Game 39

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Within the Temple of the Forgotten God

**Merius’ Dream**

Damian goes to sleep. It’s dark. He sees Cirrine’s face. He realizes that the name she’s saying is Merius’ name. She looks at him, pleading.

*“It’s ok. It’s ok.”* You look up, and in front of you, you see an eclipse. An ill omen. You feel a sense of panic seeing it overhead. Damian notices that the proportions of the eclipse, proportionally, is the same from the temple. You realize something is off. There’s a little blood coming from your head.

*“It’s ok”*  Cirrine says pleading, tears streaming down her face. You look down, and you see the bodies of the party. Closest to you is Otto. There are other people. Dark shapes. Hard to make out. To your other side is Rowan. There are others…

... but then you wake up.

Otto opens up the book from his order. (found in a temple at the  Spine of the World). He sees the name Keaton Zachus. The twin snakes of the Nethralese. It’s a soldier’s journal.

**Nethrelese Soldier’s Journal**

*"--The worst school of war for the sons of nobility was in those early days and long after was Orofin. That was the devil’s playground and his chambers of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortues for young Pelorian virtuous men. It was not far out of Lundaleth, to the south of the Menin road, North of the Stormhorns. We had excellent lodgings upon arrival until one of our stables went up in a Cormyrian fireball, along with one of half of our brigade’s senior staff in the middle of a conference.The first of the Cormyrian fireball attacks. It seems their mages have cooked up some new horror within their towers. A simple firebolt spell to be easily taught, but with a tumultuous explosion of flame.Bodies, bits of bodies and clots of blood in a green metallic slime made by Cormyrian fell magics made short work of the town. Our men lived and died there. only a few yards from the enemy, crouched behind the barricades and crater holes. I once saw a mage’s firestorm burn so hot the men that stood previously were incinerated, leaving nothing left except the sand melted to glass. Disease and lice crawled all over us in legions. Human flesh, rotting and stinking in mere pulp was pasted into mudbanks. If they dug to get deeper cover, their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs and blackened hands and eyeles heads came falling over them when the enemy pounded their position with pot shot fires or blew up a new mine position.Our men slew a man half mad from some sort of spell shouting as his wife from, who was back in Oreheme. I marched happily into doom "*

*“It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to a sort of primordial code when men freshly walked the earth in company of behemoths and beasts. It made all our old philosophy of life in the civilized courts and shaded chaeteus dwarfed to be monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Pelorian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like savage-men upon the battlefield; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes retold from the front, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting the jests the more they howled with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was retold in the sterile barracks room within an orbital city or at the mess-table of some occupied backwater country tavern.*

*It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise.*

*Now that ideal had broken like a Sembian crystal vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. A King, a commoner; A holy war that renounces gods...The whole world is mad!*

*The latest episode in this ongoing comedy, the boys and I have been pulled off the front to be apart of some contingent to depart to the frozen wildlands of the frontier. The senior officers promise some sort of weapon there than can change the tide of the war. I  don’t care anymore. Anything to be pulled from the front. We're to answer to some “Martine Odynthiel”*

\*At the very bottom is a symbol drawn very quickly. A sun with a circle in front of it. (the eclipse)

\*When we reach Onestone, Stellock is there.

*“I see you all made it out of the forest. I got your message.”*

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