"Well, that was again, profoundly unpleasant."

So remarked the wizard Hycanthus, as he trudged up the steps to his mountain shack a second time, returning from the Halls of Death at the behest of an irritable Mhaldorian. The collected might of the Cyrenian Resistance lingered outside his mediocre shack as he approached, kitted up for war.

The furore of fresh assault was well under way in Mhaldor and Ashtan both. With the two citystates occupied in a fight for their very lives, perhaps now they might leave the intrepid wizard to his own business, at long last.

And what greater business was there than defusing unthwartable wards with the power of glorious, glorious explosives?

So it was that with the Resistance in tow, Hycanthus descended down into the hidden expanses of the Phaestian Temple, where few eyes had ever dared to glance. A bag of experimental explosives hummed in their sack hanging from his waist, clattering about loudly with every step.

As Sir Eril Rian-Moonshadow, the Hand of Phaestus Himself revealed a long-hidden passage into the midst of Cyrene's Lyceum, billowing tendrils of amaranthine Tide lashed back warily, testing the wardings of the Temple. Luckily, they held, the wizard noted - but for how long?

With little time to waste, Hycanthus prepared his vaunted prototype, the culmination of many hours of tinkering and work, gracefully supplemented by the countless offerings of the warriors of the White Wave and the Cyrenian Resistance. Uttering a gentle incantation, the evocation enchantments embedded into its depths spurned into life.

And live, they did. With alarming speed, the flames grew in his hands, threatening to set fire to the very archives in which all of Cyrene's hopeful presided. A casual toss sent the device Tideward, and the rest was history.

A catastrophic force rippled throughout the Vashnars, dispersing the condensed Tide in a display of arcane mastery. Some who knew Hycanthus better may be inclined to call it accidental, but not he, for the wizard had only the following to say of his magnum opus:

"I knew it would work!"

Penned by My hand on the 11th of Scarlatan, in the year 800 AF.