Coldest Trail, Part 2

EPISODE 2, Part 2

ART: GERMINUS, THOMAS; Source: New York Public Library

The Green Sail and a Welcoming Sea

When on a boat, it helps to have a touch of bardic inspiration. I trained in several instruments as a child, for boredom and the hope of some extra cash. Even then, playing in street crews and at private events, I learned that a song can elevate the dull and ease the pain when days are hard.

I played well and started to make a little money along the way, but music couldn’t keep me. It felt like a retreat from things that were more pressing, more serious and more likely to control the winds of fate in life. A minstrel does nothing to stave off the war of Urborg and Bogarden, which leaves my home city destroyed. Leaders politic and push empire proxies around, but the waters warm and the shelled monstrosities grow fat and deadly, undeterred. Our crops change faster than our governments. Penregon is ruined, Kroog frozen. I had a terrible cough for a time, but shook it faster than that calcinous empire shook its greedy landlords.

So with song sounding stale, I studied artifice. A hobby at first, but to me the language flowed from my tongue with little teaching. And, as militias exhumed the trenches and explored their horrors, demand for artificers grew. I left Ronom Lake to Terisiare, to be closer to those ancient ghosts. I picked up bones; hollow echoes of third way magic and wizards of artifice who may now be hunted for knowing what I know.

Irony. The smell of death emanates from every trench; the ice creeps and feeds on our land, and we’re out witch-hunting engineers. The dark grows longer each year yet our leaders plunder and pillage the land. Terisiare, further west, even here in the east - are more factionalized and distrustful. They hind behind new dogmas and rituals, but remain naked and afraid

The answers to our troubles can be found in those cemeteries and trenches, not the horizon. Artifice and ancient forces have survived worse times. That’s why i’m here. That’s why I hunt these bones. 16 years now. Every one of those years has reaffirmed that more power and awe awaits in the past; even a truth that unites us, fractured as we are choking on the dusts of war.

**

I almost never dream out here. I think when the mind and body are aligned on a singular journey; when we walk knowingly into dangers and unknown places; these are times when every ounce of the self directs towards survival and success. I don’t have time for the luxuries of star-born fancy. I have to bring my bounty home.

But last night was different. The sea pitched in a weird way. Not more dangerous, as it wasn't a storm nor a squall. It was faster though. It pulsed against the hull like a racing heart. When I did sleep it pulsed in my mind.

I imagined great expanses of blackness. Blackness that flew like greatly planetary knives, huge waves of darkness on an infinite sea. And in spite of that darkness there was something there. Unmistakably.

A great black serpent coils and uncoils. I can’t touch a dream but I know that its scales are ice-cold. Its mouth is an abyss. Infinite. It floats atop the waves on a whim and speeds towards something. Obscured by dream, I know that it is something I hold dear, but that I am powerlessly slow against its bolting form. The dream blinks out.

A crystal statue of a defiant figure. I think a woman. There are so many facets that distinguishing form and anatomy from armor and gallantry becomes a tricky haze. She stands at a cliff, a seaside bluff. Wind batters hair frozen in gemstone. She sees something and begins to cry. The sky burns and the dream blinks out.

A dark brotherhood sits around a table, waiting. The silence holds heavy in the room and each of the men emanates a hatred. This hate is fresh, still painful to hold, and deeply melancholy. You can tell they are of the same hose. Maybe the same family. But suddenly the doors blow open, and an armor-clad figure enters with weapon drawn overhead. The table erupts in a violent chaos, as the family annihilates itself. The dream blinks out.

““

I awaken, well-aware that I’ve been given a rare warning.

“”

Woke up again, restless but thankfully dreamless. Just a bit further now.

I spoke with the Green Sail captain about things. He never stays on land for long, and charters one of the fastest, quietest ship-crews on the Viscera Sea. A greatly aged and tall figure, he His family comes from Citanul, and though it’s centuries since argoth was destroyed in the blast and no one he knows is quite sure how to connect him to that ancient place, he stands by this claim whenever someone asks him where he’s from.

With a captain like that, you never ask things directly. Sure they’ll tell you to talk straight and mock your youth (whether real or not), but they don’t want to speak directly. They want to speak in legacy. In verbal artifice. He wants us to share insight without the burden of our silly mortal issues.

He’s seen the serpent too.

He also knows that brotherhood. He told me a story of a mighty kingdom that split into two, then split again. One side embraced a darkness that twisted them to make literal monsters. Another tried to follow a path so rigid that they’d burn themselves rather than change linens. They argued, then fought, then warred and finally held hands walking down the path of self-destruction - on one side destroyed by a cult leader who distracted them long enough to be taken; on the other, consumed more literally, ripped apart and devoured by their own creations.

“You’re going to their doorstep, you know”

Damn old sea captains.

“”

The drop point is a miserable stretch of slag. They weren’t kidding when they said the frost and dark were getting worse in some places than in others. This place is like a furnace, if a furnace could spew ice, and occasionally exploded.

The captain gave me a satchel of stones. Each has its own little carrying bag and a scroll describing how they could somehow help me? Strange, but i think when he saw the landscape, and after the dreams, he might want to invest in some return fares and see me coming back. My clock starts now. The map from Claran is somewhat helpful; it outlines a path to cities through forests, but this information is from before the lights died and the dark crept in. I will have to really look for any remnant of these landmarks.

Unfortunately, there are more landmarks here that are much fresher, and which show that fallen empires on fertile ground are excellent breeding grounds.

There’s something here. Large. Huge footprints in the snow and frozen ground, showing that they frequent this space. One of the footprints is wider than my boat.

I have to start moving, and move quietly.

First the city ruins. Then the catacomb. Therein i will find the graves, the shrine, and the target.

**

TO BE CONTINUED …