The Road: The Phoenix Highway

  1. High Road Forty-Nine
  2. The Road
  3. The Eternal City

“I got the key to the highway.”—Muddy Waters

Station of the Sun.pngOn the other side of the mountain pass, High Road 49 continues. Travelers call it the Phoenix Highway.

The blues have traveled this road since the road was built, riding thumb and wheel from the backwoods to Chicago and Memphis. The junction of Highway 61 and Highway 49 (7 and 13) in Clarkdale, Mississippi is the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. It crosses the Mississippi via a steel tied arch bridge. Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan grew up on Highway 61. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered here.

The roads are good roads, but cracked. Every once in a while they come across abandoned barricades. Even more rare are small villages, enclaves of sanity in a crumbling empire. None remain on the road. As the move further in they come into cold, ice, and snow. Near to the city is eternal winter. The days are getting longer, but darker. The sun rises lower and lower into the sky; twilight lasts longer and longer.

The railroad also continues, but the tracks are rusted and in many places gone to red dust and disappeared. They won’t be continuous again until the other side of the yellow jungle, and even then there are no trains until past the preacher at the gates of hell.

Possible extra adventures this side of the mountain are gargoyle raids and wyvern raids from the Station of the Sun.

Time should slip some as they pass through the tunnel, because they’re passing between branches of the world. Most likely when they return from being gone for several weeks (or months) they’ll instead have been gone for several years. If they left things unfinished at home, they’ll come back to a very changed homeland. But also note that time really is passing; it’s just slipping. If four years pass as they go through the tunnel, they are now four years older. Some of them might notice it, some might not; you’ll need to keep track of it.

Phoenix Highway.png
  1. High Road Forty-Nine
  2. The Road
  3. The Eternal City