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

Thirty Sixth Day of Elnu-Hamba (Elnu Descendent), 1349 A. L. (After Landfall)

"Stay out of the smoke! Don't walk too close!" you shout over the din as men struggle to keep their feet, stumbling and reeking. Good advice mayhap, but hard to take when the street is only wide enough for four or five to walk abreast no mater how good friends they might be. Given the choice to fall behind among the press of the crowd or et Aubert, Peter and Jean fend for themselves you motion to Silver to slow. Some of the folk in the crowd look to Inge with almost accusing eyes, they see her as the herald of Ikomi first and last, not as a member some foreign fellowship.

Where is Ohun? you wonder not for the first time, but in this chaos what hope is there that he could find you even if he is able to come.

Suddenly the air rings with a sound like thunder in your ears, like the howls of beasts and the screams of dying men, stones start flying out of the fire and up ahead you hear men shout something about snakes of all damned things.

" T's snakes," Inge calls out. "I can see the magic, it's ropes..."

That does not prove much better as dozens of braided ropes wrap themselves around the warriors of Lina's company, as the flames and the smoke only grow. Men that had been ready to march to the hall just a few moments ago with drum of war and flute of peace now start to turn tail.

There's no room, you realize with mounting horror, there's no bloody room and dozens, scores of armed men trying to turn back and run from a foe they cannot see. "Hold! Hold! Men of Lirman hold your hearts!"

As if in answer to your words the shadows seem to sway and twist, spindly thinning on too many legs, gaping maws with too many fangs, eyes of embers, form of smoke and shadow begotten of the nightmares of men.

"Glamor and trickery!" you hear Zaia shout as he casts a vial of fire onto the cobbles and by its baleful might, gold as the new risen sun beside the smoldering flames you see them.

As children they seem at first, pale and wrapped in dark rags as they look out from the roofs of the nearer house, save only for their eyes. No child ever had eyes like that, cold and empty and black as polished stones. You glimpse them only for a moment and then in a shimmer of the hot air they are gone and in their place stands something you had never thought to see under the light of day nor ever wished to, great spiders as large as a man is tall scampering down the pitted stone wall.

"Shadow spinners..." the thought is comes not from any of your companions, but from the familiar weight of the blade you had already drawn, it does not hunger for battle as it had against the daemons, but seems instead to hold these foes in contempt, as the lion does the mouse that scampers over the field. Alas your company hears none of this... see none of this, all they bear witness to is the city of their birth turned foreign and fel, the above of spirits come down out of the hills and out of the woods to take back the city of the stone houses.

Stones are thrown and those men who had been wrapped in rope scream as if they had been bitten by snakes. It was all that you could do to keep your own men from falling pray to the trickery. Mayhap that would have been the end of 'Queen Lina' had it not been for the words of the woman herself.

"Come out then!" she shouts, and the roar of the sea is in her voice as the touch of the waves is in her hand. "Come out and face me if you would claim this land and do not seek to drive us like the hunter drives out his pray with hounds from the bush." And lo, there is a stillness on the air that just for a moment as if the elements held their breath and then out of the walk half a dozen men...or at least beings that are more like men than most of the fey, short in stature, such that they came up only to the chest of a full grown man, but with rich and heavy beards all adorned with rings and chains in the manner of the Anwa. Their eyes are wild as the shadows of the deep woods, and their limbs gnarled like old tree toots...

"The line of kings is failed girl," the one in the lead says. "Go back to the sea and come this way no more, for we will take back what is ours..."

"Yours?" Lina laughs and the sound is sharp as broken glass, filled with sorrow and with rage. "Look around you and see the work of men's hands. Do you think they are going to give that up because you asked them to? Do you think they will all let their children starve in the wilds because you scared them with shadows? If not I then there will be another and another... they will have not the blood, but they will have that which the blood was born of, the will to take land and live and see their children live under green leaf and red branch. I do not know what pact you made, nor which you count fulfilled, but men will keep coming back. We are not bound in word and deed and we will fight!"

The more she speaks the more the men around her take heart. with voice and with spear on shield banging. Some of those who had called her powers blasphemy not so long ago now had changed their tune as from midnight to morn.

"Your kin took the island from the old one because your gonefathers slew the beasts and drove back those that wanted the land to be wild and dark between sea and star and only those that made a bargain with him and his stayed of the Lonely Folk. So said he that he was mighty and we were weak and so he would rule for as long as he could keep the peace of the land and we would have no choice in the doing. So said we of the fields and of the mountains..." A chill runs down your spine as you can feel more than see a thousand pinpricks, a thousand times again all looking down at you... at Lina out of the dark.

Tis more than mortals bearing witness, that much is sure.

"So we made the bargain and sealed it in blood and sap, so long as the line of kings was strong and unbroken we would not take back what was ours, but lo we have been asked for aid against that which the kings could not fight and then the king was lost, though no artifice of ours so we take back what is ours..."

"Lost?" Lina cuts in wide eyed. "Lost not dead?" Then her face darkens like the sun when dark clouds coming. "She took him, she took him and she lied!"

"I should not... I should not have said that...." the little man shoot in his boots, like leaf on the wind save that leaves don't jangle with gold.

Most of the folk here present likely did not understand what Lina meant, no one who had not been on the journey, perhaps no one who had no swam in the dark waters could have known at once... but you did and you do know, or guess at least. Lina's mother had taken King Ansefu captive, she had not killed him, and in so doing made him 'weak' in a way that mere death could not do. Kings died every few decades... but how many were found under the sea?

What do you do?

[] Try to negotiate some kind of a settlement, at least enough that the city will not descend into utter chaos
-[] Write in proposed terms

[] Point out that the sea fey had tricked everyone present, the spirits of the land to fight men and even her own daughter into thinking her brother was killed

[] Write in

OOC: Well this took a lot longer to write than I would have liked. In my defense it is kind of the culmination of the arc as well as an almost battle in the streets so I was juggling sheets as much as narrative, though the latter were not as relevant in the end.