The lad and lass, two enslaved children, both robbed of family sat as the carriage hauling their cage slowed and eventually stopped. They were watered, fed a cold, barely salted leg of poultry, and then ignored by their enslavers. The children ate in silence, this was the most sustenance they had been given in weeks.
“Why would they feed us so well? This for all the slaves is probably more than what some of us will sell for.” The lad had his face scrunched as he did the rough math and estimates. “They don’t feed us for the- ugh, events, so that isn’t it...”
“They are feeding us so we look more valuable... The meat will make the make us feel and look stronger at market... Or prettier, I guess for you...” The lass spoke, her eyes staring at the leg of meat as she slowly rolled it around, observing it for any poison or spices.
“I-I do not understand why you keep saying that. I am a boy. T-They would want a-a girl for... Oh Madra, the thought makes me sick...” He looked at his partly eaten leg and set it in his lap with a sigh of defeat. “We entered a city from the sounds of things, should we, ugh... Try to escape?” His last words came out in a soft whisper, barely a hint of sound as he glanced around as if the cage itself would spoil his idea.
“... Would we want to? We would just be street rats starving in an unfamiliar city...” Her inspection done, the lass took a bite, tasting almost none of the precious taste enhancing salt. “... Maybe I would be better dying in the fighting pits when they sell me...” She felt her thoughts and mind sink deeper as the thought of struggling anymore seemed to sap her of strength rather than give it.
The lad staired at the girl, a sense of disbelief filling him. They had been locked in the same cage for a month, in the dark, with only each other for company besides the feeders. As he spoke more and more with her, to her mostly, he felt a bond forming. He knew she had been through horrific things before she described the ‘competition’ between the slaves to see who was the strongest, forcing them to kill those they would be locked together with for weeks leading up to each ‘event.’ When he spoke of his family, he knew she listened, and would speak up the most. Now, the girl he had seen struggling to continue, was about to just lay down and die, accepting her fate.
An anger, a wrath filled the lad, who was somewhere in his twelfth year. His eyes burned as a movement came to him, from his hours of practice and study and repetition. The pointer finger and pinky finger stuck out as he swung his hand up to aim it at the halfling. Soft, barely visible light shown from their tips and his eyes as the mana raged through him. Without a word, he saw her shape glow, he saw flashes, glimpses whispered into his mind from a voice of leaf and wind. Moments and words, the best way to strike true into the heart of his ‘foe.’
His hand trembled as the soft glow on his fingers were tainted a deep, royal purple and a life giving green. With a spin of his hand, the lights drew together to form a circle not visible to the eyes. The lass had tilted her head up, a slow, agonized motion as she looked on with surprise at the young lad trying to cast magic, was casting magic at her, no matter how minor. Her body shot up to standing without her conscious desire. Her fist swung out but was stopped as a violent stab of mental agony hit her between the eyes.
Unprepared and unfamiliar with this kind of attack, she was stunned. The lad then attempted to tackle her in the moment of weakness, his small, thin arms that reminded her more of her sister’s back home than her brother’s, wrapped around her waist as his face buried into her chest. Her thick frame and stance didn’t budge or buckle under the assault, and her arms went to wrap around him, to grapple his smaller form to the floor of the cage when she felt his arms tighten around her waist. He wasn’t trying to grapple or tackle her. He was hugging her. And he was speaking, drowned out by the thunder of her rushing heart at first.
“P-Please, Eozira, do not make me leave you. They will hurt you for my escape, I do not wish to challenge this city alone, but I will, even if I must abandon my first true friend...” His eyes burned as he pressed himself tightly against the lass turned gladiator. He braced himself for a throw, a pain, a hold as she bent him like a soft taffy.
But nothing met his tensed body, no pain, no grip, only the sensation of something warm and wet landing on his scalp. The lass stared down at him, and whispered something, a name that he couldn’t catch, but could feel the emotion within.
“... I... I will, I will leave with you Tinkbrust... We will escape this hell...” Her voice was stoic, firm, but held a warmth, a sense of the same companionship and bond the lad had felt over his hours and days of conversation and storytelling.
The two remained as such for a time, letting their hearts and mind clear and calm down. Once they had separated, two new shadows sat across from the cage, unnoticed in their snooping.
****************************
The hag sat at her table, sipping the untouched cup of juice from the gnome, left behind and forgotten in the event that unfolded less than an hour ago. Her back and heart ached as she looked at the juice in the cup and remembered the night some two moons ago, when the Mad Goblin showed up at her shop.
He brought with him a sack of gold, an unknown recipe for some ancient dwarven potion, and a request.
“Agatha, when you’se learned I’se had the newest youngling, you’se sent me’se a bottle of wine... Do you’se have anymore?” His voice was older, raspier, but no less grating or fear inducing than it had been nearly three decades previously. It held an expectation, a demand more than a question or inquiry.
The hag had admitted she did, a whole case. The slaver she got it from said it was a halfling wine, so she thought the clan would appreciate the gift for their new members. She was not expecting the price to buy the juice and wine from her, and tried to refuse until Glora explained further.
“The gol’ is to do me’se a favor. In a few months, I’se gonna send my littlest to you’se. You’se is gonna give them’se the juice as refreshments. And then the rest of the juice and wine to her’se.”
The hag was dumbfounded, confused by the request. She knew of her acquaintance’s tendency to test his ‘children,’ she had provided many of the minor poisons and magics he used in those. But this was simple, new. And she was excited to see what the goblin had planned.
And when the children had shown up that morning, she had assumed that this was their mission, sent by their father to ask her. But after the girl’s reaction, and during her discussion with the boy, she realized that she was wrong. They had come on their own free will, and she might have ruined the task she had accepted from a creature that would kill her for harming a hair on one of those children’s heads. The information on her abilities, the healing tinctures and such were a sign to their patriarch that this was a mistake, done with the full intent of complying with the task they had given her.
When the hag learned from the boy a little about his sister’s origins, she realized why the goblin wanted her to do this. He knew she would have some kind of reaction, and wanted to know how severe it would be, and how it would manifest. He had paid her to induce a panic attack or traumatic reaction from his daughter to test her readiness, or progression since her selling into slavery. And by that reaction, she had either made tremendous progress, or almost none at all.
The sight of the confident, talented and dedicated young warrior curled up and crying like an abused child made her chest tighten in anger and pity. With a long sigh, she stood up and grabbed one of her personal bottles of moonshine, sipping from the container as she dug in a drawer for a piece of copper wire. Once found, she withdrew it, wrapping it around her tongue as she placed her hands together, almost as if in prayer. Words like the sickly smoke that rose from her cauldron spewed forth from her lips. And then her message followed as the copper dissolved with each flick of her tongue.
“Younglings arrived. Assumed you sent. Gave test. She had traumatic reaction. Apologies, boy explained you hadn’t sent when discreetly inquired. Sent on helpful sewer mission.” She felt the words leave her presence and be sent across the city to the mind and ears of the goblin she sought.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Hands move there.” There is a pause there before the remaining reply arrives to the hag. “Acceptable. Gratitude. If they can assist down there, send back to compound if they succeed. If they fail, your head remains.”
The hag let out an audible sigh of relief. She would not be held to the fire for the youngling’s failures, but they both knew that if they did perish down there, she would likely need to leave the city before the wrath remaining after the Black Hands were crushed and ground into the dusts of history like the Ceisiwie were, could be turned towards her.
****************************
The elderly goblin sat in a chair, leaning back against the closed doors of the warehouse that was temporarily their clan’s property. They had been dealing with the curious, scaring off the foolish, and beating the stupid who tried to challenge their claim. None had died yet, but if they continued to annoy the goblin, that would likely change.
Their mood had dived harshly after the hag pretending to be a simple hedge witch, Agatha, sent them a message.
The green, bony fingers traced the lines and engravings across the revolver placed in their lap. Swirling patterns of flames and destruction that swallowed and devoured the faint green trees that dotted the 12 inches of barrel, 30 lengths by the dwarves' metrics, forged from an alloy that was holy and demonic combined.
Images that were burned into the goblin’s mind nearly sixty years ago now, flashed into life once again. The dark, broken ruins of a civilization dropped by some freak accident of cosmic proportions, onto the Isle of Madra some seven centuries ago. For half that time, it was explored and picked clean by those seeking to discover the technologies and magics of a foreign world. Nothing of value had been found in that time, and with a proclamation by a prophet of Madra, nothing like that would be discovered, ever.
So, the soft folks let nature and the scavengers invade and gain control of the worthless chunk of lands to the northwest of Speaking Peak. Goblins, orcs, bugbears, and wild monsters alike, all claimed chunks of the ruins as their homes. And in those ruins, some three hundred years after the last explorer tried and failed to find anything of value, was something discovered, by a nameless goblin runt.
Within the ruins of a civilization from another plain, a relic of this world was discovered. A relic that had gone missing from its last known owner, nearly just as many years ago as the last explore had left the ruins. The weapon discovered and wielded by the Green Field Emperor, the manifested replica of the divine object, O’Re.
The goblin had been sent to scout the home of a massive owlbear that had been given the name Glora. Glora had made a large, ruined church in the territory of the goblin’s tribe her new nest. And he needed to scout it. Inside the church he snuck, after the owlbear had left to hunt for the day. He searched and searched, before finding a hidden passage into the church from below. He sunk inside, trying to find its exit so the tribe could use it to ambush the monster.
The passage went on and on, deeper and deeper, for nearly an hour. When he came across a bend in the seemingly endless tunnel. The bend seemed to go back up after passing by a small alter. As the goblin approached, his eyes were drawn to a miniscule light that beamed from the alcove behind the alter. There, stood the statue of some humanoid race, with the face of an octopus. In the hands of the disgusting statue, with their hands held up in offering to the gods above, sat a metal hunk the goblin had never seen before. It pulsed invitingly when the goblin runt grew closer and closer to it, before their dirty hands finally grasped it. And he was shown a vision of a time long ago. A vision of tens, hundreds, thousands of people grasping the handle of this weapon, this revolver, this recreation of the divine.
They all grasped the handle, and all saw the same. They witnessed the birth, the creation of a deity.
****************************
A man sat silently, staring at his creation. A revolver designed in the throes of madness by himself, a follower of the god of crafting. It was a testament to the progress of man and alchemist, smith and mage. A pistol designed to mock those who could not see the future bearing down upon them all. Using metals fallen from the very heavens, magical items to infuse the chambers and components, wisdom and advice of demons, spirits and even the eldritch horrors. It used the tears and blood of a being dedicated and devoted to the art of all crafting disciplines and a large fraction of their very own soul, to endow this weapon with powers beyond what was once considered possible.
The creator gave their life, soul, and all earthly possessions to accumulate and fashion this piece. They left their temple and duties to create this item, at the disapproval of all in their congregation but the god themself. Two decades of travel, discovery, danger and failure coalesced into the inspiration needed to design, forge, and create this marvel of an item.
Atop a peak, surrounded by dozens of items that each represented an elemental or universal force of nature, the crafter began. Six of each variety of Elemental Gems, Six Alchemy Jugs full of acid, 48 Beads of Force, Six Stormgirdles, Six Pounds of Dust of Corrosion, Six Gallons of Purple Worm Poison, Six Pounds of Refined Ruidium, and Six Talismans of Pure Good. They were condensed, mixed, refined, and separated, over and over. Mixing the opposing and different aspects of reality, and unmixable elements together in a futile, insane dance of magic, crafting, prayer, and blasphemy. The god of crafting, the god of creation, and the god of destruction watched, holding off and hiding the location from their kin who would seek to disrupt this creation.
Each step in the process, each mold used, discarded, and broken, each item reduced from its essence and intended purpose, guided and shaped into the new forms. Gems, cartridges, slugs, runes, and power were shaped and reforged into the ten main cartridges. A set of six for each element, each power of nature condensed and reworked at the whim of a mortal. And alongside his major, he had three minor cartridges, designed and molded to reflect their perfected simple natures.
Days of work, of pain, of suffering. Hours of torture, effort and passion. Minutes of agony, insanity, and enlightenment. Seconds of true, unrivaled, undeniable, perfection.
The heavens crackled, roared, shrieked and howled. Gods, demons, eldritch horrors, and beings beyond those descriptions felt the birth, the second of life, and final and total death of a crafter who reached true perfection of his craft. The mortal was to be enshrined forever in the halls of their god's afterlife, the true equal in craft to his god, died as he beheld his work, his solidification of all he believed, envisioned, craved, and loved in this world.
The item was taken, the body of its creator whisked away by their god, and the mountain, the continent, and world the event took place upon, shuddered. The whole island, the whole mountain range, the whole continent and ocean that surrounded it, were erased, destroyed, ruined, removed, and broken. a section of the world removed as if it was never in existence.
The creation, the accumulation, was beyond compare. But it was beyond all itself. It could no longer reside on the plane of its origin. It could not exist without wherever it appeared being removed as it was attempted in its inception. But each god who witnessed and assisted in its creation, could not bear it remain hidden, the craftsmanship, the passion and love, the power, the destruction it could bring. They came together, discussed, conferred, and observed the creation. And discovered, it was something like them. A deity. An inanimate object, turned into a deity.
It could not, would not, appear anywhere. But it could reach out, it could connect with, be represented, be mimicked in the way mortals did their god's artifacts. And so, it was. Once a millennium, a mimicry of O'Re, the Divine Creation, would appear to be discovered, be used, and be revered by mortals. An object to be wielded, unconnected to mortality, alignment, and desire. A testament to the power of creation, suited and fitted to the mortal world.
****************************
Glora the Mad, Glora the Gunman, Glora the current wielder of O’Re-production, felt their mind shudder at the visions that were not their own. The story of the divine, of the origin of their weapon that had stayed with them for nearly sixty years. Their finger brushed along the barrel’s length, leaving not a blemish from their sharpened and dirty nail.
O’Re was their companion and ally through seas of blood and hate. It was the only thing besides their name that remained of the residents of the foreign ruins. The metal began to heat, drawing the goblin’s attention away from the dark cesspit of emotions buried in their bloody soul.
“Yeah, yeah, you’se ol’ piece of junk, I’se ain’t losin’ focus.” The goblin sat up, bringing all their chair’s legs back to the dirt. Their cataract covered eyes bore down on the cart that was approaching from the nearest garbage pit.
The crew of five people were wearing a black and green tabard, showing off their profession. Glora simply opened the warehouse’s doors, and they drove the wagon inside. They were there for the gathered corpses. And by the looks of it, one was attempting to subtly search the corpses as they were loaded silently into the cart.
The goblin wondered on the odds of which faction the person belonged to, as any who knew better, wouldn’t waste their time on searching corpses that had already been clearly looted. The only reason would be if they sought something specific, and of little chance of being looted.
With the barest of attention, the goblin saw when the garbage man found the corpse he was looking for, after finding a tattoo on one of the wrists, and pulling free the armband of the dead woman. On the inside, could be barely made out, a crest of axe and bow.
The goblin thought for a few moments, and smiled softly as a humorous, if gory, thought came to their mind. The family of the gang member, perhaps their spouse, wanted a memento of the group their woman had dedicated their life to.
“I’se wonder who of my’se children would want a memento of me’se?” They let out a soft, raspy chuckle as the gun in their hands pulsed with heat and energy once again.