Act III

Chapter One, Crossroads & Curses

14th year AD, last days of Duskrest, Crossroads of Crestwoad

Bristling rebellion erupts everywhere, all at once! Drakkon reflected when Baron first proposed this brash & mysterious venture which brought them now to the edge of town. Time I search for why this has come to be. Humor the bard and see what my subjects are thinking, and ‘struggling through’, as he suggests. Tis the best way to absolve them of it. To correct their thought with real knowledge and intimacy of their lots. He knew well how perturbed Azarra would be by this current junction he joined his friend on, en route to bustling tavern at the crossroads. She would protest the very thought of hiding among the people under some humbling alias (as our Lord of Living Light remolded then his persona, to match the ragged attire of a large and brooding logger from afar) and not attending to his duties on high. But the amicable man trotting beside him convinced him of the need for this extravagant ruse of modesty.

Baron, bereft of his trademark lute & flutes and ostentatious fashions (he’d already made a show of having nothing to show off his ‘notoriously strong horse-riding thighs’ or having any tight hose to present the ‘other talent the muses endowed’ him with), pointed down the hill towards the trade, travel & pub hub of Crestwoad. “Alright, ‘Log’, keep in mind that when we get closer you really need to keep those shoulders scrunched. Keep off that regal, ever-erect posture of yours! Favor your costume’s world weariness and urge to drink more than speak, aha! And I, ‘Bard’, the hunter,” with this he fiddled with the bow slung behind his back and shook his small bag of game, “will evoke temperance to avoid my gloriously recognizable singing voice being released in the tavern, even if it gets noisy. Just as you should reel in the inclination to do any rousing or castigating speeches should you find something to scorn the townsfolk for.”

“For a renowned artisan of music & words it seems cleverness escapes you when it came to inventing your alias. Hmph.”

“And yours is that much more creative, my lord of loggers?”

“Ugh. I am playing a simple man, with a simple name. Alas, if the details of our masks (which are to be only briefly worn anyway) are enough to work then let us be satisfied. At least this place is busy enough that a couple strangers will not be of much notice. Even from afar it has life to it and a pressure in the air around, the tension of many lives rolling on together through all the clamors. Yet how often have I come here even as a lord? But I question myself frivolously there, so, back to it. I assume we are to meet Mordaunt at the tavern before dusk?”

“Aye, though I must admit I already forgot what name he said he travels under. Alas he awaits us at the Magister’s Concubine establishment. But our rendezvous need not be rushed should you wish to stop by the marketplace first. This is a crossroads for culture, the true culture of the mixed many, as much as commerce. Those here will have good share of stories. Then again elixirs should have ‘em spill these tales. But merchants & makers here are of diverse schools, enough that you can get a sense of how these different homes are getting on.”

“You still expect me to change my policies so swiftly the moment I hear some peasant cry into his swill? Before I play at being a player and pursue this role of ‘boozing logger’ I must say: no matter if this township is the avatar of our realm’s common heart, if its denizens prove ungrateful for my works and the heart of them is not as balanced and true, it will prove this trip as accomplishing only cementing the foundations of suspicion. Those fearful inklings that more renegades are harbored here amongst the common folk, speaking their malice & seductively coercive rhetoric of revolt. Let them, these worries, be false. But they, true.”

“I pray you will keep your heart more open and conclusions fluid to whatever sights our eyes find. Pray, hear what horrors, or praise our ears shall soon know. Keep to the flow of what circumstance and divine ordainment might fall unto our lap. Of course, if we do hit the pub early and get on with meeting our other friend there a good few pitchers of ale might help in that regard. Ah, look there’s our lad’s horse! And of course, I will not get so thrashed by the mead stores - I hear are so excellent this season - that I start singing. Chin up, Drakkon. Pray be willing to let new insights through your mind’s gate. Or rather, Log, keep that head down and hood up while we hear out what the townsfolk and wayfarers wish to say for themselves.”

Drakkon grunted. Then performed a gruffer moan of exasperation, more befitting his ‘Log’ character. Leaving their steeds tied beneath fence near their friend’s steed by watch-post, they braved the stead under bravados. He shook himself into it, even stealing a small (for his size) sip of Baron’s flask. While he would normally abstain, these weren’t normal tidings for him and being so far from his own self in attire & presentation for this ruse he wanted to gain some distance from sobriety as well. Or so he said to his heart. This, along with the arousing aromas of autumnal harvest rolling in as they passed through the fields and into the blockade of trader’s stalls hawking their freshest fruit & vegetables yet, strangely did assist in inviting his perspective to change for a riper one.

“Get your pumpkins & wreathes here!”

“Last and best tidings of the Harvest here, folks! Get yours before it gets wintry and dried when you deserve it crispy!”

The crowds absorbed Drakkon. The sheer number of people cavorting about and lining the seller stalls affirmed his assertion that everything is fine with the regulations he ordered. Baron painted him a mental image of starving masses and beggars laid out over the roads. And yet here he saw no cruel or unusually neurotic sentinels abusing the townsfolk or lifting from their wares & profits under guise of taxation. And so, he figured this would be a day to deliver a reason for revelry come the evening flood of drinks and peasants’ tales.

Baron, or ‘Bard’, must also have been ‘endowed’ by the Muses some talent for telepathy, for he seemed to read this from his friend’s brow and leaned in to offer a change of course more fitting his bias. “Shall we steer past here and into the slums?” He whispered. “Perhaps visit the ghettos where those ‘liberated’ of their homes from war and efforts to ‘restore order’ are? Shall we see their squalor with the same idle joy we greet these fair tradesmen with? See those formerly of Vizzari, born into their part as a scale of the serpent to be stripped and shed, who did not follow their fellows into the abyss of the East? Or the asylum just past the road where those cursed or without wits linger in healing shackles as they are fermented in sickness – not from war alone but by the very world which seems to ail them at every angle and who have no one to be rescued or mourned by? Surely we’ll find the found of that rebel Protectorate there?”

“You seem so pressed to prove only one harsh angle of all this yourself.” ‘Log’ said as aside before spitting and grunting, a crude practice of animalistic alias. He shrugged and pointed past the walls into the square proper. “We drink now instead. Move on, see more, later?”

“Sure, Log. Sure.”

The ‘Magister’s Concubine’ pertained repute as quite the notorious local spot. It rose its prestigious perch a couple floors above a regular inn. Walking up to it, an array of balconies and galleries above brimmed with a several ‘couples’; gleaned through careless windows and velvet veils having a good and primal time with another. Beer & patrons poured out from every orifice of the building. It had homely aspect to it despite all the ruckus, even now with yet another hour left of daylight. Into the maw of debauchery, the duo tread, in search of their friend Mordaunt.

Hiding the small frown that this overburdened display of debauchery wrinkled across his visage beneath his hood, Drakkon greeted the inn keep’s helper with a grunt. He hurled a bundle of firewood he’d brought to him and pointed towards an open table in the back. The helper nodded hastily, itching at himself as he rushed to place the timber down and bring the pair a couple of fresh pints.

In a split alcove of the first floor of the inn the two found the table their scout sat passing the wait with wine. Mordaunt dyed his hair a wine red, like a devil’s whiskers, with a fire berry and knot-root. He looked a mad highlander from Herathi heritage with an absurd checkered kilt and two axes attached to his back. The man partook plenty of the revelry here already and yet was nowhere near to meeting his threshold. Merrily imbibing his cups & toasting the two. The blooming absurdity of his appearance oddly melded his features together in a way that was more becoming and less belligerent.

“Let us move, merry mates, to a room with a more prosperous view!” He heralded them (and the helper trailing behind with two pitchers in heel, after ordering him to follow with more wine) up a couple floors towards the top. There they stretched along the large room their auspiciously redheaded host procured for their night out on the town, enjoyed the balcony seats there.

Truly the view that met their tired and slightly cynical nerves brought unexpected second breath. The side of Crestwoad sloped over the hillside the town was perched on. Galleys of houses and small artisan shops poured billowing industry from chimneys and coalsmoke forges. Craning their necks, they peered past long throngs packing the cobbled streets. All those small crowds passing on by and about their ways were hypnotic in their patterns. So mesmerizing, and a bit depersonalizing, to witness how they each held in their heads their little worlds. Each family & sprouts with their burdens and wistful promises to sleep on for the day to come. How neighborly they kept to each other. Any envy hid neath myrrh and manners.

“How is it from this harmony such trouble rouses?” Mordaunt murmured, souring the moment, and enjoying soured grapes & freshly refilled goblet. “This People’s Protectorate red rabble?”

“I went among their shambled sectors also. Yet those too I found strangely tame. Even the impoverished live with some honour to their lives. Or at least are happy to be helped enough by charity and not driven into the wilds to starve or solve some beast’s conundrum of food. Such bountiful harvests and happiness abound! Ah, so hard to sniff out any hard-nosed heretics shouting and scowling to the sky when they are content with their cattle and their needs. Wherefore do they plague us so spitefully? From whence do the rats crawl, why & where? When most sing ceaseless praise to Justice of Imperium and leapt with joy when came the call to combine their pagan customs with the Drakoni virtues.”

“’Wherefore’ indeed. Which is why I might say we stave off our pleasant viewing of these roads to room with folk who might inform us more of other tidings. Through loosened jaws and mead-warmed bellies.” Baron countered.

“Or we sit here fattening our stomachs with good starch and strains as we get to know each other better, as veteran comrades?” Drakkon sloshed about his mug. “Any particular people here we might procure some insightful conversation from?”

“I talked up several homesteads and good folk to no avail throughout the day, ye late lads. No source of this rebellious scourge.” Mordaunt shrugged. “Though we should stick to the floor below here. As to avoid interrupting any wanton lovers who might not be so conversational. Plenty of dice players a deck down. Though if you do not feel like a gambling spell the wayfarers and merchant caravans (of boat and carriage) rest for their while here. They see plenty, although they may avoid the less happy towns or those already turned heel to ‘Protectorate’ deceit as rebellious brigands descending on lonely steads.”

“I spotted a Drakoni priest the floor below. If any ‘heretics’ have been hounded up of late he would surely know of their torment. Inflicted by and upon them.” Baron intruded. “I hope he may forgive my gaping. I am astonished he’s in this den of lusting flesh & low inhibitions.”

“I do not appreciate your tone of derision, ‘Bard’.” Drakkon spat. “But yes, let us see what this herald of Living Light has to say for his work. And yet, I imagine you wish more to present some lines of inquiry to the maidens of the brothel within this fine place, correct? I am back to being a ‘Log’ once we leave the privacy of our room, but I would prefer if we refrained from encouraging scorn amongst the townsfolk through our own words, you see.”

“And let us pay special heed to tales of wary travelers from outside this happy village.” Mordaunt added before reminding them. “Call me Harald for the next few, by the way.”

Despite the spills and stains lining the tables, the mead hall they waddled into was as comely as the dozen or so maidens sprinkled about the patrons, some of whom were themselves lovely lasses (of a diff working sort however). ‘Harald’ led them to join another party, warmly receptive and aching for a few more chairs in cards & dice. Sitting by a couplet of rounded tables near fireplace stoked by another servant of the Concubine, they find welcome in toast and quick test of downing their ale. A custom on the road for swill-minded folk to size another up, even if only to compare liver frailty & alcohol endurance.

This group found its fit of disparate members meshed well enough when bathing in drink. Among them: a couple of caravan guards; pissing away their pay gambling, a sour faced Drakoni priest (whose somber look you might wonder was borne by contest of spirit & sin in himself, over the very liquor he coated his gullet with), a village ruffian or two come from the outskirts to sneak a spell in, and a woman. When it came to that amiable woman, given their locale, one might be forgiven for first presuming her a harlot. In part that perception would be helped along by how her manner, aesthetic glamor and attire woven of elegant grace & threaded by sultry fabric of tempting promise.

Her enigmatic eyeline flittered over Baron. Spotting his staring, his daydreaming & blushing analysis of her features & relaxed neckline, she initiated introduction. “I am Ishraine, a scholar from the westward Illuminarium. I only spectate these games of ‘risk’& ‘chance’ here. Although if you would rather spectate myself, I am not averse to conversation with chance strangers of interesting sort.”

“Pleased to meet you, Lady of the Word.” Baron feigned a bow, dropping a dollop of hyperbole and flagrant, if attempted charming, exaggeration of noble gesture. “I am Bard. I brought in some hares if you get hungry. This here is my woodsman pal, Log. Although he ain’t much an open trail to track as me. Our other companion on the road is Harald, hailing from Herathi, past the great river and over hills. I must confess, not to the priest but to you, Ishraine: how arresting to find a woman of wit! Pardon my fascination but those Illuminaries are so odd and unimaginable to me. Yet here a learned woman from such a mystical fount appears before me seeming nothing like the wizened scholars my little imaging could invent.”

“Well, I appreciate the flattery, Bard. You carry a bow and must study the school of skinning & salting, from those hares you brought so graciously. Yet there is something in you I feel could, should you walk another path, prosper to carry on the quill and use those talented, callused hands to strum lute strings as much as bowstrings.” Ishraine winked at him, their body language melting into one another’s mutual focus, even as the other party members joined in.

“What she study?” Drakkon, as Log, growled. Low mumbling burdening the air.

“Philosophy. The study of wisdom and insights into new perspectives on the Light this world offers. Though I am an understudy of botany & genealogy. & I do dabble in alchemy: to unravel some of the mysterious tapestry’s elemental structure. As for what brings me here a little relaxation goes a long way for unwinding. Restoring a mind fogged by too much imagining and aloof ponderings. Tis nice to be among folk who are more tethered to the soil they toil for. More lessons can be learned among the living than sifting through tomes. There are also far more vibrant discussions here, if you will excuse a lady’s presence in such a house of rapport.”

Ishraine shifted again to Baron, lifting amorous glance under eyelashes; lined with an alchemic, charcoal, hue that cast her dirty brown eyes to deep & entrancing dusky gems. Drakkon was not yet pleased with her answer however and wanted more from her before she gave the bard all her attention. “You here to spread ‘philo-pho-so-sy’ with others?”

“Are you asking if I am recruiting?” She asked coquettishly, tilting her stare from Baron’s to her potential accuser. “It is not only women up there, know you? Any adventurous soul can seek Illuminarium and the fire of learning. You could throw yourself into learning to read script? Hammer those runes with the same ferocity you must charge at the trees you fell. There is nothing shameful in promoting opportunity and education for others. And it is not like I plan on kidnapping anyone to some rocky monastery.”

Baron cocked his brow at Drakkon while the lady’s gaze shifted. Suspicious worry crumpled the lines of his forehead before regaining his poise. “Excuse my friend, he can be quite superstitious. Fear not his bulk and brawn though, for Log has a heart of gold – somewhere in that massive husk - aha! Although you might find a harder time convincing him that you scholars & wise-folk, ladies and otherwise, are not cooking up any witchery and devilment than this priest here!”

“Trust me, o lads of wild imaginations, if the scholarly caste were as lavishly exciting as your boyish brains cook up in those cauldrons, filled with witches’ sabbats clad moon-bare I would still be there enjoying such dreamy fun. You may find naked facts less appealing. The fun, or at least fruitfulness of it, comes with the application of the words in action unto the world. Then moving with brightened understanding from within it.”

“Well,” Baron nudged her, “your ‘brightened understanding’ certainly hath not hindered your beauty, lady, only emphasized that ardent light.”

“Mhm. Is that so? & how many woodland wenches hast thou hunted as game or simply spotted passing in your time, ye hunter of hare and wooer of women?”

“Eyy, priest!” Harald nearly jabbed the man of the cloth with his fat, flailing, finger before shouting question at him. “Curious as to what brings an up-keeper of faith to this den of moral defilement & ample lust?! Or just here to share the good word of Drakkon? Maybe recite it repeatedly in case these drunken ears all ‘round already too soaked to really hear it? ha!”

The priest, who’d been introduced by the resident rogue who first waved the trio over as Angwar, frowned that much further. He shook his flaky, balding mug and slammed back the one in hand. “Politics….” He muttered through mead. He sniffled some, not from emotion as much as ingestion, and eyed them through listless lids.

“And? What more? Are you not a robed herald of the Living Lord, bound to the simple politic of our Imperium’s grandeur? Helwinds, blast it! Surely you can parley or spit spite about certain policies or excessive tributes but why should the gods, and their vessel among us, care for such lowly grains?”

Drakkon nearly went cross eyed trying to grant them a suspect stare simultaneously. He yearned to know Angwar’s answer, his thoughts on ‘politics’, as did he with Mordaunt’s push of this inquiry, and any ulterior meaning. ‘Twould prove an interesting evening at the tavern indeed it seemed. Even if only for revealing more of his close companions’ feelings than any explanation of how the peasants’ and guildsmen get on from their very mouths. Mouths more concerned with quenching a lecherous and primal thirst more than sating any hunger, famine nor the plague which he’d been primed to expect.

“I believe our holier than thou friend here hath gone mute. Tis ‘cause of his shame, I bet. Come to heal the wounds of the faith while ‘avin a crisis of it ‘imself. Ha!” Cut in one of the knavish patrons.

The holy man sighed, and ghosts fled from his mortal breath. His lungs were weary with matters of life and death, & his liver ached for a punishment of man’s make, his oldest brew. “Could say that… their eyes, the boils… I fear for their souls...”

“Finally lending us a word, old lech?” One prodded.

“What can words do for their suffering? How can the terrible truth of it be phrased? Went to the South, to cast a light on the bubbling murmurs of sickness. Saw the weight of the whispers, the wicked buboes & snarled rot. Rode West next. There too ailing of apocalypse, indescribable torments. Went to Crestfall. To give congress & raise alarm to the reports, to paint that landscape etched into nightmares. Words failed me, resolve too. Chapter of bloody numbskulls! & Windhand would be no better! The congregation hierarchs care not for hearing the afflictions of ‘distant dirty rabble’ and even less how, or if, they might be healed. Damn them!” The monk’s wrinkled nose nearly dipped into his ale; head drooped in morose pose as he ranted.

“Eyy! Went to yonder plague lands and came back here, sparing not a thought for fellows here who might catch it from ye?!” Chimed a drunkard. The louse shifted in his seat as to swerve steeply from Angwar, although it also looked as though he were avoiding a nasty shit. “AM I gon’ lose an eye for looking at ye so long? Or this gabber o’mine fall off like a leper’s for clanking a mug?!”

“Nay! Nay!” Countered his compatriot, even louder. “Other priests are right to tell this one to fuck off. Tis all a blight on spotted hovels that done swore against the gods! Winds woulda washed the death-spell off ‘em well before he made his way across to Crestfall and back to the Woads ‘ere. Let ‘em rot there for all it affects us. Just pray harder for the souls, spiritualist!”

Ishraine waited for the pair’s verbal flatulence and self-assuring laughter to die down before backing Angwar. Leaning a soft hand over to his wizened branch. “If those black spells are not attended to, kept at bay or even paid the least awareness of by our larger society then should the baleful gales blow our way more of the cursed and suffering will flee with the blight on their heels. If not within them already it will very much be a horror for us all. Say we get bad grain, or other supplies soured by that sinister strain, from one of these farms yet unawares. We would unwittingly invite that scourge to travel with it. To cross any road it wishes, the range of pestilent destruction grows to match our greater Imperium.”

Only when her hand cupped his in gentle gesture did Ishraine realize how feverishly the priest’s fingers and knuckles rattled. Angwar did not smile. That facet of facial expressions would seem forever lost to him; what sights he’d seen whither that muscle which flexes optimism. But that he sustained more stillness and acknowledged her, eye to eye with gratitude. “Foreboding sigils of our frailty. Portends of our fortune’s falling in eyes of the empyrean. Could be that more than one god is offended out there? Unless tis one sore spreading across the body without visible link and with many variants, for different curses pummel those people. Fevers, winged fevers that swept whole villages up to morbid hysteria, in the south. Boils and black bumps popping up on others in the West. Each patron deity maybe sponsors a sickness to scorn their dissenters…”

“And what, noble Angwar, sin could those hearths hath housed as to incur such ire from above deserving of those sights which steal your speech?” Asked Baron, pointedly. “In your ventures to those tainted towns did you find any evidence of mass heresy? Any reasons why any of the gods should be so spiteful in their scorn?”

Angwar slinked his hand from Ishraine, her warmth evaporating. Returning to that jittering cold. “I searched, aye, and found no reason nor sign. Only suffering and omens of Ill bounty. And yet, forgive me this stray pondering, good lass, I also wonder what good any Illuminarie could conjure to contest the strife which, sin or not, shall strike the land barren. Words failed me, though I was once quite the rhetoric, when they were needed to hatch sympathy from my peers and greater councils. What could secular works or alchemical tomes & ancient culture do to combat disease? Be it by heavens making or dug from the earth’s soil.”

“Malderath’s mold, sprouting from her Sister’s breast! Elderath upturned, uncaring for her children!” Baron spat, aghast and decrying charnel fears.

“Illumination of arts, skill, knowledge and medicine still grows. With much to cross past yet, but what utility and ease there is to accumulate all that under one ceiling. There, in Illuminarium, the gods’ fruit for prosperity, their accord and gifts are catered to with focus and location. Better than scattered amongst orators or specialists abroad. They are havens for those without prospect horizon, to be then shown new chances and new lights of self and surrounding by lighting those holy candles. What illness is there in assembling such treasury of opportunity? When ‘tis not hoarded but willingly shared? What, when we might be able to one day understand these symptoms and their source? There may be a key hidden in that universal library, even if the wing we need is not yet found, to unlocking a means to curing such afflictions. At the least we might understand them better and learn to avoid them, no?”

The pretend hunter stretched his cards out on the table, flexing a good hand to the roguish gamblers while also subtly yearning to reach out for Ishraine’s grasp. An ounce desire to connect with her came through with intellectual glint slyly sprouting in the corner of his eye. “Well argued, o ‘witch’ of the word. Wisdom and hope such as that might help heal the world I would like to believe. Ahem, for tis easier to trail and fell a beast when you know its nature and habits before beginning the hunt rightly. Besides, surely there are alchemists and apprentices there who could cook up some concoction to keep Mother Elderath or her Dark Sister from reaping a black harvest of surplus souls?”

“You cannot claim to know, to understand, till you hath seen. That scouring of human flesh and souls, eaten away by invisible teeth and gnashed by lugubrious poisons.” Angwar twitched incessantly. Shaking his head ‘no’ and biting on his tongue. It wiggled foul curses, loosened, and made more vivid, vulgar, from leaking swill. “I will pray, lady, that you never encounter such an organic and educational experience with the faces of pestilence. That you never turn from those books to see the ugly visage this world has taken on and thus forsake it along with your innocence, which is so becoming of you- “

“-won’t you take a risk to escape that hollow hole you hath fallen into and come visit the Illuminarium with me? I could show you around; a friendly tour, present some inspirational reading. Even if it cannot be in the form of medical cure but of poetic syrup for your spiritual appetite. What is there to lose when your brothers’ ears will not hear you out?” Ishraine offered.

Angwar appeared arduously pained when their stares locked again. He almost seemed to loathe the idea of humoring any aspect of attaining hope again when he’d been so deadest deep in that mental plague pit. “P-perhaps. T-thank ye for the kind offer to an infirm elder. Yet, for your flambeau of inspiration & the like, what good would that hoard of greatness do should some barbarous party decide to raze it? Or tamper with it? Suppose my fealty to the divine overcomes me with a flash of inspiration to light up your libraries with purifying heat?”

The scholar shifted uncomfortably. Lapsing into silence. An awkward beat accentuated by Drakkon’s sudden, stormy inquiry. “Have you no faith in your Lord, priest? In the Living Light you would idly humor threatening this lass over for?”

‘Harald’, unsurely, padded this. “Surely you hath heard of His miracles? People hath been rescued from the maw of death by Drakkon before, so why not again when the need is more?”

“I hold to faith in the Light. Just not in my place being to carry it. O, it Lives on, that sublime Light we chase. But I am not bright enough to be but a shadow in its sun. A stain upon the finest tapestry and chip in the chapel glass am I! And yet am I much the worse than my peers among men? Are we not all condemned for our prideful and pathetic ways? O Drakkon,” misty eyes shot through ceiling to the skies, “forgive my vulgarity, but I ask now: do we not shovel so much corruption behind us, burying it from view, that we slip into its ditch? Will we drown therein when we refuse to peek at how bad it’s gotten or acknowledge the stench?”

“Have we all not pondered our purposes? Our innate callings and the feelings of failing them, of falling off the trail too lost to get back on or know where you are going at all in the thickest of it?” Ishraine diplomatically suggested. “Are we not all familiar with at some time being even so lost as to nearly forget our name? Of straying from the stakes to wander around questions of self, who we are as a whole and part of Elderath’s fold and the stars which cradle her?”

“Well, I – suppose there is merit to the world still having some meaning. The supernal is still there through it all, even if I am underserving of it. The Divine moves through us even as its influence is tortuous to us. Would that I caught what I saw! That my eves fell from my face just then as the rot covered theirs. Yet I stand still and see. I shall see it the end, just so. Although, highest preserve me, that may only be because I lack the gut to split myself open. Alas, let us not dwell on what I already cannot escape from in the gatehouse of my addled mind. Booze still, is a blessing I find. Let me steal away the sadness with this miraculous swill! This diet of earth’s stewards made by artisans in brewing!”

“Hey -hic- hoonter! What say we skip the woe-wet tales and keep up the merry games? Let us fleece this priest of his purse & robes with some hoontin’ for luck, leave ‘em with his bare sorrows?” The ruffian swiveled the course back to their gambit and the goings on at center of their sphered table.

As rude as invitation might seem a call to drink more and forget these existential issues was one heard easily by the rest of them. Even Angwar soaked in the suds and let himself float drunkenly above that current of worry which wrecked him adrift. He did indeed join their lot of devil’s dice rolls and dubious decks. And the rough neck purveyors of this purse gutting game proved prophetic in ‘fleecing him’ so well that he was stripped of his tabard and cobbled shoes. He looked more a wandering drunk than monk or herald of the Living Light. And yet, for him, this tarnished appearance was found more fitting to his spiritual mood.

Drakkon meanwhile fumed behind his brooding hush. His spiritual ire stoked by the sight of these good-for-nothings setting their rodent eyes upon the finely threaded gold & lustrous sinews arraying the priestly tunic’s breast and back. Towards the thieves he brandished scorching coals, from the centre of his glare, cursing them for their weaselly natures, from which they could naught ever be resolved of, that had them sniffing the tailorship with intent to dissect the threads for their selling. With no reverence for the sigil of the Imperium and its eminent essence the tabard represented. Why would souls so low as these, barely sentient to his solipsistic stare, not shed their little virtues, come winter over their lives, for the simplest promise of coin & gluttonous greed (for they surely had no concept of ‘need’)? Were these two not the perfect pair to show for what scum might be bought by insurgency and criminal conspiracy?

‘Harald’ was, while considerably wet by his many cups, attentive enough to each of the party’s airs to notice this thorny bramble; this snag caught in Drakkon’s glance. Before his Lord could concentrate momentum of this personal enmity arousing for these knaves, Mordaunt maneuvered his persona to shake those shoulders towards more emotional sobriety. “Ay, Log! I know ye are not a lad of much language, but I recall your partiality against the base act of idle gambling. A strange spirit lives in that chest! We Herathi prefer more straightforward and honest risk in the Highlands as well. But while I do not mind it what say you and I meander over to the smoking chamber for our own reminiscence? The steam from the last occupants is wafting out thin and I could use a pipe, whether herb, spice, or the proper stuff, to help relight the memories. And we have each of us stories still for one another. Tales that might disquiet less hardened hearts – and the poor priest is already shaken up enough and nearly sick, from the drink maybe as much as what else lingers in his guts – so let us leave them well enough alone for our warrior’s chat.”

‘Log’ grunted agreement. The proposition coming just in time to keep from growling inciting insult at the unwary and unappreciative rogues. So, the odd pair excused themselves for the specified ‘churning room’ where smoke billowed out from travelers’ pipes, diverse aromas to match the men exhaling them, as they let themselves soak in steam vents. Calling after the barmaid to bring another couple of pitchers to their temporary place of relocation first. “We are each veteran of great and terrible tides, even if you traded your war axe for a logger’s one. Beyond our shared experience though there are sorrows of which I would wish to share with you. Let us contemplate them as the concerns can be expunged in sweat and colorful smoke.”

But when the duo passed by the baths and beds (the ones with single purpose in design, that not being for sleep) they slipped into a smokehouse already simmering with tensions, of a less personal nature. There were two men already in there, well, a trio but the third was presently occupied by a snoring sleep, warmed by the steam from the billows. They engaged in conversation as heated as the chamber’s temperature, which already drew ballistae of sweat along the lines of newcomers’ brows. A rattling debate of ethics and ill omens, the latter a common conversation thread these days, largely over the recent exile another clan; cast out as fugitives.

The burlier of the men sucked on his pipe between rambling breaths as he pressed his point. Delivering it over any acknowledgement that they were now with audience. “See though, why should it be so bothersome to you that these Beruvian birds hath flown back to their ways as vagabonds? Why, when they already long surrendered their ways and rites for those of the Vizzar? Getting sent back to the wilds woulda been a fitting spin of destiny’s cycle, ‘specially when they abandoned their principles and thus forfeited their rights to a home in our borders.”

His partner in the debate huffed and puffed. Cooling his course with smoke thicker than the steam coagulating at the centre. Neither of their features were particularly identifiable when so concealed by the steamy veil and halos from pipe emissions. “You ‘ave not listened to their stories, their lore. They were denied a home by nature’s wild wrath and left to naught but shackles of that Dread Serpent. Then, when they opened their hearts to our Lord and waved their banners for Him against their rich masters, they were again denied a proper and deserving place inside our Empire! And why, when there was plenty prime lands and glory to share amongst all folk serving the Living Light? Why should they be so deserving of being scorned by Solaris?”

“Helwinds blast that blasphemous cloud back to Malderath’s bosom! Thou art and a friend and a fool, both! They hath been rightfully forbidden by Mother Elderath from squatting on her soil they surely corrupted. Tis the whims of the fates to see them be reduced to wandering rabble when they spat upon the star that blessed them, brought them back into the folds of civilization which they felt was not enough for them.”

“Blast thee, Belfar!” Shouted the second, between snags of choking smoke. “Know not what was done to their chieftain? They scraped ‘is eyeballs straight from ‘is skull! But just so that he did not die, only endured in eternal darkness. Why this agony, I ask! Why, when the strange but noble shaman and soldier only asked for what had been promised to his line? ‘Ave thou not turned thy ears to any of the bard, Baron’s, tunes? One was just song by the lass, Verilla, who – “

“–Who is only comely and lively in aspect of the sounds she makes with her throat and is otherwise entirely homely! How those chubby fingers do struggle at the strings would shame any bard, let alone the author of these songs she steals! Why listen to a lass so fat? Have you an inkling, Gaelmar, for portly maidens with throats so thick they barely gurgle?”

“Soddin’ fires, Belfar! Let the lass share in the love of music! Let others share in the love of live and the right to it. Would that thou listened for reasons other than shaming her aspiring talent maybe thou would hear the truth of that sad song. Tis a tragedy, their tale as a whole people! Drakkon had a chance to prove peace would be his ruling, like the prosperity promised yet only few still enjoy, and show mercy to a tribe not so different from those united to form the vanguard of our Imperium that toppled Vizzari. So why should there not be troubles to retort this ruling of austere ‘order’ over basic humanity? Do you not see why other clans could start considering ‘elping out the Protectorate more rigidly to avoid their people being castrated?”

“Bloody blasphemy, Gaelmar!” Belted the first following a mead-coated belch, oddly visible against the steam & misty pipes. “Know ye what that scoundrel did to incur that punishment?”

Drakkon cut in. “Their witless master led his clan to vehement scourge. Proved blind to the Light by blinding his people and sending them to abduct the wealth of their fellows” He split the steam to stare volcanic vents at this Gaelmar. “Forget not that this fugitive wretch made to carry into ruin the grandeur of Imperium!”

Breath clouds left the argumentative pair as gasps. Creaking of the wooden seats beneath them chafed against the sounds of emergent billows. The stranger who’d just spoke stood up, in their way and in the door. Looking like a monstrous shadow borne of the smoke captured by the room or else from the bitterness of their biting rapport. But the more belligerently drunk of the two flailed about nodding and acclaimed support for that threatening statement uttered by the hulking shape.

Belfar bulged more of this thought of his. Thinking the stranger’s scorn made him a friend to his argument and enemy of his friend’s, half-gloating in it instead of fearing the threat ‘neath the tone. “Those sods should hath won their homeland back through rightful service! For is our Imperium not one rewarding merit? Did you not once complain of how commoners rose, how they still can through serving well the Light through sword or speech?”

“Ah, the glory of Imperium!” Gaelmar, his associate with antagonizing opinion, prodded back. Encouraged to forget the looming ‘logger’s’ shape (and the outline of axe-heads at his back& his fellow’s) by steep pitcher. “Humor me, friend, I know our business is well, but might you remind me the name of our governing order? Is it ‘Imperium’? Or ‘Empire’? ‘Dominion’, rather? The title of our ruling reign seems to change every time a mandate is writ or spake from herald’s throat!”

Drakkon lumbered forward ominously. His words sending the heat up to a scalding sweat. “Tis that Empire which holds Dominion over all thy lots and owns the power of Imperium to judge thee worthy of life or death! Our ruling law which bids heretics be punished!”

“Death and torture to any that would insult and harm our realm! & To any that would spit spite or flash swords against Drakkon’s grandeur!” Toasted Belfar to the mist. The man was determined to find this foreboding presence a friend of his side of the debate. Instead of heeding the warning, pushing his pal to mouth off. “Death to injustice! And away with the wait! I hear they are held in Windhand dungeon but should sooner have their heads & shoulders shaved a few cubits!”

“Pah! Keep that hypocritic spittle out of the water, please.” Perhaps the blend of drunkenness and delirium from the steam-house festered a feverish wavelength for the boisterous occupants (something Log, and Harald were soon to discover for themselves) that got them bickering loudly instead of paying mind to their intruder’s intents. His compatriot of intoxication, Gaelmar, found his contesting voice again after gulping down his foul smelling, but courage instilling, elixir. “Save maybe for the sod’s forced desperation, aye ‘inexcusable’. But let folk get on their own ways and grant them leave to build their dreams. Otherwise, that grandeur shall become squalor & I dare-”

“You dare, indeed!” Drakkon slung his forest-falling axe from his back to his hand. Weaponry was not permitted in the bathhouse, frowned on not being allocated to the ‘steel-watcher’ at the tavern threshold. But the lax security and ill-prepared crew of watchers were wary of approaching the giant-kin patron and asking him to relief them his axe for custom’s sake. The sheen of the head might have been obscured by the sauna but the sound of it cutting through air alerted the pair to the sharp change in the churning fog. “Death and torture, aye. To those who know not their place. To they who harbor rebellious sympathies. Death – or a life left infirm after our meeting – to those who do not leave us the room.”

As the two drunks realized their situation then. Hastily struggled like hogs to flee their pens for the trough. Before their escape, the ‘red-headed’ stranger accompanying the axe brandishing behemoth tossed them a pouch of copper coins and a couple gilt Draks. “Get yer’self another round or, preferably, some tea to calm down. And shut up for once, lads.” While the conversation these strangers foolishly flailed would have been the sort of salt and spice among the common man’s thought, which his mission to mine and vein for information, Mordaunt had other matters on his mind. And did not seek to have strangers leering in on them from the sidelines.

Gaelmar skittered out, like an insect discovered and sought after by an unhappy boot, while Belfar nudged, then slapped, their third companion back to awareness. “Wake ye! Tis Ole Bel tellin’ ye to get yer rump up and out!” However, the dozing man only briefly flittered his lids before lulling back into a stony sleep, crashing the back of his head against the backwall as he drooped. ‘Ole Belfar dragged the last eavesdropper out and sent back some passing spite. “Happy Harvest, ye bastards!”

Mordaunt went to the window to vent some steam. Having barred the entrance, they removed their obnoxious aliases & shed false manners through thin vent. Through that slit he saw that dark had taken the rest of daylight from the town. But the orange, gold & red hues of the Autumn Aurora outshined the dusk laying claim to Crestwoad. And the town had not yet given up its mirth for sleep. For bustle and noise slipped in from outside the tavern wall.

Behind it, they doused themselves further in liquor. Mordaunt swishing through his supply, thought of how to steer their talk towards what shrouded him in distress, his Selene. “Ah, how quaint to let demons of stress be shed of our sweat, Lord! A toast to you for enduring that prattler and the others enough to show temperance when they were unknowing of whose presence they were in! Though it was partly our task to hear out their lines of reason I wager we hold reason enough in our hands to drink more aplenty to ourselves!”

Drakkon, uncertain of what good this whole ordeal served, did not need much tempting to lose himself more in the draught. “Aye! Some good draft is needed to swallow the shame of it all. But let us not lose our wandering minds. What troubles does your tongue wish to relieve you of that need ghostly vapors and secrecy to speak?”

“Do not forget the strong stout needed as well!” He laughed, a scraping sound of forced merriment. “But first I would inquire one modest guarantee that should our conversation prove not too temperate then let us forgive any indiscretion and return to a fair hearted game of good humors?” He waited for a mild nod then rolled on with his prefacing. “While I do not wish to pester much more on this matter the issue is regarding the pestilence seen by that sooth saying augur’s saintly sail to the southwest.”

“The plague? Is my most ardent warrior and champion of might now soaking his breeches in fear of sickness? For disease descending upon remote hamlets, godless or otherwise?”

“I fear not for my sake, Lord. But what Champion would not give heed of people’s plight? I must – “

“- must suddenly become so gratuitously charitable? For some semblance of chivalry? Wherefore should this plight concern you when my ears hath long been assailed by constant complaints regarding your family’s fortune, even asking to overstep what finances you keep from the rest of your household even?”

“Well, perhaps family is of some concern to the course, the core of it. Tis not something so shallow as to be related to that house I hath been shackled to, how’ere.”

“Ah, still wallowing and wailing about that engagement to the Lady Portia? Wish you, that we sent her away along the trail through the desert to bake away? Instead of having you forgive the misfortunes their line was availed of through your marriage and retain those treasures & patricians of Vizzari artisanship? What would our ‘grandeur’ be, sadly so to admit thusly, without those scales we stripped from the Serpent’s corpse to expand on our imperial decorum?”

“Damn it! Tis really not about that!” Condemnation and disdain sprouting from his shouts. “If I must say it, as truth before the coals, then let it be known to you that I do fear for certain lives which may be touched in those godless hamlets open to being swept by the front of those ill winds! Tell me, Lord, that you have a cure? A means of combating the plague as though it were as malicious a monster to fell as Vizzari! That black sheen of the dead magistrate rivalled now by affliction with bite as venomous as that snake!”

“What? Wherefore? And why this insinuative tone? Have you some bastard hiding in the filth of the countryside yet unclaimed by our great culture? Ha! Better yet a mistress still kneeling and reeling over for yet still too afraid to dare bring closer to hearth? Aha!”

“Sod it!” Mordaunt screamed into his booze. When he looked up the face of his lord was of sweltering ember, encompassing the miniature-hut in its hot breath. “Let us say then that my reasons are so petty. Should not, regardless, a true Living Lord show up to perform his miracles to his peoples? Should the ‘Divine’ in you not reach out to these yet ungripped lands and heal them as to bring them into the great fold? Did you not once raise a poisoned acolyte from death’s door and shout away storms that the sea could carry your ships? Well, most of your ships, save those who escaped your eminent course for those raging waters and cruel Vizzari welcoming standards.”

“Should a grateful man, a leader among men, not be so thick headed as to chastise his Lord? Should he not give praise for the blessings of being delivered from that misfortune? Yet he keeps hanging on to it! Casting himself back on to that ship to be wrecked by his woeful memory again & again!”

“There is more to it than the soured grapes of memory and the wine we drink of its somber reserve! This is about life – innocent life beyond the boundaries of mine own mortality - and the need to preserve it! This is about asking ‘my Lord’ if He is even capable of tackling this mortal challenge to his reign and wanting to know if he even dares attempt to sever that dragon’s head!”

“Are you sure this is not about some concubine? And are you certain you wish to press this insult further?”

“I must press it! For Selene…” his sockets distilled tears. “Not a concubine nor the brood of one but my truest daughter and moon light! She stays vulnerable to those winds crawling up just a bit further and stifling her breath to the last! My sweetest girl is as important as to me as your Corinna is to you, though not in that way but a more solvent bond of love – fatherly love for a flower yet to fully bloom. But black clouds darken her horizon, loom over her precious head and future while you dare not defy this diseased breeze at all, but rather let it waft all over till you would reign over a sepulcher!”

“Dare you to pretend to comprehend my connection with Corinna?! Shut that gabber of yours, the one you surely used to woo this Selene’s mother! Harlot or not- “

“Dare you to constantly belittle and damn those that serve you loyally for all too human vanity!” Mordaunt shot back a scathing verbal arrow. “Dare you to let all subjects whither to blight blackened bone? All while you contemplate how pretty and cosmically ordained your love for Corinna is! Dare you to disgrace and denounce my daughter the instant her life is known to you!”

“You stumble over in a rush to avoid the shame of how this little life was even made. For surely it was not arranged in proper accordance or public ceremony. That would explain your strange excursions! Or else you would not have hidden this daughter from me so. And hidden her from yourself as well! What can that speak to of your patriarch’s pride that you only just ask for some grace for her come the thirteenth hour when baleful gusts beat at her windowsill!”

“Destiny delivered her to me. From the womb of green fate that gem of a girl was sent to me. Though I hath too long let her be far from and unacknowledged by her father. Damn me for that as well! But damn you should you speak ill of her name so rapaciously! You disgrace any divinity in yourself to slander a small child on the precipice of plague!”

“What destiny can there be for a girl left stranded to impoverished wilds by a father who, when sworn to a truly Divine cause in his Lord instead refutes the grace of that servitude – abandoning it to abyss along with his seed! What else but strife and eventually decay when left alone to the gales of entropy?!”

“Bastard!”

“’Bastard’? From the mouth of a bastard-maker! Bastard-bearer, beggar-monger ye and a b- “

Mordaunt slapped the tail end of whatever slurs Drakkon’s mouth had readied. It stunned him, more from its occurrence than smarting. In this beat before any retaliation was chosen, he followed up that hand with a challenge to his lord. “Come, my Lord, friend and accuser. Let us away to a place more befitting a means to settle this before the drink keeps our stomachs from ever settling. I have a couple of blunted swords by my saddlebags. Meant for training and yet perfect for solving this crude dispute through a mock duel. What have you? Perhaps I can beat some reason into you, so you understand my means.”

“Let us draw forth these apprentice tools and see our contest. When my hand wins the day, you will quake in fear of the Divine. Then, perhaps, I shall present you the miracle of grace & mercy that is within my quantity for forgiveness.”

“Shall we wait awhile and cheers to our contest? It looked like the last autumn rain is soon to arrive outside. A little cover would be good for our modest test of arms.” They drank their tankards dry. Waited. Then walked into the rain, oddly warm on an otherwise cool night.

Past the stable Drakkon led, prickling up and agitated beneath his rustic cowl all the way. Towards a spot, a small, fenced field atop hill just over the most prominent rise neighboring Crestwoad. A no man’s land for the time where they could clash swords safely amongst this crossroads. Horizontal flares burst open the belly of stormy ceiling, shelling them with heavy tears. The thunder which drove away the Aurora; smashed streams of carmine & pumpkin by sapphire sword-flash. Their rage, this primal and personal animosity so swiftly sprouting up with cutting thorns, seized them as feverish rattles.

“Say, Drakkon,” Mordaunt started, and as the rain splattered took up dueling stance with the practice sword, “should I have brought that black blade from the ruins of the sky to match yours, and I were to split you down to the bladder, would stars pour out from you instead of blood? Is it only then I could be assured you are so divine?”

Drakkon, drunken to head-battering proportion, filled to his stature after picking up his weapon from the mud where its master tossed it. He crossed unto realm outside words and any sensible remembrance of what sobriety even ever was. Language evaded his sphere, but he swore to have the sword be his better speech and to hammer his points into Mordaunt.

He bull-rushed his contender, blade aimed to slam down like a bolt from the storm’s angry well above. But, while equally drunk, the alcohol they’d taken into themselves varied in its affect and influence over their motor, martial, functions and Mordaunt dodged the blind charge. Caught the rest of his weight, lodged leg with pivot, before the training sword could near him.

He flipped his opponent’s weight against him into disadvantage by courting Drakkon to pull him while he locked his leg against his, tripping him. A couple more feints and stumbling kicks and his warlike lord toppled into the dirty pool collecting at their feet. Mordaunt leaned over him as if to make a severing strike to the throat, but he was blocked by a clumsy, yet adequate, deflection. Not letting that keep from assuring his advantage and flexing it, he swept over to the side, withdrawing one blow to perform another strike. It landed where his tunic met his neck, causing his foe to retch and cough. “Kill. Were we fighting a kraagspeer to the death it would be farewell to your temporary shell just there.”

Drakkon got up and their clash began again. Mordaunt spat acid through the rains. “A wager for the next one? Say you will put more weight in fighting the many sicknesses of this realm, physical and spiritual than you are in facing me for your honour right now! Get a ‘kill’ on me and I will bring my Selene to the courts that you might decide her fate, fully.”

A scream and flailing sword came at him. He was ready. The sway of the still he’d swallowed smoothed him into the flow of the fight. Unlike the other contestant, his passion fueled his power rather than overpowered his impulses and spatial awareness. Drakkon floundered around in this fight, occasionally getting in a hard hit to Mordaunt (who for a second there thought he’d felt and heard the clinch of a rib-bone crunching, which the booze both numbed and exaggerated) but his blunted blade could not bash or set into anything, nor near a ‘kill’.

“Kill!” Mordaunt triumphed. Another would-be fatal delivery: having battered his enemy’s knee, grabbed back his arm, and jabbed the tip up into the armpit. “Say you will slave to save my Selene! Say that I can bring her to the courts and not have her be ostracized as witch’s brood!” The inebriated champion commanded his disdain upon this soaking stead. “You rely too much on the fear your size instills, in the fury of your blows. You are reckless, not just in how drunk you are. Too slow to see the struggles and starving needs of your servants and greatest allies. Too slow. Kill!”

“Curse the child of this occult brewing you conceived, with a witch it seems! Turn to her thyself and – hic –, ahem, care for her, if thy might is so great to challenge me when I am not myself – so cloaked in, hic, human hick’s skin!” Drakkon shoved back his insulter and swung so wildly as to sting him with vacuous flurry.

“Thou should have stayed scarce, an abstraction of god hovering in clouds and in the minds of men with strength to wield its lightning! Instead, tis so much harder to believe in the Divine in the flesh. In fleeting, failing flesh! Ataxia of heaven into humanity!” Mordaunt backed up by the woodshed and, with blood drawn against him, stumbled on the snag of heavy intoxication and titan’s blows. Yet his wits were with him still. As their trainee’s weapons cinched, he feigned a slight yield but then, before Drakkon could recover balance & rally the force of his sword fully, he switched the blunted blade around and smashed his attacker’s temple with the hilt. “Thine own mother, though of mortal make and soiled spirit, made herself Divine through thee. Who knows where thy mortal seed spilt into thy witch-mother from? Yet I mine is as a child of prophecy! I confess the sin of not loving the mother of my sunflower though. For she is a witch, not unlike your Azarra! A daughter of augury!”

The tumbling Lord, raptured up by this swell of loathing, consumed his fill of personal affronts. No longer felt charmed by child's swordplay, unfitting even of a young squire of dead Vizzari knighthood aspirations. Surging at Mordaunt, still in rugged disguise of ‘Harald the Red’, a black tide smacked beneath contemptuous surf in him. “Pathetic showcase of ‘love’ for this daughter of witchcraft!” Roared the black wave in thunder. “Crushed down as soon as it appears for I – shall – not – save – this – spurious – spawnling!”

With every break in the tempest wall’s trident tongue came the cracking of fist against skin already sore. Yet the Fortune of hysterical effects of libation preserved some vitality in Mordaunt while the waves of beatings rolled over him. A tooth even washed out from his mouth from this tidal rash. Drakkon screamed his rage and flung curses upon the holiest of names. Yet in his ears pounded an even more clamorous tune. War hymns and revelries; songs of destruction’s delight & reaping glory, drummed through his head while his brain rattled against the soggy reef.

Soaking there in the drenched topsoil, the tide pulled back out. Hapless laughter left his inflated lip as he rolled about in the background. Drakkon stormed towards the horses. Their steeds, frantically panicking in the downpour, railed against the sounds & posts they were tied to. The black mare the lord arrived on was not his regular equestrian companion but a stranger and simple means of carriage. So, when its new owner charged from the inclement walls caging its waning courage, the beast felt no shame in swearing off loyalty & doubling its attempts to flee from the stake. As lightning swirled across the embittered welkin a logger’s axe flashed in the eye of man & animal.

Drakkon limped back to the shivering ball of a rival by the end of the field. But his horse had enough. Its frenzy splintered off plank from the fence and bolted blindly in flight far from there. Encouraged by this gallop of fear & freedom the escapee’s comrade fled also into the night. This mattered not to his mania, as the master of the downcast realm extending over and across all these identical hilltops. The axe he arranged for Mordaunt’s forehead, with the violent urge mounting in him with every falling bolt, was more pressing to hold. & heavier to swing.

Blood trickled down Harald’s red brow. A fusion of plant dye leaking from his roots and fresh wound dripping over his face made for him a plum burst visage. Beaten back by fury and fist, he was left to naught but eclipsing delirium of drunken dissociation. The marching rhythms and ghostly halls shouting their war tunes beat a pace into his ailing, ale-abused, chest. Following their lead, he dodged the sluggish axe head chomping at his.

How much time rained past them while they brawled on could only be guessed. Thunder stole away their sense of time. Both bolts of their fury and those that split the obscuring ebony surrounding their scuffle. The brute force with which the lord threatened to divide his unsavory subject’s skull with was only barely held back and slimly skirted. Just then, as they sank deeper into the mud together - and the forgetfulness of all else but wrath to wrestle each other with - a stern bell tolled. Its alarum bounding from nearest watchtower, answering the threats of the pair’s boisterous storm, competing for the air.

Lethean blackness descended on their bruised peaks. Ridges worn further by obscuring whetstone, grinding their lucidity to the rusted rim. Oblivious waters splashed back at them from the mud. Memory and coherence could no longer follow their movements, leaving them to their stage of horn bashing and low blows, scarcely befitting condemned gladiators. For what reason their fists flung at their faces, and why that alien axe bouncing between their crimson and brown clad grip was there, they forgot. Only the struggle remained known to them, although even that would soon be swallowed by dark and drink. To be left as empty as their mugs and more lost as to the ‘what’ and ‘wherefore’ than the unluckiest of pilgrims stranded in sea-storm.

A faceless mob whose heads were halos from torches and armless lanterns manifest from the grim mist formed a ring around their boorish match. While the two boars thrashed about, grinding grunts and tusks against each other, familiar faces materialized. Against the blush their sentries and guard accompaniment cast the countenances of Baron, Ishraine and Angwar chipped away the dark marble like chapel glass paintings of legendary deliverers of destiny. Those depictions largely reserved for figures of living myth, graved in glass. Of which the two blood and mud sodden men resembled nothing.

“Finally, we find you! Both you and the source of Crestwoad’s disturbance, it looks like!” Ishraine chimed in, timely bidding the rains to quiet their siege so she could be heard over them. “A horse ran like a hurricane through the green! Its belly spilled out purses full of Draks and mintage only fitting for a magister of old! We had to search for missing friends – who lost themselves to drink more any should – complemented with an armed escort!”

“We thought it brigands or thieves! Or, gods deny it, a rebel squadron!” Croaked Angwar before making the sign of the star with his fingers. “Yet ‘tis only drunken fools!”

Mordaunt was first to rise. Though he struggled to sustain his weight without a nudge from one of the irate sentinels who so charitably signed on to find some ‘missing friends’ and had been first to chase down the startled source from that field. A couple of those crossroad guardians’ faces so furrowed by petulance that they contorted to nearly match the moodiness of the sky, which had capriciously decided to reel back its stone-sized drops.

“Twas but a rough but friendly tussle in the reeds!” Baron explained to them.

“Malformed and overgrown boys merely wrestling away the drunkenness and tension of the day. But so misshapen in their intellect as to frighten their own rides into scaring half the village proper awake! Alas, could our holy headed visitor shine some light on any aspect of forgiveness for their foolishness?” Offered Ishraine, backing her new, yet familiar, acquaintance.

“Would you forgive these dolts their dissenting of their steeds? They mostly abused their own property and themselves, apparently! If the gods and their servants on Elderath’s crest down here were to punish severely every man who forget his head by dipping into too much drink, we would have so few among us as to tend barely half a field. Would you not concur, goodmen? Could not the excess of coin spilt from the fled horse’ belly provide sufficient payment for other damages and inconveniences?” Added Angwar who looked a strange sight himself in new threads, charitable offered to him between Ishraine & ‘Bard’s’ spare furs.

The captain among the sentries coughed and whipped the lot of them with suspicious watch. “Such coin is cause along for scrutiny and quartering investigation. That these, could-be bandits, quarreled among themselves only assures our ease in bringing them back to the brig. Who knows, save the gods you shine for, speaker of Drakkon, how long it might take to settle this side paining mess?”

Just then, with his back to the wall otherwise, Baron strode to the captain and whispered most eminent plea. He wanted to wrap this misadventure up the best he could manage and get them all back on their suitable paths and places. This last and greatest hand proved wholly convincing and the begrudged sentry’s threats and intimidating posture evaporated. That irritated frown begat grotesque transformation into fearful mask. A mimicry his official station’s stony and dutiful apathy. Though inwardly he quaked with awe & humiliation. “Get thee hence from Crestwoad. Whatever road takes thee, let it be far from here. With respect and good fortune, I bid fair partings upon thee.”

Ishraine gaped as the half dozen armed, would be ‘investigators’ and inquisitors, instruments of justice tucked tail. The abused sentries bolted for their tower post, as though a chimera or were-beast were nipping their heels. “What in all Malderath’s miserable lair did you say to that soldier, Bard? Certainly, aimed your words with such precision as to win your mark in linguistic archery. What more to you can there be, humble ‘hunter’?”

“Ah,” Baron sighed and spat his worries into the muck of the mire their feet were eaten by, “the man needed a good hunting spot. Turns out that there are indeed criminals housed here in Crestwoad, they who gouge good men by price and pinching every copper-penny for a flank of game. So even noble hearted sentinels it seems must turn to a wee poaching in harsh times…”

He lied. Having applied a measure of deceit well hidden in the truth he wielded to sway away that penchant for arrest from the exhausted captain. Having quickly shined a look at his own identity and badge of office, a small stone etching with the rune of Light upon its eye. Having told them that the two mongrels abandoned to alcohol and anger’s most shameful combination of symptoms were Drakoni agents here on a delicate mission they’d dovetailed far from fulfilling that was none the less important and dire in its need for ignorance from the rest. Having, of course, not been able to confess the full truth; that the sad, soiled and blood-besmirched bastard just crawling up from the sunken ground was their Living Lord come among them.

Baron saved Drakkon from deeper disgrace. Having not been able to convince that same degraded Imperator to move a meter towards sympathy for the middle ring and lower peoples. Having not a shred of understanding and recollection be retained by the battered, now retching, rivals. Having retained no memory of any plights & plagues which hard-pressed the people nor anything more than the perimeter reasons for wanting to explore that spirit of the townsfolk and catch a passing glimpse along the crossroads. Save for the blistering resentment brewed up among them still. Having nothing left in strained sight to do for the time but flee the retributive rope of their hangovers, looping about their addled crania.

But though Mordaunt & his master stepped, or stumbled, over it for the time, just aiming to endure their penitence and return to sobriety’s mundane cradle, the shadow gestating beneath their feet only swelled its belly. Swollen in that neglected gloom unconscious conspiracies engorged themselves, finding safety to sprout in the shade as their eyes were stunned by the glare of the sun. The pair were yet unaware of what daemons, head-mates and tulpas sulked in that dark, the lines in the rays. At times it would tickle their brains in days to come, teasing flashes of remembrance tempered and doused with misremembrance, wild imaginings to fill the blanks with phantom happenstance before the spouts of blackness started again.

When their party dispersed and returned to their respective duties & households all that could be garnered from the event’s stain was that there had been a small squabble between the greatest of the realms fighters. None recalled how sloppy and dishonorable that depraved duel had been. Although each warrior’s mortal marble had been marked with reminders of that struggle the details had been pulverized, with only dull aching remaining in their heads for a fortnight after.

Mordaunt, marred & made even rougher of look than before (more than from any front he’d fought), was readily willing to be rid of his wife again upon return to Windhand. Out of scorn he forbids her leave the cold castle for her villa by Crestfall until his dread march against Protectorate agents and forced Beruvian exile is over. Claiming she needed to harden their sons ‘lest the first brittle breeze from a spear fell them like their kin that Sunhilte morn of Drakoni victory’. He hoped to recover what vague aspects of himself he could from the ruins of temporary loss of self, memory & purpose. But to think on his Selene only augmented hangover.

When Drakkon abstained his fortress first to flee to Azar-Drakon, to his mother, to ask for alchemical coating to his lingering condition, Azarra was aghast. While the injuries that withstood his travel from the crossroads to her tower were minor, she found them grossly uncomely and chastised him with vocal force that humbled the ferocity of his achy knuckles. “We must hide you from public view and shoo back all the counsel I planned amongst our courts, child! What devilry snuck into that divine crown of yours?! Was it the foolish musings of Baron that did it? Or were these bruises begot in the name of your crowned wench, Corinna?”

Drakkon groaned lethargic disdain. She stripped his shoulders. Washed with suds from the bath then pushed her son deeper into the obscuring herb & scent laden tub. “Our great god cannot go to his people appearing as a beggar! What image would he tarnish the flock with then? What pillar of principle and perfection could they aspire to when yours is so sullied?! Now I must hide your blood away from their prying sight and perverted nosiness!”

“Will you not keep your sight fixed to the vision I pour before you? Will you not scry it in these healing waters? Won’t you relax into what I hath so long and lovingly prepared for you?” She scrubbed the final grains of dirt and matted filth from his tameless fur. She frowned at the sacrifice of her luxurious basin, running with mud & blood. Yet seeing his despondency she bent to perk him up, joining him in the waters, awash with carmine hues from more than the dyes. She bared herself, showing her humanity but only as to adjoin his with the need of dressing in dogmatic illusion. “The tableau of Divine tissue is beholden to us but must be shown sparingly to our faithful! Can you hold to your wit enough to contain this crown on your head? I wish for you to wear it, proudly so. But not that it should be worn on head of one who forgets his nature, his truest self, for despoiling decadence and languishing quaff!”

This cosmically ordained ruler of providence over earth found his reserves of spirit too drained to protest. Sinking, complacent, under pretense of recovering rest prescribed, within his mother’s hands. While he knew not what soured his soul’s mood so, he sulked. Dagger-eyes, stabbing above the bubbly basin’s froth, poking through the impinging foam. Boiling broth to lake of fire.