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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StalkingBlue" data-source="post: 1088722" data-attributes="member: 645">Ha!  And I thought I was fast.  Great updates so far.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Here's another:  Letter from Tsui Yio ChoThe brush moves swiftly across the parchment, creating symbol after fluid symbol in the uncertain light from the fire.  A reader practised in the Veridoran script, as ancient as it is alien to Ea, will notice that this is not calligraphy.  The writer moves at a rapid pace –a draft for a business letter, possibly, or a hastily scribbled spy’s report?  The 30th Day of the 12th Month of the Year 2738 3 Years 7 Months 11 Days after Hawk’s Palace’s Fall I saw a crane again today.  They do not know cranes around here.  When I try to describe them, people look at me sideways from their round piglet’s eyes.  It is strange how sanity can lie in that which seems insane.  (There is a koan in here somewhere, which surely the Lady Ochi would have made me find.  Strange, too, that I would write of this to you, who would not know a koan if it hit you in the belly;  who, if I spoke of hawks and cranes, would turn back to your sheep and tend to an injured hind leg.  You had such patience, always, with wounded things.)  ***I am in Gaxmoor.  It is a city on the green southern plains, full of strange people with even stranger customs.  Their noses are long, as long as in the tale of Lady Sun melting the bandits’ faces.  Their eyes are round like pigs’ eyes.  Their knowledge of the civilised peoples is fragmentary.  You will not believe this, but I have met men unable to tell a Heavenly Mountain face from a Mongali one.  The bread they bake here is flabby and devoid of spices.  Their sheep grow fleece as thick and curly as Mongali beards, and are fat and incapable of climbing from their rich green feed.  Of unarmed fighting I have seen little except among drunken men in the brothel;  and that of inferior quality.  Warriors here are trained in the same way as in accursed Mount Fire.  At least Mount Fire is currently regarded as an enemy here.  The strangest custom I have yet encountered is that they give proper funerals only to poor people.  (Yes, I can see you listen up at that.)  The wealthy families hide their dead bodies away, unburnt, either in holes in the ground that are then filled in or in stone caskets placed inside houses they construct for their dead, on a hill outside the city dedicated to the purpose.  Needless to say, the place attracts rats and all sorts of unhealthy things.  But I start by shearing the sheep’s tail.  ***I came to Gaxmoor in the company of a deserter from Mount Fire, Xiang.  We were pursued all the way down from the Mountains and around the Sea of Dust by bands of Death Dealers.  By the time we reached the green plains and forests we had either killed or outrun most of our pursuers.  One band, however, staid at our heels, no doubt fired by the prospect of winning fame through capturing a certain weapon that Xiang had stolen in his escape.  I have become so fearful of treason that even now my brush pulls back from writing it, even to you:  Xiang the deserter has stolen the Black Spear.  We were within sight of the city walls when our six pursuers caught up with us.  Xiang the deserter showed himself more honourable than I would have thought him by not making his escape when I stumbled and fell behind, but turning to make a stand.  The commander of the band wheeled around us to cut off our retreat while the others attacked from behind with blades drawn.  I was lucky enough to stun him for an instant, time enough for Xiang to set the Spear, wheel his horse round and charge him.  The Spear killed him in a single thrust, his face distorting in a horror worse than anything I have ever seen when a man dies.  It is a horrible thing, this Spear, and yet it defines my path.  We made short work of the remaining Death Dealers.  While I pursued the last one, who tried to reach safety, Xiang had the good sense of collecting the others’ armour, weapons and horses.  We found later that many of these items were magic and brought high prices in the city.  I suppose I could have grown rich by just coming south to sell all those things, useless to me, that I used to chuck into crevasses or leave on the corpses … – you knew what I was and what I did, of course, though we never spoke of it.  At the city gates, Xiang was quick to introduce himself as a deserter from Mount Fire.  The guards, far from showing themselves disgusted at the dishonour, admitted us in and brought us before the Margrave, the current ruler of the city.  (It took me a while to realise the importance of this man.  No one bows formally to him and I heard only one man actually address him as Lord.)  Some others were already present, involved in a council of war with the Margrave.  As could be expected in a city that fights in the Mount Fire way, Xiang the deserter’s armour and bearing made much of an impression.  We were heard, and it turned out that by defending our lives on territory claimed by Gaxmoor, Xiang and I had infringed some privilege or other of the lord of the city (did I not warn you they have strange customs).  The Margrave invited us to join forces with the three longnoses already present, and redeem ourselves by helping investigate some trouble in the city’s place for the dead.  Naturally enough, we accepted.  The three longnoses were:  Leo of the White Way, a wizard.  Aos, who fights with a rapier and lives in a brothel;  and Titania, Aos’s companion, who plays the lute and has a trick of disappearing in the midst of battle.  Aos was hospitable enough to procure rooms and baths for Xiang and me.  Leo went to fetch his friend and helper, Tarquin, a priest.  ***The next day, we went out of the city to an inn near the graveyard where the rich store their dead bodies, to speak to a band of Sith scouts guarding the area.  Will you believe it, they had to be reassured first that Xiang the deserter and I were not Mongali!  I found later that their captain had heard rumours of Guardians.  He had heard they all died.  The Sith told us about strange lights in the night at the graveyard, and a recent attack on the inn.  Leo, whom up to then I had mostly seen mumbling over his books filled with scraggly runes, now conjured up a number of eyes, which flew through the air at his command and returned later, to report to him what they had observed at the graveyard – namely, a number of decayed but moving bodies in the bushes and some sets of giant tracks.  A discussion was held about strategy.  We decided to wait for morning and settled down to rest at the inn rather than return to the city.  The Sith captain woke us.  One of his sentries had disappeared.  The tracks, the scouts assured us, led towards the graveyard.  We set out immediately in the hope of rescuing the Sith sentry, accompanied by the entire Sith band and preceded by a number of Leo’s flying magical eyes.  Four walking dead gnolls sprang up from the ground as soon as we came near the gate into the graveyard.  Their stench was horrible.  Strips of decaying flesh dangled from their flanks.  They had hardly appeared, however, when Tarquin the priest chanted a religious phrase and they crumbled to dust.  Guided by the Sith trackers, we came first to a dead-house deep within the graveyard, which was infested by masses of rats.  Leo’s magical eyes detected magical writing on an inner door, together with a warning against breaking the seal banishing the being beyond the door.  After brief discussion we left this dead-house be and moved on.  The tracks led us to a temple building, which had a locked grate on the outside and an inner door – beyond which, Leo assured us, waited a large pack of zombies (half-decayed walking dead) and walking skeletons.  Nobody had a key to open the grate.  Various plans were discussed for getting it open, the more promising ones involving tearing it open by bare strength, or coming back tomorrow equipped with more appropriate magical means.  While we were talking, we were surprised by a woman of demonic appearance with batlike wings yet startling beauty, addressing us from our backs.  The Sith recoiled.  Aos, immediately smitten with the deomoness’s beauty, immediately left the grate and pushed his way to the front, crying out ingratiatingly that he was our leader.  In the ensuing fight the demoness conjured a beaked demon of twisted and horrible appearance, which I learnt later was called a vrock and was much feared.  True to our previous tactic of first focussing on the leader, Xiang the deserter and I both went for the demoness while the Sith scouts shot arrows at the vrock.  As I tumbled past Aos, I received a most painful wound from his rapier.  He apologised later.  The demoness’s magic washed over me tearing at the veil of my focus;  but my concentration held.  (I learnt later that Titania had been enspelled by it just like Aos.)  Tarquin cast a spell to prevent the demoness from fleeing to her own dimension.  Leo conjured up black tentacles writhing from the ground around us, which failed to catch the vrock but ensnared Xiang, who was slowed down by his armour, together with the demoness.  I stepped back among the tentacles and closed again with the demoness, but to my frustration found my power insufficient to wound her.  Meanwhile at our backs the grate to the temple screeched open and a multitude of living and dead monsters spilled out to attack.  An orc severely wounded Titania, who promptly vanished into thin air.  (She came strolling back to dispense healing once everything went quiet again, claiming she had returned to the inn.)  The orc and a misshapen dwarfish hill giant called ogre, who foamed at the mouth most dramatically, then proceeded most of the Sith scouts.  Brave men, but too quick to throw away their lives in battle.  If we had known how easily they would die, surely we should have protected them better.  Tarquin called upon his god and flew straight up into the air and hovered out of reach of the undead, whom he pelted with his religious phrases, destroying them in groups at a time.  Xiang finally killed the demoness with the Spear.  The vrock vanished without a trace and Aos was released from her spell.  Between us we made short work of the monsters that still moved outside the temple.  Tarquin dispensed his god’s healing grace to those of us who needed it.  We regrouped at the doors of the temple and burnt a magical web that Leo had laid to ensnare another band of undead.  Tarquin put the fear of his god into a group of undead gnolls.  Leo, who had warned us to expect a powerful priest among our opponents, now worked some true battle magic in the form of exploding balls of fire.  It is true that hardly any of our foes evaded them, though that may well be because most of them were already dead.  I found that the dead do not fight with the quickness of the living.  I went into the inner temple first to find and engage their leader.  It was a half-orc, already trying to escape into a back room behind the altar with the cowardice characteristic of the kind.  Aos and I quickly killed him.  I was relieved to see that this time Aos’s weapon did not stray in my direction.  I should mention that Titania played the lute to encourage our fighting;  but I fear most of us were focussing too narrowly on our foes to benefit greatly from her play.  The last living gnoll surrendered.  We finished off the remaining undead monsters, which were cowering in fear of Tarquin in various niches around the temple.  One strange thing:  when I found time to breathe, I saw Tarquin, no longer flying, in melee one of the rich decaying citizens on the temple floor.  Clumsy as the walking dead attacked, Tarquin still was receiving wounds.  The others stood and laughed until I went to help him.  What a strange way to treat a priest.  We learnt from the gnoll prisoner that he and the other living monsters had been sent to reinforce the evil priest’s band of walking dead, by a demon lord called Hercules.  Hercules appears to have rules over Gaxmoor until very recently, when the city was overrun and taken by its current longnosed rulers.  Naturally enough, he is now plotting to retake the city.  Tarquin and Leo determined which of the items we took from our dead foes and found in the back room of the temple were magic or otherwise valuable, and as the arrangement with the Margrave was that we might keep any booty, we took the items with us.  We reported back to the Margrave, who showed himself pleased, if mildly concerned at learning that yet more mysteries were waiting in the graveyard.  ***The next day Leo cast magic to determine the specific powers of the items.  A few items were claimed by various members of our company.  The rest was sold, again yielding staggering amounts of gold.  I will have to find a trader I can trust and convert my new wealth into gems.  Two items we destroyed:  a cursed spear and the golden circlet the monstrous priest had worn.  When analysing the circlet, Leo had suddenly felt compelled to put it onto its head, where it whispered to him thoughts of great and corrupting power.  He tore it off with a great effort and threw it from him with all signs of horror and disgust.  The other longnoses agreed that this was a frightening indication of the circlet’s power.  I said nothing.  Xiang the deserter claimed he did not understand what Leo said.  I wonder.  Even I can feel the Spear calling, tugging.  Leo consulted other wizards in the city.  The result was that the circlet might be an artefact created by a mighty necromancer of old, which was called his Crown.  The wizards permitted the circlet to be melted down in their tower’s furnace.  Those who were present report that they felt a wave of magic wash over them.  They had a priest say prayers over the melted gold to protect from any malicious after-effects of the destruction.  Nevertheless, in the ensuing weeks Leo suffered some frustrating setbacks in his studies, which appear to have involved attempts to make dweomered items for Aos and for himself.  He still grumbles about the lost expense in gold and what he calls ‘life energy’.  ***About a month ago Xiang the deserter and I were summoned into the Margrave’s presence.  He informed us that Mount Fire is seeking an alliance with the Mongali and may go to war against Gaxmoor and its allies, to retrieve the Black Spear.  Xiang smoothly replied that in the event of war, he would gladly volunteer his services.  The Margrave thanked him and dismissed us.  Xiang appeared satisfied that this was the end of it.  The Spear must be blinding him.  Surely it is only a question of time until the Margrave considers it more politic to return the Spear than to pay with his army’s and his citizens’ blood to protect a deserter’s hide?  And the Margrave is not the only one.  Leo has made remarks about the Spear to Xiang that made my scalp prickle.  And do I have to say to you that the last word has not been spoken on the Guardians of Hawk’s Palace?  To this I must hold, if to nothing else.  ***The wind scratches at the shutters.  Old ghosts whirls with the snowflakes and crowd around the threshold to the new year.  Dawn soon.  I should finish this before my fire dies.  They have other beliefs here than we do in the mountains.  Yet … if our priests are right, then your soul has long been reborn – quite possibly more than once, in these terrible times.  I can but pray that the essence of these words will reach you, will travel to find that fragment of your soul, that tiniest of splinters residing in the Void from eternity to eternity, anchoring us, waiting.  Ladies, let these words find him.  Tsui Yio ChoThe letter ends.  No seal, but then, no need to seal it.  The flames in the grate curl around it, push fingers through the writing, gobble the parchment up.  Smoke trails up through the chimney.  Ashes crumble.  The letter is gone.  </blockquote>

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