A jester is called from their home at the edge of the world. The Kingdom of Findel is cursed and it is dying. Fate wishes for it to die unjustly. There is no hope. There is no succor. There is only sadness and madness.
How will you save it?
The sun rose and lit upon a ring of stones that sat atop a hill growing thick with colorful trees. Their five pointed leaves rustled in the whispering wind. This hill was a lonely hill and it sat on a plain of golden grass at the edge of the world, where the sky fell after the strong breeze.
The wind danced in the leaves and the grass and played and tumbled. You sat atop the tallest stone, taller than the trees as it thrust from the center of the ring, and slept peacefully. The tinkle of the twelve bells hanging from your red and white hat woke you with a start! "Silly wind, so playful today are you?" You asked it as it touched them softly.
Tinkle tinkle.
Stretching your long arms you waved them and grasped at the sun, bright and yellow like a storybook far above. You stood on long legs far longer than a man or woman's and the bells sown to your poofy red and yellow and blue striped pantaloons gave a jingle jingle.
Your white mask grinned a jolly grin.
You hopped off the rock and alighted daintily on the grass blades en pointe, your weight bending the stalks not at all as you span on one foot with a hand to your brow. All about were the trees and their slowly falling leaves dance and spin.
But why did the wind wake you up, the silly dear?
You tilt your head with a jingle and hold a hand to your very pointy ear and listen for a sign.
Come away Jester, come away to the east with a cheer.
You blink and a joke , "Eh really Goddess? I'm rather happy here dontcha know? Why must I go save the kings and queens and courts who leer?"
You have a spark that need be shared to save lives.
Come first by leaping, then by walking, then by unseen bier.
You should not be saddened, for I am watchful and you haven been chosen.
You laugh with the sound of wind chimes and the wind plays around you in a flutter.
"A kingdom to save is just the way to start the Story. Will you push me in?"
You ask the wind and it tickles your nose.
You walk out of the trees with a chuckle slouched and jolly with a song in your heart and come to the edge where green roots reach with tiny swinging hands.
"Here goes!"
***
You leap and you fall. Down and down and down with the wind your bosom companion and clouds never coming closer. Who knew the cliff at the End would be so tall?
You certainly didn't remember after so long away from the real world. Days flash before your eyes as your body plummets gracefully through the air and turn into weeks and then you hit into the clouds. They are soft and cushy and you pass through them, swimming and fluttering off the droplets as you whirled.
In a moment you have punched through them and alight on soft dust and dirt that clings to your red shoes. It is dark all around you and the eyes of men would see nothing but for you it is like a summer day. There is nothing to see but the dusty path and the cobwebs hanging off nothing like ooze.
This is a secret way, a Path through nothing and the cobwebs left over from the world's creation left to do as they will. Your long legs carry you down the path and you bat at the cobwebs with cat like distaste. When you pass they return to their state like ghosts and no trace is left of your passage in the chill.
Days of walking seem to pass in no time at all and you whistle jolly show tunes from people you fondly remember from so long ago. You walk for so long through this twisting space and around the labyrinthine turns that infest the place that a being from the many races would surely wear their legs to stubs and die. But you only begin to feel tired as you walk for you have a very very long way still to go.
It feels like years down in the dark as a family of eternities trot past you and all thoughts but to simply walk are driven from your head as you seek your destination. But that is fine because your destination cannot be reached by the common means used in this place and instead must find you. You walk and walk and walk and walk with a quiet jingle jingle of bells until you collapse with sweat soaking your brow and clothing and sticking the dust to you till you look like you walked out of a cremation.
You sleep and in the paths outside the world you dream and a tall and cloaked being with a long and crooked ferryman's paddle comes to collect your body. When you awaken, it is to the feel of fabric on your face and a firm panel at your back. A bier for yourself even if you can feel the craftsmanship is shoddy.
You are rocking and relax as you count the fibers in the gray roughspun cloth. The swish of water is a kiss to your ears as the shushing of the ferryman's paddle pushes you onward to your destination. This hidden voyage is passed in stillness and you listen to the shushing of the water's froth.
This is the shortest of your trips, only a day and a night by your sense of the passing light and cold touch overhead. Soon the ferryman's rowing stops and the boat thumps into an obstacle and then strong hands grab the bier and tip you out. Down into a long and slick chute which reeks of blood and bile and cold steel till you reach a most foul and distasteful pile of the dead.
Kingdom of Findel, The Dregs
All about you rises sheer cliffs of manmade stone and metal and windows like empty eye sockets and gaping doors. A pile of rotting goo and rotten wood and glowing slime is your place of rest. Levering yourself up is easy and you shake out your cloak and take in the new outdoors.
The sky is a sickly green and yellow choked by rainbow smog. Below the pile lies a sump, a green pool of what was once water. Morbid shapes disturb the still surface of the evil bog.
Far across the cursed lake is a waterfall descending from a broken pipe easily large enough to swallow five of you standing together with arms spread. Swirling your cloak about yourself you parade down the pile and reach the shore. There you lift a leg and leap ahead.
The corpse you land on jerks with life, not a corpse at all, and you skip over its thrashing back on to the next. All around you a scream echoes off the stone and assaults your sensitive ears. The bells strewn about you as you dance and flexed.
Your skipping and frolicking parades over the grotesque barely living things as they surge to their feet. Their mouths were normal once you think, but now they are sucking tubes like a lamprey to drink more of the polluted waters. You feel nothing in their bodies and conclude that they are empty and incomplete.
Empty of hope, despair, hate and love. All that is left is the purpose of the curse hanging about this place to spread misery. These are the Hopeless, left at the very bottom of the kingdom to be forgotten by those above.
Dozens upon dozens surge to their feet and charge for you with swinging arms and thrashing feet. Their twisted teeth gnash for your flesh and their cries are answered by dozens more from the doors and windows from which creatures throw themselves. They scream and thrash and bleat.
But you are a shadow and a flicker flitting over them. Balancing on one lolling head you push and leap up into the skies. One turn and your jump carries you far higher than should be possible. One more turn and then you pull your hands from your cloak with fingers full of razor tipped knives.
They leave your hands like rain and thud deeply into heads and hearts, two for each beast. With gimlet mocking eye you examine the evil laid out below you as you hang in the air like a leaf. They keep moving and reaching for you, their last tenuous grasp on life held the tightest, never released.
You frown and glinting wires tighten around your bone white finger. Your cloak envelops you like a red and yellow cyclone and your blades rend the creatures to bits in a whirl of dismemberment. You alight on a piece of driftwood and the pieces rain around you in a patter of goo and truly dead flesh that will not linger.
Thirty of them, dead in a blink. A tug and your knives disappear into your cloak to sit at your back and hidden on your chest. This sump feels just a little happier for just a moment, lost with clink.
Unnatural despair settles again on your shoulders and is shrugged off without penetrating your cheer as you hear a clank behind you. There beneath the waterfall is another much larger doorway, an arch, and through the waters walks a squad of armored beings. Their armor is smashed and nailed shut around them and the rust spells out litanies of false hope as their boar spears level to run you through.
These are the City's Men, taken by its awful purpose and bent to the curse. The ten creatures give a whistling shriek like air across a blade and charge across the lake at you. With a dash and a wink you appear before them in a blur of prismatic colors and then you are amongst them. The first thrusts forward and you bend in a crescent around it and leap into a graceful spin and a jingle of bells spelling out a praising verse.
A deceptively powerful spin as your blurring palm clamps onto the prongs of the boar spear and yanks it clean out of the monster's grasp. You are not slowed and your spin carries it up and over and down into the steel of the monster's head. The creatures begins to scramble at it and then your foot slams into a prong and jolts its head clean off its shoulders in a broken metallic rasp.
Riding the corpse down you leap over and off the X two thrusting spears make below you. The creature takes a spiked heel to the back of the helm and its head shatters like an overripe melon. Running down its falling back and leaving oozing holes from spiked soles you turn into a whirling laughing dervish of legs as sharp as spears to knock them askew.
Four fall to your snapping fangs and then you freeze, balanced on one finger with a crescent bent back and legs stabbed into the chest of two different creatures. Yanking out of your split you spin and leap above the five spears stabbing for your life. They thud into the corpse of their fellow below you and your hands are free to work their whiles.
Large curving meat knives flash as you decapitate the rest in a flash of steel on steel. With a flourish you flip and land in the waves in front of the waterfall, facing the chute you descended from and the pile of rot that was your entrance. You give a flagrant gaudy bow and to the invisible crowd, kneel.
Then you exit and jump up into the waters with a flutter of colorful cloth. Your feet dance atop the waves and you fling yourself upward into the pipe. Its metal walls surround you and you race against the flow and the feeling of the congealing air thickening into an evil broth.
You pay it no head and the light ahead is reached quickly, and with a final step you are free and falling through the air into a great pit. Below are spires and spines and broken vertebrae buildings amid a swamp of pollution, shadowed by a twisted mountain consuming the horizon. You are falling from one of the lowest spires as the entire mess of pipes and spires tilts upward towards the mountainous City leering above the pit.
A city the size of a mountain, with slopes and valleys and far above the smog a glowing peak. And as you fall the air traces patterns of despair across your cheeks and you can smell the looming presence of the great Demon of Cities the inhabitants gave themselves to in folly. In every shadow and piercing ray of light and brutalist grey stone and keening shriek.
This is the Kingdom of Findel, extending beyond even where your eyes may see.
Where do you guide your fall? Where do you look for life amongst this wreckage?
[] Upslope. Here you smell and feel a subtle tinge of fear.
[] Into the Eastern Dregs. Here you can hear the clang of anger.
[] Into the Western Dregs. Here you can see a distant glimmer of loneliness.