JOURNAL OF THE MARKED
Volume I.
Tor Styx in the aftermath of the Second Scouring
7th of the Deep Cold, 222 SA.
Our worst nightmare has come to pass. The Second Scouring has come.
The Sparrow is dead. Gutted like a pig by soldiers of the Cockatrice. Tor Styx has fallen, just as the Hexicanum had ten years before. It was a massacre. We thought the mountains would be our strength, that the tower was impenetrable. What blind, arrogant fools we were. Now my brothers and sisters all lay dead, butchered by the Emperor’s dogs.
I tried to warn them. I came before the council so many times, cautioning them that our safety was not a permanent state of affairs. I tried to urge them that we must move - east, west, north, south. Anywhere but here, in the heart of where they’d most expect us. But the negligence of the Emperor had made the elders overconfident. They believed that no army would be bold enough to attempt a march across the mountains. They were wrong. How many hundreds of us had to die because they were wrong?
For all of our training and learning, we were helpless against the endless hordes of the Cockatrice. They attacked us by nightfall when most of our number slept. It was no accident that the gate was left unlatched. Someone turned their cloak, I am certain of it beyond doubt. Should the chance come one day that I shall discover the truth of it, I’ll move heaven and hell itself to find who did this and make them suffer tenfold.
I don’t know if anyone else managed to escape. I barely made it out myself. One of the ***** speared me through the shoulder. Hurts like hell. I’ve managed to patch it up with a few stitches, for now. But if I can’t find a physician to clean it properly soon, infection will kick in. Even as I’m writing this now, I can feel it burning. With every move of the arm, every scribble of the quill, a sting hotter than ten suns courses through me, deep down to the bone and marrow. But I must keep my mind resolute if I am to survive the trials to come.
In Marked tradition, we inscribe the names of our dead on the Wall of the Fallen, to remember their sacrifice forevermore. But there is no more Wall of the Dead. No more commiseration. So long as I still draw breath, I will honour them. The death toll would be too high to record on the wall, but for those faces of the slain that I observed during my flight, I will mark their names and places of birth here, as is customary, so that their memory may endure in these pages.
♰ Aldon of Mikorszold
♰ Viktor of Casteburg
♰ Laurent of Danst
♰ Mordis of Semel
♰ Gaelen of Arves
♰ Hakim of Yezid
♰ Juan of Lermo
The Redmarch Mountains
10th of the Deep Cold, 222 SA.
I’ve been on the run for nearly for three days now.
I began to ride north for the County of Annasaint once I knew I had shaken the trail of the Cockatrice soldiers that were in pursuit of me. The journey was arduous and not without its dangers. For the first three nights and days, I was alone. Navigating the mountain trails was like a stumbling drunk through a maze. Every pillar of stone and valley of rock looked almost indistinguishable from one to the other. On the first day, I had unwittingly ended up travelling in a circle along the trail, stranded right where I’d begun again after an hour of progress. I resolved thereafter to mark an X into the cliffsides once every hour at minimum as to not get lost again.
Food up in the Redmarch Mountains is in no scarcity. Plenty of hill goats, elks and even the occasional deer up there that make it a grazing spot. But also an abundance of bears, mountain lions and creatures far more vicious than them. With my shoulder still shot, I can hardly even pull a bowstring. I resolved instead to rely upon the rations of bread, cured venison and water thay I miraculously managed to depart Tor Styx with. Fortunate timing that I had my pack pre-organized to set back on the trail the day before this hell unveiled itself.
The days were cold, the nights even colder. Unfurling my bedroll every night, I’d watch the stars for a time before falling asleep. Every constellation seemed so bright, so vivid. Far more than they ever had been from the summit of Tor Styx, in the observatory where the magi of old had spent their seasons divining the skies to scry the fates. Those sorcerers back then glimpsed into days that were and days to come and days that never could be. I oft found myself wondering if they had seen and known that the razing of their fortress was an inevitability, a guarantee writ large into the annals of destiny, hundreds of years before it had come to pass.
I suppose, with it all said and done, it matters little. It isn’t as though there are many of them left on this Continent who could have ever made a stand in preventing it. For generations, the Empire has made meticulous work of wiping out the sorcerers who refused to enter imperial service just as they’ve done to the Marked. It seemed a jest that they had once, in the distant past, sought out magi and Marked both when faced with matters of magic and monsters.
The first two days along the mountain trail were bitter and long. After my priorly mentioned mishap of getting lost on the first day, I made extra caution in covering more ground to make up for lost time. The image of my slain comrades still burned hot in my mind like a twisting knife, but in their honour, I had to press on. By the third day, though, my provisions were nigh on gone, and my wound had began to grow more gangrenous with the twilight of infection. I had another day and a half at the least before I’d make it over the mountain pass and begin my descent into Annasaint, if I was fortunate. The dreary thought that I wouldn’t make it, that I was doomed to die of disease, starvation or worse yet, by one of the hundreds of predators that called this place home had crossed over me more than once. But perhaps my well of luck hadn’t drained entirely, for I came across a camp of roving Canonist monks. Led by a figure known as Brother Borislav, a squat and balding old man with a kindly moustache and fingers as fat as sausages, they quickly saw that I was wounded and offered to tend to me. Typically, I’d be a bit more stubborn in my acceptance of allowing strangers to prod and fuss over me, but I was in no position to bite a helping hand. He took me in, cleaned and dressed my wound, and offered me medicine for my worsening malaise.
Sitting around the campfire with them as I tucked into a bowl of beef and leak stew, I quickly realized there were about a dozen of them, each clad in the dour brown robes of their monastic order, each bearing the golden cross of the Lorraine around their neck with pride. Brother Borislav asked who I was and I made a convincing enough lie - I was Niko, a hunter from Bicsk who’d journeyed into these mountains in search of a legendary white stag, but was set upon by malcontent brigands and left out here to die. I did not like to lie, but men are as fickle as their coin purses, and any one of them could have wrote to the Cockatrice and turned me in for a fat sum of a gold if I’d been honest.
Brother Borislav and his cohort seemed to eat up that lie. They told me then where they were from - the city of Valdev in the Kingdom of Hanseti-Ruska, far to the west in a land known as Aevos. They had sailed to Aeldin to undertake a pilgrimage, beginning in the city of Justern and travelling along to Novengard where they were now bound for Pronce, their second to last location before the Imperial Capital of Nova Horos. When I asked why they’d chosen the mountain pass over the main roads, Borislav told me that the beasts of the hills were of less threat to them than the highwaymen and robbers that infested the highways between Venerra and Agathor, though my story was making him reconsider such a sentiment. I very nearly jested to him that I’d read once in some old tome that griffins and mountain trolls despised the taste of monk before I thought better of it, deducing that it might give away what I truly am.
Either way, Borislav and his band took some measure of pity on me. He told me that they could not afford to go back the way they came, but that I was welcome to travel with them to Pronce or one of the villages in between and find my own way back to Bicsk. None of his underlings seemed to take any issue with the proposition, either, willing to welcome me in with open arms. Of course I accepted - I am no fool. To press on alone any longer through these mountains without food or water would be suicide, and if the Cockatrice were to catch up to me, I’d blend in far better with a gaggle of holy men.
The monks were kind enough to pitch me up a spare tent, where I’m sat writing this now. With a patched wound and a full belly, I feel more hopeful now of what tomorrow might bring. Yet, I’ve barely had a moment to consider where I shall go from here. I know now that this wretched land is no longer safe for me. No safer than it ever was, perhaps, but I might well be one of the last of my kind. I’ve given some thought to heading for Aevos. The monks will no doubt seek passage back there once their pilgrimage is concluded. I’d heard stories in the past that a chapter of the Marked had once tried to establish themselves there. I do not know whether they thrived or faltered in those foreign lands, but perhaps if any of them remain on the trail, we can rebuild what was taken from us.
Whatever tomorrow shall bring, I shall be up like the lark to face it. Every fibre of my being still aches with pain from the ruination cast upon us, but I must remain strong. If not for myself, then for all of my fallen brothers and sisters.