Thanqol

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Spar one opponent long enough and it is their ghost you fight in every battle.

Lady Sandsfern's approach to battle is pounded into every one of Robena's thoughts and reflexes by endless repetition. They have dueled with swords, maces, bar stools and fists, on horseback and on foot. They have rehearsed the same forms under the gaze of Venitian swordmasters and embarrassed themselves in mounted archery before the same Turkic nomads. In each battle the instincts that guide Robena are those carved by Lady Sandsfern. In each battle she triumphs because her opponent is either a lesser version of her mistress or a lesser version of herself.

Robena fights as the mountain - reach and control and solidity and plate, the raw arithmetic of strength. Sandsfern fights as the fire, always in motion and always brilliant. They balance upon a knife edge, and with any balance that fine it is the simple, stupid trivialities that define victory. In this case it is that they are in a cramped tavern with no room for maneuver and so it is just a matter of time before Alitel runs out of space to retreat.

To besiege a castle, though, is a brutal thing. Even with better resources and a stronger army one must beware constant sally, and each step of progress is paid for with sweat and blood. Each step is paid for with a kick, each falter in her block is paid for with a blow to the head, again and again she takes hits with nothing to show for it in return. Her arms ache and her head thrums and she's conscious of all the pain for she has to do all of this appallingly sober. There is no joy in this part of the fight. It is just pain on the promise of victory, and if that vision of victory wavers even for a moment then it is just pain - and will collapses.

But then the back of Alitel's foot touches the back wall and it is time for her to return a strike.

Her punch lashes out like a thunderbolt, just past Alitel's head and smashing into the wood of the tavern wall so hard that it makes the entire building lurch and the timbers splinter. Lady Sandsfern freezes in place with Robena's arm right by her head, smile holding as sweat trickles down her face. Robena, hand heavy on the wall next to her, looms down above. How could she be grim now? Blood is far too noisy to permit cold thoughts.

"Looks like you still need protection," said Robena, "my lady."

[Great Labour: 8]

Sunshards

Chen!

The wagon groans under the weight of masks. Many are bright and colourful, cartoon characters from ancient days, painted fox-faces, snarling bears and eerie horses. For all their eye-catching friendliness there is absolutely no doubt that they are here for one reason only: to soften the blow of the mask at the centre of it all. It looms like a vision from a dream, long and cylindrical with bulging eyes and enormous teeth, all in cool blue steel. That's an Old World mask and this lady is a Technomancer who is making an attempt not to frighten small children while still advertising her profession.

Sitting next to her you can feel a faint electronic buzz on your skin, and your phone starts to chime again and again where you cannot reach it - not a big deal because those are no doubt spam messages from one of the Techomancer's tame advertising geists. The woman wears a similarly subterranean dress - long slick curtains of dark blue leather, lines of clattering loyalty cards hanging from her wrists and neck.

"You look like you're in the market for someone in my line of work," said the Technomancer, watching as Rose runs and jumps. "But I'm afraid you'll need someone a lot more powerful than me. Do you know Princess Kikil? I'll send her a message. If you're lucky she'll come out here to rescue you herself, Princess..." her eyes flick down to her phone where her digital demon has just sent a text, and she gives a smile that leaves you in no doubt that she's fucking with you. "... Chen."

Rose!

A god from the heavens themselves steps forth from his cramped car to assist you in your work.

This is a guardian spirit, one with mad painted eyes and swirling and frenzied cheeks and teeth bared with fangs all in red and jade. He covers these features beneath a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and a slouch for the ages, and perhaps he conceals more than just his divinity. That suit hangs loose and those eyes are hungry and, just as a monk must look for happy demons one must look too for hungry gods. Less separates them than you might think.

The driver of the car stays behind the wheel, reading a newspaper spread out over the wheel and dashboard and smoking a cigarette while inching his car immediately through any small gap opened amidst the fluffy sheep by you. He is probably a man, and the contrast between his expensive watch and beat-up old car gives you the impression that he is up to no good whatsoever. He strikes you as a thief, frankly.

The guardian is much less animated than you, a creature of calculated movements. Now and then he will cast his spear to land just ahead of a straying sheep causing it to think better of adventuring in the wide world and head back to its paddock. Throughout, though, the god's eyes are on you alone. "You will need payment, ancient one," said the god in stiff words. "I give you my life, though spare my master."

Always so dramatic with these guys.

Yue!

"My tricks!?" said the vixen, feigning hurt in a way that was both obvious that she was faking and nevertheless extremely effective at making you feel guilty. "This is my very first shrine! Look!" She waved her butt tails. "Two! Two tails! If I was the kind of trickster you were accusing me of I'd have at least three or four. If I had eight or nine then you'd be a fool to trust me! But I am a brand new kitsune with a heart as pure as mountain snow. I haven't tricked anyone! I've never even had the chance! And already I'm being accused of having tricks! If every kitsune who starts a shrine gets this kind of response, why, it is no wonder so many of them go into crime! They never even get a chance to make an honest living!"

She sighed extremely dramatically, flopping face-down on the stone. In the process she successfully tricked the lizard king into reflexively a few centimeters before he realized what was happening and immediately she had moved into that patch of sunlight. The lizard king stopped and gave the lizard equivalent of the someone-stole-my-wallet look.

"But you've got a wish, huh?" she mused, opening one eye to give Hyra a piercing look. "And not an easy one. That's a serious curse. I can't break it... but I can weaken it. Let her turn into a human some of the time. And if somehow I was to earn another tail or two I'd be able to do even more."

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Even though a pile of blankets may be light in terms of weight, they are still awkward to grip. The sheer bulk of them all makes it difficult to get your arms into a position where they can physically lift them. Throwing a knight in plate is not difficult with the right setup - it is all about leverage, balance and momentum. Getting a good enough grip on Robena Coilleghille is another matter entirely to the point where she did not honestly believe she could be thrown in this way.

"If by you mean champion of Lostwithiel you mean I beat the tar out of their sad excuses for knights, you're damn right," somebody said. That person stood up from the debris of the chair and pounded on her breastplate with a mailed fist. "And while I'll overlook that cheap shot because you're my lady, I can perform a demonstration if you want to learn something."

Robena's silence was a studied and cultivated thing, a thing born through long evenings contemplating virtue under foreign stars. What it covered was a mouth trained in taunts, dares and challenges in every pub from here to Jerusalem. When stunned beyond the point of sense or reason the words and smirk tumbled out on sheer conditioned reflex.

Sunshards

Rose!

Daily Affirmations of the Way <3: "All things are connected, so don't read too much into it."

The harmony of hills and mountains is undermined with the sense of discord. The path is overgrown with weeds and a fence has fallen, causing sheep to spill out all over the road to eat those weeds. Two wagons and a little car have had to come to a halt with the path ahead blocked by the fluffy tide and the most experienced of the three is already pitching her tent because she knows better than to reason with the sheep. A bolder one has advanced on the sheep with shouting but she is a fool - already a sheep-aligned goat has snuck around to her abandoned wagon to chew through the horse's restraints.

This is disharmony in its simplest form. Bad luck and rebellion, sheeps made kings and humans made fools. Back in ancient times it would cost a monthly subscription fee to ensure that your vehicle was shielded by the Metropolitan Prayer Wheel, with fines for those who engage in disharmonious conduct. Nowadays it is dealt with in a more artisanal sense by you and your order.

This isn't the wreckage of demon passage - if the Pyre had come this way then she'd have taught the sheep the secret of gunpowder. This kind of subtle entropy has been going on for a while - some sort of wicked spirit at work. Not urgent, perhaps... but not unimportant. You are a monk, are you not? And while the mysterious girl desired by Princess Qiu might be important, and while Princess Chen might be important, and while both questions are fun for you personally... can you truly look the Buddha in the eye and say they are more important than these people here before you now?

Yue!

The faintest smell of incense touches the wind. It's distant and sweet and brings only one connotation: the smell of a shrine. You pause to breathe it in, the flavour of deserts with sands of blue, as luxurious for the distance it has come as for the taste of foreign moonlights it offers. For a moment you close your eyes to appreciate the smell. In the rustling breeze you can hear the sound of wind-chimes.

And then when you open your eyes again the world is bound in red thread.

It wraps around you from a knot tied around your smallest finger, tracing up and around your arm and across your chest and tangling through your hair. It spreads up and loosely weaves through the branches of the trees. Its fragility makes it bind tighter than the heaviest chain - this thread is so delicate it demands you move with utmost caution to avoid snapping it, and who would risk snapping a red ribbon if it might lead you to true love? Here, as ever, the secret to bindings is to ensure that there is no will to escape them.

"Heya!" comes a cheerful voice from beneath two fox ears and two fox tails. "Cute fox!"

Immediately you know what kind of place this is.

"If you ever see an abandoned shrine, don't make wishes!" Everyone in the village got that lecture. Every set of grandparents hauled their grandchildren and their children to their sickbeds so they could give them the warning. "Under no circumstances!" For three days afterwards elderly guards patrolled the town with walking sticks and threats to have you by the ear to ensure that nobody snuck out to the abandoned shrine while old Mr. Barayama went down to fetch a monk to exorcise the place.

The security was necessary not because the spirit who lived at the abandoned shrine didn't grant wishes but because it did.

It is an iron law of the spirits that whenever a shrine is abandoned and falls into disrepair, a fox spirit moves in. Kitsune are absolutely terrible spirits to have occupying a shrine because, as is well known, foxes have no sense of right and wrong. If a girl comes to one and says that her beloved is married to another the fox will have no compunctions about ruining that relationship and ensuring that you are there to pick up the pieces - and then the next day she'll introduce herself to the betrayed party and offer a bargain special on vengeance. It'll keep going until the town tears itself apart while the fox rakes up the offerings.

That red string, in the end, leads back to a glittering red and onyx box that the fox is toying with. She's lying flat on the fallen stone pillar, having quite impressively contorted her body so that flows like liquid into all the spaces around the lizard king. The lizard is giving her a look that is letting her know that she has walked exactly up to the line of getting bitten, and she's waving her tails in a way that says she knows exactly where that line is.

"I am so glad to meet a girl who understands how to treat a fox," said the kitsune, and oh wow she's pretty. Fox magic pretty is the kind of thing to risk a little disaster for, isn't it? Bright teal eyes and white hair that fades to black over the last quarter of its length, a pattern mirrored on her tails. But despite the embarrassment from being seen in this state she doesn't bat an eye at you - and perhaps you're lucky she doesn't. There are plenty of stories of absent minded foxes forgetting humans wear clothes and attempting to infiltrate towns while naked, and your state is perhaps contributing to a future faux pas. "I think that you'd be able to treat a girlfriend really well too. I can help with that! Ooh, maybe you want that fox to be your girlfriend? Is that your wish?"

Those twin tails wag with the hypnotic eagerness of someone who has done absolutely zero contemplation of the ramifications of wishes.

Breathless Dead

Vasilia!

Galnius looks at you with flat boredom. You don't get the impression that they're the type to start fights - these are soldiers from Tellus, practically ceremonial, who spend all their time training, patrolling and polishing the buttons on their uniforms. Diplomatic honour guard work is their military occupational speciality and you'll have no problems from them here.

Princess Epistia, however, reacts exactly as your glare merits - an embarrassed blush and an attempt to hide her enormous warscythe behind her back. She will be trouble, as only a wilful and naive runaway can be. Isn't it great you have two of those? At least Redana seems to have cleaned up a lot better. Epistia looks like a lost farmer.

"I concur with the Captain," buzzed Iskarot. "Claim hospitality and they will respect it. Respect their customs and you will have access even amidst their halls of power. Insult them not, for the only law here is theirs. Tempt them not, for they are acquisitive. Accept no gifts under any circumstances. A favourite negotiating tactic of Magos Birmingham is to lavish people with spectacular gifts, wowing them into speechlessness right up until the point where it comes out that he is taking their ship in exchange. Neither can you decline too firmly for he may feign anger. I believe, hmm, the cook servitor will be more familiar with this manner of polite non-committal rejection than I am. And on that note, I would like to volunteer for the ground mission. I am unconvinced of my ability to remain covert in Birmingham's presence."

Bella!

"Empress Nero was huge into pants ten years ago," said Mynx. "You remember? White and black tuxes, with falsefabric so that the colour inverts depending on the lighting and shadows. Looks like these hicks finally caught up with that fad - dim the lights, see if the colour flips."

She's very distinctly not flirting right now. She's playing it cool and normal but that itself is a tell - Mynx flirts to assert social control, and the fact that she's not doing that means she's in way over her head right now. She's never been good at maintaining sassiness after you've actually put your hands on her.

"Hey, uh, so you know how the Diodekoi Adept got out during the fight?" This again? "I'm just wondering, you know. Do you think one of the Lanterns woke it up? You hang out with them, has your Auspex seen any hidden Artemis tattoos or anything?"

Mynx has been on this for like a week now and this is her dumbest theory yet. No, the ship's serviles didn't put in the activation codes for one of the Empress' army-slaying assassins. That walking cathedral just walked out through the big hole in the side of its cell and destroyed five Plovers - almost half the enemy boarding force - by itself in arguably the most straightfowards case of self defense in the galaxy. Other than the wardrobe upgrade, that live fire proof of how unstoppable your assassin is was the best thing to come from that stupid encounter. And Mynx just can't seem to chill out and take the win.

Sunshards

Yue!

If one has to be lost, one could choose worse places than the Sunwood.

Tall trees form a leaky rooftop; here and there in the gaps between mighty branches fall little rays and puddles of sunlight. The grass is thick and soft and mossy beneath your feet, cool and slippery, damp with dew and bright with tiny star-flowers. From branches hang heavy bundles of apples amidst the wysteria, and as much of the fruit is on the ground as it is on the branches. As you watch a large and glittering silver cockatoo with a bright red crest plucks a branch, takes a single bite of a apple, and then tosses the rest of it on the floor in an act of ludicrous wastefulness. He raises his crest in defiance when you look at him and screeches a song too hideous for a mother to love.

Upon the ground scuttle lizards. They nap in piles of a dozen or more in the puddles of sunlight leaking through the canopy, only scuttling away when footsteps come too close to them, or when they need to venture into the shade to take nibbling bites of the fallen apples. Every so often fragments of crafted marble can be found in the forest - fallen pillars, the moss-grown heads of statues, and where one of these touches sunlight the mightiest lizard kings can be found, towering a grand thirty centimeters above their tiny cousins, crowned with sulfur crests, basking in the radiant luxury of sun-warmed stone.

This is a long way from home, Yue. It's a long way from rescue. But you're not in danger here. You're amidst the woods with the music and motion of nature at harvest time all about you. You have blackberries and apples and even the odd pomegranate to pick from. But as for water...

You can hear the sound of running water in the distance, but that is never a thing to approach incautiously.

Fellowship: The Heart

Ailee is different now.

See all she has done with the mere words of King Dragon, found engraved on dusty opal in the venerable heart of the Bransmuth? How powerful her Words were when the idea of Vice was pure theory? She was mighty then, but now she has seen the face of her dark master and now she truly understands what it means to wield the power of the Heart.

There is no hiding it. She burned away her good coat when she tried to put it on. No matter, a flick of Pride and she made a cloak of emerald set with peacock eyes. A whisper of Impatience reaching for her glasses in the morning and her eyes were sharp as razors, but a shrug of Waste and the glass burned into startlingly fashionable sunglasses. And now she gazes upon the Carnival with the dark spirit of Judgement looming over her in all its immensity, a column of unbreakable contempt for those who came so close to those who have come so close to true power and settled for mere immortality. The Heart awaits! Evil awaits! And here you pitched your tents!?

The songbird upon her shoulder trembles with each shiver of terrifying energy that runs through her. Fear is sufficient to keep even a bird from the sky. It seems that men and clowns are no better.

"Fine," she snaps, so harsh and cold and uncharacteristically devoid of prolonged insulting commentary. Fine, she would go to the heart of this place too. Perhaps they, too, would need to burn.

Breathless Dead

The Plousios

The sheer scale of the Yakanov's operations are staggering. This ship alone has given this primitive world the orbital operations of an industrialized spaceport. Swarms of wardiscs flow to every corner of the system, massive macro-conveyors lower mining equipment to the surface and return bearing cargo holds filled with water, ore, and other treasures. The Yakanov itself is a glowing furnace of power, three Reactors linked together to power enormous manufacturing systems, the ship almost a spaceport. This is, of course, nothing compared to the Armada in terms of scale, but in co-ordination it is genuinely shocking. As befits the faithful of the Messenger God the speed and precision of every element at work here is spectacular. To someone who grew up on Tellus, only seeing the Order of Hermes as air conditioner repairmen, barely above the equipment they worked on, to think of them as capable of this kind of spectacular military might is almost unimaginable. It would be like discovering that the nation of mice had their own nuclear deterrent.

Pity Ridenki, and the pity the Alced, with their little wooden boats.

"See there?" Iskarot said to Princess Redana, pointing at a huge crystal spire emerging from the heart of the Yakanov. "That is the Regret Cannon, one of Hermes' great relics. It can destroy time itself when fired, trapping an entire ship - or an entire city - in visions of the past, leaving them helpless. We are blessed to witness it."

Though Iskarot may have bought you here to defeat his rival within the Order, even he can't keep the awe from his voice at seeing that gleaming weapon. Proof manifest of his God's might and presence in the mortal realm. It took him a moment to rouse himself to speak again.

"The Order is here in force, but do not think of them as unified, and do not think of them as heartless," said Iskarot. "Above all, each of them, from the lowest Apprentice to the most deadly Coherent is driven by curiosity. It is the one factor selected for in all our recruitment. No matter how they appear, approach them with knowledge in one hand and you approach them as an avatar of Hermes Zeus-Daughter and they will treat you fairly. These are priests who happen to be capable of war, not soldiers in service to priests."

The Anemoi!

Mynx has been weird.

You know her well enough to know what this is - this is her bodyguarding mode. She's been sticking to you like glue wherever you go in the ship and blithely ignores any sort of polite or even impolite invitations to buzz off. It takes physically shoving out the door to stop her standing and watching you sleep all night, and even then she'll just stand right outside with her ear pressed to the door right until the moment she hears you yawn first thing in the morning and then she'll come right back in.

It might at least be forgivable if she was guarding you against something specific. So far all she's been able to say is "Something feels wrong."

So that's the context for the moment when she walks in to your room not five seconds after your eyes first woke up in the morning, beaming brightly and carrying a plate with coffee and breakfast. "Good morning, Bella~!" she chirps in the voice of someone who literally has no idea what it's like to be tired. "Are you all right? Any soreness, mosquito bites, strange tastes in the back of your mouth? Maybe I should bite you with my antitoxin just to be sure -"

Breathless Dead

They sing as they march across alien sands. "Follow, follow, follow the Path!"

The voices involved are as different as the drums are from the clarinet. Some are synthetic, some are not, some might have once been human and others are definitely alien. But this diverse group has spent a great many years singing marching songs together and, as the clarinet can learn to compliment the drums, so have their voices merged into one glorious harmony. "Follow, follow, follow the Path!"

And it is glorious! It booms out, loud and unambigous, across the beaches, rising above the waves, all the way to the tropical rainforest where it spooks the parrots to silence. As the voices ring out so too do the Coherent of the Order of Hermes stand out dramatically. They do not wear the full brilliant yellow of a true magi - they wear heavy black capes, traced with lines of yellow, and they do not conceal themselves. They wear their augmentations openly, brazenly - bodies furred and smooth and scaled, armoured in black and bronze, synthesis of mechanical genius and organic perfection and as diverse as the stars themselves. Magi regard their bodies as secret, their augmentations hidden knowledge, their bodies private things - not so the martial arm of the Order! They are proud of the shapes that they have made for themselves, their bodies works of art to please themselves and the gods! "Through the storm, follow the Path!"

Each Coherent drags behind her a cable, wrist-thick, leathery and slippery. They trace their ways back and up to an tripod walker the size of a main battle tank, all the more resplendent in its glorious carved beauty for the thick black smoke that pours from it - and the cleaning such a sooty construction must require. Between its three legs hangs a great banner depicting a Coherent warrior gripping a burning moon with one hand and raising her scepter above its head, like a pharaoh of ancient Egypt about to crush an enemy's skull. This machine is a mobile chemical reactor (MCR), condensed Reactor-stuff that allows the Hermetic warriors tethered to it to fire their awesome weaponry. "To the truth, follow the Path!"

"Follow the Path!" the refrain roar comes from behind.

Thousands of voices. These Coherent are not alone - they are merely the vanguard of a much larger force. Hundreds of tripod MCRs, each cabled to eight Coherent warriors like the tentacles of an octopus. Above the army looms three massive War Daises, the mobile operations centres for powerful Hermatic magi and their apprentices. These huge platforms swarm with yellow-cloaked figures and extend mighty robotic arms to take samples from trees, to adjust settings on the MCRs, to even tweak the crystals of the esoteric weapons carried by the Coherent warriors as they march. Atop each War Dias stands a Choirmaster, paragons in black and yellow hazard stripes, Magi of the Order who study the secrets Hermes hid within war itself. "To the end, follow the Path!"

A shadow passes over the sun, for all this in all this glory is but the least fragment of the Order of Hermes. Behind the advancing column soars a great wing of disc-shaped atmospheric shuttlecraft, screaming across the heavens and leaving contrails like bars in the sky. And behind them, silhouetted in solar glory, looming as large in the sky as the gas giant that the planet Ridenki is a moon of, comes the Yakanov. The Galleon Hermetic looms in the sky, engines burning bright, the ultimate expression of the Saffron God's might. "To the end, follow, follow, follow the Path!"

What is a mere planet in comparison?

Sunshards

For a moment Princess Yin does not look pretty at all. Beauty is as much a thing of the heart as the face, and no amount of radiance could turn that flash of anger into something admirable.

It lingers on her, half suppressed, buried underneath a face that quickly re-adopts its calm and radiant expression. Not because she has control of the feeling, oh no, quite the opposite - she is merely thinking through the very best way to inflict punishment.

"You," said Princess Yin, at last drawing her long and glorious fencing rapier, "are going to wish you didn't choose the hard way."

"Princess Yin! Princess Yin! Silent screams above the din!"

As the world hesitates on that screeching orchestral chord, the moment before your very first fight - a crash echoes through the clearing. Two trees fall to either side causing the darkness to recoil - although what replaces it is not much better.

A demon enters the clearing - tall and mighty and muzzled, a two-handed katana held casually over one shoulder, smouldering with hellfire. She is a demon swordswoman whose kimono sleeves were torn off to make more room for her muscles, and what remains of the garment seems one solid flex away from bursting entire. Her skin is tattooed with ten thousand fencing diagrams, the sword-bearing stick-figures seeming to move and clash as the tattoos rotate in spiralling patterns up her arms. Beat, beat, beat. Behold, the Secrets of the Stance.

Behind her comes a figure from legend, a creature depicted on ancient statues and with the classical beauty of those forgotten times. Glowing golden horns and eyes the same, hypnotic enough to lull a mouse to walk willingly into her jaws. Her long serpentine tail flicks with that same beat, scales of lapis lazuli and the occasional gold gorgeous enough to draw attention away from the fact that she's soaking wet. Well, demons usually are, aren't they? These creatures are here from the river, hunting for one soul in particular, and the grin on the face of the Scales of Meaning lets you know that it is you.

Princess Yin steps back and her shadows cluster close around her, blade held ready for a fight. As the faces of evil look to engage you feel gentle teeth brush against your ankle. Hyra, trapped in the form of a wolf, is telling you that it is time to run.