The Wayward Wanderer's Guide to Aneos

The world of Aneos as documented by Zedd Fennett.

Issue 7 - From Arbitra to Anglertown: An Ahndai Primer
There are times in writing pieces such as these, speaking as both an amateur historian and professional vagrant, when it becomes distinctly difficult to separate an objective account from personal bias. Perhaps this was exemplified to a degree meriting apology in the annals of Issue 6; despite my attempts at providing a comprehensive view of New Babylonian culture and society, it soon became apparent that the article’s focus and my attention had been diverted almost entirely to my personal pilgrimage to the home and venerated study of the legend Wolfgang Sol. Though I propose that I cannot be blamed for chasing heroic shadows and other subjects of personal fascination, I will admit that such fancies should be explored in a far more holistic manner than I have previously presented. Thus, I write this article in the spirit of compromise; while I shall endeavor to provide a complete account of the historical and cultural context surrounding it, I will make no attempt to hide my admitted infatuation with that final relic of the First and Last Great Empire of Man: that last gem of Ald-Arbitra, called Ahndai for ‘distant days.’

In order to fully appreciate the city in its modern state, some historical context is almost certainly required; one cannot examine one of the foremost cities of the Archaic Age without first addressing the men and times which shaped it, after all. However, the strains on eye and attention span of uninhibited text have been illustrated abundantly, painstakingly, and creatively to me by the Wayward Wanderer Editorial Staff; therefore, in the interest of editors and readers alike, I have elected to separate the piece into three sections, regarding the city’s ancient and recent past and my own account of its current state. For those who value now over then, you are welcome to skip ahead; however, do so with the knowledge that it condemns you to the skin-deep appreciation of a cultural philistine.

-In Hope For Distant Days-
It is understandably difficult for a modern mind to imagine a world where humanity, arguably the most widely-diffused and integrated of Aenos’ civilized species, existed only as an isolationist collective of clans spread along the banks of the River Celmir [1]. While a fascinating story in its own right, this tribal people’s unification as the nation-state of Ur-Arbitra under the god-king Berakalder, their eventual fall and integration into the elven kingdom of Sara’kaia, and their subsequent usurpation of the Sara’kaia throne and declaration of the new empire of Ald-Arbitra at the start of the Archaic Age remain outside the scope of this account. Our story must start, then, with a dying emperor on the joint thrones of Remve’linos (Kaiadian Elven, translating to ‘Seat of Heaven’) and Pyimir (Ur-Arbitra, ‘Three-Waters’) [2], a pair of princes, and a storm of succession troubles and fratricide that would lead to full-blown civil war.

Following the ascension of Sartinan as both King of Ur-Arbitra and Kailar of Sara’kaia [3], the new joint empire of Ald-Arbitra (‘Second Arbitra’, though the distinction only arose among later scholars) enjoyed a relatively peaceful, if locally chaotic, reign as the region’s unchallenged dominant power for a span of seven decades. The aged Sartinan, having occupied his Kingship subduing the dying remnants of elven coups at home, intimidating tribes into submission and tribute abroad, and all-around being the sort of ruler people like to write myths about, was worried for the state of his empire after his death, as he deemed neither of his heirs capable of shouldering the burden of rule alone. In a move unprecedented for its time, Sartinan named both his sons the dual successors to the Ald-Arbitran throne: the elder, Talintus, to act as King in Pyimir while the younger, Falain, would be King in Remve’linos. Sartinan hoped for the brothers to support one another in a cooperative rule, with each guarding the back of the other; judging by the clay-tablet accounts recovered from the rubble of the capitals, it was almost as if the Majestic King had never met his sons.

Since childhood the brothers Talintus and Falain had quarrelled over vain and trivial things. A famous parable tells of an incident when Falain killed his brother’s pet gulinti [4] in a fit of meaningless sadism, only for Talintus to kill Falain’s favorite slave in retaliation. The feud escalates, with Falain killing two of Talintus’s waiting-girls and Talintus killing the entirety of Falain’s kitchen staff, before the brothers are punished by their more temperate father. While the tale is meant to act as a warning to the repetitious and self-destructive nature of grudges and revenge, apparently the princes didn’t get the memo; feigning goodwill and fraternity at their father’s deathbed, the brothers never overcame their mutual spite and resentment for the other.

Upon each prince, now King, taking their respective throne, Ald-Arbitra fell almost immediately into a state of cold war; divided at a shifting and arbitrary line along the gentle hills separating the center of the Plains, the kingships of Remve’linos and Pyimir acted as a single empire in name only. Without absolute justification to truly declare war on Arbitran kin, the brothers engaged in a passive-aggressive campaign of internal tariffs, legal restrictions, and slanderous propaganda [5] for years in an attempt to weaken the political prestige of their rival. Neither managed to gain an advantageous position until the seventeenth year of their rule, when Talintus, pressed by border incursions of the Dwarves to the East and the Reptillian nomads to the North, was forced to plead to Falain for military aid.

With what one can only imagine as a mischievous glint in his eye, Falain agreed to lead troops into northern Ald-Arbitra to drive back the foreign invaders. True to his word on this, at least, Falain repelled the armies at the Arbitran borders… only to turn his troops inward on a march to Pyimir. Citing Talintus’s military failings and administrative incompetence, Falain used the opportunity to launch a siege on the capital in a bid for total imperial control. His troops exhausted and outmanned three-to-one, Talintus’s army was routed and the city breeched within the month. Talintus himself managed to escape the city along with his family and what remained of his troops, fleeing south into the heart of the Central Plains.

Reaching the dead center of the Plains and running west to reach the River Celmir, Talintus pitched a small camp at the foot of the range of hills that marked the Plains’ end. They would find no peace, their base continually harassed by an indigenous people the Arbitrans called Talanet, or ‘Moth-Men’. The Talanet, true to the Arbitran description, are bipedal insectoids resembling men, with four segmented arms, large papery wings, and the odd antenna and large compound eyes of their namesake. Unwilling to leave the hills for fear of being discovered by Falain’s troops, Talintus marched his army into the hillside’s enormous cavern system in hopes of subduing the Talanet in their sunless home.

Befuddled by the natural labyrinth, Talintus never found the Talanet hives. Instead, venturing to the innermost depths of the cavern, the displaced King discovered a vast and sparkling underground lake at the bottom of a deep sheer shaft, and was struck with divine awe at the sight [6]. Believing the lake to be none other than the birth-waters of the god Malatan at the center of the world (Talintus, evidently, lost track of just how deep the caverns ran), Talintus led his party down the vertical shaft to the edge of the great pool. Looking upon the still and shimmering waters [7] Talintus saw no trace of his own visage; in its place he claimed to witness the reflection of a grand and beautiful city, suspended in the vertical shaft far above the pool. There exists no evidence of the truth to this claim beyond Talintus’s own account; each member of the Arbitran party recorded a different sight in the waters of what would later be named the Reflecting Pool. Nonetheless, inscriptions on the walls of the Hanging Temple of Malatan attribute this moment to the founding of Ahndai, quoting Talintus with the words carved into the city annex even today: Fi Ahndai Vele, ‘In hope for distant days’.

-Of Moths and Miracles-
In the first days of its early Arbitran founding, the great city of Ahndai amounted to little more than a semi-permanent encampment of tents and mats atop a haphazard framework of Plains lumber, its meager population sustained by the mushroom-meat, lush mosses, and eyeless newt-beasts native to the caverns. This changed in a matter of months; employing the advances in occultism the Ald-Arbitran empire grew famous for, an intricate grid of stonework foundations was grown from the walls of the cavern shaft above the pool using Immortal labor and esoteric magic. Ironically, despite this being one of the most influential periods in the city’s history, little to no documentation exists from the time; this could be attributed to the complexity and difficulty of use of Ur-Arbitra cuneiform, as well as the relative lack of administrative structure of the new town. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the new stone lattice, appearing as if it were a natural formation, would serve to support the increasingly elaborate architecture that came to define the city’s Arbitran sector, soon growing to include the last remaining marvels of Ald-Arbitran legacy: the Hanging Temple of Malatan and Talintus’s Gazing Hall.

Dedicated to the perceived divine nature of the Reflecting Pool, and by extension the caverns of Ahndai themselves, the Hanging Temple enshrines the last cult statues of the Arbitran faith known to survive the empire’s instantaneous collapse. Unlike the enclosed stone typical to most of the ancient city’s buildings, the Temple consists of a series of open-air platforms placed at the center of the pool shaft, arranged as a hollow square and suspended from the cavern ceiling by seemingly nothing but divine favor [8].

Each square holds a shrine to a member of the Ald-Arbitran pantheon, though the names of the majority have been lost to time, while the great statue of the matronly Malatan stands in the air above the Temple’s center gap, floating over the waters of the Reflecting Pool to match her legend. Illuminated naturally by a complex system of polished stone mirrors that capture and reflect the light of the Pool, the Temple was likely the most impressive house of Arbitran worship ever created.

Not to be outdone by the divine, Talintus ordered the construction of a palace to match the Hanging Temple’s opulence. The Gazing Hall, extending outward as a singular annex from the walls at the shaft’s highest point, overlooks the entirety of Ahndai and the Reflecting Pool beneath. The grand lobby, looking out upon the city through a wall and floor of translucent stone [9], stretches along the shaft’s circumference to house the court and opal throne of its first and last King, as well as the royal library of stone tablets and steles. The library offers our first glimpse at recorded events in the city since the myth of its foundation, documenting notable history throughout its remaining Arbitran occupation, and provides our only hints to its peoples’ sudden and catastrophic end.

Judging from the inscriptions both in the library and on the walls of the Gazing Hall itself, periodic skirmishes with the native Talanet continued unabated as Ahndai grew to the status of a city proper. While large-scale reliefs show in lavish detail the great triumphs of Arbitran warriors as they storm the Talanet hives, wild inaccuracies in the depiction of hive structure points to the more believable story of Talintus and his Arbitrans never actually succeeding in hunting down any of their Moth-Men. Modern Talanet oral accounts help to corroborate this; songs and dramatic poems of individual valor in raids against their foreign invaders have persisted to this day, but not one references either side gaining traction in routing the other. The most likely scenario is that an uneasy stalemate arose between the two, with neither side able to win but with both content to sit in their respective cities, pat themselves on the back for imagined victories, and watch for an opening to arise.

While the Talanet remained a scattered collection of hive-tribes, however, Ahndai continued to expand into a city to rival Pyimir and Remve’linos. Seen as a sanctuary from the increasingly despotic rule of the now unchallenged King Falain, refugees from both ends of the empire poured into Ahndai seeking political asylum. As the city’s population swelled, so did Talintus’s ego; still believing himself the rightful King of Ald-Arbitra, Talintus thought to foster Ahndai as the capital of a new regime. Of course, the boon for Ahndai meant an equal loss for Falain; once the drop in tax revenue became noticeable, it was only a matter of time before Falain mustered troops to the Plains heartland to finally put an end to his brother’s ambition.

With Falain’s army set in at the cavern’s mouth for a prolonged siege of the city and the Talanet continuing their raids unabated, the now-aging Talintus began to feel the pressure. Going beyond the typical measures of forced conscription and heavy taxation Talintus began spending weeks at a time locked away in the Hanging Temple, deep in prayer for deliverance and what he saw as a much-needed miracle. From the hands of what sort of Immortal thing remains unclear, but Talintus was evidently bestowed his miracle; for the span of several months meetings between Talintus and prominent engineers and occultists within the city are recorded, in which Talintus describes the construction of a device to ‘set right the world’ [10].

Record of what would be the last days of the Arbitran city of Ahndai devolve into chaos soon after the sole mention of Talintus’s Miracle Machine. Conflicting and broken accounts indicate a breakthrough by Falain, a full assault from the Talanet, and the incursion of foreign agents; frustratingly, no one can provide the full story of what actually happened in those final fateful hours. The only certainty is that the Miracle Machine did whatever it was made to do, or what it wasn’t made to do; Talanet histories correlate the Miracle Machine’s activation with the birth of the Ahndai Anomaly and the complete disappearance of the populations of Ahndai, Pyimir, and Remve’linos, though any idea of the Machine’s function or form has been lost with the Machine itself [11]. Nonetheless, its peoples’ disappearance soon led to the complete collapse of both the city of Ahndai and the Ald-Arbitran empire as a whole eight centuries before the Age of Steam, leading to the dispersal of humanity throughout Lower Aenos, and the eventual Talanet occupation and expansion of the city would mold Ahndai into the tourist trap and cultural hotspot we know today.

-Anglertown-
Jumping about 1400 years into the future I found myself staring down the mouth of the caverns of Ahndai, my feet walking a path beaten by the step of a thousand other pilgrims and tourists. Any traces of the siege that locked the city away have vanished aeons ago, gone with the men on both sides of it, but as I passed into the caverns themselves and drew my eyes across their walls I couldn’t help but imagine that each scratch in the stone was the mark of an Arbitran blade. Immaculately gardened lines of phosphorescent mushrooms, small as the palm of my hand and glowing in deep shades of purple and blue, beckon and guide the traveler deeper into the winding tunnel maze.

I followed them for what seemed like hours, greeted along the way by the vending stalls of local Talanet capitalizing on tourists’ heavy pockets, until the great archway above the first stone pathway into the Reflecting Pool shaft loomed before me. The shaft itself was enormous, a natural sheer cliff in the cavern stone with a diameter wide enough that I could not see its curve, and it stretched so deep below that a small part of me could truly believe the Reflecting Pool to be the center of the world. The city was illuminated dimly by the ambient light filtered through the Pool, accented by hooded fungal lanterns and more traditional burning lights strung along cables and hung from buildings, and the air itself seemed to grow brighter the closer one travelled to that shimmering Pool. Just a few feet above the water, mysterious and static as ever, the Ahndai Anomaly floats ominously: a perfect sphere of white light, roughly ten feet in diameter, that is blinding to look at directly but seems to contribute nothing to the illumination around it [12]. Peering directly downward, a traveler along the city walkways can glimpse it from any point through the thicket of Lowtown’s hives, suspended in the same place it has been since the Talanet first reclaimed Ahndai.

Taking my first awestruck steps onto the walkways of Arbitran Ahndai I was greeted by the polished gleam of the Gazing Hall, its enclosed but translucent walkway wrapping around the upper rim of the shaft entirely. Through the glasstone directly across from the entry archway, I could just make out the multicolor glint of the opal throne, and felt the steely gaze of Talintus’s storied ghost press upon my shoulders as he surveyed the throngs of newcomers to his once-forgotten city. Stretching below for miles, the perfectly inhuman form of Ald-Arbitran architecture [13] unfolded before me, held aloft on the tangled web of stone that grew from the sheer shaft walls like the roots of an earthen tree.

I passed the domed meeting halls and ancient homes, occasionally interrupted by an anachronistic wooden tavern or shop built in recent years, winding my way downward along the city shaft. The open platforms of the Hanging Temple could be seen from all sides, the massive cult statue of Malatan floating at the center of the archaic city as if to bless the crowds of curious visitors even now. The native Talanet were largely absent from the Arbitran part of the city, save for the occasional entrepreneur running local restaurants or trinket stands, with the stone city now inhabited by the eclectic mix of once-foreigners typical of a modern urban center. As I ventured further down, however, the stone walkways abruptly gave way to the hardened resin paths and porous spongy structures of Lowtown’s Talanet hives.

The hives, spiraling downward from the Arbitran sector like hanging fruit with the bottoms of the lowest stone walkways as support, are massive perforated structures made of a soft tan material that squashed slightly under my foot. Each hive seemed to house an entire township of the Moth-Men to itself, with each holding one of their uncountable rival clans. Talanet bustled in and out of them in chaotic droves, flitting through the air with an enviable convenience, and seemed to grow denser in population the further I descended. Without wings of my own I was left to walk the dark golden resin paths that linked the many hives like haphazard clothing lines, each hive stretching down further than the one before it. All of Ahndai grows newer the further down you go, but in Lowtown it becomes the most blatant; even as I walked them I could see Talanet laborers shaping the waxen clay of new hives, each striving to reach ever closer to the waters below.

The Talanet, traditionally worshipers of a solar deity they call Rok’shesh and believers in the sacred nature of light, view the shining Reflecting Pool in a similar divine nature as the Ald-Arbitrans (though for obviously different reasons). More significantly, it has become commonly accepted among them that the Ahndai Anomaly can be nothing less than the incarnation of Rok’shesh on the mundane plane [14]; thus, building efforts to push Lowtown closer and closer to the Pool and its Anomaly have been a constant for centuries. The malign effects of its growing proximity can be easily seen in the newest generations of Talanet young; spending their lives awash in heavier and heavier concentrations of radiative Juice from the Reflecting Pool and the stranger energies of the Anomaly has caused Juice mutation rates, crippling and otherwise, among Talanet larva to skyrocket. Even so, the Talanet show no signs of slowing their self-destructive expansion; the allure of the Anomaly, and its sardonic resemblance to the light of that beckoning deep-sea hunter, has given rise to a more ominous colloquial name for the Talanet’s hive-city: Anglertown.

At the lowest point of the lowest hive, a rope ladder hangs limply down the tower-sized gap to the Reflecting Pool. Like flotsam on its surface, a cluster of waxen clay platforms sporting modest fabric huts formed something of a hollow circular island surrounding the Ahndai Anomaly. The drifting island is home to the Talanet mystics, a devout cult of Rok’shesh that happen to be the most drastically mutated of the Moth populous. Baptized at birth in the waters of the Reflecting Pool, the mystics claim to see time itself reflected in its surface; of course, the few mystic prophecies released to those outside the Talanet are so frustratingly cryptic as to be impossible to prove true or false.

Making the long and perilous descent I made pilgrimage to the isle of the mystics, feeling the Juice hanging in the air prickle my neck and force the hairs of my arm to stand on end. Wobbling unsteadily on the buoyant waxen platforms I cast a curious glance upon the Pool, but caught sight of nothing beyond the glimmer of light beneath its ripples. The mystics spoke of this as fortune, claiming that though they are often misinterpreted the Pool’s reflections show nothing but tragedy and endings. Journalistic integrity on the line, I insisted that they show me anyway. With some notable reluctance at indulging what could only be an obnoxious and loud foreigner, the mystics took my head in their hands and plunged it into the still waters.

I will not write of what I saw. I wish I had not seen. It has become my greatest consolation to tell myself that it was just as likely a Juice-borne hallucination or a trick of a travel-ill mind, so that I no longer dwell on the fact that I know how I will die. Despite this grim end to an otherwise magnificent trip, I end with my wholehearted recommendation to you, dear reader, to read your own histories and visit the city yourself; do note, however, that I do so with an age-old adage at heart: don’t drink the water.

---

[1] Named in Ur-Arbitra and translating roughly to ‘Waters of God’, the river is located on the westernmost limits of the Lower Central Plains. Ur-Arbitran priests believed it flowed directly from the sacred lake at the center of the world as alluded to in their religious inscriptions, though this was later rescinded by the Ald-Arbitran campaign to the Southern Sea.

[2] The former capitals of Sara’kaia and Ur-Arbitra, prior to the institution of dual kingship by Sartinan the Majestic. Once located at the northern reaches of the Everwood and at the lakefront intersection of the three rivers of the Plain, respectively, though they have long been razed to their foundations following their populations’ mass disappearance.

[3] An antiqued elven term for leader, champion, or tyrant; the subtleties of the translation have been lost to modern dialects.

[4] A small mammal native to the Central Plains. For those unfamiliar, imagine a housecat crossed with a beetle.

[5] To quote Falain: “The King of Pyimir, should he truly be called such, is equal to me only in our shared Father. He is an uncouth brute, ignorant in the ways of royal benevolence compared to me, and, I suspect, born from the womb of an edge-eared servant rather than the Dowager’s sacred bosom.” Existing suspicions of Talintus’s half-elven heritage notwithstanding… ouch.

[6] The chief maternal god of Arbitran religious doctrine. Highly advanced in the arts of occultism and their dealings with Immortal beings, the epic Song of Berakalder holds that Arbitran knowledge of the Beyond was bestowed upon the First King when he met with Malatan at the waters pooled from the birth of Man, gathered at a great lake at the center of the world.

[7] Modern studies have identified a staggering concentration of unfiltered Juice infused in the Reflecting Pool’s water, stemming from an unidentified source at its uncharted bottom; this offers a feasible cause for the water’s mystical qualities, but also raises credible suspicions of mass hallucination.

[8] According to the inscription at the base of Malatan’s cult statue, the Hanging Temple is ‘held aloft by her Hands, Grace and Mercy’. A more practical theory points to small deposits of an unknown substance underneath the platforms, visible from the Moth-made shanties of Lowtown; as of yet, no studies have been made regarding their origin.

[9] The stone, clear as glass, eludes modern attempts at recreation; the techniques used in its creation remain lost to history, though Immortal involvement is almost guaranteed.

[10] The world, of course, referring to the Plains from Remve’linos to Pyimir; the Ald-Arbitrans were well aware of the ancestral Dwarven lands to the east and unclaimed wilds to the north, but considered them beneath imperial notice.

[11] I can only consider myself an utterly unqualified source in discussing the theories and conjecture surrounding Talintus’s Miracle Machine; for a complete overview, consult Cylister Veel’s The Miracle of Ahndai.

[12] A popular theory characterizes the Anhdai Anomaly as the trace cross-planar remnants of the Miracle Machine post-activation; without any conclusive information on the nature of the Anomaly, and nothing at all regarding the Miracle Machine, this remains an unsupported, if tantalizing, conspiracy theory at best.

[13] Ald-Arbitran masonry, flawless and occasionally impossible in geometric form, closely matches the seamless structures of the abandoned attempts at Immortal colonization found on the scattered floating isles of Upper Aenos; Djinn researchers have been unable to pinpoint the Realm from which the style originates, but the link adds to the legacy of occultism left in Ald-Arbitra’s wake.

[14] It is not an uncommon sight to find very young and very old Talanet bumbling about with darkened eyes; prone to spend hours at a time staring into the Anomaly’s blistering form, the Moths struck blind by the ordeal are often treated as sightless saints.

Issue 19 - The Amberwood, Part One: I Should Really Be Dead Right Now
As longtime readers may be aware, I have always held an appreciation for the cultural touchstones of Aenos’ repressed and deprived: the tusk-etched cliff face of Gro’mttl, the Altar of the First Sermon on the shores of the Curdled Sea, the Singular Heart wrought from the metals of the same Cogs that make pilgrimage there today. [1] It should come as no shock then that, fresh from the angular stone halls of my visit to Kan Lodar (for further reminiscence, see Issue 18), rumors of a ‘sanctuary for the small’ secluded in the imposing forestry buffering the mountains from the Darkwood sparked an investigator’s spirit in my heart. Admittedly, my weeks in the regrettably cramped Dwarven hostel had me somewhat soured on the concept of ‘small,’ but curiosity soon defeated cramps and I began my foray into the fringes of what Sol’s handbook termed the Amberwood.

 

Stepping off the Dwarven highway and onto the dirt paths skirting the forest proper I approached the woods with a heady confidence, certain both in my goal and my preparedness. It was a rush I had not quite felt since I first began my wanderings; with no maps to guide me but my own pen and parchment, I had a glimpse at the thrill of discovery the explorers of a bygone age surely reveled in. The dirt paths curved to give the wood a wide berth, leaving a gap of untamed highland between the greenery and the last gasps of Dwarven civil engineering.

 

My first steps into the forest were flanked by a pair of massive oaks, a towering pillar of foliage to either side. The sheer density of flora was astounding, even at its outermost edges, and it was to no small relief that I soon happened upon a modest trail snaking through the trees and shrubbery a short distance from where I entered. It was narrow, but well maintained and cleared; shockingly so, for a place with such scarce visitation. As I walked my nose occasionally twitched at an intrusively unfamiliar scent, foreign and muted by the forest musk. [2] That I could not place the fragrance irritated me to no end, and I eventually attributed it to any of the colorful fungal varieties littering the forest floor to ease my mind.

 

I followed this trail, winding and turning in such labyrinthine manners as to destroy any frame of reference with the outside world, and as I trod capriciously down any fork it offered I found myself in the heart of the forest’s namesake. The transition was gradual, but radical; the greenery browned, then blossomed in a vibrant scale of golden yellow hues. The sight was breathtaking, and prose does not do it justice, but I cannot help but echo Wolfgang Sol’s comparison to “that rarest and most prized of a tree’s memories.” [3]

 

Though the sight was incomparable, I could not shake a persistent and disconcerting feeling as I gazed beyond the line of trees. Paranoia is an easy thing to come by, in a place so shrouded and claustrophobic, and I cannot claim I possess the fortitude to dismiss such things easily. With that said, I could not attribute this to tricks of the mind alone; at my furtive glance I could swear things moved in the distance, eyes boring into me. It did not help that I had yet to spot a single instance of fauna in the woods, save for the bugs. My pace quickened.

 

Soon enough I was taken by paranoia of another kind, the ever-present nightmare of explorers and travelers; as the last beams of light filtered through the forest canopy and a blanket of dark settled, I began to realize how utterly and hopelessly lost I had become. Every turn of the trail offered the same view as the last stretch, and even that was soon lost as the flickering of my torch became the sole source of illumination. It’s a horrible, gnawing feeling, the thought that you may starve alone in a hateful wilderness. The intensity of my regret brought to mind the words of the Orcish poet-chief Keligm, uttered to his routed armies on the plains of Tuk’ai: “Behold, my kin, for the drought on our lands has ended. The rains come in the tears of our mothers and our daughters. I can no longer stop this rain. I, too, can simply weep.” [4]

Too nervous to venture an attempt at making camp, I pressed on further and found to my growing horror that at each branch the trail simply ended. I doubled back, marching down any road I could find, and again and again I found myself staring at a dead end. It was a devil’s choice; I could either brave the untamed forest and be torn apart by the things lurking within, or die of thirst as I wandered the same trails again and again. I stepped off the trail. This was a mistake.

 

The moment my offending foot broached into the foliage beyond the path, the tranquil façade the forest affected shattered. In its place were things defying description, things that lurk and ooze and possess far too many teeth, things I can unabashedly and genuinely term demons. [5] I cannot say why it is they shied from intruding upon the trail itself, but whatever reservations they held before evaporated as they mercilessly chased me through the brush.

 

I clawed and tumbled through branches and plant life, not daring to glance back and gauge the distance from my pursuers. Fumbling on an outstretched root I lost my grip on my torch; robbed of the last source of light it was all I could do to keep my mad dash going. Just as the dark seemed impenetrable, I caught sight of a faint flicker deep within the maze of trees. It became my center; desperate and distraught, I stumbled toward that single hope of guidance like a man depraved.

 

I came upon a small clearing, a slim metal post at its center. Atop this post was an odd sphere, hollow and engraved with lettering I did not recognize, which leaked hazy white smoke and dim blue light in equal parts from the holes spotting its surface. I again was hit with that unfamiliar scent, now far stronger, and finally I placed this censer as its source. From the edges of the clearing the demons stirred hatefully, but they refused to venture further in to finish me. I made the logical leap; whatever was burned in this censer kept them at bay. Evidently it had been since I first set foot on that trail; I chose not to linger on how close I had come to my own evisceration. Awash with relief at my safety my fatigue overcame me and I collapsed, the light from that post the last thing I remember before my consciousness slipped away.

 

I awoke. I wish I could say how long I had slept, but the canopy of leaves had long since obscured the sky. I rose slowly, my muscles stiff, but a rustling from the bushes bordering my small refuge startled my sluggish senses into action. I realized far too belatedly that the scent of the incense had faded; my heart leapt to my throat at the thought as something moved closer.

 

A creature emerged. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding; it was humanoid, and I would take whatever danger it posed over the things I had seen the night before any day. With that said it was difficult to call the man threatening at all; I at first mistook it for a Dwarven child, not yet graced with the facial stubble of manhood. [6] His frame, however, was too thin to fit the Dwarven mold; a Halfling, I soon surmised.

 

For a brief, pregnant moment I stared at the small figure. My legs tensed as I weighed the option of another flight into the wood, as terrible an idea as that seemed, but ultimately I offered a hesitant greeting towards the man. He smiled at me in return, a vacant and amiable grin, and as he approached I could not help but smile myself. I babbled a jumbled explanation of my situation towards him, barely stopping to breathe in my excitement at finding a friendly soul, and the Halfling’s smile widened.

 

I never questioned why he never spoke a word. I never looked closely at his face, never noticed the lack of fine detail or the dull, functionless eyes. Not until he was a stone’s throw away, at any rate, and by then the seams had already began to unravel. The Halfling split down the middle, a line opening from the tip of its head to its navel as it continued staggering at me. The two halves separated with a wet smack to reveal row after row of razor-edged incisors and a deep red maw that snapped suddenly towards me. [7]

 

I collapsed back in shock and panic, salivating demise inches from my face. I knew I should have run. I could only manage to scream.

To be continued. [8]

[1] See Weird Religion, or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the All-Eater, Issue 13

[2] An approximation can be made to the incense exhaled at noon from the great hollow dragon at the center of Banuk Khad, though with far less smoky undertones; refer again to Issue 18.

[3] The Memoirs of Wolfgang Sol, 3rd Ed., 48.

[4] Refer to the compilation of Keligm’s works in the Ragh’Megd, available in any library worth its cultural salt.

[5] Perhaps ‘defying description’ is a misnomer; ‘evading description’ may be more accurate, as I was far too preoccupied with survival to properly formulate descriptive prose.

[6] Or womanhood, as the brothels of Kan Lodar so shamelessly flaunt.

[7] An Amber Angler, I would later learn, cousin to the Weeping Maidens known to prey on travelers and heroes; for a far more detailed and scientific overview, refer to the Encyclopedia Demonica.

[8] Though it is well known these articles are published after the events depicted occur, please do not allow this to ruin what remaining suspense this cliffhanger can muster.