![[Image - Splash - Campaign 06.png]] *“The old gods do not die. They wait beneath the snow, beneath the roots, beneath the breath of the living — to be remembered.”* # The Clearing The forest lay still beneath a gentle falling snow, wrapped in a quiet that seemed untouched by the world beyond. [[Locations/The Waste/The Waste|The Waste]] had always been a land of stark beauty and quiet brutality, a place where survival was hard-won and the cold carved its will into stone and bone alike. But now the silence was no longer natural. It was strained, held at the edge of something — as though the land itself were listening. For as long as histories were told, the [[Gnoll|gnolls]] and the [[Northern Hillmen]] had been bound together by violence, clashing over the sacred places along the slopes of [[The Nordwall Mountains|The South Range]]. Yet the world had shifted. [[Kajit Hoard|Great armies of cat-men]] had poured into the land from the north, moving southeast toward [[The Cold March]], destroying all in their path. Whole packs had fled across the mountains, and those who remained had been forced to change. Fragile alliances had formed between gnoll packs and hillman tribes, forged not from trust but from necessity. [[Toto Grimn|Grimm]] and [[Soren]] moved through the trees of the [[The Faynewood]], reading the signs left in the snow. Two days earlier, the hillman tribe they had travelled with had been attacked by a scouting pride of [[Kajit Hoard|Kajits]]. Six men had died in the fighting, but the tribe had held. The attackers had been cut down, every one of them save for a single scout who had slipped away into the forest. [[Toto Grimn|Grimm]] had become part of the new order that the war had forced into being. He moved between tribes and packs, a [[Gnoll|gnoll]] of the [[Embertooth Pack]] carrying messages and offering aid where he could, living a life that never settled. For one such as him, born to the rhythms of pack and place, the constant movement weighed heavily. Beside him, [[Soren]] walked with a different burden. His [[Northern Hillmen|people]] were dying, caught between the [[Kajit Hoard]] from the north and the [[The Army of the Western Realm|holy armies]] pressing upward from [[The Western Realm|the south]]. As a [[Day-Crows and Night Crows]], [[Soren]] was more than a survivor. He was a healer, a keeper of stories, and the bearer of a sacred purpose — to find the [[Náuva Ring]], a lost library said to have once held all knowledge, now scattered or forgotten. Not far off, [[Hoodwink]] and [[Gimble]] made their way north through the same frigid forest. Having crossed over [[The Nordwall Mountains]] from [[The Western Realm]] into [[Locations/The Waste/The Waste|The Waste]], the two [[Tiefling|tieflings]] had endured bitter storms, relentless cold, and the harrying of mountain gnolls. They were exhausted, and hunted, and still the memory of the journey clung to them with every step. Further north still, [[KD6-3.7]] sat cross-legged within a cage fixed to the back of a horse-drawn cart. The wood creaked and jolted as it was dragged through the forest, cutting over roots and frozen ground. Around them, a company of [[The Army of the Western Realm|armed humans]] marched in ordered lines, their breath rising in pale clouds against the cold air. Behind the cart walked two more captives — [[Harfin Himgard|a man]] and [[Eirik Himgard|a boy]] — both bound, both silent, their steps heavy with exhaustion. All three paths drew toward the same place. A clearing opened in the forest, broken by the crumbling remains of an ancient ruin. At its centre lay a body — the fallen [[Kajit Hoard|Kajit]] scout that [[Soren]] and [[Toto Grimn|Grimm]] had been tracking. They arrived almost at once. Steel met steel. Snow broke underfoot. The quiet of the Waste shattered as the three groups collided, confusion turning instantly to violence. In the chaos, [[Hoodwink]] moved toward the fallen body. With little hesitation, she reached into the familiar edge of death and called something back. The corpse stirred — but what rose was not empty. Within it, something awakened. The consciousness of [[Ra-Zekou]]. The soldiers became the common enemy. [[Hoodwink]], [[Soren]], [[Toto Grimn|Grimm]], [[KD6-3.7]], [[Gimble]] and the newly-risen [[Ra-Zekou]] banded together against the cleric [[Anslem]] and his men. When the dust finally settled, the clearing was theirs, and the priest’s possessions held a map marked with strange, careful crosses — one of them drawn over the very place they now stood. Beneath the ruin they found a barrow, and in the barrow a raised dais of hewn logs, and upon the dais a vast glass vessel filled with a murky liquid. Within it, preserved and slowly beating, was a huge heart. Carved again and again into the wood around it, in the old hillman tongue that only [[Soren]] could still read, were the words: [[Náuva's Heart of Light]]. [[Hoodwink]] placed it inside [[The Globe]], the strange glass sphere she carried and could step into as one steps into a dream. None of them yet understood what they had found. # The Road to Brunvik [[Harfin Himgard|Harfin]] and his son [[Eirik Himgard|Eirik]] had not spoken of home while bound behind the cart, but with the soldiers dead, they spoke of little else. The village of [[Brunvik]] lay a day or two north, and his wife [[Yilda Himgard|Yilda]] and daughter [[Sigrid Himgard|Sigrid]] still waited for him there. [[Harfin Himgard|Harfin]] promised that an elderly [[Day-Crows and Night Crows]] lived in the village — a wise woman called [[Alfonhild]]. Hearing this, [[Soren]] resolved to accompany them. The others followed. The road unfolded as it always did in the Waste — cold, watchful, beautiful, and wrong. On their first night, [[Ra-Zekou]] caught the scent of smoke and led [[Toto Grimn|Grimm]] through the trees to a small fire tended by three figures of his own kind. [[Ko Mbali]] and her scouts sat huddled over the flames, and when the blood of a guinea fowl was spilled, green spirits rose from its body, drifting into the fire and into the chests of the three [[Kajit]] warriors in turn. It was a quiet, reverent magic, one [[Ra-Zekou]] felt he ought to remember and could not. [[Ko Mbali]] looked at him for a long time before she spoke. What had been done to him, she said, could only be understood by a [[Diviner]]. If he wished answers, he must travel north and present himself to the war chief [[Shaka Kaji]]. The next day the sky opened. A pegasus broke the grey, circling high above the plain, and beneath it wheeled a red dragon, her flight strangely constrained, as though something in her body pulled against her will. [[Ra-Zekou]] drew their attention without meaning to, and the dragon came down upon them. In the fighting that followed, [[Gimble]] was killed. [[Harfin Himgard|Harfin]] and his son [[Eirik Himgard|Eirik]] fell beside him. The horses died in the snow. Yet in the desperation of the battle, the party realised that a sword had been driven into the dragon’s flesh — a [[The Knights of The Son of Serah|Knightly]] blade, bound with cruel magic — and they pulled it free. The dragon staggered, then stilled. [[Soren]], reaching toward her with nothing but intention, felt something meet him. Her name, when she gave it, was [[Calderyn (The Red Dragon)|Calderyn]], and she had been made a weapon by the paladin who rode the pegasus above. That paladin was [[Brynn]]. Released from her bondage, [[Calderyn (The Red Dragon)|Calderyn]] flew away into the grey. That evening, [[Hoodwink]] learned that [[Gimble]] had not wholly left her. Something of him had passed into [[Seluinethil's Hearthbound Key]], the ornate silver key she wore close to her heart. He could not yet speak. But he was there. # Brunvik They arrived at [[Brunvik]] to find it undone. The village was eerily still. Half the houses had been cut clean through, not by blade or fire but as though some blade in the sky had sheared them apart, and where they should have stood was now a vast, precise circle of unfamiliar land — warm-climate trees with flat, umbrella canopies, golden grass, the corpse of a great horned beast from somewhere far away. To the north, a cloud of white crows turned quietly above a single grave. To the south, the rhinoceroses grazed as though they had always been there. There would be no [[Alfonhild]] to consult. She was already dead. A small voice called from inside a collapsed hut. [[KD6-3.7]] found her — [[Sigrid Himgard|Sigrid]] — clutching a children’s book about dragons, her mother [[Yilda Himgard|Yilda]] nowhere to be seen. She had been on one side of the house when the rift opened; her mother had been on the other. Now her mother was somewhere else entirely. The rhinoceroses charged without warning. In the fighting, [[Calderyn (The Red Dragon)|Calderyn]] returned — still wounded, still cautious — and [[Scratch Greyember]], one of her [[Kobold|kobold]] servants, came with her. Together they broke the herd. In the aftermath, [[Scratch Greyember|Scratch]] knelt before [[Sigrid Himgard|Sigrid]] and asked, very seriously, if he might have her book. He offered her a small magic sword in trade. [[Sigrid Himgard|Sigrid]], after a moment’s thought, accepted. [[The Dragon Tome]] passed into kobold hands, and a sword too large for her was strapped across her back. The white crows parted around [[Alfonhild|the Day-Crow’s grave]], and [[Hoodwink]] spoke to her. The villagers, she said, had fled east toward [[Frostvik]]. There, near her body, the party found an amulet — [[Feirrune]] — which [[Soren]] took up, and which would let him echo, just once, a spell cast near him that day. The crows watched, and did not follow. [[KD6-3.7]], in whom something had been quietly changing since awakening in the cart, let [[Sigrid Himgard|Sigrid]] climb onto the back of her steel defender as though it were a pony. For the first time since consciousness had come to them, the [[Watcher]] felt a shape to their purpose. They set out east. # The Eastward Road Following the trail of the [[Brunvik]] villagers, the party came upon a hole in the ground ringed by weathered stone. It was an [[Earthkin|earthkin]] place — a geotemple of a people long since driven from the Waste — and when they descended they found it guarded still, by a warden of stone and flesh that did not understand it had been forgotten. They fought it. They killed it. They took from the temple an arrow, carved of a material no smith in the Waste could name. Further east they met [[Faolin]] and [[Ko Mbali]] once more, travelling in a [[Nomadic Elf Conclaves|conclave’s]] quiet company. [[Faolin]] passed a small stone into [[Ra-Zekou|Ra-Zekou’s]] hand — a [[Jump Stones|Jump Stone]] — and told him it would carry him to [[Ko Mbali]] wherever she was, so long as he acted before she returned home. If he wished to cross into [[N'garba]] and seek a diviner, this was the way. The villagers of [[Brunvik]], when they were finally overtaken, did not want the child. It became clear quickly. They had been offered safe passage through the forest on condition of a tribute, and the tribute was a little girl with a book that was no longer hers. The [[Night Crows]] — druids of the dark side of the Day-Crow faith — would accept her, they said, and they would be allowed to pass. [[Soren]] heard this and did not speak. [[KD6-3.7]] heard it and did. The party fought the [[Night Crows]] in the snow. They did not give [[Sigrid Himgard|Sigrid]] up. # The Rift From the abandoned village of [[Tharnok]], [[Ko Mbali]] led them out onto the open tundra, a small drum in her hands that played of its own accord once begun. They followed its beat across the snow until, without warning, it stopped. Violet light flickered in the empty air. It swirled, small at first, then wider — a translucent veil through which another world could be seen. A small deer bolted through it and disappeared into the snow, panicked by its crossing. The [[N'garba Rifts|rift]] widened, and as they prepared to step through, [[Brynn]] came for them. She had tracked them on her pegasus across the open ground, a paladin of [[The Knights of The Son of Serah]] hunting her own former people. Yet the rift closed around the party before she could reach them, and when the cold broke, it was gone — and so was the Waste, and so was winter. They stood on the western edge of [[The M'kuluway na Samo Mountains]], beneath a sky heavy with warmth, and they smelled green things for the first time in months. # N'garba The land of [[N'garba]] was not what any of them had imagined. Broad grasslands opened beneath them, speckled with acacia and watered by rivers they could hear from a great distance away. The party crossed a ridge and caught the tail end of a rhythmic exchange drifting up from below — a warthog and a meerkat, or so it seemed, practicing together a philosophy of freedom from problems. Life without worry, they agreed. A way of living unburdened, troubles acknowledged and calmly set aside. [[Toto Grimn|Grimm]] considered it, and moved on. They found an elephant dead in the grass, its tusks cut from its head. They found the men who had done it soon after. [[Rafe Colter]] and his poachers had built a camp around a lookout platform, and the bleached piles of ivory around them told the rest of the story. The party did not pass them by. The poachers died in their own camp, and the bush resumed its sounds behind them. That evening, within the confines of [[The Globe]], [[Hoodwink]]'s settlement was quietly becoming a village. Hobbits she had not asked for tended small crops and goats. [[Sigrid Himgard|Sigrid]] taught a few of them to weave hillman baskets. [[KD6-3.7]]'s steel defender was lashed to a plough. And at the centre of that strange green place stood a smooth black stone pyramid — silent most of the time, and impossible to move. When an elderly hobbit died in [[Hoodwink|Hoodwink’s]] arms, the pyramid shifted of its own accord, turning and grinding like a vast puzzle. A side of it opened, and from the opening a naked hobbit was born, covered in a thick glistening substance that the other hobbits wiped away without comment. Carved into the pyramid’s face, in the old infernal tongue, was an inscription: ***Biological Continuity Engine. Established to preserve the living pattern. To prevent erosion of form through time. When the vessel fails, the pattern endures. When the pattern thins, it is renewed. Flesh is transient. The sequence is not. Continuity is maintained. Continuity is required.*** # The Pride Home and the Tunnels At the [[N'Tambra Run]] river, the party split. [[Soren]] and [[Ra-Zekou]] went south with [[Ko Mbali]], through [[Jaku|Jaku's homestead]] — an old man who traded them a cow in return for a promise to carry a medallion to his son [[Janaku]], should their paths ever cross in the Waste. On the way to [[N'kontoto Pride Home]] they were set upon by hyenal, and [[Ko Mbali]] fought beside them for the first time openly as a warrior and not merely a guide. The pride home, when they reached it, was carved into a hillside above the jungle, hundreds of thatched huts gathered around a vast grass hall with a living tree growing up through its roof. Inside, forty young [[Kajit|Kajits]] stood in rows to be initiated as warriors. A bull was slaughtered, and green spirits rose from it, unseen by [[Soren]], into the chests of those who were being made into something new. [[Moraka-Na]], the chieftain, watched in silence. Beside him stood a woman in a black cloak whose face no-one would look at — [[Ishara]], [[Diviner]] for [[Tongo Garah]]. [[Ishara]] did not kill [[Soren]] when she might have. Instead, she told him what she had seen — a vision of him standing at an icy cliff face, wind at his back, before a door made from giant roots which sprouted from the mountain itself. For him, this was the first certainty in a life spent chasing shadows. The [[Náuva Ring]] was real, and it was waiting. [[Soren]] and [[Ra-Zekou]] agreed to travel with her. Far to the north, the rest of the party followed a different road. [[Hoodwink]], [[Toto Grimn|Grimm]] and [[KD6-3.7]] moved eastward along the foothills until they reached a sheer rock face carved with the colossal head of a [[Kajit]], its jaws open in a silent roar, framing the entrance to the forgotten tunnels of the [[pyramid builders]]. Inside, the air was dry and dead and very old. They walked for a day without progress. They passed the body of a [[Kajit]] woman pinned to the wall by a spear none of them could place. They triggered traps, disarmed others, fought a mimic, slew the slow-circling dead. They found treasure enough to weigh them down and kept moving. In a tomb of an ancient Kajit queen, something went wrong. [[Hoodwink]] fell, and did not rise. [[Toto Grimn|Grimm]] and [[KD6-3.7]] were alone with her body in the dark for a long time before [[Zari]] found them. A tomb raider by trade, and a [[Kajit]] by birth, she worked for a diviner of the war chief and knew these tunnels better than anyone still living. She led them to a chamber at the heart of the complex, where a smaller pyramid stood — the same shape as the one inside [[The Globe]], the same shape as a machine that had been working, somewhere, for longer than any of them could count. Together they worked out how it might be asked. The cost was another life, and a cow, generated by the magic of the [[Biological Continuity Engine|black pyramid]], was to be the sacrifice. A thin green wisp rose from the pit and passed through the pyramid into a body the pyramid shaped around it. [[Hoodwink]] returned from the dark with the smell of earth still on her. She did not speak of what she had seen. # The Palace of Kaloway Ra Emerging from the northern face of the mountains, the three survivors — four, now, with [[Zari]] — looked down across a catchment plain a hundred and fifty kilometres wide. In the distance, the palace of [[Kaloway Ra Palace|Kaloway Ra]] rose from the earth. It was a tree. A [[Baobab]], but vaster than any tree had any right to be, its trunk as wide as a fortress and its canopy reaching another five stories beyond the fifteen of its carved dwellings. Channels had been cut into the living wood and the sap within it glowed — a deep, green-gold light that spilled from every window, every door, every worked groove. It was not a palace that sheltered a city. It was a city, and it sang. They were brought before [[Shaka Kaji]], and beside him his diviner [[Razi’Moya]], and they placed in her hand the diamond [[Zari]] had carried out of the tunnels. [[Razi’Moya]]’s eyes rolled back in her head. Spirits rose from the altar through the heart of the tree, threading themselves through the diamond, and images flickered across the walls of the war chamber. A [[Kajit]] warrior snarling in an icy place. A sweep over the golden land of [[N'garba]], its plains and jungles and mountains, and then the violet shimmering wounds of the rifts. The vision followed the rifts into the Waste, across cold tundra, and came to rest on a glacier. Beneath the ice it showed them a machine — vast, pulsing, purpled at its heart — and around it, soldiers in the red of [[The Knights of The Son of Serah]]. Then the image of the warrior again, closer now, a warhammer crackling in his grip as he faced them. The rifts were not a thing that had happened to [[N'garba]]. They were a thing that was being done to it. [[Ko Mbali]] arrived soon after, and the palace itself began to make ready. The next rift, [[Shaka Kaji]] told them, was coming for the city. In two days, Kaloway Ra itself would be carried into the Waste. # The Returning Far to the south, [[Soren]] and [[Ra-Zekou]] were learning what it meant to travel with [[Ishara]]. Her war band moved slowly across the plains, a long column of dust and bronze. She rode high above them on the back of an elephant, two huge spirit drums swaying at its flanks, and every morning she killed a human at random from the caged cart her soldiers pulled behind, setting the head on a spike as an offering. [[Soren]] watched. [[Ra-Zekou]] watched. They did not speak of what could be done and what could not. When at last the drums found another rift, it took them back to the Waste. It dropped them directly into the centre of a military outpost — [[Fort Verth]] — and a terrible battle erupted. The [[Kajit]] war band was obliterated, but so were the human soldiers. From each dying warrior, both kajit and man, a wispy green essence was pulled, out of their corpse and into a covered wagon at the edge of the battlefield. When the shouting ended, only [[Ishara]], [[Soren]] and [[Ra-Zekou]] still stood. The three investigated the wagon, and inside it another [[Náuva's Hearts|heart]] in its glass — and they understood, at last, that the green spirits they had seen pulled from the dying were absorbed into this strange beating artifact. [[Ishara]], [[Soren]] and [[Ra-Zekou]] packed some provisions from the decimated fortress, loaded them onto the cart, and headed north, taking the heart with them. After several days' travel they spotted a huge contingent of [[The Army of the Western Realm]] also moving north across [[The Wasted Planes]]. Above the army flew a massive black dragon and the small figure of [[Brynn]] and her flying pegasus. She spotted them, and instantly gave chase, flying her steed at breakneck speed across the plains towards them. Back in [[N'garba]], the rift swallowed [[Kaloway Ra Palace|Kaloway Ra]] whole. The palace crossed from the warm green valley of its home to the frozen plains of a land it had not been made for, and in the crossing, everything that could not be carried — the ancestors whose spirits dwelt in the walls — was left behind and ended. A great stretch of [[N'garba]] became dead land overnight. What arrived in the Waste was still the palace, but it was hollowed of the ancestors. [[Hoodwink]], [[Toto Grimn|Grimm]], [[KD6-3.7]] and [[Zari]] rode the rift with it. So did [[Shaka Kaji]], [[Razi’Moya]] and [[Ko Mbali]]. Once in [[Locations/The Waste/The Waste|The Waste]], [[Hoodwink]] quickly moved to get the others into [[The Globe]] and use the [[Jump Stones]] to travel to [[Ra-Zekou]]. Arriving just in time, she ushered [[Ishara]], [[Soren]] and [[Ra-Zekou]] and the heart into the globe and whisked them away back to the [[Kaloway Ra Palace]]. Back at the [[Kaloway Ra Palace]], [[Shaka Kaji]] was preparing his troops to move south, but the party did not follow him. Instead they chose to investigate a strange pass into the mountains, one that bore the signs of [[Náuva The Root Mother]]. Soren led the party up into the snowy mountains. # The Mountain Pass Higher in [[The Nordwall Mountains|The Nordwall]], the path narrowed to a slot between two walls of black stone, and the wind turned from cold to bitter. [[Soren]] led. He had done this, in some strange sense, his whole life. The trolls came down on them with an avalanche...