“Fort Klaria was a bustling port town sitting on the edge of the eastern deserts. It was once a Basar military fort they used against the desert kingdoms. After the Basar-Nomadic wars ended, the fort became decommissioned, and despite having a garrison. However, the site had built itself a trading network with the clans and other countries and, from their trade, built a new town and home on the edge of the sands. The part of the desert closest to shore was more clay than fine sand and the orange mesa proved to be a solid enough foundation to support not just a military fort but also permanent housing. With trees being scarce, lumber was a high-priced commodity. People used sandstone, clay, and dried mud brick to make houses instead.”
“The founders of Fort Klaria were exclusively human, made from the ship crews and former soldiers who stayed put after retiring. Trade brought in new people from all over the world and even drew out the residents of the sand dunes; Desert-folk, a race of humans with darker skin tones to counter the bright and aggressive sun, dune-ants were a species of insectoid beastfolk that almost exclusively resided in underground cities, and green skins from the wetter regions beyond the sand’s growing borders. They survived on a diet of spices and fish, relying on tapping underground springs for freshwater...”
~A Sampling of Civilization Abroad, Written in 1982 of the 5th Era.
Simadger set the book down. Her trip to the desert served multiple purposes. She was to gather information on the other gods and lesser deities, establish a communication network, bring back knowledge as books and spell scrolls, and lastly, find her people. The last goal was a more personal one. She considered Oakengrove and the others to be her family, but something didn’t feel complete. She wanted to find her original colony.
The seafaring ship she was on was a larger civilian cruiser designed for traveling the world. It carried three hundred passengers and had five large masts, each with three cloth sails. It was called “Queen Anne” and it flew the flag of Rykensvik, twin crosses, one blue and the other gold, both outlined in white and planted in a dark red background. The ship had armed guards on board and some black powder cannons to deter high seas pirates; something she had heard was pretty common in the far west.
Below deck were several floors with small rooms on them, just large enough to fit a single-person bed, a travel trunk, and a ceiling-mounted oil lamp. The ship was rocking the orange carapaced dune ant to sleep. It was a calming and gentle sway over the open ocean, similar to a hammock she had back home. She continued to read her book to learn something about the place she was visiting, on top of the twelve books she’d already finished in the first week of the trip.
”The eastern desert has a rather rich history spanning across the eras. The first major kingdom that ruled over it belonged to a species of beastfolk that are now long extinct. These beastfolk were very dissimilar to those we see today. They had human bodies and animal heads with a clear separation and distinction between the two where they met. While there is no overarching name for this class of species, several prominent ones are actually ancestors to modern-day beastfolk. Sobekins is one such creature with an alligator head. Horusan features a bird head, usually that of a falcon or eagle. The third most common one known is Setal, which displays a jackal.
“Some historians theorize that the Basar Lamia belongs to the same family of creatures, although the earliest found fossil dates millennia after these creatures went extinct. Others think it is a sibling species as these traits are swapped in modern lamia, centaurs, and satyrs and co-evolved in different geographic locations.”
“The City of Ashtu is rumored to be buried deep beneath the sand, but because of the extreme climate and weather patterns that affect the desert, excavation has been near impossible. Ashtu is believed to be the capital city of the ancient desert kingdom and is home to an exorbitant amount of wealth that it plundered during its time. The largest kingdom, known as Menbyhenet, existed along the coastline of the continent. Studies of the text, hieroglyphs, and geology have led researchers to believe the city fell into the ocean during the end of the 2nd era. This study contradicted the previously established theory that the city was buried beneath the sands, which may explain why finding it has been near impossible; archeologists have been digging in the wrong spot. The current running theory behind its disappearance is that when the city fell to green skin hands, the gods of these people displayed their wrath as a tectonic quake which plunged the entire city into the ocean; a slight alteration from being subjected to a city-sized sinkhole in the desert.”
”Menbyhenet dominated the continent against not just other desert dwellers, but against the goblin and orcish kingdoms just beyond the mountains. However, Menbyhenet fell after two thousand years. A combination of corruption and internal strife gave rise to the ultimate opportunity, which put orcs and goblins on the map. Studies of goblin and orcish history make a footnote of a weapon Menbyhenet utilized in the war. It was vengeful, silent, and consumed their camps in a white fuzz and burst forth from their people.”
“Researchers believe this to be an exaggeration of events, with these early goblins and orcs taking two unrelated things and drawing a false connection. Researchers believed that the white fuzz is a mold outbreak. Traveling camps often had to deal with mold because of weather and humidity. It is believed that a horsetail worm or tapeworm is the entity bursting forth. A parasitic type of worm that burrows in the stomach lining and feasts off the host, sometimes growing long enough to be dangling out of the rectum and still attached to the stomach. While the world has changed in the twenty thousand years since, the southeast jungles are still home to similar parasites and those parasites live in the rivers and mud.”
After that, Simadger couldn’t stomach any more reading and set the book aside, hoping that her dream wouldn’t be tainted with a newfound fear.
Fort Klaria was much more than an old war fort. The dockyard had a collection of piers and anchor points, hosting a dozen sailing ships from all over the world. Most of the flags flown were unrecognized by Simadger, but it was a very colorful sight to behold. The city was a large walled settlement made mostly of sandstone and mud brick, just as the books described it. Unlike the wooden and thatch-roofed huts of the north, these sandstone houses were squarish and painted with stripes of various colors, adding a splash of life to the cityscape. Colorful sheets of silk and patterned rugs adorned windowless sills, with some featuring a potted cactus on top of the drapery.
The city itself was alive and buzzing with activity. The docks were crawling with workers moving crates and barrels of trade goods around, some of which smelled beautifully fragrant. Walking down the wooden pier, Simadger noticed a few oddities about the people present. The humans here were a hundred times darker skinned and visibly more physically fit than the ones back home. Among the crowds of humans were scatterings of beastfolk, mostly of the type who had darker skin tones to handle direct sunlight and hot, dry conditions. This meant that most of the beastfolk present were of the insectoid variety however, she didn’t see any of her kind. Not a single ant sub-species was in sight.
Then she realized she was getting stares from many of the dockworkers. Any time she’d look to catch their gaze, she’d see a look of contempt, even from the other insectoid beastfolk. Beneath a brown cotton cloak, she wore her heavy bronze-plated cuirass and a leather battle skirt, but the cloak lacked a hood to hide beneath. Hesitant to come off, as vulnerable to the locals, lest she risked getting jumped, she straightened out her posture and strutted down the docks and into the city with a falsified sense of determination.
Once in the city proper, the entire mood changed. She wondered if the dock workers were just grouchy and hateful people. From afar, the intricacies of the rugs and silks draped across all the houses were hard to see. Being only mere feet away from many of them, she could easily and clearly see the beautifully woven patterns. Most of the rugs had some sort of repeating pattern, but there was one which depicted a scene. The dune ant approached the ground-level window to look at it. It showed men in chain mail and furs swinging swords at a sea serpent.
A set of stoneware plates clanged above her. Her antennae flinched with the vibrations and she stood up to meet the very surprised look of a gnoll. Sitting between them on the counter was a peach cobbler pie. The gnoll was an elderly woman wearing a cooking apron over her loungewear. “Oh hi there,” she said, with a doting tone in her voice. “Haven’t seen you before.”
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Simadger smiled, “I’m from out of town, ma’am. Just arrived on a sailing ship about ten minutes ago.”
The gnoll slapped her hand on the rug in excitement. “Ah! I always welcome a friendly face to these parts. What brings you to my window, youngling?”
Simadger pointed to the rug on display. “I saw these from the docks and wanted to get a better view of one. Apologies if I spooked you.”
The gnoll shook her head. For an elderly gnoll, she was very energetic. “I get spooked by my shadow sometimes.” The gnoll adjusted a set of spectacles on her face and saw the dune ant better. “Is that armor you got on underneath?”
Simadger nodded, opting to close the cloak further. “Traveling adventurer,” she said, hoping the gnoll would understand what that meant.
The gnoll didn’t understand. “What is an adventurer? Some new job in the city garrison?”
Simadger clicked her mandibles, “I am a mercenary, a caravan guard, bodyguard, pest exterminator,” her voice trailed off, “I’m looking for a library today.”
The gnoll leaned out the window and over the pie, pointing down the road to her right, “It’s a bit tricky to navigate but head down that way and go left after the fifth alley, then a right on the second alley and that should get you to the market where someone else can get you closer. I had the route memorized, but I haven’t visited in years. The sandstorms keep me housebound these days.”
Simadger looked towards the blue sky. “Are the sandstorms sudden?”
The gnoll stood upright, echoing a series of joint cracks as she did. “They can be. We usually get an hour of warning before they hit, just enough time to pull in any laundry and close the shutters.”
Simadger looked up, realizing that the weird flat of thatch and wood above the window was actually a shutter and not an awning. “That explains that.”
Barely audible over the roar of city life was a rampant ringing bell. The gnoll’s ears perked up. “Speaking of the devil, we got one inbound. Come in, you can wait it out in here.” She then walked a few feet over and opened the green-painted wooden door. “I am Shith, by the way.”
The dune ant stepped into the gnoll’s house and closed the door behind her. “Simadger.”
Shith walked back to her kitchenette, leaning on a wooden cane she had. “If you could be a dear and head upstairs for me and close the shutters, I’d greatly appreciate it. You can set your stuff down by the front door.”
Simadger unhooked her shield from her back and set it down. She undid the belt that held her Khopesh and set it beside the shield and laid the cloak over them both. The door opened straight into the stairs with the kitchenette and dining table in a side room to the right. The house was narrow and deep, but the stairs weren’t steep. Going up the stairs was very easy. The stairwell opened into a large single room, a master bedroom with a few windows to let in fresh light. Simadger wondered about bug control but remembered reading that deserts had a few insects that fly.
She walked up to the window closest to the bed and saw a rigging rope going through the wall to a bracket on the inside. She undid the knot and slowly released the rope, allowing the trap door to lower and rest against the window. Inside the shutter, there was a metal sliding bolt that mirrored a hole in the window frame. She slid the bolt, effectively locking the shutter closed. Simadger repeated the process for the other three windows in the room. “All done up here!” She called out.
There was no response. She shrugged her shoulders and headed back down the staircase. The gnoll was sitting in a chair at the dining table, looking out the only remaining open window. Between the gaps in the tightly packed houses, she was watching the sandstorm approach. Her gaze turned to Simadger. “All boarded up?”
“Yeah, did you not hear me call out?” Simadger asked.
“My hearing is good, but the sound in this house doesn’t carry well.” The gnoll’s gaze was locked on the distant storm. “When the storm is over, there’s a sit-down grill in the market that’s worth going to. They make some really good barbecued cod.”
Simadger took a seat at the table. “To kill time, do you mind me asking you some questions?”
The gnoll stood up, lowered the shutter, and bolted it closed. “Not at all. Ask me anything. I’m just grateful to have someone to talk to.”
“How long have you lived in this city?” Simadger figured she’d keep the first few questions simple.
“Forty years, give or take.” She, too, responded with a very simple answer.
“Do you know why the dockworkers would give unkind stares to me?”
The gnoll quizzically tilted her head, “No, I don’t.”
Simadger let out a sigh. “Are there any other dune ants in the city?”
Shith shook her head. “Actually, you’re the first I’ve seen in my life.”
She clicked her mandibles. The books she’d been reading all pointed to the eastern desert as a home for dune ant colonies but for them to be non-existent in cities was unexpected. “I’m trying to find other dune ants. I want to know if there are others like me.”
The gnoll leaned forward and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, “Honey, don’t force it. They’re out there, deep in the sand, but I wouldn’t go looking. Colony ants don’t like outsiders, even ants from sister colonies. You may not like what you find.”
“How can they hate their own?” Simadger’s face showed her worry.
“Because people are people. Doesn’t matter if they’re human, fummau, gnoll,” she gestured to herself then pointed to Simadger, “or dune ant. Most living creatures naturally have an ingrained hatred for the outside world. Let me explain.”
Simadger didn’t want to believe that her own kind would reject her. Sure, she had a permanent home with Oakengrove, but she wanted to meet her own people and possibly find her home colony if it still existed. “I’m listening.”
“Gnolls come from a continent far west of here, on the other side of the world. Over there, my people are divided between thirteen clans who fight not just each other, but the other residents of the continent. They will enslave any prisoners and non-combatants, all in the name of their god, Thezec.” Shith fell silent as the winds kicked up outside. The silence seemed to be as if she felt she summoned a monster just by saying his name.
The wind outside whistled through the city streets. The deafening sound of sand blasted the structure of the house, rattling it like a wooden spoon in a tin can. A look of concern overcame the gnoll’s previously calm demeanor. They sat in silence for what felt like an hour. The winds continued to whistle, but the volume of sand being churned up into the air wasn’t nearly as huge. They could finally hear themselves think.
The gnoll coughed to get Simadger’s attention then continued the conversation, “I tried to convince them that this way of life would see us exterminated, that we as a people would be seen as nothing more than savages.” She let out a deep and long sigh of defeat. “I was banished from Clan Dymreith with nothing, stripped of my clothes, whipped and beaten, and left to rot in the wild. I stowed away on a trade ship and ended up in this city. When I got found, I got turned over to the city guard to deal with. Long story short, when you have an entire clan, or colony, or even a country that is so dead set in its ways, it’s sometimes best to walk away and never look back.”
Simadger listened intently, and something stuck out to her. Shith was warning her about people who couldn’t change their ways, but claimed she didn’t know why the dock workers didn’t like her. Shith was hiding something. “Why tell me this? What do you know I don’t?”
Shith debated the conversation in her head, then spoke, “I was short with you, truth be told. The reason the dock workers looked at you with dislike is because many of them lost their lives to a dune ant raid some years back. A dune ant colony amassed an army looking for food and killed almost a thousand people. The walls have since been repaired and fortified, but the dune ants made enemies of the city, and I’m not sure you’d survive an encounter with them, geared to the nines or otherwise.”
Simadger didn’t immediately respond. She was relieved to know there was a nearby colony of dune ants. Yet, hearing of the atrocities, hesitance overtook her eagerness. “Even so,” she said with a deep breath to regain her willingness, “I would still like to find my people.”
The gnoll knew there was no stopping her at this point and conceded to tell her where to go to find the nearest dune ant colony. The sandstorm let up about an hour later and Simadger departed the gnoll’s house but not before thanking her for the hospitality. She walked down the street towards the market. A hundred market stalls surrounded a central water feature that had long since dried up in a haphazard arrangement. The market stalls were reopening as the crowd of city residents returned from the safety of their homes. Recalling the words of Shith, Simadger made for the Adventurer’s Hall, a building run by the international organization. On the way there, she overheard something from a group of people leaving the place.
“…Out in the sand there’s an old crypt that is believed to belong to Menbyhenet, just got to get around the dune ants,” the wood elf of the group.
Simadger’s antennae perked up and twitched in their direction. They didn’t really notice her, but she heard them clearly. Following them was now a viable option instead of asking for a guide, and it was free. To avoid detection, she kept a distance but remained close enough to hear them.
The party consisted of a female wood elf with cheap-looking leather armor and a set of daggers, a male blue-scaled kobold with cloth pants, iron gauntlets, and an iron cuirass and no visible weapon, a male Lizardfolk with a two-handed great sword strapped to his back, and a male Sandman with dual scimitars and the only environmentally appropriate clothing. The wood elf seemed in charge as she rambled on and on about their objective.
The city gates were wide open, with the guards being relaxed and inattentive. Simadger followed the group outside the city walls on foot.