The Ineffable Sense of Finally Arriving
Or, Damn it Feels Good to be a Bolg
It is rather extraordinary to watch my mother, Magda, decide what information she is going to offer and what she will withhold.
I had asked to make use of one of her crafting Patterns, and to this my mother responded that to earn that right I had best go check in on the ancestral pre-Scourge Bolg family mountain retreat. To this end, she provided me with a map, an exhaustive list of supplies, trinkets, and one pair of tweezers to recover from the place, and pasties for my companions (Dubhan, Karl, and William) and myself to feed us on the journey.
The map was accurate, the pasties delicious, the information she provided about the Bolg family retreat was entirely and absurdly incomplete. Sufficiently so that I suspect intentional omission.
Our family retreat is not far (HEX: 42.08/43.08) but did require us to ascend the mountains to where the air is crisp and clear and thin. Along the way, we encountered a rather gruesome group: Three cave trolls that had been tortured into submission and rage and obedience by an absolutely foul worm-tailed flying creature with faint, passing similarity to a diseased, obese Windling, though clearly not of those wonderful people.
The trolls did as one would expect. They ran fiercely on long legs and swung heavy stone axes with prodigious strength. They were accompanied by some fell spirit of cold and vengeance that attempted (and failed, thanks to Dubhan's wards) to put the freezing immobility of winter in my bones. Their master, however, was that tiny thing we are calling a Changeling. For it had the dread ability to shape bone itself.
It used that ability on William, dragging shards of his breastbone out through his very skin. He shrieked in terrible pain and I hope to never again encounter the sight of thorns piercing a Namegiver's skin from the inside.
We cleansed the cave these fell creatures had occupied - finding it full of distressing but elegant bone sculptures - and continued on.
(It should be observed for mountain travelers that exertion is particularly taxing at these high altitudes. Be prepared!)
We continued on until we found the first markers of my family home. And reader, what glorious work the dwarfs of the past had done. Bolgenar, as our retreat was called, was always a sanctuary for artists and crafters, of makers and dreamers. And these great people had turned their imaginations to extraordinary and mighty works of art. Our journey to the gates of the valley was spend in wonder.
And after passing through the great iron doors that protected our retreat, we were treated to the sight of the valley, green and inviting, rustic and comfortable. As if a painting had come to life.
There we <redacted> and had a lovely meal before turning in on most comfortable beds. In the morning, we looked for the many things on my mother's list and found most of them (apologies: those tweezers are gone forever). We also found the <redacted>.
<Redacted>
Upon returning to the main area of the retreat, we found every reason to run in fear. To surrender to terror.
For before us, howling its eerie hollow cry, was a full-grown Wyvern. A beast of rapacious appetite and potent venom, of ferocious claws and animal fury. But, worse, this Wyvern had been returned from the dead by some foul process. It had the stink and the fury of Cadaver Men in the body of a massive, sinuous, flying killing machine.
We had many reasons to flee. But our time <redacted> had reaffirmed our mission as Adepts. I cannot speak for my companions, but I felt, perhaps for the first time in truth, that I was set on a great and vital path. That I represented something great. And that I was a critical part of it.
And so we gave battle. Dubhan and I wove spells, at the outset, while William and Karl set to peppering it. This angered the beast, which tried to poison me with its barbed tail - to no avail - and tried to tear William asunder, with rather more success. No, kind reader, he did not perish but he came near enough!
And that is when Dubhan cried out the words of the spell called Seeking Sight. And Karl marshaled all of his Karma and poured them into the purest distillation of his Discipline - the relentless pursuit of a clear path and a direct solution. We could nearly see the glow and glitter of his soul's blessing on his arrowheads as he loosed two arrows that burrowed into the heart of the beast.
Two arrows that dropped the Wyvern to the ground, dead again.
We recovered from its unfortunate, terrible, dreadful corpse what scraps of its former glory we could. For the greatest service we could do was to recover something of value from this poor corrupted beast. And then, we took it out of our valley and burned it down to ash.
Bolgenar is ours again and I feel a special kinship to it, having been one to help restore it. And I am the Maker of this generation of Bolgs, so I suppose it is now my place to hold, where I shall nurture the artisans and crafters of this new age of Throal.Statistics:Posted by bronzemountain — Sat May 16, 2020 1:15 pm
]]>