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Clayday, Disorder Week, Dark Season 1626
After dispatching one of the bandits and laying him beneath the wooden steps to the second story of the Tarkalor’s Keep, Berrik used his life sight to peer into the floors above us. He could see several living souls, and a small one in the central room with the animals on the ground floor near us. Suspecting it was a child hiding among the livestock, Berrik barred the door to the animal pens.
We presumed that the inhabitants of the tower were eating their supper, gathered in a common room above us. Suspecting that someone would soon come down to relieve the guard we had dispatched, we waited. Soon, someone did come down the creaky stairs, but it wasn’t a guard: it was a Lunar Tarshite woman with a small girl in tow, calling out into the darkness in the foreign and accented language of the Empire for her son, Joran, whom we had locked in the animal pens.
We quickly and quietly surrounded her. Aeson captured her attention as a golden son of Yelmalio, and when he told her his name, she recognized him, relaxed, and told us her name was Larna Ozan. She told us that there were two groups of people in the tower: a dozen Lunar refugees and a band of Gargarthi, ten minus the one we’d killed. The refugees were Heartland settlers, shopkeepers and students, who had come to Jonstown with the promise of better lives in the new province. They’d fled Jonstown to escape Kallyr’s Candle Dancers and the pogroms, and soon found themselves lost in the hills. She said she wanted to find her way to Renekot’s Hope, where she has kinsmen. The twelve surviving refugees that had taken refuge from the oncoming winter in the tower were all that were left of their original group. The others had died (starved, diseased, or killed) as they wandered hopelessly in Stael’s Hills.
The refugee’s young leader had struck a bargain with the band of Gargarthi who had camped in the tower to wait out the winter. The bandits were lead a man named Harnal. Berrik suggested that we could find places for the refugees in the nearby clans - after all, Apple Lane had already done so once before - dispersing them to the nearby villages to lessen the burden on the clans and to endure the winter protected by Heort’s Law rather than the Gargarthi. We still needed to deal with Harnal and his band of outlaws, however.
Larna Ozan agreed to bring Berrik’s offer to the leader of the refugees. After she returned upstairs, a young man named Dornal Seven Blessed, came down. Dornal Seven Blessed spoke excellent, if accented, Heortling. A former missionary student and initiate of the Seven Mothers, he weighed Berrik’s offer, gave us information on the bandits, and agreed to sneak his people out of the tower as the bandits retired to their beds. They would wait for us outside (in the cold) while we dealt with the bandits overnight.
And so our plan moved into action. One by one, the Lunar refugees, cold and scared, trickled down and out of the tower while the bandits worshipped their beastly god, threw dice, and fell to sleep.
Outside the tower in the pitch-black moonless night, the first heavy snow of winter fell. Just after midnight we crept up the stairs and found three Gargarthi in the feast hall, whispering plots and drinking. They died quickly.
Places and People
Tarkalor's Keep
This stone complex in Stael’s Hills consists of a tall central tower of some 25 meters high with four floors, and three additional towers of two floors. From atop the central tower, a watch can be kept on both the Ormthane and Swan valleys. The tower was built to keep peace between the Colymar and Malani tribes, and the princes of Sartar often used the keep as a hunting lodge. The keep was abandoned during the Lunar Occupation and has served as a refuge for bandits, outlaws, and rebels.
Larna Ozan /e,
Lunar refugee from Jonstown, age 34.
A Lunar woman in her mid-thirties with two children (Mara and Joran), she came to Jonstown with her husband from Tarsh seeking a better life for her family. Her husband was killed by Kallyr’s Candle Dancers and Larna fled Jonstown with her children and the other refugees. Her ragged clothes hint at a wealth she no longer has.
Dornal Seven Blessed /l
Former missionary student, current refugee leader, and initiate of the Seven Mothers, age 22.
Intelligent, sensitive, and well-educated from the Heartlands, Dornal Seven Blessed came to the provinces to learn about the people there and minister to them. He deeply believes in the peace and all-accepting love of the Lunar Way and is heart-broken by the cycle of rebellion and reprisal that has wracked Sartar in recent years. After the Sacking of Jonstown, he became the de facto leader of a band of two dozen refugees trying to make their way back to the safety of the Glowline. He’s an urban priest-scholar, not a soldier, and he’s found that thoughts and prayers have costly limits in the wilderness.
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