Blackstone is a land I haven’t been to in a very long time. I think the last time I was there was way back in October of 603. However, Dame Parthynia was traveling there this weekend, and I thought that traveling with her would give me a good chance to get in some squire training, and so I decided to go.
I got there a little before Dame Parthynia, and so I grabbed a cabin for her,
Sheriff Mario, and myself to stay in, and I adorned the door with the Ducal
colors of Therendry. It was the first time I have ever stayed in a cabin with
the Ducal colors, and I was proud of it in some small, probably insignificant
way.
Well, when Dame Parthynia got there I met her and Mario in the tavern, and before
long a drunk guy stumbled in. He was muttering something about a password. I
caught him so that he wouldn’t fall on the floor, and in doing so I accidentally
said the password, “floor.” He handed me a coded message, saying something
about Lord Rawling, and then stumbled out of the tavern.
I immediately handed the message to Dame Parthynia and we set about translating
it. Unfortunately, that is not our area of expertise, and so we handed it to
my friend Nikki to translate instead. She is usually good at these sorts of
things, but not even she could crack the code.
I was saying hi to my good friend Caliphar in a corner of the tavern when Dame
Parthynia called me over. She said that a gentleman was selling wards and we
were buying one, so we had to go watch him cast it. She, being a biata, did
not want to be inside the building when the ward went up, so someone had to
stay inside and watch the casting of the ward. That someone ended up being me.
Meanwhile, Dame Parthynia, Mario, and the Archmage Rastlin stood guard outside.
Let me pause a moment here to say a few words about Rastlin. I hadn’t gotten
to know Rastlin very well before this weekend, but he impressed me. I have always
known that he was an exceptionally talented caster (in fact, he is the best
caster I have ever met), but I did not know that he is also an exceptionally
brave man. I saw him go off on a mission where death was a very really possibility
without ever doubting it, just because it was for the good of the Duchy. Such
bravery really impresses me, as it is becoming rarer and rarer these days.
At any rate, getting back to my story, when the ward-casting gentleman got done,
he made himself a duplicate key, which he said he was giving to the nobles of
the Duchy. Mario told him that there was no way he was walking away with a duplicate
key in his hand. He relented, and we presented the duplicate key to Sir Cedric
later.
After our ward casting got done, the ward-casting gentleman went over to cast
a ward for my friend Sathen, who is now back after a long period of not adventuring.
Meanwhile, I went over to guard Rastlin as he was casting his own ward. Well,
the ward-caster made Sathen’s ward, and then made a duplicate key, and
then ran off with the duplicate key, with Mario and Dame Parthynia and Sathen
in hot pursuit.
I, of course, could not pursue, because I could not leave Rastlin defenseless
while in the process of casting a ward. When Rastlin finished, though, we hurried
up to the tavern, and we found Mario and Dame Parthynia behind the tavern, where
the ward-caster had gone. Apparently he had thrown the key into the woods somewhere,
and then killed himself, so he could later retrieve the key.
Dame Parthynia lifed the ward-caster, and then we knocked him out, trying to
decide what to do with him while we searched for the key. Finally, we decided
to heal him and interrogate him. Mario gave him a cure light, but he started
screaming for Lord Rawling, the evil lord who is working with Saxony against
the rightful rulers of Blackstone (if you don’t remember Lord Rawling,
Baron Zug and I took him down in October, 603, and you should be able to find
a journal entry for that gathering). I reacted quick and hit him to shut him
up, just in case there were Saxons within hearing distance.
Ultimately, we decided to throw him in jail. We stuck him in a prison so that
he couldn’t get out in the five days that the ward would be up. I do not
believe that the ward key was ever found, but I don’t think there was ever
an incident.
When we went back to the tavern, I got a chance to speak to my old friends from
Fengate: Logenn, Pyre, and Uzuri. I was thrilled to see that they were in town,
and we probably talked for an hour about current events in Fengate. Strangely,
I can’t get to Fengate these days, because I get stopped at the border
by some invisible force. It’s kind of like the magic barrier in Ravenholt,
except it only stops me.
I got pulled away from my discussions, though, when a dwarf called 9 of 32 showed
up in town. Apparently the rest of his mining company were being terrorized
by golems, and so they needed people to go in and take them out. We had to organize
a small, elite strike team to do the job. The people we grabbed were Dame Parthynia,
Mario, Lady Pyroxia of Calais, Peregrine of Lochwood, Caliphar, Nikki, and myself.
When we went into the mines, we were shocked to find that the golems were swinging
so hard that the blows went right through our shields. Fortunately, even though
the blows were going through our shields, I found that with my new protection
aura from Greyhorn, they were not able to damage me very much. And so, I stood
on the front line and basically sucked punishment and tried to get in as many
hits as I could. I would not have survived, though, if it wasn’t for a
lot of timely healing from Lady Pyroxia.
After we saved the dwarven miners, Caliphar made an interesting comment. He
called me the “hero of the encounter.” I want to think on that for
a moment. Really, what is a hero? Am I am hero? I don’t think so. Heroes
are people who do spectacular things. For example, a few months back when I
was in Greyhorn, Lady Chancellor Nyneave threw her own life on the line to heal
a room full of people when it seemed like all hope was lost. That kind of thing
is heroism. What I do is my job. I save people because it’s what I am supposed
to do, and because it’s right. I grew up idolizing great heroes like Basil
Ravenhurst and Galen Cumberland. Someday, I would like to be a great hero like
them, but I know I am not yet. Right now, all I am is a person trying to do
his best.
At any rate, when we got done cleaning out the golems, we went back to town
just in time to get attacked by hoards and hoards of undead. I once again wound
up on the front line (it was a recurring theme of the weekend) and managed to
take down some undead, but many more kept coming. By the end of the battle,
I was absolutely exhausted, but at least I was alive.
At that point, Mario, Dame Parthynia, and I decided to call it a night, and
went back to our cabin. When we got there, we had a good discussion of what
it is to be a proper noble, and then went to bed. However, immediately afterwards,
we heard screams coming from the neighboring cabin. We heard a death spell thrown,
and then some gasses, and then nothing. We all jumped out of bed, and Mario
was first out the door. When he got there, he succeeded in killing the last
of three bandits that had attacked. Dame Parthynia and I arrived a moment later.
Lady Pyroxia had dispatched the other two.
As we went back to bed, I remarked to Dame Parthynia, “I guess that’s
what you mean by being a proper noble.”
By the time I stumbled out of bed the next morning, it was already fairly late,
probably near 11 AM. I strapped on my gear and walked to the tavern, and found
that they were serving breakfast. I ordered up some hearty pancakes, and sat
down to eat. Amazingly, I wasn’t interrupted while I was eating. I did
carry on a conversation with Pyre and Uzuri which was interesting, though.
After I was done eating, I stepped out onto the porch just in time to see four
people in red tabards walking down the road. I told Sir Cedric that they looked
like Lord Rawling’s troops, and he sent me to go investigate. I walked
after them with Pyre, Uzuri, and Logenn. I hesitated to enter into direct combat
with them, though, because they had two casters and I wasn’t sure I could
take two casters. So I merely trailed after them, waiting for the right opportunity.
The right opportunity never came, though, because Beryl came running out of
a valley and she had some of the wolven and gypsies behind her, as well as an
unconscious Caliphar. I ran over to Caliphar, gave him a life spell, and then
we ran down to find Mackarious, who had apparently been left behind.
Unfortunately, by the time we got there, it was too late. He had dissipated,
and his stuff was still there, but he was gone. I believe Beryl resurrected
him at the earth circle in town. I was sorry that I couldn’t get there
in time.
However, I had little time to mourn, as the town was then attacked by golems.
This was right about the time that Mario was waking up, and so I called for
him to come help me fight them, as I was relatively certain that Caliphar, myself,
and many lesser experienced adventurers were not going to be able to handle
a combination of crystal golems and steel golems.
However, with Mario’s help, it wasn’t that difficult. They were tough,
yes, but my protection aura minimized their blows, and so I was able to stand
up to them for quite a while. Usually, I would fight them from the front, giving
Mario a chance to move up from behind.
The problem was that they kept coming, and so we retreated towards the tavern.
I told everyone to keep behind me, because I could survive the constant damage
a lot better than anyone else could with the protection aura helping me.
When we finally got back to the tavern, we fought the golems there, up until
there were none left. I am not entirely sure who was sending them or why, but
my guess would be the Saxons were sending them as part of their plan to take
over Blackstone.
It was about this time that Dame Parthynia and Mario asked me to come along
on some type of randomness adventure. It sounded pretty chaotic to me, and so
I wasn’t much interested, but of course I was willing to go if asked. First,
though, I checked with Lady Pyroxia, and she asked that someone stay in town
to provide another sword arm in case there was an attack. I decided to stay,
and Dame Parthynia allowed me to, and it turned out to be a wise decision.
I was sitting on the front porch with Lady Pyroxia, talking to Lady Blackstone,
when they began to appear. They formed out of a puddle, and came right at us.
Water elementals, I thought to myself as I began to help Lady Pyroxia usher
everyone inside.
The water elementals didn’t seem interested in coming through the door,
or they were unable to figure out how to open it. Either way, we thought about
just leaving them outside, but decided that they should be destroyed, and so
we let them in, to fight on our turf.
It was a pitched battle, and the healing pools that Lady Pyroxia and I had up
were the only things that saved everyone from oblivion. However, they were running
down fast, and people weren’t ponying up the components for us to create
more. It’s amazing to me how people’s greed consumes them even when
their life is in imminent danger. I know for a fact that there were people in
that room that had components that didn’t supply them even to save their
own lives, and that makes me sick.
At any rate, Lady Pyroxia and I stood as the front line, fighting water elementals
as best we could. There was a member of the Ducal army there as well who used
celestial magic to great effectiveness against the water elementals, but even
despite his efforts the fight was hard. We had no big fighters, just two scholars
standing against the tide of water elementals, if you’ll excuse the pun.
Eventually, though, we persevered. We managed to destroy that group of water
elementals, and we took on another group. This fight didn’t go so well.
Two of them managed to pin me in a corner, and they were both extremely skilled
fighters. I did the best I could to stay up, because when I looked over to the
other side of the tavern, everyone else was down. Realizing how desperate things
were, I started lashing out with spells. I took down the two I was fighting,
and then Lady Pyroxia managed to get everyone healed up on the other side of
the tavern.
We fought another couple groups, but eventually we realized that we were tapping
ourselves out and we weren’t sure how many we could take, so we stopped
letting them in. Then, when the randomness adventure group got back, we were
able to pretty much clean out the rest of the water elementals.
When that was all over, I once again went to sit on the porch with Lady Pyroxia
and Lady Blackstone, and we had some good discussions. Eventually, though, Sir
Cedric gathered everyone together to go take out a pyramid which apparently
was capable of stopping magical communications. It was guarded by a bunch of
supposed peasants, who all turned out to be spellcasters, of course.
The battle was fierce, but the hero was Mario, without question. When the circle
around the pyramid was dropped, he managed to get his weapon in and choose in
before a new circle could be created. He dodged several death spells, and took
down both the casters, which dropped the circle and allowed us to destroy the
pyramid. Mario put his life on the line for Blackstone, and came through with
another show of true bravery. I was very impressed.
That mission was heavily resource consuming, and it didn’t help that it
was followed up not long after with another heavily resource consuming mission.
This time, Lord Mikhail of the Blackstone Navy needed help to recapture his
ship which the Saxons had stolen. We had two fey, named Will and Way, transport
us to the docks where the ship was moored. We tried to move in stealthily, but
there were just too many Saxons, and they spotted us.
The Saxons had a few front line fighting types, but most of their people were
casters, archers, and gassers. This presented a significant problem, since we
were running low on resources as it was, and it wasted lots of resources to
constantly remove the gas effects on people. Personally, I spent a lot of time
trying to get behind the line of Saxons, because the archers and casters were
easy to take out if you could just get on top of them. Also, if anyone needs
proof that the Saxons are the bad guys in this war, they merely need to look
at the fact that they tried to take me out by throwing necromancy at me in broad
daylight.
We fought along the docks, and managed to free two caravels from Saxon control,
but we were still moving toward Lord Mikhail’s ship, the Minion. I actually
had a discussion with Lord Mikhail about the name of his ship. You see, the
name The Minion implies servitude, which seems to me to make the name weaker.
I would think it could be stronger if it were named something like The Overlord,
which implies dominance and strength. That’s just my opinion, though.
Anyhow, we continued to move towards The Minion, and I pulled aside Lord Mikhail
and Lady Pyroxia and tried to tell Lord Mikhail that going on might be suicide,
because we were basically out of resources at this point. We had no purify blood
spells left, no awaken spells left, nothing like that. In fact, things got so
desperate at one point that I spent several minutes paralyzed before Dame Parthynia
convinced Lady Blackstone to drop a Circle and unparalyze me.
Lord Mikhail and Lady Pyroxia, though, created a new strategy. They said that
we should rush the next ship, so that we could take it quickly. We did so, and
we overwhelmed the Saxons. I was impressed with their eye for strategy.
After taking the third caravel, we moved on to the Minion itself, which was
guarded by traps and yet more gassers. However, we got lucky, because when the
crew saw Lord Mikhail, some of them turned against Saxony and helped us win
the day. Dame Parthynia managed to get herself up onto the deck, and heal the
loyal Blackstone soldiers when they got cut down. By the time we were finished,
we had routed the Saxons, and re-taken The Minion.
After that was over, I finally got a chance to rest for a while, and after Will
and Way rifted us back, I went into the tavern to get some dinner. Not too much
happened after that for a while. There were some giants that showed up in town,
but they were dispatched pretty easily. As it turns out, one gas took these
giants down, and so Hooch and Pendulum had a field day.
My particular favorite part of the battle was when one of the giants, who was
bigger than the rest and firing a bow, kept shooting at me and I kept ducking
and diving and avoiding his arrows. If one had connected, that might have been
it for me, but I managed to prevent that from happening.
After the giants were disposed of, some orcs and a human necromancer came into
town. They weren’t especially dangerous, and I used the opportunity to
help some new adventurers learn how to fight. I trained especially hard with
Logenn. I also gave Caliphar a chance to train with an orc, by promising to
heal up whichever contestant fell. The orc fell, and, as was my word, I healed
it up.
The strangest incident, though, was still to come. I was dueling with some new
adventurers, and I got tangled up with one and we both tripped. I held my footing,
though, while he fell to the ground. Dame Parthynia saw this, and she told me
to come over to her. However, I was in the middle of battle and didn’t
hear her. Mario turned to her, and asked, “Do you want me to show him the
Greymist waylay?” She jokingly nodded, and he was off.
From my spot on the field, where I was still training with the new adventurers,
all I heard was a rocket with bells coming at me. I turned in time to see Mario
arrive, and I figured he wanted to join in the training. Then, he began swinging
his sword at me for real. I was shocked, but I recovered quickly, and my protection
aura ate his first couple blows.
I responded to him in kind, and pretty soon he realized that as long as I kept
in front of him, he couldn’t possibly beat me, because of the protection
aura. About halfway through the fight, he turned to Dame Parthynia, and yelled,
“I’m getting my a** kicked!”
Finally, I managed to take him down, and then I healed him up, finally having
figured out what was going on. Dame Parthynia came over and tried to heal him
some more, but he was okay after the healing I had given him.
Afterwards, Dame Parthynia explained the entire situation to me, and explained
that it was just a joke. I nodded, but I was too exhausted from all the fighting
to give much of a real response. I think I walked inside the tavern and collapsed
into a chair.
There was only one more thing to do that night. A Blackstone military captain
showed up to lead us to an area where Morbidus Bane, a fearsome undead, was
hiding out. Apparently Morbidus Bane was a relative of Malek Bane, and Malek
Bane was the one who took over from Necros as the most powerful undead in Blackstone.
We lined up on a path in front of a gate, and advanced forward. I had Sir Delwyn
to my right, and Kaja to my left. At this point, Kaja was using a shield, and
it made her much more effective. Lady Pyroxia opened up a bane of the dead behind
us, and that was really the difference. She kept smiting the lesser undead and
damaging the greater undead with it.
Eventually, we moved the line up and through the gate, where Morbidus Bane was
aiting for us on the other side. It was an intense battle. He threw arcane deaths
at us like water. Mario sucked one, and I ate another. Fortunately, Lady Pyroxia
was right behind me to life me.
The battle raged on, and pretty soon I noticed that there were ten adventurers
lying on the ground at the feet of Morbidus Bane. I rushed over to help, and
quickly realized that I had gotten myself in over my head. I couldn’t take
a super-undead by myself. Nevertheless, I didn’t have much choice but to
try. I incanted, “I call upon the earth to destroy undead 70” and
let the magic fly at him. He stumbled backwards, and I pressed my advantage.
I unleashed five more destroy undead spells at him, and that was the end of
Morbidus Bane. He collapsed to the ground at my feet. I am sure he is bottled
somewhere, but at least we made temporary progress.
We beat back the rest of the undead, and found a very ordinary looking graveyard,
and then we retreated back through the gate. After the last two people, Peregrine
and Sir Delwyn, made it out, we hurried back to town.
At that point, I was very tired, and I went to bed, as did Mario and Dame Parthynia.
However, others stayed up, and later told me that Adder re-appeared, and stole
back his axe from Caliphar. Also, Malek Bane showed up in town, but I don’t
know what he wanted. He was probably irritated that we destroyed his uncle,
but I have no way to know for sure.
At any rate, in the end the gathering seemed to be a productive one. We made
gains against Saxony, which was the most important thing. Hopefully, next month
we will be able to deliver the killing blow once and for all to the Saxons’
aspirations of a coup.
Scribed by Seronia on the 15th day of June in the year 604.