First Blood at Sternfell

[Luxury 1081]

 

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The first hours after landing at the lands soon to become Sternfell, rather a more realized Sternfell with buildings and infrastructure, did not undercut Ivy's expectations. The region was untamed, with few places to stop and rest, and sloped... bad for the knees, though Blissfoil ointments did wonders in those stretches she needed to power through. Her traveling companions were spry, eager, and capable. She admired all of these things in equal parts, and had no qualms when a foray into an abandoned mineshaft was initiated. Ivy did not typically partake in adventure, figuring those days had long passed... though she could not say when they had been, exactly, or what they had looked like. The feeling was there, or perhaps the spirit thereof.

 

The mineshaft was not a mineshaft. It unfolded inward, damp and branching, with dusty corridors leading to dustier corridors. Books lined entire stretches of wall, swollen with moisture and mostly illegible. A labyrinth, then, as it might have been described in children's story books. Ivy shuffled along at the rear, one hand trailing the stone, cataloguing the herbs that grew in the cracks by touch alone. Life flourishes even in places light doesn't go. Then, a hulking figure was spotted ahead, and soon another at the flank. It wasn't long before the party was noticed, reinforcements called, and of course aggressed upon. They were massive things, any one of which could have cleaved a man in twain with so much as a single swing of their enormous axes. The corridor became permeated with noise and motion and the sense of impending doom. Ivy tucked into the backlines, knowing her strengths lay elsewhere.

 

What struck her, watching from behind, was the group itself. Human and elf and dwarf, tall and short, fast and steady. Not one of them fought the same way as they moved around each other with a stark fluidity, covering each other's flanks. She thought distantly that this was what Descendantkind looked like at its full unrealized potential. Not despite the differences but because of them. This is Sternfell, she assessed. The minotaurs fell quickly, but not without due injury on the adventuring side, signaling her time to act. The first patient had taken a blow to the skull, which she treated with alacrity, at least to the best of her capacity. Head wounds are treacherous, but not impossible.

 

Beyond the minotaurs, deeper in, they found enslaved laborers; caged or chained or simply too broken to have wandered out on their own. Ivy moved among them with care, finding cuts and lengths of arm that shackles had worn raw... They were starved and dehydrated. She hadn't thought to ask their names, rather, letting her introduction be the alms she shared thereafter. Once the captives received first aid and were sent on, the party carried on. There at the end of it all was a impermeable gate. She stood before it in thought. Gates, beyond their structural significance, represent transitory change. Perhaps this was some sort of foretelling for what was to unfold in these rolling hills... the beginning stage of the Crusades.

 

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