What Happened Last Session
The Green
Morning found the order’s shelf empty, and the company chose to leave before anyone asked why. They got a hex before fifty gaunt acolytes who could feel where the calf had gone came pouring out of the snow behind them. They did not draw steel. They sniffed. “Why do I smell the bull on you?”
Ro’an did not deny it. He told them the bull had sent him to spread the green wherever he went and to overcome the snow, laid his sword on the shoulder of a young acolyte named Pear, named him his avatar, and renamed the whole order the Green. He gave them laws of non-violence; they knelt in the snow and repeated them back as “we shall force everyone to accept it.” The company rode east and left one-legged Solas among them.
Two Left of a Village
At 0903 the snow gave up a silhouette the size of a keep, and it was a mushroom: a dull green cap spotted every colour, and doors cut into the stalk by hands. Outside, Arthur found round, toeless tracks bigger than hooves heading toward Burke; inside, by a campfire, sat the people who make them.
The cap folk are pale and soft and hairless, with flat round feet and brows that overhang like a cap; the brim grows with age. Tasmin, a grandmother, asked why the knights’ skin was so dry, fed them mushroom stew, and told them it had been a whole village, and now it was her and her silent son Pell. Cap folk do not bear children. The mushroom does, in a good year, and nobody knows what a good year is any more. Down the root stairs lay floors of empty underground farm, rot everywhere and worse the deeper they went, the deepest roots frozen hard. Whatever this was, it had started before the freeze. Ro’an offered Pell a future as a Seer’s knight; Tasmin said she would be sad and would not fight it, and the company let it lie. “We’ll return with help. If we can.”
The Old Girl o’ the Pond
The night at 1003 brought a shared dream of a half-asleep fisherman muttering that the old girl of the pond cannot be trusted on her word, and three knights woke with their Clarity gone. From the rise they had seen a cliff, a moving cloud at 1103 that turned out to be the swarm, and a giant stone tablet with writing on it standing alone at 1002.
At 1004 there was a duckweed pond, and out of it came a fairy the size of a hand with the voice of an old woman. “You draw some good rings,” she told Arthur, and flew into his Circle at full speed. Her name was Wrundl. She wanted to know if he was married, she wanted the matching ring on Ro’an, and when he told her what he liked in a woman was a mushroom, she cried and sank. In the morning the pond had moved to their camp. “Name any object you want. In the past, future, present, anything.” Arthur answered at once: a coin with a city on it.
A Little Gruesome
Burke Keep was an hour’s climb and a keep full of coughing. Wattle dropped his sword standing up to greet Sir Robin and Lady Seeli, and admitted he had no sulfur, no cure, and a Seer in the tower that people were kept from hearing. “It’s a little gruesome.”
The Carved Seer sat in his own blood, carving runes into his skin with one knife and the floor with the other, and knew all five names. He would not speak of the snow at all. “Dowell is not well. Destroy the city. Find the rot in Dowell.” Asked whether he meant the seat, the city or the government, he said the people, and the bigger the better. He would come, he said, but he would not assist. Arthur, Steward of Dowell, asked whether he now had a conflict of interest. The argument ran the length of a candle and ended where it began: to Dowell, with the Seer, to find the rot and their own Seers before any war. Blacksmith Capo was too sick to forge a tusk.
She Loves Only Me
One hex south of Burke, a red cape flickered at the corner of Seeli’s eye, and there was the pond again. Two figures of green water were fighting over it, “she loves only me,” and when the knights spoke her name they charged. Arthur drew the Circle and they broke on it like waves. Then Bray bit one and showed it a memory: Wrundl, flirting with Arthur. It beat its own face into the ground; the second fled on the same memory; the first, with Ro’an standing over it, talked. She had told them she loved them. She had drowned them. She had forgotten. “This is where her love lives. That’s them.”
Ro’an dropped a mushroom in the pond. Arthur drew a circle on the bank and called: “Wrundl, our time apart has made me think of you. You up?” She came, delighted, not quite ready with your gift, and behind her the whole pond stood up screaming. The company is inside the Circle. Robin’s flail is in the air.
Looking Ahead
The swing lands next session, and so does whatever Wrundl was bringing. Beyond the pond the road runs to Dowell with a bleeding Seer in tow and an instruction nobody can stomach as written, while behind them Ro’an’s cult has already got his commandments backwards. The cap folk are still dying, the tablet at 1002 is still unread, and the Red Seer is still owed a knight. The snow, meanwhile, has not been addressed by anyone.
Ask a Seer for help and you may be handed a war; ask a lover for anything, and you had better mean it.