THE PETRAN CIVIL WAR

[tilly 5115]

The Queen-Emeritus, Renilde of the Petra, could not wait to read the recap of her younger years as the pamphlet was delivered to her home of Courteis Hale. Undoing its binding, and over the warmest cup of honey mead did she dig right into the non-fiction that was her twenties.

 

"I can't thank her enough," Renilde said to one of the many Auclairs that lived alongside her in the big house. Poor Guillaume had been stuck talking with her about the entire piece for the last several hours - bless him. "For coming to chat with me, and bringing such clarity to a time - with sources! - that was a mess and a whirlwind. That Erika was such a nice girl - I knitted her a little shoulder wrap.." The old woman brambled on, going back and forth about what was written, and what she'd personally experienced that might not've made it onto the paper.

 

"I remember when Sir Valentin yelled at Marius and I for what felt like an hour straight, after the war had been won. How angry he was about our playing of stupid games." She laughed fondly. "Same with Georg, though before the war had been fought. That one was a bit more disheartening... but we deserved it, really. And, oh, how steely faced Georg was at the duel against Constanz. One might've thought he was betting against Marius!"

[MrMojoMordor 2413]

"Wub da zkahh.." says the goblin who hasn't even began reading.
He's absoloutly blown away by the format, lettering & REFRENCES to other missive. The goblin won't rest until he has dug up centuries old missives from libraries & gathered the whole story.

Spoiler

Jesus ****, you got ******* refrences and everything holy shit.
The Forum-game is going CRAZY lately. 

 

[Cracker 4570]

"Bacchanae, Baelroths, Bakujas, Balaurs, Banshees, Bargandyrs... Basilisks."

 

Sarson’s fingers trailed the embossed spines of the great bestiaries, flitting through his patron’s archives in quiet frustration. Hired to hunt barghasts—black nether-dogs wrenched into existence from ill-performed dark rites—he could not even track them within these hallowed tomes. They were creatures of lesser record, feared but not studied, more fright than fatality. The beastmasters had given them little space in their chronicles, yet the townsfolk feared them, and coin always flowed easily for those willing to banish shadows from the roads.

 

Six hours of study had yielded only two accounts—meager findings for a long night of toil.

 

The first was laughable, tucked away in a volume of print advertisements from a past decade. There, amidst the mundane, a toddy house's signage proclaimed a "Barghast Bargain" on all banana wines—black dog deals so good they’d have you keel over.

 

Sarson grinned, then, as a charm for good luck—and away from his patron’s watchful eye—tore the page out for himself. It reminded him of Helena, his boyhood home, where merchants sold their wares with gaudy theatrics and the streets pulsed with the glow of oversized, garish signage. Even among the great pearls of the Amber Sea, nowhere else had ever matched the sheer ruthless, cloying commercialism of Helena’s avenues.

 

The second account, however, proved much more useful.

 

Written by a pair of monster hunters from the West Akritian Isles, it detailed a land where hedge magic was crude, its practitioners more prone to folly, and where the conjuring of barghasts was far more common.

 

There, the hunters spoke of how ebonsteel bolts flew swift and true, striking the brow ridge of a barghast. Yet rather than tearing through flesh or whizzing through ether, the bolts dragged, sinking into the beast’s glabella as if wading through thickened jelly. The creatures belted and fled—not from pain, but from something deeper. A psychic horror. A realization that their wounds did not behave as wounds should.

 

This gave Sarson some reassurance. Even without a gilded weapon, a barghast could still yield.

 

He set aside the findings and turned to the next parcel of texts, riffling through the collection sent his way. Among them, to his great surprise, laid a copy of The Petran Civil War.

 

A mistake, no doubt. The head librarian, assuming the Wilvenlands were riddled with such aberrations, had erroneously included a historical text from the region instead. Sarson traced his fingers over its binding, in awe of the Aevosian relic in his clay hand. These days, he still wore his black and silver Balianese fusta, a gift from the monarch he had once served in the name of Balian. Yet as he read the writings of Erika Kortrevitch, the garment felt less like a royal honor and more like an embrace from a life he thought long past.

 

For a moment, he was no longer in this foreign court but a century younger, cast back into the days when he had reclaimed his lost limb among the Oyashimans, when he had earned the title of Pigeon Knight from King Alexander, and been given the rare opportunity to ferry great instruments of state and artifacts of yore between two worthy civilizations. Seeing Atrus bloom from a shanty town at the heels of bandits to a great wildflower of the south, a kingdom capable of slaying dragons and pretenders alike, is a sight few elves, even those that count their years in millennia, can say they witnessed firsthand.

 

Sarson reflected quietly - proud of his time in those lands, and prouder still of how they shaped him.  He entered as a maimed saboteur, raucous vagabond, and trained killer named Shalashannan Doxos, ashamed of his name and heritage, and left proud - a noble courier, a resolute sheriff, a devoted townsman, and a knight who embraced the clans that came before him.

 

 

Yet above all else, it was the title of Grand Librarian, conferred upon him by a late Duke of Adria (@Nooblius), that had defined the last stretch of his journey and the current path he walked. A quiet, fearless keeper of an old way in a wildly changing world. Seeing his first works referenced after a century in a rare and articulate history brought the ker a quiet sense of pride.

 

With that, Sarson Halgrim closed the book and slid it into his satchel. Another keepsake from his patron's inventory. No one in this foreign court would find value in it. To them, it was a novel account of tribal conflict - barbarians fighting over mud and thistle.

 

Better with the pigeon knight, who loved the spirit of these Wilvenlands like few others.

[subatomic 1497]

Spoiler

really enjoyed reading this, awesome post and awesome writing.