The Bone Ships had been drifting upon the Soul Stream for a long time. Murmond, elven justicar of Tavril, looked out over the starry expanse of the soul stream, and idly scratched into the bone hull of the ark. “How long had it been.” He wondered, it was hard to say for certain. There was no dawn, no dusk, no spring or summer, just the endless dark. At first they could chart their course by the other planes, the flow of souls that flowed into this spiritual river provided current. For a while it was a turbulent barrage, now they slowly spun about upon this metaphysical gyre of the dead.

The Mathosians were the first to go. They seemed to age before Murmond’s eyes. They had made an effort to ensure their race’s survival within their necromancy powered arks, but their offspring were sickly and deformed, and their lines quickly died out. The dwarves were next. They had constructed these twenty three bone arks, but even the durable, long lived dwarves would succumb to the ravages of time, and the morose terrors of the Plane of Death. That left the elves. They had enchanted the foliage that sustained the inhabitants of the arks that traveled the Plane of Death. Their long lives afforded them the privilege of watching the cosmos, as they knew it, perish.

Murmond often pondered this sad fate of the Telarans as he sat at the edge of the ark. The view was always awe inspiring, a vast spiral galaxy of souls and spirits could be seen. He would often scrimshaw the view into parts of the ship to chart their progress. It was only when he compared the views over a span of time that he noticed how small the stream of souls had become.

“They must be beyond the horizon now.” He thought. The brought up the pang of longing he had for his deity, Tavril. “She’s not dead.” He whispered fervently to calm himself. “She’s just too far away. The Akvan have stretched the cosmos into strange dimensions. All distance is becoming infinite.” Ciar the elementalist had explained it to him, but he never really understood it fully.

Suddenly, eleven vast rubbery tentacle shot out of the darkness below, and wrapped itself around the flotilla, smashing them together. Crawling along the appendages at speeds impossible in this dimension were thousands of hairless, amphibious creatures, cold as the grave.

“Shahgi!” The cry came from many parts of the ark wreckage.

Murmond grabbed his mace and shield, said a quick prayer that he knew would never be granted, and leaped down onto the tentacles that now tore through the dimension of death itself. “I wish I still had my spells.” He thought as he slammed into the front line of the Shahgi, knocking them off their perch upon their master’s limbs. His mace swung back and force, caving in slick, slime covered skulls of the akvan’s servants.

Blue ichor spattered the cleric’s green shield, and soon the ex-justicar found himself surrounded by brutes. His armor was ripped asunder. His wounds became infected and festered in the displaced timeline that surrounds these most ancient of demons. He was done for.

Then a high pitched note of an arrow in flight sang out, and a needle plunged into his back. Murmond cried out in agony, fearing he was done for. But then he felt the familiar tingling sensation of a healing potion knitting together his wounds. Turning around momentarily he saw the lithe figure of an archer leaping from perch to perch among the wreckage of the arks, letting loose arrow after arrow of alchemical hope.

It was Kiera, the ark’s Physician. With the Akvan’s victory, gods and spirits were unreachable, so healing prayers were no longer granted. It was Kiera the archer that took up this role. She was already a capable alchemist, but in the heat of battle getting her potions into the warriors on the front line was always a challenge. After the tentacles began to hunt the fleet, Kiera declared that she would deliver the healing from her position at over-watch.

With Kiera in place the rest of the elves began to fall in behind Murmond, who’s back now resembled a pincushion of alchemical treatments and therapies. A massive therapy to repair the acid the shahgi spit in his face, an active treatment for the bone scimitar through the kidney, a casual treatment or two to deal with claw swipes to the face, and then a maintenance treatment so she could shift attention to other parts of the battlefield.

Kiera started to pick off the shahgi that had made it past the defensive line, shooting arrows with trailing alchemical tubes. With each arrow hit it drained their life energy, and, as alien as they were, converted it to a healing admixture. The physician healed herself under the assault of spells and arrows that the attackers aimed at her, and finished off the outliers one by one.

As the healing arrows flew in, the elves of the arks began to push back the shahgi enough to focus on removing the massive, god like tentacles that bound their refuge. As Murmond slogged across the tentacle, now writhing in pain, he heard a frantic cry from above. They were about to cut the Akvan loose from the arks, he had to retreat now or fall into that strange dimension the rest of the cosmos has been turned into. As he ran back to the ark he looked up towards Kiera, who was kneeling on top of the ark, exhausted. Murmond yelled frantically to warn her of a group of shahgi that had reached her position.

Kiera whipped out a syringe and stabbed herself in the leg, and was full of energy. The Physician spun around and a volley of arrows flew out at the amphibians, Kiera then tossed another potion at the leader of this group, then returned to her relentless assault of healing. With every healing payload, the shahgi leader had a reaction where a stone grew from out of each vital organ, until he, and the rest of the akvan minions, lay dead.

Murmond lay among the rest of the wounded warriors, waiting his turn to be restored back to health. The bone arks jostled against each other as they drifted closer to the center of the latest vortex.

“We can’t survive much longer. Our mission is a failure.” Murmond looked up at his Physician with despair.

She pondered this statement, “We will find the lost goddess, and then undo this cosmic ending that Fate has spun.”

Kiera’s inventive nature is what had gotten them this far, but it was her pragmatism that really saw them through. “How can we not? There isn’t much of a cosmos left to search.”