A Heavy Price [Season 10].

After the Storm

The Tritooth Wharf, Port Ffirst
A scorched door, barely hanging in its hinges, opens slowly, light-blue furred hands straining against the rubble and the mocking sunlight.

“Oh dear…”

Uloria Galewhisper, the Primespeaker of Milil of the Temple of Two Faith in Port Ffirst… well, doesnt have much of a temple anymore. Her eyes adjusting to the deceptively cheery sunshine of the morning belie the utter carnage the dragon fire has wrought on Port Ffirst. Charred lanes have been burnt across the Tritooth Wharf, a good half of the warehouses, merchant estates and docks having gone up in cruel flames. Most of the merchant ships, and the war galleys of the Grey Zephir Armada sunk in harbor dot the artificial lagoon. How many lives lost? No way to tell, with so many finding wet graves below the gray waves.

“Oh dear…”


New Town
Click-clack, click-clack

The sound of steel tipped boots on the cobblestones feels less inspiring to Captain Galliant today. Inspecting the damages with a squad of surviving Town Guards, he can't suppress a shiver at the thought of how close he himself had come to perishing in the flames. His men had done what they could, but fighting dragons and Githyanki was not what they had been trained for. And without much in terms of support from Daring and the adventuring community…
They make their way past townsfolk trying to clear the rubble, reinforcing the salvageable town houses with material liberated from those in ruins. Every third house seems to have been destroyed. Good stonework had saved New Town from greater danger, and some people had found refuge in the sewer system during the night, but the rebuilding would take a monumental effort, that much was clear.

“Damn that Council in Daring Heights! They kept all their preparations focused on themselves…” the captain exclaims to noone in particular. Noone bothering to listen anyway. Noone got time for that with their own troubles piling sky high.


Old Town
“Be sure to thin down the stew, Gertrude! Bet we will have a lot of mouths to feed today.”

Jedd Heights, proprietor of the Cavernous Seashank, busies himself cleaning the surviving mugs of his “respectable” establishment.

“Billy, when you are done sweeping the floor, throw down fresh straw, as much as we have. Gotta make sure people without a roof over their heads no more got a place to sleep tonight, and the bunks are all filled.”

He thinks of all the people they are housing now and where to get the food to feed them now. But that might have to be future-Jedd’s problem.
With a sigh he hefts a bucket of rubbish and makes for the door out onto Old Port. Or what is left of it.
As he steps out into the sunlight, the silence is deafening. The gulls have gone. Funny that. You never notice the small things, until they aren't there anymore.
He dumps the contents of the bucket unceremoniously into the waterfront, where the fishing piers used to be.
The Cavernous Seashank miraculously survived the firestorm when hardly anything else in Old Town did, the wooden buildings of the slum going up in flames like so much tinder. Must have been the rot in the Seashank’s walls acting as a flame retardant that protected them. He reckons the inn might well be the oldest building left in all of Port Ffirst now.
The smell of burnt timber and flesh almost makes him retch. But he has a hard stomach. Has seen this before and knows the town will be rebuilt. Just something that people do. They pick themselves up and go on living.

A whistle has him turn, and he sees a group of urchins chasing a cat through the ruined streets. “Leave that cat alone!” He calls after them. “Hardly any meat on it anyway. Fish stew is almost done. Come to the Seashank, warm yourselves. Tomorrow we start again.” And he smiles.
Tomorrow they would start again.