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He stands in the center of his father's Pattern.
Last appearance of the Hall of Mirrors has suggested that he should get very far away from both Amber and The Courts, and Ghostwheel has managed to talk him into exploring the limits of Pattern's ability to transport people.
With Pattern of Amber and Logrus of Chaos both still rather cross with him, there's really only one option for that.
So, he stands in the center of his father's Pattern.
Rinaldo-the-pattern-ghost and the glowing disk of Ghostwheel's presence were both there, watching him depart.
He's not exactly clear on how he's planning to return, so he's geared for trouble - all Trumps he could possibly need, and a some blanks, a dozen spells using Cowrin's Pattern as the scaffold (Sigil of Logrus does seem to obey him for simple magic, but he isn't going to rely on it continuing to behave), a good sword from The Courts, Frakir around his wrist, a pocketful of blue crystals, and various supplies.
Unfortunately, taking the spikard unknown distance away from its ties to shadow is probably not safe, so there goes his source of unlimited magic.
"Well, here it goes." he says, and then concentrates on his destination.
Take me somewhere far, where no-one could have gone before
'Where no one could have gone before' was perhaps a bit too much to ask in the literal sense, as the building he is now standing in was clearly built by thinking beings. Approximately human ones, even, if the ones in front of him are representative.
A handful of men and women in steel armor armed with swords and shield, blue and white tabards with heraldic griffons presumably signaling an allegiance of some sort stand guard against intruders at a closed door. Their backs are to the newest visitor and they don't seem to have noticed him yet.
This seems to be some sort of antechamber or receiving room to a private suite, with the guards in front of the door to the wider building. The walls are lavishly painted with the story of, uh, a woman being burned at the stake to stop a siege and a group of men being very sad about this and carrying her ashes to a mountain in an urn. Or something along those lines.
There are signs of a struggle, with the heavily gilded furniture roughly pushed out of the way and tossed to the side, clearing a staight path from door to door.
If he had a nickel for every time he Patterned into a well-protected fortress...
He'll try to sneak away from the guards before they notice him, and go along the path of the struggle, while getting Ghostwheel's and Rinaldo's Trumps. No contact, not even slightly cold. Well, that's to be expected.
He'll have to contend with a closed door before he gets too far, blocking his path out of the room.
He brings his hand next to the lock, and Frakir starts unwinding from it, slithering into the lock.
Can an animated strangling cord pick it?
Easily.
What the animated strangling cord cannot do is oil the hinges before the door creaks open, alerting the guards behind him.
Well, there goes his attempt at stealth.
Frakir wraps around his wrist again, and he turns to the guards.
"Hello there, I think I landed here on accident."
Well, that's certainly a welcome.
He doesn't want to kill them wantonly, so he'll loose a sleep spell on them.
Should there happen to be anybody capable of seeing magic looking on him, they'd see an image of Corwin's Pattern flash before his eyes for a brief moment.
The clang of steel and thumping of falling bodies will probably alert others if they haven't already been. No reinforcements seem to be imminent, however.
But from further into the suite, it sounds like a woman has started to shout for help.
The scene he finds is thus:
An old woman wearing robes of red and white held aloft by writhing bands of eldritch power. Surrounding her, more soldiers with the griffon sigil and one oddly skeletal figure, almost eight feet tall. The tall man is in black robes that seem to have been melted into his skin in some areas. Also melted into his skin in certain locations are irregular shards of metal and stone. The overall effect is... quite disconcerting. In his right hand, he holds an orb inscribed with a swirling pattern that emits a sickly green glow.
"Run!" the old woman shouts, terrified. "Run while you can! Warn them!"
"Slay the human," the tall one commands, pointing a spindly finger in the newcomer's direction.
Fuck.
That seems dramatic. He speaks a word, and a shield rises up in front of him, just for a few seconds, but should be enough to stop whatever they throw at him first.
He could try stopping the tall guy's heart, but he isn't sure he even has the right anatomy for the spell to land... He beings to speak completion words for another spell, this one to try to paralyze him, and also draws his sword.
Bolts of fire shot by one of the soldiers wielding a wooden staff with a crystal on the top batter at his shield, cracking it open just before the other soldiers reach him.
He's a trained swordsman with vastly superhuman strength, so he'll start dealing with the soldiers coming in, while finishing the paralytic spell, and directing most of it to anyone holding the staves, and with the rest of it going to the Big Guy, though he's not sure it'll work.
It works well enough that the tall man fumbles the orb! It rolls between the bodies in his direction as the tall man curses.
He rushes forward, picking up the orb, and tries to take the woman off the altar. Will the bands of power break before he starts risking her bones?
Technically yes, but also no. Which is to say, the bands of power break before her bones do, but only because both items are subjected to the same external force that will vaporize them both, and said force hits the bands before the bones.
When the orb gets too close to the woman, there is a massive explosion of magical energy as reality implodes on itself. His perception of the world is consumed in green fire.
Strangely, all the pain that he should be feeling from being so close to blasted into his constituent atoms is concentrated in the hand he was holding the orb in.
Pain of being blasted into constituent atoms: Comparable to negotiating the Logrus or walking the Pattern.
Concentrated entirely into his hand: Ouch.
He call the image of the Pattern before him, and pours energy directly through it, trying to create an island of Order within the green fire, and to see past it.
Through his Pattern-sight, he sees burning wreckage, air choked thick with ash and debris.
This is, it must be noted, notably different than the environment around him outside of the Pattern's effect when the green fire fades away a moment later. It seems to be the same as the room he was just standing in, though minus the other inhabitants. And the furniture seems to change when he's not directly observing it.
And his hand still hurts, though the orb has disappeared.
Weird, all of it.
Changing furniture least of it, really. The shadows near the Courts pull stunts like that regularly, it takes him a moment to even notice that it's not normal for an otherwise orderly-looking shadow.
Fire visible only through pattern-sight is weird though, it doesn't look the way magic tends to look, which implies the normal-looking room is probably illusion of some sort, though a weird one.
He tries to touch the fire, see if it would burn him.
Huh.
Well, everything seems surprisingly calm for the moment, so he'll try to deal with his hand (ouch).
With a minute of preparation, he first tries to shapeshift it to demonic form, and if that doesn't help, to something entirely without pain receptors.
It still hurts in demon form, but if he removes his pain receptors it no longer hurts. No matter what form, there is a brightly glowing mark, the same eerie green as the spectral fire earlier, fluctuating slightly like it's breathing.
That's better.
He tries looking at the mark through the Pattern, is it like a spell or something?
It's... definitely like something, yeah. An incredibly dense knot of magical power, purpose unclear. It seems somehow unfinished or scrambled.