Solomon slams his fist down on the table as he reads the latest letter. He’d asked to be alone for this, with none of his scribes or attendants to bother him, but he’s now wishing he wasn’t king at all. It had all happened so fast, and all so much at once, and still doesn’t really feel real, though he knows it is.
The war with Etrest is no longer on the horizon, it’s practically on his doorstep. A battle on the border, a skirmish inside Riverta, a mustering in a town across the great valley, and Etrest’s official declaration expected to come within the next few months. Solomon knows that there isn’t much more time left to prepare, Kaulderfield has gained forcible control over sixty percent of the country's nobility, but what remains are those powerful enough to actually pose a threat should they rebel. And rebel they probably will, if Solomon calls them to a war they cannot yet win.
That isn’t the bottom of his list of problems, though. Solomon reaches for the open bottle of wine beside him, and takes a large swig, trying to calm himself with the taste and intoxication for a moment, but as he sets it down, he’s once again forced to face reality. A camp of soldiers, a couple miles away from the border, attacked and burned to the ground, even three reasonably high leveled adventurers and two high leveled retired adventurers killed. Apparently the village the camp was made near had also been having problems with bandits recently, likely those Etrest released, so Solomon can’t discount the possibility those released bandits were just cover for a group of elite soldiers capable of something like this.
The blow to his forces, however… Are not particularly dire, two hundred men slaughtered and burned in the night is bad for public opinion, not for his military might. The loss of a level ten life cleric poses its own set of issues, though. If it had been that [Untouchable], obviously the priest wouldn’t have stood a chance, but there had been no indication that the calamity was the source of this attack. After all, there was no undead army, according to the reports. The only thing the survivors swear they saw was a swordsman with a longsword bearing an Etrestian noble symbol on its guard.
It was either the Etrestian bandits, or a covert force of Etrestian elites, then, but both are equally worrying. If his soldiers couldn’t beat those bandits, then that village is probably doomed, since none of the other Etrestian bandits have left their raided locations intact. If it was Etrestian elites, Solomon is pretty sure he’d rather fight a calamitous [Untouchable] than have to figure out a way to beat high leveled individuals while Edora’s Hand and Crimson Mists are still missing.
And now he’s reminded himself of that problem, too. Riverta’s two trump cards, a legendary hero’s party and the best monster hunters in the business, both missing at the same time, both after going into dungeons on the outskirts of the kingdom. Nearly a month had passed since Edora’s Hand had gone missing, and none of his reports have an estimate for how long Crimson Mists has been gone for. Duke Kaulderfield is confident his son and the rest of Crimson Mists are alive, but that’s not very helpful, since they still aren’t here. Edora’s Hand… Well, even if the rest of them are dead, his intelligence sources have long since had the suspicion that Edora’s Hand’s sole male member won’t be dead for long. Whether or not anyone will survive that man’s wrath if the rest of the group really is dead… Is yet to be seen.
Solomon and the royals will probably survive Max’s rampage, solely by virtue of his late daughter’s relationship with the man, but outside of the recently prophesied undead and the strongest adventuring parties Solomon is aware of, that hero is more or less unstoppable. Still, he is a hero, so he won’t cause too many problems, even if he does lose his companions. If anything, Solomon is silently rooting for at least one of them, preferably that disgusting dark elf, to die, so he could blame the undead and thus motivate Max to hunt down the [Untouchable].
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He slumps back in his chair and stops thinking about each problem individually for a moment, and instead takes a mental look at the bigger picture. He ponders if maybe he shouldn’t have taken the crown, if continuing his former life as a fraternizing bard prince would be better than his current life of politics, war, parenting, and apparently also stopping god killing monsters. Riverta probably can’t win a war with Etrest, there’s an [Untouchable] with an undead army and a serious grudge against the Cult of Undeath running around somewhere in his kingdom, his brother and daughter are trying to unify the kingdom by taking control away from the nobles, the rest of the nobles are preparing to either rebel or defect, his only useful son is struggling to maintain the defense of the border with Etrest, and his less useful sons are looking to win themselves some glory in an unwinnable war. The Bard King shuffles all the papers in front of him around for a moment, and then sighs.
He has a way out, he knows he has a way out of at least one of those problems. He knows it’s pretty much assured that it’ll completely annihilate one of those problems, actually, but that doesn’t mean it’s without issue. Solomon sighs again, and pick up two empty letters, and begins writing. The first words he writes-
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“My dearest daughter Marietta Riverta, it is with regret that I inform you of my own inability to prevent this situation, but the usage of your brother and my son’s curse for the purposes of winning the war with Etrest may be necessary. I would prefer to discuss this reality with yourself and James in person. This letter has been kept intentionally brief in furtherance of this desire.
King Solomon Riverta”
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Violet sits down with her legs crossed in front of her, and listens to the quiet argument between Jay and John.
“Look, we know this dungeon does weird time and fate stuff, right?” Jay’s tone is somewhat annoyed, and John replies in kind.
“Right, because ‘weird’ is the word someone uses when they know something.”
“Fuck off, I don’t know what type of time magic it is, but I know this place is coated in it! And this door-” Jay points to the door, and Violet turns her head away from their argument for a moment.
She accepts the offered piece of jerky from the ranger, which she hadn’t needed to look at to know he was offering. They’d had a bet on how long it would be until one of their two lovebirds swore at each other.
“I don’t know all of its conditions, but this is one of [The Forgotten King]’s dungeons, that’s for damn sure. No other entity would have ‘break an oath or vow’ as only one of four conditions to open the fucking exit door.” Jay finishes with a statement Violet hadn’t heard him make in their earlier discussion about it. A couple thoughts come to her mind, not the smallest of which being that the open condition means they do have the first door key, her.
“None of us is breaking one of those for a god that might not even exist yet, there’s another way, there has to be.” John’s response would ordinarily be the one the group would all agree with more, but there isn’t any verbal agreement this time. If Violet had to guess, the combination of not knowing how long they’ve actually been down here, how difficult of a time they’ve had it, and the fact that none of them wanted to come into this dungeon in the first place.
“Jay, what are the other door conditions?” The ranger asks from behind Violet, and for a moment, John frowns, but quickly he returns to his usual expression.
“The vow/oath one, taking a curse, feeding a curse, and beating that golem thing we ran from a day ago.”
“Feeding… a curse? What does that mean?” Max asks, putting his hand on the elaborate door for a moment, before pulling away at the response.
“You purge yourself of a curse, in exchange for [The Forgotten King]’s blessing. That’s… probably worse than even the curse the ranger has, actually.”