Sailing Ether Tides
Ch: 21 Long Memories And Bitter Grudges
Count Liam, his two life guards from the ducal warband, the Red Ascots, and four giddy, excited teenagers came tumbling into the garden in a mob. They clattered, banged around, shouted and laughed while heading for the baths, in a tumult of noise and activity.
Within minutes, the whole team’s armor and gear was carefully racked up, while their baggage was carelessly stacked up; beside the entrance to the changing room.
Count Liam emerged into the garden, freshly dressed in common workman’s clothing of fine cut and cloth, but otherwise unremarkable stuff. He joined Gary in the task of sorting out and stowing the gear with an amused sigh.
“The first year I knew you, I never saw you pack, unpack, search for anything or fetch anything… It was all right there, every time, ready to hand in your… Pockets!...”
His mad friend looked up from his task and grinned wearily, before getting back to sorting filthy laundry. It was a big job, four teenage boys can dirty a lot of clothes, even if only on an overnight hunting trip.
“Thanks for getting the pronunciation right!” The fool chuckled as he worked to untangle a knot of socks and undershorts without touching them. His non dimensional storage gift, Pockets!, allowed him to stow objects in a space between worlds, tucked in a fold of reality until needed. Such gifts were rare, but not innately strange, save that the mad boy forever insisted that the name be said with the happy and excited inflection of a person who had put on a favorite old coat and found a stash of forgotten money in the… Pockets!. Liam smiled again at his silly brother, a bond of friendship far beyond the sibling kinship all orphans claimed with each other. Gary worked on, carefully unfolding and re packing the boys’ tents and bedrolls heedless of his brother’s gaze.
Since falling to this world, lost, confused and alone, his gifts had been Gary’s constant companions, welded onto his soul by heedless deities and fae, in their mad experiments and plots. Natives of this world were born with six primary attributes: Might, Will, Resilience, Agility, Mind and Animus… Attached to the most relevant attribute and touching all the others to a greater or lesser degree, each person received six primary gifts.
Every being’s gifts were natural expressions of the individual’s soul and nature, and expressed in different ways, depending on the individual.
Those gifts remained mundane talents, sometimes startling in their depth and scope, but always simply mortal abilities; until the person formed a Contract with a divine, spiritual or etheric entity… Or until bound to a magical construct of human arts and craft created for the purpose of forming a Contract with a mortal soul. Such Contract artifacts were vanishingly rare; the art of their creation lost in the mists of ancient history.
One sunny, early summer day, the mad fellow had landed alone and naked in the outlands of a dusty, backwater domain, remarkable only for agriculture and for her truly excellent mercenary warbands for hire.
Poor Gary spoke little of his first days on his strange new home, and even less of stumbling on a slowly cooling dead man, seated in a lonely cabin far from any other habitation.
The mad wizard Zygnos Matteus had foreseen, through his occult crafts, that a wanderer from another world would be arriving, just as his own life wound to a natural close.
For reasons none could guess, the dying wizard had bequeathed his material goods to a man he would never meet, on the conditions that he bury the old man’s body decently, and deliver a manuscript to a colleague in the nearby city of Wheatford. Gary wandered into town hungry, ill clothed in a very small old man’s bizarre garments and into a tangled mess of laws, schemes, plots and deceptions already long underway. Schemes originated and perpetrated by forces mortal, immortal, divine and abhorrent…
Gary found himself suddenly declared a child until his twentieth birthday, under the local law and was swiftly shuttled into an orphanage, to live and work until his majority. The young musician and artisan was clueless, an orphan without connections and an obvious foreigner, lost and alone in a land where travel was fraught by bandits, monsters and far worse perils.
Local law declared that all orphans, on the day they attained their majority at twenty, should be Contracted to gods of their caretaker’s choosing and sold into indenture for five years, to be a slave…
Whether fated to be a soldier or house servant to a noble lord or wealthy merchant, slavery was the fate of all orphans. The law demanded that they first be bound at the soul to a god or gods of another’s choice, then sent to the auction block, to serve their new master’s will for five years.
Should they survive the full term of indenture, they would be freed, politically… Magical soul Contracts with entities beyond mortal ken, were seldom easy to dissolve, often impossible.
Count Liam sighed again as he worked and pondered, considering the path his life might have taken, but for this silly goof, with his strange songs and foolish antics. Liam too was an orphan, bound to serve and likely die a slave soldier in a rich man’s warband for hire.
Liam had been doomed to live that short, brutish, loveless, lonely life; shackled by a divine Contract, binding his soul to the god War. His father, a minor noble and a priest of that hard, unyielding god had forged that bond, while the lad was barely five years old; contorting and twisting Liam’s soul into the design his father and the god envisioned for him, despite his love and devotion to the goddess of Healing, even as a tiny lad.
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When his father perished, fighting some unnamed beast, to the orphanage Liam went, to endure and await his fate, certain of the course laid before him, unswerving and grim… Until his mad brother had swept down from the hills like a slow moving storm, to drown the world in strange new things. Gary had walked the world for one long year, scattering chaos, destruction and joy in his wake, upending settled traditions and drawing even the gods into his deranged and inscrutable machinations.
Now, count Liam Kinnis, was lord of county Kinnis, working to restore the long lost domain of his forefathers, rebuilding the ruined city from tumbled foundations and overgrown streets.
Foresthome, the city had been called, the shady and welcoming seat of his ancestors once overlooked vast forested hills, rich croplands and bustling trade. His homeland had been a small city of perhaps forty thousand souls, surrounded by villages and hamlets of farmers, foresters and herders, on the edge of human lands.
All that vanished in an eyeblink, consumed in a tide of undead, monstrous and demonic filth in a single long forgotten night, hundreds of years before. For all those long years since that night, a wretched, immortal, undead demonic obscenity squatted in the empty ruins, waiting, lurking and plotting; craving mortal souls and flesh for her cruel amusements.
Together, a band of young Adventurers had expunged that loathsome thing, shattering her works and even slaying the creature at the end, a feat known to be absolutely impossible… by both mortals and gods. Immortals or demons could not be slain, only driven away, banished from physical reality for a time, at great cost.
They could and would return eventually, once conditions were right; by coaxing, tempting or bargaining mortal agents into opening the door to allow them to return.
Once allowed in, they were invariably ravenous for vengeance against the descendants of those who had banished them, no matter how long ago the affront may have occurred.
Actually slaying an immortal was impossible, undoubtedly and certainly… Every god, spirit and demon knew that with absolute surety. It had never happened, nor would it ever happen, such a thing was not even a vague fear or consideration for those who were eternal. Impossible.
Impossible was just a word to the mad musician that had upended Liam’s life, and who was currently upending a satchel of camp cooking gear. Pots, pans, cups, plates and cutlery tumbled out onto the soft green lawn, all quite dirty and packed away with food bits still stuck to the wares.
“My kids have some bad habits, bro.” Gary sighed sadly, as he glared at the crusty cookware. “I get it, they grew up never washing dishes… but that’s not real life.” He sighed again, weary to the bone.
“We’ll work that out of them soon enough, once they start Adventuring.” The smaller man soothed his brother with soft words. “Things are moving quickly, and you know how you get when you feel powerless, Gary.”
“I am powerless.” He mumbled as he worked, scraping crud from a cookpot with a sour expression on his face. “I can’t use most of my gifts for anything. Just sneaking into your house nearly killed me, forget about anything really fun.”
“Gary…” Liam whispered, running his hands through his spiky, jet black hair in frustration. “You ensorceled and befuddled the minds of my entire household, including my copper ranked stealth specialist; crept into my chambers and took a nap on my bed, while Tawny and I were eating breakfast… in our chambers.” He said dryly and with some heat. “I myself, am no tyro, and my familiar is a guardian few would challenge… We never even sensed your approach.”
“Well, maybe you are getting sloppy… and your guards suck.” He continued working with a sour look on his face, an alien expression on the usually cheery fellow. “When I try to do anything important, I just run out of everything and pass out immediately.”
“You mean making people, spirits and monsters engage in elaborate song and dance performances against their will?” The count asked gently.
The big man sank down onto the lawn, beside the dirty dishes and grumbled something incomprehensible.
“How ya gonna do it if you really don’ wanna dance? Getcha back up off the wall…”
Some mad gibberish was normal for him, but Liam misliked the man’s mood. “Don’t crawl up your own ass and hang out there, brother. We have better scenery to look out over.” He answered softly, gesturing to the deep, calm lake and the hills rising above, encompassing the waterfall tumbling down into the river behind the lovely country inn.
Foresthome stood on the hillside, looking out over the fertile valley bottom beyond and the Ward family inn, beside the lake. Toward the walled city, white plastered houses now stood, where scattered stones and woodlands had been, when last the inn stood near here. The once overgrown roads were clear and level, lined with neatly tended gardens and small orchards here and there.
The lands were slowly taking shape, after untold centuries lost to monsters, demons and the abhorrent walking dead. The land no longer choked and gagged on the misery and horror of a potent demonic presence; all trace of the entity’s aura had been cleansed and the county was steadily being re-peopled by immigrants of every kith and kin.
Several beaver and otter smallholds ringed the huge lake, their distinctive, rounded homes on the waterside looking snug and cozy in the late morning sunshine.
“Get out and meet some people, work your mortal arts and crafts, be a husband and father… Forget the pantheon, let my wife’s goddess be angry and sulky.” He smiled slyly at his big, moody friend. “We still haven’t explored and cataloged all the flora and fauna around here… Shai said she might take you fishing, if you can be good.”
“Ooh?” He asked, sounding more than a little interested. “What’s the catch? You have some job or quest?” He demanded a moment later, his eyes narrowed slightly with a hint of ugly suspicion.
“Gary, I’m a count now, but I’m still your brother. You are welcome in my home and lands, just as you made me welcome in your home, before all this.” The young warrior lord whispered to the commoner sprawled on the lawn.
“No catch, no jobs, no quest… just one rule.” Liam sighed sadly. “Don’t summon anything… evil or unpleasant in my domain without my permission. Otherwise… go make things a little less ordinary around here.”
“Really?” He asked in a voice so unlike his usual lilting and faintly musical tones. “I was sure Tawny was going to rip me a new one, because of what I did to that slaver…” He murmured sadly.
“She understands better than most, and she’s gotten better at standing up to her deity, after so much practice.” Liam smiled at the memory of his fearsome, tiny, beautiful wife often cowing and scolding his giant brother with a golden finger wag and a frown of displeasure hiding her dimples.
“She is and always will be on your side, brother… even if her goddess can be a pain.”
“The pantheon never forgets or forgives, so everything I do just pisses them off more.” He sighed. “I should just accept that I’m a heretic and an infidel… I could lean into that.”
He was still complaining, when he squatted by the waterside and began scrubbing the pots and dishes from his sons’ knapsacks with a handful of soft lake sand.
“Gary…?” Liam asked gently, from behind the dishwashing weirdo. “Why don’t you do that inside? In the sink?”
“I can’t…” The big man answered sullenly, without turning around or pausing his work. “I didn’t make these, so if I wash them in the water from the house, they’ll rust away to nothing in my hands. For the last year, I’m having more and more trouble maintaining control of some of my less… socially acceptable gifts.”
“Are you going to start… Haunting, again?” The count asked with a hint of worry in his voice, with a keen eye on his brother’s often unpredictable shadow.
“Maybe a little? Most of my best tools and instruments are iron or copper ranked, so I can’t use ‘em… I can’t enchant anything either, not without Shai doing most of the work I feel hollowed out and brittle, Liam.” He stuffed the wet gear back in its bag and stood, ambling toward his house with a listless gait. “Maybe you’re right, I’ll forget the gods, nobles and guilds… for now.”
He turned around, with a wet sack of goods over his shoulder and smiled at the much smaller lord. “If only they would forget me…”
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