Scribe Ineti

This is a little story I threw together to cover my deva avenger's background at the start of the FR campaign my friend is GMing. It was inspired in large part by the Ecology of the Deva article in a recent Dragon issue. Enjoy!

I. THE RETURNING
25 Hammer 1479

Enabria, steward of one of Tempus’s sacred circles, glanced up from her dinner preparations and stared hard toward the clearing outside her modest cottage. Her eladrin heritage had blessed her with outstanding hearing; hearing that hadn’t faded much over all her twenty plus decades of life. She was certain she had heard something different – something unnatural – cutting through the brisk winter breeze rattling off the Star Mounts. Swirls of falling snow brushed against the window. Her still-sharp eyes could make out nothing unusual other than the bright snow and the swaying trees and the rugged mountainside beyond the circle.

“Kendrus? Are you awake?” She glanced toward the bedroom she shared with her fellow steward and life companion.

A grunt of assent reached her ears, followed by the rustling sounds of Kendrus rolling over in the bed and rearranging the sheets around his body.

She let a brief smile tug at her mouth, then called again. “Kendrus. I heard something outside. Something…,” she searched for a likely word, “…unusual.”

Another grunt from Kendrus was her answer, but she heard him sigh and get out of the bed soon enough. He shuffled into the main living area of their cottage as he wrapped a thick bedrobe more comfortably around his shoulders. “Eh, what’s that, Ennie? Sommat outside?” He rubbed his bleary eyes.

Enabria pointed her paring knife at the window. “Out there, somewhere near the circle. I didn’t see anything. Just heard something through the wind.”

Kendrus snorted, then cleared his throat. “Well, all the same. I best go on out and have a look. Can’t imagine getting a visitor in this weather, though.” He waved a hand toward the falling snow outside. “I don’t expect the next supply delivery until Ches. No one wants to make the trip through the forest or up these mountains, not in this weather.”

Enabria nodded at Kendrus’s statements and then turned back to her dinner makings. He was reasonably intelligent, for a human midway through his sixth decade. Over her shoulder, she said, “While you’re out there, bring in some more wood for the stove. We could use a little extra tonight, I think. Feels like it’s going to get colder.”

By now, Kendrus had traded his bedrobe for hunter’s leggings and tunic, and had pulled on his boots and thrown a heavy cloak over his shoulders. “That’s all it does in Hammer, love. Get colder. Won’t feel a warm spell for a few months yet.”

He slipped a dagger into the top of one boot and grabbed his shortbow and quiver of arrows. He pulled the cloak shut in front of his modest belly and nodded at her. “I’ll be but a minute or two. While I’m up, I might as well check the traps too. See if we can get us some meat for that Midwinter stew you have in mind.”

She responded with a nod of her own, then braced herself against the sudden chill as he opened the door and pushed himself out into the cold Grey Vale winter.

~~~

Kendrus moved through the door and shut it behind him quick as he could, hoping to preserve what warmth he could inside the house for Ennie’s benefit. Wouldn’t do for her to get cold as well, even though her fey blood somehow kept her comfortable except in the worst cold snaps. He latched the door shut, hunkered down into his cloak, then trudged out into the inches-deep snow toward the treeline, where he’d set up several small game traps.

Much to his pleasure, two of the traps had borne fruit. He cleaned and dressed the trapped beasts, then reset the traps, using a little salted meat as bait. Kendrus headed toward the sacred circle, careful to nod his head in deference, quietly reciting the litany of thanks to the gods for the bounties from the traps.

He paused in his recital, squinted at the circle. He hadn’t heard anything over the crisp wind, but he could have sworn he saw…

Frowning now, the litany forgotten, he took a few steps closer to the circle. He generally didn’t get this close to it except for when he and Ennie came out every month to ritually purify it, but he was a steward of the circle, same as her, and there was something going on inside it that he’d never seen before. By the blood of Tempus, he had never even heard of it before, not even from the stewards he’d inherited the circle from.

Inside the circle, at roughly chest-height, a whirlpool of silvery light spun at a slow, measured pace. A faint humming sound reached his ears. At first he wasn’t sure what it was, and jiggled a finger judiciously in one ear to help clear it in case he was hearing things, but no. The hum grew in volume as the lights picked up pace, spinning faster in alternating tight and loose circles and swirls. The lights separated into more, smaller, lights, and soon thin strands of silvery energy coalesced within the sacred circle, lengthening to a foot, two feet, more.

The hackles on the back of his neck danced and his teeth chattered, if not from the chill, then from a deep crawling sensation within his belly. Something was happening here, something he’d never experienced before. He didn’t understand it, but he felt it. It had the feeling of something otherworldly, monumental.

He glanced back toward the cottage, but saw little of it through the swirling snow. He turned back to the swirling energies within the circle. By now the silvery strands swirled some seven feet in height, from the ground up, and spun around right at the edges of the sacred circle. The strands were spinning so fast now that he had lost count of how many there were. The strands had become ribbons and the ribbons had morphed into a curtained pillar of bright silver energy.

As he stared at the energies, he felt Ennie’s hand press into one of his own. He glanced down at her, at his side, and offered a surprised smile. She had a long black cloak on, clenched shut against the weather. She stared her bright eyes at the curtain of light and smiled.

“It’s happening, Kendrus. By all the gods and the mighty hand of Tempus, it’s happening.” She blinked back tears. “In all my years, I never thought I’d see such a sight.”

Kendrus stared at her, noted that she had a folded burgundy cloak under her free arm. He focused on the spinning, glowing curtain. “Is it a sign from the gods?”

Ennie squeezed his hand. “It’s a Returning.”

As if in confirmation of her statement, the pillar of silver light reached its maximum spinning speed, and the humming modulated into a howl. Then, with a clap of thunder and a flash of blinding light, the whole pillar exploded in a fireworks display of sound and color, and then, all was calm aside from the falling snow and the constant breeze.

Kendrus blinked his eyes several times, trying to clear the bright spots the explosion of light had created. Ennie gave a sharp intake of breath. Together, they stared up and into the sacred circle.

Standing in the center of the circle, on ground strangely devoid of snow, stood a tall man, naked to the elements. At first Kendrus thought the man must be frozen, as he had light blue skin streaked with darker shades, but no. It was the man’s natural skin color, if such a thing could be considered natural. The man had shoulder length hair, dark blue in color.

As Kendrus stared, the man blinked his iris-less ivory eyes and then turned toward Kendrus and Ennie. In a quiet, almost hesitant voice, the man said, “Greetings. I am…,” and here he paused, as if remembering something from the shadowy depths of time. “My name is Amulek.”

So, after running a nice 12-session arc of a 4e Eberron game last year, my group took a bit of a break from gaming but have been getting back to it of late. One of the players in the group has started a 4e Forgotten Realms game, and I'm really enjoying the opportunity to play the game for the first time as something other than the DM.

I'm playing a deva avenger based out of the Grey Vales, and so far the story has centered around that area. We just hit second level last week, and tonight's session will be the first to showcase our new leet skills. Or whatever.

The game is just as much fun to play as it is to DM, so that's a plus. What's even better is that the online tools (particularly the character builder and the compendium) are much farther along than they were when I was DMing Eberron, so the FR game is just that much better organized.

In the coming days, I'll post some stuff on my character in the the FR game in addition to my notes on getting my Eberron game ready for the next story arc.

To paraphrase Scotty from the new Trek movie, "I love this game. It's exciting!"

For all two of you reading this blog....

The game didn't actually die. We ran a solid twelve sessions and got the PCs to fifth level before taking a break for the 2008 holidays, and then once the new year rolled around the group of players were caught up in life and other things.

One of the players started running a 4e Forgotten Realms game about a month ago, and now I'm in the process of playing that but also getting my notes together to run the next short arc of Eberron sessions. I expect we'll start soon.

As part of the return, I'm hoping to get my session notes from the first twelve sessions together so that I can actually get around to updating this blog!

I had a chance last night to download and mess with the character builder software that's currently in closed beta for DDI. I was quite impressed. It looks like it'll be a great tool once it's fully operational.

Unfortunately, my party is currently 4th level about to hit 5th level, so the builder beta is of somewhat limited immediate use.

However, I plugged in two of the characters and realized that we had erred on some math, so we made corrections to our homebrew sheets.

Anyway, once the builder is fully operational, it plus the encounter tool will more than cover the subscription cost, in my eyes. Getting Dungeon and Dragon free is a bonus.

While I haven't been posting to this blog in some time, the game has been going on since I stopped posting. The players sort of stopped compiling notes for the sessions, and I haven't had time to compile them myself.

We'll be running the eleventh session of the game this week, at which point Book I of the campaign will close and we'll take a short break for the holidays before continuing the story. I expect to use part of the break to revise all the raw notes I have in hand and to bring this blog fully up to date.

I see a lot of my posts have many reads but no comments, so someone is reading.