Professor Archibald Finch

Archibald was not present for the goblin and worg fighting in Nightstone. He had wandered off to examine one of the crushed buildings at the edge of the village, having identified what he believed to be an unusual mineral composition in the boulders used to destroy it — the kind of observation that seemed, to Archibald, far more pressing than whatever the others were doing with all the snarling.

Archibald had not rejoined the party since Triboar. He had been pursuing a line of research into the elemental plane connections he'd traced through Dustin's tome — following threads into libraries and private collections across the region, as was his way, with no particular urgency and no reliable method of sending word.

The road north gave no sign of Archibald. The party pressed on toward Fireshear without him, as they had since Triboar — long enough that his absence had ceased to feel like a gap and begun to feel like the natural order of things.

The bloodstone took Archibald again during the party's stay in Fireshear. One moment the old wizard was examining frost giant loot with his usual absent-minded curiosity — the next, the air around him shimmered, his outline blurred, and he was simply gone. Not dead. Not invisible. Shifted — pulled bodily into the Ethereal Plane, the same grey half-world that had swallowed Dustin and Kürbis in Nightstone.

The party had seen this before. The bloodstone — the dark gem Dustin had found in the hag's house and lost through his own translucent fingers — had a will of its own, or something close to it. It had been in Archibald's possession since Nightstone, and its pull on the old wizard was growing stronger. Each time it took him, the transitions came faster, lasted longer, and left less warning.

This time, Archibald did not return before the party departed for the Eye of the All-Father. They left Fireshear without him — not by choice, but by necessity. The Spine of the World would not wait, and neither would the Oracle.

Archibald reappeared in the temple corridor moments after the fighting ended — materialising between one heartbeat and the next, the grey shimmer of the Ethereal Plane clinging to his robes like morning fog. He blinked. Looked around. Took in the dead barbarians, the salt water pooling on the flagstones, the bruised and bleeding adventurers who had clearly been having an awful time without him.

Again. It had happened again. Pulled out of one reality and dropped into another with no warning, no control, and no consideration for the fact that he was an elderly academic who had specifically not signed up for any of this. The bloodstone did as it pleased, and Archibald was beginning to suspect that what it pleased was chaos.

He adjusted his spectacles. He dusted off his robes. He surveyed the carnage with the weary resignation of a man who had long since stopped being surprised by the trouble this particular band of careless adventurers managed to find — or, more accurately, manufacture — in his absence.

One day, he thought, he would wake up somewhere quiet. A library, perhaps. A study with a warm fire and a locked door and absolutely no one wielding an axe.

Today was not that day.