Memory Sapphires Vision

On drinking the potion Stag's mind is flooded with two distinct sets of memories. It takes a while to sort them out. Sometimes, the memory contains context for items, letting Stag "just know" what they are, as the original thinker did, but sometimes such context is missing, and must judge the image in the memory for himself.

Memory One

You are male, and can feel the power of the element of water in your blood. You walk steadily and with lethal purpose (Stag recognizes serious martial arts training here, and guesses this person is a master of Water Dragon Style). The ship moored next to you creaks in the night. Standing on the dock, you blindfold a homely woman with dark green skin and black hair (obviously a wood aspect Dragon-blooded with very pure blood), then guide her up the gangway onto the ship. A ring made of black glass sits on one of her fingers. As you settle into the ship and sail off, you look silently at the coastal city, but it means nothing to you. (Having been there, Stag is pretty sure the city is Pangu, a city on the eastern edge of the Blessed Isle.)

The sailing journey lasts a long time, with the woman blindfolded the whole way. Most of the time is spent meditating and avoiding the crew. Though it doesn't happen often, occasionally one of terrestrials mentions the name of the other one, but somehow the memory doesn't really convey the name. (Each time this happens, a strange feeling washes over Stag. He's never felt anything like it. It feels very much like something has tampered with Fate, preventing him from remembering the names, almost like they've been erased from history itself.)

Eventually, the small ship comes to land, and travels past a very large fortress city (Stag has never been there, but is almost positive this is Lookshy) and up a major river. Many days later, it comes to a fork in the river at a huge city (which Stag thinks must be Nexus) and turns onto the small of the forks, leading south. The boat trudges up the river for a really, really long time, even though you help move it along with some subtle magic charms. It almost never stops, docking only to resupply. Eventually, another fairly large fork in the river appears, this time at a small village. The ship again takes the narrower part, this time turning east. After even more sailing, the boat reaches a strange, semi-ruined stone dock, jutting out of the jungle with no other civilization in site.

The five-man crew docks the ship and you lead them and the woman up the dock, into the jungle. Heading down a small path, you suddenly turn on the crew and kill them all in seconds, leaving them where they fall. You and the still-blindfolded woman stalk carefully through the jungle, managing to stay hidden and avoid a number of lizard-like predators and other hazards. After a few days travel, you come to a very large city, mostly overgrown by the jungle (Stag does not know, but given that Sundial claimed these men went to Rathess, that is a good bet. It matches what little he knows of the place). Strange creatures lazily guard the main gates, so you scale the wall. The blindfolded woman follows, less quickly but in total silence.

In the dark, you wind your way through numerous triangular towers, all made of brightly colored glass and overgrown by centuries of jungle plants, but with no visible entrances. (Writing is visible in a few places, and Stag recognizes it as the language of the Dragon Kings, mostly praising various gods or bragging about long-forgotten achievements.) You eventually come to an extremely wide road made of red granite. Notably lacking any vegetative overgrowth, the road's pristine surface reflects light from a huge stepped pyramid to which it leads, miles away. Across this road, more triangular buildings grow from islands in a large, man-made lake. You quickly lead the woman across the lake and wind through more buildings to a bridge that connects the land you are on to one of the islands in the lake. Once across, more walking is interrupted by a patrol of more strange creatures, but you avoid them. Winding through the buildings, you occasionally see the great pyramid through the buildings, dead ahead. You come to another foot bridge and cross half way. Looking at the woman, you both activate some magic, then dive into the dank water below.

You cannot see much in the dark, polluted water, but you have magic running which lets you know your surroundings a bit. The auras of living things appear clearly, and there are many in the water, some very large reptilian horrors. More magic prevents them from detecting you. You swim effortlessly, holding onto the woman's belt. You can both breathe, but only you can sense anything. You drag the woman to what looks like the mouth of a large dragon, crafted in stone covered with muck. You swim into it, entering a large tunnel. Lit occasionally by glowing red orbs, the water here is slightly more fresh, revealing a large network of catacombs. You take a left, a right, another right and a left, reaching a chamber of sorts, a shrine to a female lizard-god (Stag recognizes the statue as being Leeayta, primary goddess of the Dragon Kings and a lieutenant of the Unconquered Sun), with a statue of her ripping a shark in half. A dozen different hallways lead out of it.

There you stop and finally remove the woman's blindfold. She ties it on you and you cancel your perception magic. You wait for several hours in the water's chill, waiting. Then the blindfold is removed, the woman smiles, and you tie it back on her. Reactivating your charms, you swim back the way you came. Leaving the water, you spend months running the same journey in reverse.

Eventually, you return to the dock where you started, and remove the blindfold from the woman.

Memory Two

You are a woman. You stand on a dock. A man with a slightly blue tint to his skin ties a blindfold around your eyes. You feel a ring sitting awkwardly on your finger. It doesn't get any more comfortable for the long journey that follows. You take numerous drugs on the trip and meditate for hours (From the ease with which she does this, Stag guesses that this person was a master of Wood Dragon Style, as their training involves lots both drugs and meditation.) You move occasionally, but not often, and speak even less.

One day, you leave the ship and get led on journey. You are outside. Bugs try biting you, and you let them. The man asks you to do things once in a while, but you barely notice. Your mind gradually gets sharper and you realize you are harder ground than before. You know what you are supposed to do, and activate some magic to breathe underwater. Then everything gets wet. More dragging, through the cold water this time.

The blindfold finally comes off and the dim red light seems shockingly bright. You blindfold the man and look around. You choose a passage at random and swim off that direction, trailing a string behind you. You take a left, a quick right, then swim for about a half mile, eventually coming to a statue of the Unconquered Sun. Scowling as you pass that, you swim down the passage closest to the statue's shield. Archways lead off the tunnel, but you ignore them, swimming for another half mile. Eventually you come to a T-intersection, but you backtrack three archways back on the left and take that passage instead. This leads into a series of rooms where three corridors meet. In the first room, you go straight. The hallways in are all covered with relief sculpture, mostly of faces and bodies In the next, left. And so on, going straight, straight, straight, right, left, straight. About ten yards before this hallway leads to the next room, you stop. There, you remove a stone from the ceiling, destroying the grout with your bare hands. You take off the glass ring and smash it against the rock. A huge black sword appears in your hand and you quickly stash it into a hole left by the removed stone. You replace the stone, and unleash some magic to fuse it in place.

With the stone set, you look at the decoration on the walls of the hallway. Most are lizardman forms. You dump out a backpack onto the floor. A pile of stones, a metal folding contraption of some kind and bag drift to the ground, kicking up dust. You place the stones in the eyes of the lizardman decorations on the wall, where they click in place. You unfold the contraption, forming it into a bizarre sort of net, which promptly vanishes. You drop the bag in the center of the hallway and swim about 20 yards a way. You work some magic and the bag begins to glow and pulse. You turn fast swim like hell back the way you came, winding the string in clumps as you go. Behind you, the pulsing gets brighter, but you quickly leave it far behind.

You reach the man, and take his blindfold, which he puts on you. Another long period of drug filled stupor begins not long after you reach the surface. You're not sure how long it lasts, but you find yourself on a dock, taking your blindfold off.

Suggested Breakdown

To split up the landmarks, Stag should probably do something like the following, given that the whole circle already has been told the sword is in Rathess:

1. Directions to the bridge.
2. Once underwater, find the dragon's mouth and enter, leading to the statue of Leeayta.
3. From Leeayta to the statue of Unconquered Sun.
4. From the Unconquered Sun to the archway after the T-instersection.
5. From that archway to the final room.

Result

Stag eventually told the circle each a part of the directions to the place. He remembers the order in which the directions need to be applied, but ripped the rest from his head with sorcery and destroyed the resulting gem.