Elgin

  *No, it fell apart thousands of years ago, before the heyday of Greece. One year plague killed many who visited here and then those who came in contact with those who had come here and survived. It was decades before the next meeting, but it was a shadow of what it had been, the links were mostly broken, and never had a chance to reconnect. The smaller meets went on every few years for decades, gradually growing in size, then fighting broke out at one, precipitating a war that lasted generations. This place was considered cursed, and a place of evil, avoided by all, and over time the power here sank deep into slumber.*

  Elgin closed his eyes, it was like he was standing in dim twilight, he could see bats and night birds flitting on the hunt. Cutter looked very natural in the leathers of a mountain Indian. He was looking pensively down into the crater pool. He glanced at Elgin, “Did you see the Claws’ club compound?”

  “Several sources of magic close together?”

  Cutter nodded, pointed down and around, “The last time I was here there were hundreds of tribesmen and women here, where a hundred years before there had been thousands. When I closed my eyes every crack and crevice glowed with its own light. The shamans could see or sense it and were afraid of it instead of reveling in it like their forefathers and foremothers had. They spoke of evil spirits, evil tidings, and it was their fear that set off the war that followed.” He sighed, “Humans.”

  Now Elgin ‘looked’ down and around, he didn’t see the glow from every crack and crevice but there was a brooding sense of something underlying soil and surface rock. “Would it all go away or would it just become less, obvious, over time?”

  “You sense something,” Cutter looked interested, frowning he looked around.

  “Something, a presence almost, all around, under everything we see, I guess I’d say brooding, maybe asleep.”

  “Things can become imbued with magic intentionally, and unintentionally. This place was important for a long time, the magic changed the very structure of the rock to hold what might be called, natural spells.”

  “You and Iffrit can’t see it?”

  Cutter shook his head, “I only see what you or Iffrit sees, just less clearly. When disincarnate Iffrit can see things you cannot, but something very subtle and almost of your world, might well be invisible.”

  Elgin opened his eyes, his night vision had fully returned and the Den was almost as clear with his eyes open as with them closed. But the sense of brooding underlayment was just a whisper now.

  “Did the Djin give something to the Claw do you think? Is that why you gave me the idea of riding out here?” Elgin asked.

  *Almost without a doubt. And it was your intuition that brought you here, not my pondering, unless the connection was at a level below intentional thought.*

  “What could the Djin have given them?”

  *Almost anything, but knowing the Djin, it came with a price, the Djin loves to play games with lives.*

  “How much do you think the Djin told them about uh, you, me...us.”