Day of Landfall.
It had been late in the season to travel the high seas. Only
fools or the desperate would dare so in such wild weather, and desperate fools they
were. If there had been any other place for them to find refuge in this southernmost
reaches of the Holy Simolic Empire they would have holed up there and waited out the season, until the winter's fury was over and brought the spring, calmer seas and a safer journey for them to return home on . Alas these poor souls did not have that luxury. After the brutal
ransacking and destruction of the Abbey there had been no place where Goddess
fearing men and women could seek shelter in this corner of the world overrun by
faithless Heretics. Indeed there was nothing left to stay for. The Abbey had
been destroyed completely. Everything of worth had been looted, everything else
had been obliterated. The monks had all been mercilessly slaughtered, as had
the nuns after they had been viciously defiled. The company of Holy Knights that
had came to the Abbey’s call for aid had been outmatched and outnumbered, their
corpses now feed the only inhabitants left in that razed ruin, the crows. The
only survivors of this bleak tragedy had been the five fair maidens, novices of
the Abbey, who had managed to elude the attackers by hiding in a small antechamber
hidden amongst the crypts as the looters plundered, raped and murdered all around
them. It was three days later when thirst drove them from their secret refuge
to witness the horrid aftermath of that disaster. Amongst the corpses that
littered the halls and grounds they could only find five other survivors, all
of them Holy Knights who had been struck down and left for dead during the fierce
battle. It was only by the grace of the Goddess that the ransackers had not
discovered them and finished them off as they had done so to their comrades. The
maidens tended to the young knights wounds and after gathering what meagre supplies
they could they had all made their way to the nearest port and to their way home, far
across the sea, to the Capital and the heart of the Empire. With winter fast
approaching it was a mad gamble, but they hadn’t the gold or the resources to stay
out the winter and wait for spring, they barely had enough to pay for the
passage as it was. So the ten brave souls boarded the last vessel to leave the
port headed for home and prayed to the Goddess that they would survive their journey.
As we all well know the Goddess does not always answers our
prayers as we intended her to. Sometimes she has her own plans in mind.
The winds had howled and the waves had thrashed, and the
vessel and it’s poor occupants had been led far off course into the wide unknown
by the wild and errant current. After many weeks under this relentless
onslaught the vessel surrendered itself to nature’s fury and sunk beneath the
waves. Some of the crew and passengers managed to escape the ship’s fate aboard
the handful of rafts that had been onboard, but they quickly all got separated
in this wild and turbulent weather. For many days one of these rafts was tossed
upon the seas before it was finally broken apart leaving it’s ten occupants adrift,
until they too were finally washed ashore. When our ten awoke they found themselves
in a beautiful and verdant uninhabited land, a land they came to call…..
Viridis
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