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The Druid of Mirghul
Posted: 24 Feb 2006 07:24 AM |
“No more secrets, too much darkness. Darkness comes and day will never be again…”
~*~
The sickness had killed him.
He who had defended these woods for nigh on a century. The Half-Elven Cyradwen, Druid of Mirghul. I can’t believe we never knew his name until he died. I can’t believe we never even saw him until it was too late.
The sickness had killed him. That’s what the Sunbringers told us.
I don’t trust them. Never have. It seems we only ever see them when things go terribly wrong. They’re bad omens, they are. Bringers of bad luck and doom and death. I am not imagining this. Seriously, it’s true. They’re worse than Paladins. Hell, that’s saying a lot. Paladins are disaster bombs waiting to go off, you know what I mean?
Listen. Just listen for a bit. Follow through with me on this, all right?
They show up right when a disaster gets really bad. Not to save the day, oh no. Just... just to show they’re there. Just to make their presence known. Ever seen ’em lift a finger to help out, of their own accord, on their own initiative? No? I didn’t think so.
They spend a lot of time in Maldovia. I mean, a lot. It’s not like Sunbringers are a common sight, you know? They come and go. And where do they go when they’re in between disasters, huh? Where’s this limbo of theirs where they chill out until the next disaster comes along? Maldovia. Bloody Maldovia.
And now this. Look at this. Look at what’s happened. No sign of them until that nightmarish Syn debacle last year. Then suddenly a hell of a lot of things go wrong that still haven’t been fixed. Oh. Oh, sure. A bunch of people think it’s fixed, but if that’s so, then why do we still have that bloody glowing spiral sitting right next to the lodge? Ah. Speaking of which. The lodge. That was their idea too. Their idea to build it there. As if they knew, they knew that spiral was going to appear there, and they wanted to get the lodge finished before we discovered its existence. Does that sound suspicious to you? Because it sure as hell sounds suspicious to me.
So let’s go back to Syn. See, there was this thing that happened. Never mind what it was; that’s not what this is about. This thing happened, right, and it was pretty horrific around the east coast for a bit, and our druid, right, we get told that he’s fallen sick. Told by whom? The Sunbringers. Why’s he sick? Because of Syn. Who told us that? The Sunbringers.
Half a year later, he still isn’t cured. Lodge is finished, spiral’s still squatting right outside despite all the Syn stuff having passed, and this pandemic sickness strikes druids and rangers worldwide. No, really. I was sick for weeks. Thank the Mother it’s passed. I hear some folks up in Ferein fixed it all up. Whatever. That isn’t the point. The point is... can you see what the point is? I’ll tell you what the point is. All this happened and they lied, they lied, they said he was sick because of Syn, then this time they blame it on the world sickness.
Was he ever really our local Druid? Or is this just some guy they decided to have play the role? Oh, we know there is a local Druid. Hard to explain if you aren’t Mirghulian. Just trust me on this.
Mirghul needs a Druid like a Dryad needs a tree. We don’t have any other druids. The forest simply won’t allow it. I mean, we get visiting druids, but they aren’t The Druid, the one linked to Mirghul. No one born here can become one unless they’re chosen, you know?
So. Here’s Cyradwen, and the sickness killed him. Killed him the day after the pandemic ended. Takes a while for the news to filter down to us, of course, and no one noticed but me. Do you see where I’m going with this? Do you see what I’m getting at?
We held a funeral, of course. Nice and quiet-like. The Sunbringers were there.
They were the last to see him alive.
And Mirghul—living, breathing Mirghul, intrinsically and inexplicably linked to the life of its Druid—lived on.
~*~
Weeks later, when the comet first showed up in the sky, we had a visitor. The Sunbringers brought her in to the Lodge one day and herded those of us present into the common room.
Merciful Mother, I never met anyone who creeped me out so much in my entire life.
Tall. Lithe. Gaunt. Leathery skin like a reptile and a hissing accent to match. Hair as black as a raven, with the same glossy sheen as one of those cursed birds. And eyes as green as witchfire. She looked...
She looked like Mirghul come to life. Take the entire dark forest and roll it up into a compact Human-shaped package and that’s what it would look like.
I knew who and what she was before she introduced herself. Pretty glaringly obvious, I’d say.
“My name,” she hissed, “issss Sszadia Ssskarfell. I am the new Druid of Mirghul.”
New druid, I wondered? Or had you always been?
“A covenant wasss made,” she continued, “by he who came before me... that there would be no more sssecretsss.” Her one-eyed gaze swept the room. Venom and ice. That piercing gaze injected venom and ice straight into your blood and left you feeling weak. “Therefore lisssten. I know a great many sssecretsss but I ssshall not be telling them outright. When the Blood Moon blassszesss in the sssky, then I sssshall tell talesss with ssssecretsss hidden within them.”
What did I tell you? Doom and disaster.
My name is Jim Vonrolde. I’m one of Mirghul’s local rangers.
And I have a really bad feeling about this. |
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Old Wounds
Posted: 27 Feb 2006 09:11 AM |
A living and breathing work of art. The world is what me make it. Put your ear to the ground and hear its heartbeat. Feel the wind on your face, the breath of the world as it dreams, as it dreams.
Do you know who I am? Who I truly am? I doubt it. There are no words in any mortal language for myself or my kind. And the world is shrinking and we are growing. Too much, too fast, in opposite directions. The pull too strong. The snap inevitable. It's so very hard to crowd into this world we've all grown too big for. We fill it. It overflows with our presence.
I wanted to leave. I tried to leave. But the world is a cage beyond which there is nothing. To open the door outside is to let the nothingness in. Does nature abhor a vacuum? Then the vacuum abhors nature also. It screams a silent scream from outside the cage, wanting to be let in, wanting to devour the everything, the all.
This is the enemy I faced. The enemy that I face still.
I tend old wounds, poorly patched. Break the scab away and the world bleeds. Entropy of matter. Entropy of mind. Morals relax, trust becomes suspicion, friendship becomes enmity. And the world—this bright and multicoloured work of art, so precious, so alive—fades to grey. Grey apathy. Grey anomie.
Did you think The Void was black? Black as sin, purest evil, dark as fear? No. These things are part of life. They have meaning. They create meaning. A reason for light to exist. A necessary contrast.
And this... this is why I walk amongst mortals. Ephemeral as they are, they tend to blur together from a distance. But up close they are multicoloured spectacles. They live between the blinks of an eye. Living slivers of infinity. How strange that eternity relies on the existence of such transient beings. How bright their hope shines. How deep their tragedies plunge. How dark their poisonous hatred. How intense their lives compared with those of immortals. We are stretched thin across time. Our colours have faded, if ever we had any.
Do you know who I am? Who I truly am? I doubt it would make any difference if you did. The identity I wear is a mask, one which I'll have to discard in a single blink. But in the time it takes for me to blink, civilisations rise and fall, life is born and life is lost, and the sun rises and sets a thousand thousand times...
And might never rise again.
Old wounds. There are old wounds here in this place and I don't know how much longer I can tend to them. So much death lately. The death of lives and the death of souls. And the death of morals. Yesterday, there was anger in the Lodge. Hope lost. Despair. Division.
This is the sentence passed upon the world and not even I can alter it.
Listen to the silence fast approaching. The Void opens wide its maw once more. |
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Odd Rumours from Around the World...
Posted: 04 May 2006 02:11 AM |
Port Royale
Six people have been bitten in the past week by pit vipers believed to be escaped from the abandoned mines in Port Royale.
Most fingers are pointing to nosy adventurers who can't read signs and traipse wherever they please, dragging all manner of nasty beasties behind them in their wake.
Denizens of Port report that small, odd creatures the size of Halflings have been seen scurrying about at night, poking around garbage piles. Bald Rick babbles that one of them seemed to be commanding a group of vipers... but of course, who pays attention to Rick?
In apparently unrelated news, an exquisite statue was found by a Port Royale Sanitation employee in the southern sewers, near the exit in front of the mines.
The Northern Highway
A quick chat with any of the Northern Rangers will reveal that the Kua-Toa have been seen venturing out of their caves, making pests of themselves around houses in the northern woodlands surrounding the Northern Highway.
Uwe and Castidis moan that they can often be heard slapping around the outside of the Four Winds Inn, upsetting adventurers and guests.
Celdor will boast to anyone who will listen of the one that he shot from seven hundred metres away, through a dense and obscuring curtain of fog and driving rain.
Buckshire
The guards of Buckshire grumble that there have been incidents along Buckshire Coast and Aquinas Coast involving the lizardfolk of the swamp. Apparently they've been harassing homesteads all along the coast.
Captain Highliner will confirm this rumour, happily gloating about all the scaly heads he's smashed in the past two weeks. He will also add that it just doesn't have the same satisfaction as smiting giant beetles.
Tanglewood
The Artio people are uneasy and on edge. One is reminded of a cat or a dog snarling at some invisible force that is simply beyond the means of ordinary folk to perceive: this is the attitude of the clan at the moment. |
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A Stirring in the Darkness
Posted: 07 May 2006 07:01 AM |
Steps so silent that they made no sound on the hard cold floor of the crypt. Bodies stirring from hibernation, called into wakefulness once more. Metabolisms slowed by the frigidity of the place, actions slow and sluggish... but lent strength by sheer force of will. And hunger.
The door to the Coldheart Crypts swept open but no one came out.
Steps so light that they left no tracks in the soft snow.
[Li'ses is es is ssli ezisyas zli'sayayas z ye sslig ayali's sla iszli's kis zyeli'sayazvayaisg.]
Death so sudden and thorough that it left no evidence of the murderers. |
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Hibernation
Posted: 04 Jun 2006 11:26 AM |
Zadia knew the symptoms well. Hadn't she experienced this personally? She did not know who the other was of whom the nervous man had spoken, but the boy was one she had met before. The boy had survived the touch of Undeath; it was likely he would survive the touch of the cold-blooded ones.
And so she sent him to the realms of winter that bordered her lands, buried him alive in cold and ice to slow the onslaught—but now the time was drawing near. Something was coming. He would have to be woken from his hibernation.
A running leap off the edge of the cliff, to gain the necessary momentum. A twisting, a warping—she took to the air with newfound wings, a sharp outline of white against the lightless dark of the ancient woods as she shrank down into wyrmling form.
Something was coming. She flitted west over the mountains to wake him. None understood change as well as her, and the outcome of this change was entirely dependent on a single and apparently insignificant decision. |
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Strength
Posted: 21 Jun 2006 09:12 PM |
Extinction is the natural order of things.
The world changes. The world evolves.
The weak are sacrificed so that the strong may flourish.
They who are about to die try to flee it, but they cannot. Death is close at their heels.
The ones that time forgot have ceased to be forgotten. A shadow on the periphery of the public's collective consciousness. There and then gone again when looked at directly:
Ebonarri.
The forces of the subtle darkness. The diversion has paid off. The deception has paid off. The lie they planted is believed. And while all eyes turn to Midor and the Midorans—
Their goal has already been achieved. |
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