The Enchantress of World's End

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Scene: Northern YamaYama* Land; The Wastes of Ning; The Free City of Chx; the Vanishing Mountains.

The Characters: An Illusionist, a Construct, a Girl Knight and the Bazonga; Chxiaii Townsfolk, Jailers and Triumvirs; Thirty-Two Death Dwarves.

Through the skies of Gondwane the Great, Earth’s last and mightiest continent, there floated an extraordinary vehicle. It bore the likeness of an ungainly Phoenix-shaped bird of dark bronze, with spread wings and peacock-tail, measuring some thirty feet from beak to tail-tip. For all that it should have weighed many tons, it soared as lightly as a wisp of cloud through the sides.

Behind the arched neck, and between the broad shoulders of the bronze bird-machine, a cockpit containing six seats was hollowed. The vehicle transported a remarkable foursome. In the “driver’s seat,” so to speak, reposed an elderly but vigorous man robed and gloved in glimmering silks, whose features were perpetually masked from sight behind a visor of lilac vapor. This personage was a powerful but friendly magician known as the Illusionist of Nerelon. For better or for worse, he regarded himself as the benign protector of these regions of north-central-eastern Gondwane—a position of responsibility he had, in a sense, inherited.

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