A Record of Ash & Ruin: The Grieving Lands

Chapter 19: Talk of the Past

Chapter 19: Talk of the Past

Dragonroot harvested in the depths of the most primal forests is jealousy guarded by the great Jaderock bees. According to the observations of the researchers of Quas, these giant bees need the poison produced by the flowers to raise one of their number to a new queen. Dragonroot, also known as the Widow’s Mercy, is much sought after in many alchemical concoctions. According to legend the dragon slayers of old coated their weapons in a paste made from the root to slay their scaly foes.

- The Fanciful Travels by Beron de Laney 376 A.C

When finally my shifts were over, the exhaustion I felt could still not quite dampen my good spirits. I made sure to hide my smile from the guards who looked at me as if I was deranged, and I made sure to smile at each slave who met my eyes too. Some of the poor slaves even hesitantly smiled back.

“You look to be in good spirits boy, did something good happen in those godforsaken mines? Maybe you poked about in a different shaft!” Adita jibed jovially, laughing at her own crude joke.

“No, no madam Adita. Nothing of that nature, but I see that this evening’s meal looks as delicious as ever,” I replied adroitly, my good spirits lighting my eyes.

“Told you I’m not a madam, not one of those high-nobility types, and flattery will get you nowhere!” she cackled as she dolloped an extra portion into my bowl. “Old Monta caught himself a little delicious Rockcrab by the Latifundium, threw that in today.”

You have gained 1 Charisma

I smiled knowingly, taking my bowl filled to the brim with the questionable stew. The gain in Charisma was extraneous to my current dire circumstance. My mind was more focused on the fact that the game’s internal logic had translated Adita’s words into the ancient Roman word for slave quarters. An oddity that I puzzled over as I began eating my evening meal. Soon a familiar hulking manacled shape hobbled over. I rose and clasped his arm at the elbow, which he returned in greetings.

“Welcome, Kidu the Raider,” I grinned up at him, my neck having to tilt upwards to meet his cold blue eyes.

“And you, Gilgamesh of Uruk,” he chortled, settling his bulk down cross-legged on the hard-packed earth.

“I have questions…” I began hesitantly.

“Of course you do, god-touched, as long as we do not debate Quassian philosophy I welcome them. Perhaps through the answering, you will gain a little of your past,” he said with sympathy coloring his voice as we both sat.

We talked for a while. I confirmed that he truly had no knowledge of the strange mental script which I dubbed the ‘UI’ or ‘User Interface,’ one that apparently only I could see. He viewed my interpretation of the UI’s messages as some form of communication from the divine.

I also learned from Kidu that the language of the Children of the Tides was simply called ‘Trade’ and that the guttural language was almost the lingua franca for this region. He considered my pronunciation of Trade to be above average; my grasp of the spoken language had clearly grown by leaps and bounds. The singsong language I had some experience with was called ‘High Quassian,’ and was also spoken by the desert people of the south.

In time the large man told me his tale. I found out that Kidu was from the far frozen north. His tribe was a nomadic people that hunted a massive creature called the Cronir. The Cronir traveled across the tundra in vast herds, in the manner of caribou, and were sometimes preyed upon by vicious ice drakes. His tribe had lost several skirmishes, with the allocation of hunting rights to rival tribes further weakening them. The Windspeakers of his tribe, a group of the elderly and the wise who kept the oral traditions of the Three Bears, advised the chief to send a raiding party to the South.

The chief sent Kidu, who even then had a reputation for being a belligerent troublemaker, along with a few other men to form a party and travel south as raiders. The leader had planned for them to bring exotic riches from the warm verdant lands back home so that they could trade for favors from other tribes. However, in a frontier town near the frozen wastes, they had been duped by shady characters in the local drinking den promising them the location of a rich caravan that was scheduled to pass through. Instead of a profitable raid, they were assaulted in the night in their drunken stupor, stripped of their weapons, and sold into slavery to the said caravan. Kidu had been sold and traded from master to master due to his fractious and violent nature. Eventually, he had changed so many hands that he had finally made it to Ansan, the jewel of the grass sea of the Grieving Lands and a gateway to the Wilds.

Spying Durhit with a group of tired-looking men, I called him over. His face at a distance looked like he had just swallowed a sour plum as he made his way over. Suspicion warred with a need to make a connection across his bearded face. In the end, despite initial reluctance, the need to find some form of solace won.

“Be a little quieter manling, the guards here be sensitive to those with loud tongues,” grumbled the dwarf.

I held my hands up in mock acquiescence, a grin still on my face.

“I’ve never seen a human, yes dwarves aplenty, but never a human so happy pounding away at rock. I swear he is a little queer in the head,” he grumbled again.

“Then you have probably never heard of the gold rush,” I replied. The dwarf’s eyes almost comically widened at my mention of gold. “Men would cross oceans, plains, and deserts in their search of gold,” I tried to intone as wisely as possible.

“Aye that, it is well known that man’s greed of gold can rival even a dwarven Deeptaker’s,” Durhit nodded sagely into his bowl, his long beard almost brushing into the stew.

“I know you are god-touched, but at times you sound like my tribe’s Windspeakers, Gilgamesh of Uruk. Are you a scholar?” interjected the wildman, his voice surprisingly serious in its earnestness.

A bittersweet smile formed on my face, shaking my head as the lie found its way to my lips, “No, Kidu of the Three Bears, though I have heard a few things here and there.” Already treading on dangerous ground with my mention of the California gold rush, I was wary that continuing the line of thought would lead me to share more about my origins.

“Your tribe will enjoy many good years with their offering, to give not only a god-touched but also a man wiser than his years to the Chooser of the Slain,” he nodded, accepting my lie totally.

“How about you, mysterious manling, what brought you here to the great Ansan?” the dwarf inquired, bushy eyebrows raising a fraction in interest.

Thankfully Kidu interjected, eager to tell my story to the dwarf, with just a little bit of joy in the telling. He embellished little, except for my fight in the arena. According to the savage-looking man, instead of killing a green and untested youth, I had slain a scarred seasoned warrior, his blade pitted with the clash of many battles.

“...And what brings a stone-eater so far from your mountain halls?” the wildman finished finally with a question.

The dwarf’s face scrunched in irritation before looking down troubled, as if trying to retrieve the memory from the ground itself. In time, he too told his tale, “Bunch of lads and I signed as mercenaries for the manling Lord Hayles against one of his neighbors, the Lord Farilse. Something about an exorbitant port tax that one of Haylebury's ships refused to pay for. This led to the City Lord Farilse seizing his vessel, the Pride of Iron, that was berthed.” Something ticked the back of my mind with the ship’s name, but I quickly turned my attention back to the dwarf’s tale.

“The port of Seaguard had strong high walls and even stronger coastal defenses, and little Lord Hayles decided he needed a bit of dwarven ingenuity to do something about the defenses. A messy affair if there ever was one.”

He spat on the ground before continuing, “Good rights to pillage and steady coin are a siren song to any good dwarf worth his ore and we marched under Haylebury’s banner with the baggage train. But, Farilse was a cunning one, and he hired mercenaries of his own. Hateful pointy-eared scum, Dark Elves, quiet like shadow fell upon the baggage train near, gutting the sentries and picket lines with not so much a sound. My own mate Kabruk was taken down right before my eyes, one of their cursed black blades across his throat as he tried to raise the alarm. I gave as good a reckoning as any of the Stoneborn, and I perhaps got a few of them with my trusty hammer. Like hitting leaves and twigs those Dark Elves are. They faded away like morning mist just as the first light hit, and the damage they had done was great. They had hit our poor Girabis, poor blundering beasts, and just like that our whole venture was hamstrung. A curse of ash and ruin on the sharp ears!”

Durhit continued, “Farilse never faced us in open battle after that, he hit us again and again and finally forced Hayles’ surrender.” The dwarf paused for a moment as if dredging up the memory caused him bittersweet pain.

“My sister Evenes could only afford the ransom of her man Nolat, and I don’t in half a mind blame her in truth as it was more my idea to go about on that slagheap of an adventure. She promised that once she and Nolat started work on the new claim they had, they’d find a way to pay my bond price. But with no way to pay my immediate ransom, Farilse sold us to a passing slaver caravan. Those vultures always be about the edges of war, like flies to a fresh corpse. Now here I am in Ansan mining ore for manlings to make weapons to wage war upon one another.”

Something must have struck a chord with the wildman, as he silently patted the dwarf on the shoulder in compassion, only to be brushed off brusquely. I was silent for another reason. Something the dwarf said set off something in my mind, like suddenly remembering an important memory.

Then I found it; the spell Rust. Like a slippery eel, it had always wriggled its way from my attention. Circumstances had meant I never had any leeway to experiment with its use. Determined now, I called out to it and was met by resistance. Black slithering things crossed the edges of my vision and cold sibilant whispers caressed my ears, making me shiver as electricity traveled down the nape of my neck. A sense of wrongness so profound and utterly inimical to all things filled me. Wanting to release this dark energy as soon as possible, I eyed a random slave engaged in evening conversation in the corner of my eye. Focusing my target, I surreptitiously cast the spell at his manacled feet.

Black lines of power left me then, seemingly invisible to everyone else, wrapping around the chains like velvet lightning as he continued talking. The whispers slowly left me, the feeling of wrongness lessening, but I could still see the dark lightning working its way around his iron chains. Gradually now, the lightning danced around the iron, slowly and steadily like a funeral procession. Where it touched, a few dots of orange and red could be seen as the metal was slowly oxidized at an accelerated rate. The spell had only cost me a single point in Mana.

I made every effort to hide the grin on my face as I looked back at my companions, questioning looks on their faces at my sudden rise. I had found the keys to my chains. Explaining to them that I thought I saw a ghost of a familiar face, they nodded sympathetically at my false hope.

Durhit shared that he had often done a similar thing when new dwarves were welcomed to the mines. We talked about small things of little importance, and I learned some more of the common knowledge of this world. The name of the world I found myself in was called many things by its innumerable people. But here in this area, known colloquially as the ‘Grieving Lands’ due to the sudden tumultuous storms that were endemic to the region in the winter months, the locals called the world ‘Gesthe.’ This meant ‘Garden’ in the language of the First People, as the Elves liked to call themselves. The Grieving Lands were but a small part of an enormous world that was broken up into massive continents, which according to Durhit were the bones of land dragons.

We talked also of strange and fanciful places. According to Durhit, his home, ‘The Beacon Mountains,’ were an active range of volcanoes, their fiery maws bursting up into flame and ash. I wondered to myself what sort of people would choose to live in such a dangerous place. Somewhere in the conversation, there was talk of a place to the far west called the ‘Glass Fire Sea.’ Here sailors feared to navigate its treacherous waters as great crystalline glass formations floated on its becalmed surface, burning any ship to blackened husk that got too close. Still, some savvy captains would venture forth on moonless nights to gather fragments of the precious glass to be sold to the great universities of Quas.

The flames of adventure were lit once more in my heart, and I could feel a desperate need to be free taking a deeper root. However, once again before too long we were herded back into the slave stables. Before going to sleep I sat up, casting Rust silently, picturing iron manacles, and releasing the energy in random directions in the room. The black lightning from my spell was invisible, even to me in the darkness. I knew the spell was being cast as I could see my Mana drop in steady increments, and on the ninth cast I was rewarded with a notification.

You have gained 1 Intelligence

Lying back down on my cot, I perused my character Status. Like the other day, I had gained some nominal experience from Mining. But more importantly, I now had the tools to make a bid for freedom. I needed the patience to see my growing plans through, and it felt to me that my chains chafed more than usual now that a path to freedom could be seen. To feel, to experience the best this fantasy world had to offer, and not be just a slave to destiny.

STATUS

CallingGilgamesh Level 6 Acolyte of Avaria Strength20 Dexterity13 Constitution27 Intelligence17 Wisdom12 Charisma9 Luck13

SKILLS & PROFICIENCIES

Pain Nullification (lvl.1) Power Strike (lvl.2) Endure (lvl.2) Stealth (lvl.1) Rest (lvl.1) Backstab (lvl.2) Dodge (lvl.2) Polearms (lvl.2) Dual Wield (lvl.1) Critical Hit Mastery (lvl.2) Mining (lvl.2) Unarmed Combat (lvl.3) Hammers (lvl.1)

SPELLS & MAGIC

Heal (lvl.5) Rust (lvl.1) Identify (lvl.2)

Silent Casting (lvl.1)

GIFTS

Curse of Entropy -20% all starting attributes.

Experience to next level 850/991

Health92/117 Stamina13/43 Mana1/12