Post by Milo Brightmane on Apr 2, 2019 16:02:55 GMT
"You alright there Milo?" Gety Ambershield peered worriedly at his friend over the tavern table. "You've been staring at the top of your pint for ten minutes now!"
"Hmm? Ah, no, just thinking about the Hammerfall, it’s not doing the business I'd hoped. I'm getting by on horseshoes and pots and pans and the like, but it’s not what I trained for."
"Oh yes? Magic swords for great heroes, that's your destiny sure enough." Gety grinned at his jest, but Milo hardly seemed to notice. Clearly the struggling smithy wasn't the only matter on his mind, and Gety knew enough to give Milo time to get his thoughts in order.
After a few more minutes had passed, Milo stirred. "You know the fey folk?"
"Like... pictsies, and sprites and that?" Milo shook his head. "Hmm. No, the other ones. The Lords and the Ladies."
"Ah, those," said Gety, pulling at his intricately braided beard, shimmering with engraved metal beads, a far cry from Milo's mad, russet tangle. "Only what I've heard in stories. Sort of a step above elves aren't they? Powerful folks, like to play jokes, that kind of thing."
Milo nodded. "That's them." He drew a wavy line through a small spillage on the table, and another underneath it before continuing. “I met some of them the other day.”
“Piss off! Popped into the Hammerfall did they? Needed their unicorns reshod?”
But Milo was having none of it. “I’m telling you I met them! And they’re even stranger than the stories tell. It was on that trip I took west past the farmlands, to figure out where all the flooding was coming from.”
“Mmm, that was some bad business,” nodded Gety. “Heard about some folks getting washed away in surges. Bad business. Seems to have stopped now though.”
Milo patted his chest. “That was us! Me and a couple of other dwarves, little guy called Dòddil, and some haughty fella called Dhoggan. Plus a big half-orc called Othar, seemed pretty gentle compared to most of his kind, and a human called Raham. Oh, and Jacinta, remember that halfling I met in Port Ffirst? The only sane one in the group? She was there too, Thank the All Father, or we’d have been in far more trouble I reckon.
We wandered up one of the little rivers that ends up in the delta, not so little at that point! Right up on its banks it was, and not far off breaking right through them. We came upon a little community of Erina, the hedgehog folk, their burrows were filling up too. We were there with a bunch of gnome engineers, and they set about pumping the water out of the burrows while we carried on up the river. I’ll tell you what though, they had this enormous long hose that went into this tiny tent, I tried finding out where they were actually pumping the water to, but inside the tent was just another, smaller tent. And inside that one another tent! And it kept going! I got down to a tent that was only about a foot high and in that one the hose just disappeared into darkness. Remind me not to underestimate gnomes again, Gety, they’ve got some strange magics.
So we carried on up the river, right, and Dhoggan examines the water, says it’s got fey magic in it, and Jacinta looks a bit glassy-eyed for a moment then says that if we follow the river there’s an open portal to another plane, and we start putting two and two together and thinking ‘oh dear’. So a little bit further up there was this old mill house, abandoned for years by the looks of it. Waterwheel still turning, even faster now with the river up. And at the bottom of the river, in a bit of a bottleneck, was this old millstone, which Jacinta point out and says ‘That’s the portal.’ And true enough, on one side of the stone the river was just like normal, nice and low and peaceful, and on the other it was surging past.”
“So what did you do?” Gety was leaning forward on the table now, jokes all forgotten. “Think I’d have hauled the stone up, smashed it and gone home. End of problem.”
“I was half a second from suggesting that myself, though it’s probably a good job we didn’t in the end. While we were thinking what to do, this tall, wiry guy in armour rides up right out of the river! Him and his squire, both on horses, standing right on top of the river.”
“Now I know you’re pulling my beard,” Gety said in disbelief. “Armoured blokes in armour on horses standing on water? There’ll be trolls flying around in the air next.”
“It’s the truth! You think I have the imagination to come up with something like that? I’m not like you, I like my thoughts solid and nailed down. So we ask this guy what’s going on with the river, and he introduces himself oh so politely as Sir Oberist of the Court of the River King, and says that everything that’s happening is as the River King wishes it. We told him that crops were getting ruined, that people had died! Says it’s nothing to do with him, he’s just there to make sure the River King’s plan goes according to... well, to plan, I suppose. If we’ve got any issues we’re free to take it up with the River King himself in the Summerlands, he says, pointing at the portal stone, and rides off down the river. And the others start saying ‘Right, we’d better go talk to the River King then’, as if popping into another plane to have a chat with royalty is something they do every day. And they start jumping into the river! Now you know I’m not much of a swimmer, but I couldn’t let them all go off without some protection, so I held my breath and sort of fell into the river, let my armour carry me to the bottom where the stone was. I touched it, and there was this huge rush, and I was tumbling around so I might have panicked a little, and started pushing for the surface. All the forge work must have made me stronger than I thought because even with all the mail on and my hammer and shield I made it up to the surface without much trouble, and once I’d got my breath back you wouldn’t believe the place we were in – the strangest colours, orange and purple grasses, trees with blueish leaves, and the grass and trees kept moving, even without wind, and it was twilight there, and it stayed twilight the whole time we were there. Can’t say I liked it much, it gave me the willies. I heard Jacinta say ‘the Feywild...’ so I guess that’s what the place was called. Well we had no idea where to go, so Jacinta goes looking for an animal to talk to, I guess she can do that, has a chat with a hedgehog, wouldn’t you know it, and says we need to make our way down river.”
Milo paused a moment, glancing out a window into the busy town outside. “You know, we could see where Daring Heights would have been, in that place. But there wasn’t a town, just this bright light, going right up into the sky. This is an important place, Gety. It needs protecting.”
For once Gety didn’t say anything, just supped from his glass and waited for Milo to continue.
“We’d gone a little way when we came across these ladies playing in the river. They beckoned us over, and they were so beautiful Gety, even without beards, but they felt strange and wild, and I didn’t trust them. They must have been working some strange charm though, because Dòddil and Raham both went stumbling into the river towards the ladies. Then all Nine Hells broke loose, because the ladies suddenly weren’t so beautiful any more, and they starting pushing those two under the water. I managed to get in and cast a spell of resistance on Dòddil, which worked for a bit and he came up spluttering, but they did it again and we had to fight them off.”
Looking down at the table, embarrassed, Milo muttered “I can’t even say I was that much help. I think I panicked – I put up a shield around Raham but the ladies had these claws that went right through it, and I tried setting one of them on fire. In the middle of a river! What was I thinking...” He rubbed as his eyes in frustration.
“I’m not sure if we actually killed them, or they just got bored and faded away into the river, maybe both. But eventually we were back alone and we carried on to this runestone the hedgehog had apparently told Jacinta about. I’m not sure what she did with it but all of a sudden we were surrounded by this court, full of people that looked just like Oberist, and the ladies in the river. Tall and beautiful and arrogant looking, and the most beautiful and arrogant one was draped over a throne in front of us, leg up on one side looking bored. Jacinta had this whole conversation with him in their language, Sylvan, but she told me afterwards that this guy was the River King, which I could have guessed, and that he’d almost completely forgotten about the portal in the river, and whatever his plan for it had been. He’d moved on to other plans, apparently. There was this group on the side of the court chanting away, and he told them to stop, and apparently that worked because when we got back to Kantas the river was slowing down and the water was dropping.”
“Well that’s quite a story,” Gety broke into Milo’s thoughts. “And those fey don’t sound too nice. What can you do when people with that kind of power have their plans and don’t care who gets hurt.”
“That’s what worries me. I’m here to help people, Gety, to protect this land. The River King seems to see us as friends for now, but I got the impression he’s as likely to have already forgotten us. And who knows what his other plans are.”
He went back to staring at his pint, and Gety gave up trying to get any more conversation out of him.
---
On his way home that night, Milo felt in his pocket the stone the River King had gifted him, same as he had given every one in the group. He’d said skipping it across the water would summon him if we needed him, but Milo felt a deep unease about relying on someone that fickle and forgetful. He ought to drop the stone in the street, and move on. Instead he rubbed it a little with his thumb, then dropped it back in his pocket, and continued down the street.
