The Fifth Crusade
For over a century, the demon-haunted wasteland of the Worldwound has bled into the world of mortals. As the magical Wardstones that hold back the tide begin to flicker and fail, a new generation of crusaders must take up the sword. But this war requires more than steel; it requires the power of Myths.
Paladin / Wizard
Monk / Paladin
Inquisitor / Rogue
Paladin / Oracle
Intelligence Report: The Marchlands
Held. The Banner flies over it and the objective of the march is complete. The work now is the unglamorous kind — room by room, drain by drain — and the relic-corrupting forge below has been argued back into an honest tool and given a new name.
The supply road’s one gate, and twice the size it was a week ago. Four dozen Kellids who were raiding this depot now camp beside it, taking work. Its quartermaster looked at the whole problem walking over the hill and said only: all right, we can do this.
The only place along the escarpment a wagon can climb, which makes it the only western road. Reported to have demons living in it. Scouted for an hour and nothing found — a thing that flies leaves nothing on the ground to read.
Empty. A windowless stone hall with no sentries but a refuse heap that shrieks when disturbed, and a clan living in tents pitched inside the footprints of their grandparents’ town. Their chieftain is ash outside the door and the rest of them have gone east to the Ford.
Two hundred feet down a chasm with a river of molten rock in it. A priest was pulled off the coffin alive. The heretic inside it still wears her grave goods and still has a bow laid at her side, because nobody present had the right to open a stranger’s grave.
Demon ground, and the reason the map stops meaning anything to the southwest. The Queen has ordered the Wounded Lands ranged for whatever can be turned against the Abyss. This is the direction that order points.
Seventy-five years in demon hands, and taken in an afternoon once the Banner was over it. The work now is the unglamorous kind: room by room, drain by drain, cultists talked out of granaries or not talked out of them. Below, the relic-corrupting forge has been argued back into an honest tool over four days and given a new name. Two shrines on two sides of one courtyard are being scrubbed by two sets of hands, and nobody gave the order.
"There are four dozen Kellids at Vilareth Ford as of this week, and they are ours. I am aware of what they were doing to that road a month ago. I am aware of what they look like. I will say this once to every company: the man who made them do it is dead and burned, and the ones who are left were as much his prisoners as the crusaders they took. They will be given work, they will be given rations, and they will be given the ordinary courtesy of the camp. It will not be a problem unless somebody in this army decides to make it one."
The Worldwound
Session XX — The Marchlands
The supply road to Drezen had been bleeding for months. Raiders out of the west, taking grain and taking people, and every account of them agreed: bone spikes coming up through the skin, the Abyss somewhere inside them, and a ferocity that was not bravery. It was a good description and it was wrong. The spikes came off a dead man's shoulder in one hand — drilled, pegged through the leather and lashed down with sinew, with ordinary scarred skin underneath — because only their chieftain ever grew them, and only when his temper went. The rest of them had spent a generation dressing as the thing that ate them, in the hope it would look past them. What the company found at the end of that road was not a war camp. It was four dozen frightened people living in tents pitched inside the footprints of the town their grandparents fled, with a midden of human remains against the hall wall serving as the only sentry they had. A duel was offered to end it without killing anyone. The offer was made well, and won three times over, and won too contemptuously — and a man who had murdered three brothers for challenging him broke his word rather than be laughed at. He died for it in two hammer blows. And by the clan's own law, everything he had passed to the dwarf holding the hammer.
Fallen Guardian
Silver Dragon · Protector of Kenabres
“She wore a plain face for a hundred years. Not to be spared — nothing in that city could have touched her — but because a dragon standing in the open is a reason for the Abyss to come, and she wanted the market to stay a market. She bought her bread. She let people be rude to her. Every ordinary morning she spent being nobody was a morning Kenabres did not have to be defended, and not one soul she passed ever knew they had been given anything. Then the sky opened and the disguise stopped being useful, and she dropped it in the street and went up into the thing that killed her, in front of everybody, so that four strangers falling through a hole in the world would fall slowly enough to live.”
The One Who Won It Too Well
Paladin / Wizard
He learned their language out of a book at nineteen because a trader had been rude to him in it, and twenty years later it was the only reason anyone in that hall could be spoken to at all. He read the village in ninety seconds and got it right. Then he offered a duel to end the thing without blood — hit me once in three attempts and we concede — and won it three times over without cutting anybody. The offer was real. The oath was broken by the man who swore it, who had murdered three of his own brothers for less. What Caleth missed was smaller and entirely his own: he spent that whole hour on the man in the chair, and never once looked at the frightened people standing in a ring around them.
The One Who Turned Back
Monk / Paladin
He was at the horse’s head before anyone saw him move, six inches from a rolling white eye, talking it down onto four feet while something the size of an elephant came out of the dark. And then he asked leave to go, and would not say why until he did: a promise had been made to the rescued priest and not yet kept, and once that man reached a bed in a fortress he would stop being someone who was offered something and start being a patient, and a patient is a thing that waits. So he went back to Drezen — the half-elf folded the three of them there between one step and the next — to stand in a room while somebody else performed a rite. It does not require an audience. It requires a witness.
The One Who Remembered Her
Inquisitor / Rogue
He killed the thing on the night road without hurrying — invisible, two cuts along the underside, put exactly where a man would put them after ten seconds of watching it walk. At dawn, watching the half-elf crouch over a dead raider and turn the bone on its shoulder the way you test a hinge, he got there on his own three seconds later by a different road — and remembered a woman in a fortress with horns bolted to her armor, whom two paladins had read as evil and he had spared anyway, and who had told them nothing but the truth. In a hall full of armed men he was the one singled out to be killed first, and had both daggers out before the sentence finished. And when a forgiven man said out loud that a man can be forgiven and still owe, he went very still and said nothing at all.
The One They Turned To
Paladin / Oracle
He took an exploding ball of ice meant for two men and healed it off himself standing on the ground it had frozen, and finished the chieftain in two blows after the man broke his word — and then a stranger walked out of the crowd and told him the tribe was his. He did not want it and did not refuse it. The raids stop, he said. Then: why are you people living here. Then, when it was suggested the clan be sent back where they came from, he looked at them and said three words and that was the end of the argument. He spent the evening on his knees in the mud driving tent pegs and telling frightened people true things, and it worked better than any plan anyone had written down.
Current Status
The raids stopped · The clan resettled · One vial that undoes a death
The supply road is quiet for the first time in months, and the reason is standing in the camp at Vilareth Ford eating its rations. Four dozen Kellids, a people who were marched back into the Worldwound by a man they were all afraid of, now doubling the size of the depot they were raiding a week ago and taking whatever work they are given. Their liege is a dwarf who never asked for them, and who has promised them out loud that when the war ends they go wherever they like. Back at the fortress a priest has been given his absolution and has left to go earn it, a locked chest nobody will discuss has reached a wizard by courier, and an old potion out of a traitor's quarters has turned out to be one draught of the philosopher's stone — poured on a dead body, it brings them back once, on one corpse, spent in a hurry by whoever is still standing. The half-elf carries it over his heart, and cannot make himself picture the day it gets used.
Retrieving field report...
A visual record of the Worldwound and the souls caught in its wake
End of Record
