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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 744678" data-attributes="member: 143">Travels through the Wild West: a Forgotten Realms StoryBook VIIIPrologueSummer came late to the Western Heartlands in the Year of Lightning Storms, 1374 by Dalereckoning, as the spring rains persisted through the month of Kythorn well into Flamerule.  But when the skies cleared and the sun started to fill the long days, it came strong and hard, as if making up for time lost.  With the land saturated by the particularly heavy spring rains, the heat that descended upon the region was thick with damp, an oppressive heat that splattered the landscape like a heavy blanket.  The west was abuzz with tales of the events in the Sunset Vale that spring, and their continuing aftermath in Iriaebor.  The most common name spoken in those stories was that of General Aghmer Goran, who was already being transformed into a legend by the bards who fed the appetite of the people for stories of war and glory.  Goran’s victory over a Zhent army in the shadow of the Sunset Mountains had been retold in a thousand different versions.  If some of the details seemed a bit odd—that the Zhents had been moving north, away from the settlements of the Vale, when Goran’s mounted forces had caught them, or that the force was rather smaller than the initial reports had claimed—those details could be forgotten in the face of what was still clearly an important victory over the faces of Evil that threatened all the goodly and peaceful folk of the region.  The details varied with each telling; some of the more popular tales has the General facing and defeating the enemy leader—a dark cleric of Bane—in personal combat, while others described her fleeing the battlefield while her forces were slaughtered by Goran’s cavalry.  There were also many tellings of the clash of great magics at the battle, with evil clerics and a Zhent magic-user—a skymage, no less—facing off against the divine power of the clerics of Eldath, Chauntea, and Selûne from Iriaebor.  The precise outcome of that confrontation depended upon who was doing the telling, but one thing was clear; the broken body of the Zhentarim mage had been found afterward from where he’d been blasted from his saddle by a divine bolt of searing light, and conversely three clerics of Good had returned to Iriaebor in shrouds, to be mourned by their congregations before being laid to their final rest. The storytellers had already dubbed the conflict as the Battle of Goran’s Ridge, after the place where the mounted troopers of Iriaebor had forced the Zhents to ground and overrun them.  According to the most reliable of the many reports, several hundred of the Black Network’s elite troops had been slain in the engagement, with upwards of fifty more brought back in chains to face trial and the hangman’s noose.   Goran’s return had been accompanied of course by an incredible triumph, the likes of which rivaled even the incredible displays of pomp and festivity that one found in the military states of the Old Kingdoms of the east.  The pent-up fear and anxiety that had plagued the citizens of Iriaebor had been let out in an incredible outpouring of celebration that had gone on for three full days.  In the aftermath of that victory, Goran could have had himself crowned king, or consul-for-life, but the triumphant general quietly rejected such suggestions.  Instead, he took the title of “first citizen,” this honorific granted him by the leaders of the Guild Council.  That collection of powerful leaders from the city’s richest merchant houses were masters at knowing which way the wind of public opinion blew, and realized that if they failed to act, they might have had to confront Goran being raised to a new crown regardless of what the man actually claimed to want or not want.  In the following tendays, while the public mood still waxed positive, a few clauses of the City Charter were quietly rewritten to grant the new First Citizen certain powers within the Council, including a limited veto, executive authority over the town administration, and unrestricted command of the city’s armed forces.  A few of the Councilors may have felt some misgivings at some of these changes, carried out as they were without debate and behind the scenes, but none, fearing the volatility of the mob, ventured to challenge them publicly.    As the tendays passed, however, things quieted down, and the tales that traveled with the merchants along the western roads shifted back to more mundane topics, like the wicked summer heat.  Those people that had survived the darkest days of what some folk were already calling the Vale War set about rebuilding their lives as best they could, although it would be years, if not decades, before Asbravn was rebuilt into anything more than a shadow of what it had been.But even as public interest shifted away from the tumult of great events, back to the practicalities of life, the repercussions of the events of that dangerous spring continued to be felt in the halls of power among the west.  What had happened had involved a serious challenge to the order of things, and that could not be forgotten with the defeat of a Zhentarim army.  As the summer stretched on in a wave of sweltering heat, certain individuals continued to meet quietly, drawing consensus toward several important decisions that would further shape the outcome of events in the west.  The rumors that crossed the land began to speak of retaliatory strikes and perhaps even another war—or perhaps just a continuation of the one that had started with the wave of hobgoblins and giants that had descended onto Asbravn that cold spring night.</blockquote>

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