>>5938797>>5938805>>5938812>>5938835>>5938835Racing back to the capital with Avitus, the ones who accompanied the archon explain in breathless urgency what has happened. Without missing a beat, the Rex-Imperator demands that all seers and diviners immediately go about using all of their power to discern the location of this thing. He commands the dragons to begin scouring the countryside around Taurica, to find anything that might be wrong. He sets about commanding a legion of scouts and wolf-scouts to do the same.
For days, there are no results. The seers continue to attempt their augury with only vague visions and contradictory reports. Leads are followed up on, only to come up empty. The Rex-Imperator paces incessantly. These archons are a completely unknown threat---can they truly destroy the entirety of our people? Is their power truly so great? What countermeasures, if any, do we even possess against such a thing?
Our red naga lord has been in seclusion with his five female naga disciples and several powerful seers for days now, deep in focus and meditation. The Rex-Imperator does not wish to intrude upon them, but the desire to break open the door and shout what is taking so long is getting more and more prevalent in his thoughts.
Finally, after much tension, doubt and fear, the chamber to the inner sanctum of Asclepius opens, and a female seer delivers the news: the creature has been found.
It first came to our world through a hole, a rip in the fabric of reality. It nestled into a sunken shrine at the bottom of a lake. Fishermen from Taurica came to fish, and it began to whisper to them, giving them fish and allowing them to become prosperous. With their help, it was smuggled back to Taurica, where it began to manipulate the minds of others, working its insidious plot. This was interrupted when the archon came to find it. If we had let the archon continue its work, perhaps it would have been found, but once we led the archon away the creature slipped back into the river and into the lake, hiding within the ruins of the sunken shrine. It is an exceptionally good hiding place; water is a difficult veil to pierce for even powerful entities like the archons.
The Rex-Imperator wastes no time. Knowing that the archons may not even listen to our people when they arrive, perhaps thinking that anything we say would be a trick of the monstrous abomination influencing us, he gives the order. A host is summoned, and marched east from Taurica deep into the jungle. They follow the river until they come upon this lake, and at the bottom of it lies an ancient shrine and within it the evil abomination the archons seek.
