Session 1, Part 2: Ajax of Haigonopolis
I followed that gnome through the wall of mist. Refreshingly, the sun was yellow again once we got to the other side. I however, was still dead. The Median came just behind me. The woman did not follow.
It was obvious that the other two were dead also, since none of us were breathing. After the violence of the last few minutes, we should all have been near dropping.
The gnome started chirping in what I can only assume was gnomish, but I didn’t understand a word he said. He searched through the stuff he’d picked up from the corpses on the other side of the wall and drank a potion.
“Jamili Legens, at your service,” he said in flawless Median.
“I’m Ajax.”
“Zaveon,” said the Median man.
The three of us swapped items we had found, based on our skills and unspoken agreement to cooperate for survival’s sake. I was still a bit leery of this Jamili. He had looked just like Tariq Dost, one of my old companions before he crumbled and turned into this guy. But he was honest enough in the trading.
Zaveon was a wearer of white, one of those sworn to protect holy Avasara’s places of worship, and had been beaten up pretty badly during the battle. I suggested that he use the power granted by Avasara to heal himself. He clasped his hands upon his wounds and the faint glow that accompanies the positive energy came from his hands. The wounds grew larger. He cried out in pain. “What is happening?”
He then realized his training. We were dead, and such energy which heals the living wounds the dead.
“What happened to that woman?” I asked them.
Zaveon thought she would be coming out just behind him. We had had a clear line of escape for the mist and took it. So we waited. None of us knew her, we determined, but if Avasara willed that the four of us appear together, then there must be a reason for it. We kept waiting.
Jamili didn’t know who Avasara is. Zaveon explained the Eternal Faith to the gnome as best he could, better than I could have, but not as well as a true priest.
We each related our tales, trying to orient ourselves and make sense of our situation. Each of us told of our death. Jamili talked about a race of creatures called the sovereigns with the bottom half of a snake, top of a six-armed man and head of an insect.
“Oh, you mean the Eldritch,” I told him.
Neither of them were familiar with the term. Rookies.
“The Eldritch were an evil race which dominated the world millennia ago,” I began. They were overthrown by an army of creatures which call themselves the Ghinn.”
“Yes, the tattooed ones,” Jamili said. “They are truly great.”
“No,” Zaveon said firmly. “They worship Sin and all that is evil.”
“He’s right on this one,” I told them. “When the Eldritch were beaten, they left this world and constructed a barrier around it, one which could not be pierced by Avasara or by Sin. It was this barrier that the Mother of the Eternal Faith, Arrousha, was able to pierce. The Ghinn, as part of the bargain they had made with Sin for the power to defeat the Eldritch, committed mass suicide after they won. Except for the warriors, which were encased in a stone slumber.”
“Ah, interesting. If it’s true,” Zaveon said.
I forgot that what my companions, former companions apparently since I was the only “survivor” of the green wave, and I were able to discover is not common knowledge. There are only a handful of people in the world who have even heard the word “Eldritch,” much less are those who are able to recite the ancient history of them. Not including the Ghinn, who know them intimately of course.
“Arrousha pierced the barrier and ended the age of erroneous idolatry,” I said. She allowed Avasara to enter the world again, but others—Sin— were also be permitted entry once more.
“A group called the Athanatos, they are Ionians, like me, except they believe Ionians to be the master race. They discovered, somehow some of the more minor secrets of the Eldritch and practiced Eldritch magic about 20 years ago. Well, 20 years before I died, anyway. That wakened the slumbering Ghinn who set about building cities, training and creating a new generation of Ghinn, so to speak.
“The Athanatos then actually found a live Eldritch, in a severely weakened state, under the ruined city of Saeedah-Bel,” I said.
It’s a shame about what happened there.
“They brought that Eldritch back to their base and the leaders of the group were using it somehow in a bid for immortality. I died trying to stop them.”
I left it at that. I didn’t tell them that it was partly my fault, well my group’s fault, that the Athanatos had done whatever they did to set off that green wave. I didn’t tell them my suspicion that the place we just left was the aftermath of that green wave.
Avasara wants me back for something and he thinks I need to be with these two, so be it. So, Jamili lived under the Eldritch while he was alive, that’s bound to come in useful.
Zaveon had his throat slit by a Jola nomad. I won’t tell him that I knew a Jola named Throat-Slitter, and that the old shaman had saved my life once in the desert.
After a few minutes of talking and trading, we started to think the woman wasn’t coming out.
“I’m not going back in that place for someone I never met,” I told them. I think they were relieved to hear someone else say it. We stood around staring at each other trying to decide what to do. Our choices seemed limited, back toward the misty barrier or set off into the brown, rocky desert terrain.
Jamili saw it first, some smoke in the distance, probably a settlement. “Maybe we should go there,” he suggested.
None of us knew where there, or here was, but we didn’t have any better ideas so we began to walk north toward the smoke.
It turns out that being dead makes traveling very easy. We didn’t have to eat or drink, and we didn’t get tired or really annoyed by the rocks in our sandals.
