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42- Back To The Forsaken Lands
🕑 Added 2025-07-14 23:45:29 +0000 UTCVraxious- Hopes End
There was an uncomfortable stillness, the townsfolk's weapons drawn and the official representatives gloating over their perceived power over the townsfolk. Before anyone could do anything that couldn’t be undone, William spoke, stopping things from escalating further.
“Let his wonderful, magnanimous, glorious, resplendent, little pricked highness the duke know that we, the king’s loyal citizens, have received his message.” He spat at the two with equal parts venom and sarcasm. They both made their exit out the nearest gate as the town watched them.
“Well fuck…” William muttered, “If we have another crusade coming, we need to get ready, and we need to finally have that town meeting.”
Vrax rushed up the stairs and gave William a big hug. “Well, hell, I guess I have bad timing.” Vrax joked.
“Bah, it’s never a bad time for a boy to come give his doting father a hug,” William said warmly.
“Doting?” Vrax chuckled.
“Meh, I did my best with what I was given, and you didn’t die before adulthood. I count that as a success. Now come on in and catch your father up on your adventures,” William said, then turned to a burly nearby guard. “Thomas, could you please put the plant back where it lives in the privy field?”
A stout young guard, an even mix between muscle and fat with a thin beard, responded, “Aww dammit, why me, boss? He's the one that made it!” His face said he didn’t want to get anywhere near it.
“Because you’re closest,” William said, ignoring the fact that was patently untrue and edging past the gulper plant into the chapel.
Vrax and William reclined in William's study for several hours. A stalwart wooden room lined with knickknacks from his adventures. The largest of which was a broken black axe carefully pieced back together and resting prominently on a red silken cloth behind William's desk. Vrax gave him the broad strokes of their adventures, leaving out a few of the more inglorious details. Vrax finally broke the happy reunion with a serious question.
“The crusade—how bad is it?” Vrax asked with a look of concern across his face.
William let out a long sigh. “I won’t lie to you; it’s bad, really bad. You were just a tot for the last one, but they take what they want from who they want and have tried to use it as an excuse to install a puppet of the dukes as the town leader every time. This last one was bad; they looked for any reason to arrest folks and tried their damnedest to instigate the townsfolk so as to have an excuse to “purge the criminals.” It only really came to an end after their leader…got lost in the woods…and paladins started going missing. The town can’t just openly fight back; we might actually stand a pretty good chance against whatever they send, but if we do that while we are still in the duke’s borders, they have won. They can call for the king’s aid and label us rebels; they would get to purge the city with the king’s help.” William spoke with an uncharacteristically grave tone, making sure Vrax understood every unspoken part of his explanation.
“And what if the borders finally pushed past Hopes End…and technically we were just an unincorporated town?”
“Well, hypothetically, we could do whatever the fuck we wanted. The duke would probably try and return the town to the fold by force, but he would be doing it alone; the king would tell him to go fuck himself if he asked for aid. The undying old king is very specific about his rules, and as far as he is concerned, if you can't secure your own borders from monsters, that is a you problem. That is what I intend to have a town meeting about... If we want to stop culling the scary shit on the edges and let the border push towards us. We probably don’t have long enough to become unincorporated before the crusade, but….” William trailed off.
Vrax picked up on what he was saying. “But…if the paladins have a long and difficult time on their crusade, they might not be able to secure the borders before we get the chance to be free…”
“Exactly, we have all talked about it for years, but we would need to take a real vote; it would mean a hell of a lot more monster attacks on town, and we would have to fend for ourselves against foreign powers. But I think damn near everyone here would rather go stab a few Dewlions and bury a spy or two in the woods than deal with what is coming from the duke indefinitely, so I'm going to call a few small town meetings—can't do it too openly—and take some votes.” William took a slug of ale from a mug sitting on his beat-up desk.
“Alright, you already know my damn vote,” Vrax said, taking a sip from his mug of spiced cider, savoring the slight warm burn.
“Pffft, of course I do. I’m sure you’re planning to build a damn house out there now that not literally everything can eat you without some effort.” William said with a chuckle and pointed broadly to a rough map of the forsaken lands that Vrax had been writing notes on for years that was prominently on the wall.”
“Not a house...exactly. I am going to try and make a stronghold, though I can’t currently safely experiment with my powers near...well…normal civilization. And if some paladins happen to wander into the wrong slightly green glowing glade, oh well…” Vrax said with a smile, and the box next to him chirped in agreement.
William leaned forward a bit. “Do what you must to explore your powers, son, but your friend Stereos was right; you have the single most potentially dangerous class I know of. It makes even the necromancer’s pale; he needed corpses and souls, but you need nothing more than a flower and time. When people start figuring that out, they are going to get very scared, and scared people lash out. Things are going to be getting very dangerous here soon; be ready for it.” He laid a comforting hand on Vrax’s shoulder and gave a light squeeze.
“Sooo...what class do you actually have?” Vrax tried
“Get the fuck out of my office; I have shit to do. If you don’t die before the second tier, I’ll tell you.” William laughed, half shoving his kid back towards the exit.
Vrax went to his room and replenished some of his adventuring supplies and made sure to get some more jars for new friends. Torvald was responsible for getting rations; he always got better rates at the food merchants in town, especially the butcher. The butcher fucking loved Torvald and his two whole-ass chickens a day average. Torvald was also presumably offloading the minor magic items from the bandit scuffle with the very intense halfling scavenger. I wonder if he did actually get a magic ring to make him stealthier. I have to remember to ask; I got distracted by the whole the dungeon is stealing your monsters thing.
Vrax met up with Torvald a bit after midday on the edge of town, both of them fully geared with large packs for an extended trip into the forsaken lands. With a nod, they started walking down the gently sloping hill into the waist-high grass that led to the nearby curtain of willows. Torvald dragged the box through the grass for Vrax; they had made it halfway across the clearing before they felt the unmistakable shift in energy as they stepped past the border of the duchy.
Vrax looked around in surprise. “That...moved nearly thirty strides in the time we have been gone.” Vrax stepped back and forth a few times to make sure he wasn’t imagining it.
“Well damn, I wonder what feisty shit has moved closer to the edges now,” Torvald grumbled while shoving a black circular nose ring into place like a bull might have. “Oww…” Torvald grumbled for a second while the other ring he had quickly stemmed the nosebleed.
“Did you not have your fucking nose pierced for the ring?” Vrax asked, astonished at what Torvald had just done.
“They wanted a whole silver to do that... It’s fine, I got it. By the way, this makes me a bit quieter, and it can make me damn near invisible for a few minutes a day.” Torvald said with a grimace, adjusting his fresh piercing slightly so the red gem was facing straight down.
Vrax looked at him, mouth agape still for a moment. “Is the edge of that ring even sharp, man!?”
Torvald winced and kept walking with the box. “Kinda,” he responded.
They passed through the curtain of willows, Torvald visibly tensing as they strode into one of the deadliest places in the world. Vrax took a deep breath of the heavy air and trailed his hands through the line of willows, adding a star-studded green sparkle to an entire line of them as they came to the first clearing from town and gazed upon the broken road covered in the smoldering orange of smelter moss.
“Gods, it’s good to be back.” Vrax slapped a hand on the box, unleashing the Dreadfeast into the forest, and rushed forward in a half crouch, the multicolored flowers around him parting so as not to rustle with his passage. The dreadfeast looked around curiously for a moment, and then, realizing it was home, did a happy twirl, settling its luminescence to a dull orange that let it blend with the smelter moss on the road, and disappeared into the shadows behind Vrax.
“Am I the only one concerned about...well, everything here?” Torvald hissed to himself, carefully stepping around drips of acid raining from a dull red tree and kicking away a plant near his feet that was trying to slither into his boot.
They continued this way for several hours, Vrax and the Dreadfeast. Prowling ahead through the edges of the long-forsaken road. They skirted around the rim of a yawning portal in the ground, something that stank of rotten flesh and fermentation shuffling within. Past a verdant field of red wildflowers that Vrax insisted they did not want anything to do with. And finally, as the sun started setting, angled off from the road and across the brooks branching like veins, tiny islands of life dotted throughout the waters.
Vrax slowed after navigating them to a particularly large island; a tree with bark of bone and leaves that rattled and looked like teeth sat overhead. Small black worms slithered through the sharp teeth overhead, letting out soft sighs as they picked across the myriad of bird corpses within.
“Is this okay to be under?” Torvald whispered, almost lying down on the island to stay as far from the tree as he could.”
“What? Yeah, it’s fine. Just don’t touch it now. Hush, I see something.” Vrax whispered back and focused his enhanced hearing forward, trying to pick out what had drawn his eye. The sudden squelch of fast-moving hoofs on shallow mud drew his head to the right. Another three islands, each with their own variety of tree, sat amid the shallow streams burbling around them. A rock formation past the last island broke up the brooks into even smaller streams. Rushing this way desperately was a deerlike being. Soft brown-red fur and antlers that curved down its back like the crest of a wave—it ran across the water, its hooves only slightly sinking into it. It turned to a fine mist, crossing one island in the span of a heartbeat without touching it. Only slowing as it veered too far to avoid a fallen log in its path and sinking into the mud of an island Vrax flashed identify from his shaded spot beside their cover. [Mist Runner Elk Tier-1](lvl 23)
Mist runners were harmless, but Vrax didn’t relax; he couldn’t see what it was running from yet. The deer thrashed in the mud, taking far too long to escape. It gathered mana, obviously about to turn to mist again and return to the comfort of its streams. Then it froze still halfway in the mud as its eyes widened in panic and it let out an awful bray of terror.
“What?” Vrax muttered to himself; he couldn’t see anything else yet either, although his hearing was picking up a bizarre gurgling noise, separate from the streams and brooks, and there was the smell of iron and decay in the air.
The mist runner violently turned inside out as something within the mud reached through its body and pulled, spilling steaming organs and blood all across the island. The body jerked for a moment as a hulking, dull red form heaved free from the gore-covered muck.
Comments
Beeees!
Ahhhhhhhh, so good to be back into these woods
