Warson the Warrior
You see a bare-chested
man with long, red hair beard. Nearby a suit of gold and red armor and spear are
arrayed on a primitive armor tree. He stands a stone cobbled courtyard common to
homes of eras long past. Reverently, he dips his hand into a caldron of
translucent, amber oil and smears the slick liquid across the hardened muscles
of his torso and arms. After a quick prayer in an ages old tongue, a sense of
serenity envelopes lethal warrior as he sprinkles herbs into the caldron and
ignites it.
Wielding a wooden practice axe, the red haired man moves through numerous
rapid-fire drills battering wooden practice dummies carved in the likeness of
some sort of troll. He gives no sign he is aware of your presence or perhaps he
simply enjoys an audience during his exercises. With a bone rattling crack and a
rain of splinters the man’s wooden axe shatters as it decapitates one of the
wooden trolls. The man lashes out with a vicious kick, punts the head across the
courtyards cobbles and turns to you.
"I only wish that was
as satisfying as beheading a real one. There is no thrill in killing a block of
wood. Allow me to greet thee. Ho, little landsman, I am Warson, master of arms
in the Lord of Burning Oil’s Army. I served in the Twelve Lords’ legions until
the Second War of the Flame, the Time of Great Ruin. I understand not why I
languish in this boneyard, but for the moment it is my fate. Yet I worry not for
this place is a waystation to my glorious destiny. Ever since I left that elven
crypt, I have felt them out there searching for me. If they be enemies they will
perish in a furious melee. If they be allies they will find me a warrior true
unlike any of this pallid age. I blame you not for your anemic existence for you
lack true adversaries to test thy metal. My spirit has walked the areas about
this hamlet and found nothing but laughable aberrations poising as once great
races. I had to stifle my cackling once I saw the pathetic shambling leaf mold
that you call trolls. There was more of compost than combat within its pathetic
heart.
Even sadder, were the mulchlings that call themselves goblins. These sexless,
mindless drones are nothing more than faint shadows of the goblins of the True
Ages. The cunning, lethal legions that broke the Lands of Great Saarden were the
scourge of all men until their fall. These things wandering around your
woodlands are as fatal as idle-minded infants. If you had known trolls and
goblins as they were meant to be, if you had tempered your burning iron in their
blood, you would truly understand how docile and timid the men of your era are
or have died in the trying.
With the tumult caused by the deluge of water magics certain histories have come
to the fore as well, for the deluge has entered the realm of spirit as well as
man. There it brings monsters and treasures but here it has brought memories
with it. I made me remember the Clan Crusades, a bloody and brutal battle where
entire families, nay whole kingdoms fell. As I remembered the stories my father
told me, the memories became these two scrolls. I will give the first to
whomever I speak to first and the second copy I shall leave in the town library.
I need them not. I have the hearth stories of those times to remind me of when
men fought TRUE WAR and warm my blood for when that time shall come again.
Soon... very soon!