Kitsal Hamlet

May they Rest in peace

> *It was only after I’d mounted Traveler and we left Kitsal that I realized why everyone had been looking at me strangely.  Tears had been streaming down my face constantly since I’d finished the spell.* - Minalan after thaumaturgically divining the evil spells used at Kitsal
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## History

Kitsal was a border hamlet lying between Green Hill and Fesdarlen. It was a community lying on the literal edge of two baronies. It was poor. Not a root cellar, nor a timber building in the settlement. The hamlet did the jobs no one else wanted: trapper, tanner, woodsman, charcoal burner. Four families lived in five wattle-and-daub huts.

## Overview

Prior to the Battle of Tudry, Minalan, Azar, Astyral and a small scouting party came upon the remnants of the small border hamlet. The gurvani and an urgulnosti shaman had horribly tortured and killed the residents to power a spell of despair. Minalan thaumaturgically analyzed the magical working and, in so doing, relived the ghastly horror that the peasants had endured. Minalan was so abjectly appalled that it haunted him for many years to come.

## Summary

Riding in the vanguard of the army moving towards Tudry, Minalan led a mounted party finding and dismantling magical and ordinary traps or ambushes laid down by enemy shamans. At the border between Green Hill and Fesdarlen they came upon the ruins of Kitsal. There they found a makeshift alter and an iron kettle three feet wide over a central fire pit. The corpses of the adults were tied to trees or posts around the center fire. All of the bodies had been tortured by someone who knew how to do it without killing the victims. Closest to the firepit was the corpse of one woman.

> She had been bound with her arms suspended from a branch tied cross-ways to a sturdy oak.  Maybe twenty years old, her naked body had been tormented for days.  There was a wooden ladle jammed in her mouth, so far down her throat it had ruptured it.
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She witnessed the slaying of her children ... four of them boiled alive in the large kettle. Then force fed to the tortured mother by a wooden spoon jammed through her clenched teeth.

There was an evil purpose to the torture, terror that lasted for days, and hideous death. Minalan, as the best trained thaumaturge, had to break down the gurvani magics and learn their purpose.

The Spellmonger determined there were three separate workings. The first was a seeking spell looking for something of power. The second was an emoting spell.

> *Fear. Terror. Panic. Agony. Helplessness. Sadness. Desperation. Anguish. Confusion. Hate. Rage. Temper. Jealousy. Hopelessness. Sorrow. Lament. Despair.*
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Despair, most of all.
The third working collected the miasma of emotions and projected them into the psychic atmosphere. It wasn't just fear, it wasn't just sorrow, it wasn't just anguish.

> It was the anguish of being given the choice, of either watching your beloved child’s limbs be eagerly bludgeoned by one of those wicked iron mallets the gurvani favor, starting with the fingers and toes and working up to the pelvis and then being thrown in boiling water to suffer even further before they expired . . . or being allowed to spare her that horrible fate by bashing in her skull yourself before she was cooked.  Brutally murdering your child out of a sense of motherly love . . . it was that specific kind of anguish.  An emotion so raw, so powerful, and so foul in its inception that it washed across my mind like a putrid hide.
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This psychic power, driven by the totality of terror and pain suffered in Kitsal, harnessed and distilled, broadly affected Alshar--every man, woman, and child for hundreds of miles around would suffer all of the emotions broadcast by the horrific spell. However, Vorone was the specific target, which explained why Duke Lenguin was paralyzed by "panicked hesitation."

## References

1. ↑ Mancour, Terry. Warmage: Book Two Of The Spellmonger Series (p. 162). Kindle Edition.
2. ↑ Mancour, Terry. Warmage: Book Two Of The Spellmonger Series (p. 155). Kindle Edition.
3. ↑ Mancour, Terry. Warmage: Book Two Of The Spellmonger Series (p. 158). Kindle Edition.
4. ↑ Mancour, Terry. Warmage: Book Two Of The Spellmonger Series (p. 159). Kindle Edition.