“That was the day the Yunai fell.”
Vestria looked at this final note and couldn’t help but feel the pride of every citizen that lived here on Azirin. The day the Yunai fell. After millennia of attacking this World Ship, the end had finally come. The greatest foe they had ever faced was defeated, and their World Ship was safe in a way it had never been before.
“Of course, safe is a relative term,” Sionis added.
“The hole?” Vestria asked.
Sionis nodded. “The hole.”
The hole was, of course, a literal hole, the size of a building that reached into the clouds. There was no metaphor here. The Yunai that had come to Azirin had come up with a final plan. They used their powerful weapons to puncture the World Ship’s hull, opening a new way into the World Ship.
“So, what about you in the desert?” Vestria asked. “What happened after Iliera defeated the Yunai?”
“The Yunai ships retreated. We just stood there, dumbfounded. Then, they blew open the side of the realm, exposing the entire realm to the void of space. I used a portal and got our people out, as well as a bunch of others that had ended up in the area.”
“What an adventure…” Vestria said.
“Of course, that damage was the beginning of the end for us,” Sionis said, still eating his noodles, picking at them and trying to scoop up the last of his green sauce.
“Wait. What? How was the hole the end?”
“With the Yunai defeated, we celebrated,” Sionis explained. “We threw parties in the cities, we went home to our loved ones, and we started trying to figure out what would come next. We buried our dead, we said goodbye, and everyone started trying to find their place on Azirin. The Bescherman used the Grid to seal off the desert from the rest of the World Ship, that part of our world was lost forever.”
“Then the inevitable…” Vestria mused.
“Old wounds can only be ignored for so long,” Sionis agreed. “The Zinji had one more bone to pick.”
“So, how did it all go down? What happened to the Academy of Hope?”
“We’ll get to that,” Sionis said. “There was some other business to attend to before the tragedy unfolded. You see, things were going so well with the Academy after the Yunai were defeated, that I finally had a chance to turn my attention to a mystery that had been itching at the back of my mind for a while now…”
“The wand?!” Vestria asked, leaning forward. “Please tell me it was about the wand.”
I nodded.
“Yes, finally. Okay. So, what happened there?”
“It all started when Fynn was celebrating in the old town district of Stonehaven. He and a few of his buddies had hit up an older pub and while they were having a great old time. Then, Fynn spotted our Yunai hunter friend Aebaloth. Obviously, the paladin went right for him, and Aebaloth was far too intoxicated to properly defend himself. They had a good little chase through the district, and then Fynn eventually got his hands on the Yunai hunter and pummeled him a bit while demanding to have his mother’s wand back.”
“Did Aebaloth have it?”
“No,” Sionis answered. “He’d sold it to a particularly nasty fellow, one of the cartel leaders down in Bounty Bay.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, it turned out that Baron Revellai had bought it, I assume to hunt me down for some… other problems that he and I had in the past.”
“I took notes on that incident,” Vestria said, proud of her research.
“Right. Anyway, Iliera and I got this information from Fynn and, frankly, we decided we wanted to take a trip down to Bounty Bay and see if we couldn’t figure out where the wand had gone, why it had Iliera’s name, and what we might do with it.”
“What about Fynn?”
“Fynn and some of the other members of the Academy continued to help with the military operations back home. They helped the King of Stonehaven with a gathering various factions. We both know it ended poorly, but at the time we assumed it would be fine. We were all still riding high on the unification of the fight against the Yunai. We had forgotten about our old conflicts… about their plans…”
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