Domarc paces awkwardly behind Pafthinel as he speaks, but the mist flows easily through and around his legs.
"I see," Pafthinel says. "This saddens me. The Soilchild...I had grown attached to him." He takes a deep breath and sighs. "The House of Orjo. Yes. That was my employer. They showed me the Sphere, this great trophy they had taken, so sure they were that it contained puissant secrets...and yet it was nothing more than crudely-worked sky iron. Impressive in size, certainly, but that was all. At that point in my studies, sky iron held nothing more to interest me.
"It was the youth, the little one they were raising up to serve as the child-lord of Hazard, who came up with the idea, I believe. Do you know the story of the Troian Bull? That must have been where he got the germ of it. Hazard was making peace with their rival, that old city on the coast they took the Sphere from--I forget the name of it--and the Orjo clan found this peace necessary but humiliating. How bitterly they complained about it at night, while by day they sat in the negotiations that were making it possible! And the young one heard all this, little Bapdis Orjo, and he went to his grandfather with the plot he had devised. He suggested that they return the Sphere to the rival city as a gift of peace and reconciliation, but that they enchant it in such a way that when the time was right, they could use it to strike back in revenge.
"Of course, they dismissed this plan at first. Any such enchantment would be easy to detect, and the peace would be spoiled as soon as the Sphere was handed over. But the elders of the Orjo clan relished the concept and spoke of how they wished they could make the plan feasible. I...I took it up as an intriguing challenge, and...I had my own interests to look after. I told them I could find a way, if they would provide funds for further research and acquisition of materials. In truth, I had thought of a solution very quickly after I set my mind to it. But the Orjos used me as little more than a court mage, they did not understand what I was capable of.
"So I put my theory into practice, and on one moonless night we put it to the test, and it worked. They sent Bapdis Orjo's gift back home to their rivals the very next morning. It was a very clever solution, if I may be permitted to speak so highly of myself, in that it did not require enchanting the Sphere at all. Through my explorations of the Elemental Plane of Earth, I became aware of the existence of the Demi-Plane of Magnetism, and so I was able to attune the Sphere to a fixed point in the Werld. A proper arrangement of ordinary magnetic stones at that point would collapse the magnetic field around the Sphere into a vortex, creating a conduit between the two from anywhere in the Multiverse. Of course, the Orjos were of limited imagination, and only plotted to march an army through it one day and sack the city, just as Troia was sacked by the warriors hidden in the belly of the wooden bull.
"As I said, I take little pride in facilitating acts of war, but what the Orjos paid me enabled me to go about my work independently, here in this place, freed at last from any Werldly concerns. I suppose now they see the time as right to open the conduit and make war. If you would put a stop to it...you could destroy the Sphere. That would suffice. Or simply remove it to an unexpected location. Under the sea, perhaps. I am proud of the planar and elemental magic I worked with the Sphere, I feel it was quite innovative. But I have no desire to see it used for its intended purpose, and now that you know what that is, you should be able to thwart it easily. I hope you will leave this place now, leave me to grieve my Soilchild, and leave me to return to my pursuit of knowledge."
At the end of this explanation, you all notice that the mist has settled around him and rises nearly up to his chest, swirling under his breath.
