Far From Home

     He hit the ground with a loud grunt. Growling deep in his throat, Ragnoth pushed himself to his feet as his opponent tried to collect her breath. Tightening his grip on his polearm, Ragnoth rushed at the woman that had attacked him with the rest of the bandits she was with. Was.

     Out of a small group of three bandits, only the woman was left. That is not to say that they died easily. Ragnoth, their intended prey, was badly injured. Cuts covered his arms, one over his left eye effectively left him blind in that eye, three teeth had been knocked out of his mouth, his chest would be a mass of bruises in the morning, and from the feel of it at least one rib was cracked if not broken.

     The bandit woman raised her shield to intercept the point of Ragnoth’s war-scythe. Shifting his grip, Ragnoth changed the angle of his attack. Instead of striking at her chest, he targeted her legs. The tip of his blade bit deeply into muscle and nicked bone, causing a veritable fountain of blood to weep from the wound.

     Dropping to the ground with a scream of agony, the bandit woman tried in vain to staunch the blood seeping from her thigh. With a glare, Ragnoth pushed himself upright and wiped off the blood from his scythe using the tunic of the crying, panicking woman.

     “You thought three were enough to kill me. You were wrong,” Ragnoth growled at the soon to be dead woman as he hobbled further down the road; from the way his hip flared in pain with each step he must have twisted it one of the times that he was knocked down.

     If there was one thing that Ragnoth was good at, it was getting up when he was knocked down. He’d been doing it his entire life. First in the ring against his full blood peers, and then amongst the lowlanders in the southern lands.

     Admittedly, he thought to himself, not all the lowlanders were soft. The alfar Jadra is lethal with that curved blade of hers, and her mixed blood companion utilized a shield like it was a part of his body.

     The half-orc had encountered the two travelers on a road much like the one he hobbled down, nearly a year ago. He had been newly arrived in the Green Coast, having stowed away on a ship leaving Eszath for Argoport, and happened upon the camp that the elf and half-elf had made shortly after dark.

     The two companions offered to share their campfire, an offer which Ragnoth could scarcely refuse. Offering to share the tubers and root vegetables that they had scavenged, he in turn offered to share the brace of rabbits that he had shot just before stumbling upon their camp.

     While normally using one of his clan’s war bows would be deemed excessive to hunt rabbits, it was the only means of hunting the speedy animals. When he explained this to his dinner companions as the half-elven man stirred the meat and vegetables into a stew, Jadra asked to see his clan’s war bow.

     After carefully handing the bow to her, Jadra almost immediately concluded that the draw weight was impractically heavy for more than exceptional individuals. She was barely able to pull the arms close enough together to string the bow, and while she had the strength to draw the string back, her arm shook and her fingers were numb after releasing the string.

     Ragnoth decided not to tell her that he sometimes had difficulty with the draw weight himself. He did tell her that amongst the orcs in Sylvanor, being able to string and draw back the bow is a common, widespread rite of passage for both men and women. You were considered a child until you had the strength to make use of the bow. You weren’t considered an adult until you killed something like a bear or a caribou on a hunt with it.

     Shaking his head to chase away the memories, Ragnoth squinted his eyes to try to get a better look at the building off in the distance. It was getting late and he needed a place to either stay or camp for the night. It looked to be a farmhouse, so he could probably trade manual labor for a roof over his head while he slept. A plan in mind, Ragnoth picked up his pace to the farmhouse.

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From the Journals of Algren Twinbraid

My name is Professor Algren Twinbraid, a researcher and archaeologist from the University of History in Eszath. I do not know if anyone on the surface will ever read these entries, but I still feel the necessity of recording my thoughts and experiences.

Cosmology: The River of Dreams

By far the largest of the planes, some scholars feel that it belongs within a separate category, for it defies most attempts at fitting the definition of a plane of existence. No creatures summoned from it can describe it to researchers, so scholars are forced to extrapolate what they can from the bits and pieces that ancient texts describe and the rigors of conjuring its inhabitants.

     Like all planes, there are creatures that call it home. The most well-known are the water elementals, entities composed entirely of the stuff of the plane. Unlike the other planes, very few permanent settlements exist. These settlements act as neutral grounds between the inhabitants of the planes of Urzalak and Yinnola. On rare occasions, the largest of these settlements see fiery visitors from Zarth’s corpse on some mission that takes them away from their home. Some scholars theorize that the nature of the River prevent any such settlements from forming, the River reflects the minds that inhabit it after-all. Despite this malleability, or perhaps because of it, the River follows no consistent logic outside of the more stable settlements.

An Introduction to the Planes

Pay attention apprentice, today we will begin your studies into the Art of Conjuration. No, you will not be summoning an Archdevil or a Solar, though I understand the excitement. My master Tobias caught me sneaking into the Summoning Chamber more than once. Oh the lectures I received.

     I digress, we will begin with an overview of the planes of existence. Seeing as how I recruited you from a farming village, I would assume that you are not familiar with the term? Calm yourself apprentice, that was not an insult. Allow me to fill you in on a secret: I was raised born to a blacksmith. I understand entering a world so different than what you are used to.