B3CH64-Lord Sovann (Patreon)

Chey woke him before the light, one hand on his shoulder and the other already holding out his coat, and Sovann knew it was bad before the boy said anything.

"My lord. You need to see the forum."

Sovann took the coat and asked no questions in the dark. Dread pulled at him, and he pulled his boots on and went up.

The rampart over the harbor was where he did his thinking. It was a low wall of piled stone and salvaged timber that his people had thrown up along the ridge above the water this autumn. It looked down on what was left of Kompong Kravanh — a harbor, a huddle of roofs, a breakwater, and past the breakwater the black water going out flat to a horizon that hadn't lightened yet. After numerous raids from the kobolds, they were barely hanging on here. The winter had given them time to recover, but it wasn't enough. Not yet.

It was cold up here, but already it was warming up. The south's winter was a soft one. And that was a problem. A wet warmth rose off the sea, meaning the season was turning. He turned a spit to the side quickly, getting the sleep out of his mouth.

He didn't like that warmth. He'd learned to hate it. The kobolds slept through the cold, dug into their nest with their fires banked; they were starting to wake.

He pulled up his own System panel and found the forum the boy wanted him to see.

The front page had loaded, the threads sorting themselves by activity, the active ones floating up and the quiet ones falling away under them. He read slowly, and this morning he read even more slowly, setting one account against the next before he'd trust any of it.

The forum was a useful tool. It was also full of junk. But a topic told you something just by how fast it updated, and the one at the top of the list this morning had been up less than three hours and already carried replies in the millions.

He let his eye go down the list.

The Night of Falling Stars. 44829173 replies.

And it climbed while he watched it, the number ticking up under his eye.

West of the Blackjaws — the steles are down. 9274651 replies.

What came out of the sky. Survivors and witnesses post here. 18463902 replies.

And lower, an old one, the one he opened most mornings before the rest.

Kobold Region Coordination - 301847293 replies.

The lords who shared the region coordinated their actions on that thread. Then he opened The Night of Falling Stars.

The top of it was pinned and updated, and someone had been keeping it up to date through the night.

Steward Colm — Ashford clearinghouse

Pinned. I will keep this post up to date as confirmations come in. Read it before you post so we are not all counting the same dead twice.

What we know as of the third hour past midnight.

Last night, at the coalition summit in the Blackjaws, fire rained down from the sky onto the camps. No army on the ground first. It came down out of the sky, striking two camps within the summit itself. Where it landed, the camps are mostly gone. Confirmed dead or unaccounted: at least twenty-two of the lords who came to the table, and better than a hundred of their crafters and adventurers. Adventurer teams were in the camps right after the explosions, fighting through the tents on foot attacking other people while other people were evacuated. We do not yet know whose they were.

The same night, and we believe the same hour, steles were struck in towns all along the west side of the Blackjaws. All were struck by fire from the air, the way the summit was. Every oath sworn by the lords who owned those steles was shattered. If your lord's stele is down and you woke this morning loosed from your binding, you are not alone.

Post your town below and we will add it to the list.

That is what we know. The rest of this thread is people working out the how and the who.

Sovann read it twice, shocked. What the hell happened? The Blackjaw goblins? Was Count Calder still alive?

Lord Aldous — Cairnwall

Twenty-two lords dead at the summit in the Blackjaws. Twenty-two.

Anonymous Adventurer

its not twenty two its more. count the towns that arent answering their own check ins. count the silent ones

Lord Meriks — Highmoor

@Anonymous Adventurer We have names for eighteen confirmed. Four more not answering as of this morning. Call it twenty-two and pray to whatever you pray to that it stops there.

Twenty-two lords, in one night, at the largest gathering of humanity anywhere on Gravesend. Presumably more in the towns where they were struck the same night. Lords needed their steles to be Lords. The real number was likely a lot more.

Anonymous

is anyone else just sitting here staring at this. i read it an hour ago and i still havent gotten up off the floor

Marda — Two Rivers

my hands wont stop shaking and i wasnt even there. we saw the light off the clouds from our wall in the middle of the night and thought it was lightning. 

Lord Hessom — Pinebrook

Vasque held the valley above mine. He took two of my grain barges last spring and burned a third when I complained, and I could do nothing but write it in a ledger. I woke this morning and he is gone and im damned happy he was. The man was a bully and a thief.

Anonymous

@Lord Hessom half the coast is feeling exactly that and lying about it in this thread. at least you signed your name

LeeroySteakins

so twenty-two lord-tier kills in one night. does anyone have the drop table on that? asking for a friend

xX_KoboldGobbler_Xx

@LeeroySteakins read the room you absolute goblin

LeeroySteakins

im just saying if theyre dead anyway someone should be looting

Sovann did not follow half of what the young ones typed. And what is a steakins?

Grubnix

first

Anonymous Adventurer

@Grubnix twenty-two lords are dead and you typed first. may your next respawn be waist deep in a latrine

BoneyardBilly

not to be that guy but somewhere in that crater is the fattest drop table in the history of Gravesend and it is gone forever. gone. pour one out for it, im serious. Imagine the perks you get from killing lords like that. Whos the winner?

xX_KoboldGobbler_Xx

@BoneyardBilly o7 for the loot. real ones know

CritFishing

imagine surviving the apocalypse, getting hauled off to a whole new world, and then some lord you never met drops the sun on your tent. some people just cannot catch a break lmaooo

Steward Colm — Ashford clearinghouse

@CritFishing If there were children in those camps i’ll be banning you from this post. Sit this one out. The next tasteless post in this thread gets the account muted, and I have the time today.

Lord Verrin — Duncarrow

Forget the lords for one hour. There are a hundred dead or missing; some are saying half again that, and nobody has finished counting the soldiers at all. My cousin was camped at the summit's edge. I have had nothing from him since.

Tomas — Redhollow

has anyone got a list of the soldier dead. please. my brother's century was sworn to Harl of the Weir, he marched up for the summit before the snow and i have had one letter off him the whole winter. i dont need it to be good news. i just need to know

Steward Colm — Ashford clearinghouse

@Tomas — Redhollow The soldier lists are not done and will not be for days. The camps are still being dug, and half those companies never registered a roll with anyone. Do not read the silence as your answer yet. When we have names they go here and nowhere else. Watch this thread, and do not trust a list posted anywhere but this one.

Anonymous

@Tomas i was in Harl's third century. they pulled us back to hold the baggage line the night before it happened. i dont know who was still up at the tents when it came down. 

Nessa — Fairholt

i know how small this is going to sound next to all of it. my husband went up as a cook three weeks ago. he only cooks, he isnt a fighter, he isnt anybody. is there a separate list for the camp people. please tell me the cooks were kept behind the line

Ket — Weir town

someone posted the Weir muster further down the thread. i found my boy on the list. i dont know why im typing this here of all places. i just cant say it out loud in the house yet

Anonymous

@Ket im so sorry. i dont have anything better than that word. im sorry

Sovann had put men in the ground under his own oath. He made himself keep reading.

Anonymous — Sethric's camp

It came out of the sky with a scream like that old german bomber. I was out on the picket, or I would be gone with it. I saw it fall out of the sky and strike our camp. It exploded into fire. I was part of the crew helping dig people out.

Adventurer — Harrow

Fire fell on the tents like rain and where it landed it burned forever. We couldn't put it out with water. It was like Greek fire or napalm.

respawn_camper

honest question and im not trying to be a dick. if you take a hit from the sky fire and LIVE do you get a fire resist perk out of it. because that would be pretty sick

GandalfTheGrey8

@respawn_camper nobody at that camp lived. thats the point of the post you are replying to

respawn_camper

hence almost

Sovann should have been able to hate the boy for that. He couldn't though. It was an honest question. Because the fool was right. Dara had felt Lord Harold's aura in his auction house last autumn and come home from it with a common perk that helped her resist auras with her own. The system made you stronger when you survived.

NotThePapa

twenty-two lords in a night is an impressive kill count

GandalfTheGrey8

@NotThePapa those are humans that died bro

Anonymous Adventurer

@NotThePapa people died man

NotThePapa

...and people are dying all over Gravesend. what makes those twenty-two special

Lord Tolm — Blackfen

What was that weapon? We need to figure that out now. Was it the Velthari?

MetaSlave99

Forget the panic for one second. the sky weapon one-shot twenty-two lord-tier targets with area damage and then did who knows how many towns to the west in the same night. i need the cooldown. And you're all busy typing F

Lord Aldous — Cairnwall

@MetaSlave99 There is no cooldown you can plan around, no line you stop it at, no horn that sounds in time. The alliances have been shouting each other down since it happened and the sun is not even up.

min_maxxer

ok serious for a second. WHAT fell. it wasnt a spell, no crafter is that powerful yet. Was it the Velthari bonded? somebody explain the delivery.

PatchNotesTruther

@min_maxxer relic. Either that or some lord dug up a system relic sitting on a full charge and spent the whole thing in one go

min_maxxer

@PatchNotesTruther one relic does not do the summit AND however many steles down the whole west side in the same night.

Lord Emrick — Fenn

It came down in a line. My picket watched it cross the ridge west to east, point after point after point, each one finding a target. It was aimed at those steles and lords.

QuartermasterKade

@Lord Emrick aimed means artillery. flying artillery that reloads all night. If true that would be an insane weapon

PallyMain

survivors are saying wings. thats dragonfire! we are at war with a man who has a DRAGON

sword_guy_42

@PallyMain nobody saw a dragon. they saw fire in the dark and thought dragon.

Steward Marek — Duncarrow clearinghouse

I am going to say this once, and then I start removing it. There was no dragon. Not one survivor account in this thread or in my office describes wings — the "wings" post all of you keep quoting was a man saying he saw fire and assumed the rest. Stop reposting it as confirmed. And it is not fifty lords. The number is in the pinned post at the top. Read the top before you add to the bottom.

He knew whose fire it was. If there was any lord who could make an ever-burning alchemical fire and figure out a flying delivery system. It was the Potion Lord.

Xx_HeroicEvil_xX

I sat up tonight and put the confirmed dead against what my office already knew about them. There was a pattern here. Corliss kept pens. Vasque kept pens. Harl of the Weir sold his own sworn people. Draven murdered an entire town that tried to rebel. Every name I can confirm from that summit is one my office already had a file on. These were not Lords anyone would call good.

Lord Sarn — Greywater

@Anonymous Steward Careful. You are one line from saying they had it coming

Anonymous Steward

@Lord Sarn I did not say deserved but if you want my opinion on it they deserved it.

Bren — the Vale

they had it coming

Lord Wystan — Hollowmere

Whoever did it murdered peers under a summit banner. He burned it. Whatever any of you felt about Corliss, the man who did this has decided he is the only law left standing, and the rest of us are alive this morning only because he has not gotten to us yet.

Lady Corvain — Ashmark

@Lord Wystan Who is next? That is the only question left now. He reached the summit and the entire western reach in one night. Tonight every lord will be going to bed wondering if their name is on the list. That is one man's hand around all our throats. Or woman.

Lord Verrin — Duncarrow

@Lord Wystan The compact was already dead. It has been dead since the first lord kept a room of humans like cattle and the rest of us ignored it.

HalvorTrades

grain futures. with the western granaries burned, prices are going to move hard by the end of the week. anyone sitting on western stores with grain, message me. fair terms, coin up front

Steward Colm — Ashford clearinghouse

@HalvorTrades Wrong thread, and read the room. Market talk goes in Trade & Barter. I am not merging a grain auction into a dead count. Take it there.

HalvorTrades

@Steward Colm fair enough, apologies, moving it. offer stands though

Anonymous

He's dead. The stele's down and Corliss is dead and we are FREE. Released from forced oaths to that monster. I don't care who did it. Whoever you are, wherever you are. Thank you.

Bren — the Vale

For a year Corliss kept my sister in that pen. When the stele was destroyed, the oath was released. I'm moving my forces to recover my family.

Sokhem

the stele in our square is a burned stump this morning. Lord Vasque is gone. good. but everyone keeps typing free and i dont feel free, i feel dropped. who runs the town now. who holds the fields when the thaw comes. who says what we eat. nobody came to the square. nobody is in charge and i dont think anybody is coming

Anonymous

@Sokhem you are. thats what this is now. get your neighbors into that square today and sort it out yourselves, before someone worse than Vasque wanders in and sorts it for you

Old Pel

my grandson set this box up so an old man could read it and then he went off to the wall, so i am doing this alone. i do not understand half these words. i only wanted to ask something. was our lord a wicked man? the young ones in the square are singing, and i put three sons in the ground from his wars

littlefox

im 11. mum says our lord is dead and we can leave now and she wont stop crying. is it the good kind of crying or the bad kind. and do we really walk east like the man up the thread said i dont like walking far

Anonymous

@littlefox its the good kind. stay with your mum and dont walk anywhere yet, the roads arent safe. someone will come. just hang on

Ottley

Everybody on here keeps asking who. I know who. Same as every one of us knows who. Lord Harold Calder. There are people on this thread already walking east to serve him and I am going to be one of them. I would rather die on the road to that man than spend one more day sworn to some of these fucking animals.

sword_guy_42

alright. one time. name me a single person on Gravesend who COULD do this. not who you think did it. who has the reach. the whole west side and the summit in one dark. give me one name.

MetaSlave99

@sword_guy_42 nobody. thats the answer. theres no one else. every lord you could name cant reach that far, and everyone who could reach cant swing that hard

QuartermasterKade

@sword_guy_42 the potion lord posted the whole auction outcome for free before it happened and was right straight down the line. He's responsible for the supplies that broke the Velthari at Hallow's Reach. he runs a school that teaches Paths. he has whatever arrangement he has with Alnor. im saying it because when you cross off everyone who cant, hes the only name left standing

NorthRoadNed

its Calder. its been Calder since the first stele went down and every one of you typing dragon knows it

sword_guy_42

@NorthRoadNed yeah. If it was Calder, then we should be asking who the people that died were. The man has acted almost universally for all of our good. I find it hard to believe that these killings were unjustified.

Also, is this going to turn into the bird thing again... i already stopped trusting my neighbor's chicken. They're all Velthari spies :(

TheEndTimesGuy

this is the extinction event. Praise jesus and repent!

Anonymous Adventurer

F

Anonymous Adventurer

F

BigTFromMarketing

@TheEndTimesGuy you posted this exact thing when the trolls migrated. word for word.

TheEndTimesGuy

and was I wrong

BigTFromMarketing

catastrophically, yes

ZugZugWarrior

so thats what, a few thousand freed people all walking one direction. Landing about to have the biggest recruiting week in the history of the peninsula LOL!

Anonymous

@ZugZugWarrior read the room

ZugZugWarrior

Oh im sorry, was what i said too true for you.

He put the panel away and walked the rampart, pacing as he ordered his thoughts. The stone was wet under his hand where he trailed it along the top.

No one on Gravesend had done more for his coast than Harold Calder. And no one on Gravesend had done a thing like what Calder had done last night. Not the monster you had to be to win. Calder had said that to him, and the words resounded inside him since. The real fight, he'd said, was to do every ugly thing that had to be done and come out the far side of it still a man.

Sovann looked out at the dark water and wondered, honestly, which side of that line last night had been. He couldn't tell. Harold was the butcher who called himself a gardener. He was old enough to know it could be both, and perhaps he was wise enough to know he could fear the man and be grateful.

Boots pounded on the ramp behind him.

Sovann didn't turn until they'd come up onto the wall. Veasna came up first. He was gray at the temples and already scowling, Dara a step behind, Chey hurrying to keep up.

They weren't here for the forum. "South line," Veasna said. "Two hours ago. They came up the dry wash at the third ridge and hit Rin's post."

Sovann's mind came off the forum and recalled his mental map of the area. "How many?"

"Not many. Forty, fifty. A probe." Veasna spat over the wall. "They lost interest when Rin's people held and pulled back into the dark. We've got two hurt, none dead. This time."

"They were testing," Dara said. She was looking south, past the roofs, toward the black line of the hills. She had the small pressure emanating from her still — Sovann felt it even now, a faint wrongness that hovered around her. "Poking the line, looking to get around us. They've been holed up two months."

"The weather is beginning to change," Sovann said.

"The weather." Veasna nodded, grim. "You feel it the same as I do, my lord. It's turning. And they feel it in that nest too. They're waking up hungry."

"How's Rin's post?" he said.

"Holding. Wants more crossbows he's not going to get. Same as last month, and the month before." Veasna's mouth twisted. "I told him no. He called me a few names. I was almost proud of him."

"He'll get what we've got." Sovann turned it over. "Pull the reserve company up behind the third ridge before midday. If they poked it once, they'll attack it again, I'd rather they get slaughtered next time. Dara — you go with them."

Dara's chin came up a fraction. It was as close as she came, these days, to pleased.

"Leave a few for the reserve," Veasna said. Dara didn't answer him.

"And send word down the coast to the others," Sovann said. "Every lord in the alliance. Tell them the thaw's come early and the kobolds are up and testing already, and if they've got any doubt left about what's coming for all of us—" He stopped. Chey had gone still, and Veasna was looking at him. "Tell them I'll be calling them all together sooner than we said. Before the moon turns."

Chey found his voice. "You're — my lord, you were going to wait for the ship. To have something in hand when you called them."

"I know what I said." Sovann kept his eyes south. He hadn't told them all of it — hadn't told anyone all of what he agreed to. "The ship's late, Chey. It may not come. And the kobolds aren't going to wait on Calder's shipwrights any more than the summit did."

"My lord," Chey said, quieter, and pointed. "The ship isn't late."

Sovann turned.

Out past the breakwater, coming in off the flat gray water with the first light behind them, were ships. He counted the masts as they approached. Grey ships. He knew them on sight. The Alnor ships, a series of what looked like galleys and carracks — long, low, dull as a gun barrel, the ships that had patrolled his shoreline and cut across the mouth of his harbor. He'd have known that grey at any distance. He'd cursed it often enough.

And they were turning in. Toward his breakwater. Toward his harbor.

"Those are Alnor," Veasna said, and stopped. He started shaking his head and didn't seem able to make it quit. "Since we came to this coast those grey ships have cut across the mouth of our harbor like we were a rock they had to steer round. Never dipped a flag. Never answered a signal. Never once put in — not for storm, not for water or food." His head kept going. "And now they turn in?"

Dara had gone still beside him. The pressure that hung around her had drawn in tight, and her eyes were fixed on the banner-ships inside the grey screen. "There are fighters on those ships," she said. "Strong ones, judging by their equipment. More than I can count." Her voice sounded nervous, but her hand had closed hard on the top of the wall.

They came in a loose screen of six. And inside the screen, escorted, shepherded like a merchant convoy under a warship's guns, came five more ships that were not flying the same colors. These flew a banner Sovann had last seen over a warm box in an auction house. The sprig and the blade — escorted into Sovann's harbor by the one navy on Gravesend that no one had been able to interact with.

Sovann put both hands on the rampart. He did not trust his legs to keep him standing.

"That's him," Chey breathed. He was up on his toes to see, one hand white on the wall. "That's the ships. That's the reinforcements—"

"That's more than the reinforcements." Sovann's voice came out roughly. He was watching the grey ships and doing the math. But it didn't make sense. He didn't need that many ships for the help Lord Calder promised. Calder had said a handful of higher-tier fighters. Trainers, if Alnor would send them. Enough to blunt the worst of a season while his people learned. Sovann counted the decks coming in, the crates lashed on them, the ranked shapes of soldiers standing at the rails of the banner-ships, and it was not a handful. It was a small army with its supplies stacked behind it. Alnor had arrived for war. Their ships were bristling with some kind of artillery on their decks.

By the time the lead grey ship put its nose past the breakwater, the whole town was awake behind him, faces at every roofline. They came down out of the roofs and the fort in their blankets and their patched coats, thin from a winter of short rations, and crowded onto the quay and cheered ships they had cursed the whole time they'd been on this coast. An old woman near the front had both fists pressed to her mouth. A boy climbed a mooring post to see and nobody pulled him down. Sovann went down off the rampart to the water where his people were cheering as the ships pulled in.

The ships flying Lord Calder's banner tied up. The grey ships did not — they held off in the harbor mouth, oars shipped, watching the water. But the lead grey ship put over a boat, and a man stepped off it onto Sovann's quay who could only have come from Alnor.

He was lean and grey-clad and unhurried, and he looked at Kompong Kravanh — the burned-back town, the hill fort — with the flat, weighing look that reminded Sovann of the woman at the arch of Calder's box. The schoolmistress who'd weighed him and allowed him to continue. The cheering rolled down the quay to meet the man and did not touch his face at all.

"Lord Sovann," the man said. "Of the Kravanh Reach."

"I am." Sovann kept his back straight. "You have me at a disadvantage. Your people have sailed past my harbor since we arrived on Gravesend."

Something that was almost dry humor crossed the grey man's face and was gone. "Gravesend? I do not know this name. I am Vane," he said. "Envoy of the 3rd Class, for the Kingdom of Alnor." He looked past Sovann's shoulder at the fort on the hill, and back. "We don't put in lightly. You'll understand this is not a thing we do." He said it simply as he looked around him. "We are here as part of a trade with Count Calder of the Basin. He has an understanding with my king, and I'll tell you, I don't much like being away from home." He turned his hand toward the banner-ships, where the ramps were already down, and men were coming off them in order, and crates were swinging up out of the holds. "My Path-holders. They'll teach your people a real Path and create some real fighters. I command a force of 500 to assist you in your campaign. Count Calder judged you'd need more than he first offered. He paid a heavy price to gain our assistance." The flat grey eyes came back to Sovann. "He was not wrong, from the look of your hills. On the way in we saw multiple raiding parties of the kobolds staging. You will soon be attacked by the beasts."

Down the quay, a path-holder had already dropped to one knee beside one of Sovann's wounded from Rin's post. It was a spearman with a gut wound. He would have recovered but it would have taken a long time. The path-holder put both hands on him and did something, and the man's back came up off the stretcher, and then he was breathing easily and staring at his own belly where the wound had been. He started to laugh, or to cry. From the quay Sovann couldn't tell which. The men around him went dead quiet. That was a far different kind of magic than Lord Calder had offered. Healing at a touch? That was not something the humans of Gravesend had seen before.

Sovann made himself look at what was coming off the holds, and the harbor master in him counted it. Grain — sacks of it, swung up in nets four and five at a time, more grain than his town had seen since the raids started. Crates of crossbow bolts, banded and stacked. A ballista broken down to its timbers and lashed to a pallet, and another behind it. Casks he'd have bet his hills were potions, healing and the combat kind both, packed in straw. Crated weapons, the blades and heads still greased. He priced it as it landed, out of old habit, and the number he came to was one no lord on this coast could have paid. Not him. Not all of them together.

His quartermaster, Rith, had come down to the quay with his tally-slate and stopped writing on it. "My lord," he said. "My lord, I don't— where do I even put it? We don't have the sheds for it." His voice had gone thin. "That's a year of grain. At least."

A woman near the grain nets had quit cheering. She stood with a child on her hip and watched the sacks come down, then sat on the stones where she was, still holding the child, and put her free hand over her face as she silently sobbed.

Down the quay the soldiers were coming off the ramps and forming up, five hundred of them by Vane's word, ranking out in grey and iron in an order Sovann's own people had never managed. Dara had come down off the wall behind him. She stood at the edge of it with her jaw set. "I felt them from up top," she said, low, only to him. "Made my teeth ache. They have some serious mana behind them." Her chin was up.

Everything Calder had said he'd do, he was doing. No. He was doing more than he promised.

"He sends his regards," Vane said, looking at him from the corner of his eye, "and a word. He said to tell you: the season's turning, and he keeps his bargains, and he'll expect you to keep yours." The envoy's mouth moved. "I don't know what your bargain is. I don't care what it is either. I will fulfill the terms my king agreed to and go home."

Sovann turned from the ships and looked at Veasna.

"Get the path-holders up to the fort so they can begin their instruction," he said. "And put the fresh fighters at the third ridge with Dara by noon. If those things come back tonight, I want them to break their teeth on our blades."

Veasna looked at the grey ships one more time, shook his head, and went to do it.

Sovann started up the hill toward the fort, and his people fell in around him. The envoy joined them as they walked. "And Chey — draw up the alliance summons. All of them, every lord in the alliance. I'm going to go make the rest of the south swear to me, one way or the other."

He said it, and meant it.

The sun rose over the water behind the grey ships as they unloaded supplies. There was a war to prepare for