Our Story So Far...
Wicked Sanguine
All I Want Is Everything
- Location
- The High Desert
Hey, everyone! Been a little while, and it'll be a little while to come, but here, nine weeks in, I wanted to do something to show you that I'm still here and I still care. So, first, a reminder of my other project:
The Weight of Names is updating semi-regularly, a story of a young doctor who moves to take over her deceased mentor's position in a small, foreign town full of secrets, so if you love this world and/or my writing, I am absolutely working on that and that's where I'm actively putting my writing out these days!
But here, I've been trying to figure out what Never Full is to me, something a little more than this massive, bloated quest y'all know and love, and I can't promise anything other than that I'm sticking with these characters and this world for a long time to come, and I hope you stay with me along the way! So here's sort of a mocked-up hybrid between a rewrite and a recap episode, to remind us where we've gone up until now, and hopefully set the stage for where we'll wind up going. I hope you enjoy it!
[The following contains mentions of visceral violence and cannibalism, though it is glossed over in this recap format, as well as general depictions of an unhealthy, dangerous society. Stay safe.]
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WELCOME TO IASH QOMA
Your name is Grail. It's short for Thrice-Pierced Chalice of Eternal Regard, your prophecy-name given to you at age 13, when you took the holy Ves, the mutagenic sacrament around which your entire society, that of the far northern city of Vespergren, is based. You grew up in the creche among your peers, foundling children taken in and sired by the Vesakh of Vespergren, children both found on their various raids of the southern world and born naturally. You learned the basics of the world--that the world was a dangerous place, but that the most dangerous things in it were Vesakh, and once you became one, the entire world would belong to you as long as you had the strength in your liver to take it. Once you'd taken your First Sacrament, you spent your teenage years wandering Vespergren, forming and breaking alliances, getting in trouble, sharpening your skills, preparing for your Second Treatment.
Your Second made you stronger and changed your form to something you could really be proud of, and that meant it was time to really prove yourself, as a proper adult and not just a barely-above-hatchling First. You left Vespergren, greatest of the three Vesakh settlements, and headed south, for the very center of the Continent--the great city-state of Iash Qoma. You'd been told that it was the perfect place to go, the perfect intermediary between non-Vesakh, Unchosen culture, and the mercenary catch-as-catch-can values of Vesakh culture. And so you traveled there through the great Bronze Mirrors that collapse space to allow rapid travel, ready to test the skills you've learned, skills of subterfuge and appraisal, combat and violence, tracking and hunting, plotting and scheming, the skills of a proper Vesakh, to become a mercenary, thief, hunter or bandit as is your people's custom. That's what you thought you'd learn… what you really learned there would change everything you thought you knew.
Arriving at Iash Qoma, you immediately decided to play your role to the hilt--you saw bearers carrying the holy Ves that makes your people everything they are, and followed them to the Vespergrenite Embassy in the Qoman district called the Rise, a place they called the Butcher Shop. There, you took a job from the Vespergrenite Ambassador Dial, who oversaw a full third of all Vesakh in the city, to track down an inventor who'd been working on a new type of gun. But first, you saw an augur. Prophecy and prediction are very important to your culture, and to you, specifically--you could be considered rather superstitious, and no serious endeavor could be conducted without consulting the bones, the guts, the dice or the gods. The augur Loupe, an autoharuspex who lived in the area, made you a deal--bring them the clockwork bird that represented a since-lapsed contract between them and the shuzhiren underworld figure Mock Vey, and they would read the entrails for you. Said entrails were their own, as Vesakh heal quickly, and they revealed to you that figures known as the Smiling Thief, the Walking Wound, the Rain-Glutton and the Falling Star would be important in your life, and that a flood of blood was coming to wash over the Continent, a flood that would cleanse nothing.
Your first mission led you across Iash Qoma, a city built within a massive cavern, open to the sky with a great central pillar becoming a mountain above the surface, a city built across several islands in the Unfound Sea below the crater that led to the surface. From the Rise, the base of the massive central pillar that served as the heart of Iash Qoma, to Irontown, a neighborhood bustling with factories and manufacturing, to Great Men, an ominous place of ramshackle construction and giant statues that reminded you of home, you traveled in search of the gunsmith Shelev and her marvelous new invention. Along the way, you encountered citizens of the southeastern Confederacy of Azharach, who hate your people for their long history of conflict with their own, the ominous Law, keepers of order in Iash Qoma, and various signs of a city experiencing great internal and external tension. In Irontown, you'd meet an agent of the Bariq Armament Concern, a weaponsmithing company, who'd offer you a gun in exchange for tracking down an employee who'd stolen a bunch of components, and in Great Men you'd track that man, through a fraught neighborhood full of armed gangs and mercenaries, to a tiny apartment in a vast wall of them. Alek Helingen, the thief of the components, had stolen them so he could threaten Shelev, the gunsmith you were tracking, to make him his own private supply of her new invention. You defeated Helingen in single combat and told Shelev that you could provide protection, and the two of you turned him in to the Law, where you discovered exactly how scary they are--among other things, they practice the art of melding machines with flesh, something that is one of the greatest blasphemies to your culture. Vesakh that practice this are called Cicadas, and they are outcast heretics hated by the others. Unchosen who do it are to be tolerated, since they are not part of the holy pact of the Ves, but it is still something you feared.
Returning to the Butcher Shop, you'd discovered that the Embassy was under attack by a terrible Cicada, the Law encounter having been a foreshadowing, and you'd stashed Shelev with Loupe so that you could join the fight. The Cicada, a terrible thing that flew with spinning blades of metal and fought with smoky blasts of liquid flame, easily held you and the other guardians of the embassy at bay, until Dial showed up, thanked you for your help, and tore the thing easily asunder with magic you still don't understand. In the aftermath, Dial thanked you with money, a promise of future employment, and the key to an apartment in town, taking Shelev under her wing and promising to protect the gunsmith from other schemers like Helingen or worse. You'd retired to eat and rest, your head full of thoughts, and resolved to, the next day, set out to repay your debt to Loupe.
THE SCAB PALACE
Loupe had told you that Mock Vey's redoubt was located in a place called the Scab Palace, but they didn't bother to tell you where that was, and you were afraid of incurring further debt by asking exactly where it could be found. So, you set to searching. That search would first take you to breakfast, where you enjoyed the Unchosen luxuries of sausage rolls, coffee, and your first newspapers. The newspapers gave you a better idea of the world around you, as well as the sinking feeling that said world was about to collapse beneath your feet. In Iash Qoma, pressure from outside leading to tension inside, and even a series of terrorist attacks by someone called the Longwinter Bomber. In Nashax, they fear international war; in the Confederacy, international war; in the Brimstone Republic, international war. Everyone seems to be afraid that the tensions between nations are about to boil over into legitimate conflict, a serious Continental War, and the belligerents will inevitably include your home.
Electing to focus on the job in front of you for the time being--even if war does happen, why enter a war while cursed by an augur? Better to get that danger out of the way first and foremost--you'd continued on your path to find the Scab Palace. This path took you all the way to Diemen's Steps, the neighborhood-island that features a land route to the surface, a ramp into the cavern-pit of Iash Qoma. You made your way to the surface, where, hanging around the caravanserais and bars that visitors and traders made a habit of refreshing and gossiping at, you'd found yourself a lead--that one of the Bomber's attacks had resulted in the death of some cattle sacred to the Confederate god Savnok, and they were trying to recoup their losses by subtly getting rid of the holy beef on the black market. A skewer of this very beef had been your first meal upon visiting Qoma, and you felt like the connection to this lead was too strong to ignore. You followed the lead back into the pit after renting a riding-bat, to a facilitator of things called the Mellifluous Factor. A Devil from Dis, a people and civilization as old or older than your own, and terribly attractive to boot, they'd offered you more information in exchange for some of that holy beef, and you'd traveled from Rise to Rise in order to seek out the black-market animal product merchant Big Yan. A mimic, member of the same clan as Mock Vey and the same broader species as Six-Coins Choi, a weapons merchant you'd visited after the Cicada incident, Yan had sold you the beef and offered you future employment. On the way back to the Factor, you were interrupted by a man called Simeon, a member of a local mercenary guild called the Crow Brothers, who told you his people were keeping an eye on all new mercenaries in the city. You finally made it back to the Factor, noticing a mysterious Confederate agent along the way, and they performed a divination for you---a magical working that used the emotional resonance of the beef to track down other buyers, which included Mock Vey. The magic took you and your new bat right back to Great Men, where you finally entered the Scab Palace itself.
The Scab Palace was a maze of strange set-pieces, rooms patterned after different periods and styles. Adobe and stucco, brick and oil lamps, stone and torches, rugs and tapestries, gold and fire, silver and water, and all connected by pulsing strands of dark red resin that resembled nothing so much as skinned muscle. You'd explored, looting as you went, for everywhere you went was heaving with loose treasure, and no Vesakh instinct could pass up such a thing. It was going well, until you ran into a guardian. Mock Vey and Big Yan are shuzhiren, the Veil Clan of mimics--but Six-Coins Choi is heziren, Box Clan, and so was this guardian, the dangerous gang enforcer known as Coffin Lau, a coffin full of angry, cigar-smoking giant crustacean. Lau was stronger than you, and too experienced for you to easily fight the way you're accustomed to, and you were put into flight. Fortunately for you, there was a second person exploring the Scab Palace with intent to rob it, and she was willing to band together with you to defeat Lau. That's how you met Archas Steele, the woman you would later learn is the Falling Star from Loupe's Prophecy, and a person who'd change your life forever.
Archas Steele was unlike anyone you'd ever met. A Yasaali woman from the far west, she'd had wings grafted onto her back, and her ability to fly came in handy as the two of you explored the Palace, and saw strange and wonderful, terrible things together. You talked, about your lives and your goals, as you went. You learned that she has many of the advantages of the Vesakh as you found a blasphemous temple; she learned how you'd left behind people that used to be as close as family when you came to Qoma as you escaped a guardian made of living water. The two of you bonded, the camaraderie borne of stress and adversity, until you'd finally reached the office of Mock Vey itself. You looted items--a strange stone called Dhallrose, a new coat, a sword designed for a Vesakh wielder but in an unfamiliar style, the bird Loupe had sent you to retrieve--before Vey itself showed up, and the two of you had to run.
You'd fled Mock Vey right into a place Steele knew as the Red Circus, a carnival-themed house of mercenary labor and gladiatorial games run by strange creatures called Krabinay. She knew they loved fun and abominated guns, and as Mock Vey's battle form, a towering pillar of red resin equipped with scythe and cannon appeared, you formulated a plan. You engaged Vey in combat, using your superior speed and Steele's expertly refined power, and enraged the massive monster enough to open fire. You were wounded by its scythe bad enough to lose an arm and pass out, but the last thing you saw before losing consciousness was the sight of the Krabinay swarming Mock Vey and Steele rushing to your aid.
She took you to a doctor before you went back to see Loupe, and you ended that mission with the strange feeling of, not only having accomplished a task, but of having made a friend along the way.
A COLD WIND BLOWING
You and Steele resolved to work together for at least one job after this--your interest in her morals, the life debt you now owed her, and your burgeoning crush on this strong, competent and beautiful woman combined to keep you together for the time being. You arranged to meet for drinks at a bar she knew, the Fourteenth Scale, where you ran into the dragon-hunter Berrak Kaya on her way to feature in someone else's story, and met Steele, where, over shellfish, spicy chicken and beer, you chose a contract to pursue together. A trade caravan from far northwestern Noster got lost in the dangerous Yascheritsi Forest just outside town, where powerful entities called the Yascheritsi and their servants, the dangerous Straszydla. Steele got you two hired to go rescue and/or recover the caravan from the depths of the forest, and with that you were off on your first official adventure together.
The Yascherits Forest provided lumber and game to Iash Qoma at a regular price, the health of the forest overseen by nightmarish creatures with complicated rules, and as you searched it for the caravan, you came upon increasingly strange and terrible sights. Dead animals, frozen to death. Trees, toppled asunder amid the smell of smoke and sulfur. And a battlefield where Dissian and Confederate soldiers had been killed alike by something much stronger. The one survivor wasn't long for this world, and when she saw you, she became terrified, wanting nothing more than not to "die as food." Steele assured her she wouldn't, and prevented you from embracing Vesakh custom and consuming the bodies, something which, deeply horrified in a novel and alien way, you had been put off of anyway. You did take a rifle from the wreckage, the idea of profiting nothing by the dead still anathema to your culture, but you were now thinking harder about how the Vesakh were seen by the world at large--a world that called you Locusts, and saw you fit for violence and violence alone.
You wound up talking to Steele about her ideas of right and wrong while exploring the forest, hearing about her code of honor and her rules for being a good mercenary, and you decided to take them into consideration, balancing them with the Edacian Creed, the code of self-determination and selfishness you'd been taught from birth, the edicts of the Tribulations, your harsh and dangerous gods. The seeds of doubt had been firmly planted… but discussions of relative morality would have to wait, for your third encounter with the melding of flesh and machinery came crashing out of the woods at that moment. The Machine, a clanking, roaring engine of fire and steel that smelled of blood at its heart--possessed of a living core. The Yascheritsi abominated its presence in their woods, and sent you after it, promising they would lead you to the lost caravan if you removed it.
Tracking the Machine through the woods made it clear that there were two different sources, each carving a path of destruction, and it wasn't much longer before you met the second source. Bellona Poderosa, a Devil that fought like a Vesakh. An engine of destruction that you found as impressive as you did dangerous, she had a long history with Steele that came up during the fight, and it was during this fight that you realized that the pieces of Loupe's prophesy were coming together--Steele was the Falling Star, and this Bellona was the Walking Wound. The Machine attacked during your conversation, and the two of you fought Bellona and the Machine together. While Steele fought the Machine, you fought Bellona, flustering her by telling her how attractive she was, something she clearly wasn't used to hearing. The fight ended in mutual impalement, causing you both to pass out, and it was during your dream of the terrible sunlight that you put together the details about the prophecy. When you woke up, Bellona decided to leave, and, as the Yascheritsi showed up, she bribed them with a mysterious substance before fleeing, using her power to swim through the dirt like water. Steele explained that she and her partner, CL Braganza, were old enemies of hers, old rivals, and that they tend to stick around when foiled--you'd definitely see them again.
The Yascheritsi guided you to the caravan, which had a few survivors that explained that their caravan had run afoul of the forest guardians. The thankful caravaneers promised to spread a good word around town about the two of you, in addition to the ordinary payment, and, pockets heavy, Steele and you returned to Iash Qoma proper. Your bat and her wings made it easy to travel in and out of the crater at will. Flying down through the tangle of cable cars and dangling structures strung between the towers of Qoma, you were intercepted by more Crow Brothers. Like Simeon before them, they introduced themselves as regulators of the uneasy peace in Iash Qoma among mercenaries, and offered you an invitation to a meeting of every adventurer, sellsword, harrower and coin soldier in the entire city in light of the approaching war, heavily implying that, without attending, you'd find it difficult to get contracts anywhere near Qoma. Out of curiosity more than pressure, you agreed, but Steele had something important to do, first.
The important thing turned out to be a visit to Maryam, an older Yasaali woman that Steele described as her "mother by adoption." It was a quiet, pleasant visit over coffee and sweets, a lacuna between violences, and you didn't know what to do with it. Maryam didn't require money or tribute from Steele, nor was Steele acting as if constantly aware that Maryam could kill her if she wanted. Love… isn't something Vesakh are taught, and neither are familial relationships like that. Your confusion over the lack of what you see as normal dynamics turned into a sort of envy--you wanted what Steele had, and you knew you couldn't get it through violence, like you could everything else you'd ever wanted up until this point. The cracks that had already begun to show in your worldview grew.
Traveling to the site of the meeting, the Old Hook, you and Steele split up in order to work the crowd together, and what would have been a dream a few days ago--a chance to peacefully interact with the greatest mercenaries, pirates, adventurers and sellswords in the world, to learn from them and forge connections--wound up being strangely terrible in a surreal way as it played off the cracks in the facade that the last couple of days had put in your worldview.
From the experienced hunter Mavaro Redview, you heard of the terrible cost that this business can have, the massive amounts of lives that can be lost and the sheer trickery and un-Steele-like dishonor needed to succeed time after time without risk.
From Roscuro Gardener, someone who clearly had a problem with Steele and didn't care who knew it, you learned that the constant war between people, the inability to trust your peers, applied to Unchosen too, and that Steele's trust in Maryam and even in you both constituted radical acts.
And from the Nashaxi monster-hunters Sree, Vimala and Sekar, you learned that the war was already starting. You also learned that the cause might be something terrible and secret from your peoples' history,, and you told them of the famous founder of Vespergren, Zero, while also hiding from them the Vesakh's ancestral enemies, the Ghul people.
As all of this came together and you began to put together a thought, the leader of the Crow Brotherhood, the Crow Father, took the stage and announced--the war has begun, and Iash Qoma must remain neutral. As everyone in the room, most of whom are from places that are going to get involved in the war, eyed each other distrustfully, you met Steele's eyes across the room, and you knew that your rite of passage was about to take an entirely new direction…
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I don't know where I'm going with this story, and I really welcome feedback, thoughts and discussion, but I'm glad I've gotten this far, and I'm glad y'all have been there throughout! Here's to more of the Hungerverse, and here's a health to the company, with a special thanks to the Patreon server, who are always there to guide and help out. Lemony, Wall, Esper, Crank, Doc, Cyn, Cerril, Rag, all you guys. This'd be a lot harder without you.
Thank you all, and stay hungry!
The Weight of Names is updating semi-regularly, a story of a young doctor who moves to take over her deceased mentor's position in a small, foreign town full of secrets, so if you love this world and/or my writing, I am absolutely working on that and that's where I'm actively putting my writing out these days!
But here, I've been trying to figure out what Never Full is to me, something a little more than this massive, bloated quest y'all know and love, and I can't promise anything other than that I'm sticking with these characters and this world for a long time to come, and I hope you stay with me along the way! So here's sort of a mocked-up hybrid between a rewrite and a recap episode, to remind us where we've gone up until now, and hopefully set the stage for where we'll wind up going. I hope you enjoy it!
[The following contains mentions of visceral violence and cannibalism, though it is glossed over in this recap format, as well as general depictions of an unhealthy, dangerous society. Stay safe.]
------------- ------------- -------------
WELCOME TO IASH QOMA
Your name is Grail. It's short for Thrice-Pierced Chalice of Eternal Regard, your prophecy-name given to you at age 13, when you took the holy Ves, the mutagenic sacrament around which your entire society, that of the far northern city of Vespergren, is based. You grew up in the creche among your peers, foundling children taken in and sired by the Vesakh of Vespergren, children both found on their various raids of the southern world and born naturally. You learned the basics of the world--that the world was a dangerous place, but that the most dangerous things in it were Vesakh, and once you became one, the entire world would belong to you as long as you had the strength in your liver to take it. Once you'd taken your First Sacrament, you spent your teenage years wandering Vespergren, forming and breaking alliances, getting in trouble, sharpening your skills, preparing for your Second Treatment.
Your Second made you stronger and changed your form to something you could really be proud of, and that meant it was time to really prove yourself, as a proper adult and not just a barely-above-hatchling First. You left Vespergren, greatest of the three Vesakh settlements, and headed south, for the very center of the Continent--the great city-state of Iash Qoma. You'd been told that it was the perfect place to go, the perfect intermediary between non-Vesakh, Unchosen culture, and the mercenary catch-as-catch-can values of Vesakh culture. And so you traveled there through the great Bronze Mirrors that collapse space to allow rapid travel, ready to test the skills you've learned, skills of subterfuge and appraisal, combat and violence, tracking and hunting, plotting and scheming, the skills of a proper Vesakh, to become a mercenary, thief, hunter or bandit as is your people's custom. That's what you thought you'd learn… what you really learned there would change everything you thought you knew.
Arriving at Iash Qoma, you immediately decided to play your role to the hilt--you saw bearers carrying the holy Ves that makes your people everything they are, and followed them to the Vespergrenite Embassy in the Qoman district called the Rise, a place they called the Butcher Shop. There, you took a job from the Vespergrenite Ambassador Dial, who oversaw a full third of all Vesakh in the city, to track down an inventor who'd been working on a new type of gun. But first, you saw an augur. Prophecy and prediction are very important to your culture, and to you, specifically--you could be considered rather superstitious, and no serious endeavor could be conducted without consulting the bones, the guts, the dice or the gods. The augur Loupe, an autoharuspex who lived in the area, made you a deal--bring them the clockwork bird that represented a since-lapsed contract between them and the shuzhiren underworld figure Mock Vey, and they would read the entrails for you. Said entrails were their own, as Vesakh heal quickly, and they revealed to you that figures known as the Smiling Thief, the Walking Wound, the Rain-Glutton and the Falling Star would be important in your life, and that a flood of blood was coming to wash over the Continent, a flood that would cleanse nothing.
Your first mission led you across Iash Qoma, a city built within a massive cavern, open to the sky with a great central pillar becoming a mountain above the surface, a city built across several islands in the Unfound Sea below the crater that led to the surface. From the Rise, the base of the massive central pillar that served as the heart of Iash Qoma, to Irontown, a neighborhood bustling with factories and manufacturing, to Great Men, an ominous place of ramshackle construction and giant statues that reminded you of home, you traveled in search of the gunsmith Shelev and her marvelous new invention. Along the way, you encountered citizens of the southeastern Confederacy of Azharach, who hate your people for their long history of conflict with their own, the ominous Law, keepers of order in Iash Qoma, and various signs of a city experiencing great internal and external tension. In Irontown, you'd meet an agent of the Bariq Armament Concern, a weaponsmithing company, who'd offer you a gun in exchange for tracking down an employee who'd stolen a bunch of components, and in Great Men you'd track that man, through a fraught neighborhood full of armed gangs and mercenaries, to a tiny apartment in a vast wall of them. Alek Helingen, the thief of the components, had stolen them so he could threaten Shelev, the gunsmith you were tracking, to make him his own private supply of her new invention. You defeated Helingen in single combat and told Shelev that you could provide protection, and the two of you turned him in to the Law, where you discovered exactly how scary they are--among other things, they practice the art of melding machines with flesh, something that is one of the greatest blasphemies to your culture. Vesakh that practice this are called Cicadas, and they are outcast heretics hated by the others. Unchosen who do it are to be tolerated, since they are not part of the holy pact of the Ves, but it is still something you feared.
Returning to the Butcher Shop, you'd discovered that the Embassy was under attack by a terrible Cicada, the Law encounter having been a foreshadowing, and you'd stashed Shelev with Loupe so that you could join the fight. The Cicada, a terrible thing that flew with spinning blades of metal and fought with smoky blasts of liquid flame, easily held you and the other guardians of the embassy at bay, until Dial showed up, thanked you for your help, and tore the thing easily asunder with magic you still don't understand. In the aftermath, Dial thanked you with money, a promise of future employment, and the key to an apartment in town, taking Shelev under her wing and promising to protect the gunsmith from other schemers like Helingen or worse. You'd retired to eat and rest, your head full of thoughts, and resolved to, the next day, set out to repay your debt to Loupe.
THE SCAB PALACE
Loupe had told you that Mock Vey's redoubt was located in a place called the Scab Palace, but they didn't bother to tell you where that was, and you were afraid of incurring further debt by asking exactly where it could be found. So, you set to searching. That search would first take you to breakfast, where you enjoyed the Unchosen luxuries of sausage rolls, coffee, and your first newspapers. The newspapers gave you a better idea of the world around you, as well as the sinking feeling that said world was about to collapse beneath your feet. In Iash Qoma, pressure from outside leading to tension inside, and even a series of terrorist attacks by someone called the Longwinter Bomber. In Nashax, they fear international war; in the Confederacy, international war; in the Brimstone Republic, international war. Everyone seems to be afraid that the tensions between nations are about to boil over into legitimate conflict, a serious Continental War, and the belligerents will inevitably include your home.
Electing to focus on the job in front of you for the time being--even if war does happen, why enter a war while cursed by an augur? Better to get that danger out of the way first and foremost--you'd continued on your path to find the Scab Palace. This path took you all the way to Diemen's Steps, the neighborhood-island that features a land route to the surface, a ramp into the cavern-pit of Iash Qoma. You made your way to the surface, where, hanging around the caravanserais and bars that visitors and traders made a habit of refreshing and gossiping at, you'd found yourself a lead--that one of the Bomber's attacks had resulted in the death of some cattle sacred to the Confederate god Savnok, and they were trying to recoup their losses by subtly getting rid of the holy beef on the black market. A skewer of this very beef had been your first meal upon visiting Qoma, and you felt like the connection to this lead was too strong to ignore. You followed the lead back into the pit after renting a riding-bat, to a facilitator of things called the Mellifluous Factor. A Devil from Dis, a people and civilization as old or older than your own, and terribly attractive to boot, they'd offered you more information in exchange for some of that holy beef, and you'd traveled from Rise to Rise in order to seek out the black-market animal product merchant Big Yan. A mimic, member of the same clan as Mock Vey and the same broader species as Six-Coins Choi, a weapons merchant you'd visited after the Cicada incident, Yan had sold you the beef and offered you future employment. On the way back to the Factor, you were interrupted by a man called Simeon, a member of a local mercenary guild called the Crow Brothers, who told you his people were keeping an eye on all new mercenaries in the city. You finally made it back to the Factor, noticing a mysterious Confederate agent along the way, and they performed a divination for you---a magical working that used the emotional resonance of the beef to track down other buyers, which included Mock Vey. The magic took you and your new bat right back to Great Men, where you finally entered the Scab Palace itself.
The Scab Palace was a maze of strange set-pieces, rooms patterned after different periods and styles. Adobe and stucco, brick and oil lamps, stone and torches, rugs and tapestries, gold and fire, silver and water, and all connected by pulsing strands of dark red resin that resembled nothing so much as skinned muscle. You'd explored, looting as you went, for everywhere you went was heaving with loose treasure, and no Vesakh instinct could pass up such a thing. It was going well, until you ran into a guardian. Mock Vey and Big Yan are shuzhiren, the Veil Clan of mimics--but Six-Coins Choi is heziren, Box Clan, and so was this guardian, the dangerous gang enforcer known as Coffin Lau, a coffin full of angry, cigar-smoking giant crustacean. Lau was stronger than you, and too experienced for you to easily fight the way you're accustomed to, and you were put into flight. Fortunately for you, there was a second person exploring the Scab Palace with intent to rob it, and she was willing to band together with you to defeat Lau. That's how you met Archas Steele, the woman you would later learn is the Falling Star from Loupe's Prophecy, and a person who'd change your life forever.
Archas Steele was unlike anyone you'd ever met. A Yasaali woman from the far west, she'd had wings grafted onto her back, and her ability to fly came in handy as the two of you explored the Palace, and saw strange and wonderful, terrible things together. You talked, about your lives and your goals, as you went. You learned that she has many of the advantages of the Vesakh as you found a blasphemous temple; she learned how you'd left behind people that used to be as close as family when you came to Qoma as you escaped a guardian made of living water. The two of you bonded, the camaraderie borne of stress and adversity, until you'd finally reached the office of Mock Vey itself. You looted items--a strange stone called Dhallrose, a new coat, a sword designed for a Vesakh wielder but in an unfamiliar style, the bird Loupe had sent you to retrieve--before Vey itself showed up, and the two of you had to run.
You'd fled Mock Vey right into a place Steele knew as the Red Circus, a carnival-themed house of mercenary labor and gladiatorial games run by strange creatures called Krabinay. She knew they loved fun and abominated guns, and as Mock Vey's battle form, a towering pillar of red resin equipped with scythe and cannon appeared, you formulated a plan. You engaged Vey in combat, using your superior speed and Steele's expertly refined power, and enraged the massive monster enough to open fire. You were wounded by its scythe bad enough to lose an arm and pass out, but the last thing you saw before losing consciousness was the sight of the Krabinay swarming Mock Vey and Steele rushing to your aid.
She took you to a doctor before you went back to see Loupe, and you ended that mission with the strange feeling of, not only having accomplished a task, but of having made a friend along the way.
A COLD WIND BLOWING
You and Steele resolved to work together for at least one job after this--your interest in her morals, the life debt you now owed her, and your burgeoning crush on this strong, competent and beautiful woman combined to keep you together for the time being. You arranged to meet for drinks at a bar she knew, the Fourteenth Scale, where you ran into the dragon-hunter Berrak Kaya on her way to feature in someone else's story, and met Steele, where, over shellfish, spicy chicken and beer, you chose a contract to pursue together. A trade caravan from far northwestern Noster got lost in the dangerous Yascheritsi Forest just outside town, where powerful entities called the Yascheritsi and their servants, the dangerous Straszydla. Steele got you two hired to go rescue and/or recover the caravan from the depths of the forest, and with that you were off on your first official adventure together.
The Yascherits Forest provided lumber and game to Iash Qoma at a regular price, the health of the forest overseen by nightmarish creatures with complicated rules, and as you searched it for the caravan, you came upon increasingly strange and terrible sights. Dead animals, frozen to death. Trees, toppled asunder amid the smell of smoke and sulfur. And a battlefield where Dissian and Confederate soldiers had been killed alike by something much stronger. The one survivor wasn't long for this world, and when she saw you, she became terrified, wanting nothing more than not to "die as food." Steele assured her she wouldn't, and prevented you from embracing Vesakh custom and consuming the bodies, something which, deeply horrified in a novel and alien way, you had been put off of anyway. You did take a rifle from the wreckage, the idea of profiting nothing by the dead still anathema to your culture, but you were now thinking harder about how the Vesakh were seen by the world at large--a world that called you Locusts, and saw you fit for violence and violence alone.
You wound up talking to Steele about her ideas of right and wrong while exploring the forest, hearing about her code of honor and her rules for being a good mercenary, and you decided to take them into consideration, balancing them with the Edacian Creed, the code of self-determination and selfishness you'd been taught from birth, the edicts of the Tribulations, your harsh and dangerous gods. The seeds of doubt had been firmly planted… but discussions of relative morality would have to wait, for your third encounter with the melding of flesh and machinery came crashing out of the woods at that moment. The Machine, a clanking, roaring engine of fire and steel that smelled of blood at its heart--possessed of a living core. The Yascheritsi abominated its presence in their woods, and sent you after it, promising they would lead you to the lost caravan if you removed it.
Tracking the Machine through the woods made it clear that there were two different sources, each carving a path of destruction, and it wasn't much longer before you met the second source. Bellona Poderosa, a Devil that fought like a Vesakh. An engine of destruction that you found as impressive as you did dangerous, she had a long history with Steele that came up during the fight, and it was during this fight that you realized that the pieces of Loupe's prophesy were coming together--Steele was the Falling Star, and this Bellona was the Walking Wound. The Machine attacked during your conversation, and the two of you fought Bellona and the Machine together. While Steele fought the Machine, you fought Bellona, flustering her by telling her how attractive she was, something she clearly wasn't used to hearing. The fight ended in mutual impalement, causing you both to pass out, and it was during your dream of the terrible sunlight that you put together the details about the prophecy. When you woke up, Bellona decided to leave, and, as the Yascheritsi showed up, she bribed them with a mysterious substance before fleeing, using her power to swim through the dirt like water. Steele explained that she and her partner, CL Braganza, were old enemies of hers, old rivals, and that they tend to stick around when foiled--you'd definitely see them again.
The Yascheritsi guided you to the caravan, which had a few survivors that explained that their caravan had run afoul of the forest guardians. The thankful caravaneers promised to spread a good word around town about the two of you, in addition to the ordinary payment, and, pockets heavy, Steele and you returned to Iash Qoma proper. Your bat and her wings made it easy to travel in and out of the crater at will. Flying down through the tangle of cable cars and dangling structures strung between the towers of Qoma, you were intercepted by more Crow Brothers. Like Simeon before them, they introduced themselves as regulators of the uneasy peace in Iash Qoma among mercenaries, and offered you an invitation to a meeting of every adventurer, sellsword, harrower and coin soldier in the entire city in light of the approaching war, heavily implying that, without attending, you'd find it difficult to get contracts anywhere near Qoma. Out of curiosity more than pressure, you agreed, but Steele had something important to do, first.
The important thing turned out to be a visit to Maryam, an older Yasaali woman that Steele described as her "mother by adoption." It was a quiet, pleasant visit over coffee and sweets, a lacuna between violences, and you didn't know what to do with it. Maryam didn't require money or tribute from Steele, nor was Steele acting as if constantly aware that Maryam could kill her if she wanted. Love… isn't something Vesakh are taught, and neither are familial relationships like that. Your confusion over the lack of what you see as normal dynamics turned into a sort of envy--you wanted what Steele had, and you knew you couldn't get it through violence, like you could everything else you'd ever wanted up until this point. The cracks that had already begun to show in your worldview grew.
Traveling to the site of the meeting, the Old Hook, you and Steele split up in order to work the crowd together, and what would have been a dream a few days ago--a chance to peacefully interact with the greatest mercenaries, pirates, adventurers and sellswords in the world, to learn from them and forge connections--wound up being strangely terrible in a surreal way as it played off the cracks in the facade that the last couple of days had put in your worldview.
From the experienced hunter Mavaro Redview, you heard of the terrible cost that this business can have, the massive amounts of lives that can be lost and the sheer trickery and un-Steele-like dishonor needed to succeed time after time without risk.
From Roscuro Gardener, someone who clearly had a problem with Steele and didn't care who knew it, you learned that the constant war between people, the inability to trust your peers, applied to Unchosen too, and that Steele's trust in Maryam and even in you both constituted radical acts.
And from the Nashaxi monster-hunters Sree, Vimala and Sekar, you learned that the war was already starting. You also learned that the cause might be something terrible and secret from your peoples' history,, and you told them of the famous founder of Vespergren, Zero, while also hiding from them the Vesakh's ancestral enemies, the Ghul people.
As all of this came together and you began to put together a thought, the leader of the Crow Brotherhood, the Crow Father, took the stage and announced--the war has begun, and Iash Qoma must remain neutral. As everyone in the room, most of whom are from places that are going to get involved in the war, eyed each other distrustfully, you met Steele's eyes across the room, and you knew that your rite of passage was about to take an entirely new direction…
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I don't know where I'm going with this story, and I really welcome feedback, thoughts and discussion, but I'm glad I've gotten this far, and I'm glad y'all have been there throughout! Here's to more of the Hungerverse, and here's a health to the company, with a special thanks to the Patreon server, who are always there to guide and help out. Lemony, Wall, Esper, Crank, Doc, Cyn, Cerril, Rag, all you guys. This'd be a lot harder without you.
Thank you all, and stay hungry!
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