Professor Archibald Finch

Archibald was not present for the goblin and worg fighting in Nightstone. He had wandered off to examine one of the crushed buildings at the edge of the village, having identified what he believed to be an unusual mineral composition in the boulders used to destroy it — the kind of observation that seemed, to Archibald, far more pressing than whatever the others were doing with all the snarling.

Archibald had not been seen since the bloodstone took him in Triboar. The old wizard had been studying the gem when the familiar shimmer caught him — pulled into the Ethereal Plane with his notes still spread across the table. That had been weeks ago. The bloodstone had never held anyone this long before, and the party was beginning to wonder whether it intended to give him back at all.

The road north gave no sign of Archibald. The bloodstone still held him — wherever held meant when the holding was done between planes. The party pressed on toward Fireshear without him, as they had since Triboar. Long enough that his absence had ceased to feel like a gap and begun to feel like the natural order of things.

The bloodstone had held Archibald since Triboar — longer than it had ever held anyone. The party had grown used to its tricks by now: the shimmer, the blur, the sudden absence. People came back. They always came back. But Archibald's absence stretched through Yartar, through Everlund, through Luskan, through Fireshear — weeks bleeding into months with no shimmer, no return, no sign that the Ethereal Plane intended to release him at all.

The bloodstone — the dark gem Dustin had found in the hag's house and lost through his own translucent fingers — had a will of its own, or something close to it. It had been in Archibald's possession since Nightstone, and whatever hold it had on the old wizard was deeper than anything the party had seen before.

They left Fireshear without him — not by choice, but by necessity. The Spine of the World would not wait, and neither would the Oracle.

Archibald reappeared in the temple corridor moments after the fighting ended — materialising between one heartbeat and the next, the grey shimmer of the Ethereal Plane clinging to his robes like morning fog. He blinked. Looked around. Took in the dead barbarians, the salt water pooling on the flagstones, the bruised and bleeding adventurers who had clearly been having an awful time without him.

Again. It had happened again. Pulled out of one reality and dropped into another with no warning, no control, and no consideration for the fact that he was an elderly academic who had specifically not signed up for any of this. The bloodstone did as it pleased, and Archibald was beginning to suspect that what it pleased was chaos.

He adjusted his spectacles. He dusted off his robes. He surveyed the carnage with the weary resignation of a man who had long since stopped being surprised by the trouble this particular band of careless adventurers managed to find — or, more accurately, manufacture — in his absence.

One day, he thought, he would wake up somewhere quiet. A library, perhaps. A study with a warm fire and a locked door and absolutely no one wielding an axe.

Today was not that day.