Clearing of the broken statue

The clearing of the broken statue is a hidden clearing in the forests of Canarque in the campaign Yeni Dünya ("New World"). Badgers questioned by the Inran guide Fauna pointed the band of travellers escorting the head consul Orpi towards Aquila, though not by the shortest road; they followed tracks four or five days old for about two hours and came upon it.¹²³

The statue

In the clearing stands a human statue whose head has been broken off; in its place sits a dark, bowl-like piece filled with faintly smoking crystals. The crystals are not Alaztaşı, though they are a strange substance like it, and the smoke seems to come from the material itself. The stones looked less black than lightless, an unnatural darkness. The added piece shows no wear, and four other old stone pedestals around the clearing, perhaps made with the statue, show nothing unusual.³⁴⁵⁶⁷

Within ten or fifteen paces of the pedestal there were no natural sounds of movement and no smells, though sounds from outside and the knock of metal on stone could still be heard. The grass had not withered and animals still crossed the clearing. A cat-shaped familiar grew plainly uneasy at the sight of the statue, yet a search for magic found no trace.⁸⁹

The seven dead

Around a cold campfire lay seven bodies of the party that had been pursuing the band, with no wounds or blood; their clothes and bodies had crumbled as if very old. A closer look showed that they had not aged but that every moist, organic substance in them had vanished very quickly. A hummingbird told Fauna that after the mage leading them did something, a dark human shape appeared and the seven died at once.¹⁰¹¹¹²

The mage's notes said that they had tried a small piece near the enemy, that the result went beyond what they expected and that they did not expect to return; they asked whoever found them to tell Deimos that they could succeed. Finding the band was only their second task. Orpi saw no protective runes or ritual safeguards and thought the mage may have known he could not stop the effect, or did not mean to.¹³¹⁴¹⁵

Spoiler: The waveRevealSpoils: Yeni Dünya #15; Yeni Dünya #26 · Say what you have read

The dark silhouette rose among the dead and drew their shadows into itself. When it vanished, a wave spread out and destroyed every living, organic thing around, leaving bone-dry barren ground. The black stones lost their darkness and became clear white stones like salt. When the band came back, the oppressive feeling was gone and the earth crumbled like sand underfoot; Bruno gathered pieces of the stones with a cloth in his black arm.^16171819

Finli found that the white stones held no water and did not dissolve in alcohol or acid-like substances; they were crystalline and brittle, could be split with a chisel but were hard to cut. They proved to be the spent husk of a material that, whole, takes in magical energy at its source and carries it elsewhere for study; even small samples of it are very valuable, and the amount gathered was an extraordinary reserve. Whatever had been poured into it had broken its structure, a result not expected of ordinary spells; the darkness had been drawn from its source and stored in the stone. Only a faint trace of its pull on energy remained, and whether it could be woken again was unknown.^{202122232425262728}

The tabaxi Kuraks later described a black, unsettling, round crystal, partly cut and partly raw, around which several mages had gathered in a ritual; he was not sure it resembled the band's small spell-absorbing crystal, but his description matched the black stone of the clearing.²⁹³⁰