Where: The Valley of Lost Bearings, on a rock outcrop among the dunes, on the last leg toward the dusk
Seen: Session 3 Recap - Three to the Dusk
A company of soldiers under torn black banners, camped on a rock that the purple worm won’t cross. Their armour was caked with sand and grit and cut in a style none of the party had seen. Some wore bangles on their arms and seashell necklaces. They spoke Common in an odd, old-sounding accent. They shouted the party up onto the rock, out of the worm’s path, and shared their food.
- Who they serve: the Black Queen, who likes to call herself the Obsidian Empress. Their first question was which sibling do you fight for?
- Their orders: to cross the Divine Desert and cut off the Red Prince’s forces.
- Their last news from home: the king and queen had just perished, the war between the siblings had begun, and the Black Queen meant to take Godshome. The party took this to mean the Sibling Wars, millennia ago.
- How long: it seems like forever. None of them could say which way they had come from. They had lost soldiers to a spider, and half their number to the worm. Those who left the rock didn’t come back.
- Their sorceress: a woman in black with a staff. She knows little of time magic and laughed at Thalan’s suggestion that the party came from their future. She found the party’s rations delicious. The soldiers’ own food turned to sand in the party’s mouths.
- Their supplies included potion bottles from Lucia’s family’s house of glass, made in the days of its founder, Orbonne Tagliapietra.
- The cheesemaker: the soldier who caught Lucia. He showed her a painting of his children, so old it crumbled to dust in his hand. Then he sat down and turned to sand, and the rest followed him one by one.
- What was left: a camp a thousand years dead. Bones, rusted armour, spoiled food, shattered vials, and a rotted coffer of about fifty gold, stamped with the face of a stern queen.
- Thalan’s sense for the holy and unholy found nothing celestial, fiendish or undead among them, only strange, unnatural energies.