2020-09-22 – Threshold guardians – Dwirhian
Sept 26, 2020 21:29:51 GMT
Igrainne (RETIRED), Merla, the Daughter of Summer, and 2 more like this
Post by Dwirhian on Sept 26, 2020 21:29:51 GMT
Dwirhian is telling you excitedly about this beautiful little valley in the Feythorn Forest – so colourful and intense, full of kaleidoscope flowers and bright berries and incredible silver-blue trees with red leaves…! It’s a place where you can get to the Feywild, she says. Well, that’s what she was told, she didn’t go. Not this time. Definitely some day soon, but this time she was helping someone with something.
The ‘someone’, it turns out when you ask, was actually a couple of guys, Levon and Hama. Levon works at the Daring Academy and studies plants. He’s really interesting, Dwirhian assures you, apparently feeling that you didn’t look suitably impressed by the idea of someone studying plants. And Hama, she goes on to explain, is the person who guards this valley – the Feyverge Valley, it’s called, apparently – except he needed some help guarding it because he’d been chased away by some plant monsters so he was hanging out at the Gilded Mirror. Which is why he and Levon hired Dwirhian and a few others: Bugloss the dragonborn and Indeterminant Objection the goliath (she waves at the them across the Ettin’s spacious main hall), Ymaren the elf, and Aslog, who she hesitantly says is maybe a human? She doesn’t know many humans, she explains, they’re kind of a new experience for her.
Anyway, you really must go and have a look at this valley, Dwirhian insists. It isn’t far, like half a day south-east. She jumps up from her chair and goes over to the map table, gesturing you to follow – apparently untroubled by the fact that several people are already sitting around it. In fact she squeezes between two of them, placing a hand on the shoulder of one with a sorry, hon, don’t mind me. This is quickly followed by a wow, you have amazing eyes! and then is this your badger? so adorable! and…
A minute or two later you and everyone at the table know each other’s names and Dwirhian is perched on the carved table-top pointing to the place where someone in years gone by has marked ‘valley of beautiful flowers’, telling you and the others that this must be the place.
It’s so worth a visit, she says, and it should be safe now because she and the others did a pretty thorough job clearing out the monsters, with Hama’s help. It started with Indeterminant walking right into the valley singing as loud as he could, while the rest of the group crept quietly after him…
You and every other drinker at the map table fall silent, gripped by every twist and turn as Dwirhian unfolds the story. Your heart beats faster as she describes being attacked by sticks and branches twisted together into small figures with grasping, scraping fingers; you feel stirred to action when she repeats Hama’s call to take back the valley; you almost feel like applauding at the moment when she magically sent most of them to sleep, but then you feel a chill as more of the creatures emerge, followed by the crashing arrival of a great moving tree, thrashing its heavy branches around and knocking the party left and right; the next moment you’re laughing at Ymaren’s repeated mocking jibes at the tree creature, and at the way not a single one seemed to make the slightest dent in its woody self-esteem; and finally the feeling of triumph and relief when Dwirhian describes the Bugloss finishing it off in a great blaze of holy fire is almost as if you’d been fighting the battle yourself.
In the rapt silence that follows, Dwirhian looks happily at the appreciative faces around the table but then changes, as if struck by doubt. Before anyone can say anything, she hurriedly starts speaking again. At first she seems to be talking just for the sake of filling the pause, not knowing quite what she wants to say. But soon she’s telling you how it’s interesting because it turned out the monsters had been made by putting pieces of a broken magic mirror inside each of them – she shows you and the others a fragment of very sharp and unnaturally cold mirror-glass that she holds carefully in a piece of thick cloth. The biggest piece had a symbol on it that Hama said was to do with the Snow Queen: she must have been trying to take over the valley, that’s what Hama reckoned. Anyway it’s sorted now and Hama is back protecting the place now in stead of spending all day drinking in the Gilded Mirror so really there’s no reason not to go, is there?
And, with that, Dwirhian hops down from the table and asks what everyone wants from the bar. A few moments later she’s leaning at the counter and chatting to a black-scaled dragonborn with an unusual narrow-brimmed hat while Coll pours the next round.
Anyway, Dwirhian says, eventually returning to the table with several mugs in each hand – what about you, what have you all been doing the last few days?
The ‘someone’, it turns out when you ask, was actually a couple of guys, Levon and Hama. Levon works at the Daring Academy and studies plants. He’s really interesting, Dwirhian assures you, apparently feeling that you didn’t look suitably impressed by the idea of someone studying plants. And Hama, she goes on to explain, is the person who guards this valley – the Feyverge Valley, it’s called, apparently – except he needed some help guarding it because he’d been chased away by some plant monsters so he was hanging out at the Gilded Mirror. Which is why he and Levon hired Dwirhian and a few others: Bugloss the dragonborn and Indeterminant Objection the goliath (she waves at the them across the Ettin’s spacious main hall), Ymaren the elf, and Aslog, who she hesitantly says is maybe a human? She doesn’t know many humans, she explains, they’re kind of a new experience for her.
Anyway, you really must go and have a look at this valley, Dwirhian insists. It isn’t far, like half a day south-east. She jumps up from her chair and goes over to the map table, gesturing you to follow – apparently untroubled by the fact that several people are already sitting around it. In fact she squeezes between two of them, placing a hand on the shoulder of one with a sorry, hon, don’t mind me. This is quickly followed by a wow, you have amazing eyes! and then is this your badger? so adorable! and…
A minute or two later you and everyone at the table know each other’s names and Dwirhian is perched on the carved table-top pointing to the place where someone in years gone by has marked ‘valley of beautiful flowers’, telling you and the others that this must be the place.
It’s so worth a visit, she says, and it should be safe now because she and the others did a pretty thorough job clearing out the monsters, with Hama’s help. It started with Indeterminant walking right into the valley singing as loud as he could, while the rest of the group crept quietly after him…
You and every other drinker at the map table fall silent, gripped by every twist and turn as Dwirhian unfolds the story. Your heart beats faster as she describes being attacked by sticks and branches twisted together into small figures with grasping, scraping fingers; you feel stirred to action when she repeats Hama’s call to take back the valley; you almost feel like applauding at the moment when she magically sent most of them to sleep, but then you feel a chill as more of the creatures emerge, followed by the crashing arrival of a great moving tree, thrashing its heavy branches around and knocking the party left and right; the next moment you’re laughing at Ymaren’s repeated mocking jibes at the tree creature, and at the way not a single one seemed to make the slightest dent in its woody self-esteem; and finally the feeling of triumph and relief when Dwirhian describes the Bugloss finishing it off in a great blaze of holy fire is almost as if you’d been fighting the battle yourself.
In the rapt silence that follows, Dwirhian looks happily at the appreciative faces around the table but then changes, as if struck by doubt. Before anyone can say anything, she hurriedly starts speaking again. At first she seems to be talking just for the sake of filling the pause, not knowing quite what she wants to say. But soon she’s telling you how it’s interesting because it turned out the monsters had been made by putting pieces of a broken magic mirror inside each of them – she shows you and the others a fragment of very sharp and unnaturally cold mirror-glass that she holds carefully in a piece of thick cloth. The biggest piece had a symbol on it that Hama said was to do with the Snow Queen: she must have been trying to take over the valley, that’s what Hama reckoned. Anyway it’s sorted now and Hama is back protecting the place now in stead of spending all day drinking in the Gilded Mirror so really there’s no reason not to go, is there?
And, with that, Dwirhian hops down from the table and asks what everyone wants from the bar. A few moments later she’s leaning at the counter and chatting to a black-scaled dragonborn with an unusual narrow-brimmed hat while Coll pours the next round.
Anyway, Dwirhian says, eventually returning to the table with several mugs in each hand – what about you, what have you all been doing the last few days?