Sworded Tales

“Come along you sanctimonious nag,” Qualen Findrow said to the obstinate horse in his delightful sing-song tone.  There were those in the small town of Havenfork that whispered about Qualen’s facility with horses, that he had otherworldly powers.  He had poo-pooed such nonsense over his years of driver work, but he suspected that his ability to guarantee a timely delivery was all that kept him from being run off.

Mostly due to the Centaurs in the area.  Constant raids and bands of four-legged brigands interrupted trade routes all along the Savanche Coast.  Life was becoming increasingly unbearable for many of the inhabitants, but Qualen wasn’t one of them.  The Centaurs avoided him like the plague, and no one knew why. Continue reading

Umung walked among the gods.  His soul was one of the most ancient.  He paralleled the paths of perfection sought by those along the journeys of spiritual completion.  There was one problem though.  When his enlightenment should have been at hand, should have come to pass, he did not transcend.

Umung carried a seed of darkness, and the gods knew not how or why. Continue reading

Wu-Wu Fan was a scribe for the Sacred Order of Monarchs.  Not those that ruled the kingdoms, but those that ruled the monastery gardens, flitting on delicate wings.  The Great Transmutation was a lifelong study for the monks of the Order.  From nothingness to formative egg.  From devouring caterpillar to devout cocoon.  From majestic monarch back to nothingness.  Enlightenment in all stages of life brought harmony with self and surrounding.

Wu-Wu Fan had only recently evolved into her caterpillar form.  She devoured the written pages before her, scribbling the archaic writing into legible and durable translation.  The circle of life for the written works, too, honored the Great Transmutation.  One sheet after another passed through her, as the caterpillar ratchets through the foliage, and the knowledge of the ancients accumulated. Continue reading

Xorton was more of a nuisance than a menace to the town of Shifting Wind.  Somewhere in the hulking brute’s past, his bloodline was touched with that of Orc, and speculators thought that a taint of Ogre was mixed into his lineage as well.  Whatever his bastardized heritage, he stood well over seven feet tall with the physique of a small frigate.  As is often the case with such extremes, his intellect was equally lacking, but he had the dreamy heart of a child.

The local constabulary devised a means to manage the good-natured man-child, who by all accounts was relatively sedate if his belly and mug were kept full.  Hunger had a way of bringing out the nastier side of this beast though, and after a few broken bones and considerable property damage over the years, the issue needed addressed. Continue reading

Ingerd never sought to become a ratter, let alone Head Ratter of the Opal District Chef’s Quarter.  She excelled at it though.  Hunting vermin.  The gods had seen fit to give her this particular calling.  Why?  She never cared to ask.  Religions, and churches, and people for that matter made her uncomfortable.  She was more at home in the dank mazeways beneath the city.

So she hunted vermin.  She scourged them, and she learned with a facility that set her apart from the other ratters in the Guild, made her an oddball.  She didn’t care.  She could hunt circles around any of them, and those that put coin in her pocket knew as much.

Ingerd was a ratter.  She would never have considered herself a ranger. Continue reading

Prince Kavar Jessik, seventeenth in line for the throne of Caramahr, was a skilled archer, a noble huntsman and educated in numerous mathematical forms.  Fair in appearance, he bore the cultivated visage of the female line with the rigid bone structure of the Jessik bloodline barely identifiable.  The host of siblings and servants and tutors engendered an affable and approachable persona as the prince matured, but few saw into the deeper recesses of the old soul which wandered within his heart.

For all of the opportunity presented to him, Prince Kavar lived within a prison of privilege.  His personal beliefs were overshadowed by the propriety of a society in which he would not have chosen to exist.  Those naysayers that would scoff at the notion, proclaiming the pining of a spoiled prince little more than idle boredom, abide until the tale’s completion and pass judgment only once both sides of the coin have been revealed. Continue reading

Dar Thrun’s curse was to herd the dead.  As an apprentice necromancer in ill standing, he was relegated to the lowest position possible.  Well, lowest among the living.  The slime suckers had taken the prize for worst task performance for several years running.

As a half-Orc, his facility with arcane magics was the first facet of his accursed gem of existence.  Grovius Throng, shaman of the Knucklemuncher clan, saw the perverse nature of the adolescent half-breed and understood the threat to his own seat of power.  Exiled to the Bafari Wilds, Dar Thrun found himself mercilessly hunted by the ancient Orcish enemy, the Shimtree Elves.

It was his flight from the Elven hunters which forced him into the Feckless Wastes, a haunted region of perverse demons and lustful jellies, or so the campfire tales told.  Instead he found death waiting. Continue reading

Vl’Lavinda Feinn told a different tale each time she recounted how she lost her eye, each more grandiose than the last.  The most recent incarnation included a Beholder harvesting the eye to transplant it onto one of its own damaged stalks.  She included the fact that she sometimes witnessed phantom images of what the creature was seeing.  Few sought to see beyond the veil of hair she fancied to find the eye still intact within its socket.

In truth, the eye simply went dark for no discernible reason over her pubescent years.  A gradual process considering her Elven heritage which granted her the time necessary to come to terms with her singular vision.  The healers found no solution to the blindness and attributed it to congenital anomaly.  She was not bitter or torn, despite the unlikelihood of her ever finding a suitor among the great Houses.  Her own family, while supportive, conveyed enough subtle pity that Vl’Lavinda chose to relinquish the study of her arcane gifts and to strike out on her own. Continue reading

Ipsen Garr lost both legs above the knee to a savage sea shark.  Forward spotter on the Waveskimmer, the ill-fated Human had served nobly aboard the fishing vessel for years before crossing paths with the beast known as Tur T’tumic, Sea Bastard in the native tongue.

Dangling from the prow with his seer’s glass at hand, Ipsen’s life changed when the legendary creature took the battle to the shark hunters.  Ipsen was the first casualty, a vast majority of the prow vanishing along with his lower appendages.  Only the quick action of the resident cleric stemmed the gush of blood onto the ragged deck as the wounded man swung from his harness.

The Waveskimmer went to the bottom that day, and Tur T’tumic owned the waters each day forth. Continue reading

Mireya del Castillo didn’t mind the term privateer but she was a pirate at heart.  The sole daughter to a brood of children, she inherited the composite female beauty of the family line and the fiery spirit to match.

The del Castillos heralded from a long line of marine merchants, specializing in materials and sculpture designed for ship craft.  Mireya was a talented shipwright that spent the great majority of her life upon the seas.  Her evolution from craftsman to artisan and sailor to pirate came to pass despite her father’s best attempts to steer her clear of such a perilous life.

Such was not to be her fate.  The sea flowed in her veins. Continue reading