Age of Ice and Blood: A Pathfinder System Heroic Fantasy Quest

First Day of Olweje-hamba (Olweje Descending) 1348 A. L. (After Landfall)

Once more you have reasons aplenty to thank Zaia for his good work, your hand may have been bathed in all manner of strange smelling herbs and salts and basted like a roast ready for the spit, but in the end you can move your fingers as well as you ever could, much to your relief. You had heard many a sad tale of knights who had been ruined by some old wound to their sword arm and lived to see their honor trampled and glory snatched away. But that is not to be your fate, now or likely ever so long as you travel upon the Marcella. However long that might be...

Other worries crowd in your mind, recollections of that moment of dizziness and emptiness and of Antonio telling the story of the rat's end. He had done it with a smile on his lips and boasts ready on the tongue as was his wont, but you had read the lingering unease like a shadow upon his face and you had not missed how quickly he had downed his 'celebratory' drink. Thus you are resolved to discover what might share the ship with you, or what it miht have become that the Knikut of the Mouth of the world were so willing to bar your way first with spears in hand than with curse out of the dark.

"It's not any servant or Ikomi or creature born of her dreams, that I am sure of," Inge explains. "If the world of the living is like an island and Ikomi's realm is like the wide sea all about it than this thing is born of the far shore, only it is not a shore exactly for it is not 'land' akin to the world we see with our waking eyes, a Far Realm where the writ of the gods does not hold sway and beyond that..." she shrugs helplessly. "Maybe other worlds like yours, islands of life and seas of death. You passed through... ship passed through, ship is changed."

"Then why is it none of us have changed?" you ask, in your heart wishing for reassurance that you indeed had not.

"I don't know, maybe the ship kept you safe from the Far Realm and that which dwells there," the girl replies, obviously frustrated at herself for not being able to give a better answer.

"What does dwell there?" Your mind flies to some fog shrouded realm filled with shadowy monsters of whipping limbs like the one Antonio had described.

"They are supposed to be... er... 'beyond telling and beyond knowing, stranger to us than the face of the moon and the depths of the sea '." From her tone it is clear she is quoting something, though what you cannot tell for certain. "They warp the flesh and the mind." Inge searches around the cabin as though expecting the answer to fly out of one of the walls... which is not as impossible as you might have preferred. "Well the ship has neither flesh nor soul so we should be fine."

You are not as set at your ease as Inge might have hoped.


That night you find Esha on deck, alone save for the night watch which had chosen to stay as far from her position at the aft end of the ship as they could. She is sitting cross-legged on a large pillow in a position that seems strange to your eye, but which is clearly both comfortable and familiar to her and so you do not remark upon it, asking instead the same question you had Inge. what dwelt within the Marcella and how had it come to be here.

"The way it was explained to me is like this, we all live on one page in a book, we can go up and down left and right, but even if we were to travel to the ends of the earth or up into the firmament we would not get on another page. The other pages are like and unlike our own, the Lingering Realm of ghosts and specters, the Dreaming Woods of the fey whose bordermarches you have set foot in from the accounts of your companions, the House of Dust where all that was is preserved in moribund shadow."

"So this Far Realm of which Inge spoke is another page in the book?"

"No, it is another book on the shelf across the room, or maybe across a mountain," she replies and laughs softly, somehow you feel as much at her expense as at yours. "The only thing I know for certain is that you would have to be mad to conjure by it." For perhaps thirty heartbeats she is silent then in a softer voice she adds. "My father warned me not to attempt to use the gift of tongues to read books related to such summoning lest it drive me mad... and less useful to his purposes."

For your part you are too surprised by the admission to find words, and soon she spares you from having to find them with a question of her own. "So what am I do be to you when we make port?"

"Pardon?" you ask, bemused by the sudden change of subject.

"In case it has escaped your notice unlike the other mage upon this ship I am not a little girl." It had not. "And if we do not give the folk of Orinilu some other thing to call me than they shall simply assume concubine." And with that all impure thoughts flee from your mind as surely as if you had been ducked in ice water, that one who had at risk to herself aided you in battle twice over should be thought as nothing more than a mistress by another name would be revolting and a stain upon honor to even contemplate.

What do your propose to introduce Esha as?

[] A close relation of someone on board
-[] Antonio's sister
-[] Inge's mother

[] A wealthy merchant in her own right (uncommon among the Anwa but not unheard of)

[] A scholar and priestess of Nikure (Esha knows enough about the cult to impersonate a priestess on all but close interogation)

[] Write in

OOC: And here we are, the first very crude introduction to planar mechanics, from people who do not have the appropriate skills, but do at least have connected knowledge kills, like arcana and religion. Not yet edited.