January 2024: Hey, Remember That Time We Killed a Dragon Pt 1
Hey, Remember that Time We Killed a Dragon?
The strange thing about being on the open road is that you end up thinking about nothing more than the next village or town. You could be the kind of person who falls to sleep in your soft bed dreaming of the open wilds, and you’ll find yourself only thinking of that warm soft bed after a few days of hard travel. After a few more days, your standards don’t even reach that high. By that point, even a nice bundle of straw in a stable stall will do. All the comforts which you took for granted within the walls of a town slowly become the only things you can think about, and you become more and more desperate until even a brush with the most rudimentary form of civilisation is a thing which you yearn for the way which amorous fools in Fiorentine operas yearn after the fair prince in the high tower. After five days on the road, you would pay out your entire fortune, even to sleep on the rail of a fence.
We had been on the road for seven when we approached the village of Sendehafen. It was our last stop before we crossed the river and into the heartlands of the Grand Duchy of Torinhall. From there, we had a pressing engagement in Kendrickstone, where Leo’s great-aunt had some urgent pressing political matter she expected our presence at for some reason or other. Our map had put us on the right road, but as with most maps, it didn’t really give us the right distance. We knew that if we kept walking, we’d reach the place, but we didn’t know how long it would take. It was a road we’d used before, but that had been in the summer, with a caravan which brought some of the comforts of life with it. Now it was autumn, and in between the rain and wind and the cold hard ground, we were all feeling in desperate need of some of those comforts right then. That was what kept us going forward, one foot in front of the other: the thought that if we kept going, we’d eventually reach Sendehafen, and even if the place was a miserable little collection of hovels with a single traveller’s inn, at least that inn would have hot food and beds to sleep in.
Unfortunately, we had no such luck.
The first sign we had that something had gone wrong was the plume of smoke rising from the distance. Of course, villages give off smoke all the time. It’s the sort of thing that civilisation kind of leaves, like a fingerprint on a glass goblet. We use fire to cook our food, forge our steel, boil our water. Even a single isolated hut in the woods leaves smoke. But this, this wasn’t the kind of wispy little collection of strands you expect from a village, this was huge, roiling, giant gouts of black being tossed into the sky as if someone on the ground was throwing it. None of us had ever seen a village on fire before. We were about to.
My first thought when we saw the flames first hand was annoyance at the fact that we were stuck sleeping on the ground for the next week until we reached Torinhall. Maybe this says something about my character, it probably does. Leofric’s first reaction on the other hand, definitely said something about his. I remember seeing the emotions cross his face, one after the other: shock, horror, determination. “Ellie, we have to look for survivors,” he declared, so quick it had to be a reflex. For a moment, it didn’t even look as if he’d realised he’d said it at all. Then, he turned to the third in our party. “Elias, put these flames out.”
Elias was an apprentice court mage from Amberhelm, one of the half dozen or so the Prince’s court had maintained. He’d been with us for a few months at this point, out trying to make a name for himself so he’d get a better chance of being chosen as his master’s successor. We got along well enough, after a few confusing days of untangling the fact that our respective parents had given us inconveniently similar names. The best thing about him was he that he didn’t talk much, and he didn’t argue when someone (usually Leofric) had an obviously good idea. So, like the string of an arbalest, he sprang into action. Within moments, we could feel the air around us grow heavy with moisture as water began to manifest from the sky and lash at the flames like swords.
The flames didn’t last long. Evidently, they hadn’t burned very hot. Unfortunately, we’d gotten there far too late to save much of the village. The outlying cottages had escaped heavy damage, but the market square, the buildings around it, and much of the fields had been razed to bare ash. In hindsight, it was the last bit that was the most curious. I’ve since learned just how difficult it is to burn crops to the ground, but back then, that sort of experience was still several years and a rather nasty war away. I assumed that grass had burned as easily as straw, and didn’t know any better.
As the last of the fires guttered out under our mage’s careful efforts, the first figures appeared from the woods: the villagers of Sendehafen. They looked in pretty nasty shape, bruised and covered with ash. Most carried heavy bundles on their backs – evidently, they’d been remarkably capable of rescuing their possessions from the blaze. When they saw us, the first amongst them immediately dropped to their knees. They thanked us profusely for putting out the flames, and putting to flight the dragon that had started them.
“Wait,” Leofric interrupted. “What was that about a dragon?”
“A great beast, Sir Knight! Like from the tapestries and tales! No doubt you have slain many in your adventures!”
Leofric had winced a little at that first ‘sir knight’, we were supposed to be travelling incognito, as mere wandering adventurers of no particular distinction. He even had us swap out our knightly spurs for common ones, just in case someone looked too closely. But there was only so much you could hide, and both of us had the look of Knight-Errants, that unconscious sense of pride, coupled with that eagle-eyed hunger for any opportunity to win glory. I was perhaps a bit hungrier than him (he was going to inherit a Duchy, after all), but either way, no matter how many threadbare cloaks we’d thrown on, our bearing had been dead giveaways.
Of course, neither of us really believed him. Dragons weren’t real, despite what the stories would tell you. Still, Leofric had that same indulgent streak he still does as Duke of Kendrickstone. He drew his sword and swore on it that he’d find the beast that destroyed the village and exact the appropriate punishment. Now, he didn’t specifically say the word ‘dragon’, or even imply it, but the villagers seemed happy enough, and they were even more pleased when he offered to escort them all to Torinhall, where they could make their report to their own liege lord.
Now, I suppose some of you have been to Torinhall some time in the past few years, and you might have even seen its sitting Duke: a big strapping young fellow who looks like the sort of lad who’d pick a fight with you in a tavern, beat you half senseless, then buy you drinks to show that it was all in good fun. He hadn’t even been born at this point. No, the Duke we got to meet was a weedy little man, who barely seemed to care about anything going on around him. Oh, of course, he went through all the motions of greeting when Leo showed up – he was too important to offend after all – yet the moment that passed and he sat down back in his chair, he seemed to fall straight asleep. I’d have almost expected to hear him snoring as the villagers explained what had happened to their village – and why they wouldn’t be in any shape to pay any taxes for the next three or four years at least. I did not think the old stick would have roused if someone had pushed him over.
At least, that was until he was told about the dragon.
In Korilandis, they have this sort of tea which can wake someone up from a dead sleep. It smells incredible, but it tastes like the bitterest poison you could imagine, which I guess is how it wakes people up. At the mention of a dragon, the old Duke shot upright, as if someone had just poured a whole cask of that stuff down his throat. Whatever his thoughts might have been before, it was clear from one look in his eyes that his head was now full of visions of great and terrible beasts winging their way through the air, dealing out fire and death – and brave adventurers riding out to face the creature, sword in hand.
Next thing I know, the little man is charging us with doing just that. “A Quest, most grave and most glorious”, he calls it. By the time the words register, Leofric had already agreed.
“Leo, the Duchess is waiting for you in Kendrickstone,” I reminded him.
“This is more important, lives are at stake”, he replied – and that was that. We barely stayed in Torinhall a day before riding back out the way we came, with a mule full of supplies and a handful of the villagers to act as guides.
And that was how we ended up on the road once again, on a mission to kill a dragon.
February 2024: Hey, Remember That Time We Killed a Dragon Pt 2
The trip out from Torinhall would have been uneventful if not for one rather inconvenient fact.
You see, when the Duke commissioned us on this quest of his, he made the mistake of announcing it to his entire court, which meant that they announced it to the rest of the city. By the time we finally went out the gate the next day, we were flooded with hangers-on, all from that silly little class of not-quite-children and not-quite-adults who were old enough to leave home, but not quite old enough to know that dragons don’t actually exist. There were maybe four or five dozen of them, enough to pass for a sizeable war party.
They were armed like one too. Most of the peaceable folk of the city were busy, of course. They had work to do expanding the big circuit of walls you can still see if you visit Torinhall today, or refurbishing the Sanctuary, where you can now see that famous stained glass hall showing Torin breaking the heart of the Tower of Thorns. No, it was the idle who came along with us – which was to say, the wealthy and the well-born, the bored children of merchants, squires on leave, even a fellow Errant or two, all of them bringing their own helms and shields and weapons. Some of them even brought their own maille with them, which I took as something of a vote of confidence at the time – at least it meant they were taking it seriously.
And they did take it seriously at first. As we set out from the city, we moved at a crawl, with eyes pitched upwards, anticipating an attack from the sky that might come from any time or place. Of course, the fact that we had faced no such attack on the way to the city had evidently escaped our young and foolish minds, as we were just as apprehensive as the others. Some of them would take turns riding on the back of mules, with arbalests pointed directly at the sky, as if a Dragon from so high up might be able to see, let alone be threatened by such an implement. As a result, that first day, we covered maybe a quarter of the distance we could have covered by ourselves.
This wouldn’t last though. The thing about youths is that they might be all enthusiasm at first, but that ardour quickly wears away when confronted with the actual reality of campaigning. I knew I’d been when I’d first set out with Leo not so long before all this had happened. It was really only my knight’s oath and the eyes of my best friend and future liege which kept me on the road. (Leo, of course, didn’t show a single sign of reluctance or hesitation. I think he was simply different that way). Our own little baggage train had no one to keep them on the straight and narrow, and soon enough, after a day and a night of constant travel and sleeping on the ground, some of them started to go home. A few of them had not packed bedrolls and simply got sick sleeping in the open. Others got bored. A few, laden down with all their gear, simply declared that they were going to have a break, and never caught up with us again.
I was told that all of them made it safely back to the city – which seems obvious in hindsight, given how little progress we had made.
On second thought, an actual fear of confronting a real live dragon was probably something that got a few of them turning for the way home too. In the years since, I’ve seen all too many instances of those who were eager and excited at the prospect of glorious adventure and combat, only to balk when they give it some thought and remember that battle has winners and losers – and that even the winners stand a chance of having a very unpleasant time. It’s almost always for the best. Better that those who endure all the sufferings of battle be the ones who are completely committed to it.
In our case, the ones who were completely committed to it seemed to consist only of the three of us and our guides. By the time we actually returned to the village. We were the only ones left. The ruins of Sendehafen were empty too – at least of dragons. There were wild dogs and the like around, which the locals who’d come with us quickly set to driving off, leaving us alone to investigate what had happened – and where this dragon had come from.
“I hope the Duke is willing to provide charity to the villagers,” Leo remarked as we searched the fields. “With their crops burned, I do not think they will have a chance to plant and harvest again before winter.”
I nodded to that, idly, my attention elsewhere. Evidently, the third of our party was paying a bit more attention.
“The crops were already harvested.” Elias said.
He pointed at a patch of field which had not quite been burned entirely – and the stubble of wheat stalks on it – wheat stalks which had been reaped neatly with a scythe.
“Must have been good timing then,” I replied.
“Not necessarily,” Leo answered. “It would have simply burned with their granary, instead of in the fields.”
“Only if their granary actually burned.”
Some of the buildings had survived the fire not intact, but in good enough shape. Hoping that the village granary had been one of them, we interrupted our search to look for it.
The guides we had along quickly pointed us to it – or at least to where it used to be. It was as if the Dragon had held a particular grudge against that building in particular. Even while the surrounded cottages still had some bits of their frames left standing, the granary was burned almost entirely to the ground, with barely a pile of ashes left.
Between you and me, we probably would have left it at that and gone back to our search, if not for one of the wild dogs which the locals had driven off earlier. Somehow, it’d managed to get past us, to begin pawing and digging at the ground where the granary had stood. At first, we just assumed it had smelled some trace scent of burned meat or something, but our guides suddenly sprang into action, trying to chase off the poor creature with what could only be described as frantic desperation, almost as if they had been trying to protect something.
Our suspicions raised, we began to pick up where the dog had left off, digging into the ground with the mountain picks we’d gotten for our trip over the passes. One of the villagers seemed about to stop us, but evidently thought better than to interrupt two armed nobles and a mage. Even so, we could see their expressions shift from anxiety, to fear, to despair as we dug deeper and deeper.
Until we’d dug down the whole height of a man, and struck wood.
It was the top of a chest, one of a great many, all of them packed with threshed grain, salted meat, onions, beets, carrots, and all manner of other crops, carefully wrapped and preserved, and kept entirely safe from the fire which had burned the granary above.
All three of us were thinking the same thing at that point. I certainly was, and I could see it in the others’ eyes. The problem was saying something. It seemed at the time like it would have been bad manners, especially for knights who’d sworn to defend people just like the ones around us.
Luckily for both of us, the third member of our party possessed neither a knightly oath, nor manners.
“You burned the village yourselves,” he said after a moment. “There was no dragon.”
The truth came out after that, like the fill of a curtain wall breached by a trebuchet. There was no dragon. The Duke’s renovations of his seat were being paid for by repeated taxes, levied almost every year. This year’s just happened to be too much. The people of Sendehafen had barely enough as it was without sending off a tenth of it to rebuild a city they’d likely never see more than four times in their life. So, faced with a choice between destitution or rebellion, they picked a third option, they picked cunning instead.
They had known that their Duke was a man fond of fanciful stories, and so they decided to concoct one of their own. They brought everyone and their valuables to safety, buried their food, and burned their own village to the ground – taking care to do so early enough to rebuild for the coming winter, and late enough so that they could go before their liege with a straight face, and tell him that there was no time left in the year for a second planting.
And it probably would have worked, if the first people to come across their scheme had not been adventurers.
This, naturally, left us in something of a bind. As Knights, we were sworn to protect the weak and the innocent, and although you could probably make the argument that “burning down your own village to commit tax fraud” probably wasn’t the way most people would describe the actions of the entirely blameless, it was obvious to us that it was desperation, not malice, which drove them to such lengths. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to just burn their home to the ground on principle, and even if one person did, there was no way the entire village would have gone along with it unless they were all up the same creek.
On the other hand, we were also sworn to tell the truth, especially to those who could call themselves their superiors. Errants were bound to the laws of whatever realm they passed through – which was why Knights-Errant are allowed such free passage in the first place – and although Leofric would be a Duke one day, he wasn’t one yet. We had an obligation to report accurately to the Duke of Torinhall, even though it’d probably mean that the villagers involved would be punished for it. Judging by the looks on our guides’ faces as we left them, it seemed clear to me which way we were going to go.
But it wasn’t, not to any of us, the whole ride back to Torinhall. Elias was perhaps the luckiest of us. He had no oaths to uphold either way. He didn’t have to say anything to anyone, and it was pretty clear that he didn’t intend to. That left the two of us.
Leo had every reason to tell the truth. He had always been more of a stickler for law and order than I was (probably because soon enough, he’d be the one writing the laws), and more than that, the last thing he needed was bad blood with the Duke of Torinhall when he eventually became Duke of Kendrickstone – especially given how at that time, there were still Torinhallers who claimed Hallowford as their rightful territory, and not ours.
By the time we’d returned to the city, I was basically committed to answering first. The problem was, I didn’t know what I was going to say either, even as we walked up the steps and bowed before the Duke, I was still weighing the merits either way.
It was only when the expectant old man in front of us demanded an answer that I came to a decision. I drew myself up, took a breath and-
“It was a Dragon,” Leofric replied, before I could. “We killed it. That’s all.”
March 2024: An Account of the Reach Folk
To the far north, beyond the peaks of the Barazin Mountains, lie a land of icy hillocks and pastures, split by many fast-moving rivers with steep and rocky banks. This is the land of what the Khazari and the Barazini refer to as the Reach Folk. Very little is known about these people, even less so in the lands which do not directly border such territory. The Barazini, divided from such lands as they are by the mountains, pay them little attention save to guard the passes against the very rare raid. They are more pre-occupied with their generations-long contention with the Khazari along their heavily fortified and heavily guarded southern border. As the for the Khazari themselves, their means of accessing the Northern Reach comes only through the upstream navigation of the Ullanye and Baraz rivers – with the former being blocked by regular Barazini patrols and fortresses – and the latter being treacherous to navigate at the best of times, and nearly impassable for most parts of the year.
As a result, there are very few reliable sources regarding the Reachfolk. The customary legends of mountain cave-cities with halls encrusted with gems, and adorned with rivers of molten gold can be dismissed out of hand. As can the idea of flying fortresses levitating on the power of some unknown magic, similar to that which sustains certain relics of the Flowering Court, which once occupied the lands of the Concordat. Indeed, the state of the Reach Folk, in the perspective of the few who deal with them in an official capacity might probably be best summed up by the words of a Khazari bureaucrat whose remit included the surveying of the Ullanye River: “they are not wealthy enough to trade with, and not troublesome enough to conquer”.
This is not to say that the Reach Folk are not worthy of study. Despite the harshness of the territory which they inhabit, they have evidently not only been able to settle the land in permanent ways, but thrive in conditions which would be considered unsuitable for settlement by most. In a relative absence of wood, of metal, and of land capable of supporting most crops, they have built homes which have evidently lasted for centuries. While the techniques and tools which they use to secure such lives may not seem as impressive or as complex as those familiar to the means by which our own people have tamed the desert, it remains something worthy of study. Last of all, there remains the fact that the Reach Folk, although distant and unfamiliar, remain a people, and it is our duty as scholars and adventurers to learn of all of the world’s inhabitants, so that we may better understand the nature of creation.
Unfortunately, such understanding does not come easily. The Reach itself is nearly impossible to approach, and thus all our knowledge comes from Khazari sources, or second hand, via the Barazini Princes, whom we do not have regular contact with. As a result, such sources might be distorted, incomplete, or otherwise create false impressions, being as they are taken from multiple contacts over the course of over a century, across a wide region. However, they do give us a coherent picture of the Reach Folk, no matter how obscured or incomplete it may be.
The Reach Folk are primarily divided into two groups: those who dwell atop and within the hills, and those who dwell along the banks of the rivers.
From what is understood to me, the Hill-dwellers settle in the highest of the hills. There, they dig pits and cover them with sod to shelter themselves from the elements. They sustain themselves mostly from the raising of sheep, and the village claims all it can survey from the top of its hill as the rightful pasture land for its herds. The Hill-dwellers have no kings or lords or officials. Instead, all decisions are taken in common, with the owner of each herd having a say when the village meets at the beginning of each month to decide how things should be done. These votes are not even, for at the beginning of each month, each herd-owner must provide or pledge to provide a certain number of animals from their herd, to be butchered to provide common meat for those without herds and common wool and hides for trade and those who require it. The greater the number of animals pledged, the greater the weight of a given herd-owner’s vote in the subsequent deliberations.
Aside from the meat and milk from their herds, the Hill-dwellers also grow plots of root vegetables during the warmest season of the year when such things are possible. These vegetables they harvest and store in the deepest parts of their homes, where they are able to resist decay the longest period of time. The growing plots are manured with the droppings of the herds and the people alike, but even with such efforts, the land is so poor that it is common for a household to share the eating of maybe only a single onion in the course of two or three days.
Lacking a central authority, the villages of the Hill-dwellers are in a constant state of war with one another, although rarely to the degree which we consider normal for warfare in the Empire. Young members of a village who lack animals of their own will often conduct night raids on the herds of a rival village to steal some animals with which to form the foundations of their own herds. Likewise, brawls between villages are common in regards to the possession of a given hillock, especially one which is within view of multiple villages. These combats often have more the character of games or contests than battles, with injuries being common but deaths being very rare. The Hill-dwellers do not hold grudges over these contests, for the great frequency of these “battles” mean that a hillock lost may be regained in a month or two once the wounded have healed sufficiently to contest ownership once again.
However, this does not mean that the Hill-dwellers take no defensive measures. Most villages will possess a strong fence or terrace wall made of sod and fieldstone around its dwellings, with space enough for all the herds of the village folk to be drawn inside in case a hostile raid is discovered. Likewise, most villages also possess a great mound in its centre, upon which sits a tower of stone, or very rarely, wood, from which a village might not only see attacks approaching, but might also be used to survey – and thus claim – greater amounts of grazing land.
River-dwellers differ from Hill-dwellers primarily due to their choice of habitation. Instead of living atop hills, they live by the banks of rivers, near natural fords, or river bends which lead to the formation of lakes, marshes, or other bodies of water which might be made more calm than the typical fast-moving current of the Reach’s rivers. These settlements will often further improve the natural features of the waterway by excavating fish ponds, or protected harbours from which boats of sizes ranging from single-person craft to large vessels nearly equal in size to the smaller variety of sea-going galley might be built.
These boats make for curious sights, for although some small stands of trees exist in the Reach, especially along the deepest of the river valleys, such material remains exceptionally rare and valuable, to the degree that only those villages which live the closest to those meagre forests which exist might even consider building their watercraft entirely out of wood. In most cases, wood is used for keels and frames only, with the rest being filled in with reeds or oiled hides. As a result, these craft tend to be rather shallower and more fragile than those which might be found in the Concordat or the Khazari territories, and those who crew them very rarely stray too far from the waters around their settlements.
As for the settlements themselves, these are of a rather different character than those of the Hill-dwellers. Rather than being dug into the ground, they are raised on embankments of sod and stone, to keep them safe from flooding. The walls too are made from stone, with the use of sod and reeds reserved primarily for roofs. The one exception is the centre of each settlement, a building made entirely of stone, which houses at all times a great fire used to dry and smoke the fish caught by the fishermen. This too is the political centre of each village, for every year, a person among them is chosen whose sole duty is to keep the fire in this stone house fed and burning. They are required to watch the fire at all times, and as a result, is fed and clothed by the donations of the village, and possesses the power to demand a certain amount of fuel as a sort of tax. The importance of this role comes from the fact that the fish which the River-dwellers rely upon for sustenance would otherwise rot quickly in the cold and wet conditions of the Reach, thus making the preservation of such harvested fish to be of utmost importance.
Because the River-Dwellers do not make regular contact with other villages along the river, and do not require the use of pastures as the Hill-dwellers do, River-dweller villages very rarely go to war with other settlements. Indeed, it is very common for Hill-dwellers and River-dwellers to engage in regular trade with one another. The hides which almost all Reach Folk wear are made from the skins of Hill-dweller herds, but are treated with oil made from River-dweller fish to better keep out rain and wind. Fish too is often traded to the Hill-dwellers to help manure their fields, which grow root vegetables sometimes traded to the River-dwellers to supplement a diet which would otherwise be made almost entirely of fish, smoked or fresh.
This forms a picture of the way which the Reach Folk interact with one another, but it is only a rough one, of broad outlines and dim shapes. These accounts come second or third hand, and cannot be verified directly by anyone who might be subject to the rigours of formal scholarship. Thus, it must be said that it is entirely possible such accounts are nothing more than the fanciful tales of ferry-workers and merchants, to be left unconfirmed until the day they the Reach Folk themselves come south to correct the record.
Or until the day we come to them.
April 2024: The Most Depraved Sicko I’ve Ever Met Pt 1
Now. as I’m sure you’re all aware by now, I’ve run into some truly messed-up people over the years: bandit kings with daddy issues, torturers who got off on their work, the kinds of petty tyrants who have no joys in life except from making other people miserable, and so on. The sad truth is, the world is fully of those kinds of people, and the stuff they do only makes more of them. It’s a depressing cycle, one which adventurers like me aren’t really equipped to handle – except maybe through murder, which, obviously, also kinda causes problems along the way.
But you don’t want to hear stories about those kinds of people. Those kinds of people aren’t just evil or deranged, they’re boring. Every village has one, and every town has at least ten. Ask your friends if you don’t know who they are – and if you don’t have any friends to ask, maybe take a look in a still pool of water and wonder if that person’s you.
Anyway, as I was saying, those kinds of evil people are boring, staid, common as rocks on a stream bed. No, you’re not here to listen to stories about those losers. You all know those losers. You’re here to listen about the kinds of messed up people who are messed up in ways beyond what’s normal, the ones who shine as exemplars of what dysfunctional upbringings, personal trauma, and a broken moral compass – wait, do you know what a compass is? It’s this Islander device which, never mind, it points at things all the time, that’s what’s important.
ANYWAY, like I was saying. You’re here for the really unhinged shit, and I, Mundy of Bridgeport, am always happy to oblige a promptly paying employer.
Buy me a drink, and let me tell you the story of the most depraved sicko I have ever met.
So no shit, there I was, doing an extended tour of the city of Amberhelm, seeing the sights, and doing my duty to my fellow adventurers by rating each of the city’s alehouses by a complex and comprehensive measurement system involving atmosphere, pricing, how much they watered down their house brew, and how much force they used when they threw you out the door. I was only about six in when I overheard a bunch of peasants from the hinterlands sharing some rather interesting rumours. Apparently, the new baron of this place up north was generating all kinds of messed-up stories: he was weird, not just by nobility standards, and not just by Amberhelm standards, but by Amberhelm nobility standards, which is real Court-damned worrying.
For those of you who’ve never gone that far north: congratulations, you’ve never known what it’s like for the weather to be too cold to bathe for three months at a stretch, I envy you – and at that point back there, I would have envied you even more. I also owe you kind of an explanation. You see, back when Amberhelm was the biggest of the old kingdoms, it lorded over the other coastal realms and sucked all the wealth from the Island trade into itself. It built a whole bunch of grand castles and monuments and that huge ugly sanctuary you might have heard of. Then the Flowering Court went and fucked off and suddenly all the other coastal realms had a lot more useful land than Amberhelm did. Worse, their own Prince decided to create a whole new capital further south, which was great for almost everyone else – but not for Amberhelm.
The end result was that Amberhelm was a big expensive city full of big expensive public buildings and nowhere near enough money to keep them maintained. Every Prince of Amberhelm since has been up to their ears in debt to the Lumberers and Carpenters, which is part of the reason why they have so much Court-damned power up there. To pay these debts – or at least the interest on these depts, the Princes and Princesses of Amberhelm sell off bits and pieces of their demense to anyone who can afford them. The only reason they can do that is because under Amberhelm law, any noble house which dies without an heir has their property revert to the Principality.
The current Princess put an end to that. I have no idea where she gets money from now, I think she’s just stopped paying the guilds altogether. In any case, this was decades ago, before our girl Aoife was a lecherous glint in the troubadour’s eye – no you can’t ask how old I am, stop that.
So, in any case, apparently one of these recently vacated baronies got sold to some strange foreigner from who-knows where, and he was doing stuff that even Amberhelmer peasants were muttering about with terrified looks and hushed whispers. To say that I was interested in getting a look at this weirdo for myself would be something of an understatement.
A bit more questioning – and a bit of sobering up – pointed me in the direction of the Barony of Helmcrest, an unimaginatively named little parcel of land at the foot of the mountains which overlook the Amber Vale – that’s the big valley Amberhelm is in, for those of you who can’t read a map, or can’t read. Everything I’d heard about it before implied that it was a pretty poor place, the soil wasn’t much good and the mines which used to sustain the whole region had run dry or been replaced with richer ones further inland generations ago. That only left stonecutting, which wasn’t much in demand, and forestry, which was – naturally – in the iron grip of the Lumberers and Carpenters.
As I got closer to the village though, things got really weird. I could still see signs of poverty around: the fields weren’t being tended, a lot of the outlying homesteads were pretty much abandoned, I certainly didn’t see many people going the same direction I was. But at the same time, there were other signs of the exact opposite. The buildings which were still inhabited looked newly white-washed and well-maintained. The village square had all kinds of goods on sale which I’d never seen before, and the roads, Holy Court, the ROADS! Not only were they well maintained with well-dug drainage ditches and wide lanes, they were paved – but not with flagstones. They were covered in a sort of dark gravel which was stuck to the bed with some kind of magic which I’d never seen. Not until I’d visit the Nizam-i Khazar would I walk on roads so smooth, and even then only in the centre of the biggest cities, not here in this backwater village in the arse end of nowhere.
And it wasn’t hard to see why those roads stayed so smooth either – because none of the locals dared set foot on them. More than that, they seemed terrified of their own shadows, peering fearfully around corners, and nervously eyeing the ground as I passed by. That was really weird. Usually, when a village gets a sudden upturn in prosperity, everyone’s cheery and blustery, like they’d taken on the world and won. Not here. Here, they were frightened, and given the architectural monstrosity that loomed over them, it wasn’t hard to see why.
Castle Helmcrest had probably been a normal keep once. I could still see the square shape of its stone gatehouse and its curtain walls peeking through here and there. But apparently, whoever owned it now hadn’t liked that very much. Quite frankly, it looked like someone had ripped off the whole top half of the place, and replaced it with these spiky stone towers and deeply steepled roofs. Honestly, the place looked like something halfway between a sanctuary and a Flowering Court ruin. Some of the walls seemed to be made of something other than stone, others seemed to outright shimmer in the sun. It was deeply unsettling, and this is me talking here, so you know it must have been something weirder than weird.
By that point, I was definitely looking to do some investigating. The strange roads, the looks of terror in the eyes of the locals, and now the castle’s unusual architecture had twigged me on to the fact that something was very clearly not right with this place. I had to snoop around a bit, ask some questions, maybe get someone drunk enough to get them to explain to me what was actually going on here. However, before I could even cross the village square, someone else made the first move: a bird dove out of the sky and landed right in front of me. It had a thin strip of… well it wasn’t quite parchment, but it wasn’t rag either. It was some other kind of thing which I’d never seen before.
And it had a message on it: apparently, my arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed, and the Baron Maximilian of Helmcrest had invited me, famed adventurer that I was, to dine with him up in the castle.
Little did I know that I’d just been invited to sit down to dinner with the most depraved sicko I would ever meet.
May 2024: The Most Depraved Sicko I’ve Ever Met Pt 2
“Mundy, you motherless imbecile”, you’re probably saying, “are you just going to go to dinner with a mysterious and sinister nobleman without precautions just because he asked you to?”
First of all, I did, in fact, have a mother, and I bet if she was still alive, she would be absolutely appalled at being written out of my life’s story.
And second of all, I’m not an imbecile, of course I took precautions. That was why about three or four hours before I was supposed to show up for dinner, I snuck out of my Inn room, slid into the bushes, and decided to do a little scouting work.
So no shit, there I was, clambering around Castle Helmcrest’s dry moat, trying to find out which part of the castle I wanted to investigate first. Normally, I’d pick out the weirdest or most off-putting part of the place, and take a closer look, but to be honest, the whole thing was off-putting. There were walls where there weren’t supposed to be walls, towers where there weren’t supposed to be towers, and weirdest of all, there was a whole-arse section of the outer curtain wall which had been ripped away, along with a whole part of one of the big corner towers, to be replaced with what honestly looked at a distance like a tent made of some kind of shimmering material.
After some thought, I figured that was where I had to go. The other places were weird, but they were normal weird, the kind of weird even a boring normal person understands once they stare at a bit. The weird of normal stone and wood in un-normal places. This other part? This was weird-weird, the kind of thing you don’t even expect to exist, let alone be built into a castle.
It wasn’t easy getting there. The moat was especially deep. Frankly, I’m just glad that it was dry – at least until I realised how weird that was too. Normally, the cesspits of the castle would empty into that sort of thing, which was why you’d fill the ditch with water to flush it out. The last thing most nobles want is to live surrounded by the smell of floating shit – it probably reminds them that they’re not all that different from the people they rule over. Here, however, the moat was dry, and what was even more unsettling, there was no smell of waste at all, which meant that either the cesspits were emptied some other way, or they weren’t emptied at all.
Suddenly, I was growing very worried at the thought of how the inside of the castle probably smelled.
But that didn’t stop me. I’d faced worse prospects than the possibility of bad smells, even then. I scaled up the side of the moat, and got close enough to take a better look at that weird crystalline structure jutting out of the castle.
It was made almost entirely of glass.
Now, I know what you’re all thinking. “The Great Mundy of Bridgeport got cold feet because of a few panes of glass? Clearly they’re not a tenth the adventurer everyone says they are, what a loser! What a rube! What an idiot!” First of all, you’d be surprised how many people have never seen glass in their lives before. It’s a pretty rare thing outside of the walled towns. Second of all, I’m not talking about cut crystal, or those little panes you see on windows held together with lead strips. I’m talking huge sheets of the stuff, as flat and smooth as if it had been copper worked over by a smith. There was no frosting, no distortion, I could see right through them. No glassblower made this stuff, especially since the panes themselves were so big, I doubted a glassblower would have had the lung capacity. No, this was something entirely different, almost definitely magickal – but nothing like any spellcasting I knew about, not even from the Flowering Court.
And that wasn’t even the most unsettling part. The most unsettling part was what I saw inside.
If you owned a castle with a big magical glass tower in it, what would you do? “Sit in the sun without having to worry about birds shitting on you”, I can hear some of you say. “Raise statues and tapestries which everyone could see without having to worry about them being damaged”, another good answer. Oh yes, the classic “It won’t matter because anyone who does that is a powerful wizard and doesn’t give a damn about what other people want”, true, I’ve run into that lot before.
But Baron Maximilian of Helmcrest wasn’t doing any of those things. He was using the bloody thing to grow crops.
I am not kidding, the blasted thing didn’t even have a floor. It was just tilled earth from one glass wall to the other. What was even more unsettling was that they weren’t growing a garden of rare flowers or anything, but crops – proper crops, rows upon rows of some kind of tree, enough to probably feed a small village by itself – or so I thought until I took a closer look at them.
See, they looked like fruit trees, these plants. They were about the height of a grown person, but the leaves were broad and green, and the fruits hanging off of them were these great bulbous orbs of yellow and red. At first, I thought they were apples – but no, apples don’t grow that big until the tree is fully grown. Then I thought, maybe some sort of melon – but no, they were too bright and fleshy looking for that.
No, there was only one kind of plant with fruits like that: nightshade.
So there I was, having just learned that I was about to go have dinner with a guy who grew poison on an industrial scale. Not exactly the most reassuring thing, for sure.
But I didn’t get the reputation I have by running from the first hint of danger. No, I ran towards these kinds of threats, not away from them – and I’d be doing it prepared. I might not have been a coward, but I wasn’t a motherless imbecile either – as we’ve already established.
So, when it came time for my dinner with the Baron, I went in with every precaution: two hidden daggers, a maille shirt under my tunic, a few charges of blackpowder in case I needed to start a fire or something, and a dose of antitoxin which I had been assured would deal with any poison, assuming I didn’t ingest too much of it. Of course, I wasn’t entirely sure about that one. My plan was to carefully avoid eating anything that might have been poisoned at all, but you never know in situations like this, so I didn’t take half measures. I took every preparation I could, no matter how helpful or unhelpful they might be.
Unfortunately, they weren’t enough.
I should have known something was off the second I came through the gates.
First of all, there were no guards, like at all. Not even to watch the portcullis. For a second, I wondered if the Baron had some kind of magickal security system watching me. But as I went into the main hall, I noticed something else.
There weren’t any servants either.
Now, most nobles like to be waited on hand and foot, which means that they need servants near them at any given time, so they can call from any point of their gigantic over-built homes and get help lacing their shoes or wiping their arses or chewing their food. That means usually, in castles like this, there are servants in every hallway, every room, tidying up after their pampered overlords if nothing else. Here though? Nothing. It was as if the castle had no staff at all – which was impossible, a place this big needed more than one person to keep clean, and I’d bet gold that the Baron wasn’t sullying his own hands with any of that work.
So where were the servants? Also, why was the edge of my vision shimmering? I recalled right about then that the guy who sold me this antitoxin stuff back in Amberhelm warned me about side-effects, hallucinations or something. At the time, I didn’t pay it much mind, I figured that if I was going to get poisoned, seeing things was going to be the least of my worries.
And in any case, I had places to be, things to do, and food to eat. So I blinked my vision clear (which seemed to work), kept my head up, and stepped into the great hall of Castle Helmcrest.
To have dinner with the most depraved sicko I’d ever meet.
June 2024: The Most Depraved Sicko I’ve Ever Met Pt 3
The funny thing about Maximilian of Helmcrest was how normal he looked at first glance, like, not even unassumingly so. He looked almost aggressively normal: thin, short brown hair, bit of a nose. I’d never seen him in person before, of course, and apparently he wasn’t the sort of megalomaniac to have a statue made of himself, so this came almost as a shock. Part of me expected him to be some sort of outlandish weirdo, completely decked out in human skin or with severed hands for a hat. The fact that he showed up dressed in what seemed like a completely normal doublet was something of a relief to me.
At least, at first.
As I stepped closer to the high table, I started noticing the parts that were off. His doublet wasn’t quilted, but it seemed more form-fitting than any I’d ever seen. His shoes too, were thick-soled, strange. His chin wasn’t quite clean-shaven, but it wasn’t bearded either, almost like it was intentionally kept at a day’s growth. He was young too, like, really young. I wouldn’t have put him at more than twenty-five, but I couldn’t see how that was possible. Nobody amasses that kind of wealth at that young an age without people knowing about it, and as far as I and the Princes of Amberhelm were concerned, the man had appeared out of thin air.
Then there were the eyes.
There was something really strange about his eyes. They weren’t different colours or anything, but they were sharp, piercing, almost as if they were made of glass, with the pupils painted on. The way he looked at everything as he slouched in his chair at the high table gave me the shivers – and as you probably know by now, it takes quite a bloody lot to scare me.
“Oh hey,” he began. “You got my invitation, nice. Sit down wherever.”
The way he spoke, maybe that was the weirdest thing of all. It was definitely some kind of accent, broad and almost bland in the way it stretched the vowels. At the same time, it didn’t have the… well…
Okay, nobles, right? They speak a certain way. Rich merchants too. Even some high-up guild muckity-mucks. They all carefully measure their words, cut them like precious silks, making sure that not a sound is wasted or misunderstood. Given that a misunderstanding between Dukes can – and has – started small wars, I don’t really blame them. Peasants have their own way of speaking too, but they tend to use short, simple words – not because they’re stupid or anything, but because the concepts they usually need are short and simple.
This guy? Baron Maximilian? He didn’t speak like either of them. His words seemed so lazy that they almost slurred together, but they were the kind of words nobles used, not peasants. It took me a moment to put two and two together: Baron Maximilian was already drunk.
Now, I’m not one of those people, as you may have already noticed. I’m not averse to a drink or five, but getting drunk at the high table before the food had even come out? That was strange. I couldn’t even say it was rude. Weirder yet, though the man spoke like he was drunk, he didn’t show any other signs of it. He moved and sat as if he were stone sober, and he didn’t even wobble as his servants came in with platters loaded down with… something.
“Dinner, my lord,” the servingman said as he set down the plates.
“Hey, thanks Jeff, you want some?”
The servingman looked at the Lord with wary eyes. I could see the fear in his face as he started to back away. “N-no, my lord.”
“Alright, later.”
Now that was interesting… and disturbing.
Now, I’m not against the idea of being a bit casual, even when it’s a master and a servant, but this was way beyond anything I’d ever seen. Under other circumstances, I’d almost say it was the way that an old married couple might speak to each other – only the obvious fear in the servingman’s eyes had more sinister implications. I’d only seen that combination of familiarity and fear in one sort of relationship, and trust me, it’s not the kind you want me to get into detail about.
That impression was reinforced the next moment when a procession of new servants brought in the place settings.
As it turns out, that single servingman? Jeff? He was the only servingman in the entire castle. The rest were women, attractive, young women dressed in some of the most garish and forward clothing I’d ever seen – not even like the clothes which Courtesans wear in the Island-Cities, something even stranger, like nothing I’d ever seen before. More than that, they seemed far more interesting in fawning over their lord than in putting the plates down, pawing and cooing at him like birds or animals. It was frankly embarrassing. No person would act like that of their own free will, I thought. What I saw in their eyes only confirmed it. They all had a glazed, contented look in them, like they were half-dreaming, half-drugged. It takes a lot to get me genuinely suspicious, but now, I was getting there.
And that’s when I looked down at the table.
What came looking up at me was the kind of thing I never want to see again, for on that plate was neither meat nor bread, but a mass of wriggling sickly-yellow worms glistening with some kind of greasy slime, all topped with an acrid-smelling sauce mixed with meat – what kind, I didn’t want to think about. I looked up in surprise just in time to see the Baron smiling at me from across the table.
“I’ve never met a real adventurer before, so I thought I’d get you something from where I come from.”
I nodded, trying my best to stay polite. I didn’t know if there was an arbalest pointed at the back of my head, but I thought it was probably best to be safe. Despite the horrifying look of the platter on the table, the smell was starting to grow on me – some kind of herbs I’d never smelled before. I was almost willing to give it a try. It couldn’t be as bad as it looked right?
Only problem was, I had no idea how. I didn’t want to risk touching it with my bare fingers, and there was no way a spoon was going to be useful there. Instead, I waited for the Baron’s lead, maybe he would show me?
He did, to my immediate regret.
The instrument he picked up was a long metal device, its end filled with sharp prongs.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Mundy, you idiot, don’t tell me you’ve never seen a fork before?’ Of course I’ve seen a fork before. But this was no fork. No, instead of two prongs, this thing seemed to have a dozen, all of them tightly spaced. This wasn’t a tool intended to pick up meat, this was like a torture implement, intended to be stabbed into a body to cause as much pain and bleeding as possible.
The Baron stabbed the implement into the writhing mass of worms and twisted it, as if it were a knife. The worms slithered and curled. I swear I could hear them screaming. He couldn’t though, not by the way he ate, slurping the writhing mass into his mouth with obscene sucking sounds. For a moment, he didn’t even seem to notice me at all. He just kept sucking up the mass in front of him like a primordial beast, the chunks of red sauce falling away as he devoured bite after bite.
Red.
That’s when it all came together for me: the submissive serving women, the fragrant horror on my plate, the fear in the servingman’s eyes – and most of all, the row upon row of nightshade plants under the glass house.
See, one of the effects of nightshade they don’t tell you about – usually because people who take it don’t survive – is that it messes with your head in lower doses. It screws with your perceptions, especially your judgement. It’s like getting drunk except you die at the end. I was pretty certain by that point that the poisonfruits the Baron was growing in that big glass tower had the same kind of effect.
And that red sauce he was eating? The herbs might have hidden the smell, and he might have made it less obvious by mashing it up, but that sauce was almost entirely made of those poison fruits.
So that’s what it was: the Baron was growing these poisonfruits, hiding them in food, feeding them to people, and turning them into his thralls for… well, let’s just say there’s a reason he eventually became known as “Maximilian the Lewd”. And as for those thralls? I was probably one bite away from joining them. I didn’t know if the antivenom I took would work against whatever this stuff was. As far as I knew, it was some kind of unique poison. I wasn’t going to take the chance.
“Hey, you okay? You look a bit sick.”
I looked up to find the Baron leering at me. His suspicions were raised.
“I uh, I need to…” Fuck, I was on the spot there, and I needed something to deflect attention. Unfortunately, that antivenom was still messing with me too, and I was nowhere near as cool under stress as I should have been. “I need to wash my hands!”
It was the most utterly inane excuse, an obvious deflection, but the Baron simply nodded. “Oh yeah, you should have done that before we started eating. Weird how nobody else here does that.”
Part of me wanted to ask further, to figure out what he meant by that. The other part of me wasn’t about to light a rush and stick it down a gift horse’s mouth. No, I had my opening, I was taking it.
So, I got up, walked out of the great hall, out of the courtyard, out of the castle, and then I started running, as fast as I could.
I didn’t stop until I was halfway to Amberhelm.
About a year later, an angry mob stormed Castle Helmcrest, after hearing rumours about half the shit that went on up there – some of it had been stuff I’d been warning people about. Other stuff? I guess they might have made that up themselves. The upshot was that the castle was burned to the ground and the Baron driven out. Nobody died in the flames, thankfully, but the poor people the Baron enthralled seemed to insist on following him, even after any hold should have been broken and the groves of poisonfruits were burned. They even spoke on his behalf before the Prince of Amberhelm, which was how he got himself a second barony at Aldersrill by way of compensation.
But I’m sure you’ve already heard that story.
As for this one, there isn’t much more than that. You might not think that it was all that heroic to run away instead od slaying the unhinged evil mind-controlling Baron, and maybe that antivenom had something to do with that. But at the time, at that moment, I just felt lucky enough to escape unscathed.
I was just happy to evade the clutches of the most depraved sicko I’d ever met.
July 2024: Architecture of the Concordat
The fundamental principle of architecture is to build with what is available. This does not just apply to the obvious matter of building material, but also to matters of labour, skill, and even the quality of the ground.
This becomes particularly noticeable in the Concordat, a land which possesses high-quality building material in great abundance: the forests are filled with excellent timber. Hillocks and river basins make for common sources of strong building stone, and good iron is available in limited quantities throughout the region – with great quantities of the highest quality metal relatively common thanks to relatively close proximity of the Iron Marches. However, there are other differences to consider – notably, the human factor.
The Concordat is a land which has been long considered a backwater by its neighbours, and often for good reason. There are none of the great sprawling cities of the Khazari, or the highly developed infrastructure of the Korilandine Empire, or even the ability to ship great amounts of material by sea as is done in the Island-Cities. By comparison, the Concordat’s cities are small, its roads and rural areas are wild and underdeveloped, and its ability to transport by water is limited along the coast, and nearly non-existent inland save for the rare naturally navigable rivers such as those which allow the city of Kendrickstone to prosper. As a result, the vast majority of the Concordat’s people – those who live in the hinterlands as farmers or herders or cottage-crafters – lack the tools, the skilled crafters, the machinery, or even the number of hands necessary to raise impressive edifices.
Another important resource which the builders of the Concordat often lack is suitable ground in suitable quantity. During the time of the Flowering Court, the inland regions were the sole preserve of those people, and those who lived along the coast – the ancestors of the Concordat’s current inhabitants – possessed little space to build. What flat ground was allowed them was often given over to farming or pasturage, which meant that only the most marginal land was given over to building – usually land close to natural harbours and beaches, where the inhabitants could more easily ply the seas for fish.
This tradition stood the descendants of these people in good stead following the disappearance of the Flowering Court, for although the land which was once off-limits to them was now theirs to settle, it remained heavily overgrown, not only with the ruins of their predecessors, but with the feral and often dangerous remnants of their magic. Thus, the inland settlements of the early Concordat were not so much built as they were carved out of the forests – hollowed out of the vast green expanses to provide enough space for cottages, barns, storehouses; and eventually fields.
These buildings were, naturally, built out of the byproduct of this “carving”: wood features prominently in Concordat rural architecture. The first buildings erected by the settlers of a given village were often made entirely out of the heavy logs of felled trees, filled in with the branches of those same trees – and sometimes even founded upon the massive trunk of a particularly large tree, hollowed out by fire to create a low chamber which is effectively entirely made of a single piece of wood. As these settlements grew, however, such practises became less and less common. Larger families and demands for greater interior space meant that “stump huts” which might have served the purposes of one or two homesteaders could not be so easily used by an extended family and their livestock. Likewise, many of these stumps were inconveniently placed – amid swathes of flat and fertile land better suited for farming. As a result, many of these structures have been razed and uprooted over the years, though ever so often, a traveller may see an example of such a building, though its outsides may be covered with daub and whitewashed so that it might resemble a more modern construction.
This reflects a similar change in overall architecture in the rural areas of the Concordat as well. As the first settlements began to clear their hinterlands and old-growth forest gave way to fields and pastures, the availability of building materials also changed. Heavy timber became increasingly difficult to haul increasingly long distances to the centres of villages, while clay, manure, and straw became increasingly available. As a result, newer, larger houses still used heavy timbers for frames, but now relied on field stone – usually dug up from field clearing – for foundations and flooring, while wattle-and-daub walls and thatched roofs provided superior insulation made of materials more easily replaced than timbers which could take decades if not centuries to replenish.
A similar progression might be seen in the construction of the various keeps and fortresses of the inland Concordat. Initially, many of these buildings were simply residences and storehouses for the small parties of adventurers who led the way in clearing the wilds. Usually built upon large rocky promontories or other natural high vantage points, they initially took on a highly makeshift nature, with buildings constructed of whatever was available on short notice and capable of being thrown together by relatively small groups. The resulting constructions were short-term, often fragile, and usually temporary, made up of branches, small logs, even canvas and brush.
Naturally, as these adventurers established themselves as permanent residents, these constructions became more permanent as well. A wooden tower would often be the first serious building erected, made of the same sort of local heavy timber which other settlers would use. This would allow the inhabitants an even greater vantage point, allowing for earlier detection of threats and greater visibility. Some towers would incorporate a beacon fire as well, though naturally such devices proved unsafe when placed atop wooden towers. As a result, these towers were often quickly converted to rammed earth, or stone construction.
The use of rammed earth becomes common as a construction method as the initial towers began to expand into small fortresses, complete with outbuildings and barracks. Being cheaper than pure constructions of stone and wood – and taking advantage of the greater availability of labour resulting from increasing levels of settlement – soil would be piled behind a wooden or stone retaining wall, effectively expanding the often cramped space atop the natural promontory which the initial tower was built upon. In addition, these constructions would also create a vertical defence surrounding nearly the entire perimeter of the fortification, and serve as a base for further defences – usually some form of low palisade.
As these fortresses began to grow in prominence, they became the nucleus of greater settlements, those we now refer to as castle-towns. This meant an increasing supply of labour and materials, as well as an increase in the wealth now available to use for the import of more exotic materials and the hiring of guilded crafters. These new resources were needed, as with greater levels of settlement came a greater sort of threat. No longer were these nascent castles frontier fortresses intended to keep away wild animals and the occasional brigand through the use of early warning and elevation. Now they were expected to hold off besieging forces of well-equipped soldiers led by professional Knights and Servants-at-Arms, often equipped with siege equipment. Against such threats, palisades and ramparts were insufficient. High curtain walls made of stone were raised to improve upon the natural advantages of height. Ditches were dug around those walls to do the same. The wooden towers were now uniformly replaced with stone, built not only to elevate beacons and shelter inhabitants from the elements, but from trebuchet stones and battle mages too.
From this comes the basic shape of the stone castles which we see today: thick curtain walls to ward off the projectiles of siege engines, crenellations to protect defenders on the parapets, moats and ramparts to render those defences even more imposing, towers which project from those walls in ways which allow defenders to catch attackers in crossfire while remaining themselves protected. These fortified positions allow for only a dozen or two defenders to hold off entire armies for weeks or months at a time, provided they are well-stocked with provisions – and as the small garrison necessarily consumes less than the much larger force needed to take a castle, more sieges are ended through the starvation of the attacker than the defender.
Of course, some of these castles are larger than others, even now. Those which have been built on relatively minor vantage points or regions which have since become backwaters do not exceed the bounds which were set for them by their first founders two centuries ago. In the meantime, other castles – ones which find themselves in positions of great import – have become the citadels of large towns and cities, which themselves concentrate the needed labour, materials, and skilled crafters needed to create the sort of architecture which serves as the state of the art within the lands of the Concordat.
August 2024: Accounts of the Flowering Court
Cyril and the Weeping Tree
(A folk tale from the time before the disappearance of the Flowering Court)
Cyril was a woodcutter in a village by the coast, at a time when all humans lived by the coast. His father and mother had been woodcutters before him, and as he grew, they taught him their trade: how to cut trees down, strip them bare, and chop them into billets. How to turn those billets into the firewood which the village relied upon to stay warm during the stormy days of summer and the great snows of winter. They taught him of the types of driftwoods, of the young trees which grew by the shore, and the woody shrubs which cluster at the base of the great bluff which separated shore from the deep forests within.
“But beware the wood of those forests, they are not for you,” warned Cyril’s father. “They are the domain of the Court of Flowers, and they will not answer well to intrusion on their lands.”
At first, Cyril heeded these warnings, and never cut any tree which grew atop the bluff, no matter how sturdy they seemed, no matter how rich their wood or how tall they grew. At times, he would think about how much wood just one of those mighty oaks would provide. At times, he wondered as to who this Court of Flowers was, for he never saw anyone within those woods, even when he wandered close to them.
Years passed, and so did Cyril’s parents. It was he who stood as the eldest woodcutter of the village now, and still he continued to cut only the trees which grew along the shore – and still his eyes wandered towards the great forest.
One year, the storms were particularly harsh, and the trees along the shore were ripped away, leaving little left for firewood. In desperation, Cyril began cutting to the very edge of the bluff, and when that proved insufficient, he at last took an axe to one of the great oaks of the forest.
“Cease!”
A face appeared out of the tree’s trunk, just before the axe blow fell.
“This tree is under the protection of the Flowering Court,” it cried out, in a low voice, like wind through holed pots. “Persist and there will be the gravest consequences.”
For a moment, Cyril paused. He looked to see where the voice came from. But he saw no others in the woods around him, only this face in this tree, which now stood still.
He raised his axe again.
“Cease this destructive behaviour at once!”
Again, Cyril looked, again he found nothing. This time, when he raised his axe, he brought it down on the tree, iron biting deep into bark and wood.
“There will be no further warnings,” the voice screamed with what sounded like desperation, as rivulets of sap flowed from its eyes. “Persist and there will be the gravest consequences!”
But Cyril was no longer listening. His axe bit deeper into the oaken trunk, obliterating the weeping face, and bringing down the mighty tree. No consequences came, the forest remained still, and quiet save for the chirping of birds and the thump of Cyril’s axe.
The great wooden bulk of the felled oak produced enough firewood to feed the village’s hearths for a year.
But that night, as the village slept, the forest awoke. Tendrils of ivy as strong as iron reached out over the bluff to the village below. They tore at the stones upon which the people of the village had built their homes. They snapped beams like twigs and crushed bedrock like hazelnuts. All this it did in the time of a single long breath.
By the time the sun rose, there was only water and broken stone where people once lived – and of Cyril, his family, and his entire village, nothing remained at all.
The Complaint of Maestro Lorenzo di Montelarra
(The fragment of a response to an academic paper by one Maestra Ludovica di Tomasina, of Isonza.)
-most ridiculous and most far-fetched of all is this account by Maestra di Tomasina, a fiction which would make for comedy were it not presented as scholarly truth.
It is well known that the existence of this supposed ‘Flowering Court’ is nothing more than a pious fiction by the inhabitants of the coastlands, to explain their cowardice and lack of preparedness in taming the inland forests of their country. A sufficiently equipped and armed party could just as like easily penetrate these territories to demonstrate that there is nothing to fear within them. However, the lack of any useful resources within these territories, and the fact that any land which might be gained from them must be painstakingly cleared of old growth has made such an enterprise impractical. Those alone are the reasons from the lack of inhabitation in the region, not the presence of some greatly-advanced race of creatures living amongst its trees, as the coastal folk – and Maestra di Tomasina claim.
Yet it is not enough that she merely advance this fanciful folk-tale as truth. She proceeds to compound this folly by claiming to have visited this Flowering Court, to seen its edifices and to render accounts as to how its denizens live and speak with one another. These supposed accounts would be laughable alone for the fact that they are obvious falsehoods, but the nature of them only renders them doubly incredible.
Perhaps, if Maestra di Tomasina had restricted her descriptions to something more akin to reality, the plausibility of her reports might be subject to more serious attention, but instead, she has chosen to present the most fanciful fabrications as fact. What scholar sound in mind could take her accounts of cities in the tree tops, built from stone which ‘is made to flow like water amidst and into the great branches’ as anything more than impossibility? Who amongst us could at any measure consider her descriptions of the individuals who supposedly inhabit these tree-cities – with their faces obscured and partially made up of brass, with their machinery animated by magical spirits, with their elongated physiognomies and disproportionate sizes – as anything other than falsehood intended to create sensation and draw attention from the uneducated quarters of society?
Surely, any charlatan capable of making such claims is unsuited to wear the robes of a scholar of this society. Thus, I would move that…
East Beyond the Mountains
(A Khazari poem, believed to be at least four centuries old.)
East beyond the mountains, beneath the rising sky,
the kingdom of the forests, in oaken founding lies.
Stone and iron intertwined amongst the lapis leaves,
cities of the forest-folk rise amidst the trees.
There the crafters work their trade with lightning and with fire,
to wright with bright brass and flesh the beasts that never tire.
There the scholars labour on without food or breath,
to know the secrets of the world, the ways of life and death.
This place it has no hunger, no poverty or waste,
where every one knows their task, and glories in their place.
Between all their many number, no dispute is heard,
their quarrels settle silently, with nary a single word.
But no army, fleet or party, with this land easily find,
with mountains high and cliffside sharp are its frontiers lined.
The trees defend its denizens, with trunks iron-hard,
with viny hedge and wooded walls and thorns many-starred.
East beyond the mountains, beneath the rising sun,
the kingdom of the forests, woods entwined as one.
A land enwrapped in shadow, amidst the lapis leaves,
the greatest of all empires, proud amongst the trees.
September 2024: Creeds and Cults Pt 3
Those who live under the impression that the Concordat exists under the uniform and complete dominance of the Orthodox Creed of the Divine Court might be shocked to learn just how lightly and how patchily this orthodoxy rests upon the land between the mountains and the Ocean Sea. The way in which worship of the Divine Court is organised already lends itself to a decentralised structure, with the minutiae of worship and doctrine often determined by the High Arbiters of each individual Grand Sanctuary, and from there disseminated to satellite Sanctuaries, to be interpreted by Lower Arbiters, Justiciars, and Watchers.
Furthermore, while Orthodoxy reigns more or less uncontested in close proximity to the great centres of worship in cities and towns, this is far less the case in the countryside, where the majority of folk live. While it could be said that perhaps eight out of ten residents of a large town may be within the bounds of Orthodoxy as it is defined by their local Arbiters, the same could not be said for the countryside, or even walled towns out on the frontier, where such proportions may in fact be as low as four out of ten.
This does not mean that the countryside is overrun with packs of dangerous cultists. The fact that the worship of the Divine Court is not for everyone – and not interpreted the same way for everyone – is something which the High Arbiters are well aware of. Although they believe that those not in Orthodoxy or not in conformity with conventional worship do not devote themselves as efficiently or as effectively as those who are, they bear no ill-feeling towards these folk, nor will they seek to persecute those who worship in different ways, so long as they are not seen as inflicting harm on the community which hosts them.
As a result, of the four categories of “Unorthodoxy” which the High Arbiters recognise, only one is considered dangerous. The others are merely accounted as local eccentricities, or even local variants of worship which are still seen as within Orthodoxy, and thus receive some degree of official sanction within the region which plays host to them.
These so-called “Variant Creeds” are differentiated often only by minor changes in ritual and ceremony: festivals and events held indoors instead of outdoors, the use of different materials for various objects and focuses. Most commonly of all are variations in the donations expected of those receiving healing or other services. Instead of coin, donations of produce, herbs, even certain types of stone are allowed for instead, most commonly in areas far from walled towns or major trade routes, when the availability of silver – and especially gold – coinage is rare even among more prosperous households.
Likewise, most Variant Creeds are almost always the result of practical concerns: the use of available materials instead of ones ordained by Orthodoxy which might not be so readily at hand, or the adaptation of rituals for different climates and conditions. In almost all cases, they are tolerated by the High Arbiters, if not considered practically within the borders of Orthodoxy, predicated on the very Orthodox understanding that the Divine Court judges the intention of actions rather than the consequence – and that as a result, any honest devotion is ultimately legitimate in nature.
Of course, the fact that Variant Creeds are almost always by nature restricted to relatively limited areas of the countryside also eases matters, as they are very unlikely to interfere with worship in towns and cities, or the local customs of other areas.
Similarly regional are the so-called “Hero-Cults”, which exist in addition to Orthodox (or heterodox) worship of the Divine Court, rather than altering it. These cults venerate the memory and deeds of singular individuals of particular significance in a given region’s past. In general terms, they see that individual as an embodiment of a human virtue, and believe that following death, the individual has been judged not only worthy of reward by the Divine Court, but so virtuous that they are indeed appointed to the Court themselves. Although these Hero-Cults are primarily also a rural phenomenon, some possess strong footholds in towns and cities – notably the Cult of Prince-Duke Malcolm the Negotiator in Amberhelm and its environs.
As with Variant Creeds, these Hero-Cults are generally accepted by the relevant authorities, mostly because they are seen as supplementing, rather than supplanting the established mode of Orthodox worship. As a result, local clergy commonly acknowledge, or even encourage the veneration of local heroes as members of the Divine Court – a body which of course, is said to be as unlimited in number as it is in power and wisdom – so long as it does not conflict with the existing tenets of Orthodoxy.
However, this does not mean Hero-Cults cause no trouble at all. Not all local heroes are seen as quite so heroic outside their homelands, and conflicts between rival Hero-Cults, or supporters of a Hero-Cult and its detractors are not entirely unheard of. While these disputes are usually settled with heated words or the occasional fist, there have been rare occasions in which matters have escalated to involve local nobility and their retinues. These cases, usually brought before the local High Arbiter, tend to be thorny ones, as to uphold the claim of one party often means deprecating or rendering heretical the faith of another. As a result, these disputes are most commonly settled with an uneasy sort of compromise, where the open practice of a Hero-Cult might be accepted or even officially encouraged in one village, while strongly discouraged or even outlawed the next one over.
Similar tensions arise from the third category: foreign merchants and arrivals, or the children and descendants of the same, who have retained the religion of their ancestral homeland. The Concordat enforces a common and broad policy of toleration for these individuals, allowing them to worship as they wish with the proviso that they do not, under any circumstances, enforce their own faith upon another, even their children. These conditions have been mostly accepted by those it affects, and there is little sign of any great number of “foreigners” who begrudge these restrictions.
Alas, the same cannot be said for many of those who live next to those of a foreign creed. While the people of the Concordat generally do not discriminate based on appearance, gender, or any outward characteristics, these matters become something more complicated when it comes to matters of faith. Religion, after all, is a matter of choice, and unlike the shape of a nose or the colour of skin, it also shapes the way its practitioners see the world in both subtle and obvious ways. These differences between faiths have led to friction in the past before, and although these matters are almost always settled peacefully – with the clergy of the Divine Court itself trusted as impartial mediators even by those who do not cleave to the Divine Court’s veneration – there remains a certain degree of distrust. Whether the grandchild of a traveller from the Korliandine Empire or the Island-Cities might be considered by their village or neighbourhood to be “one of them” might depend entirely on whether they have chosen the religion of their ancestors, or of their homeland.
So far, all of the groups defined have been benign in nature. Despite tensions and the occasional conflict, these systems of belief – foreign or homegrown – are fundamentally rooted in the veneration and the practice of the same virtues and values.
The same cannot be said of the last group.
Here are the truly dangerous systems of belief, the so-called “Malevolent Cults”.
These systems of belief are generally considered transgressive for two reasons: the first being that their rites require the destruction of human life or property. If a cult demands that its believers destroy the property of any other person without their consent – or worse, demand the sacrifice of human beings in their rites – then that cult is classed as Malevolent. Secondly, if a cult seeks to expand by converting others against their will or by calling for violence against those who do not believe as they do, that too is grounds to be declared Malevolent.
This sort of declaration is not one taken lightly, for there is no toleration here as there is for the other three types mentioned above. To declare a cult Malevolent is to present every believer with an ultimatum: either renounce the offending beliefs or be outlawed and placed outside the protection of any legal authority. Thus, this process is a highly involved one, requiring the unanimous agreement of all High Arbiters following an investigation into a cult’s practices and beliefs. Such a process can take months, or even years, especially as such cults tend to appear either deep in the frontiers, or within the highest circles of a city’s high society. Indeed, authorities have simply found it far more expedient to simply hire adventurers to seek out a suspected cult on false or disingenuous premises, using them much as the way an arbalest might throw a bolt. It is only after that projectile strikes home – and evidence of the Malevolent nature of the cult in question is gathered and presented – do things proceed formally.
Of course, there is a danger to this. Neither local authorities nor adventurers tend to be theologians, and it is dangerously easy for unfamiliar or unorthodox rituals to be misconstrued as dangerous ones, either by accident or intention. While most adventurers in such a situation will often feel morally bound to conclude their investigation honestly rather than victimise innocent members of a Hero-Cult or Variant Creed, there are those for whom the allure of plundering the possessions of others with official sanction proves too much to turn away from. Likewise, while most authorities ordering such investigations do so out of some honest desire to prevent the establishment of Malevolent Cults, others are less scrupulous, using the threat of such a danger as a pretense to target their enemies. While these instances are rare, they also occur more often than commonly believed, as neither the adventurers nor the authorities involved have any interest in revealing their true motivations in such an incident.
Even rarer are instances of the opposite: when adventurers find themselves duped or otherwise deceived into believing that a truly Malevolent Cult is in fact a benign one. However, despite the relative infrequency of such occurrences, the inevitable resulting scandal means that the story quickly grows more and more exaggerated in the telling and re-telling, until the commonly known version no longer resembles the truth. The result is a certain attitude amongst some individuals – especially adventurers – that Malevolent Cults are far better at hiding themselves than they actually are. This degree of paranoia has led to increased vigilance in some respects, but dangerous side-effects in others – particularly in the zealousness of adventuring parties convinced that the Concordat is riddled with evil cults, and that every other idiosyncratic or unfamiliar Variant Creed is in fact Malevolent.
A means to resolve this problem has been debated for years, if not decades. The clergy of the Divine Court have little control over the laws which they must judge, and adventurers are known to play fast and loose with law in general. Any attempt to regulate overzealous adventuring parties seeing Malevolent Cults in every shadow would necessarily prove difficult to enforce – and may in fact lead to circumstances which allow genuine harmful practices to persist.
As things are, the matter remains in dispute, leaving individual towns, villages, and adventuring parties to seek out the solutions they think best.
October 2024: A Vagrant’s Guide to Affordable Social Climbing
What is the difference between a peasant and a landed noble?
Ask the noble, and they will tell you that the difference is one of obligations: a noble must protect the land they administer, and have the right combination of skills, virtues, and loyalties. How these marvellous qualities are to be attained by sliding out of the right womb, no landed aristocrat has yet managed to explain to me.
Ask a peasant, and they will tell you that a noble is as different from a peasant as an oak to a shrub, that people are simply born in different worlds, and they should make the best of the place which they were made to inhabit. Of course, if you go up the family trees of most nobles, you will find a peasant somewhere up the line – I suppose that shrub must have had quite the talent for chatting up oak trees.
The truth is, the difference between a peasant and a landed noble is attitude: a willingness to take risks, to address as equals those who would style themselves your betters, and to be willing to accept that every person and thing has its price. Most of all, it is to remember above all that station is a lot like hair colour: you’re born with what you’re born with, but if you’re good enough at lying, nobody will ever know what that colour was.
So, where do we start?
Most ambitious youths off to go a-venturing do so with dreams in their eyes and the best weapon they can manage to improvise in their hands, off to make their names in the wilds or even the hinterlands of the more settled regions. Most of these poor idiots end up dead within the year. Understand first of all that although you may see the world as the backdrop to your story, you are not the hero of a ballad. If you are alone and without aid or experience, any little thing out there can kill you. Run into the wrong kind of rodent? Dead. Slip and fall down a ravine? Dead. Drink water from the wrong stream? Agonizing gut pain, spewing out of every conceivable orifice, headaches, delirium, then – you guessed it – dead, and a very smelly and undignified mess for whoever finds your body too.
So, you think, best to find some party or others who would be willing to take you along. Yes, that’s an excellent idea. There is no better place to learn how to fend for yourself than among those who have already managed to do so.
And with this in mind, you go to your local traveller’s inn, or tavern, or other such establishment, and try to sign on with those flashy vagabonds and free blades who seem to always be boasting about their exploits – true or exaggerated – in the corner of the common room. No, do not do this. This is a bad idea.
For you see, only two varieties of adventurers would openly brag about themselves in public. The first kind are those so callow and untested that they do not quite understand how the entire craft of adventuring works. They make up stories to make themselves look tougher and more competent than they are, usually in hopes of finding some paying work. Their braggadocio is intended to fool gullible employers, but they can fool gullible would-be novice adventurers as well. Sign on with such a group, and you will find little useful to learn, Instead, it is more likely that your own ignorance will compound that of your fellows, and instead of fame or fortune, you will all end up drinking from the wrong stream, with the result being that the site of your end will be even smellier and more undignified than if you had gone before the Divine Court alone.
The other type of adventurer who tells stories about themselves is the kind who has no need to brag. In fact, usually the stories they tell are less outlandish and more realistic than the ones which others tell about them. This is because their very name is all the advertisement they need. Mundy of Bridgeport does not need to exaggerate their deeds to attract work. Of course, Mundy of Bridgeport does not need some callow youth slowing them down either. You will survive asking to join them, but only because they will reject you out of hand – unless they are the more unscrupulous type, and in need of some poor patsy to carry their supplies, tend their campfire, and scout ahead for traps. That too, can lead to an ignominious end, but the stories which are told about such figures ought to be warning enough.
So instead, you must tread the middle road: those groups obviously equipped for rough travel and battle, but who do not go out of their way to advertise themselves. when such groups are competent and possess a good reputation, they have no need to pull the attention of employers, rather employers are likely to seek them out instead. Of course, such a group might not be “real” adventurers at all, but bandits, or the more unsavoury sort of mercenary, but there is no need to be too dismayed should you find yourself in such company. After all, the only real difference between a brigand and an adventurer is the time of death of those they are robbing – and the only difference between a mercenary and a brigand is often only the time of the week.
You may not like the party you sign up to work with, that’s fine. You don’t have to. In fact, it’d be easier if you didn’t. Your job isn’t to make friends, it’s to learn all you can about what it takes to stay alive, in battle, in the wilds, and amongst the arcane mysteries of the Flowering Court. Your main goal in all of this is to stay alive with the information that you’ve gathered safely in your head. Don’t worry about arguing for a share of the loot, because the most important treasure you get out of all of this isn’t gold, but experience.
See, adventuring is a craft, and like all crafts, those who work it are separated by the knowledge they possess. So long as you are in an apprenticeship, it is your goal to learn. Once you have learned all you can from one group, you make up some pretense to leave and find another. The second time will be easier than the first – after all, you’ve become a seasoned adventurer with multiple travels under your belt, you know the basics, and that will be respected among the kinds of people who will keep you alive more than any title or magic trinket. Once again, learn everything you can, and leave for another group, and so on and so on, until you can learn no more.
That’s when you make the jump from your apprenticeship to mastery.
Knowing when to begin as the leader of your own adventuring party is a lot like knowing when to jump from the top of a falling tree. Too early, and you’ll break your legs. Too late, and you’re just as likely to get crushed – though in this case by the passage of time rather than by a falling trunk. Strike out on your own without the reputation and experience you need, and you’ll get nowhere. Strike out too late and you might be successful, or you might find yourself too decrepit to even maintain a successful career, let alone enjoy any sort of retirement after. So, you must choose your moment well, although even at the fastest, this moment will often only come after years and years of working as a member of someone else’s party.
There are those who would think to put this book down now, believing that they have been swindled: adventuring was supposed to be an easy way to wealth and now here this author is telling you that it will take a lifetime of effort. What happened to the short and fortunate way? Well, that way exists, be assured – but it is narrow and perilous, retained on both sides by the corpses of those who have drunk from the wrong stream. This is the guide to the broad and even road – with just enough risk to turn a tidy profit, but not enough to render any likely traveller dead before they reach its destination.
But when to take the next step on that road? Well, that’s easy enough to figure out. Founding your own adventuring party tends to be the kind of thing that happens naturally. If you prove yourself experienced and able, others will latch on to you, trying to find their own mentors. Eventually, you’ll have enough of them capable of spending a day in the woods without tripping over a cliff to form your own party of venturers, to go out into the wilds to seek a fortune for yourself, rather than some other.
Now, you can turn your attention to your reputation.
Yes, yes, silver is important – and yes, you want your companions to trust you enough not to stab you in the back at the wrong moment, but reputation is how you get those things. Reputation is what gets you offers of work from those willing to pay your fees, it brings you people who think you’re a figure to be trusted with their lives. Get a reputation for competence and reliability, and the rest will follow.
It might be tempting to defy that adage at moments, especially ones where a betrayal could lead to a big payout. Don’t be so tempted. After all, should you make it to retire into the upper ranks of society, who will your peers be? The employer you might seek to betray. If you then need to have a problem solved when you’re old and grey and out of shape from roast geese and fine wine, who will you have to hire? The former fellow adventurers you might have once double-crossed. Reputation is an investment in the future as well as one in the present, never forget that.
But don’t grow too overly fond of your companions either. They too might be in a stage of their apprenticeship, seeking only to learn what they can before seeking out better opportunities. Don’t begrudge them that. Simply replace them with someone else. If you’ve been managing your reputation right, then you’ll be able to find a newcomer twice as skilled as the old without issue, provided you are in a large town or city.
But how do you display this reputation? Not by boasting, that is for sure. Any idiot can pretend to be a storied adventurer, and the ones who are genuinely storied don’t have to say much of anything at all. Instead, you should advertise your success in ways which can’t lie: keep a few trinkets (not the expensive ones, just weird-looking ones) around you where people can see. If you’ve got any scratches or wear on your armour, keep those around unless they actually cause problems. Tears in your cloak? Tatters on your boots? A slash in your hat? Definitely keep those around. All of that shows that you’ve seen danger, and the fact that you’re still wearing it all is proof you survived it. Some people might turn their noses at that kind of thing, but the ones you want on your adventuring party? They’ll understand.
And so will your potential employers, although not because of how you dress. Nobles and guildmasters talk, they talk a lot. One of their favourite subjects to talk about is the reliability of those they hire to fix their problems for them. This means that when trying to find work, you should look for easy work, well within your abilities and resources. That’s what gets you a reputation for being dependable, and to people with more money than trust in humanity like your average baron, that reliability is worth more than anything else. They’ll pay a premium for that, and in time, that premium will be worth more than any big payout you could get from a single risky job with a more than even chance of killing you and everyone you bring with you.
In fact, if you work reliably enough for a noble for long enough, that might be enough to secure your retirement. Nobles – especially ones on the frontier – often knight reliable adventurers and bring them into their retinue. After all, what is a successful adventuring career but errantry without spurs? Sometimes, they’ll keep these new knights on errant, sometimes they bring them into their household. Either way, the advantages are the same: a stipend, a safe headquarters, and most importantly, the knowledge that you’ve broken into the lowest rank of the nobility, and that any children you might have will be born into the same class.
Of course, you didn’t pick this book up and consider this path because you wanted to settle for the easiest path, did you? If you did, then you’d still be considering a career which didn’t involve mortal peril and dangerous travel and sleeping on the ground. A greater prize means greater risk, but that doesn’t mean the risk isn’t worth taking.
For example, nobles out on the frontier often put a call out for adventurers to clear a particularly troublesome nest of brigands, or make secure a particularly profitable pass. Those who succeed often have the chance to remain on that land as landed vassals in their own right. Of course, the competition for such rewards is great, but with a sufficient reputation, it’s possible to be invited to handle the task before a general call comes out. Of course, this is something you can prepare for ahead of time too. Nobles who’ve hired you before and perhaps already think of you as a friend are more likely to do you favours like this, which means it’s always a good idea to learn how to behave in front of nobility, to figure out their likes and dislikes, and work them accordingly.
After all, if you become a landed knight, these people are going to become your peers, and then you’d better know how to deal with them if you want to fit in.
There is, of course, also the riskiest option: simply walking out into the unclaimed wilds with your party and raising a keep of your own. After all, how else do you think our current crop of nobles became nobles in the first place? It wasn’t as if Kendrick Giant-Slayer showed up with official documentation. Clearing out that land and then enforcing that claim might require a small army, but that’s what your party is, isn’t it? if you can trust them, and they’re strong enough to fend off anyone who might disagree, then a lordship is as simple as giving yourself a title and enforcing that claim.
Thus is the way opened: a reasonably safe path from peasant to lord, from the bottom to the very top with what might be considered a minimal amount of effort. It is not as easy a road as some might hope for, but it is easier than most, and when you reach the top, you may still have plenty of time to look down upon those not wise enough to set foot upon it.
November 2024: In the Service of the Sultana
Official Record of Maksim, Son of Reyhan and Miroslava, Officer of the Ministry of Public Ways and Works
On this day, this officer has been commissioned to plan and secure the construction of a stone bridge over the Lower Kasim, a minor tributary of the Great Khwarzen. This will be a bridge of not less than twelve paces wide, of which ten paces will be reserved for roadway. Construction is to take a period of no more than eight months. This bridge will serve to shorten the pathways between the local market towns, improving the prospects of commerce in the locality. This the Minister has ordered in accordance with the Sultana’s directive of increasing the prosperity of the governate.
In all things, the Great Sultana strives towards the good of her people, and in all things, we her loyal servants obey to that end.
May Order Reign and Law Flourish.
Private Record of Maksim, Officer of the Ministry of Ways of Getting Publicly Fucked at Work.
This is such bullshit.
The Minister knows there is no more room in the budget for a new bridge. She knows that the only reason we’re building this one is so she can match the quota in the Sultana’s directives so she can look like she’s anything other than a monomaniacal warmonger (funny, given that it’s the Vizier with the one eye, not her).
Will the bridge actually increase commerce in the governate? probably. There isn’t a bridge there and I’m sure there’ve been complaints, or else nobody would propose building the damned thing in the first place. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we’ll be allocated any money to actually build it. Does the Porte even know how much money a bridge like this will cost?
Well, I know how much it’ll cost me if I don’t deliver a working bridge in eight months, that’s for real fucking sure.
Official Record of Maksim, Son of Reyhan and Miroslava, Officer of the Ministry of Public Ways and Works
Having visited the site in question, plans have been drawn up for the construction of the bridge so ordered by the Great Sultana through her officers of the Ministry of Public Ways and Works.
This construction, which is to be made of the best stone available atop piles of the strongest wood, is to serve as the primary crossing for the six villages in the vicinity, giving them easy access to the local market towns on either side of the river. It will consist of three stone arches, each at least ten paces high to prevent the obstruction of river traffic, and will be able to withstand the passage of any variety of foot and cart traffic – including that of siege guns should the bridge be required as a military thoroughfare.
The local inhabitants are greatly enthused by the prospect of a new bridge, and praise the Sultana’s generosity in seeing tangible steps to seeing the bridge constructed. Its cost has been assessed at fifteen hundred altin, of which eight hundred is to be reserved for material, five hundred and fifty for the cost of labour, and the remainder to be maintained as a reserve for emergencies and to compensate those workers injured in the construction, as required by the ordnances of the Great Sultana’s predecessor.
May Order Reign and Law Flourish.
Private Record of Maksim, Officer of Yet Another Way of Getting Publicly Worked Over.
Fifteen hundred altin.
Where the fuck am I going to get fifteen hundred altin?
Never mind the fact that it’s going to be nowhere near enough to get the bridge that the Ministry supposedly wants, even getting that much money is going to be impossible, given how much the budget’s been cut this year. The Minister is probably already borrowing money under the table to keep the road and bridge projects already on the ledgers moving, there’s going to be nothing left in the coffers for a new bridge.
So I guess it’s time to make the rounds to the other Ministries myself. Based on my inspection tour, I can cut some costs, try to make things a bit more efficient, maybe get that fifteen hundred to something more manageable, then I can maybe get that amount as a loan from Military Supply, or the Mail Service, or something like that. They usually have a surplus in peacetime, since the Sultana always wants them ready to go in case she sleeps funny, gets annoyed and decides to beat up our neighbours again.
It’s hardly going to be pleasant, but so long as there isn’t another war, the money should be there – and it beats being out of a job and facing indenture, at least.
Official Record of Maksim, Son of Reyhan and Miroslava, Officer of the Ministry of Public Ways and Works
The Glorious Sultana has declared another campaign in the far west, against the peoples of that country, their raids against our frontiers proving to be too great an insult for the dignity of the realm and the safety of our citizens.
An expeditionary force is being readied to punish the offenders and bring peace to the region. By taking personal command, the Sultana once again demonstrates her devotion to even the most far-flung of her subjects, and to the most vulnerable governates of our land.
May Order Reign and Law Flourish.
Private Record of Maksim, Officer of-
[This entry is made up entirely of obscenities.]
Private Record of Maksim, Officer Who is About to get Fired
What the fuck do I do now?
Every Ministry with money to spare is going to be spending it all on next campaigning season. In fact, I bet they’re already pounding on our Minister’s door to call back all of their loans. There’s no chance of getting any of the funding this bridge will need until the beginning of next year, which means I’ll either have to report this project as a failure – which will probably get me dismissed, or pretend as if everything’s going according to plan until I can’t anymore – in which case the Grand Vizier will probably drag me out of my office personally, take her eyepatch off, and strangle me to death with it.
I should have listened to my mother and gone into the army like my sister. She’s doing great. She gets promoted with every year. She probably has all the funding she’ll ever need, and as a supply officer, she probably doesn’t even need to smell gunpowder, except when it’s sitting in kegs as she inspects the supply lines she lays out.
Wait, that gives me an idea.
Official Record of Maksim, Son of Reyhan and Miroslava, Officer of the Ministry of Public Ways and Works
On this day, this officer is pleased to report to the Ministry that funding has been secured for the bridge over the Lower Kasim. This has been done by expedited means upon the designation of the crossing as a necessary supply route by Captain of the Second Rank Anastasyia, Daughter of Reyhan and Miroslava, Quartermaster-Deputy of the Third Army.
As a result of this designation, military resources and labour will be allocated to expedite the preparation of the building site and the construction of the required bridge. Materials will be provided by state quarries to ensure that the crossing will be able to sustain the traffic necessary to ensure the supply of the Third Army and its support formations. The resources and funding already allocated from the Ministry of Public Ways and Works will be returned to the Ministry reserves as per regulation.
For this solution – which has prevented the superfluous use of state resources and increased the efficiency of both the workings of the Ministry of Ways and Works and the plan of the Sultana’s upcoming campaign, this officer has been duly commended by the Grand Vizier, and awarded a step in pay by the Grand Bookkeeper.
This officer resolves to continue to do his utmost to serve the Ministry, the State, and the Sultana, whose victories are the victories of all her people, and whose power brings peace to all within her gaze.
May Order Reign and Law Flourish.
Paul Wang 