A naked man is comforted by a blacksmith, a butcher gets involved in funeral services, a candlestick maker watches an old man die, and a scholar pulls a blade on an orphan.
A group of disaster survivors have become Adventurers, and now head towards the ruins of a great dam through a ruined city, a place destroyed in the same catastrophic flood that has taken everything else from them.
When the went past Carrowmere, and through Pollnagollam, a great many things beyond those places were lost in the rushing waters.
Orick Verdun was the son of a butcher, and his fathers father was a butcher too, and this pattern went back much farther in the ancestry. Orick would have been the first in his family history to abandon the pursuit of meatcutting, as Orick had learnt just enough of the art of Magic to decide that a butchers life was not the life for him. When the flood came and destroyed the family shop, and also took that family along with it, Orick was all but already prepared: he had planned to soon depart his family forever, and had already packed what he owned and valued. With a rope of sausages and a pair of pistols he traveled towards the place from where the floods had come.
Talon de Frey was a scholar and a teacher, and he despised every one of his students. He felt no great pain when the university did crumble in the flood, and he would not pine over any of these drowned pupils. All the same, he had returned from a journey abroad to find his livelihood now ruined, and so went towards the broken dam beyond Carrowmere to see what might lie there: he was scholar of old treasures, and other things of value long missing.
Catherine D' Ambray lived an austere life of stoic self sufficiency, and through occasional work as a blacksmith was able to fund a mostly solitary existence in the wilds. The water that came washed away not only the buyers of her goods but also the wild game and other edible parts of the natural world upon which she depended. So with her apron, hammers, and longbow she joined the others and walked towards the floodlands.
Viktor Gray knew well the techniques of bloodshed and slaughter, but did his very best to no longer practice them. He was a chandler now, a candlestick maker, and spent his days meditatively dipping wicks and tapering those candles to elegant points instead of the old profession of bashing in heads and lopping off arms and legs as he had so much before. This gentle pursuit was made impossible by the floods, and though he didnt lose much else that was all he really had to lose. So Viktor took up the old armaments, still sharpened and well-mainted, and journeyed with the rest to Carrowmere,
There was a woman called Elizabeth who would have joined all this too, but she was weak and had drowned in the floods, since the floods spared nobody at all.
Atop a steep hillside these four Adventurers did find themselves looking down upon Carrowmere, beyond the trees at the base of that same hill. The looked upon ruin-crammed water dappled with dim sunlight, and through the haze could see little detail in the devastation. Carrowmere was all but gone. They walked down this hill and through a waterlogged wood, coming to fields just outside the city. Here they first saw what others had lost, and were in the process of losing now.
Catherine saw a withered old man, damp and nude; she heard him muttering sadly and cursing as crept closer to him between the trees. He dragged a dead body along with him. Catherine approached him, and he spoke. The body he dragged was the body of his wife, and her name was Sorla. He was Curtis Ghyll. Sorla was a fortune teller, when she lived. Though she would not say when she would die, she had told Curtis that he ought never take her to the family tomb, should the need arise. She said there would be strangers who would do this task instead. This was why Curtis became so happy, despite his nudity and loss. Her body was more or less intact as well, as she died only that morning.
Orick approached too, though not very stealthily, after he had attended to a robed man sputtering and slipping off a floating log some distance ahead. He and Talon had rescued this most gratful man, a priest called Selenium Tem. Selenium wore the splendid symbolic eye of the Optical God. Although having just barely evaded drowning by means of Orick and Talons arrival he was primarily concerned about that state of his church. He did some brief sermons over the body of Sorla Ghyll, while Orick, after being told of his expected burial and transportation duties as stranger spoken of in prophecy, wondered aloud if he might be able to use some butchers tricks to make her easier to transport. He did not act on this idea.
Catherine caught sight of something in the distance, a gaggle of youths sinking and thrashing in water that was hopelessly deep for them. They chased something in the water, and would die if they kept chasing it. As Catherine trudged towards them she heard their weeping cries of "Mother! Mother!" towards a body that was rapidly drifting away. She reached them just in time to hold them back, and gathere them, and drag them to the treeline with the priest, the widower, and the body of his wife.
Viktor caught sight of a man struggling to navigate a crumbling, badly improvised raft. This raft was weighted down with the feeble elderly, and many children. He leaned into the guiding pole as the raft began to fragment into smaller portions. Plowing through chest high water, Viktor grabbed at what pieces he could and tried to hold them together with sheer muscle. It seemed a hopeless task, and both young and old began spilling into the water and quickly sinking. Soon came Orick, Talon, and Catherine, who all began wrapping rope around what solid pieces they too could grab. Orick embedded his meat hooks into the planks of wood to better tug it all along, and together they managed to hold it in a sort of form. They began piling survivors back on as fast as they were able, but they had already begun to drift away. Attempting to save a desperate silver haired man, Viktor held one end of the boatmans staff with one hand, and with the other held out his polearms handle. Despite his best efforts the man was unable to keep his grip, and Viktor saw as he gulped down a few final mouthfuls of water before sinking down, then silently floating away.
They dragged the raft to the treeline, where the water was nearer to calf-level. Viktor distributed all the rations he had among the children when he realized they had all been starving, and Catherine listened in as a child told her about the old witch called Gruta, who had been drowned in the well after being thrown down it, She had been stabbed and smashed and cut and burned and poisoned too, and now she surely drifted free. The boatman Callao said this was all nonesense, but the children seemed preternaturally serious about the matter. They were all from Pollnagollam. Catherine quietly asked the child what color this witches hair might be, and the child said it was orangey-red. Catherine then eyed the hair of all bodies suspiciously, watching for witch-colored hair.
While others worked to repair the raft more thoroughly Orick cast a spell which coated the bottom of the raft with an unnatural grease, and this caused it float much more buyoantly.
Catherine saw the minder of more than a dozen children be driven to tears as they ran from her, the dark haired woman began screaming as they scattered into the watery streets.
Talon trudged beyond where they had pulled the raft from. A woman was wandering amongst wrecked houses; babbling about unclean meat and how "she didn't eat them". When he asked her who them was she pointed to corpses. Her gibberish was too much to bear, and he ignored her. Orick approached a starved and crazed looking woman fishing with a simple stick and twine from the crumbling bits of a wall. She was quite eager to show him her only catch: a waterlogged corpse, with a mouth full of golden dust. "If only one could eat that!" she proclaimed. Orick scraped this dust from the cold corpse mouth, and upon hearing from her that many such bodies carried this kind of treasure investigated several more nearby. Their mouths had only teeth, unfortunately. She was most grateful for the sausages he gave her, all the same.
Talon went further, to a smallish bank above the waterline. Shallow graves had been dug here, and before them stood a wild haired man who tore at his balding scalp in furious despair. He bemoaned his miserliness, which had lead to him never appreciating of his own family, who now all lay here dead. He promised a vast rewards to anyone who could explain to him the cause of this most merciless diaster. There was movement then, atop another muddy mound a distance ahead: a hooded sort of figure pawing about in the dirt. As Talon slowly appraoched though the figure crept away, carrying something in its arms. It glanced back and saw that it had been observed. It was some kind of person it seemed, and this person ran further into the city ruins, and out of sight. When Talon examined the burial mound he saw a fresh stump at the leg of one body, indicating a limb had been recently removed. He caught movement in corner of his eye; a boy had crept up to him just like a pickpocket. The boy froze when Talon unsheathed his blade and pointed it directly at him. He wanted food, and his name was Wit Tandoum. He followed Talon back when he returned to the survivors. He looked to be a beggar boy, and he said he wanted to come with them. He carried a knife himself, and he said that he was tough, and strong too. Catherine took a shine to him immediately, and provided him with pieces of squid. Viktor had impaled this squid in the water, after seeing how crowded these waters were with scanvengers.
It was proposed that they could go, Adventurers survivors and all, to a house that had not been fully ruined to perhaps find shelter, and also a kitchen in which they might prepare some food. Callao was incredulous. Go back> To what? This had all been ruined, destroyed by the flood. Pollnagollam was gone, Carrowmere was gone. All was gone: these waters would never recede. And they had almost died there, they would not go back to drown. All they wanted was to leave this place behind, to beyond all this horror and loss.
Viktor told them there was not much else where they had come from, as it too had also been ruined in the flood.
It could not be any worse than this, said Callao, after almost no pause at all.
They gave Callao the raft, and Viktor gave them candles and torches. Callao thanked them profusely, praising their great generosity and profound kindness and heroism. Callao had seen a great ship outside Carrowmere after leaving Pollnagollam, but the men on that ship would spare no rations, even for these starving children. The Adventurers, he said, were much better people than they. So as those meek and feeble souls went off towards new and unfamiliar devastation the Adventurers went deeper into the drenched ruins of Carrowmere, both towards uncertain ends.
Excellent work
ReplyDelete