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Jack Nazareth, The Beggar King, Part 1: The Tomb of Mauzolous

Slightly Later Than the Beginning of Our Story…

“Bad idea!  Bad, bad, bad idea!”

“We are pretty much out of options- kind of don’t have a choice here!”

Even over the rush of river water and the roar of the waterfall, Jack Nazareth could hear the army of fish people and their abominable, underwater pets fast approaching.  The din was one of bubbling language: half-croaking frog burps and sloshing squeals.  It was terrifying in its own right.  Only slightly less terrifying was the waterfall directly in front of him that promised to lead deeper into the sunken city beneath the waves.  Between being captured, flayed and devoured, or throwing himself over the edge of the cataract into the depths of unknown horror, Jack’s alternatives were few and grim.

The little dragon on his shoulder knew as much, too.  “I knew it.  I knew the day I met you in Mauzolous’s Tomb, you were going to be the death of me.”

“We’re not dead yet,” Jack replied resolutely, his voice devoid of its typical mirth and arrogance.

“You think you can survive that plunge?”

“I can as long as I have the Anchor.”

“Yet I cannot help but notice you’re choosing the course of action to which you believe your odds of survival are higher,” the little dragon pointed out.  “We’ve never actually tested whether or not the Anchor makes you immortal- we’re just assuming that’s how it works.  And someone’s confidence is shaky, no?”

“Will you shut up for a second so I can think?!” Jack snapped back.

Several of the fish people came racing around the corner behind them, and charged.

“You have run out of seconds, beggar king,” the little dragon reckoned.

He agreed.  “Ready to find out if your life flashes before your eyes in your last moments?”

“I have lived an incalculably long time, human.” 

“Well,” Jack peered over the edge of the falls, “it is an awfully long way down.”

“By the way- what makes you think they won’t just follow us?  They’re fish people.  I imagine jumping off waterfalls and into dark pools with no discernible bottom is a fairly average mid-morning jaunt for them.”

“Stop poking holes in my ideas and just hang on tight.”

“Sure.  Great.  Such wisdom.”

“Here we go!”  Jack spread his arms wide and threw himself over the edge of the cataract just moments before the black, shiny claws of the fish people could grab hold of his flowing tunic.  The clothe fluttered out behind him like the feathers of some great, plummeting raptor as it was ripped from the heavens and hurtled towards the cold grip of the earth.  He could hear their squealing, burping voices fall away from him as he dove towards the pool of oblivion far below.  Disappointingly, his life did not in fact flash before his eyes as he fell.  Just a series of poor life choices that ultimately led to him having to fling himself off the edge of an underwater river that ran through the heart of a lost, sunken city because he had managed to somehow offend the elite class of a highly developed aquatic human hybrid society.  

Pretty much par for the course.

Introduction Story: The Tomb of Mauzolous

Something to the tune of two hundred and fifty years prior to the waterfall incident, Jack Nazareth had been a, more or less, regular sort of hopeless, rock-bottom, going nowhere gentleman criminal.  No, you read that correct- two hundred and fifty years, but we will address that pesky little gap in time shortly.  Our (what we will very unfortunately have to call him as there is nothing heroic about Jack whatsoever) hero in these stories will find himself quite lost soon enough- although, not lost in the world, but rather lost in the spaces between time.  Have you ever had trouble finding your way through the streets of an unfamiliar city?  Imagine that city stretched infinitely in every direction, and you no longer remembered how to get back to the home you started out from.  Herein, was the plight of Jack Nazareth.

However, at the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, let us instead start back at the day his life took an unexpected turn for the… well, unexpected.  Jack was sitting in a sandy, hot, low-ceilinged tavern named- actually, it is not really important what the tavern was named, just that he was there in a perfectly nondescript place at the edge of a completely mundane existence in the midst of a totally unassuming universe.  He was at his favorite little inn with one of his least favorite people: a titanic, beast of a man called Vilos.  Vilos was a mercenary, and Jack was a sell-sword, and their paths occasionally crossed having similar lines of work.  Just because they sometimes worked together, however, in no way obliged Jack to enjoy the company of Vilos.

You see, Jack fancied himself a bit of a vagabond poet, a sort of romantic murderer-for-hire that made his way in an unforgiving world by living just beyond the border of morality.  He was found to be of above average cleverness, eloquent to a point that most people accused him of having flowery speech, and slightly overly self-assured.  A pair of glimmering, boyish eyes under his fair brow were always a gaze away from suggesting he did not so much enjoy the life of being a sell-sword, that if it were within his means he would leave it behind for a life of contemplation and civility, but clearly enjoyed the hustle all the same.  Jack was a walking contradiction, not quite the poet, but not quiet the cold-blooded killer, a man at odds with himself.

Vilos, on the other hand, was perfectly content being a world-class son-of-a-bitch.  He was gigantic, and used his size to crush his way past anyone who dared suggest he was wrong in the slightest about anything.  Loyalty to him was something to be bought and sold like a commodity or any other goods, and he was unapologetic about this.  Worse, apart from his immense size that was wielded strictly in the interest of the highest bidder, he was boorish, uneducated, and unwilling to be open minded about anything other than money.  Vilos was exactly the kind of typical mercenary that Jack hated to be associated with.  And yet, all too often, they had to work together.

On that particularly auspicious day where nothing out of the ordinary was happening whatsoever, Jack and Vilos were sitting at a dimly lit, wooden table, debating the finer things in life.    

“I just…” Jack was at a loss for words, “I cannot possibly accept your stance.  More often than not I pride myself on being a man of wisdom- one who thinks critically and can see beyond just my own opinions or judgements.  Yet, I find I just cannot reach the ground you are on, Vilos.”

“Why not?” the titanic man sitting opposite grunted as he wiped white suds of ale from his enormous, black beard.  “I am right.  Accept it.”

Jack tapped the wooden table several times for emphasis.  “But how does one not enjoy cheese?”

“It flummoxes the gut and fouls the bowels, just as all things of dairy persuasion do.  It is the byproduct of the blood of demons,” Vilos snarled.

“You know, considering your propensity for being ill-spoken, you do occasionally challenge my perceptions and prejudices of you.”

“I don’t know what you just said,” the larger man growled, “but if you say it again, I’ll cut your tongue out.”

“That feels more like the normal.”  Jack nodded and made a disgusted face.

Vilos belched loudly.  “I want more beer.”  He got up to leave for the bar.

Jack looked at his empty cup.  “No, that’s fine, I can get my own, no need to offer.”  

He was just about to get up and follow the larger man to the bar, when the tavern door opened and a woman walked in.  This was the kind of inn where women often entered, though they tended to be of a certain profession, and this particular woman was clearly not.  She walked differently, and her dress was modest even if her features were anything but plain.  Her eyes were inquisitive as they scanned the bar, but not suspicious or afraid.  It was clear she was looking for something, that she knew what it would look like when she saw it, and was not interested in wasting time on compromise.  Yes, Jack could tell off that just by how she was considering the patrons of the tavern.  At least, that’s what he told himself.  Either way, he was immediately struck by the woman’s presence, and found himself drawn to her magnetically.

“Today is about to get a whole lot better.”  Jack ran his fingers through his hair, adjusted his sword at his side, and tried to take a drink from an empty cup.  He looked at it quizzically as though he had already forgotten he was off to get another drink, and cast the humble tankard aside.  “Drinks here are shit anyway.”

Jack swaggered across the bar like a jungle cat he had once read about in a book he had half-thumbed through, and sidled up next to the woman at the bar.  He gave her a flippant nod, and did his best to sound detached and disinterested.

“The company in this place can be so atrocious- it’s almost unfathomable to find the right kind of person.  You know what I mean?”

She fixed him with an icy stare.  “If everyone in here is as insufferable as you, then yes, I would say I know exactly what you mean.”

Jack threw up his hands, and immediately became defensive.  “Whoa, hey, I was just trying to say hello, that’s all.”

“A suggestion- the next unfortunate soul you approach: just say, ‘hello.’”

“Of course, of course.”  He chuckled.  “You’ll have to forgive me.  I am simply unused to meeting someone of such singularly alluring presence in this desert-rat infested place.”

She gave him a look.  “I doubt you are used to talking to a woman, period.”

Jack opened his mouth to respond, but just as he did, Vilos approached and made an equally charming introduction.

“This tavern is nearly drunk dry,” he said to Jack.  The massive mercenary’s eyes turned towards the woman.  “We should sleep together.  I’m huge.”

She blinked a few times, perhaps in complete shock, and perhaps because the invitation was all too churlishly familiar.  “Yes, well.  As charming as the two of you have been, I do have business to attend to.  If you’ll excuse me.”

“Well, wait a minute,” Jack tried to stop her.  “What’s your business?  Obviously you came here looking for a certain sort of help, otherwise you wouldn’t be in this tavern.  Perhaps I can offer the kind of assistance you are seeking.”

“Yeah, me too,” Vilos said.  “If you’re paying money, anyway.”

She fixed Jack with a cold, steely stare.  “Just what business are you in?”

“I am a sell-sword,” he replied proudly.

“Hm.”  She raised her eyebrows and made a noise like it was painfully obvious already what his profession was.  “And you?”  Her eyes flitted disgustedly towards Vilos.

“Mercenary.”  He belched and picked up a half-eaten loaf of bread someone had left behind on the bar and took a noisy bite out of it.

She cleared her throat.  “I see.  Unfortunately, ahem, gentlemen, I am not certain either one of you qualify for what I am seeking.  Mercenaries are not necessarily what I need.”

“Then you have no need for my large and ill-mannered occasional accomplice,” Jack interjected.  “I am no mere mercenary- I am a sell-sword.”

With a squint, she asked, “And just what exactly is the difference?”

“My blade is for hire- I kill only when and if the price is right, and only when and if I agree to a job.  I have rules that I abide, and not everyone is necessarily welcome to my services.”

Vilos snorted.  “I don’t care what you want me to do.  If you pay me, I’ll do it.”

Jack made a face.  “That is the difference, my lady.”

“Seriously,” Vilos went on, “I’ve done it all.  If you pay me, I’ll scoop someone’s eyes out with a spoon, brand their feet with hot irons, tear their ribs out with a hook, just ask.  And pay me.”

Her eyes went wide.  “That list is far too specific for those not to be actual examples of your work.”

Vilos shrugged.  “Once or twice.”

“Really?  All of them?”

“Yeah.”  Vilos took another loud bite of the stale bread he found.  “They hurt.”

“You see?”  Jack took the opportunity to build on his pitch.  “Vilos here is an animal.  I’m certain whatever job you need done requires more finesse than what he offers.”

“Call me an animal again.”  Vilos chomped on the heel of the loaf.  “I’ll break your teeth out one at a time.”

“And only earlier you threatened to cut out my tongue.  Losing track of our threats?”

The massive mercenary snorted.  “Keeping them fresh.”

“Again,” the woman said loudly, “I do not think either of you offer the particular brand of talent I require for my purposes.  I am not looking to have anyone murdered, or their eyes scooped out or their feet branded, or whatever else it is you do.”  She looked exasperatedly at Vilos again.  “Really?  All of that?”

Again, he shrugged.  “It hurts.”

“Pain is not what I am here to hire, nor is death.”  

“Then just who are you, and what are you looking for?” Jack asked pointedly, quite put out with the course the conversation had taken.

She sighed.  “My name is Elie.  I practice the mystical arts.”

It was Jack’s turn to affix her with an extremely suspicious look.  “Mystical arts?  You mean magic.”

“Yes, for the uninitiated, magic.  And…” she paused for a moment, “I steal things.”

“Steal things?”

“Occasionally.  Mostly because spell elements are often too expensive to buy outright… or too difficult to come by in abundance.”

Jack laughed.  “I’m certain.  Well, are you any good?”

She gave him a a subtly furious look.  “What did you say your profession was again?”

“I’m a sell-sword.”

“Right.  So, sell-sword, where exactly is your blade?”

Jack reached down to tap the hilt of his trusty weapon, but his hand met an empty space where it should have been.  His eyes went wide as he grasped for a nonexistent sword, until he felt something very sharp tap him between his legs.  He looked down to find Elie was holding his weapon, and had placed its edge rather dangerously next to his nether region.

He coughed quietly as she held the sword an uncomfortably long time.  “Magic?  Or did you steal it?”

She smiled curtly.  “Either way, I think I proved my point.”

“You certainly did.”

Elie finally handed the sword back to Jack.  “Thank you, Mr. Sell-Sword, for the chance to demonstrate.  If you’ll excuse me, this has been a colossal waste of time, and I do have business to attend to.”

“I’m not convinced it was such a waste of time,” he tried one more time to stay her exit.  “Clearly two talented individuals such as ourselves were not brought together by accident.  This meeting has a touch of kismet to it, yes?”

She raised an eyebrow.  “I have no need of a murderer for hire, where I’m going.  So, unless you are as gifted at thieving as you are making a fool of yourself, then I maintain we are concluded.”  Elie chided him patronizingly just a bit further.  “Have you ever stolen anything?” 

Jack smiled slyly.  “I’ve stolen hearts.”

Before Elie could object to his misplaced, uninvited flirtation, Vilos interrupted.

“So have I.  Still have several of them with me.  You want to buy one?”  He reached into the satchel at his side and started to rummage through its contents.

“Gods, no!”  Elie held out her hands in objection and pleaded the mercenary not draw a gory horror out of the depths of his bag.  “Not ever.”

Vilos shrugged, but went back to his drink.

Jack quickly interjected before Elie could slink away in disgust.  “So you need to rob someone.  Do I gather that correctly?  I can still be of assistance in your endeavor.  My blade is for hire, though if you do not wish to direct it to slay, it can be instead used to defend.  Certainly you will need protection on this job, right?  Why not hire the best sword jockey in the desert?”

“Whatever you’re going to pay him for the job,” Vilos shoved Jack out of the way, “I’ll do it for less.”

Jack looked at the mercenary aghast.  “You are just… the worst negotiator, do you know that?” 

“Beds are cheap, so is ale.  I want to get drunk and sleep.”

“See, this is your problem, Vilos- you have absolutely no vision.  You never see beyond the immediate, you’re not planning for your future.”

“I’ll die someday.  Future planned.”

Jack rolled his eyes.  “Ms. Elie, I do apologize, but I can assure you…”  By the time he turned back towards the young woman, she was already nearly to the door.

Now, Jack Nazareth may have been quite adept at pointing out the flaws in thinking of his large and dimwitted companion, but recall- he himself was a sell-sword going nowhere.  In an age where shining kingdoms lay stretched across the broad Sha’rahn desert, when the mighty colossuses of ancient times rose proudly against the setting sun, at the very edge of the birth of the great empire, he was an insignificant speck of sand under the boots of stirring titans.  And on top of being completely inconsequential, he was very nearly out of money.  It had been an arduously hot, slow summer, and even in a city as violent and sand-scattered as Zagron, killing work had been sparse.  For all his talk of considering the future and keeping an eye on what was to come, Jack was basically totally broke.  And he was not about to let the first job prospect to walk through the door of his favorite tavern in two weeks walk away without really making a case for why he should be a part of it.  Even if he had absolutely no skills whatsoever that might be useful in such an endeavor.

“Wait!” he shouted after her.  Nearly tripping over his own sandals, he crossed the bar and scooted around the young woman before she could leave.  “Admittedly, this was probably not the best first impression.”

“You think?”

“Hear me out,” he said breathlessly.  “If you think you’re going to find anyone in this city with a better moral compass than me, you’re setting yourself up for massive disappointment.”

Elie looked at him quizzically.  “You kill people.  For money.”

“Yes, that’s true, but I also have rules!” Jack defended.  “Principle among is no matter the counter-offer, never to turn on my employer.  A mercenary like Vilos, he’ll sell you out for the next shiniest object, and Zagron is full of cutthroats, torturers and thieves just like him.  It’s not just my blade that is for sale, but also my loyalty.  If you have a job that needs done and you want someone to count on, hire me.  You’ll be in the safest place in the desert- behind my sword, not in front of it.  Just make an offer.”

She narrowed her eyes.  “Is another one of your rules to say with one hundred words what you could have said with ten?”

“What ten would you have used, Ms. Elie?”

The young woman counted on her fingers.  “Give me money and I promise not to kill you.”

He considered it for a moment.  “Still leaves an awful lot of ambiguity, don’t you think?”

Despite herself, Elie smiled slightly.  “You are persistent, I’ll give you that.”

“Is that a job offer?”

“Maybe you’d like to hear what I’m actually trying to acquire first.”

“We don’t care,” Vilos approached and clapped a heavy hand on Jack’s shoulder.  “Pay us.  We’ll steal it.”

Elie looked at the large mercenary undecidedly.  “I was not looking to hire a gang.”

Vilos grinned through his thick black beard and yellowing teeth.  “Too late.  You just did.”

***

Away from the noise of the bar and the crowded tavern floor, tucked in a small booth lit by a tiny lantern throwing of a dim, yellow glow, over the grumbling of the inn patrons and the roar of the Sha’Rahn desert winds outside, Elie laid out her plan.  Of course, she was not able to do so completely without interruption or ill-mannered interposing on the part of Jack and especially Vilos.  She had just opened her mouth to explain the heist she was hiring for when Vilos tossed aside his cup, snorted loudly and picked something green and slimy out of his teeth.

“Gonna need another drink.”

Elie could not hide her revulsion.  “Do you ever stop drinking?”

“Never thought to.”

“He’s not kidding,” Jack motioned at his erstwhile companion.  “The thought literally has never crossed his mind.  If you were hiring for brains, you got halfway there with me- Vilos on the other hand has a certain lack of cerebral hardiness.”

The immense mercenary glared at him.  “For a tiny man, you say a lot of things.”

“Are the two of you willing to calm yourselves for a few moments so I can explain what we are doing, or should I skip right to the part where I regret all of this?”  Elie put a stop to their childish bickering.

Jack waved her on.  “Proceed.”

“Talk.”  Vilos grunted.

Elie nodded.  “Have you ever heard of-”

“Never mind, already bored.  Going to get beer, just tell me later what I need to hit.”  Vilos stood up and crashed his way back to the bar.

Jack sighed.  “He’s really quite good at what he does.  Though, come to think of it, I cannot for the life of me reason why I am defending him.”

“I’m certain you don’t understand the irony of what I am about to say here, but I am rather short on time.  Can we get on with it?”

“Please, of course.”

Elie huffed, but continued.  “Have you ever heard of something called The Mortal Anchor?”

He shrugged.  “In legend only.  Supposedly a diamond the size of a tear drop that makes its wearer unkillable.”

She made a face and her shoulders slumped.  “That’s such a juvenile interpretation of what it actually does.”

“Fine- enlighten me.”

“The Mortal Anchor is exactly that- it’s an anchor to the mortal realm.  So yes, in a way, it would make its bearer essentially invulnerable because it would hold your spirit to this dimension instead of crossing over in death.  There are a number of other uses for it though, and its power to keep one from slipping into the wrong phase of existence has immense potential for a mystic like me.”

Jack considered her.  “Such as?”

Elie leaned in.  “Time travel.  The ability to skip across whole segments of future history, or leap back to places of antiquity.  Magically traveling through time requires one to step outside the folds of our realm, and if it is not done correctly, you may find yourself ending your journey in a universe not of the one you began.  But, if you knew the right spells and you possessed the Mortal Anchor, you could move through time with impunity and never worry about landing in the wrong dimension.”

Most of it went right over Jack’s head.  “Why not.  If I may be so bold, how exactly do you plan on stealing something that is a legend?”

“Because it’s not a legend- it exists and I know where to find it.”

“Putting aside whether or not I believe in all of this magic and time travel nonsense-” he paused, “oh, short on time, now I get why that’s ironic.  As I was saying, let’s assume I believe you.  This comes down to stealing a diamond, which doesn’t seem especially difficult.  Considering you think you’re a magician of sorts-”

“I am a magician,” Elie cut him off. 

“Yet to be definitively proven.  But, since you’re so confident, what would a practitioner of the mystical arts need from a thug and a murderer-for-hire?  Not to sell myself short-”

“I’m certain you never would.”

Jack smirked.  “Not to sell myself short, but some muscle and a blade seem a little unnecessary to someone who can bend reality to her will, yeah?”

“Let’s leave it at I’m still learning and I’m not stupid enough to attempt something like this without even some modest help.”

“Fair enough.  So that leaves two important details.  How much are you paying, and who are we going to steal your diamond from?”   

“Not who,” Elie corrected, “where.  The Mortal Anchor has disappeared from the world several times in its hundred thousand year history, but its most recent vanishing left some clues.  If my sources are correct, we can find it in the Tomb of Mauzolous.”

Jack’s eyes almost bugged out of his head.  “The Tomb of Mauzolous?”

“Your fee for the job is whatever you can carry.  The Mortal Anchor is mine, but any other treasure we come across is yours.”

“Hold on.  This just took a leap to a bridge too far.”

“You can’t combine phrases like that.”

“Whatever,” Jack waved dismissively.  “You want to hire me to help you steal a diamond, that may or may not exist, from the palatial crypt that literally has no entrance so that you can time travel.  Do I have that more or less correct?”

Elie wrinkled up her face.  “I don’t see what the problem is.”

Jack laughed loudly, drawing the attention of several nearby patrons who looked at him vehemently for disturbing the growling quiet of the tavern.  “The problem is I could be looking for a legitimate job instead of listening to the fairytales of a supposed magician.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Ms. Elie- I don’t deal in magic because for the most part, I don’t believe in it.  Your trick at the bar may very well have been the handiwork of a gifted pick pocket.  And I am not especially keen on breaking into a tomb that has no entrance.  You are no more getting into the Tomb of Mauzolous than I am getting into your…” he gestured suggestively at her.

Elie raised her eyebrows sharply.  “Say something like again, and I’ll make more than your sword disappear.”

Jack went momentarily white.  “Can… can you do that?”

“Try me.”

“And anyway,” he threw up his hands and kept griping, “why is everyone threatening me today?  I’m the sell-sword, I do the threatening.  And the killing for that matter.  I feel as though there has been an imbalance in threat etiquette today.”

“You’re obnoxious, that’s why.  And Mauzolous’s crypt does have an entrance.  It’s just… bricked over.”

“Exactly!  The stairs that lead up to the main chamber were sealed behind bricks centuries ago, and unless you intend on trying to hammer our way through some pretty impressive mortar work in broad daylight, I stand by ‘there is no way in.’”

“If you know what you’re doing, and I do, there is a way in, but- and I cannot believe I have to remind you this considering how much you were begging for this job- if you want to do this we need to get moving now because we really are running out of time here.”

At this, Jack narrowed his eyes.  “Yeah, what about that?  Why are you so short on time if it’s time travel you’re interested in?”

“Because I’m not the only one who knows how to get into the tomb,” Elie hissed.  “And the people I stole that secret from are neither the type sit on their laurels nor be forgiving.  I have a plan to keep us from their grip afterwards, but it is dependent on us being successful.”

The sell-sword chewed his tongue for a moment.  “If you were looking for proper thieves, you never would have stopped and listened to Vilos and I.  So you are looking for protection.  Who’s after you?”

“The Magi.”

“More fairytales.”

“The Magi of the Sha’rhan are real.  They’re a true secret society, one everyone thinks is fake because they’re actually pretty good at keeping secrets.  The fact that I know how to get to the Mortal Anchor would be enough for them to want to kill me, and the fact that I stole that secret from them is enough to make them want to do far worse.  I can’t match their power, so I need a little…” she trailed off.

“You need a couple of idiots to get burned alive while you make your escape,” Jack finished.

“Not necessarily, not if- when!- we’re successful.  Like I said, I can keep us out of their grasp permanently if we get the Anchor, but believe me they are already headed this way and if I had the time to find another pair of idiots I would but I don’t and we really just need to get moving on this thing.”  She took a deep breath after her wildly delivered run on sentence.

Jack sat back and crossed his arms.  “How are you going to keep us from getting pinched when this job is done?”

“Are you serious right now?”

“You’ve told me enough fairytales already, might as well complete the storybook so I can decide if I want to leave you to your magical trouble or actually attempt this act of insanity.”

Elie made a frustrated noise in her throat, but relented.  She pulled a scroll out of her robes and put it on the table between them.  “This is a spell.  It allows the chanter to open a portal backwards in time.  As soon as we have the Anchor, I’ll send us backwards to the day before I steal the location of the diamond.  It’ll be like it never happened.  You’ll have your treasure, I’ll have my anchor, we can go our separate ways with our ill-gotten gains and no one will ever know how or where we acquired them.  Does that pretty much explain it all?”

For a moment, Jack looked at her entirely disbelievingly, but then rather abruptly gave in.  “That seems airtight to me.  For the record, though, if I had even one job prospect that didn’t seem so ridiculous on the face, I would leave you sitting alone in this booth faster than an empty glass.”

“You are so caring.”

“Only when it comes to money.”

“Something you and your friend Vilos have in common.”

“What do we have in common?”  Vilos sat heavily down in the booth and crushed Jack into the corner just as Elie asked the question.

“Right now?”  Jack shoved the mercenary away as best as he could.  “A job.” 

“Good.  What does it pay?”  Vilos had a tankard in each hand, and on asking what his potential financial gain would be, he promptly drained one and threw it aside.

“Anything and everything we can carry out of a tomb,” Jack said.

“Grave robbing.  Good.  I can carry a lot when no one alive is trying to stop me.”

***

Jack was no sky-scraping titan like Vilos, but he was certainly taller than most men, and even he had a difficult time keeping up with Elie’s brisk pace as they practically sprinted through the streets of Zagron.  Her cadence seemed effortless and graceful, yet she moved like she were floating across the sands of the city streets almost out of time with the rest of her surroundings.  Whether it was by some magic spell or she was just surprisingly fleet-footed, Jack could not tell.  All he knew was their hurried walk to the Tomb of Mauzolous quickly became an unpleasant reminder that he was not in nearly the fighting shape he used to be when he was a younger sell-sword and a more spritely battle-brand.

This was not to say that Jack was by any stretch of slovenly dress or build.  He was, after all, accustomed to a brutal, active existence.  Being a professional killer for hire meant maintaining a degree of physical form.  And unlike Vilos, who was a barrel-chested, oxen-backed monstrosity with arms like thunderheads, Jack was of a more average persuasion.  Still, there was a time his muscles looked like they had been carved out of marble, and recent years had softened his steely composition some.  Too many nights spending extra for soft beds and too many days spent swilling ale instead of chasing the coin.  Now, chasing Elie through the narrow, twisting alleys of Zagron, Jack pined for the days his belly was carved like cobblestone and his arms etched like the statue of god.

He pushed his long, black hair out of his face and wiped the sweat from his brow as the late afternoon sun beat down on them.  Behind him, he could hear Vilos huffing and puffing noisily through his massive beard, but Elie barely seemed to have even a shimmer of perspiration on her.  More and more, Jack was convinced she had some mystical assistance- he just could not come to peace with the idea she was in substantially better form than he was.  Between you, dear reader, and me, she was.  In better form.  Again, Jack was not a slouch, but beyond the quick sprint of combat, he was pretty much out of his depth trying to keep pace with Elie.  As their adventures go on you will see some substantial change in him, of course, but it is worth noting at their first meeting, the sell-sword was out of breath just jogging from his favorite bar to the immense tomb at the city’s edge.

The desert around Zagron was a cruel mistress, and its loathsome heat and torturous winds slithered between every sandy building and baked every being foolish enough to still be out.  There was a reason most of the crime in Zagron happened at night- it was the only time anyone could even stand to leave the cool confines of their shaded homes and taverns.  Legend held that the Sha’rhan desert was once a mighty oasis, overgrown with tropical trees and spotted with crystal clear lakes.  The king of that primordial paradise spurned the gods, they say, and in retribution they turned him into the red cliffs that jutted up among the desert and burned his tropical world down to just sand and heat.  Even the original Sha’rhan people for whom the broiling expanse was named had only barely adapted to the blistering lands.  It was an elder kingdom where only the strong could survive.

For all the devastating heat and furious sun, Zagron was home to some of the great monoliths and monuments of that ancient world.  It is any wonder how they were built, considering just how brutal it was to stand outside- try to imagine doing hard labor in such conditions.  There was a grisly rumor that had more truth to it than is comfortable, that the broken, half-dried bodies of the laborers who were forced to construct the great colossi were simply mixed in with the mortar, and their baked guts and bleached bones held many of the buildings together.  There was not one monument that did not have the distinct scent of decay hanging over it, nor the uneasy sensation that something within its walls still lived a damned life beyond death.  Every immense statue, every towering obelisk, every shadowy temple all had the same shiver inducing air to them.  None, though, were worse than the Tomb of Mauzolous.

The family Mauzolous, direct descendants of the original Sha’rhan, had once been the ruling lords over Zagron, and their familial tomb was an looming reminder of the power they once wielded in times before written word.  Just its base was more than fifty feet high and almost twice as wide, and carved into enclaves around it were towering statues of the family entombed within.  Atop that immense base was the resting hall, a temple that would have been sizable on its own but straddling the great foundation it was absolutely colossal.  There were, without exaggeration, towns that dotted the Sha’rhan desert that were unequivocally smaller than the Tomb of Mauzolous.  And, as Jack had pointed out earlier, there were buried vaults that were easier to get into.

At one time, a grand staircase had run up the base of the tomb into the resting house at the top.  It was, according to stories, a glittering, gilded marble affair with a red stripe down its center meant to be reminiscent of a royal carpet, though supposedly it had been stained that color from the blood of hundreds of sacrifices at the Tomb’s dedication.  After the Mauzolous family fell out of power, there was  neither the treasure nor the interest to keep a standing guard at the Tomb, so the stairs were bricked over and the entrance eternally sealed.  Its sheer walls were notoriously unforgiving for those who tried to scale the monument and get inside, and only the strongest of arm could sling a grapple to the top of the base.  Perhaps even more terrifying, there was no record of anyone managing to sneak into the Tomb and then returning.  Naturally it gathered a reputation as being cursed, and that the spirits of the Mauzolous family guarded over their own treasure having been abandoned by their old, mortal sentinels.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the shade thrown off by the tomb was a chilling affair, bereft of any kind of comfort and a wholly uncomfortable, eerie darkness to stand in.  Jack got chills as they approached the tomb, and not the kind of chills that made the blazing heat of the day feel more bearable.  The kind of chills that precipitated him wanting to be absolutely anywhere other than right in front of that immense structure, standing in its late day shadow.  He grimaced slightly as they got near to the mighty monument to mortality, and his stomach turned over unexpectedly.  Half warrior and half poet he may have been, but the sell-sword was certainly at no lack of confidence, and he was rarely put at unease by anything at all.  There were few odds he felt he could not stand against, and yet walking up to the tomb he quite suddenly felt as though he were far beyond his ken.

“Ugh,” was all the more Jack could manage as they stopped in front of the tomb.

Vilos snorted and scratched at his beard.  “You should not so outwardly reflect your fear.  It makes you seem weak.”

Jack screwed up his face and shot the mercenary a disgusted look.  “And you should be wary of places like this, as you will eventually end up in one without breath in your lungs.  That commands a certain degree of respect, yes?”

“This place can respect the whole length of my-”

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Elie broke in before Vilos could get too much more crude.  “Are we ready to do some thievery, gentlem…?”  Her voice faded.  She could not bring herself to call them gentlemen by any stretch.

Jack rapped his knuckles on the stone wall.  “We’re still rather stuck on the outside, Ms. Elie.  Unless your magic can float us over the parapets, you are yet to explain just how we are getting into this thing.”

“I’ll climb,” Vilos offered.  “You wait down here and I will toss down treasure.”

“Why do I not for even a moment believe that to be true?” Jack asked.

“Because you are suspicious and untrusting.”

“As though you have give me reason to be anything but.”

Vilos grinned darkly at what he knew to be true.

Again, Elie interjected.  “No magic and no climbing necessary.  Just make sure no one is watching and be ready to move when I say so.”

“Make sure no one is watching?”  Jack looked at her quizzically.

“Do you want other people to see the secret entrance into the tomb we are about to raid?”

The sell-sword squinted at her and then abruptly turned to his larger companion.  “Vilos, keep watch.  If anyone comes near, I don’t know, growl at them.”

“It’d be more effective if I just hit them.  They won’t get back up.”

“Whatever works,” Jack clapped him on the shoulder.  “I want to see the secret entrance for myself.”

“If you try and leave me behind,” Vilos started.

“Yeah, yeah, you’ll do something terrible to my teeth or my lungs or my eyes.  I get it.  Just stand watch there, okay?”

Vilos grunted, but crossed his arms and turned his attention to the very few people wandering around the alley near them.  The Tomb of Mauzolous was not a particularly popular place to be so late in the day.

Elie had already clambered into one of the alcoves where a thirty foot statue of some ancient, dead lord stood looking severely down at the city of Zagron.  Jack climbed into the towering recess after her.  She pressed her shoulders against the wall and wiggled her way behind the statue.  He took a few cautious looks around, and then followed.  It looked like a tight squeeze, but the sheer size of the statue must have been playing tricks on him because it was actually quite a wide gap once they were around the back of the effigy.  Elie was running her hands along the recess wall.

“When the staircase was still here, they wanted the guards to be able to come and go almost unseen,” she explained.  “So tunnels were built just behind the wall of the base, and they lead out to many of the statuary alcoves.  All of them connected back to hidden doors just off the main staircase.  When they bricked over the stairs, they left the tunnels intact, apparently.  All we have to do-”

She stopped short when a handful of sand came away from a clear seam in the bricks.  Elie smiled.

“Is find one of them.”

Jacks raised an eyebrow.  “There’s no way it’s that easy.”

She chuckled.  “It isn’t.  It’s locked, for one thing, but I can help with that part.  Other than that- yeah, it pretty much is that easy.  Would you ever think to look for a door behind a thirty foot monolith to get into a tomb that is supposedly haunted by its own inhabitants.”

“I mean when you put it that way.”

“Here, help me clear away the sand so I can find the keyhole.”

Jack ran his fingers along the seam in the bricks until the outline of a door appeared.  Elie knelt down in front of it and fiddled around with the gaps in the mortar until more sand fell away and a keyhole indeed materialized.

He could not hide his awe.  “Your fairytale is coming to life, Lady Wizard.”

“Watch and learn, Mr. Sell-Sword.”   

Elie removed a small satchel from her belt, and unrolled an assortment of thieves picks and miniature tools.  Jack chewed his tongue at seeing the parcel.

“Do you actually know how to use any of that?”

Elie shot him a look as she went about picking the lock of the hidden door.  “I told you- components for magic and the spells themselves are pretty expensive.  I can’t exactly afford most of it.  Desperate times…”

With a dusty cough, the lock sprung free.

Jack cocked his head.  “Lead to impressive results.”

She smiled curtly and rolled her tools back up.  “Your preconceived notions are childishly offensive.  You better be as good with that sword as you claim to be.”

Jack snorted.  “Are you expecting a whole lot of resistance in a house literally built for the dead.”

Elie shrugged.  “There has to be some reason everyone who has gone in there hasn’t come back out, right?”

At that, Jack went white and his heart skipped a beat.  “That is a truly terrifying and eldritch supposition.  I don’t want to think about what one would have to do to survive in there all these years.”

“Who says they’re surviving?  Time has little bearing on the undead.”

“Ha, right, the undead.”

She shrugged again.

Jack pressed.  “You’re kidding right.  You are kidding.  Come on, you’re kidding.  Are you… are you kidding?  You’re kidding!”

“Choose a few more words.”

“Lady Wizard, I have cut down more men in my time than there are grains of sand in the whole Sha’rhan desert-”

“Doubtful.”

“Horror stories about the ghosts of deceased lords are all fine and good, but I would not know the first thing about slaying the undead, if such a thing actually exists.  A walking corpse provides a particular kind of challenge in that it’s already dead- which makes it decidedly difficult to kill, right?”

“I imagine if you cut off enough pieces, it would be rather hard for a walking corpse to continue to be a threat.”

“If you cut off enough… this is insanity, you realize this, right?”

“You don’t have to come along.  And besides, could all just be legend and rumor.  For all we know, this tomb is riddled with booby traps and the last few raiders who came through simply plummeted to their death through a hidden trap door, or were crushed by a falling false ceiling.”

“Much more comforting.”

“For a murderer-for-hire, you are remarkably apprehensive about the idea of a challenging job.”

“A challenging job for me, Lady Wizard, is fending off six assailants at once.  Tomb raiding and grave robbing are not my typical business.”

“Consider it a growing experience.  Go get your friend, we don’t have much time left.”

“He is not my friend,” Jack grumbled to himself as he edged around the statue to retrieve Vilos.  It was just in time too- the immense mercenary looked just bored enough that he probably was about to wander off in search of something either more interesting, more profitable, or just something smaller than him to torment.  “Vilos,” Jack hissed, “let’s go.”

The mercenary clambered into alcove.  “Someone asked me what I was doing here.  He wont ask that question again.”

“I don’t need to know the details.”  

“Your squeamishness is unbecoming of a murderer.”

“And your unseemliness is just that- unseemly.”

The two attempted to squeeze past the giant statue at the same time.  It left them uncomfortably pinned shoulder to shoulder in the narrow gap as both struggled to go first.  After a moment of jostling, the overpowering girth of Vilos won out and Jack tumbled past the statue behind his much larger companion.  Brushing sand out of his hair and attempting to brush his wounded pride off his shoulders, Jack threw one last look behind at the city of Zagron as the sun dipped low behind the skyline and an ominous, blood-red twilight settled itself into the alleys.  It was an uneasy sight.  Everything about the moment felt uneasy.  With all the confidence and moxie he had left, Jack shook off the sensation of creeping flesh as best he could, and ducked into the tomb.

If he was expecting things inside the massive crypt to be any less accommodating or pleasant, the sell-sword was sorely mistaken.  The silence just beyond the secret entrance was harsh and oppressive.  Sands beneath his sandals seemed to shift under a phantom breeze, but it was bereft of the telltale whisper of slithering earth.  Musty air that was colder than it had any right to be in the heart of the desert choked the passage way with the scent of stale time and ancient death.  The bricks along the passage were punctuated by the occasional skull, giving credence to the macabre rumor that those who died completing the tomb were built right into its walls.  And only the slightest distance in front of Jack, the whole hallway was swallowed by singularly the most impenetrable blackness he had ever witnessed.

There was immediately no sign of Vilos or Elie, and the sell-sword wondered if his erstwhile companions had already managed to fall into some terrible trap, or had been wholly and silently devoured by a lurking beast.  Jack hissed both their names quietly, but the sound barely seem to penetrate the hedge of his own lips, much less the curtain of darkness before him.  He tried again, but again to no avail.  Feeling no particular sense of loyalty to either the strange wizard girl or revolting mercenary, and especially not one that precipitated braving the terror inducing darkness of that hallway, Jack very slowly turned on his heels with all intent of sulking back out of the tomb and finding something else to do.  There might be just enough time left in the day to get another job- a real job.

No sooner had he turned did a gust of wind blow the door shut with a resounding and disheartening boom.  Jack threw himself against the stone portal, but it was either locked from the outside or stuck.  One way or the other, it positively would not budge, and it left him with slim options other than trying to find his way down the bewildering passage in what could only be described as absolute darkness.  It was not an especially thrilling prospect.

At first, the sell-sword put one hand against the wall and tried to feel his way down the hall.  When, in the process, his fingers fell into the jaw of an agape skull and something skittered across his hand, Jack withdrew his arm swiftly, shook it several times in frightened discomfort, and preceded with his hands out in front of him instead.  Step by step, as bravely as he could manage, the sell-sword crept down the dark hall with his hands groping out in front, hoping they would grab hold of something much more pleasant, or somehow find their way into light of any kind.

Instead, something grabbed him.  Jack shrieked.  Shrieked.  Made the kind of noise you would expect a cat to make when you accidentally step on its tail with a pair of metal-studded boots.  A thin hand clapped over his screaming lips, and a face pressed itself into his limited field of vision.  It was Elie.  She had both a look of extreme amusement and complete befuddlement.  

“Did that noise really come from you?”

Jack cleared his throat.  “It’s really hard to see in here.”

“I know- Vilos and I were looking for a torch.”

“Can’t you just conjure up some light or something?” he asked.

“Yeah, I can,” she replied curtly.  “But only if I have Goblin Weed.  Do you have any on you?”

“I do not.”

“Didn’t think so.  How about you come help us find a torch now?”

“That seems agreeable.”

“Good.  And keep your mouth shut, we don’t need anymore attention coming our way- this is supposed to be a theft,” she chastised.

“You just caught me by surprise, that’s all,” he defended.  “Feeling your way along in the dark leaves one’s hands rather vulnerable to unfortunate shock.”

Even through the dark, Jack could see the intensely quizzical look Elie was giving him.  “Why in the nine hells didn’t you just use your sword to find your way along, then?”

Jack made a number of undignified noises in his throat.  “You… you said you might know where a torch can be found?”

“I do.”

“Then please lead on.”

Elie snickered, but continued down the passage.  She placed Jack’s hand on her shoulder so he could follow her through the darkness.  It drifted lower once, and after a surprisingly well-placed slap given the pressing black, the sell-sword left it on her shoulder the remainder of their slow march through the tomb’s hall.  Less and less she seemed like the kind of woman who should be trifled with.  Jack had to begrudgingly admit that much to himself at least.

Up ahead, a faint crimson glow illuminated a turn in the hall and promised the comforting embrace of precious light- something Jack never thought he would ever be at want for living in the midst of the sun-bleached desert.  As soon as they rounded the bend, Elie and Jack found Vilos was holding several torches and standing bored in the middle of the hall.  He fixed them with a disgusted look when they finally arrived.

“Nearly left,” he grunted, and thrust out a torch to them both.  “Took you long enough to find your way down a one way hall.”

Elie nodded in agreement as she accepted one of the blazing brands.  “The tides of time certainly seem to shift oddly in this place.  I can sense magic.”

“Lovely,” Jack said he as he too accepted a torch.  He nearly dropped it when he realized Vilos had, in fact, improvised it from a few dirty rags and the leg bone of what was almost certainly a human being.  “Where did you find this?”

Vilos just squinted at the sell-sword.  Jack put up his hands in surrender.  It clearly was one of those questions he did not actually want answered.  Elie walked briskly past them both and started further into the passage.  The sell-sword and the mercenary followed quickly behind her.

After a few more twists and turns past even more ominously dark doorways that beckoned in no particular direction, the little troupe very suddenly emerged into an immense, wide-open expanse.  Before them was the gargantuan main staircase that had once lead to the top of the ziggurat before being sealed and bricked over centuries prior.  Each stair was fully three feet high and the longest steps at the base were nearly eighty feet in breadth.  The meager light of their torches did little to reveal the full width of the enormous chamber, and they could see no discernible ceiling.  Only slightly more terrifying was the fact that every shadow around them seemed to flutter, and the claustrophobic stillness of the passage behind them gave way to a creeping, squirming dark.  Wisps of what might have been spiderwebs brushed Jack’s face and toyed idly with his hair.  He shuddered- though, hopefully not visibly.

Naturally, Elie was the first to begin ascending the staircase, climbing as best she could with only one available hand over each ridiculously tall step.

“Urgm!”  Vilos did not do much say any word in any particular language to get her attention, he just made a noise that he assumed would get his point across.  “Where do these stairs go?”

Elie looked at him, turned and looked up, up, up into the darkness above, and then turned back at the mercenary expectantly.

“Well?” Vilos pressed further.

Jack huffed loudly.  “Where do you think they go, my large and unburdened-by-logical-thought, friend?”

The sell-sword started to climb after Elie, and after a moment or two, Vilos followed behind them, grumbling about not getting a proper answer to a perfectly reasonable question.   

As tall as it was and as oversized as the stairs were, the climb up the tomb’s grand staircase was an arduous affair.  Further, as Elie had pointed out earlier, there was a strange warping to time that made some moments seem as though they stretched out ridiculously long, and other moments seem so hurried they almost did not occur at all.  The sensation was truly more one that had to be experienced and is rather a difficult thing indeed to describe.  Consider, if it is simpler, being handed a bundle of strings that you have been assured are all the same length.  As you pull at them, you find some are with all certainty longer than others and some are barely more than a snippet of thread.  Yet, when you place them all next to each other again, they are indeed the same length.  Now try to imagine experiencing time this way.  Not a fun way to climb a giant set of stairs.

When they finally reached the top, only a short distance in front of the troupe was the grand, ceremonial casket of Maouzolous, a gaudy, monolithic stone and precious gem monstrosity that supposedly contained the remains of the great lord himself.  Marble pillars held up the roof over the immense casket, and the peak of the tomb once again broke into open air.  Around them, the three companions could see the pinprick lights of the city of Zagron like dozens of glittering topaz scattered over the dark sand.  Jack was breathing deep the cool night air when a gargantuan, hairy hand was clapped on his shoulder.

“Your muscles are few but needed,” Vilos grunted.  “Push.”

The mercenary dragged his sell-sword companion over to the casket, and both put their hands against its thunderous lid.

“‘Please’ would have been nice,” Jack snorted back.

“Push,” Vilos repeated.

Jack did.  So did Vilos.  They grit their teeth, sweated and exerted, challenging the hefty casket covering to grind slowly off its base.  At first it budged only as much as one would expect a mountain to move when a goat bangs its horns against it.  Then, with resentful leisure, the massive stone lid began to rumble off the coffin.  More wind of rancid death and stuffy age burst from the casket as it was forced open, and Jack stepped away, hacking, just before the great lid teetered off the base.

Elie was looking, annoyed, at both of them.  “So, that I did have the spell components to move, if you had just asked for my help.  Woulda saved you all that fun lifting.”

“Speak louder next time,” Vilos demanded.

Jack coughed the last of the mummy dust out of his lungs.  “Truly.  For once I agree with loud-and-angry over there.  Speak up if you have a better solution.”

Elie shrugged.  “Maybe you should just not jump to ‘my brawn is always the right answer’ solutions in the future and consult with the rest of the group, mm?”

Jack shot her a look.  “There better be something, just, SO valuable in there that we can pawn to make this shit worth it.”

“It’s empty,” Vilos reported.

The sell-sword rolled his eyes.  “No, you oaf, it’s dark and you just can’t see what’s in there.”

The mercenary grabbed Jack by the scruff of his neck and forced his face and a torch into the casket.  “Empty!” he shouted.

Jack’s eyes searched the contents of the stone box.  There were, in fact, none contents.  Empty.  Just like Vilos said.  He wriggled free of the mercenary and looked angrily at Elie.

“What gives?!”

She leaned casually on the casket.  “Would you like my input now?”

“Yes, that would be very nice, Lady Wizard.”

“Thank you for being so obliging, Beggar King.”

Elie reached down to one of the large gemstones that studded the casket, and depressed it.  The gem sank inward with a raspy sigh, and the faint ticking of a hundred clockwork gears and cogs could suddenly be heard in the walls of the coffin.  Almost silently, the floor of the casket fell away, and a steep, narrow set of spiral stairs appeared.  The ticking stopped as everything clicked into place and the casket fell quiet.

Jack  narrowed his eyes.  “Isn’t that fine.  More stairs.”

Elie chewed the inside of her lip for a moment.  “In terms of grave robbing, just exactly how much of it did you imagine would take place above ground?  Just so I can properly set your expectations going forward.”

The sell-sword pointed a gloved finger at her.  “Weren’t you the one speaking to me about brevity?”

She smiled curtly.  “Why don’t you just poke around down there a moment and be sure it’s safe for us.  You know- what you’re being paid to do.”

Vilos elbowed Jack painfully out of the way.  “I’ll be damned if the little man gets to all the treasure first.  After you?”  He scoffed loudly.  “After me!”

The hulking mercenary went swiftly down the narrow staircase.  Well, at least as swiftly as a man of his stature could descend through such a lean space.  Jack looked up at Elie.

“He’s charming, isn’t he?  All the wit of the world’s finest poets with the grace of a lithe little acrobat.  Truly, I am so glad you hired us both- absolutely capital decision on your part, Lady Wizard.”

“Get your ass down there, sword jockey.” 

Without another word, Jack followed after Vilos.  The spiral staircase that cut down below the false sarcophagus was tight business indeed.  As one who positively loathed small spaces and close quarters, Jack was patently uncomfortable.  He much preferred the open step, the wind in his face, and the mountains of sand that stretched eternal under the diamond sun.  Even his work as a murderer for hire usually kept him out of doors.  He was not, after all, a robber for hire.  Not usually, anyway.  All of this dust and darkness was decidedly against his liking.  He had no taste for it.  As soon as he had his cut of the nasty little dungeon crawl, he made up his mind to move out of Zagron permanent and towards somewhere less seedy, even if it meant a smaller town.  Maybe somewhere near the Stonesoul Mountains.  Dreams, anyway.

Jack again became potently aware of the strange lensing of time.  Maybe it was partly in his imagination, given just how wildly claustrophobic their surroundings were, but he could not help but feel that odd stretching and squeezing of each individual moment.  Something about it was beyond the strange, but downright weird, like an eldritch dread that crept in the shadows.  He was certain he could not sense magic in the same manner as Elie, but none the less, Jack was certain he could sense something magical about their surroundings.  Something was off about the tomb, and the lower they descended the more unsettling it became.  Not even the cool hilt of his sword was enough to ease his nerves.  Normally it was a comfort; that day it did little.

As they went lower, the air became cooler and damper.  The dry blaze of their torches cut a smaller and smaller swath through the impenetrable darkness, and the heat they gave off slacked with each step.  Jack shivered, and was glad he was behind Vilos to do so.  The mercenary would never let him live down such an act of humanity.  Though for one so accustomed to the scorching Sha’rahn sun and the daily toil of life in the sands, a wet, chilly tomb was exactly the opposite of what the sell-sword was used to. 

“Any idea how much further?” he tried to casually ask Elie over his shoulder.

“Because I’ve been down in this particular crypt so many times before,” she shot back.

“You are the one who lead us here.”

She sighed heavily.  “Look, even if I did know the answer to that, exactly what good do you think it would do us?  We already know it’s next to impossible to tell how much time is passing down here.  So what good is it to know how much further we have to go?”

“Fair point,” he conceded.

“We’re there,” Vilos barked gruffly.

Blessedly, the mercenary’s perfectly timed snarl was correct.  Jack felt the stairs give way to flat ground, and the room around them opened up into a downright cavernous underground chamber.  Even from the dim light of their torches, the sell-sword could tell the room was absolutely palatial in scope, with high vaulted cathedral-like ceilings and absolutely immense pillars holding up the soaring roof.  Each pillar was carved with hundreds upon hundreds of ancient runic texts, or covered in frescos of heroic and demonic grandeur.  It might have been wondrous had it not been for one minor detail.  Between all those pillars and lining the chamber from wall to wall was a truly horrific over-abundance of coffins.

Coffins like rows of crops went on as far as the chamber stretched.  And considering just how immense the room was- there were really an awful lot of coffins down there.  They were all fairly uniform, neither especially ornate nor completely plain, and they were all covered with a fine layer of dust that assured none had been disturbed in quite some time.  Well, there were a few exceptions.  Here and there, every now and again, there would be an open casket with its lid dumped carelessly on the ground and the scattered remnants of bones nearby, as though someone had hastily rummaged through the coffin and left the owner’s remains thoughtlessly strewn.  Otherwise, the chamber was unperturbed and still.  Still as death, as it were.

“There are, and this is no exaggeration, about a million and a half other places I would rather be right now,” Jack announced.

Vilos, on the other hand, was more than willing to do some slapdash salvaging.  He threw the lid off the nearest coffin and reached inside.  The mercenary came up with a fist full of rags and bones, but little in the way of valuable or shiny.  He made a disappointed and angry noise.

“Where is the treasure?”

Elie rolled her eyes, an action she was getting increasingly used to around Vilos and Jack.  “This is just the first chamber, gentlemen.  The resting place of the servants to Mauzolous.”

Jack looked over the mass of caskets wide-eyed.  “All of these were his servants?”

“Sacrificed at the time of his death,” Elie confirmed.  She then followed with a comment that was horrifying but delivered with a distinct air of sarcasm.  “And cursed to serve him eternally, even after their passing.”

She wiggled her fingers and made a low moaning noise, like she was performing a terrible impersonation of a ghoul reaching out for Jack.

“Not funny.”  He jerked away from her and did not take his eyes off the coffins.

“Come on, Beggar King,” she ribbed him.  “You don’t actually believe in the walking undead, do you?”

“You seemed rather convinced of them not long ago.”

“For all your skill for it, sarcasm is just completely lost on you, isn’t it?”

“In as much as simple manners seem to be lost on you, Lady Wizard.”

Elie opened her mouth to respond, but Vilos cut her off.

“Company,” he grunted.  “Dead company.”

Replete with shock and horror, Elie and Jack looked in the direction the mercenary was pointing and watched as the lid of a coffin quietly pried itself loose and the skeletal remains of its former inhabitant climbed out.  With the creaks of an ancient door and the crackles of dead leaves underfoot in the late gray of autumn, the shambling corpse drew itself up and turned its empty eye sockets towards the trio.

Jack was slack-jawed.  “Get the fuck out of here.”

Even Elie was at a lack of comprehension.  “They… they’re really real.”

Vilos was slightly less miffed at the unusual moment.  He quickly grabbed up the lid of the coffin he had opened and strode towards the walking skeleton.  The dusty corpse reached out a clawed hand at the mercenary, and Jack imagined it closing tightly around the throat of his cohort to strangle the life out of the titanic man.  Vilos was quicker than the skeleton, however.  He took one single swing with the coffin lid and blasted the undead creature into all two hundred odd separate pieces.  Dust and bone clouded the air, but in the midst of it stood Vilos the victorious.

He shrugged.  “Not so hard.”

Jack looked aghast around the room.  “Feel like doing that about a hundred more times?”

The once silent and still chamber was quivering to life as more casket lids pushed themselves aside, and the servants of Mauzolous drew themselves up from the dead to do their sworn, accursed duty.  Vilos narrowed his eyes as the army of skeletons rose up around them.

“That’s more difficult.”

When they moved, it was as one, altogether in one horrifying surge of clattering limbs that rattled like dry reeds in a the winds before a storm.  A ring of death closed in around the trio, and it became frighteningly clear to Jack they were far, far out of their depth.  He drew his sword, though to what affect it would have he felt less assured.  Its gleaming blade was honed to tear through flesh, but against clunking bones- what good?  And the sheer number of horrors alone… Jack immediately regretted getting out of bed that morning.  He was about to become just another casualty to the curse of the Tomb of Mauzolous, fallen victim to its all too real curse of undead.  Not what he had in mind when the sun came up.

As Jack and Vilos assessed and reassessed their hopeless situation, Elie was doing something slightly more useful.  She was rummaging through her supplies, looking for a very particular component of a spell she was almost pretty certain she could pull off.  

“Hold them off!” she shouted at the sell-sword and mercenary.

“Hold- hold them off?!” Jack asked incredulously.

“And get ready to run!” she followed up with.

“Lady Wizard, if you have something to say…”

She found what she was looking for.

“That might in some way shed some light…”

Elie tossed the item into the air and started to chant under her breath.

“On just exactly how you plan to escape…”

When nothing happened, she grabbed the component, threw it up in the air and started the chant again, pronouncing each word of an ancient, long forgotten tongue as deliberately as she could.

“Our current plight, it would be most appreciated right about now!”

This time, Elie felt the otherworldly thrum of power race through her.  She finished the spell and whispered, “Second Sun.”

Overhead, a blast of garish, desert light leapt into existence.  In all its painful brilliance, it rained down on the army of skeletons, and its impossible brilliance struck them all to the ground.  They hissed and keened as though the sunlight bathing them was a geyser of acid melting them from within.

Elie grinned widely.  “You were saying something about shedding some light?”

“Run!” Jack grabbed her arm and took off for the far side of the chamber.

Vilos hurried ahead of them, shattering skeletons as he went, bashing them aside with the coffin lid he was still carrying.  Despite the burning light, they clutched out for the trio as they raced by, but the mighty mercenary hammered their withered hands away, clearing a path for his companions trailing behind.  

Even as the troupe of tomb raiders raced for the far side of the chamber, it was clear their window of opportunity to escape the undead army was going to be a narrow one.  Already Elie’s false sunrise was melting into dusk, and they had only moments longer before the light went out completely and the swarm of skeletons would be able to clamber back to their boney feet and give chase.  The thieves sprinted towards an immense set of doors that Jack felt fairly confident not even dozens skeletons would be able to move, and that he hoped would lead somewhere not totally overrun with the undead.

Vilos, Elie and Jack barely managed to skitter through the doorway before the magic sunlight went out completely.  Elie whipped around to face the onslaught of shambling corpses and barked orders at the mercenary and sell-sword.

“I’ll get the door!  You find something to bar it with!”

Jack and Vilos looked frantically around the new room they found themselves in for something to block the door shut.  Behind them, they could hear Elie chanting something again as the young wizard tried her hand at another spell.  The two hired hands found a beam that looked like it was specifically for the purpose of barring the door, and hefted it to their chest to rush over to the portal.  Vilos did most of the lifting, naturally.  Jack turned just in time to be horrified to find the army of skeletons had almost reached the doorway and one was reaching out to grab Elie.  Her eyes were closed and her arms were spread as though she were welcoming the deadly embrace.  Suddenly, she clapped her hands together, and the doors slammed shut with the force of an avalanche, severing the bony arm and sealing the skeletons behind.

She looked expectantly at Vilos and Jack.  “Any time you want to put that jam in place, that would be great.  I don’t know how long the doors will hold.” 

They hurriedly placed the massive beam into the waiting bar clutches, and took a long breath.  From the other side, they could hear the undead fiends scratching and banging on the immense doors, but between the weight of the portal and the huge jam they had just put in place, everyone felt pretty assured they were safe… for the time being.  Jack slumped down, and Elie collapsed as well.  Only Vilos remained standing, and he looked quizzically at his exhausted cohorts as though he could not fathom just why it was they were out of breath.

Jack side-eyed Elie.  “How did you do that?  Any of that.”

She looked somewhat disgustedly back at him.  A moment later, she handed him his sword.  Jack took it from her, mouth agape.

“Did I drop this?”

“No,” she shook her head.  “You did not drop it.”

“Did you take it by pick pocketing, or magic?”

“What in the nine hells do you think, Beggar King?”

“Okay, Lady Wizard- you’ve got some skill.  That sunlight thing- that was an especially cool trick.”

“I thought I should be prepared on the very off chance there really were undead down here.  Looks like that was the right call.”

“What were those things you threw into the air to make it work?”

She sighed and pushed the hair out of her face.  “The teeth of an infant bat.  Like I said- spell components can be remarkably hard to come by.  Between rare and just downright expensive, nothing magical happens for free.  You would not believe what the current markup on some of my components is.”

“Hence you steal things,” Jack suggested.

“Hence I just saved our collective asses from being torn apart by an army of skeletons.  You’re welcome, by the way.”

Vilos seemed less than grateful.  “The doorway narrows the passage.  We could have taken them here.”

Elie huffed.  “You two are the height of terrible, you know that right?”

“I didn’t see you being particularly helpful with the door jam,” Jack fired back.

“And I didn’t see you smiting down a few hundred skeletons and closing the door to begin with.”

Before things could get too acrimonious, Vilos interrupted.  “Is there treasure in here?”

“Why don’t you look instead of assuming I know?” Elie asked pointedly.

The mercenary gave her a dark look, but moved on to rifling through the chamber’s contents in search of something he could turn a profit on.

They found themselves in a room much narrower and shorter than the massive assembly hall they had just passed through, but no less tall.  It had the same palatial height as the burial atrium, and from floor to ceiling the walls were bursting with shelves of books, scrolls and tomes of all description.  Leather bound spines inscribed with runes and lettering from every known tongue packed every inch of wall space in the room.  In the center was a large table decorated only with a few candelabras that looked like dragons.  Several open books were scattered on the table, arranged around candles that had long since burned down to small pools of wax and wick.  It was a much calmer space than the burial chamber, and with decidedly fewer places for undead things to jump out of.

Vilos was unimpressed with the collection of books.  “Useless,” he grunted as he tossed several aside.  “No money in paper.  Where is the gold?!”

“If you would quite be careful with those, I would very much appreciate it, they’re very old.”  The voice spoke from the shadows of the room surprising all three of the tomb raiders.

Jack, Elie and Vilos whirled towards where the sound had come from.  Their torches barely pierced the shadows of the room, and they could see nothing.  They all jumped when the startling sound of clawed feet scratching over stoney ground met their ears, but there was still nothing to be seen.  The skittering came again, and in unison they all whipped towards the source of the sound.  Jack was the first to find his voice.

“Show yourself, fiend, and face retribution!”

“Very intimidating,” Elie whispered at him.

“Thank you,” he whispered back, evidently missing her sarcasm.

“All due respect,” the voice replied, “you are trespassing in my room, so if anyone is going to be facing retribution, it’s you.  Not that I am in any particular mood to dole it out, I would just prefer you not be here any longer.  You’re disturbing my reading.”

“Perhaps you did not see, fiend, but my companions and I just defeated all of the undead warriors you had posted outside your chamber!  If a hundred walking skeletons were not enough to stop us, what makes you think YOU will be?!” Jack shouted back.

“Oh yes, I saw your performance,” the voice replied drawly.  “My favorite part was when you weakly conjured up a fake sun and turned tail and ran.  Quite heroic.  Such courage and skill.”

Vilos had enough of his courage being called into question.  “You curse us for cowards yet you hide in shadow!  Face me, doomed one, and know your destruction!”

The voice sighed.  “Ugh, fine, if you insist.”  There was an additional skittering sound, and a tiny dragon, much like the ones the candelabras were modeled after, appeared on the reading table.  He was a fine, metallic blue color, and instead of shimmering scales on his wings, he had a course of beautiful feathers.  No bigger than perhaps the size of an average house cat, it perched on the edge of the table and considered the group, while they in turn considered it right back.

Jack slowly lowered his guard.  “You’re not exactly what I expected you to be.”

The little dragon cocked its head.  “And what exactly where you expecting, you who have so much experience raiding tombs and fighting the undead?  A phantom in a sheet?  A mummy covered in dusty rags?”

“Well,” he admitted, “I mean, yeah.”

The tiny monster sighed deeply again, and adjusted a minuscule pair of spectacles that were riding at the end of its snout.  “I can’t really tell what’s more stunning: your naivety or how trite and cliched such a thing would be.  Also, I am more than mildly insulted.  Have you ever, and I mean ever, met a member of the walking dead with diction and syntax as advanced as mine?  I should think not.”

Elie took a step closer to the miniature dragon.  “Who are you?”

It swept a wing out and bowed courteously.  “Sharpwitmonstrominius.” 

Jack balked a moment.  “That is quite a name.”

The little dragon cocked its head.  “Well I’m quite the being.  You, being of decidedly a pedestrian variety, I’m just as certain have a pedestrian name.  Like Pete.  Or Jack.”

Elie gave a short laugh.  “Solid guess.”

Jack shot her a look.  “I am not pedestrian, and neither is my name.”  He turned back towards the miniature monster.  “Yours, however, is just far too long.  Is there anything shorter you go by.  You know, to match your stature.”

The little dragon smacked its lips, and unless Jack was very mistaken, the faintest hit of a smile tugged at its mouth.  “Now that, Jack, was very nearly clever enough to be amusing.  If my full name is beyond your ken to speak, then I would kindly settle upon a nickname that appropriately illustrates my intelligence- though even the idea of such a thing as a nickname is borderline derogatory.  Never the less.  As I am dealing with beings of lesser acumen, you may call me Wit.”

“There now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Jack asked sarcastically.

Wit rolled his eyes.  “You have no idea, flesh being.”

“Know you where the treasure is?!” Vilos snarled.

“Well, we are of a one track mind, aren’t we?” Wit admonished.

“I’ll squish ya!” Vilos threatened further.

“My my, and such a temper.”  Wit clicked his tongues in disgust.  “Tsk tsk.  And to answer your question, my very large and overly vexed friend, that should depend entirely upon what treasure it is you are seeking.  There are a number of them here, you see.  Could you be a bit more specific?”

“We’re looking for the Mortal Anchor,” Elie interjected.

Wit raised his eyebrow horns suddenly.  “Is that so?”

“And something to make OUR time worth it,” Jack reminded them both.  “Namely something shiny that can be sold for, if not vast sums of wealth, certainly a moderate heap of it.”

Wit rolled his little eyes.  “That feels more like what I expected from a band of raiders as ill-prepared and under-skilled as yourselves.”

Elie visibly sulked.  “I thought I did okay just now.”

“My dear, meaning no offense, but the conjuring of a false sunlight should be a most basic cantrip to even a novice student of the magic arts.  It took you more than one try to execute, and whilst the results were perfectly satisfactory, they were ultimately short-lived and lacking in a certain spectacular brilliance that would have rendered that entire company of necromantic nitwits unto not but dust.  You have a ways to go before being considered even passingly skilled,” Wit appraised.

Jack smirked at her.  “I somehow feel like you owe me an apology.” 

She scowled.  “I disagree wholeheartedly.”

“TREASURE!” Vilos roared in his own way.

“Yes, yes of course- the Mortal Anchor and, ahem… shiny things.”  Wit glowered at both Vilos and Jack.  “I can lead you there if you can manage to not become completely lost even with my most specific instructions.”

Jack considered the little dragon very suspiciously.  “Just like that?  Why would you help us so easily?  That feels like a trap.”

Again, Wit adjusted his tiny spectacles, and sighed heavily.  “Master Jack, just what in the world do you imagine I would have use for worldly treasure?”

Jack shrugged.  “I dunno.  Buying… like… meat, or something?”

“I’m vegetarian,” the little dragon snapped back.  “And even if I wasn’t, do you really think me so inept a hunter as to not be able to find my own prey that I should have cause to buy it?”

The sell-sword looked at Wit quizzically.  “You’re vegetarian?”

“That is correct.”

“Why are we still talking about this?!” Vilos shouted.  “Why do you always insist on talking?!  More doing!  More treasure!”

“Hold on just a second,” Jack raised a hand to shush the mercenary.  “I need to unpack this.  Why in the nine hells would a DRAGON, even a little one, be a vegetarian?”

“My lord,” Wit explained exasperatedly, “if you must know, I have a cousin on the far side of the world.  Do you know what he prefers to dine upon?  The toes of human beings.  Almost to their exclusivity.  Now, you tell me: would that not be enough to ruin you on a carnivorous diet for the rest of eternity, or do you imagine you would find your own pleasure in such a course of faire?”

Elie rubbed her temples.  “What in the name of the gods is wrong with this world?”

“Quite more than you know, my lady,” Wit replied.

Jack had not yet unwrinkled his face in disgust.  “Yeah.  Okay.  I’m now with Vilos.  Treasure.  That’s enough conversation for, like… a few years.  At least.”

The little dragon shrugged his wings.  “As you wish.  When you are reasonably prepared, we may carry on to the lower catacombs.  That is where the resting place of Mauzolous’s closest adviser, the wizard Kraakish, lies.”

Something about everything Wit said made Jack more than a little uncomfortable.  “Do you care to first explain why we must go into the lower catacombs?”

“You wish to find the Mortal Anchor?” the little dragon affirmed.

“Yes,” Elie said eagerly.

“The to the tomb of Kraakish we must go.  To the nearest of my understanding, if the Anchor is anywhere here, it is there.”

“But you’re not entirely sure?” Jack asked suspiciously.

“I only arrived here two thousand years ago, Master Jack,” Wit replied.  “And given the absolutely sumptuous supply of fine reading that exists in the upper tombs, I have hardly had want or cause to venture much deeper.  I only just last week memorized my six thousandth one hundred and ninety second book- there is still an immense amount of reading to be done.”

“Then how do you even know the Anchor thing is down there?” the sell-sword pressed.

“Because that is what the records here suggest.”  Wit said it as though it should have been obvious.

Jack threw up his hands.  “I’m sorry, but I find this all far too convenient for my liking.  If you know how to so easily get to the Mortal Anchor, then why would it still be there?  We can’t be the first thieves to go after it.”

The little dragon pursed its lips.  “While I appreciate your line of reasoning, appreciate the following.  Just how many raiders past do you figure have made it past that lot?”

Wit motioned with one wing towards the door they had all come through, which was still quaking and shivering as the army of skeletons pounded and clawed at it.  

He went on.  “And those few who did manage to heroically outrun the undead never chanced to pass back this way.  Which is, for the record, the only way in or out.  No other secret tunnels past this point, my new friends.  Just a lot of stairs and tunnels that go deeper and deeper into the catacombs.  It therefor, stands to reason no one has ever made it back out- least ways not in the time since I have been here.”

“And how did you come to be here?” Jack queried finally.

“I was counsel to one of Mauzolous’s descendants.  When she passed, I stayed.  I had little use for the outside world after she was gone, so I remained among the libraries, and will remain among them until I have consumed their accumulated knowledge, after which point I shall go where I feel is next most agreeable.  Is that quite enough for you, Master Jack?  May I now show you the way to Kraakish’s tomb, or will you just allow me to return to my reading.”

The sell-sword finally relented.  “Lead on.”

Wit bowed sarcastically with a sweep of his wing.  “Thank you kindly, good sir.  Who might be in the lead of this company?  I don’t suppose it is you?”

“I am!” Elie spoke up.

“Very well, dear lady.”  The little dragon fluttered to her shoulder and alighted.  He waved with a wing towards the dark hallways ahead.  “Just that way then.”

She took a few cautious steps forward.  “What about all of them?”  Elie motioned behind her at the door quaking from the efforts of the undead army.  “If this is the only way in and out, what do we do about them?”

“Yes, well, I imagine that is a problem for you to solve, now isn’t it?  The undead have little interest in a well-read feather dragon, such as myself, so my supposition is that particular quandary rests upon your rather lovely shoulders.”

Jack rolled his eyes hard enough to see the lining of his own skull.  “You are just the height of helpful, you know that?”

Elie shot him a look.  “At least he’s well spoken, mercenary.”

“Sell-sword,” Jack corrected.  “And let’s get moving.  I’d rather not be around if they break through the door.”

“Wise decision,” Wit commended.  “Onward then.”

“At last,” Vilos grumbled.  “Less talking with my next job.  Can’t stand all this jabber.  Blood-letting.  Very little talking in that.”

“What charming company I have fallen in with,” Wit quipped.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Elie remarked as she moved down the hall.

***

The passage quickly turned into more stairs, and the troupe descended into the further depths of the massive tomb.  Every flight or so, the stairs would open up into a landing lined with inlets.  Corpses in all manner of decay lay in those inlets, some reduced just to bones, others still surprisingly fresh, as though the tomb were still in active use.  Wit explained that the further into the catacombs they went, the less the bodies were exposed to air, which often times slowed their decomposition.  It was of very little comfort to Jack who found the whole character of the place- overrun with cobwebs and stacked to its brim with death- entirely unpleasant, to say the least.  He very much decided on the spot that furthermore, he would relegate himself to creating corpses, rather than spelunking amongst them.  That is, after all, what a sell-sword is supposed to do.  Yes, tomb raiding was just not for him.

As they descended further, the dankness of the air gave way to a drier, staler atmosphere as the temperature within the catacombs continued to drop.  Jack found himself shivering slightly in the sharp chill of the air, so used was he to the raging heat of Sha’rhan desert.  His hands reached out and found the more jagged, rough hewn walls had turned into a more masoned affair, well constructed and finely smoothed.  It struck him as odd that the deeper into the tomb they went, the nicer the stonework was.  Then, it did stand to reason that over time as disinterest eroded public use of the mighty tomb, they probably gave up making things look nice.  Those original depths, the earliest well of souls, would have been appointed for the enshrining of lords who were looked upon as gods.  

They might have been better constructed, but they were in no less a place of being overrun with vermin and critters of all manner.  Jack squirmed a few times when his hands ran across an oversized cobweb, and he visibly wriggled when he occasionally thought its inhabitant was running across the length of his shoulders.  Rats scampered around his feet, and long beetles the length of snakes with thousands of wiry legs darted in and out of the cracks in the masonry.  The sell-sword made a show of trying to see into the shadows of the darkness with his torch, but really he was just swinging the flame at anything moving to keep it away from him.

Ahead, Elie and Wit seemed locked in a perfectly pleasant conversation.

“So you were really council to someone who was buried here?” she asked.

“A few hundred generations before you were even conceived, back in the early days of the Magi of the Sha-rhan, yes, I was,” the little dragon replied.  “Zagron was a different place then.  It still reeked of decrepit crime and moldering corruption, but there was a nobility to the imperial family, back when the line was still descendant of Mauzolous.”

“Why did you stay after he died?”

“After she died,” Wit corrected, “I found that the house of the new king had very little use for a feather dragon with fathomless knowledge of the world, incredibly.  I could see it was the beginning of the downfall of the line of Mauzolous, and I elected to remain close to their collected knowledge, rather than take my chances on the wind.”

“How adventurous of you,” Jack remarked offhandedly.

The little dragon turned his serpentine neck round to address the sell-sword.  “I rather find, erm, adventure, to be a robust and counterproductive waste of time.  Apart from having little in the way of assured outcome, they take away from time that could be better utilized learning.”

“What good all that learning if you never put it to use?” Jack pointed out.

“Because someone around here needs to be a historian.  Storytellers, record keepers- they are in short supply in this world.  And paper, a glorious an invention as your species seems to think it is, is a rather fragile way to mark down records.  I am decidedly less fragile.”

“We could test that,” Vilos growled.

“You would regret it,” Wit replied tritely.  “Do not mistake my amicable nature, large one.  I am no less dangerous than my larger kin, and immolating someone as drunk as you would be of little difficulty.  Why I bet your blood itself would catch on fire you’ve drunk so much.”

Elie immediately changed the conversation.  “You said we’re looking for the tomb of a wizard?  Kraakish?  How did he end up with the Mortal Anchor?  Do you think there would be anything else in there useful to a practitioner of the mystical like me?”

Wit turned his attention back to the young woman.  “To the first line of inquires: I have very little idea indeed.  The Mortal Anchor has a troubled past in general, and while Kraakish was among one of the greatest wizards to ever stride this realm, he was also secretive, aggressively reticent, and simply mad to boot.”

“Mad?  As in crazy?” Elie probed further.

“Depending upon one’s definition, I suppose.  Madness is, after all, merely an assigned value based on a presumed understanding or acceptance of sanity.  But yes, at the time he was alive, Kraakish was very much considered to be mad.  Late in life, his principle preoccupation was the practice of necromancy, and then the bending of time.”

“Sounds like someone I know,” Jack quipped.

Wit ignored him.  “His understanding of the magic of life and death was imperfect, and despite his own power he was unable to ever fully revive the dead.  Though he came close enough that I imagine some of the undead guardians of this tomb are derivative of his own ancient spells and curses aimed to bring back the deceased.  Hence, his final experiments were with time, for who should need to return life to the dead if you could simply bend time to your will and age no more?  Much more dangerous experiments those- toying with the fabric of the universe and whatnot.  I imagine at some point in his quest to conquer time, he managed to come into possession of the Mortal Anchor.”

“That’s definitely this side of crazy,” the sell-sword appraised.

“Could you please not be involved in this conversation?” Elie snipped at him.  

Jack held up his hands in surrender and turned his attention back to… well, the walls, there really was not anything else for him to pay attention to.

“As to your second line of question, dearest lady,” Wit went on, “that exact madness is why I would strongly encourage you not search too hard among his possessions for something that you might find useful to yourself.  I have no doubt that anything Kraakish found even passingly valuable to himself will be trapped and cursed in ways that defy explanation.  Likely if you touch the wrong thing, it will turn you into one of his undead experiments, or perhaps phase you just slightly out of time in this existence, rendering you caught between existences for the remainder of the eternity.  Nasty business that.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Elie said.

“Of course, my dear.  Of all the assorted company I find myself in today, yours is the company I find least objectionable.”

“Hey, no fair picking favorites,” Jack objected.

“What of what we came for?” Vilos elbowed in.  “If there traps in the wizard’s coffin, where do we find the treasure we carry out?”

Wit was not listening.  Rather, he had his little head tilted towards the ceiling, as though he were listening to something several floors above them in the higher reaches of the catacombs.

The little dragon wrinkled up his snout.  “Did you come in with anyone else?”

“Wouldn’t we have waited for them?” Elie pointed out.

“Perhaps not.  A smaller band the greater share of pay to each.  I only just met you, I don’t know your values,” Wit reminded her.

Elie sighed.  “Not altogether unmerited.  No, we came in with no one else.”

Wit wrinkled his snout again.  “I suspect the skeletons have broken into my library.  There is an awful ruckus above us.  They’re going to make such a mess of things.  It’ll take me a decade at least to put everything back in order.”

Jack snapped his head up towards the ceiling.  “They’re free?!  You can hear them?!”

“I hear something,” Wit said.  “And unless someone else has managed to break in here today, the odds of which are slim at best, I would caution that yes, the little army of boneheads is free of the door you futilely attempted to bar.  I wish you the best of luck in your escape.”

“Don’t worry,” Elie turned over her shoulder towards Jack.  “If we find the Mortal Anchor, we won’t need to go back that way.”

“If.  IF!” he emphasized.  “If we’re all wrong about this, what then?”

“Then I imagine you have one pickle of a fight on your hands, Master Jack,” Wit appraised.  

Even Vilos grumbled.  “Will be more difficult to fight back out with our arms full of treasure.  Speaking of.”

“Yes, yes, of course, your treasure,” Wit said exasperatedly.  “There will be plenty of it in the chambers surrounding Kraakish.  Mauzolous was buried with absolutely heroic amounts of wealth.  You will not be disappointed.”

Vilos smiled through broken teeth.  “Good.”

“How much further do we have to go?” Jack griped.  “There have been more stairs involved in today than I think I have seen the entire breadth of my life heretofore.”

“A sound body is a long lived one,” Wit said.  “Better to exercise today than to be bedridden tomorrow, Master Jack.  A few more stairs will do you good.  And to more directly answer your question, we are nearly there.  We are about to pass through the chambers of Mauzolous’s third descendant, Minolous.  I trust if you find nothing of interest in the lowest burial chambers, you will find something that appeals here.”

They came to a landing with a heavy stone door ahead.  Wit motioned at them to open it, but only Vilos possessed the unbridled strength to move the massive portal.  When he did, however, the sight that met them was beyond reasoning.  Behind the door was a towering chamber, much like the great entrance hall they came into, just as high and as lengthy.  In the four corners of the grand hall were enormous carvings of lions, each with an open, roaring mouth from which gargantuan flames flickered, lighting the entire chamber.  Instead of being littered with coffins, though, this chamber was packed with gold.  Stupefying amounts of it.  Comical amounts of it.  Treasure from floor to ceiling in bursting barrels, chests, lock boxes, and where there was no container, just loose piles of it scattered on the floor.  Coins, platters, jewelry, gems and precious heirlooms in amounts that would sustain the wealth of a hundred generations of kings and queens choked the massive room.

“Hello and good evening, retirement, it is my absolute pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Jack half whispered as they all stumbled inside.

“Gold,” Vilos growled long and low.

“Where did all of this come from?” Elie asked breathlessly.

“Minolous was a hoarder and a conqueror,” Wit explained.  “These are the collected spoils of his conquest of several rival empires.  He spent almost none of it, just buried it away so that his sons could use it to expand their own kingdoms.  Of the eight of them, though, only one would survive the others- likely he killed his brothers in jealousy.  And this was, as you can imagine, far too much wealth for one man or woman to spend in their lifetime.  Ozumindolous, as he was named, built several colossi and other mighty works in his time, but ultimately when he died the secret of his fortune died with him, and here it remained.”

“How do you know all this,” Jack asked, still trying to comprehend the glittering valley of money he found himself.

“I read,” Wit scoffed.

“I shall need a cart drawn by many horses,” Vilos calculated.

“It would take you more years than you have left just to dig it all out,” the little dragon said.  “Minolous had an entire army devoted just to the collection and accumulation of this treasure.  Without hiring your own army, you’ll have to settle for what you can carry out.”

Jack plunged his hand into a loose pile of treasure, and when he drew his fist back out he was holding more money than he had ever been paid in total for every one of his deeds over the course of his whole career.  “Where in the nine hells do we even begin?”

“Not here, if you want the really valuable things,” Wit replied.  “Wait until we make it to the tomb of Mauzolous himself.  Artifacts worth far more and much easier to carry.  Consider this your last resort if you really do not find yourselves happy with what is down there.”

Jack stuffed some of the coins into his breeches all the same.  “I’m not one to take chances when this stuff is just sitting out in the open.”

The little dragon rolled his eyes.  “The greed of man will truly be your undoing.”

“‘Greed is a secondary consequence to the want of power’,” Jack quoted.

Wit raised his eyebrow horns.  “'For greed is but means to an end, veritably the simplest way to buy influence without having to shed lifeblood or put one’s own at risk’,” the little dragon finished the quote.  “You’ve read the Musings of the Eight?”

“Several times.”

“I did not initially take you to be of even the passingly learned, Master Jack.  There is hope for you yet.”

The sell-sword flashed a toothy smile.

“I assume the tomb of Kraakish is near?” Elie interjected.

Wit nodded.  “Of course dearest lady.  Once through this hall it is only but another flight of stairs down and will arrive in the original burial chambers.  Those of Mauzolous and his wife, their children, and their counsel: Kraakish.”  He turned his little head back up towards the ceiling.  “You’re absolutely certain no one else came in here with you?  You weren’t perhaps followed?”

Elie looked uneasily back at Vilos, who shrugged and turned towards Jack.

The sell-sword faltered a bit.  “I mean, I’m pretty sure.”

Wit looked a little concerned.  “That does not sound much like the scraping of bone against stone, as it does sound like sandals and soft boots and the sweeping of robes.  I think there is someone else in here with us.”

Jack slowly drew his sword.  “Well, that’s comforting.”

“Best we be finished with your errand, and quickly,” Wit said.  “There are many other routes through this tomb, and it concerns me to no small degree that whoever else is in here has come along our exact trail.  That is not coincidence, my rather ridiculous companions, that is patently ‘we have been followed.’” 

“Aren’t there more traps or guards or curses to stop them?” Elie asked as they picked up their pace through the massive treasure chamber.

“Dearest lady, just how many would-be tomb raiders do you figure would made it alive past an army of undead?”  Wit posed.

“Fair enough.”

“Besides, I promise you,” the little dragon went on, “in the lowest chamber, where the most valuable things are, there will not be want for traps and curses.”

Something about that made Jack extremely nervous.

They hustled quickly through the remainder of the treasure room and swiftly descended the next flight of stairs.  It left the troupe in a circular antechamber, with three vault doors.  Above each great door were inscriptions, presumably of who or what might be behind said portal.  Wit motioned with his wing at the rightmost door.

“That one- that’s the resting place of Kraakish, later known simply as The Defiler.”

Jack raised his eyebrows.  “The Defiler?”

Wit glanced in his direction.  “People don’t exactly take kindly to someone who meddles with the forces of life and death, Master Jack.”

The sell-sword sighed.  “Let’s get your little diamond and then find a payday so we can get the nine hells out of here.”

Elie agreed.  “I’m not looking to spend a whole lot more time down here myself.”

“Vilos, if you’ll get the door once again.”  Jack motioned at the huge vault.

It took more than one try, but eventually Vilos did manage to bash the door open.  The tomb within was surprisingly nondescript.  It was a very simple stone room, one wall carved with shelves bursting with scrolls and books as one might imagine a wizard would have, and the center a great stone sarcophagus carved with hundreds of tiny runes.  Jack and Vilos wasted little time in hefting the lid of the coffin off its base and throwing it aside.  Together, they and Elie warily peered into the casket.  

Kraakish, the Defiler, was not a pretty sight after resting below the sands of Zagron for untold millennia.  What might have once been fine, brightly colored, royal robes had decayed to rough scraps.  A few wisps of white hair and patches of a long, rotting beard dotted his brown, peeling skull.  Boney fingers gripped a large tome that looked like it would have once been bound in luxurious leather, but it too had succumbed to time and was decaying.  Beneath that book and those crumbling robes was a partially mummified body of yellow flesh and rough bones.  Devoid of its muscle and organs, Kraakish’s corpse looked sunken and altogether frightening- as though there was still some manner of life left in it despite having nothing left to give it that spark.  One wondrous thing did catch their eye.

Around the corpse’s neck was a simple chain.  At the end of the chain was a diamond about the size of a tear drop.  It glittered from a light it seemed to be producing itself, and twinkled brightly in the dim chamber.

“Is that it?” Jack asked.

“I think so,” Elie said softly.

The sell-sword reached into the coffin and tugged at the chain.  With a puff of dust, it broke through Kraakish’s crumbling neck bones and came free in Jack’s hand.  He slowly withdrew his hand from the coffin and held the tiny diamond up for all of them to see.  It gleamed intensely, and they almost had to shield their eyes from its brilliance.  All three leaned in to get a closer look despite its piercing shine.

“Doesn’t look like much,” Vilos decided.

“How do you tell if it’s the real thing?” Jack asked.

“We’re gonna know pretty well if I try and send us back in time and we get stuck between dimensions,” Elie responded not so encouragingly.

“That sounds like a risk, Lady Wizard.”

“Everything is, Mister Sell Sword.”

“Hey,” Jack turned towards Wit, who was perched on the lid of the sarcophagus intently reading the inscriptions on it, “I thought you said there would be a ton of traps and curses and whatnot.”

“I’m trying to figure that out myself,” the little dragon said.  “There’s something funny about these sigils.  They don’t so much look like a warning to keep out like I would expect, but more like glyphs of protection keeping something in.”

“Beg your pardon?” Jack asked.

“My knowledge of this particular dialect is a bit rusty, but if I am not very much mistaken these look like they were put in place to keep something in the coffin, rather than preventing us from taking anything out.”

“Now what good exactly would that do?!” Jack practically shouted.  “He’s not getting back up!  He’s dead!”

“Perhaps not as much as you think.”  A voice came rasping behind them.

Wide-eyed, Jack, Vilos and Elie turned back towards the coffin.  Kraakish had sat up, and from the depths of eyeless sockets, was staring at them.

Vilos, in his own manner, hauled off and punched the decaying skull right square where its nose would have been.  Kraakish’s head flew free from his body and sailed across the chamber.  Just before hitting the wall and shattering apart, it snapped upright and floated in the air.  In the blink of an eye, it hurtled back towards its anchor on the top of his neck and clicked back into place.  Kraakish raised a bony finger and wagged it menacingly at Vilos.

Wit’s little jaw dropped open.  “Not great.”

Kraakish waved with one of his skeletal arms, and the whole crew flew across the room and went head over heels back through the vault door.  They smashed into the far wall of the landing and slumped to the floor.

Jack grunted.  “That explains why there weren’t more booby traps.”

Wit shook himself.  “And why those sigils were meant to keep him in his coffin.”

“I can hit him harder,” Vilos assured everyone.

Elie, for her part, was rummaging as quickly as she could through some of the scrolls in her satchel and weeding through the little bag of components on her hip.  She frantically found what she was looking for just as Kraakish came hovering through the doorway.

His voice was wet and dry at the same time, a hollow, rattling sound that grated on the ears and induced goosebumps with every syllable uttered.  “What insects are these that impede upon my sleep?”

“The kind that will send you to a permanent one!” Vilos hollered.  He rushed the floating corpse.

Kraakish barely raised a single finger, and before the mercenary could reach him, Vilos was sent tumbling towards the far wall again.  This time, when he struck, dozens of skeletal hands reached out of the mortar and grabbed hold of him.  The immense mercenary was clasped tightly to the wall by those clutching claws, no matter how hard his massive girth struggled.

Jack looked on with terror, but charged the undead wizard with as much bravery as he could possibly muster.  Kraakish raised another hand, and a length of phantasmal, purple chains extended from his palm.  They wrapped around the sell-sword like a constricting serpent, and tightened their grasp.  It was excruciating being in their grip, and Jack writhed and bucked to be free of them as burning sensations coursed through him the tighter the magic chains became.  Before Wit could do anything at all, Kraakish opened his jaw, and an opalescent bubble floated out from between his teeth.  It grew larger and larger, and as the little dragon tried to flap away, it enveloped him, hovering the tiny monster harmlessly into the air where he could do little more than float and watch.

Only Elie managed to get in a strike.  She had been chanting under her breath as Vilos, Jack and Wit were all easily cast aside, and just as Kraakish turned her direction, she finished her spell and smashed a live spider in her grip.

“Viscous lattice!” she hollered.

A broad, grey spider’s web leapt from her fingertips and flew towards the zombie wizard.  Before it reached him, he laughed in his boney throat and defiantly held up one hand.  The web paused in midair just before him before reversing directions and entangling Elie instead.  Kraakish snapped his fingers, and a titanic spider was conjured from the ceiling.  It dropped to the floor, picked up the young woman and carried her up the wall, where it hung waiting for its next command.

“Now then,” Kraakish began again.  “By what manner shall you die today?”

“If I could,” Jack grunted between grit teeth as the agony of his burning magic chains only intensified, “none manner would be preferable.  We’ll just go, we know our way out.”

Kraakish threw back his skull and laughed openly, a horrifying sound that was reminiscent of a funeral bell ringing.  “Tiny speck, if releasing you were of my proclivity, you would already be vanished into the night and on your way.  You tried to take my anchor from me, child- for that you will pay with your lives!”

As the zombie wizard roared the word ‘lives,’ he spread his hands and a web of lightning flashed from his fingers, scorching the assembled companions and eliciting howls of pain from them all.  Kraakish only laughed louder as his captives screamed.  

The undead sorcerer clenched his fists and the lightning stopped.  “Now then.  The manner of your deaths.  And the order.  Who wishes to watch who die?”

“Is this what things have come to?” Wit bemoaned.  “Are you fools to be the cause of my demise?”

“Shut up while I try and figure something out!” Jack snarled back.

“Fight me like a man, wizard!” Vilos shouted.  “Use not your magics, but your fists, and let us see who then be the victor is!”

“I really hate it here,” Elie moaned as the gargantuan spider hanging her from the ceiling hissed in her face.

Just when it was certain that all hope was lost- another calamity descended into that chamber and things got even worse.  From the stairway, from the cracks in the ceilings and the gaps in the mortar in the walls, a dusky red smoke flooded the room.  Even Kraakish took pause as the smoke rushed around the room and then gathered in five narrow pillars at the center.  The pillars of crimson smoke wavered and then solidified into five broad men, cloaked in burgundy robes trimmed in gold, with deep hoods pulled over their faces.  The robed man at their lead barely raised one hand and uttered a single word.

“Nullify.”

The hands holding Vilos, the web and spider menacing Elie, the glowing chains ensnaring Jack, even the odd little bubble holding Wit all vanished instantaneously, and the companions tumbled to the floor again.  Kraakish’s empty eye sockets suddenly erupted in purple flame as he roared in rage.

“MAGI!”

“Oh shit,” Elie said beneath her breath.  “They found me.”

The lead magician who had banished the zombie wizard’s magic threw back his hood and spoke.  “Gods above and below.  Kraakish?  Is that you?”

If the fleshless skull of Kraakish’s face could have formed a look of surprise, it would have.  “Diivroi Ka.  How are you still living?”

“I have learned the art of passing my spirit from one vessel to the next, and achieved a manner of immortality that I might pass on the teachings of the Magi properly where I trust no one else to do so.  Did we not execute you some time ago, Kraakish?” the wizard named Ka said.

“Evidently not well enough.  Who are these children you bring with you?”  The zombie wizard motioned at the other robed men.

“They are my apprentices,” Ka snapped back.

“Your standards have fallen,” Kraakish snorted.

One of the apprentice wizards took exception to that.  “Speak no more, foul beast!  Your time upon this world has reached its end!”

The undead sorcerer waved his hand.  The apprentice turned completely inside out, his guts and muscle flipping outward where his flesh should have been.  He then exploded, spraying the room with gore and bone.  In the same motion, one of the other apprentices began screaming shrilly.  The scream was cut short when he vanished into a pile of sand and the tatters of his robe floated the floor.

Jack watched it all happen, bug-eyed.  “I am SO glad that’s not how he greeted us.”

“I don’t hate you as much as I hate them,” Kraakish explained.

“Thank the gods for that,” Elie said.

“Enough of this!” Ka exclaimed.  “Kraakish so long as you return to your coffin, we will have no quarrel with you.  We came for the girl.  Surrender her and her companions and you shall be allowed to continue to exist.”

“And what will you do with them?” the undead wizard asked.  “Burn them at the stake as you did me?”

“She stole several valuable spell components and information from our palace, and she is practicing magic outside our concordance, the penalty for which is death.  The others are aiding and abetting her efforts, so they shall share in her fate,” Ka barked.

“An arbitrary concordance that you enforce at your own pleasure, Magi.  I feel little inclination to help you carry out such a capricious sentence,” Kraakish snapped.

“I don’t know why, but I feel compelled to point out that just a moment ago you were going to kill us,” Jack piped up.

“That would amuse me,” the undead wizard replied.  “I get no pleasure in them killing you.  And besides- you stole from me.”

“She stole from US!” Ka roared.

Kraakish shrugged in as much as he was able with such boney shoulders.  “Semantics.”

Ka’s hands started to glow green.  “You could not best us in life, wizard, and you shall fair no better in undeath!  If you would have it this way, I will obliterate you!”

The zombie sorcerer snarled and magic leapt into his own rotting palms.  “I have had millennia upon to perfect my craft.  This tomb shall be now your resting place, and I shall be once again upon the world!”

“So be it!” Ka shouted.  “Abandah!  Mazak!  Destroy him!”

Together, all three Magi began hurling flashing spells and unleashing divine magics upon the zombie wizard.  Kraakish raised a hand and brushed it all aside, while pointing his free hand and spewing dark power right back at them.  They conjured their own magic shields, deflecting the undead sorcerer’s spells.  Back and forth it went, a blaze of magic and hollered insults.

Amidst this chaotic battle of magic and will, Elie was furiously digging through the contents of her bag.  Jack crawled over to her, desperate to keep his head under all of the spells ricocheting back and forth between the Magi and the undead wizard.

“What are you doing?!” he shouted over the din.

“Getting us the nine hells out of here!” she yelled back.  Elie exclaimed in excitement when she found a particular scroll and a very specific component.  Immediately she started reading from the tattered piece of parchment, muttering under her breath and trying desperately to keep her attention on the glyphs on the page, and not on battle going on.  She broke off only for a moment to yell at Jack, “Grab Vilos!”

Jack reached out and took hold of Vilos’s massive arm, and with his other hand snagged Wit out of the air.  Elie reached up and grabbed the Mortal Anchor hanging around Jack’s neck.  She kept chanting.

Wit took his eyes off the fight when he listened to what she was saying.  His brow horns shot up in surprise and alarm.  “Wait!  No!  That’s not how that spell goes!”

It was too late.  Elie finished the words on the scroll and smashed a tiny hourglass on the ground.

“Time rewoven,” she said at last.

“Not good!” Wit yelped.

The floor disappeared from under them all.  A whirlpool of reality appeared in its place.  The sands of time, events of future history and things long since forgotten spun in a maddening maelstrom beneath the companions and the dueling wizards.  Jack could feel its tides pulling them all down.  He clung tighter to Vilos and Wit, and hoped Elie had a good grip on the Anchor around his neck.  The roar of the whirlpool drowned out the battle between the Magi and Kraakish, and they finally stopped to take notice.

Ka and his apprentices were dragged down first.  Screaming and cursing retribution, they were sucked into some kingdom perhaps five decades into the future and vanished.  Kraakish was clawing to stay connected to the current time and place, but even he was caught up in the current of the spell.  He keened as he was pulled into an empire a thousand years in later times.

“I will have my Anchor back, insects!  There is no where in time you can hide from me!  Wherever you go, I will be waiting!”

The zombie wizard vanished.  Jack could see where he and his companions were being dragged towards- another shining kingdom on the other side of the known world in a time years upon years later than the current day.  He held his breath as the spell drew them down into the whirlpool of time and reality.  Elie smiled faintly as she gripped the Anchor even tighter.

“I really hope this thing works.”

[krogthebattleprince]

Beginnings of the Colossian Age

In Krög’s world, the heroes often discuss in hushed voices the first empire that the demon Raltar destroyed.  This ancient civilization is known namelessly, called only “The Western Empire,” but it is well known for its expansive rule, long lived culture, and immense wealth... all before the demon lord sets it afire, anyway.  We catch a glimpse of this ancient world when Krög and his allies sail across The Sea of Despair to find the city of Colossus, the former empire’s capital, and the secrets it holds.

Colossus was the pinnacle of the fallen civilization’s growth: the absolutely “colossal” series of archipelagos where the richest and most influential of the empire came to reside.  It was also notoriously in existence only towards the end of the culminating civilization, being recognized as the capital for only the last millennia of a ten thousand year growth period.  

So what did that “Golden Age” look like before Raltar came to call?  What was the world like when Colossus was the center of all things and the Empire around it was flourishing?

Forthcoming is a series of short stories and adventures that follow a few erstwhile rogues who existed in this time, and in some way shaped the ultimate fate of Colossus- or helped clean up after it all fell apart.  Meet Jack Nazareth, a sell-sword just trying to make his way in a harsh and unforgiving desert town thousands of miles from the oasis capital.  Meet Rook, King of 100 Battles, the invincible slayer who was cursed by a dark power to take the crowns from six king’s heads.  Meet Ivinden, or Ivy, a mysterious warrior who is given charge over protecting one of the most terrible artifacts of the ancient empire: Winter’s Blade.

I will be starting with Jack’s story, and his exasperating companions: a fellow mercenary, Vilos, a young up and coming magician, Elie, and Wit- a feather dragon who just happens to be cousins with Scale.  Tune in tomorrow for the start of their adventures together as they hurtle through the ancient wonders of their world, fully two thousand years before the conception of Colossus.

[krogthebattleprince]

Owning a dog means coming to terms with having a roommate that occasionally wakes up from a dead sleep and remembers that there is heavy machinery across the street she or he needs to shout at, even when it is night and those things cannot be seen.

[krogthebattleprince]

If this isn’t today’s #mood I don’t know what is.

[krogthebattleprince]

Were the Turtles the Musketeers?

Anyone ever consider the possibility the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are an accidental modern retelling of “The 3 Musketeers”?  There’s Leonardo, who is clearly D’artagnan, the skilled swordsman and leader of the band, Raphael, who smacks of the moody warrior Athos, Donatello whose character rhymes with the thoughtful philosopher Aramis, and Michaelangelo, who is undeniably the boisterous, outgoing Porthos.  These are the things that keep me up at night.  

[krogthebattleprince]

That’s strange... that looks like a fourth banner.  But... there are only Three Known Kingdoms... aren’t there?  It almost looks like the kind of flower that someone once asked the prince for... doesn’t it?

As the windup towards Volume 4 continues, just a brief update this week.  As with Volume 1, as we come to bookend the prince’s days I thought I would put down a short playlist of music that rings true for the stories to come.  For your entertainment, the soundtrack to “The Mythical, Mystical, Magnificent Adventures of Krög: The Battle Prince, Volume 4: Heavy Is The Crown”

“The Battle Prince and the Phantom Trail”

“Diamonds and Rust” as recorded by Blackmore’s Night

“Song of Exile” as recorded by Tribal Thunder

“The King of the Golden Hall” by Howard Shore

“Together” by Paul Leonard Morgan

“Cailleach’s Whisper” by David Arkenstone... this one is of special significance.  I have long considered it the unofficial theme of Krög and Lee, and the song sounds like a conversation between lovers.  Listen to the stringed harp as though it were Lee lilting and dancing, and hear the pipe music as the fury and angst of Krög quelled in her presence.  

“The 13th Son of Röm”

“Through the Fire and the Flames” by Dragonforce

“Warriors of Time” by Black Tide

“God of Thunder” by KISS

“Anvil of Crom” by Basil Poledouris

“I Stand Alone” by Godsmack

“Hail to the King” by Avenged Sevenfold

[krogthebattleprince]

Part three in “Essays On the Southern Reach.”  Above, more art from Jon Hunt: this is the hammer of the Eastern Collective, what would fly on a flag just like the skull, shield and crown of the Reach.  When assassin emissaries come to the Great Hall, they bear the standard above!

This week’s essay is a breakdown of the warrior castes that exist in the Southern Reach.  We’ve heard of the Griffin Riders, we’ve heard of the Barbarian Hordes, and we’ve heard a few whispers of the Warbrands... but who are they really?  How do they work together, and what makes the barbarians of the south the greatest fighting body in the Three Known Kingdoms?  Read on!

Essays of the Southern Reach Concerning the Warrior Castes of the South

Without question, the greatest fame afforded to the Southern Reach rests upon the shoulders of her warriors and the many barbarians who raise sword and axe in defense of her lands.  Though outside perspective, particularly those of the Northern Empire and Eastern Collective, largely regard the barbarian societies of the south as little more than loose tribal bands of savages, there is a surprisingly organized and regimented way to their society.  Herein examines the breakdown of their warrior society in particular, and how these varying castes function together to create the most respected, and truly feared, militaries in the Three Known Kingdoms.

The most basic warrior in the Southern Reach is the barbarian.  It may surprise many to know that servitude as a barbarian is not required in the country, though those who do serve are rewarded on retirement with lands to farm and develop.  Those whose service was valorous enough to warrant further reward often become leaders in their communities, some even attaining warlord rank and going on to represent their towns and constituencies on the Battle King’s Council of Elders.  And while serving in the barbarian hordes may not be a requirement of society in the Southern Reach, all children of teenage persuasion must spend no less than four years in the capital Fortress City at War School, where they learn the way of the sword.  In this way, every man, woman and child of the Southern Reach is a warrior, which makes occupation of the country a rather challenging prospect.  “Mirth and Mayhem” and “Fortune’s Last Resort” are said to be the most requested posts among the barbarian hordes for their reputations of legendary bravery and being nearly undefeated in battle.

Barbarian hordes in battle are not the wild, untamed riots one might expect, but instead a very channeled funnel of battle rage and strength.  Preferred weapons are simple, mostly axes and hammers, though poorer families will strike out with clubs if they cannot afford better.  Regimental leaders carry swords and wear light armor, but most barbarians bring little more to the fight than a weapon in one hand and a stout shield in the other.  Being born left handed brings with it a certain honor in the Southern Reach, as these barbarians are always the first into battle, their shield arm stronger than their axe hand.  They create an impenetrable wall of shields for their brethren to fight behind, and it is a frighteningly difficult thing to break through the barrier.  These barbarians are called “Shield Knights.”

Archers are rare in the Southern Reach, but those of particularly dextrous persuasion and with uncharacteristically good vision may take up the bow.  Barbarian archers are also the primary trench diggers of the army as well, and their preparations have actually turned battles before a single axe shivers a shield.  These lighter warriors dig out ditches on the forward field of battle, fill them with pitch and oil, and light them aflame as the enemy approaches.  Navigating a battlefield of flaming trenches while dodging a rain of arrows makes even getting near the rest of the hordes an awful labor.  

Most famous of all in the Southern Reach, are the Griffin Riders, so named for their chosen mount.  Within the Griffin Riders are three distinct hierarchies, the Messengers, the Scouts, and the Assault Wings.  Becoming a Griffin Rider is a volunteer service, and those wishing to join are highly vetted as they require a patience and fearlessness about them in order to tame a mount.  In strange contrast to this patience, Griffin Riders tend to be the wildest of the wild warriors of the south, a quality known among the other barbarians as ‘air madness.’  It is assumed that so much time among the thinner air in the clouds makes Griffin Riders particularly crazy, their patience reading instead as bizarre disregard, and their fearlessness reading as insanity.

Most secretive and most exclusive among the Griffin Riders are the Messenger Wings.  Small in number and lightly armed and armored, Messengers keep the word of the king and the news of the day fresh to all denizens of the Southern Reach.  Even though it is the smallest of the Three Known Kingdoms by no less than half of its closest neighbor, the agility and speed of the Messenger Wings create a society that is always aware.  While the land based couriers of the Northern Empire, or especially the gigantic, sprawling Eastern Collective, may take several weeks or often many months to bring word from one side of the kingdom to the other, the Messenger Wings of the Griffin Riders can do so in only a few days.  These Riders and their mounts are always the youngest, as the stamina and fortitude required is extraordinary.  In fact, the final test of a Messenger Wing prospect is a two day continuous flight across the stormiest regions of the Reach.  Owing to the nature of their missions and their extreme exclusivity, Messenger Wings tend to be very closed, mysterious societies.  “On Whispered Wings” and “Stormbreath” are two of the most storied Messenger Wings, the later serving the Battle Family directly.

A larger, though decidedly more invisible, force than the Messenger Wings are the Scout Wings of the Griffin Riders.  Often, once the extreme constitution demanded by a Messenger begins to slip, they graduate to the Scouts.  Though they carry very little in terms of personal belongings, Scout Wings often are much more heavily armed and more combat focused.  Serving as frontier patrols and often making up search and survey parties, Scouts Wings are the eyes and ears of the Southern Reach, seeing all and knowing all.  They work in close concourse with Messengers to keep the newest intelligence circulating through the region.  In order to successfully qualify for a Scout position, a Rider and his mount must navigate dragon territory in the badlands, along a very specific, sprawling course, without attracting the attention of any dragons along the way.  Their most respected teams are called “Resolute,” which once saw Battle Prince Gögan serve, and “Slamdrö’s Last Watch,” the later named for the Battle King that founded the Griffin Riders and was first to take to the skies. Rowdiest, wildest and greatest in number are the Assault Wings.  Membership among the Assault Wings of Griffin Riders is contingent merely upon volunteer and training a mount, though training a mount is far easier said than done.  Assault Wings serve as advance, quick moving, shock troops that prevent the Southern Reach from every being caught truly flat-footed.  In the event of an ambush or invasion, Assault Wings are always the first to respond, often much quicker than an enemy force expects, and are more than capable of holding the line while the rest of the Southern Reach’s armies muster.  Their unofficial motto is “first to the battle, first to the bar,” as while they may strike first, they are also the first to be relieved once the barbarian hordes take to the fight.  In recent years, Assault Wings have begun riding two to a griffin, one whose sole responsibility it is to steer in flight, and the other armed with a bow or lance to rake across the battlefield.  Most famous for their exploits of unbelievable bravery are “Autumn’s Revenge” and “The Reaper’s Tempest,” though the Griffin Rider Assault Wings that have produced the most Warbrands are “Fury and Benevolence” and “Mortal Piety.”

Atop the heap are the Warbrands.  Often characterized as blood thirsty murderers who answer only to the Battle King and their own internal leadership, in truth the Warbrands are a darkly misunderstood arm of the barbarian hordes.  Warbrands are never volunteers, they can only be selected, and to be called to their number is the highest honor that can be achieved in the Southern Reach.  To be considered a warrior must have seen battle, served for no less than six years, and performed an act extraordinary valor above and beyond that of their fellows, or an act of extraordinary brutality in the service of the kingdom.  Griffin Riders who slay dragons in packs are never considered by the Warbrands.  A barbarian who stands alone before a dragon and emerges victorious may be.  Warbrands carry great swords into battle, and the strongest of their number may be allowed to wield a war sledge, a two handed hammer with an enormous head bearing a sickle on its back side.

A new warbrand is distinguished from the rest of the hordes through a massive pattern of spiraling tattoos that covers the entire left side of their body.  Asymmetry is a tradition in the Southern Reach, and as the king wears a glove on his right hand, “the hand that holds the sword,” this is known as the King’s Side, and it is kept free of the marks.  On very rare occasion, a warrior is awarded Warbrand status posthumously or honorarily just before they embark on a mission where they are expected to die.  In these cases, the right side of the body is tattooed, the process called “Mortal Marking.”  There are no living Warbrands wearing the Mortal Marks.

Aside from the Battle Family, there are four warriors of uncommon recognition in the Southern Reach.  They are the General, the Warmaster, and the Battle Family’s two Honor Guards.  All four positions are selected personally by the Battle King, and are undisputed.  In the case of a dispute by a warlord or member of the Council of Elders, the lord bringing dispute may challenge the Battle King to a contest of strength or knowledge.  In the three cases of a dispute ever being made, the lord in question was summarily crushed by his king.

Leader Primary of the Barbarian Hordes is the General, and of the Warbrands is the Warmaster.  Typically these are both positions selected from the cadre closest to the king.  It is not uncommon for the Battle King to choose a member of his family to serve as General, and to select a prospective future Honor Guard to become Warmaster.  These two positions exist only in wartime, and are dissolved as soon as a conflict is concluded.  While ultimately they are expected to carry out the will of the king and kingdom, General and Warmaster are largely autonomous and trusted to be the strategic minds that bring wartime to swift conclusion.  This autonomy quite often grates on the will of the Council of Elders, and can cause strife among the leadership of the kingdom at times. Constantly at the side of the Battle Family, entrusted to guard the Battle King, Queen and their children above all other interests, are the Honor Guards.  Theirs is a truly legendary line and to be named Honor Guard is to be a member of the Battle Family and all associated exploits and myths.  There are always two Honor Guards: a senior or “elder” guard and a junior or “apprentice” guard.  The process of selecting a prospective Honor Guard is shrouded in secrecy and mysticism, although it is perhaps not as archaic and arbitrary as it might seem. An Apprentice Honor Guard is selected from a very specific pool of warriors.  There are two sources an apprentice may come from.  Either they are a Warbrand of uncommon youth and strength usually scouted at the age of twenty four and watched carefully for no less than ten years, or they are called up from the Shield Knights for acts that are heroically altruistic and unreasonably brave, also to be observed for a period of no less than ten years.  In this way, a majority of the Honor Guards in history have been left handed, and just as the right is the King’s side, the left is the Protector’s side.  Junior Honor Guards who are selected spend at least twenty five years under the tutelage of a Senior Honor Guard before the Senior can retire, usually after the death of their king.  

Senior Honor Guards, owing to their advanced age and life experience, serve a very special place at the side of the Battle King.  While they are among the most extraordinarily gifted and experienced warriors in the kingdom, they are primarily the most trusted and sage advisor to the king they serve.  More often than any other, a Senior Honor Guard may be the voice of reason to a king when that Battle King will hear no other.  Elder guards serve as apprentice under one king, and then Senior under the next.  In this way, their traditions and wisdom are passed down one to the next, with no break in the lineage of Honor Guards.  Senior Honor Guards very often die in service to their Battle King, though they do occasionally retire if their king steps down or is himself killed.  

[krogthebattleprince]

Part two of my “Essays on the Southern Reach” series.  This chapter details the history behind how the Battle King’s great hall came to be, and the lineage of BKs that were most directly involved with its construction!  Telling the story of some of the earliest Southern Reach tradition, this essay especially delves into the history of one of the most famous kings: Lödrek, the Conqueror.

Essays of the Southern Reach The Settling and Establishment of the Great Hall at Ganithen

While unquestioningly the most iconic and imposing symbol of the Southern Reach’s might, resiliency and warrior dominance, the Battle King’s Great Hall at Ganithen is perhaps a more modern structure than most familiar with Southern Reach history may realize.  It tends to be taken for granted the massive Fortress City has always stood and will always stand, a legend that fills would be invaders with no small amount of dread.  The truth behind the enormous garrison and trade center begins a full century and a half into the establishment of the Southern Reach as a kingdom, and followed one of the darkest chapters in the country’s history.

During the Reach’s initial settlement, its main military presence was stationed in a riverside stronghold called Fort Blaze, so named for its constant watchfires that burned night and day.  Fort Blaze was one half of a symbiotic sister city system with Drenin on the north bank of the Swordsong River.  Between both, survivors of the collapse of the Western Empire found shelter, commerce and protection as they made their way into settling either side of the river, or using it as a stopover before heading even farther east, as many did.  Fort Blaze was the more prominent of the two settlements, as its stone walls were believed to be magic for having never been breeched by the trolls when war broke out.  Largely thanks to the brilliance of Battle King Röm, the incredible fortifications at Fort Blaze, and the intense fighting spirit of the warriors stationed there, a massive troll army found defeat and were prevented from crossing the river and raiding Drenin.

While most are at least passingly familiar with the Great Troll War that was fought in the infancy of the Southern Reach and its ramifications in creating the Battle King line, far fewer realize the simmering conflict that was left in its wake.  After the trolls were forced out of the forests immediately surrounding Fort Blaze, rather than retreat they tried to strike a blow on what they took to be an unguarded port city, New Hope.  New Hope belonged to neither the burgeoning northern or southern kingdoms, and the trolls assumed it would be left undefended after the fierce fighting that took place surrounding Fort Blaze.  One of Battle King Röm’s senior commanders, a shield maiden named Shay who would eventually go on to be the first Battle Queen, anticipated the move and was waiting with a sizable force at New Hope.  She temporarily conscripted every person fleeing the Western Empire arriving at New Hope into her force, promising them all a safe kingdom to settle once the trolls were truly defeated.  The weary, travel worn army along with Shay’s barbarian legion succinctly crushed the trolls and forced them into the seaside caves on the cliffs of the Sea of Despair.  Originally forest dwellers, this was seen as deep insult and injury by the beaten trolls, and they took that rage with them down into the dark.

Truly victorious, Shay returned to Fort Blaze where she and Battle King Röm, the First, were married.  Fort Blaze became the seat of the Battle King lineage for their son, Rözar, the Explorer, and his son, Nömel, the One Armed.  During this period, what was known of the Southern Reach was a densely forested country that extended from the southern bank of the Swordsong Reach all the way to an extensive valley of rocky badlands.  Exploring those forests to the edge of the badlands became the chief preoccupation of Rözar and Nömel during their reigns, the later of whom established a small outpost and shelter called Ganithen right on the edge of the forest and the badlands beyond.  Here is where the seeds of the Great Hall and Fortress City are truly born.

When Nömel died at the end of the Southern Reach’s first century and his father, Lödrek took the crown, the fledgling kingdom was thrown into turmoil once again.  Trolls being extremely long lived and possessed of vengeful, unforgetting and unforgiving spirits, had been seething in anger since their defeat at the hands of Röm.  When an unusually intelligent ogre brokered a coalition between his clans, which had remained hidden in the forests when the trolls were driven underground, and what remained of the troll warrior tribes, the Southern Reach found itself once again caught in bloody conflict.  The ogre warlord, in a stunning victory, forced the expulsion of the barbarians from Fort Blaze and burned the castle to the ground.  Lödrek immediately made for Ganithen in the far south, but his warriors found themselves engaged by the trolls at every turn.  Beaten, thinning in numbers, and hopelessly lost in the trees, the Southern Reach very nearly met its end there.

Once again ambushed by beasts that knew the forests infinitely better than the barbarians had come to learn, Lödrek and his last remaining warriors stood their ground and fought back.  The battle came to be known as The Bloody Baptism, wherein those who survived are largely accepted to be the first Warbrands for impossibly heroic acts of valor and bloodshed.  It was there Lödrek earned his monicker The Conqueror, and just how it was he and his warriors survived, much less won, that battle is still a heatedly debated corner of Southern Reach history.  Never the less, Lödrek and the Warbrands lead the survivors of Fort Blaze to one of the few remaining Southern Reach settlements, Ganithen, where they hunkered down for what was expected to be a long and brutal winter.

Lödrek refused to use the cold months to recuperate.  Working shoulder to shoulder with his Warbrands, the Conqueror cleared a great deal of the forested hills surrounding Ganithen and more than tripled its fortifications.  During the thaw of spring in preparation for a redoubled effort on the part of the ogre warlord and the trolls, they cleared even farther and constructed enormous siege machines behind the walls of Ganithen.  When the tribes and clans of trolls and ogres returned, they were unprepared for the battering Lödrek had prepared for them.  Without the forests to hide in as before, they were caught out in the newly open fields around Ganithen where they were pummeled by the Conqueror’s siege machines.  What few squadrons of trolls managed to get past the flaming fields were set upon by the bloodthirsty and extraordinarily vengeful Warbrands.  Lödrek himself took the head of the ogre warlord and hung it from his fortress’s gates.  Scattered and on the run, the remaining troll tribes and ogre clans hastily retreated into the relative safety of the trees. The Conqueror was far from finished.  He and his Warbrands gave chase.  Over the following summer, they not only hunted down the ogres until almost their total extinction, they made it a priority to deforest the Southern Reach as best they could.  Lödrek wanted his foes to have nowhere to hide and ambush him and his people ever again.  They hacked down every mighty arbor and scorched their roots out in a furious campaign to secure some manner of safety for the Reach ever after.  The once proud sylvan desert that covered the plains and hills south of the Swordsong River to the badlands was reduced to a singular strip only about sixty miles wide.

No one is totally sure why Lödrek halted his campaign to deforest all of the Reach, but common myth and legend holds the forests eventually fought back and prevented him from going any further.  Either way one believes, he and the Warbrands did eventually retreat into Ganithen.  The Conqueror lived out the rest of his days in constant pain from battle wounds that never truly healed, but he managed to establish two more of the largest Southern Reach communities, Dustridge in the east and Shale Plains in the west, both just over the border of the rocky badlands.  Occasionally Lödrek ventured back north to check the ogres, who in their infinite stupidity would occasionally still harass New Hope or some of the smaller settlements, but the trolls never resurfaced.  Whether their spirt had been broken or they were quietly biding their time, for the ensuing centuries the trolls never returned from the caves to whence they were banished.

Lödrek finally succumbed to infection and exhaustion after ruling on the throne of the Southern Reach for fifty two years.  After his passing came an era between the Three Known Kingdoms known as the 2nd Great Expansion.  During this period, the kingdoms around the southern reach pushed their boundaries, and the son of Lödrek resolved to establish the Reach as a proper, stable kingdom.  While the bordering countries spread their wings and their lands, Drökun, fifth Battle King and first born son of The Conqueror, stabilized his kingdom and ushered in an era of peace and civility.  

Drökun was a much wiser and more sedate Battle King than his warlord father, and he saw the need not only for a true capitol as a rallying point for his peoples, but also a seat of governance.  Drökun insisted the last tree behind Ganithen be left standing, and he carved his throne into it and built the Great Hall around it.  He commissioned similar halls in Shale Plains and Dustridge, earning him the name The Hall Raiser.  A lover and venerator of history, Drökun also called upon the few artists of his kingdom to carve the great doors of his hall with the stories of the wars they had won, that they might never forget the ferocity of their enemy nor repeat the mistakes of their fathers.  

After rearming the city’s batteries and building even greater fortifications along the walls, The Hall Raiser turned his inventive, architectural mind towards creating creature comforts for those who shared his Fortress City with him.  Luxury dwellings for his most trusted warlords were erected.  He designed the intricate steam systems that would be built under the Battle Queen’s House of Waiting, creating a bath house that was without rival in terms of warm, cozy, humid comfort, an atmosphere found nowhere else in the Southern Reach.  Drökun also designed the technologically magnificent door system outside his hall that required a team of oxen manipulate a series of massive iron gears to open the front portal.  At one point, he even designed a complicated series of weights and lifts that he had intended to use in an expansion of the Great Hall by putting a tower with an elevator system at its back.  Ultimately this would not be his legacy, though those designs would be further expanded upon by his son, Slamdrö, who had the Aviary at Brokus built.

With an assurance of protection thanks to the massive fortifications that had been erected by Drökun, Ganithen the Fortress City expanded into a booming municipality where once it had stood as a military camp.  While the Warbrands continued to call it home, most of the other clans and tribes of barbarians pushed further south over the years.  The Great Hall its centerpiece, the Fortress City became a symbol of the extraordinary might of the Southern Reach and on fields explored by two battle kings, defended by another, and settled by still another.  And like the clans that would wander further south, certainly some of the Battle Kings that came next would follow, but the Great Hall saw more of the warrior lords than any other place in the Southern Reach.

[krogthebattleprince]

For the return of Krög and in the ramp up for Volume 4, I wanted to introduce everyone to some of the “background” essays I have penned over the years to help keep the culture and history of the Southern Reach straight in my own mind.  While these do not directly impact the story itself, they do help (in my mind) lend a degree of realism to a fantasy fairytale world.  Called “Essays on the Southern Reach,” I will slowly begin releasing these over the next few weeks.  They will ramp up to a new mini series called “The Four Winds Pursuit” that will function as a lead in to the next Krög release!

The first of these essays regards the Battle King lineage Krög comes from.  This is one of the oldest culture essays I wrote, so please excuse the fact that it is not, shall we say, grammatically or linguistically sound.  It has not been edited, I just thought I would share it.  While the kings I call “The Big Four” are mentioned with a degree of repetition (Röm, the First, Lödrek, the Conqueror, Ghömak, the Dragon Slayer, and Mögren, the Tyrant), this essay expands on the entire line of Battle Kings descending from Röm.

Two last notes before the essay itself: one, this is the longest of the essays, so while I do appreciate you reading I also realize how busy we all are... come back to this when you have a few minutes.  Second, I cut this essay significantly short to refrain from giving away critical plot elements in Krög’s story.  That said, it will end rather abruptly, so please excuse the pacing... and as I said earlier... all the spelling and language issues.  Enjoy!

Governance and Leadership within the Southern Reach: An essay on the lineage of Battle Kings

Understanding the reign of the barbarian lords of the Southern Reach, the most primitive and underdeveloped of the Three Known Kingdoms along the Swordsong River, requires an understanding of how their line established itself and came to power.  Despite the warmongering, hyperbolic nature of the title held by the sovereign, sole executor for the badlands kingdom, their lineage has largely broken the traditions of warlords taking their lands by force.  With few exceptions, most of the Battle Kings to lead over the Southern Reach, while certainly rough hewn and mostly uncivilized given the expansive cultures of their neighboring countries, accomplished their many legacies through measured, tempered management.  Even those individuals who reigned as traditional warlords, through intimidation, brutality and military influence, were still regarded as preferable leaders compared to the dictatorial councils of other kingdoms.  The culture of the land being focused less on wealth and more on exploration and, so called, adventure, seems to be the primary contributor to this break, but it may simply be the Southern Reach and her Battle Kings were simply a pointed exception to almost all the rules of monarchies during its, nearly, five hundred year existence.

To fully understand the rise of the Battle King line and the fourteen rulers to hold the title, one must first examine the origins of the Three Known Kingdoms on the Swordsong River.  The conflict known in the Western Empire as the Raltarian War (alternatively in some places The First Coming of Raltar and The First Raltarian Cycle) saw its early days in 1033 IA (Imperial Age) when a zealot to demon demigod hijacked a magic forge and created the legendary Raltarian Sword.  After more than two decades of growing his influence, the zealot declared war on the city of Colossus and in 1068 IA, following a twelve year siege the capital city fell and the Great Flight Across the Boundless occurred.  Post exodus, the timeline was rewritten as AC, After Colossus, and during the first year of this age, a great deal of refugees wandered desperately across the Boundless Sea in search of a new country to inhabit.  The first of the fleeing pioneers reached the Cape of New Hope early on in 1AC, and it did not take long before more of the refugees pressed further upstream.  Please note, there is some overlap between the first recorded years of the AC age, and the final recorded years of the IA age, as while the body majority of citizens from the Western Empire fled its shores, a good deal stayed behind to try to salvage their kingdom, and chronicled those efforts unto their last days.

Officially, the Southern Reach was first settled midway through year 1 AC with the establishment of the war camp, Fort Blaze, where it was overseen by a soldier named Röm.  While records indicate Röm may have been a low level officer, he was certainly not a strategic mastermind, but was described in many accounts of his fellows as being a resolute, calm, if often stern man who was looked to for strength.  It is surprising Röm managed to carry off such an even demeanor given his wife and three daughters were murdered by pirates preying on ships escaping Colossus before his arrival in the Southern Reach- such tragedy would be enough to break the spirits of most men.  Many believe the very spirt of the Southern Reach came from his persistence to carry on in the face of sorrow and adversity in those early days.

Röm was recognized as the first Battle King when Fort Blaze and the small surrounding villages it protected came under assault by troll army from nearby forested areas.  By this point, Röm had developed a personal council consisting of Brok, an aged, powerful former Steelblazer whose wisdom was only matched by his combat prowess, and Drake, a bunkmate from basic training who never left Röm’s side.  The two provided the Battle King not only with support and advice, but protection as well, and it is largely accepted this is where the tradition of the Senior and Apprentice Honor Guards was born.  After several crushing defeats which nearly spelled the complete annihilation of the peoples settling south of the Swordsong River, Röm lead a striking comeback campaign and conquered the trolls, cementing his legacy permanently.

Eventually, Röm would remarry a senior commander in his army and the first Battle Queen, Shay, gave birth to their son Rözar who ascended to the throne following his father’s death in 42 AC.  Exhausted by a life raised in the shadows of a bloody war, Rözar sought to expand his father’s kingdom, and his own influence, by engaging in exploration and encouraging frontiersman style settlements.  Sometimes called the Homeless Battle King, Rözar, whose actual epitaph read “The Explorer,” spent almost his entire reign on the trails and is credited for pushing the Southern Reach out of the forests on the south bank of the Swordsong River, and into the true badlands north of the Dragon’s Spine’s foothills.  The city of Brokus was built under his watch as an outpost to service the better established trade cities on the river, and the agricultural villages which had started to sprawl way from the woodlands.  Rather than live out his days in a throne room, Rözar amicably surrendered his throne to his son before setting out into the mountains one morning never to be seen again.

Nömel was a fearless risk taker completely overtaken with his father’s adventuring spirit but with a powerful love of warfare as well.  His nickname, the One Armed, came from a teenage run in with a Wild Dragon wherein the creature permanently maimed the, then, Battle Prince, but still fell to his sword all the same.  Nömel would go on to learn how to wield a gigantic war hammer in his left hand, and many accept the tradition of Honor Guards carrying similar sledges began with him.  While a stout and hearty man of some considerable strength, despite having only one arm, Nömel was a lax and disinterested leader, more focused on increasing his own holdings of trophies and glory than developing a kingdom.  At the time of his death in 99AC during a hunting accident, the Southern Reach had largely stagnated.

So came the rise of Lödrek, the Conqueror, the Southern Reach’s first proper warlord and military monarch.  In combat, Lödrek was without equal, though he was also resentful of his father’s unfocused reign and determined to use his prowess in battle to return some semblance of respect to the kingdom.  He got his chance early on when an insurrection lead by an ogre chieftain burned down Fort Blaze and raided a number of the Southern Reach’s northernmost outposts.  Refusing to be vanquished, Lödrek reestablished the barbarian hordes and a personal squadron he called the Warbrands and not only crushed the ogres, but lead a furious, bloody campaign against the rest of the giant kin and fell beasts living within the boundaries of his kingdom.  Lödrek flattened much of the forest along the southern bank of the Swordsong River in his conquest, chasing the majority of the trolls into hiding and permanently establishing his country as a military force not to be played at.  Until his death in 151 AC to infection of battle wounds, the Conqueror never halted his expansion and taming of the lands around him.

Drökun was a far more sedate and cerebral ruler than his father, and oversaw a long period of peace and prosperity in the Southern Reach, though many attribute this to the scorched earth tactics employed by Lödrek previously.  Far less interested in travel and exploration than his forefathers, Drökun saw the need to build protective holdings to keep the more vulnerable municipalities safe from further attack.  He earned his title as The Hall Raiser when he centralized the Warbrands in a giant fortress city, Ganithen, and created the Battle King’s palace and throne from one of the last standing trees after Lödrek’s reign.  After building the massive battlement to replace Fort Blaze and have a permanent, defendable outpost which served as gateway to the rest of the kingdom, Drökun finished out a quiet rule which he eventually handed over to his son in 180AC.

Following his father’s retirement, Slamdrö very reluctantly took over as Battle King of the Southern Reach without much fanfare or heralding.  Even more than his ancestor Nömel, Slamdrö has very little desire to oversee the fledgling kingdom, and did little to expand its borders in his time.  Indeed, the major contribution of the 6th Battle King was less his diplomacy or military prowess, but with his establishment of the legendary scouting corp, the Griffin Riders.  Preferring the company of beasts over men, Slamdrö was rumored to have stumbled out of a bar one night, take a look at a flock of griffins passing over the moon and proclaiming he would not only ride one, he would make them his family.  After domesticating the first clutch, Slamdrö had the tower aviary at Brokus raised where he spent the rest of his time as Battle King training the birds.  Easily the most removed of his lineage, his legacy is no less diminished as the Griffin Riders continue to the be lords of the skies wherever they fly.

The next in the line is a matter of some debate and there is a growing community which believes Slamdrö was, in fact, the final Battle King directly descendent of Röm.  This follows for a number of reasons.  Firstly, Slamdrö was a recluse who never took a wife or maintained very many friends, and there was no proof he ever sired an heir.  Secondly, the following Battle King who took the throne following his death in 208 AC, Töban, was even more infrequently seen.  Nicknamed the Bone Crusher and presumably possessed of truly legendary, impossible strength, Töban was storied for his unverifiable perfection.  By all written accounts of the lords and elders who supposedly served with him he was ridiculously mighty and boisterous, a true barbarian’s barbarian, but almost no accounts from his municipality confirm his existence.  There is even a total lack of record supporting the existence of his Honor Guard team.  The supposition goes after Slamdrö passed on without leaving a son behind, the regional governors and warlords fell into disarray trying to elect a suitable replacement, and created a mythological, perfect Battle King to keep the municipalities in line.  Whether he existed or not, the Southern Reach persisted and Töban’s “son” or successor was a far more visible leader.

In 252 AC, Förak the Blacksmith came into power.  Believing the Battle King line had become to removed from the people they both lorded over and protected, likely by the example of the reclusive Slamdrö and absent Töban, Förak sought to reestablish the position as a leader of people and frontiersman.  A talented craftsman, the 8th Battle King visited more of the outlying cities than any other of those who came before him and worked side by side with his citizens every single day.  He sweat and hammered with them, tended fields and built weapons to gain a greater degree of understanding and appreciation for the subjects living in the badlands away from the most direct protection of the Fortress City.  While Förak contributed little in the way of advancing the kingdom, he was instrumental in restoring the people’s faith in their warrior monarch who was as much their defender as he was their ruler.  Förak was one of the most mourned Battle Kings on his death in 283AC, legendarily having a wake which stretched for miles.

The lineage returned to form with Förak’s son, Makö, nicknamed The Mighty.  With a far bolder vision and ambitions than his father, Makö sought to once again expand the borders of the Southern Reach, wildly envious of the expansive Northern Empire and Eastern Collective, and madly inspired by the tales of Nömel and Lödrek.  The Mighty managed to fairly successfully marry the legacies of his many inspirations and pushed the edges of his kingdom farther southward where he established the outpost of Strömlan to keep back the hunting packs of Wild Dragons which lived in the caves of the mountains at their deepest border.  Makö was known to have hunted and killed dragons, trolls, ogres and the newly discovered cavelings and cliffbeasts in single combat just to prove his own strength and indomitable spirit.  Ultimately he failed to improve the Southern Reach’s standing among the Three Known Kingdoms very much, but did a great deal to reinvigorate the legacy of the Battle Kings.

Makö passed in 320 AC and the throne went to his son Ghömak who began one of the most legendary campaigns accredited to the Battle King line- the Grand Dragon Purge.  Believing the Battle Kings were more symbolic as myth forgers than they were effective as world leaders, Ghömak set his sights on passing into truly storied realms by cutting the most powerful, most revered dragons from the very skies.  By sheer volume and numbers, Ghömak the Dragon Slayer successfully tracked and killed more dragons than any of his predecessors or any of his successors had or would.  With an insane twinkle for want of glory in his eyes and a broad set of shoulders, Ghömak threw hundreds, if not thousands, of his barbarians into the hunt to slay the Grands.  It actually served to substantially weaken the Southern Reach’s footing in the world by not only depleting its military, but also making it look like a country totally obsessed with bloodshed for the sake of bloodshed.  The Dragon Slayer met his end facing down an extremely vengeful Grand named Yinlong who rallied the remaining of his kind to nearly scorch the Southern Reach right off the countryside.

In 344, Mögren took the crown and had to quickly conclude the war against the Grand Dragons victoriously or risk the entire country vanishing and collapsing.  By 352 AC, Mögren and his forces had cut the Grand Dragons to only a handful, or chased them completely out of the country, and in late 353 AC the last Grand burned itself alive with its own fire breath on the knoll behind the Fortress City, its ashes charring the hillside permanently and giving rise to the Scorched Hill.  Realizing his country was terribly weakened by the campaign, Mögren turned to an iron fisted rule to stabilize the region and drag the kingdom back from the edge of oblivion.  His consolidation of power and massive expansion of the barbarian military to the point of making five years service mandatory for not just all men, but all citizens in general, earned him the nickname The Tyrant.  Mögren damaged diplomatic relationships with his neighbors, especially the Eastern Collective through war hawking, but the blusterous display of power served to make the other two kingdoms extremely apprehensive about attempting to forcibly annex the Southern Reach.  Through brute force, Mögren turned the badlands country into a force to be reckoned with and the permanent military might of the region.

The second half of the Tyrant’s reign is subject to much debate and is shrouded in ferocious mysticism.  For one, Mögren lived an unnaturally long time and refused to surrender his throne until well into nineties after a nearly seventy years under the crown.  Popular legend goes he sold his soul for the influence and power to rebuild his kingdom, even going so far as to promise the soul of his firstborn son as well.  Additionally, the Tyrant not only was long lived, but ageless of body and died just as strong and broad as he was in his prime.  During his final years, he descended towards a place of madness, and was constantly spouting off about coming shadows to the land and how the young would always being paying for the sins of the old.  It is largely speculative Mögren might have been a kind hearted, caring ruler had he come into the throne under different circumstances, but hardship and determination drove him to a place of tyranny in order to ensure the survival of his country.  He made the hard decisions and took the staunch action needed for the Southern Reach to persevere and was largely damned for it.

Mögren only gave up the throne two years prior to his death in 413AC to his son Öx, an extremely strong and skilled combatant.  More than anything Öx was known for how close he was to his commanders and soldiers, and he was a greater, more talented swordsman than any of them.  In fact, the soft spoken, steady man surrounded himself with his Warbrands to the point of it being suspect- Öx seemed to be fearful constantly.  While even tempered and gentle, despite his immense size and strength, the Ironclad, as he came to be known for routinely sleeping in his armor, was always tinged with uneasiness as though afraid of something he never spoke on.  This only fueled the rumors his father had promised his soul to some unspoken power, and Öx entertained a relatively short rule before vanishing east during an extremely tumultuous period wherein his son had disappeared on a mission west.

With the familial line divided and one Battle King having wandered one direction and his eldest son missing in completely the opposite, the council of elders and warlords seized on the opportunity to attempt to reform the government of the Southern Reach more in the style of their rival, the Eastern Collective.  Desiring to reorganize the country as a loose confederacy of semi independent states, their efforts were halted when the Battle Prince Bröghue not only returned, but was stunningly supported by his younger brother Gögan to take the crown.  Öx’s apprentice Honor Guard, Xylus the Warbrand, also gave his resounding support to Bröghue which rallied the barbarian armies behind him.  Faced with a turning tide of public opinion to reinstate the throne, the council eventually relented and the crown passed to Bröghue in 437AC.  

Known to his subjects as The Wise, and his closest friends and family as Big Brö, the twelfth of the Battle Kings is largely revered as the second greatest of the lineage behind only Röm and ahead of more proven warriors like Lödrek or Makö.  A wanderer and adventurer of some repute as a Battle Prince, Bröghue immediately settled when taking the throne and went forward with immediately repairing diplomatic relationships with the surrounding countries.  He quickly established new and stronger trade and protection treaties with the Northern Empires and promised his son in marriage to the Merchant Lord’s daughter as collateral to the ends of an even tighter tie to their northern neighbor.  And though alliances with the Eastern Collective continued to suffer, more perhaps due to political upheaval within the eastern states themselves, Bröghue did manage to stave off outright war with them for the majority of his rule.  He was beloved by both his people, with whom he maintained close solidarity to, his armies, who saw him as an incredibly strong and potent warrior and for the most part his council who were glad to have their voices heard to a greater degree than under Mögren.

[krogthebattleprince]

Wreck of the “Twilight Raider”... The Conclusion

-the last act-

By Declaration of His Majesty, Battle King Bröghue, 12th Son of Röm

Wartime Decree

Initial Marching Orders

Warriors of the Southern Reach: As of this, the fourth new moon of 463 AC, I declare our nation to be at war with the neighboring kingdom, Everfrost, western most country of the Eastern Collective.  What follows is our initial strategy and organization as we prepare to receive hostile forces.  Muster immediately and await further marching orders.

Personnel Specific Orders

Captain 1st Class Gögan is recalled from Griffin Rider scout wing 67.  He will henceforth be addressed as General Gögan, now in command of the barbarian hordes.

Unit Specific Movements:

The following units shall adhere to Order 1. Griffin Rider messenger wing 19, “Stormbreath,” under command of Captain 3rd Class Raïlon, with Captain 1st Class Iolar serving Griffin Rider scout wing 67, “Resolute,” under command of Lt. Drägg Griffin Rider assault wing 6, “Fury and Benevolence,” under command of Captain 3rd Class Shraka Griffin Rider assault wing 22, “Mortal Piety,” under command of Captain 2nd Class Voläan

The following units shall adhere to Order 2. Griffin Rider messenger wing 27, “On Whispered Wings,” under command of Lt. Mnemon Griffin Rider scout wing 32, “Slamdrö’s Last Watch,” under command of Captain 2nd Class Floralil Griffin Rider assault wing 66, “The Reaper’s Tempest,” under command of Captain 2nd Class Slade Griffin Rider assault wing 83, “Autumn’s Revenge,” under command of Captain 3rd Class Pfinder

The following units shall adhere to Order 3. Griffin Rider assault wing 85, “Wyrm Wind,” under joint command of Lt. Wrickter and Lt. Krucier

Division Movements

The following brigades shall adhere to Order 4.

Brigade 3, “The Iron Legion,” under command of General Gögan Brigade 7, “Of Lödrek’s Breath,” under command of General Gögan Brigade 9, “Mirth and Mayhem,” under command of General Gögan Brigade 14, “Fortune’s Last Resort,” under command of General Gögan

General Commands

All Warbrands are to return to the Fortress City to await further orders from His Lord, the Battle King All remaining Griffin Rider assault wings are to return to Brokus to support the eastern frontier, or until such time as Captain 1st Class Iolar resumes battle command All remaining Griffin Rider scout wings are to advance north to the Swordsong River and maintain control of the Swordsong Valley All remaining Griffin Rider messenger wings are to return to the nearest town, no more than one day’s flight, and give aerial support to stationed barbarians All barbarian horde companies, battalions, brigades, and divisions not specifically named are to fortify and defend their garrisons until such time as they are called to move by General Gögan

Orders

Order 1: Beginning on the southern banks of the Swordsong river and moving south along the western foothills of the Dragon’s Spine Mountains, search, locate and return Battle Prince Krög to the Great Hall Order 2: Beginning from the northern foothills of Strömlan and moving north along the western foothills of the Dragon’s Spine Mountains, search, locate and return Battle Prince Krög to the Great Hall Order 3: Return to the bogs south of the Swordsong river to retrieve the remaining survivors of the Battle Prince’s company and return them to the Great Hall Order 4: Advance east over the Dragon’s Spine Mountains to Kybber’s Pass and begin fortifying the cliff’s gap- prepare to receive enemy invasion force

All inquiries, concerns or objections to the above orders shall be directed to horde commanders who shall pass them along to the Battle King.  The Battle King shall take all matters into consideration before disregarding them completely.  End wartime decree.

His Lord, The Battle King

Bröghue scribbled frantically to finish the decree and put the final touches on his first orders commanding his country into a period of war.  The Southern Reach had not taken up armed conflict since the purging of the Grand Dragons began at the hands of his Great-Grandfather Ghömak, the Dragon Slayer, and his Grandfather, Mögren, the Tyrant.  Even still, the last time his kingdom had open hostilities against another nation dated back to Makö, the Mighty, more than two hundred years prior.  It was a perilous slope, one full of a vague history of hushed names and forgotten dates.  They were all a blur in the Battle King’s mind, and of no importance.  The details were meaningless.  The history and the names were meaningless.  There was only one thing on his mind. “One thousand copies.”  The king handed his decree to his court crier to take to an army of scribes standing by to replicate his orders.  “Any barbarian carrying a rank should be given these commands.  All available Griffin Riders in the Fortress City are now dispatched to carry my decree to the corners of my kingdom.” “Aye, Battle King.”  The crier was markedly grave as he accepted the papers and made his way out of the Great Hall. In his rush to leave the warrior lord, the crier nearly ran face-first into a hulking shadow clad in steel standing in the darkness by the door.  From behind his death’s head mask, the sharp eyes of Xylus, senior Honor Guard, glowered at the small messenger.  An iron-fisted gauntlet reached out, and a rumbling voice demanded from behind a ringing metal helm. “I will take that.” The crier’s voice quaked.  “I… I have orders… from the king.” “And they shall be seen to.  Give me that decree.” Still, the crier blanched.  “If… if the king’s commands are not carried out-” “Then I shall bear the blame.”  Xylus’s voice rose slightly and his eyes flared.  “Now, give it to me.” His hand quavering, the crier held out the lengthy scroll to the tremendous Honor Guard.  Xylus’s hand closed gently but resolutely around the paper and he nodded. “You are dismissed, crier,” the venerable knight commanded. Without saying another word, the messenger bolted through the mighty doors of the Great Hall, and the guards beyond closed the portal behind him.  They shut with a resounding boom, and it left the Battle King alone with his most aged and trusted guardian.  Of course, the warrior lord barely noticed Xylus was there.  He had busied himself with rummaging through a number of old relics and aging weapons that were hung around the walls of the Great Hall.  Over the soft din of clattering iron and scrambling footsteps, Xylus read through the decree under a furrowed, anxious brow.  When he reached its conclusion, the shield knight took in a deep breath and stepped forward to address his king. “My lord, you cannot send this.” “Telling me how to run my kingdom, Xylus?”  The Battle King did not look up from whatever it was he had set his mind upon. “My king, apart from declaring open war, you reveal that the Battle Prince is missing.  Thus far, perhaps a handful of people even know this fact outside of the Hall.  If the rest of the country were to learn its heir were missing, the Council would turn on you and there would be chaos.” “Where is Razortongue?” the Battle King asked absentmindedly. “Öx’s second sword?” “Yes.  I know my father passed it on to you before he vanished east.  Where did you put it?” “For what reason do you require your father’s second sword?” “You are questioning my command far too much, Honor Guard.”  The Battle King at last turned angrily towards his shield knight.  “I could have you locked in the brig for insubordination.” “Just as you threatened to demote Captain Iolar?” the Honor Guard replied coldly. “I don’t have time for this.”  Bröghue moved to sweep past Xylus.  “I need to find Razortongue.” Without thinking, the Honor Guard thrust out an arm like an oak branch wrapped in iron, and shoved the Battle King backwards into a nearby chair.  Even in their advanced age, there were few barbarians larger and stronger than the Battle King and his Honor Guard, and the edge often went to Bröghue.  The twin titans glared at each other for an uncomfortably long moment before the warrior lord finally relented and motioned for his shield knight to sit down as well. “You have my attention.”  The Battle King sighed. Xylus settled himself opposite his lord and removed his helm, revealing the spiraling tattoos that twisted up the side of his face, and a mane of silver hair that hung like a heavenly shroud to his immense shoulders. “My king,” he motioned at the decree, “why?” Bröghue grit his teeth, and seethed quietly.  “My son is missing.” “But war, my lord?” “I am assured you have already read Captain Iolar’s last report.  Even now the Eastern Collective masses its forces on our borders at Kybber’s Pass.  The sovereign has made good on his threat-” “At least three seasons earlier than he possibly could have!  Even if something went amiss on the quest for Winter’s Blade-” “IF?!”  The warrior lord roared.  “What IF?!” “My lord!” Xylus shouted back, “I am not finished, and you will receive my council, even if it is my last act as your guardian!”  He grabbed a map lying nearby, and slammed it down in front of the Battle King.  “Blackwall Ridge where the High Emperor of the Eastern Collective sits is five month’s sail against the Swordsong River from the Sovereign’s kingdom in Everfrost!  Your son only left on his mission four months ago.  How could the Sovereign possibly have already reached his Emperor, convinced him to take up arms against The Reach and return with a full invasion force?!  Zaren is not fool enough to move against the us without his master’s permission.  For him to assemble the army that Captain Iolar has suggested threatens our border would be an undertaking of no less than a year in the making!” “What exactly is your point, Xylus?!”  The king stood and tossed the map aside. “These are NOT Zaren’s actions!  You don’t know what enemy you move against!”  The shield knight pointed a steel-clad finger at his lord.  “This,” he held up the war decree, “is a rash, foolish action, and you are wiser and steadier than it!” “MY SON IS MISSING, DAMMIT!” Bröghue roared.  “Do you really think now is the time for measured action?  Do you think it matters even the slightest?!” “It does when you weigh the fate of the entire Southern Reach against the fate of its heir!” Xylus shouted in reply, before sighing heavily and hedging his rage.  “My lord, we will find your son.  We will.  And I will help you every step of the way.  But this,” he slid the decree towards the king, “this is not the way.” Bröghue drove his fist against the table between them, which splintered beneath his strength.  “Do you think I would stop at anything to find my son, Xylus?!  If I must level the Dragon’s Spine Mountains myself, I will!  If I must cut down every rival kingdom on this continent to do so, I will do it with my own blade!” “You don’t know who your enemy is!  I have NEVER known you to take a battlefield without knowing your enemy better than he knows himself!  That is your principle!  It is what has made you such a ferocious leader!” “I know one thing.”  The Battle King’s voice lowered to sinister timbre.  “My son is out there.  He is lost on the border between kingdoms, and there is a hostile army headed his direction.  My army will reach him first.  My army will repel whoever it is dares impugn the resolve of this kingdom.  I will find my son, and I will STAMPEDE the kingdom, sovereign, or whoever it is that thought they could get the better of me and my family.” Xylus shook his head.  “This has echoes of eternity in it, my lord.  Things are moving swifter than we are prepared to receive.  I realize you do not share my considerations in this matter, but we may be at the precipice of the last moment of clear thought we have for some time.  I implore you, old friend- use this moment.  Do not act until we have had time to consider the fallout of the actions you propose.  Please.” “Xylus,” the Battle King rumbled, “it’s my son.  The last time I saw him was four months ago, and two months ago I learned he had gone missing.  I have been as patient as I aim to be considering the circumstances.  I will wait no longer to put the full might of my kingdom into his recovery.  Do you understand me?  I will bring him home.” “And I will help you, old friend, but for the last time I beg you to reconsider this decree.  As my king and as a man I dare call brother, please do not so rashly send our country into war against an enemy you do not truly know.  Defend our borders, of course.  Search restlessly for your son, without question.  But stay the war.  Not just yet, my lord.” Bröghue settled heavily in the chair and held his head in his hands.  “War is coming no matter when we choose to act.  You know it.  I know it.  We should have known it when that Mordenall character made a play for the scepter of the Northern Empire.  But we both knew it the moment Zaren came to our door and mentioned Winter’s Blade in the same breath as my son.  It has been coming since that day almost thirty years ago.” “We did all we could, my lord,” Xylus said quietly. “Perhaps we should have done more.”  The Battle King spoke with a distant voice and misty eyes. “Will you tell him if you find him?” “When,” the warrior lord corrected.  “When I find him… I shall consider it.” “He is old enough to know the truth, old friend.” “I will not allow him to pay for my failures.” Hesitantly, the shield knight asked, “Was there ever any chance of truly avoiding it?” The king’s voice turned faraway.  “Again and again you and I have argued that, brother.  Now, it seems, the answer has come rushing like an avalanche down out of the mountains.” “And if a darker purpose guides those stampeding snows…”  Xylus’s words drifted. “Then you believe now there is something more sinister at work?” “Perhaps I am beginning to.” The Battle King nodded.  “Bring me Razortongue.” Xylus paused, but finally strode over to an immense shield hanging on the wall of the Great Hall.  He brushed his fingers over cherished words riveted into the steel.  “The Ironclad” they read, a name given to the eleventh Son of Röm, Battle King Öx, a gentle, peaceful man who lived and slept night and day in his armor, and was unquestionably the greatest swordfighter the Southern Reach had ever known.  Xylus lifted the shield off its anchoring on the wall, revealing a glittering sword underneath.  It was broad bladed, shimmering silver, and just as keen edged as the day it was forged.  The ancient warrior almost lovingly removed it from where it had been hidden. “When words failed, The Tongue spoke,” Xylus mused as he held the weapon.  He smiled faintly as he turned towards Bröghue.  “This was your father’s sword when he retired Thundersteel.  ‘That the blade that brought a thousand storms might never again blacken the skies over the Southern Reach,’ he said.”   Reluctantly, he offered it to the Battle King,  “What will you do with it now?” Bröghue took the weapon, and slung it over his shoulder.  “Find my son.”  He picked up the war decree off the table and thrust it towards his Honor Guard.  “One thousand copies.  We are at war.  If the beast has broken free of its bonds, then I will shutter it back in its cage.” Xylus paused before accepting the scroll.  “Then your mind is made up?” “It is.” The warrior lord brushed past his shield knight and made for the doors of the Great Hall.  Beyond them the wilderness of the world awaited, and somewhere amidst its many hidden corners the Battle Prince, heir to the barbarian throne and future king of the Southern Reach, was waiting to be found.  Between the Battle King and his son was a growing army that he was assured was looking for the same thing.  Krög.   There was work to do. Before leaving the Great Hall, Bröghue, twelfth Son of Röm turned back to his senior Honor Guard, the Warbrand Xylus.  “Are you with me, brother?” The ancient warrior closed his steel gauntlet around the decree in his fist.  “I am.”

[krogthebattleprince]

Wreck of the “Twilight Raider” 9 and 10

-The 9th and 10th Letters-

M.C.F: C1 Iolar W85 serv W19 C.O: C2 Voläan W22 D.T: King

Lord,

Enemy troop movements, East. Massing near Kybber’s Pass. Invasion Force. Orders?

Iolar

Martial Correspondence from: His Lord, the Battle King Courtesy of: Captain 2nd Class Voläan, Griffin Rider assault wing 22, Mortal Piety Directed to: Captain 1st Class Iolar, Griffin Rider assault wing 85, Wyrm Wind serving messenger wing 19, Stormbreath

Iolar,

Find my son.

The Battle King

[krogthebattleprince]

The Long and Winding Road...

An open letter to those who follow the exploits of the Battle Prince, and await the release of each volume...

Dear Readers,

Only this morning I completed what will likely be the final edits and formatting to prepare Volume 3 of Krög's adventures, "The Shadow of Winter's Pall," for release. There are still a few weeks worth of work to be done, but largely, the process is finished and the book is ready.

I wanted to briefly share with you the amount of work that goes into the editing and preparation of these books. I initially wrote the tales that comprise Volume 3 back in 2014 between April and May. It took about 60 days, give or take, to write the rough drafts in some form of completion. Largely, at the time I considered them perfect and beyond reproach after putting a grueling effort to crank them out. Of course, in retrospect this was far from the truth, but at the time I thought they were pretty much flawless.

Fast forward to the period where I begin to conceptualize actually publishing these tales as a volume. My initial read through occurred in October of 2016 and revealed a litany of issues and glaring flaws that needed correction for the sake of construct and cohesion. I set out to create a series of additions that would bolster the story as a whole, and ultimately yield a more robust volume. Those efforts resulted in almost an additional 20k words of material, and brought me to late November.

Since that time (Nov 2016), myself and a few very close friends have been rebuilding, restructuring, and recutting the length and breadth of "The Shadow of Winter's Pall." With all confidence, in my opinion this is the best reading volume yet, and I am extremely proud of the work that has been done on it.

This process has involved rereading the volume, at this point, nearly 5 times in a period of about 6 months, all the while constantly nudging, adjusting and correcting errors found along the way, and tightening an already tense storyline. It is long, arduous work that often keeps me awake late into the night or arising early in the morning to complete, but it is necessary to deliver the kind of story Krög and his readers are deserving of.

Now, I share this not in a "rah rah, look how much I have done!" moment. Rather, I hope to bring better understanding of the difficulty and labor intensive nature of self-publishing these works. I promise you all, if I could snap these books out so they are ready to read with a sneeze, I would do it. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Therefor I offer my sincerest thanks to you all, the readers, for your utmost patience as I work tirelessly out of sight to bring you the continuing tales of Krög and his gang. My hope, and belief, is that what is coming is worth the wait. Trust me- we are not long for Volume 3, and I cannot wait myself to have it published.

-Ryan

PS. The thought of starting this process over for Volume 4 gives me anxiety. It's even longer. And more intense.

...don't worry, I'll get over it.

[krogthebattleprince]

Wreck of the “Twilight Raider” 8

-The 8th Letter-

Martial Correspondence from: His Lord, the Battle King

Courtesy of: Captain 3rd Class Shraka, Griffin Rider assault wing 6, Fury and Benevolence

Directed to: Captain 1st Class Iolar, Griffin Rider assault wing 85, Wyrm Wind serving messenger wing 19, Stormbreath

Captain,

I understand the difficulty of the task at hand given the terrain you are searching.  Even given this, however, the litany of failures noted in your last report is unacceptable.  How could you allow a pack of Boarhounds to go unnoticed, and worse yet, to escape your blades?  How is it you still have not located the band of survivors, much less my son?  You have an aerial vantage point and your mounts can smell nearly as far as a Wild Dragon- did it not occur to you to use the scent of what has been left behind in the campsites you’ve discovered to track your query?  My patience in this matter is wearing thin.  It has been more than a month since your report detailing the wreck of the Twilight Raider, and you are no closer to locating my missing son.

I am countermanding your orders, Captain.  Shraka will be returning to you, along with Fury and Benevolence.  You will not divide your efforts to find the prince.  I am sending Captain Volaän and wing 22, Mortal Piety, as well.  Including yourself and my brother, that will be nearly fifty able griffins and Riders to carry out the search of the area surrounding the prince’s last known camp.  Ground teams will begin their march within days.  Your every resource is to be on finding my son.  

For your edification and for the sake of what benevolence is left in me, I am dispatching your team, Wyrm Wind, to continue the search for the Honor Guard and Captain Durington, if they are still alive.  I trust your lieutenants are trained enough to carry this order out in your absence.  Do not mistake me, Rider, Aushleeyi and the knight are of great importance and are close allies, and I should like to have them returned safely.

But they are not my son.  They are not the heir to this kingdom.  Bring the prince home, or be prepared to turn in your wings.  I await your next report.

Respectfully, His Lord, the Battle King

Dictated Addendum:  There has been no mention of dear Lèanbh since you first reported on the wreckage of the Twilight Raider.  Do you believe her to be with the Honor Guard or my son?  I should very much like to see her again… she makes me smile.

[krogthebattleprince]

Wreck of the “Twilight Raider” 7

-The 7th Letter-

Martial Correspondence from: Captain 1st Class Iolar, Griffin Rider assault wing 85, Wyrm Wind Courtesy of: Captain 3rd Class Shraka, Griffin Rider assault wing 6, Fury and Benevolence Directed To: Her Lady, the Battle Queen or His Lord, the Battle King

My Lieges,

I cannot be certain who it is that will receive this, and I offer penitence for my utter disrespect at not addressing my correspondences to you both in the first place.  Please excuse my cavalier attitude- again, I can only consign myself to a place of urgency given the circumstances.

Two updates to briefly report.

I believe I have discovered the reasoning for the Honor Guard’s increased caution.  An unusually violent pack of Boarhounds has been trailing the survivors.  The Riders from Fury and Benevolence managed to overtake the pack and slay the majority, but four escaped.  We are still trying to find them before they reach Aushleeyi and his group.  What Boarhounds are doing this far south of the mountains concerns me- these are not mere animals on the hunt, their actions are directed.

We found an abandoned campsite three days ago with a single set of tracks leading away from it.  The prints wandered in circles and the brush is crushed in some places as though someone were crawling or being dragged.  A scrap of violet cloth like that of the prince’s court jacket was discovered among the thorns.  I believe we have found Krög’s trail.

I am taking Stormbreath in pursuit of the prince.  Gögan and Resolute are with me.  Shraka and Fury and Benevolence will continue the hunt for the Honor Guard.  The paths intertwined at one point, but they have since diverged- the two parties must have missed each other, though I cannot say by how long.  We will continue to scour the area.  This mire seems endless.  I am afraid.

Desperate, Captain 1st Class Iolar Griffin Rider Wing 85, Wyrm Wind

[krogthebattleprince]

Wreck of the “Twilight Raider” 6

-the 6th letter-

Martial Correspondence from: Her Lady, the Battle Queen Courtesy of: Lieutenant Drägg, Griffin Rider scout wing 67, Resolute Directed to: Captain 1st Class Iolar, Griffin Rider assault wing 85, Wyrm Wind

Iolar,

The Battle King is out the morning of this writing, understandably trying to find a way to settle his spirit given the times we find ourselves in.  I would be with him, were it not for the fact that someone is needed to keep the rabblous lot he calls the Council of Elders in line and this country moving.  As there is a break in hearings currently and all internal matters are for the time being settled, I thought I would do you the courtesy of responding to your last report.

Let me be clear, Captain, I do not share the king’s altruism in this situation, nor do I offer any benefit of doubt.  Your record hereto is notwithstanding.  My husband is a kind, steady man- it is one of the reasons I love him as deeply as I do.  Occasionally he allows this to take advantage of his judgement as he refuses to see anything but the good in others.  I am often of the same standing.

This is not one of those times.  Make no mistake, Rider, I will not allow the bonds of barbarian honor to overwhelm this one fact: I am a mother who has lost her son.  If I have to lead an army of my own Battle Maidens from here to Blackwall Ridge and skin every man who stands in my way to find my child, I will do it with my own hands and my own blade.  There is a trite and demeaning saying that ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’  I submit instead that the fury of all nine Hells has not the strength to hold back a mother in search of her son.  Do NOT make me come to the front line of the search.

I am not swayed by platitudes of ‘doing your best.’  I want results.  Owing to the present exhaustion of your company, I am sending in two of my own choosing to relieve your Riders.  You, Captain, however will remain in charge of this venture.  I will share what passes for your last report with the Battle King in a few days when his mind has had time to rest.  By then, your following correspondence should only be a short time away, and I expect it will have better results.

I am promoting Lieutenant Raïlon to Captain and giving her command of messenger wing 19, Stormbreath.  She will be joined by Captain Shraka of assault wing 6, Fury and Benevolence, to replace your team.  Shraka will handle further correspondence- she is not as prone to editing reports as I believe Drägg has done with General Gögan’s.

Lovingly, The Battle Queen

[krogthebattleprince]

Wreck of the “Twilight Raider” 5

-the 5th Letter-

Martial Correspondence from: Captain 1st Class Iolar, Griffin Rider assault wing 85, Wyrm Wind Courtesy of: Lieutenant Drägg, Griffin Rider scout wing 67, Resolute Directed to: His Lord, the Battle King

Battle King,

I have not long to write, as the situation at hand grows more grim with each passing day.  Captain Gögan will have sent his own report, and I trust what follows matches in tone and accuracy.  We are of a desperate strait, and I do not wish to lose time in writing.

The surviving group that has been leading away from the Twilight Raider is thinning in number.  Each day we continue to find shallow graves of those they have had to leave behind.  Some are pit fighters, some are knights.  I am yet to locate a kinsmen of the Southern Reach or any of the prince’s direct allies.  Still, I fear for the condition of the surviving band as they are without question in strained condition.  Certainly they must be wounded from the shipwreck, and the bogs offer little in the way of food or medicines.  Even the water is brackish and muddy.

Aushleeyi is an accomplished woodsmen, and this is working against us.  He has become more methodical and is covering their tracks better when they move from camp to camp.  I believe he thinks he is being hunted.  More so, I am frustrated that the speed and senses of my griffins are yet unable to overtake the troll.  I can only attribute this to the heavy canopy of the mire, and that the Honor Guard is more skilled at remaining hidden than perhaps I have given him credit.  Often we reach the end of a series of tracks to find no one at their head, only to have the trail resume miles away.  I do not know what to do. Gögan’s report will fill in the gaps.  It is of decidedly more detail than mine, but I do not believe I have seen your brother sleep since he has arrived.  It has been more than two weeks since we found the wreckage.  I am tired.  My Riders and our griffins are tired.

I swear we will search on.

In Haste, Captain 1st Class Iolar Griffin Rider wing 85, Wyrm Wind

[krogthebattleprince]

Wreck of the “Twilight Raider” 4

-the 4th Letter-

Martial Correspondence from: Captain 1st Class Iolar, Griffin Rider assault wing 85, Wyrm Wind Courtesy of: Lieutenant Drägg, Griffin Rider scout wing 67, Resolute Directed to: His Lord, the Battle King

Battle King,

Your considerations and sentiments detailed in your last correspondence are acknowledged and understood.  For what it is worth, despite the differences the prince and I have had in the past, I consider him my future king and I echo your distress.  Accept my humblest of apologies for not consulting with you sooner on his fate- I thought only of the search, and was blinded by a narrow view of only taking action.  I am a warrior of the frontier, and the vastest stretch I see is that of the horizon, never of the situation.  Verily, I defer to you and those wiser to guide my sword from a more sage vantage as strategy is not becoming of my ability.  Simply, action is.  And it was without thought of the grander scheme that I took to action.  My shortsightedness is my failing, I bear it, and I shall accept whatever consequences are merited.

Captain Gögan and the Riders of the 67th wing, Resolute, have arrived and our search efforts are now doubled.  We believe we have found the trail of the Honor Guard at the very least, given the size and distribution of a number of footprints discovered two nights ago.  While at first this gave us hope, I have held back the following conclusion from the Riders as it is a dark deduction on my part but not one I believe is wholly unwarranted.

Certainly we have evidence now that Aushleeyi is alive and at the very least healthy enough to walk.  However, I do not believe the Battle Prince is with him.  The tracks we have found of the troll’s do not follow the riverbank as one would expect of those trying to trail the waters of the Swordsong back to the Southern Reach.  Rather, they plunge deeper into the mires at the foot of the Dragon’s Spine Mountains, away from the guiding currents.  There is no discernible reason for this, other than what follows.

I believe Aushleeyi is looking for someone.  His tracks are joined by at least a dozen others that are man-sized, and they are spread quite far apart from one another, but in a definite line.  They are casting the widest net possible.  It is my opinion that in the chaos of the shipwreck, the Battle Prince became separated from his compatriots, and his Honor Guard has mounted his own search for Krög.  Whether the prince washed ashore somewhere else with his own small group, I cannot know, but certainly it appears Aushleeyi is combing the nearby forests for someone.  It is my hope that when we locate the troll, the prince will be with him and we will find them valiantly seeking out another survivor.  My instincts tell me otherwise.  The Honor Guard would not risk prolonged exposure to the ravages of the mires in the Dragon’s Spine foothills for anyone less than his ward, and he would not allow the prince to take up a similar search before first returning him to the safety of the Great Hall.  Owing to the troll’s singular purpose, I can only assume he is looking for the prince.

Lieutenant Drägg was kind enough to take my dictation and I now dispatch him back to your hall.  My shift is nigh, and there is still much to be done.  My hope is that when I write next, we will have located if not the prince, at the very least his Honor Guard and will have further assistance in our search.

Hopeful, Captain 1st Class Iolar Griffin Rider Wing 85, Wyrm Wind