Return to Kavel Land 19/9 Sorrel
Sept 22, 2023 13:00:57 GMT
Delilah Daybreaker and Velania Kalugina like this
Post by stephena on Sept 22, 2023 13:00:57 GMT
A sequel, of sorts, to the Voyage of the Legacy
--
Some problems are easily resolved. Assassinating the Witch King of the Midnight Wraiths, for instance. It just involves staying up late, carefully placing three arrows in rapid succession into the head of his flying mount – two bearing oil and one bearing fire since thundering nightmares hate it when their eyes catch alight – then sending a fourth shaft bathed in radiant power into his Achilles tendon as he crashes to the ground before gouging his eyes out with a priest blessed spork. The difficult bit is attracting his attention without slipping into the ethereal plane where those bastards have the edge, but Sorrel was on her fifth Witch King and usually just hired Kelne to flop about on the Witch King’s flight path asking where the volcanos were at.
It was much harder to go on holiday, Sorrel found. Taking too much time off when you’re a freelance always leads to tax issues later in the year so when brother Kavel paused during a kettle bell session to ask if she fancied heading off to the island formerly known as Praxima, now proudly renamed Kavel Land she hesitated until he mentioned tidying the place up.
Excellent. A little light lifting and she could put it down as a deductible work trip.
The only problem was how to get there.
Kavel had clocked Sorrel’s training regime and realised a) she was on the pull again, and b) was going for tone and definition over strength so wisely recruited some muscle and some brains in the form of hard-as-nails psychodin Oziah, airborne barbarian Beets and fluffy eared couture designer-come-conjurer Jennifur ‘Lolli’ Cottontail. When the suicide squad assembled at the teleportal, Kavel gave Sorrel a nod and both sidled up to the hobgoblin on duty.
“Well met, good fellow,” Sorrel began.
“I’m a hobgoblin not a fairy,” the portalkeep seemed irritated.
“You got a problem with fairies?” Beets bristled.
Things had started badly.
Kavel opened the subject of teleportation and the laws of chance. What, he posed as a hypothetical, were the risks in teleporting hundreds of miles across the sea to a small splodge of sand in the glinting azure?
Not a risk to be had, the hobgoblin said blithely, provided they knew the place well or had an object that had been there in the last six months. Sorrel felt that this was an unjustifiably specific clause in the magic and suspected it was health and safety gone mad but had prepared for this very eventuality with Kavel.
“Oh, that’s no problem,” she gave a curt nod. “I have this completely useless razor and this diary that’s mostly useless but strangely handy in a rare set of circumstance. Both hail from Kavel Land.”
“And hail from there within the last six months?”
“Ooooh, I’d say so brother, wouldn’t you?” she turned to Kavel.
“Yes, feels like only yesterday,” Kavel scratched his chin. “What, out of interest, might happen if it had been a tad longer?”
“Well, young sir, I heard tell of a man who used objects past their teleport-by date, it all went wrong and his hands went inside out,” the goblin’s voice slipped from every day to tourist as he finished his tale of woe.
Sorrel and Kavel exchanged glances. It had been at least a year since they bagged the tat on Kavel’s island. Kavel shook his head imperceptibly.
“Perhaps instead you could take us to Port Ffirst?” he said carefully.
“The Cavernous Seashank?” the hobgoblin brightened up.
“Please no…” Beets almost sobbed. “It half killed me.”
“It’s the only place I know,” said the hobgoblin, cranking the arcane carvings into action.
Sorrel wasn’t entirely surprised.
--
Oziah was horrified when Kavel explained how his deal with Mace worked regarding the berthing of the Legacy, the ship that had taken them to and from Kavel Land last time and which had fallen into Sorrel and Kavel’s hands by dint of the whole crew being dead.
“So, he has taken your ship and paid you no money and you didn’t even receive a receipt?” her eyes were wide with incredulity.
“I, er… I think he said berthing would cost 10,000 gold and… it sort of felt like he was doing us a favour,” Sorrel mumbled.
“Follow me.”
Sorrel noticed various signs of Macelike activities as they stalked from the Seashank to Mace Towers - people being dragged down alleyways, people handing over money to people who didn’t seem to be that interested in taking money but did have a lot of weapons, the streets being clean and the trains running on time.
Oziah’s conversation with Mace definitely used words that Sorrel knew. If you’d written the whole thing down she’d not have needed to reach for a dictionary to read it. But somehow she knew that if she had said any of the speeches they exchanged it would have no effect on anyone. When Oziah and Mace spoke, however, Sorrel felt compelled to do whatever it was that the last speaker had suggested.
Eventually Mace announced that he would be happy to lend Kavel the Legacy to make the voyage.
Oziah said that this was not a loan as Kavel owned the Legacy.
The point appeared moot.
Mace strode from his desk and walked through Port Ffirst. Sorrel noticed how the crowded streets ahead of them became deserted streets by the time Mace set foot on them. She had never seen crowds behave so much like butter before.
As they reached the dockside, Mace stopped, gestured towards the streamlined bows of the Legacy and bowed politely. “I trust Kavel Land is a truly profitable proposition,” he smiled. Somehow, Sorrel heard a whole other paragraph that she could have sworn Mace had said even though she knew his mouth hadn’t opened. It definitely involved the concept of percentages, the suggestion of the greater good and something unpleasant happening to knees.
She was relieved when they were aboard, although Beets and Oziah started looming over, under and around the captain who Sorrel would have described as hapless had he not been in charge of a couple of hundred heavily armed sailors. The main bone of contention appeared to be ownership of the Legacy. The captain thought the ship was his. Mace clearly thought it was property of Mace esq. And Kavel pointed to the mast where his name was carved with pride. Sorrel briefly examined her inventory and found ‘one percent of the ship Legacy’ in her assets list but felt this might muddy the waters.
Eventually Oziah simmered down. “What is your name?” she fixed her eyes on the be-tricorned skipper.
“Stevie Dimitrescu,” he began.
“Stevie,” Oziah leaned back and surveyed the vessel. “Stevie, Stevie, Stevie. We come aboard with a non-zero amount of suspicion that your fine crew might rob and kill us in our sleep. However, we appreciate that such crews are the tightest of crews. But Mr Mace did not give you the ship. He is not the owner. Kavel is the owner. We won’t get in your way, and you won’t murder us in our sleep.”
Kavel pulled out an elaborate map of Kavel Land. “Captain ‘if you’re ready to go?” Dimitrescu nodded. “Then could you do this in a day?”
The young sea dog pursed his lips. “Day and half…”
As the crew hoist things up, belayed stuff and possibly even horn piped, Sorrel pulled Kavel aside.
“Brother if I remember rightly we left an angry water genasi bouldered up in a cave last time?”
“Correct,” Kavel said gravely. “But he must be dead by now right?”
Sorrel nodded thoughtfully. “Right… right… he must be...”
The ships sails billowed out into soft, magical clouds which caught the wind and leaped forward, the Legacy racing across the sea so fast that Oziah, astride her winged steed Deimos, struggled to keep up.
--
Significant events on the voyage of the Legacy
1) Lolli saw something vast rise beneath the waves and almost breach the water.
2) Beets was very twitchy.
3) Oziah followed Beets around the ship doing damage control.
4) Kavel strode the deck.
5) Sorrel spent a lot of time trying to remember a water genasi’s weak spots then practising the relevant attack drills on the quarter deck.
--
Mist now surrounded the ship.
“The last time we were here, the crew got hostile in the mist,” Kavel observed.
“Will the crew do that now?” Beets seethed reaching for her weapons. “Perhaps we strike first?”
“Did the mist turn the crew dangerous?” Oziah asked.
“No, I think killing us was always their plan,” Sorrel said mildly.
“Is this the same crew?”
“No, no, they’re all dead,” Sorrel recalled.
“So why are we suspicious of this crew?” Oziah seemed puzzled.
“We’re not really,” Sorrel shrugged.
“No, we’re not suspicious at all,” Kavel added.
They all looked at Beets, who smiled beatifically.
--
They stepped onto the beach in paradise, white gold sands stretching away on either side, tropical trees dappling them with broken shade, and carved into the side of the island’s lone mountain the legend Kavel Land.
“Would you move out here brother?” Sorrel looked up at Kavel.
“I think Natalie has too much on ruling her kingdom,” Kavel rumbled. “I think more that I’d spend one month in Daring Heights, one in the Feywild and come here for holidays.”
“What about the Wild Hunt?” Beets pipped up.
“Oziah and I met them recently,” Kavel was hedging a little.
“It’s always SNAFU in the Feywild,” Oziah shrugged.
“Even Queen Titania getting a spear in her side?” Beets sounded surprised.
Sorrel listened carefully. She had been a little out of touch recently – Witch Kings don’t kill themselves – but she had the sense that this Wild Hunt might prove important.
“I want to explore my island,” Kavel seemed keen to change the subject. “Shall we see if Jimmy – Captain Midnight - is still alive in that cave?”
“You know the old saying,” Sorrel offered. “Don’t explore a tropical island if there’s a water genasi about to leap out behind you.”
“Especially if they’ve had enough time to spawn 200 children since you last saw them,” Oziah added.
Sorrel smiled. Oziah did know the old saying.
--
Crammed around the cave mouth in the cliff wall surrounding a small cove, Kavel and Oziah were shifting rock when Sorrel heard more rock shifting from deep within the cave.
“I hear more rock shifting from deep within the cave,” she warned.
The others didn’t seem to care, and the cave mouth was swiftly opened.
Sorrel almost gasped. The same vast halls greeted her gaze, but she remembered how they looked last time, filled with the most pointless tat she had seen in her live long day. And she had been to some terrible monuments in her time – the Shrieking Chasm, which shrieks almost exactly like the wind going down a chasm but still supports a small army of souvenir sellers, or the Gates of Doom, an ancient and very loud pair of metal doors so old that part of the lettering had rubbed away which, since no-one would pay to see the Gates of Boom, locals hadn’t bothered to fix as there was a lucrative market in tiny tin replicas, or even the Invisible Mountain, which was most definitively impossible to see by dint of not actually being there in any way but nonetheless shifted an actual mountain of amusing novelty gifts. She was sure there was something from all of those places buried somewhere in these vaults.
Except the vaults were empty. The bric-a-brac was gone.
Lolli wove some charms and declared there were no traces of magic. Oziah did… something… and announced there were no fiends. Sorrel flicked open her diary and found no unclaimed secrets.*
“Shame,” Sorrel breathed. “I thought you had a tourist attraction here. Kavel’s Krazy Kave.”
She thought for a second.
“With each word starting with a K,” she explained. “It would be funnier if you saw it written down.” She considered this. “Marginally funnier,” she conceded, then held her hand up. “Wait. I hear what sounds like… like someone pretending to breathe.”
“Where from?” Kavel clenched his battle fists.
Sorrel pointed off into the cavern. “Over there.”
“Over there you say?” Beets chirruped.
“I do say,” Sorrel replied.
Beets chucked a rock into the gloom.
Nothing happened.
They moved carefully forward in squad formation, Kavel and Oziah on point, Beets providing close protection for Lolli and Sorrel on flank. As they rounded an abutment they came across a vast mound of gewgaws, curios and trifles reaching up almost to the cavern ceiling.
“Here they are,” Lolli gasped.
They watched as scattered whatnots and doodahs rolled across the floor towards the mound.
“Is that you Midnight?” Kavel looked up at the bagatelle mountain.
From deep within the arcane aggregation a rolling voice boomed like ancient waves on a long-forgotten shore.
“KAVEL…” it echoed through the vaults.
The ornamental junk merged and folded backwards as the appalling twisted form of an animated steel dragon built itself out of the assembled baubles. Around its neck a mighty chain of gimcracks and nic-nacs had formed into the dread name Alan. It shifted, squirmed and turned its fiery eyes to Kavel, who seemed puzzled and turned to his comrades.
“Is this an awakened pile of tat?”
Sorrel didn’t wait for a thesaurus. She unleashed four arrows into the beasts chest too fast to even think about what she was doing, Kavel leaped through the air to rain blows down and Oziah bought her mighty blade down once, twice…
Sorrel blinked. Oziah’s two blows seemed to have hurt the abomination a little more than Sorrel’s four arrows. Sorrel wouldn’t call herself competitive in much the same way that the kettle wouldn’t describe itself as black, but she found herself setting up a metaphorical score sheet.
And then the dragon bit Oziah, clawed Kavel and flung deadly trinkets through the air, giving her a nasty flesh wound. And, if truth be told, a little hurt pride. It would not be death by trinkets on Sorrel Darkfire’s tombstone.
As she groused, Lolli hurled magic at Kavel until he towered almost as high as the tat dragon. Beets attacked but was downed by the atrocity.
Sorrel reached for a dragon slaying arrow, glanced briefly at Oziah to ensure she was watching then loosed it and two sisters into the dragon’s flanks.
Kavel bought his fists down on the dragon’s neck, then Oziah summoned her steed, leaped into the air and surrounded herself with dark spirits which flew along her blade to bring… Sorrel blinked. To bring, it seemed, a little more pain than an actual dragon slaying arrow.
Lolli distracted her with a chromatic orb, before the beast noticed and hurt her. Sorrel called on the goddess to bless her smite and sent a shaft encased in deadly moonlight into the dragon’s heart.
More fists from Kavel, then Oziah plunged her sword into the grotesque skull, felt the creature’s life force flee and slid down its collapsing neck until she could step off onto the cave floor with a little flourish.
“The very definition of overkill,” Oziah proclaimed.
As Oziah’s blade struck home, a wave of relief had washed over Sorrel. At first she thought it was the end of the fight that took a weight from her shoulders, but as Kavel clambered across the corpse, he pointed to a shrivelled, blackened hand entombed in steel. It was Captain Midnight, his corpse long dead, clutching at a dial of dark necromancy.
He had been clawing at his treasure, the things he valued most in all the world, left alone to die with them sealed off from the ocean of his life.
By Sorrel and her companions.
And that’s when she realised the relief she was feeling was down to Oziah striking the killing blow, not her. As if that absolved Sorrel of something.
Who knew when the water genasi within this beast had died? But dark magic had claimed him and forged that dragon – who had worn his own name which somehow rang a bell…
Alan. The name of the T Rex in the Angelbark whose life she had fought to save. Two Alans. Two beasts. One living, one dead. And her hand had struck first in both combats. She had judged one fit to live and one worth killing.
Daring Heights pretended to be a city, but it was still a frontier town. When the council hired adventurers, they didn’t ask for prisoners. They preferred justice, if that’s what it was, to be meted out in the moment.
The only prisoners she’d seen taken were by Derthaad, the weary dragonborn detective holding true to his ideals in a city filled with killers.
Sorrel’s crimes were legion. The bodies of her dead felt chained behind her, stretching out of the cave and across the sea to her childhood home in Balder’s Gate. Some had surely deserved to die. She had caught them in the foulest acts and administered mercy, not justice. Others were less certain and still others merely accidents. A life stolen by her poor aim.
The goddess had her arms around her, of this she was certain. But she tried to think of the stories where the gods chose mortals to carry out their tasks and everything went well for the mortal concerned.
There were none.
She had thought she had escaped the consequences of these murders, but the faces of Sana, of Silvia, of Faust, of [redacted], of all her fallen comrades and broken lives that had left her lonely and far from home swam before her eyes.
She had never seen a courthouse in Daring Heights, but she was on trial for her life, this she knew. Everybody has a jury, the voices they carry inside.
Alan sits on her jury. Sylvia sits on her jury, the Gith she hunted sat there too. They are there with countless faceless soldiers and their families, mothers and fathers and soon perhaps her sisters as well. Those she had loved and those she had hurt. Those who blessed her and those who haunted her.
Her gods of guilt.
Every day she carried on and she carried them close. Every night she stepped into the court before them, and she argued her case.
Every night, and the verdict yet to fall.
* It is not worth going into the backstory to Sorrel’s diary of irrelevant trivia. The only germane and pertaining point here being that all creatures within a 30ft radius had fake news about them appear on its pages whether they were visible or not. **
** The creatures that is, not the secrets. The secrets weren’t true so they couldn’t appear. ***
*** OK sure, in a fantasy world where magic exists it would be possible for fake secrets to crystalise into existence, but this is not that story. This is the story of Kavel, the Legacy, Kavel Land and diverse sundries. You’re wasting your time down here.
--
Some problems are easily resolved. Assassinating the Witch King of the Midnight Wraiths, for instance. It just involves staying up late, carefully placing three arrows in rapid succession into the head of his flying mount – two bearing oil and one bearing fire since thundering nightmares hate it when their eyes catch alight – then sending a fourth shaft bathed in radiant power into his Achilles tendon as he crashes to the ground before gouging his eyes out with a priest blessed spork. The difficult bit is attracting his attention without slipping into the ethereal plane where those bastards have the edge, but Sorrel was on her fifth Witch King and usually just hired Kelne to flop about on the Witch King’s flight path asking where the volcanos were at.
It was much harder to go on holiday, Sorrel found. Taking too much time off when you’re a freelance always leads to tax issues later in the year so when brother Kavel paused during a kettle bell session to ask if she fancied heading off to the island formerly known as Praxima, now proudly renamed Kavel Land she hesitated until he mentioned tidying the place up.
Excellent. A little light lifting and she could put it down as a deductible work trip.
The only problem was how to get there.
Kavel had clocked Sorrel’s training regime and realised a) she was on the pull again, and b) was going for tone and definition over strength so wisely recruited some muscle and some brains in the form of hard-as-nails psychodin Oziah, airborne barbarian Beets and fluffy eared couture designer-come-conjurer Jennifur ‘Lolli’ Cottontail. When the suicide squad assembled at the teleportal, Kavel gave Sorrel a nod and both sidled up to the hobgoblin on duty.
“Well met, good fellow,” Sorrel began.
“I’m a hobgoblin not a fairy,” the portalkeep seemed irritated.
“You got a problem with fairies?” Beets bristled.
Things had started badly.
Kavel opened the subject of teleportation and the laws of chance. What, he posed as a hypothetical, were the risks in teleporting hundreds of miles across the sea to a small splodge of sand in the glinting azure?
Not a risk to be had, the hobgoblin said blithely, provided they knew the place well or had an object that had been there in the last six months. Sorrel felt that this was an unjustifiably specific clause in the magic and suspected it was health and safety gone mad but had prepared for this very eventuality with Kavel.
“Oh, that’s no problem,” she gave a curt nod. “I have this completely useless razor and this diary that’s mostly useless but strangely handy in a rare set of circumstance. Both hail from Kavel Land.”
“And hail from there within the last six months?”
“Ooooh, I’d say so brother, wouldn’t you?” she turned to Kavel.
“Yes, feels like only yesterday,” Kavel scratched his chin. “What, out of interest, might happen if it had been a tad longer?”
“Well, young sir, I heard tell of a man who used objects past their teleport-by date, it all went wrong and his hands went inside out,” the goblin’s voice slipped from every day to tourist as he finished his tale of woe.
Sorrel and Kavel exchanged glances. It had been at least a year since they bagged the tat on Kavel’s island. Kavel shook his head imperceptibly.
“Perhaps instead you could take us to Port Ffirst?” he said carefully.
“The Cavernous Seashank?” the hobgoblin brightened up.
“Please no…” Beets almost sobbed. “It half killed me.”
“It’s the only place I know,” said the hobgoblin, cranking the arcane carvings into action.
Sorrel wasn’t entirely surprised.
--
Oziah was horrified when Kavel explained how his deal with Mace worked regarding the berthing of the Legacy, the ship that had taken them to and from Kavel Land last time and which had fallen into Sorrel and Kavel’s hands by dint of the whole crew being dead.
“So, he has taken your ship and paid you no money and you didn’t even receive a receipt?” her eyes were wide with incredulity.
“I, er… I think he said berthing would cost 10,000 gold and… it sort of felt like he was doing us a favour,” Sorrel mumbled.
“Follow me.”
Sorrel noticed various signs of Macelike activities as they stalked from the Seashank to Mace Towers - people being dragged down alleyways, people handing over money to people who didn’t seem to be that interested in taking money but did have a lot of weapons, the streets being clean and the trains running on time.
Oziah’s conversation with Mace definitely used words that Sorrel knew. If you’d written the whole thing down she’d not have needed to reach for a dictionary to read it. But somehow she knew that if she had said any of the speeches they exchanged it would have no effect on anyone. When Oziah and Mace spoke, however, Sorrel felt compelled to do whatever it was that the last speaker had suggested.
Eventually Mace announced that he would be happy to lend Kavel the Legacy to make the voyage.
Oziah said that this was not a loan as Kavel owned the Legacy.
The point appeared moot.
Mace strode from his desk and walked through Port Ffirst. Sorrel noticed how the crowded streets ahead of them became deserted streets by the time Mace set foot on them. She had never seen crowds behave so much like butter before.
As they reached the dockside, Mace stopped, gestured towards the streamlined bows of the Legacy and bowed politely. “I trust Kavel Land is a truly profitable proposition,” he smiled. Somehow, Sorrel heard a whole other paragraph that she could have sworn Mace had said even though she knew his mouth hadn’t opened. It definitely involved the concept of percentages, the suggestion of the greater good and something unpleasant happening to knees.
She was relieved when they were aboard, although Beets and Oziah started looming over, under and around the captain who Sorrel would have described as hapless had he not been in charge of a couple of hundred heavily armed sailors. The main bone of contention appeared to be ownership of the Legacy. The captain thought the ship was his. Mace clearly thought it was property of Mace esq. And Kavel pointed to the mast where his name was carved with pride. Sorrel briefly examined her inventory and found ‘one percent of the ship Legacy’ in her assets list but felt this might muddy the waters.
Eventually Oziah simmered down. “What is your name?” she fixed her eyes on the be-tricorned skipper.
“Stevie Dimitrescu,” he began.
“Stevie,” Oziah leaned back and surveyed the vessel. “Stevie, Stevie, Stevie. We come aboard with a non-zero amount of suspicion that your fine crew might rob and kill us in our sleep. However, we appreciate that such crews are the tightest of crews. But Mr Mace did not give you the ship. He is not the owner. Kavel is the owner. We won’t get in your way, and you won’t murder us in our sleep.”
Kavel pulled out an elaborate map of Kavel Land. “Captain ‘if you’re ready to go?” Dimitrescu nodded. “Then could you do this in a day?”
The young sea dog pursed his lips. “Day and half…”
As the crew hoist things up, belayed stuff and possibly even horn piped, Sorrel pulled Kavel aside.
“Brother if I remember rightly we left an angry water genasi bouldered up in a cave last time?”
“Correct,” Kavel said gravely. “But he must be dead by now right?”
Sorrel nodded thoughtfully. “Right… right… he must be...”
The ships sails billowed out into soft, magical clouds which caught the wind and leaped forward, the Legacy racing across the sea so fast that Oziah, astride her winged steed Deimos, struggled to keep up.
--
Significant events on the voyage of the Legacy
1) Lolli saw something vast rise beneath the waves and almost breach the water.
2) Beets was very twitchy.
3) Oziah followed Beets around the ship doing damage control.
4) Kavel strode the deck.
5) Sorrel spent a lot of time trying to remember a water genasi’s weak spots then practising the relevant attack drills on the quarter deck.
--
Mist now surrounded the ship.
“The last time we were here, the crew got hostile in the mist,” Kavel observed.
“Will the crew do that now?” Beets seethed reaching for her weapons. “Perhaps we strike first?”
“Did the mist turn the crew dangerous?” Oziah asked.
“No, I think killing us was always their plan,” Sorrel said mildly.
“Is this the same crew?”
“No, no, they’re all dead,” Sorrel recalled.
“So why are we suspicious of this crew?” Oziah seemed puzzled.
“We’re not really,” Sorrel shrugged.
“No, we’re not suspicious at all,” Kavel added.
They all looked at Beets, who smiled beatifically.
--
They stepped onto the beach in paradise, white gold sands stretching away on either side, tropical trees dappling them with broken shade, and carved into the side of the island’s lone mountain the legend Kavel Land.
“Would you move out here brother?” Sorrel looked up at Kavel.
“I think Natalie has too much on ruling her kingdom,” Kavel rumbled. “I think more that I’d spend one month in Daring Heights, one in the Feywild and come here for holidays.”
“What about the Wild Hunt?” Beets pipped up.
“Oziah and I met them recently,” Kavel was hedging a little.
“It’s always SNAFU in the Feywild,” Oziah shrugged.
“Even Queen Titania getting a spear in her side?” Beets sounded surprised.
Sorrel listened carefully. She had been a little out of touch recently – Witch Kings don’t kill themselves – but she had the sense that this Wild Hunt might prove important.
“I want to explore my island,” Kavel seemed keen to change the subject. “Shall we see if Jimmy – Captain Midnight - is still alive in that cave?”
“You know the old saying,” Sorrel offered. “Don’t explore a tropical island if there’s a water genasi about to leap out behind you.”
“Especially if they’ve had enough time to spawn 200 children since you last saw them,” Oziah added.
Sorrel smiled. Oziah did know the old saying.
--
Crammed around the cave mouth in the cliff wall surrounding a small cove, Kavel and Oziah were shifting rock when Sorrel heard more rock shifting from deep within the cave.
“I hear more rock shifting from deep within the cave,” she warned.
The others didn’t seem to care, and the cave mouth was swiftly opened.
Sorrel almost gasped. The same vast halls greeted her gaze, but she remembered how they looked last time, filled with the most pointless tat she had seen in her live long day. And she had been to some terrible monuments in her time – the Shrieking Chasm, which shrieks almost exactly like the wind going down a chasm but still supports a small army of souvenir sellers, or the Gates of Doom, an ancient and very loud pair of metal doors so old that part of the lettering had rubbed away which, since no-one would pay to see the Gates of Boom, locals hadn’t bothered to fix as there was a lucrative market in tiny tin replicas, or even the Invisible Mountain, which was most definitively impossible to see by dint of not actually being there in any way but nonetheless shifted an actual mountain of amusing novelty gifts. She was sure there was something from all of those places buried somewhere in these vaults.
Except the vaults were empty. The bric-a-brac was gone.
Lolli wove some charms and declared there were no traces of magic. Oziah did… something… and announced there were no fiends. Sorrel flicked open her diary and found no unclaimed secrets.*
“Shame,” Sorrel breathed. “I thought you had a tourist attraction here. Kavel’s Krazy Kave.”
She thought for a second.
“With each word starting with a K,” she explained. “It would be funnier if you saw it written down.” She considered this. “Marginally funnier,” she conceded, then held her hand up. “Wait. I hear what sounds like… like someone pretending to breathe.”
“Where from?” Kavel clenched his battle fists.
Sorrel pointed off into the cavern. “Over there.”
“Over there you say?” Beets chirruped.
“I do say,” Sorrel replied.
Beets chucked a rock into the gloom.
Nothing happened.
They moved carefully forward in squad formation, Kavel and Oziah on point, Beets providing close protection for Lolli and Sorrel on flank. As they rounded an abutment they came across a vast mound of gewgaws, curios and trifles reaching up almost to the cavern ceiling.
“Here they are,” Lolli gasped.
They watched as scattered whatnots and doodahs rolled across the floor towards the mound.
“Is that you Midnight?” Kavel looked up at the bagatelle mountain.
From deep within the arcane aggregation a rolling voice boomed like ancient waves on a long-forgotten shore.
“KAVEL…” it echoed through the vaults.
The ornamental junk merged and folded backwards as the appalling twisted form of an animated steel dragon built itself out of the assembled baubles. Around its neck a mighty chain of gimcracks and nic-nacs had formed into the dread name Alan. It shifted, squirmed and turned its fiery eyes to Kavel, who seemed puzzled and turned to his comrades.
“Is this an awakened pile of tat?”
Sorrel didn’t wait for a thesaurus. She unleashed four arrows into the beasts chest too fast to even think about what she was doing, Kavel leaped through the air to rain blows down and Oziah bought her mighty blade down once, twice…
Sorrel blinked. Oziah’s two blows seemed to have hurt the abomination a little more than Sorrel’s four arrows. Sorrel wouldn’t call herself competitive in much the same way that the kettle wouldn’t describe itself as black, but she found herself setting up a metaphorical score sheet.
And then the dragon bit Oziah, clawed Kavel and flung deadly trinkets through the air, giving her a nasty flesh wound. And, if truth be told, a little hurt pride. It would not be death by trinkets on Sorrel Darkfire’s tombstone.
As she groused, Lolli hurled magic at Kavel until he towered almost as high as the tat dragon. Beets attacked but was downed by the atrocity.
Sorrel reached for a dragon slaying arrow, glanced briefly at Oziah to ensure she was watching then loosed it and two sisters into the dragon’s flanks.
Kavel bought his fists down on the dragon’s neck, then Oziah summoned her steed, leaped into the air and surrounded herself with dark spirits which flew along her blade to bring… Sorrel blinked. To bring, it seemed, a little more pain than an actual dragon slaying arrow.
Lolli distracted her with a chromatic orb, before the beast noticed and hurt her. Sorrel called on the goddess to bless her smite and sent a shaft encased in deadly moonlight into the dragon’s heart.
More fists from Kavel, then Oziah plunged her sword into the grotesque skull, felt the creature’s life force flee and slid down its collapsing neck until she could step off onto the cave floor with a little flourish.
“The very definition of overkill,” Oziah proclaimed.
As Oziah’s blade struck home, a wave of relief had washed over Sorrel. At first she thought it was the end of the fight that took a weight from her shoulders, but as Kavel clambered across the corpse, he pointed to a shrivelled, blackened hand entombed in steel. It was Captain Midnight, his corpse long dead, clutching at a dial of dark necromancy.
He had been clawing at his treasure, the things he valued most in all the world, left alone to die with them sealed off from the ocean of his life.
By Sorrel and her companions.
And that’s when she realised the relief she was feeling was down to Oziah striking the killing blow, not her. As if that absolved Sorrel of something.
Who knew when the water genasi within this beast had died? But dark magic had claimed him and forged that dragon – who had worn his own name which somehow rang a bell…
Alan. The name of the T Rex in the Angelbark whose life she had fought to save. Two Alans. Two beasts. One living, one dead. And her hand had struck first in both combats. She had judged one fit to live and one worth killing.
Daring Heights pretended to be a city, but it was still a frontier town. When the council hired adventurers, they didn’t ask for prisoners. They preferred justice, if that’s what it was, to be meted out in the moment.
The only prisoners she’d seen taken were by Derthaad, the weary dragonborn detective holding true to his ideals in a city filled with killers.
Sorrel’s crimes were legion. The bodies of her dead felt chained behind her, stretching out of the cave and across the sea to her childhood home in Balder’s Gate. Some had surely deserved to die. She had caught them in the foulest acts and administered mercy, not justice. Others were less certain and still others merely accidents. A life stolen by her poor aim.
The goddess had her arms around her, of this she was certain. But she tried to think of the stories where the gods chose mortals to carry out their tasks and everything went well for the mortal concerned.
There were none.
She had thought she had escaped the consequences of these murders, but the faces of Sana, of Silvia, of Faust, of [redacted], of all her fallen comrades and broken lives that had left her lonely and far from home swam before her eyes.
She had never seen a courthouse in Daring Heights, but she was on trial for her life, this she knew. Everybody has a jury, the voices they carry inside.
Alan sits on her jury. Sylvia sits on her jury, the Gith she hunted sat there too. They are there with countless faceless soldiers and their families, mothers and fathers and soon perhaps her sisters as well. Those she had loved and those she had hurt. Those who blessed her and those who haunted her.
Her gods of guilt.
Every day she carried on and she carried them close. Every night she stepped into the court before them, and she argued her case.
Every night, and the verdict yet to fall.
* It is not worth going into the backstory to Sorrel’s diary of irrelevant trivia. The only germane and pertaining point here being that all creatures within a 30ft radius had fake news about them appear on its pages whether they were visible or not. **
** The creatures that is, not the secrets. The secrets weren’t true so they couldn’t appear. ***
*** OK sure, in a fantasy world where magic exists it would be possible for fake secrets to crystalise into existence, but this is not that story. This is the story of Kavel, the Legacy, Kavel Land and diverse sundries. You’re wasting your time down here.
