Legends

Future games in the World in Sunder series on Storium.

In Velvet

(Summer, 1951)

“I fear no blade above the one veiled in velvet.”

An aphorism attributed to Aluro Hlal, merchant prince of Clath Slye

during the reign of King Candac Bright-Blade.

Folk belief connects Hlal’s gruesome murder –

nailed to his own bed with ten velvet-handled knives –

with Candac’s abdication that same year.

The land of Ril Dyara lies shattered.

After decades of wanton, imperialist kings and ill-starred wars with the peaceable realms of the south,

the once-prosperous kingdom burned under the torches of two opposing forces:

the royalist Halberds, loyal to the throne,

and the rebel Pikestaffs, who sought the overthrow of the war-mongering monarchy.

The civil war ended with the capture of the last king –

Aderelan Un-Crowned, unmasked and taken into Pikestaff custody

while journeying in disguise to the capital to take up his new-elected office.

By this unexpected coup the rebels forced the royalists to a decisive defeat at the negotiating table,

lighting at last the flame of enlightened rule in the historically monarchic nation.

But as with all wars throughout history, the last salute of one

only heralds the first horn-call of another.

Ril Dyara’s great capital, Mai Dyr, stands tall amid a drawing darkness.

As postbellum tumult sweeps the realm, monsters rise from the ivory-dappled shadows of the City of Triumph –

the many heads of a beast whose coils hold peasant and noble alike in the grip of fear and suspicion,

whose velvet-gloved hands drip gold and blood upon the strings of a kingdom’s heart.

The kings are gone. Their time has come.

None remain before their ascension to the halls of power.

None, that is, yet worthy of their malefic eye.

For such is destiny, that where there are monsters there will always be men:

a few driven souls, shadows under the noonday sun, who in this troubled time

will leave behind all they have ever known to attempt the impossible…

…to infiltrate Ril Dyara’s oldest conspiracy, and bring down the Velvet Court forever.

In Chains

(Winter, 1870)

“What says it, that so few in silk are fed by so many in chains?”

The sage Aldoon, censuring the Ril Dyaran practice of penal labor on the Evergreen Isles

in one of his early discourses at the University in Mai Dyr, circa 1825.

Fragmented historical accounts indicate the legend of Chainlink also originated from this time.

The Evergreen Isles. A bleak, misnamed vision off Ril Dyara’s northwestern coast,

and the gods’ earthly strongbox; home to an inexhaustible bounty of the earth

that has funded centuries of war and peace alike in the Ever Triumphant Realm.

Gods, like men, do not easily relinquish their wealth.

And so it falls, as it always has, to criminals to crack the locks –

victims of justice blind and crooked alike,

condemned to drudgery until an end comes of them or their sentence.

Escape is a fool’s dream.

Legionaries blooded in the Leikonsir Expeditions patrol the shores. The waters between them

and Ril Dyara’s untamed northern coast, the one safe harbor in all the realm for an Isles fugitive,

churn with deadly currents and the fear of nameless things beneath.

Yet it has always been the nature of some among man to seek the one flower in the wastes.

An old prison legend tells of a place across the churning waters –

deep in the haunted Coarsewood, from which few Ril Dyarans have emerged alive.

A haven, founded by the first to escape the Evergreen Isles. A prisoners’ paradise,

where men and women live untroubled by a world that cast them out.

A fool’s dream.

To all, that is, but four of the Isles’ hapless burglars. Four condemned souls among many…

…who will risk all for freedom, a second chance, and the truth behind a legend.

In Darkness

(Spring, 325)

“Ril Dyara rose upon triumph… with roots deep in darkness.”

The sage Aldoon in his famous discourse on the Age of Colonization,

first delivered in 1833 at the University in Mai Dyr.

It was only after his death that scholars realized its true meaning:

a condemnation of the extinction wrought by the ancient Great Hunts.

In a time long before nations and flags, before the torches of civilization even burned across the world,

great serpents ruled the skies and nameless things haunted the woods and waters.

But where there are monsters, there will always be men.

Three centuries and more after the rise of the kingdom of man, the Great Hunts are all but done.

From behind the walls of First Haven armies have gone forth, and with mighty constructs of fire and iron

laid low the leviathans of the young earth.

In the deserts that will someday mold the ancestors of Khorvhairya,

the winds bury the shattered remains of giants of sand and stone.

The land that will come to be verdant Leikonsir is a desolation,

rotting beneath the carcasses of a thousand cloven-hooved horrors.

Light has pierced the darkness of a savage world. The age of man has come.

But not yet to the land destined to be the Ever Triumphant Realm of Ril Dyara.

For here be the kings of beasts, first among the ancient world’s predators –

the dragon.

Already hundreds of the great wyrms lie dead across the world,

their wings sundered, their fire quenched.

Now an eclectic and hard-bitten force crosses the mountains north into the land of dragons’ lairs:

survivors of past crossings, veterans of hunts from distant lands, seekers in search of dragon-lore.

With them go the mightiest weapons the craft-masters of First Haven have ever wrought.

Before them go a chosen few, tasked to find prey in a silent land.

Their mandate is simple…

…lure the last of the dragons from its lair, and become the last of the Great Hunts.