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Next thing you know, everyone wants to visit the shadowy part of Starstrands.

Just the edge, just a visit, just a fight with a Roachephants.  Ok, we will stay away from those.

Just a short flight, just a rollick with our familiars where no one will bother us or see it.

Come on, can't we try out the flying couch?

I should have known better.  I guess.

But I did ask my brother to come along.

And he is the one who put the rail in across the front of the couch and found out what happened when you folded out what looked like a hideabed.  Turns out it forms up a tent sort of thing with some magical strength behind it, that kind of blends into the surroundings.

So, we get the flying sofa (flying couch, flying divan?  I'm not sure what to call that thing) out of the storage shed (boy, they keep a clean shed at Amber's house) and slide through the anchor point in her back yard.  The world is pretty dusty and pretty empty right there.

Everyone starts playing tag, though Thalia/Indigo does make a play at flirting with my brother.  It is fun to make him blush. Next thing you know we spot a void shark and everyone goes to ground in a cluster of trees.  The void shark is part of a pack of them, but they don't come that far over "land" -- not to mention, something grabs it.  Looks like a giant Portuguese Man of War -- kind of a cross between a kraken and a jellyfish.  Sparks jump whenever it got to close to the edge of Starstrands, but it managed to eat all the void sharks -- they couldn't bring themselves to stay away from it.  Then it drifted back off deeper into the void.

Everyone got the point.  Don't get too far away from the edge or you will meet bad things.  Then it was back to playing tag.

Then some races.  That couch is pretty fast.  I had no idea a flying couch (come on) could go that fast.  Really, really fast -- I'd say almost 140 kilometers an hour.  Next thing I know, we are headed for the star shrine fortress.  Pretty high up, but safe.  Its a crowd on that couch, and I end up on my brother's lap (thanks, he says, and I realize that Thalia was angling for the spot).  I whisper to her that we aren't allowed to date until we are sixteen.  Well, that gets her to give him some space until his birthday.  But that is another story.

Anyway, we get to the shrine.  I remember there were more rings, but I want to be careful.

Sure enough, down on the ground I can see some spiderkin sleeping out, with a big net glistening.  You can tell that they are expecting someone to sail up to the tower.  We are flying over it instead.

The spiderkin were intermixed with some scorpionmen, the chaos tainted type.  Before I realized what had happened, my brother had jumped out of the sky in the middle of them.  It was a mess.  For them.  They should never have linked up with scorpionmen if my brother was going to be around. Much to my surprise, Thalia covered his back well and cleaned house. I had no idea that girl could fight like that.

Anyway, from there we went to the tower star001.htm to spend the night, and the kids all decided that they wanted the tattoo that I have.  Except Thalia.  She blanched at giving up wine, but realized that my brother, who isn't an initiate of Starcalled Falcon, doesn't drink wine.  In fact, she realized that no one in our group drinks alcohol -- this isn't the ancient world with bad water and no preserves.  The next morning I found her at the shrine, she had joined the rest of us.

My brother looked pleased, though you can't tell with him.

He asked if it was ok if he took Robert-Etienne hunting.  The two of them talk a lot, I think my brother is trying to help him with his anger and rage and loss.  He asked the rest of us to be careful, wait inside the warded area, and wait for him.  We all promised not to leave the wards.

And I'm sure they meant to keep their promise.  Except that as they were cleaning up around the shrine and working on restoring parts of the walls, Thalia triggered a star path and the next thing I knew, while my brother and Robert-Etienne were hunting scorpion men and taking down a pretty nasty nest of them (what were the spiderkin thinking?), we ended up on the paths.

Luckily I knew the way to Starry Path, which let us take a path I knew how to tread.  The scorpionman was the guardian from the nest my brother was stalking, so when we took him, we made that task easier.  The rest of the trip went well, though at the end we ended up with a dragonwyrm (a small one) to fight (SIZ 30, other characteristics all 30, fire breath like inferno, except it leaves burning streaks like blaze wherever it falls -- when I learned about Amber's new power I sure thought we could have used her for the fight).  We took its talons for daggers and our return to the shrine let us gain new skills.

Though I realized that places I thought were calm and safe could trigger new events.  My brother just shook his head when he got back, as if he was sure I should have known that.

The couch was acting funny, so we decided on a quick trip to the city to see if we could get some help from the sorcerers there.

Which went well, except ...

They fixed the couch's magic (it wasn't stable, good thing we checked or we would have been walking home the long way), but they wanted a service in return.  Just a quick delivery.  A fire sprite had been found trapped in a fireplace in the city. They couldn't send it home, but they could send it to the City of Glass. Turns out there is a colony of sprites living in the glass, and loving it.  They can go home from there, but they like the inside of the glass.  Since the maze collapsed, it has formed a magic space of light and fire and they love to play in it.

So, we agreed to one more trip, on a route that is safe and with a couch that had an extra layer of enchantments on it (they warded the couch for us.  I found out later that my brother had paid them with the treasure he had found cleaning out the scorpionmen lair, and that the sorcerers had gotten a better than fair price, without the errand.  But he had never seen the City of Glass either and thought the visit might be interesting).

So we were on.