Curses & Cursed

Astra relaxed ever so slightly. Her life was still in danger, the DragonMage and its Servant were still after her. She had escaped, if that was the word for it, by running into a bright light. She had found herself, at the end of that light, in a bizarre room fit only for one person with five exits - each marked by a sigil. She had chosen the sigil of the bloodied sword seeing in it the strength and sharpness needed to destroy her enemy. And then she had felt pain, then nothing, and then she was standing on the road in a moonlit night.

Astra thought back at her travails just getting into the Northern Caves. She had trained for the better part of a year just for the mission. She had spent weeks climbing the damnable and haunted hillsides until she found the entrance as marked by Miss Tria so long ago. She had hunted within those tunnels, had found queer and strange monsters, had met men of perverse thoughts, hid from bands of kobolds and encountered not a few royal women chained to walls. She had finally found the DragonMage sleeping on a pile of gold within a marvelous golden temple, deep within the hollow mountain. And then a new threat came upon her, a man of scaled flesh, the one she called the Servant of the Dragon. She found she was unable to kill him and so she ran, she ran but the man-thing bespelled the very air, and so she ran into the light.

And once out of that light and beyond the sigil of the bloodied sword, she found herself on a roadside under a near full moon. She encountered the Lady Andrea of Croix and discovered she was in the northlands, in the kingdom of Allaria and of the LiegeKing Exultaine. Though she had never traveled to this land, her people's rangers had had some previous encounters.

Yet even here the DragonMage was amassing power - now the Lady-girl was dead and she was on the run. She had nowhere to go but to the last place the dead girl had named: Arras Keep.

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In Caemlyn, in the great redoubt called the Palatine, King Emry Exultaine sat with his beloved wife. They did not speak, they simply sat, in quiet and in peace. King Emry found little peace in his days and so savored the moments he spent with his wife.

Memories of the strange appearance of Lord Fredrigo of Suffex filled him. To be visited by the dead was not common, and surely it was not good. Dead Fred's warning had allowed him to send out a new Dragon-Hunter: Sir Joshua. Yet he had been found hog-tied to an ox-cart on the lower hillsides of the Shreken. Sir Josh spoke of spells that dimmed a man's understanding and of a terrible Black Knight. Sir Josh was no longer the Dragon-Hunter, he was nothing but a humiliated knight.

The search for a new knight to become Dragon-Hunter had resumed, meanwhile, more villages had been razed, more fields burned, and more children taken by the Dragon. It was certainly a terrible year in Allaria.

And now, reports of the rabble Court of Fools rising up along and within the Duchy Anfang! Emry spit, his body tensing at the ugly thoughts. His wife rubbed his shoulders and his neck, she kissed him tenderly and the man relaxed again, if even only slightly.

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Jasper Hewlett, Victor Packard, and Lucien Caldecott sat within Croix Keep and read the most recent message of Minestus, brought on the wings of a black crow.

They were to expect a woman, an Aquilarian, she was cursed but did not know it. They were to engage her in battle, have her kill some of the expendables, have her wound a few more, and then have her leave, thinking that she had escaped. She was to be left free reign within Allaria for she was cursed and Minestus wanted that curse to spread.

The three men smiled. Though the Aquilarian arrived before they had received the note, and even though she had nearly killed Lucien, the will of Minestus - the Great Pretender - had come about! The foreign woman had indeed fought and she had killed and had maimed, and she was now roaming free - all as the Wizard Minestus had ordered. The reports last told that the woman was headed apparently in the direction of Arras Keep, but the Dragonmen had since let her leave their watch; they had more important things to attend to in Croix Keep. Yet still the three men thought much of the woman's curse; she carried the blood of the berzerker, upon the full moon she would go mad with rage and seek out any and all persons to kill or maim. Any survivors who mix blood with her would also then carry the berzerker within them, and though outside the fullness of the moon they would retain their own senses, for three nights of each month they would run mad, frothing and screaming, and killing.

1. ...Astra in foreign lands...
2. ...Emry in his own demesne...

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