Orhan 5 Day 23 TE 6054

We arrive in Selkai!

There's a little package waiting for us from Anton. It's a personal navigator obelisk. It has a little note with it, "Have fun." Oathar seems scared of it. Imre puts it away for safe keeping. We sell a bunch of items and stuff, but only manage to scrape together enough money to pay back the 1500 gold we owe poor Anton. Sigh....

Orhan 5 Day 27 TE 6054 and days following...

Imre's crew shows up and starts building his tower. They also install the chandalier in the main hall/living area.

Other current events:

• The essense is better. No more flow storms. Yay!
• The empire of Lankanok (worshiping Scalu) attacked Nuyan Kom
• There's been a spate of warship building in Selkai. Oathar likes the implications for profit opportunities.
• Invasion of Erulan failed. Rhakhans army was decimated. Several times. Unknown and bizzare forces were implecated.
• There's been an upswing in piracy.
• Locally: Taxes have been raised.

People are preparing for the upcoming year end festivities with some trepidation.

Oathar gets several inviations to various social functions.

Imre is summoned to the temple of Eissa. He is appointed as a priest of the Temple of Eissa. "Mother says your supposed to be our brother. That was very confusing." In fact, Imre is supposed to lead the services on the High Holy Day at the end of the year. (But only women can be priests of Eissa, you say? Yeah, well Eissa said to do it!)

D. is invited to a poetry session in the prince's park. We all go. Some younger poets let loose with some of their crazed avant gard wacky stuff. They are decried as pandering to popular culture by the old guard. Are they dumbing it down? or keeping it real? Only time will tell. The crowd kind of digs the tale of the valiant crew of the minnow. This guy is followed by a more grim goth sort of guy. There are in fact a wide variety of strange performance art pieces. We wander around looking at wacky stuff.

At some point, Imre discovers that he's being followed by some strange woman.We decide to break up into smaller groups to see who she follows. Well, it's not Oathar or Haeraan. After some reshuffling, it's not Kyrik. She seems to be following D. No wait, she's just following which ever group is larger. Imre detects her as Evil. Oh dear. We decide to lead her off and get her.

We do get to lead her off a bit. We get to the entrance of the alley. Imre turns and sleeps her. She resists! Oathar sleeps her. She resists! D. shoots her. She bleeds and dies. Oh dear. Imre rushes up trying to save her! Ack! Oathar and D. mind ream her while he works. She's an advance scout to find out our daily routines. She thinks of a black tower standing in the middle of a marsh. More will follow.

Searching her, we find her little mirror and some pocket change. We are questions by a truthsayer of the guards and it comes to pass that we are exonerated. "You can't just kill people for being evil! There are laws! The state has to do it!" An administrator eventually comes and let's us out by whispering to the guards. "Oh, yes sir! We'll let them go immediately sir!" The administrator, a bureaucrat, says that we appear to have friends in powerful places, but we shouldn't make this a regular occurance. "Right. We'll be more careful." He's a representative of the office of security. He also has a note for Oathar.

The note is a summons to the Grand Conclave. When he arrives, he's taken aside to a waiting area. The prince comes by Oathar's seat and says, "Please don't fall asleep." There's a meeting. It's kind of dull. There's a lot of discussion about ship-building. The defense minister says the taxes are necessary. The security minister mentally chides Oathar about the killing earlier this morning. There's a discussion about if there should be a general draft or mercenaries or a volunteer army. They do decide to start a small ill-funded volunteer army. Maas talks about intelligence gathering and how he needs money to finance operations and scouting.

After the meeting the prince asks Oathar to follow him along. "You've proven yourself to be a capable young man, and I have observer slots available." Every two weeks are the meetings, though he realizes that I won't be there all the time. He also gives a short lecture about how we don't want to get the security minister antsy any more. Oathar gets a tour of the place.

Orhan 5 Day 70 TE 6054

New Year's Eve!

Arisia shows up and Oathar escorts her to the New Year's Temple celebration. We go to the temple and Imre is eventually introduced as the newest priest of Eissa. The population is scandalized. He gives a nice speech though. At midnight the alter starts to glow. A shape of an old woman descends from the sky on a beam of light, with great black wings. She's REALLY old. Gosh, that's an Archangel of Eissa. She goes up to Imre and give him a benediction. The population is very confused by these developments. Then the archangels comes around and gives a blessing to all of the party members. It's somewhat disturbing, but it seems a good thing.

As we leave, we see Gireg Jan and Anton. They stroll by and say they'll visit us tomorrow. Back at the villa, around 2 or 3 in the morning, when suddenly, we all fall over dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Woo, we're back in Eissa's garden up on Orhan again. Alynna doesn't recognize the place. After a while, the godess Eissa shows up. Alynna freaks, but we manage to calm her down. She address us, it's all quite impressive as always. Eissa reccommends the party to Alynna as Good hearted souls. Then for the briefing. She gestures and a globe of Kulthea appears, complete with the two eyes of Utha. Behold Kulthea as it was. Then the northern eye vanishes, Kulthea as it is now. The great wall of darkness is wobbling and fragmenting and stuff like that. It's very disturbing. Out in the middle of the ocean and strange land mass rises up out of the ocean. Kyrik identifies it as the lost continent of Tarania. (Like Atlantis). A Great evil conspiracy is taking place. One that will shake the foundations of this world. There are many forces; some of which directly oppose us, some of which indirectly oppose you, and very few which will help. She points and the worlds tilts and our view focuses in way to the north and we see a giant volcanic island which comes up with a crater lake in the middle and another island in the middle of that. The outer island is a giant warren of lugraki and diar and stuff with slaves and farms. On the center island is a giant fortress. It looks pretty nasty. Behold the Ahrentorg, Citadel of Andoval It is one of the eight secrets. But it is by far the largest. Oathar says, "Are all eight of the secrets evil?" She ignores him. Andoval must not be allowed to take the southern eye. However, we of Orhan have been stabilizing the world by lending power to the southern eye. Without our support the eye would collapse. We do not have enough strength to both maintian the world and fix it. To do the latter, the people of Kulthea must take arms.

I give you a blessing and a charge. You are the inheritors of the guardians of the old empire. We have seen this even though we did not set this in motion. We encourage this. Go with our blessings. Then she takes on of the keys, (the key of life), and touches each one of us and we wake up back in our villa.

We get an additional fate points. We also get a one time bonus usable at will. For 25 hours, (one day), we get a +10 bonus to every roll we make.

We get some sleep.

Orhan 1 Day 1 TE 6055

Anton and Gireg Jan show up as expected. Anton and Alynna get on well. Anton and Gireg Jan probe us about the description and ask us to make an image of the lord of essense. Imre makes a nice illusionary image of him. They stare at it a bit. "I've never seen him. Have you ever seen him? Well, there is the statue?" There's a statue of Andrax and a portrait, and they both look like him. We believe he really was a lord of essense and not an elf. Most people assume he was driven insane.

"We'll have to report this." We brief them about our trip last night. They knew that Andoval was building the Ahrentorg. Then decide that Alynna is inextricably linked to our little group. They recruit her. They invite her and us back to Karalon. Meet us at the docks this evening after dinner.

That evening is Oathar's dinner party with the princess. The catering service takes care of everything, and we use the Emporer's china. The princess is a fine conversationalist. She taunts Oathar about sky ships.

We finish the evening with apertif's out on the balcony next to the canal. Oathar break the news that we're leaving again.

We do the wacky thing with the ship again. It's very strange. (again.)

Orhan 1 Day 2 TE 6055

We get to Karalon! Woo! Oh yeah... We are taken before a group of five loremasters. We tell them all we know. Anton comes back and joins us and tells us about their library search about the eight orders. He'll give us a briefing when it's done. Our destinys are clearly imprtant, so we get advanced training!

Advanced training

• Either learn a 6th list at normal cost or you can buy one list at half cost
• Learn any language or lore we want (within reason)
• For 1 lore or language, we can treat it as an everyman skill.
• For weapons we can buy one weapon and the category it's in with an extra rank at the lowest cost.
• Also get one free rank for a second weapon.
• The loremaster lists areavailable.

Research on Karalon results in. Alynna's vision points to desert of Udje. D.'s vision points to the architecture of the city of the dead (in Udje). Oathar's vision seems to be Malqunar, a tropical region in the south east of Emer. Imre's points to the Emerald Forest in Hystra. Haeraan is in Rulash a rainforest in southeast Emer. Kyrik's vision seems to be about the snowstorm that was created back during the rebellion in Rhakan. Their seers now believe that the force that made the snowstorm is the same as the force that controlled Kyrik's misty horsemen. The name associated: The Storm Wizard.

When Kyrik asks them to restore the decayed book of "The Prophesies of Luarto Shang", the book bursts into flames. So they stop trying.

Alynna gets to meet Tovar Decdarrian. He's the founder of her order of death monks. He's quite deadly.

Imre researches information on Shreck and uncovers a vision that drove the seer mad. A woman trapped and suspended in a prison of darkness. It's recognizable to Imre as the void. She's pregnant. Her belly distends and this thing rips out of her and consumes her. Then a portal opens and it enters into Kulthea. Then it shimmers and takes the form of a human and walks away. Oh dear.

Later, while Kyrik is researching things about Daenku, we are all gathered up and taken to a secret chamber where we are introduced to Kiren Tathon, one of the other founders of the loremasters. He's a loar. He's quite old. He feels old. Yet, he's an elf. It's crazy, but it's a true. He was alive in SE 1 (12,000 years ago). He asks us where we found the name Daenku. We tell him about the prophesy. He sighs, and thought that that particular prophesy was rubbed out. It has been ages. Daenku was the title and name that Andrax once used. He takes his staff and puts it down and it speaks and recites the following: "Ages ago, when the lords of essense ruled the galaxy, the lords of essese or the Katavari as they were know, traveled across the stars and ruled an empire that spanne dthousands of worlds, but eventually came the empress Kadaena. She decided that she was beyond the law and proceeded to initiae a reign fo cruelty and barbarism never before seen. Her cousin Utha lead a rebellions which destroyed the empire. Kadanea in her madness created the shadow stone. To counter this weapon, Utha forged the soul sword. In the final battle on Kulthea, Utha slew kadaena by headeading her and the shadowstone fell into a molten crack in the earth and disappeared. Utahs' nephew was Andrax. Even after kadeana was defeated, some of her forces still survived. Andrax took on the title of Daenku which means elder mind in uraric. Daenku formed a council of eight. This council of eight was callend teh ahrenrath which means the secret circle. This group of eight surviving lords of essense proceeded to hunt down the remaining minions of kadaena and attempted to seal all of the demonic protals that had been opened. Over the thousands of years, much of the secret cicle vanished. Some were killed, others disappeared until only Daenku was left. Then Daenku himself disappeared. Unfortunately, what happened was that not all fo the lords of essense who diappeared were killed. In particular one whose name was Andoval was not kille dbut was trapped in the void. Over the 1000's of years he was trappe dthere he was slowly driven insane, his soul was corrupted, and now he is a tool of the unlife. And so he seeks to destroy the shadow world. As part of his plans, andoval returned and reformed the secret circle but he corrupted it. The reformed cult is now known as the jerak-erenrath, the cult of the secret circle, and the order is totally corrupted. Eight showdy lords control it. Luckily for us, this cult is highly disorganized because it has been corrupted each of the members is out for him or herself, and so they hinder each other as much as they promote evil. This is part of the reason that the loremaster do not assault them directly. We find that the foil each others plots as much as they succeed. We believe that the rest of the cult has been separated from Andoval and they are currently at odds. Most of the members of the cult are merely evil and powerhungry as opposed to insane and mad. One needs to be totally nihilistic to destroy the world and we believe that many of the other members of the circle are not ready to sacrifice themselves in a great conflagration.

The head of the cult of stars is one of the eight members of the cult of the secret circle. Expect them to continue trying to kill us.

Orhan 2 Day 3 TE 6055

We return to Selkai!