"So you're saying that standing stone we passed is what the years are counting from?"

"How do you not know this?"

"There's a song about it, have you heard that one? O Standing Stone, O Standing Stone, Monument to our new home..."

"Never had any lyrics to that tune back in my day."

"Please keep your voices down. Pass Without Trace isn't any help if you're not even trying to be stealthy."

"Lumi? Cease travel where we might converse," comes the telepathic voice of her familiar. "Our prospects on this quest are growing worse."

"Hold on, Scarloc's coming with bad news," Lumi whispers. "Any good hiding-places nearby?"

"Let's try that Netherese tower-fragment. There's enough still standing we can hide inside, but not too much that we can't check it out for anything already lurking there from a distance."

The familiar reappears, dismissing their innate invisibility. The sprite hovers before the party at parade rest, wings buzzing faintly. 

"First, magic up ahead has gone awry. Odd warping even to my untrained eye."

Ivaebhin pinches the bridge of his nose in recollection, then retrieves a reference book from his pack. (Elminster's Ecologies, vol. 1, Lyra Sunrose.) 

"That would match the reported energy drifts from the mythal, but those should only be present in the edgelands, on the forest borders, not here in the city. Such zones are intermittent, but on a scale of seasons."

"Is it dangerous?"

"They can negate magic cast in close proximity, which would impede, oh, every one of our number. There's also some accounts of them affecting the appetites of animals. Snakes choked to death on apples, bloodthirsty squirrels, and so on."

"I don't think I need a spell to handle a squirrel."

"You might for a whole tree full of them swarming you. We have no Alchemist's Fire, last I checked."

"Point."

"In theory, we could undo the warping ourselves rather than wait for a natural dissipation. As a manifestation of a twist in the Weave, the cause could be addressed by righting the imbalance, casting a spell of the appropriate school to release the tension..." 

"Second, there's more than squirrels to avoid. I saw three gray-skinned mouthless humanoids. Invisibility concealed me not; their eyes tracked me as I flew far aloft."

"Sounds like doppelgangers. Can't hide from thought-reading. We'd better circle around them."

"Then I'll resume my duties as a scout."

The landscape is scattered with broken masonry amidst the tall trees, giving an eerie whistle to the cold wind blowing through, and a huge mound of rubble stands a mile to the south. True to the Yeoman's report, strange eddies of energy are dotted around the scene, leaking and pulling the energies of the Weave in a way that distorts light like a heat haze. 

"Evocation."

He takes out a forked twig, scorched to charcoal. 

"Ivaemaskan."

A crackling arc.of lightning streaks from the twig to the center of the nearest distortion, almost thirty feet away. The next moment, a hush ripples out through the air as both the Witch Bolt and its target disappear. 

"Stay clear of the nodes if you can, within fifty feet the draw is so strong you have to cast something and it'll be wasted if not the right school."

"That can wait, Scarloc says the doppelgangers are coming over. They'll fly interference, buy us some time, they say."

"Already? Hells."

The two of them hustle back to Mitrol, balancing on the trunks of fallen trees to avoid tripping noisily on the scree and roots.

Their druid waves as they get near, suddenly appearing from the haze of concealment of his spell that made him indistinguishable from the tree trunk behind him. 

"Which way?"