When last we met, your newfound group of classmates had just successfully completed the first week of their

Perquisite
Period – the year of service that is taken very seriously at the Magaambya. This is the time when students new to their
magic learn that there is no separation between their craft and the services they perform for the community, and
commit themselves to true membership in society rather than sealing themselves away as hermits. This first week, the
enterprising leader of your cohort, Esi Djana, set things up so that you got an introduction to the different schools of
study. With the Rain Scribes, you had a market day looking for rare Ojofiri chickens. With the Emerald Boughs, you
carried letters out to all sorts of people across the city, and Javeil did some light breaking and entering. With the Cascade
Bearers, you created three kinds of oils, one from lucky bones, one from collecting caterpillars, and one from incurring
an obligation to Umbo – using these oils, you created the materials for a fey warding ritual, and installed them at the site
of the gremlin attack. With the Sun-Mages you repelled an initial breach of pugwampi gremlins. And with the Uzunjati,
you retold your stories and attempted to construct a moral teaching out of what you accomplished. Tomorrow morning,
you will be presented to the faculty in a brief introduction ceremony to mark the beginning of your tenure as
Magaambya students.]

--- --- ---

Bakary? As darkness takes you, you wait for the emptiness of sleep to take you and bring the coming day. Your sense of
body fades, but your mind, and the dark, linger. Minutes, hours, days… time loses any real sense and meaning, but
you’re conscious for it, and that is almost maddening in that split second or endless stretch of experience that you’re
unable to process. As the time passes, the air grows colder around you. The faint shimmer of shifting midnight blue,
muted and distant, now unrolls in endless depth before you, rippling. You begin to flail about, your senses returning with
the dropping temperature, but there is resistance to your limbs as you move in the space around you. Your limbs feel
sluggish, and you suddenly realize - it’s not air around you, it’s water. You suddenly feel burning pain in your lungs as
your breath fights to escape you, but you hold tight. Your muscles spasm as you swim in desperation, choosing any
direction, but the shimmering blue is directionless. There is no up, there is no down. It’s just depth and the faintest
suggestion of movement. Around you, the shadows dance as one, right to left.

You feel yourself being jostled as the current begins to take you. As it shifts around again to the left to right, around
behind you, you find yourself toppling end over end, eventually coming to rest again. You spiral over and over again, the
darkness swallowing you, tightening around you as this dance, this shape, this endless coil, this spiral closes around you.
The figurehead of your ship drifts past you, looking like a broken toy, and you slowly realize that around you is the
wreckage of your family’s salvage ship. The current intensifies, roiling the water around you, and you feel yourself
dragged backwards away from the Eye of Abendego, as the storm follows you to the Magaambya. You travel up small
waterways, salt creeping from the sea to poison the freshwater and the land, and watch in the space of a moment as
plant life crystalizes with briny salt and withers away, turning farms into wasteland. The sea level rises in the rivers and
begins to spill over the countryside… you see yourself dragged over flooded landscapes as the sea rages inland. The
water rushes with insane speed, like an oncoming continental plate, and breaches the canals of Nantambu, breaking off
the delicate glasswork spire roofs and washing the great mosaics of the city under dark silt. A city of firelights, suddenly
extinguished. You become suddenly aware of the dormitory where your sleeping body lies, and in that moment, in
dream logic, you find yourself in your own new room, with water quickly rushing in the door. You’ve got probably an
inch of standing water on the floor, and it is quickly rising.
///

As the current tugs at you, battering you, you cannot fight any more as the increased power of the water pulls at your
form. You cough, and the freezing waters rush into your body, the briny taste of salt water stinging your insides, your
wincing eyes open with the pain that clutches the interior of your chest, only to see a gargantuan mass moving through
the water around you like a massive noose closing in. The pain in your chest vanishes. As your breathing normalizes,
feeling a substance that is thicker than air but breathable all the same. In that moment, yellow light bursts before you in
the shape of an enormous yellow eye. An impossibly lone tone rumbles through the waters around you, shaking you to
your core, like an organic war horn the size of a canyon. The eye narrows as the tone grows stronger. A thought enters
your mind, a jumble of emotions that your brain struggles to make sense of until a word congeals into the center of your
consciousness. “Watching.” The eye looks at you, waiting expectantly.

Bakary dreams that the sea has followed him to the Magaambya, salt creeping up the river to poison the water and land,
the water level rising around Nantambu and bursting the canals, seeping over the halls of the school as the sea
encroaches. In the dream, he wades through rising water in the dormitory to leave, but in the strange logic of dreams,
he exits not to the outside but to a mystic vision-space outside time (which research will be able to identify as the astral
plane). As hags have a connection to dreams and control of others through the plane, Bakary is able to essentially look
back through the one-way glass for a moment and see the caster of the spell. Dashilla’s control slips for a moment and
he catches a glimpse of her yellow lamplike eyes, staring aimlessly like the alien gaze of an anglerfish. They lock eyes,
and Dashilla pauses, transfixed and uncertain if this is a lucid dreamer or if she can continue on as though it is an
ordinary nightmare. If Bakary takes any action indicating he is lucid dreaming, she will rush him and he will wake to a
metal clanging sound at the moment of impact. He wakes, gasping and disoriented, and continues to hear a faint metal
clanging outside. If he goes out to investigate, he will come upon the scene of Kurshkin, the vexgit, and the gnagrif
working to sabotage the ceremony stage.

Above you, globules of light glow faintly in the distance, and you can’t tell if they are stars or the glowworms shining on
the roof of The Beyond. You strike out hard towards a multicolored glow to your left, panic beginning to form in your
chest, and stop as it comes into focus

The sea has followed you to the Magaambya.