Meanwhile (1)

Meanwhile...
Larshin breathed in deeply. It was colder than he had counted upon, but it had worked. He stood up for the first time in over a decade. His legs responded powerfully, like they used to before that hateful day in Jerdun when he had lost too much to contemplate. He could walk again. The crystal in his hand tinkled into a fine dust of sparkly shards. Its task was done. There was no going back now. The smirking yeti-girl handed him a rough felt robe with elaborate bead work at the chest and shoulders. He tried to thank her but she made the gesture for silence so he kept his peace. There would be plenty of time later to thank her for helping him make the transition to her world. It felt good to be whole again, to feel the blood rushing through all of his functional and intact limbs. He felt giddy, like a young schoolboy on the first day of holiday. He noticed his host, his guide, the yeti-girl motioning for him to follow her out of the cave into the sunlight and fresh air. He never felt the noose as it dropped over his head from above the cave mouth as the Yeren yanked him off his feet...

---

Don't forget that Bujilli is currently in a dark place and we could use your help to determine all sorts of things, including just what might be prowling around for him and Leeja to encounter...

Episode 137 (Rapunzel Overdrive)
Random Encounter Table: In A Dark Place

The Night Mail in Wermspittle

Yorim Balthome is the Post Master General in Wermspittle. The office has been in his family for over two dozen generations, not because of any lingering prestige that might still cling to the title, but more from a profound sense of inertia. There just is not a lot of mail to deliver any more. Not since the last couple of wars disrupted everything that the plagues, pestilences and poxes didn't muck-up first.

By ancient edict, dating back to the Founders, all postal deliveries in Wermspittle are to be made only under cover of darkness. The mail can only be delivered at night.

Likewise, by the same edict, Post Boxes can be mounted just outside any window, at any height, on any floor. To this day one may find Post Boxes nailed firmly into place outside sixth-story windows, leaning precariously from underneath the shutters of attics, jutting lopsidedly from wrought-iron balconies, poking through the blinds of garrets or otherwise secret cells unreachable from inside the buildings they occupy like cysts; even the tall, tall turrets of the ramshackle palaces of long-fled foreign merchant-princesses sport once gaily-painted, even richly sculpted post boxes sticking out from the upper floors like some sort of architectural rash.

Hundreds of years have come and gone, leaving crusty scars and badly-patched bullet holes in their wake, but the Postal Service still endures in Wermspittle. After a fashion. In a kind of half-life.

The airships don't come here any more. Few caravans come to Wermspittle, those that know the way or have made their own maps, and never ever in Winter. The options for getting something sent out from here tend to be slim to non-existent, but the Mail Carriers do their best. Each Autumn riders are sent out in the five directions, one for each of the primary old routes including the Cold Roads. Few, if any ever return. Even fewer come back with replies, parcels or correspondence from elsewhere. But it has happened.

The riders are something of a seasonal rite. A traditional observance. A hold-over from the Old Days before the Military Governor appointed over Occupied Wermspittle by the Franzik Empress Matrimundi more than five hundred years ago instituted a system for the apportational transmission of small parcels, letters and missives. Those systems were smashed by the Anti-Franziker Contra-militants during the so-called Last Uprising (which it wasn't). Over the years each Post Master has attempted to realign, repair and revive the mechanisms ruined by the clog-wearing hypocrites who decried all such forms of 'oppressionist sorcery' until they realized they too could starve like everyone else come Winter. But alas, it remains an unreliable thing on a good day, and there are scant few good days in a place such as this.

Pigeons once threatened to cut into the number of deliveries entrusted to the Postal Service. But that was before the Midwives' Rebellion, and only a fool trusts a bird to deliver a message in the midst of so many starving people. No one takes such things seriously any more.

Ancient, harrowed and hallowed by accumulated experience and the sheer perverse miracle of having survived into the current age, the Postal Service endures, abides, carries on as best it can. For over four hundred years the rates have remained set at one silver coin, as per the old edict...though everyone knows that in the early days a particular denomination of currency was specified, all traces of those details have been expunged and casually disregarded. Any silver coin will do, even a token. It's not about the money. It's about the ritual.

Each night what parcels, packages or pouches have been entrusted to the care and keeping of these stalwart souls go out under cover of darkness, into the night. There are only six or seven certified Mail Carriers left now, besides the Post Master General and his immediate family. They are a dying breed, say some. A thing of the past. But until something better comes along to replace them, most probably by force, the mail, such as it is, still gets delivered each night in Wermspittle.

One after another the fearless Mail Carriers strap into their harnesses, cinch-up their triply-buckled bags and float gracefully, silently out from the Post Master's Tower. Each one in charge of a licensed and bonded flock of highly trained crows, jackdaws and magpies. Each one dangling from beneath a personal aerostat of ancient design. Each one more extensively re-re-re-built and cobbled back together from the remains of defunct aerostats no longer reliably airworthy, no longer suited for continued service.

Yorim Balthome watches over Wermspittle from his decrepit tower, the tower of his family, of his ancestors, and he worries about what will become of the Postal Service once they run out of parts to repair their aerostats...

Strange Places: Low Marshes

Down along the Ertish river, on the Western side, before the great, dark woods swallow everything up beneath their dark, brooding branches, there are the Low Marshes. In the Spring, great clouds of passenger pigeons return from their migration. Every hand that can raise a net, throw a stick or use a bucket-gonne descends into the Low Marshes to reap the desperately needed bounty that flies in from all the different Souths each year.

In the Summer these wetlands are steamy, sultry and rife with clouds of swarming pests. Usually only leech-peddlers seeking to profit from the medical trades (who buy large quantities of nearly every kind of leech) and the worst of the fisherfolk can be found here in the hot times.

Fog-shrouded and treacherous through most of the Autumn, hunters prowl the Low Marshes seeking after waterfowl mostly. The flocks are plentiful for a few weeks. Before Winter falls like a headsman's axe and the waterways freeze-over. A few hunters attempt to go after larger game. Roebucks, Red Bears, moose or elk, even the tuskers , if they're stupid or have a deathwish or they're truly desperate. The worst seek to trap other hunters. Some folks never lose their taste for long-pig, even in the softer seasons.

Through-out the cold, dark Winter; there is little here for the living. Those abandoned to the Low Marshes in the Dark Part of the year are rarely ever seen again. Those that are, probably shouldn't be. The old Goules hold macabre meetings out in the worst parts of the Low Marshes during the Bleak Solstice. Some say they conduct weird, dark rites, but none care to speculate within their hearing. Hungry things prowl the margins of the Low Marshes in the cold months. Things that frighten away the wolves.

The Midwives often recite the adage that 'No one goes down to these places without bad intent or worse reasons.'

For Example...

Butcherboys pass through the Low Marshes on their way to one of the many unmarked Ectobogs where they dump remains they'd prefer were never identified or found again. Fantomists have begun to make use of the supposedly secret by-ways of the Butcherboys, sparking yet more enmity between the groups. A bloody reckoning is in the offing, so warn the Butchers from their abbatoirs, killing floors and slaughter shops. Like Winter Itself, their wrath is inevitable and they will not abide the trespasses of the foreign sorcerers no matter how powerful they might think they are. The Butchers are the Chosen of the Cold Times. They wield terrible power in the dark. They are not afraid of the Fantomists who have flouted the Old Ways, either through arrogance or ignorance. There will be blood, trouble and worse, come the next Winter...

Bandits and river-raiders gather in the Low Marshes at the early onset of Autumn. They come to the sheltered coves and secret lagoons to barter ill-gotten loot, swap prisoners, trade information, choose new leaders. They've been coming here for too many generations to count. They do not welcome eaves-droppers or interlopers. They also leave before the cold winds begin in earnest, before the killing rains, while there is still color in the leaves.

Refugees who don't know any better sometimes get stuck out in the mud. Some get pulled ashore, for an added fee, others sink and are lost. Not a few of the 'guides' who accept foreign coin to direct these sorts of folk through the Low Marshes have made good money luring them to their deaths. The paths through the Low Marshes, such as they are, tend to be misleading to those not raised down along the fetid banks. Those who live down here keep it that way. Signs get shifted about at random. Tracks get filled-in with brush or redirected into the nastiest spots. The locals are a dour, taciturn lot. Even for Wermspittle. Unfriendly, even surly to strangers until paid to be otherwise. Then they're simply unreliable and treacherous. 

The Low Marshes are best avoided. So, of course, they aren't. If you know where to look, where to avoid, who to talk to and who not to speak to under any circumstance, you might be able to locate some buried treasure or chain-weighted trunk of sunken loot. Or maybe you'll just wind up feeding the flukes, the bog-werms or leeches...or some of the other things that lurk just below the scummed-over surface of these foul wet lands...

Abandoned By Reason (Wermspittle)

“Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.”

Francisco Goya

In Wermspittle it is said that 'Genius is but Madness, after a fashion.' They appreciate Madness in Wermspittle. They truly do. It has been a staple of their existence for as long back as anyone can remember, recall or recollect, even among the hierarchies of the dead and the spirits imprisoned within the most ancient reliquaries, ossuaries, and mausoleums.

Conventional wisdom broke down before it ever even reached this place; so say the Midwives.

It is considered bad luck to kill a lunatic at night.

Change, transformation and transgression circulate through Wermspittle like the smoke pouring off of the military crematoria used to clear out those of the Low Land villages, towns or enclaves where the plagues have done their worst. In these days when the dead rise to wage war, flesh melts into strange new forms under the influence of thinking diseases, and even immortals are not above the ravages of a terrible wasting that obeys no established rule or diagnosis; nothing is what it once seemed nor will any of it ever be again.

A Prodigy can be either a beautiful or a terrible thing, and often are a bit of both.

But in truth, nothing ever really was as it might have once seemed. The Past is as much fiction as the Future, only now the Present has caught-up with them both and we know them all to be ambiguous pluralities, overlapping and interpenetrating, like a bezoar caught in a Goddesses' throat. Like a bit of barbed-wire stuck in the craw of a fat magpie. A tumor metastasizing within the guts of a walking corpse. In a place so riddled with Weak Points, surrounded by the Cold Roads, where the Adjacent Worlds and Parallel Realms are imminent and accessible, no longer theories or abstractions...Time grows strange and the Unreal often has its own feelings about things.

Wermspittle was abandoned by reason, or else it was killed and eaten during one of the first Winters; so say the Butchers along the Low Streets.

Horrors are the warped reflections of Wonders and Marvels.

Plague victims are as often turned prophetic as monstrous by the horrid effects of contagions carried up from the Low Lands. Patients may be possessed, Unfortunates might still be vectors for fresh teratogenic effects or after-shocks. The Poxed are to be pitied because they lost all semblance to whatever humanity they might have once had long, long ago when their infections were still only diseases that might have been treated.

Once. Long ago. When it might still have mattered.

Dice play God with the Universe; so say the gamblers hiding in squalid cellars and filthy dens to avoid the Debt-Collectors and Catchpoles.

Ignorance proliferates wherever fear is catered to and not challenged.

Worst of times? Best of times? What does any of that matter when it is survival that occupies every waking thought, invades ones dreams and demands outrageous sacrifices, imposes terrible consequences and forces everyone into confronting decisions both horrific and unconscionable.

Evil flourishes in the absence of action on the part of those who know better.

What is, frankly, should not be. It cannot, should not persist, let alone endure. Flux, turmoil, transition--if ever there was a time for a determined few to make a very real difference...

Less than that... (Wermspittle)

Even the dead go armed in Wermspittle. Few are so foolish as to think themselves safe in a place as infested and squalid as this festering mass of ruins, heresies, and outcast remnants from a thousand decaying or extinct principalities. Damnation and revelation walk side-by-side through the rubble-strewn streets of Wermspittle, Beauty and Terror hold court within the burned-out shells of crumbling palaces, Genius and Madness dance wantonly across the ruins of places where no one dares go any more.

Wermspittle is a hot-bed of marvels, wonders and Prodigies both oracular and all too human in nature. Judgement has long ago come and passed, much like the white-hot irons of the Iron-Masked Inquisitors and the still-smoldering wrath of the Puritans who will never be free of their guilt, their fear, their lingering, poisonous doubts...no matter how many of the damned places they try to burn away under cover of the night. Their masters have already ridden off, leaving them behind in this accursed place, to rot and to die and to be reborn among the corruption for they have been found unworthy. Their prophets no longer speak to them, their scriptures are obliterated in blood and ashes, their gods no longer answer. But it is foolish to look to unforgiving gods for forgiveness.

Puritans and Dogmatists rage and hew and burn their way through the heavy patina of phantasmagoria and the elaborate detritus of uncounted dreams that have accumulated, coagulated, taken root or festered within the dark spaces and closed-off sections. They are ill-suited to navigating the in-roads and by-ways of a composite reality that is far too negotiable, all too malleable, changeable and inconstant. Where others once grew gardens, they now sow thorns and ashes. The Forking Paths and Cold Roads mock them in their exile, their fall from grace, their damnation that they would inflict upon others rather than face in the silence of the night.

The Patriarchs of the South once declared that the very Road to Hell is to be found in Wermspittle, but the particular Encyclical in which they condemned Wermspittle has been removed from circulation (in some cases by theft, in others by assassination), and only three known copies exist, all three in the hands of librarians or book-sellers in Wermspittle. In the case of the Puritans, Dogmatists and their ilk, perhaps the Patriarchs were far too prescient, all too accurate in their condemnation.

They came here, astride black-iron steeds in search of heresies and blasphemies they could scarcely imagine without sternly punishing themselves. They came to Wermspittle seeking to exact penitence and to scourge the darkness with flame, tongs and wrath-runed steel.

What the found was their own twisted visage, glaring hatefully back at them from out the depths of an abyss none of them dared suspect they truly served. No souls did they save. Not even their own.

But what else would one expect from a place kept off of decent maps and rendered officially unmentionable by covert decree within the Ecclesiastical States?

What indeed.

Strange Places: The Cold Roads (Vignette)

The scholars and students who huddle together in the fetid taverns and smoky tap-rooms and rathskellars of Wermspittle have a saying: 'What's fiction here, isn't necessarily fiction there.' Of course they tend to look at one all knowingly, as though this were one of the profoundest statements anyone could make, especially after imbibing lots of lager, black-stout and bitter with a shot of Dim Ichor. And they rarely bother to clarify what they mean by 'there,' but one is tempted to assume that is would be some place other than what qualifies as being 'here.' One might hope.

Down the mountain and across the main bridge over the Ertish River, past the terraced orchards full of twisted and gnarled apple trees and the burned-out ruins of what once was the village of Nebitesh you can pick up the main route North. Follow the North Road for about twelve miles or so and you'll eventually spot the remains of older, unkept and non-maintained side tracks. These old roads lay upon the stony soil like fossilized remnants of dead empires or forgotten conquerors. The land is thick with the things as you head farther North. But if you make your trip during the coldest part of winter, and you find yourself moving along as the sun is at the funny angle...well...then you'll be able to see the Cold Roads from where you're walking or riding along.

There has been plenty of fancy talk of 'temporal ambiguity,' and 'transplanar transitions' whatever that all actually means. The midwives just shrug and mumble vaguely obscene trivia concerning Weak Points and the dowsers are nearly all convinced that the Cold Roads don't 'really' exist. Unnatural Philosophers have written numerous manuscripts regarding their various theories, but most languish unpublished because none of them are truly quite sure if any of them are even close to being right...and it is a rare author who allows such niggling concerns as accuracy or factual-ness to get in the way of a way to cover their bar tab, at least for a while. There are as many theories as there are cellars and tunnels and crawlspaces in Wermspittle. Or worms. The place is crawling with more questions and mysteries than a gibbet-man has worms under their oily hides.

No one is really sure just what the Cold Roads actually are. But then no one really needs to know, not if they're still sitting warm and snug behind the walls of Wermspittle swilling brews and swapping words with the likes as get caught up in heated discussions or pointless debates. Philosophy is good for business, if you're a bartender, but it never solves anything more than killing time and filling uncomfortable silences with what passes for learned discourse. The Cold Roads are out there, past the perimeter where the patrols used to try to protect travelers. Anyone honestly curious about the things ought to just go and find out for themselves.

And a few do just that; go and take a look for themselves. Some get caught by the roving plague-gangs, or fall afoul of worse sorts. If you're foolish enough, or hell-bent, or whatever, you can make the trip and leave the North Road so you can strike out along one of the Cold Roads. Every year, each winter, some choose that over quietly starving to death. Others seek out the Cold Roads thinking to escape the Plagues, the festering madness that seems to be blowing in from the east like so much bad weather, or the wandering bands of mercenaries and bandits. Others are looking for a better world, for strange adventures, or just some place other than here.

They're all looking for something, though.

Huh.

Like most of us. Maybe.

Perhaps they find what they're looking for. It is possible. When the dead walk up to the walls of Wermspittle looking for tribute and some desperate cook in a shanty-camp figures out how to make sausages from gore worms...well...maybe anything can happen. What's fiction here isn't necessarily fiction there. Or so the drunken students and grumbling professors hiding behind their tankards have been known to say.

Welcome to Wermspittle