4/11/2023 0 Comments Darkstone hammer eldest soulsEach tree seemed hung with fabulous jewels. She did not mind that chilliest of seasons, but fall was her favorite. Soon the season of storms would be upon them, and then the crystal purity of winter. Beyond the tops of the palace walls, gray clouds poured across the sky. Sharadza had been distracted by the varicolored leaves blown upon the wind. Doomed is the ship that ventures across the waves while these two deities are in dispute.” The old man turned his head to better meet the eyes of the Princess. But still sometimes the Sky and Sea fight one another, and these battles Men call hurricanes. “So the God of the Sky had no choice but to recognize the Sea God as his equal. She sat on a stone bench as the old man finished his tale. The faintest breath of winter blew on the wind today. The sun shone brightly through the turning leaves, but had lost its heat. Here, beneath trees grown safely within the palace grounds, she got a taste of those wild autumn colors, but in her heart she longed to walk among the colossal Uyga trees once again. She was not permitted to exit the gates of New Udurum, not without the escort of her father, and he had not taken her into the forest since last season. All the colors of the rainbow revealed themselves in this miniature version of the deep forest beyond the city walls. The leaves had turned from green to orange and red the rest of the courtyard’s lush foliage was following suit. Sharadza sat beneath the spreading arms of a great oak, listening to the Storyteller. A cadre of servants ran along the gigantic corridors of the palace in search of Vod’s offspring. “Bring them all before me,” he told Fangodrim. When the chill of early fall began to invade the warmth of late summer, Vod called for his children. But even he knew that Vod’s rule sat in peril. His uncle, the Giant called Fangodrim the Gray, tried to quell the fears of the court as best he could. Both Men and Giants feared his dissolution as an effective monarch. When Vod began ignoring his royal duties, his court began to grumble. She took after Queen Shaira, almost a mirror image of her mother, yet in her fifteenth year was already as tall as her brothers. His daughter, youngest of the brood, was named Sharadza. These were Tadarus and Vireon, whom many called his “true sons”. His second and third sons likewise stood no taller than average Men, but they carried the strength of Giants in their modest frames, and their skins were the color of tempered bronze. His first son Fangodrel was pale of skin, with sable hair and the anguished soul of a poet. The children of King Vod and Queen Shaira were neither Giant nor human, but a new breed all their own. Now, twenty-five years after he forged a path through the mountains and began the reconstruction of New Udurum, his children were grown and he felt the call of an old curse. ![]() He slew Omagh the Serpent-Father and rebuilt the fallen city of Giantkind. He was born as a Giant, grew into a sorcerer, and became a man to marry a human girl. Vod himself was both Man and Giant, and therefore the city’s perfect monarch. The power of King Vod had fostered an era of peace between the two races for almost three decades. Udurum was a city of both Men and Giants. At first he hid the madness from his Queen, his children, and his subjects, but eventually he could no longer steady his shaking hands or hold the gaze of his advisors during council. It did not fall upon him like a flood, but grew like a creeping fungus in the hollows of his mind. ![]() In the twenty-sixth year of his reign madness came to the King of New Udurum.
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