The Council of the Round Table have clung to stagnation for long enough.
Empty seats have been left unfilled, the Monarch’s throne especially conspicuous. The Empire’s lands are being held, but expansion has stopped. King Statton’s light burnt bright but dirty – his rule brought comfortable prosperity but that stability could not last.
The problems for the Council began the moment the first of the coal mines ran dry.
Our warden of the Barracks at the Easern Front has only grown in strength, politically. His physical attendance at Council was rare, nonetheless amongst the circles of people who mattered there was very little resistance against him. By this time he has all but forgotten his Lain, a key tool of his at the time, but now the Church had moved on without her and her husband, leaving behind the traditions she had encouraged.
Within the Barracks the Fourth Company grow restless and have to find ways to entertain themselves.
Within the isolated walls are the first generation who have grown into adulthood, knowing only the darkness of their “military” leaders. To this new generation, the dark creatures that toy and prey on them are not supernatural. On the contrary, they’re just a way of life. The feeling of being a prey creature shrinks their souls. They understand their purpose in this world, and find know pity in it.
The people outside of the those walls have no pity for them either – but only because they have no idea that hell is just a few days ride away. No word escapes. At least, not until someone found a way.
It seems Tabel is more of a concern than Sir Aeron realises, and their motivation no longer appears to be entire political. There are now two people within the walls who have managed to find a fire within them, and that can’t be good news for the Fourth.
It’s been a little over thirty years since darkness came to the Eastern Front Barracks.
There’s still no King on the throne of the Empire, but the Empire remains strong in the hands of the Round Table. Annoiting someone is right at the top of their priorities, but they’ve found a few ingenious ways of avoiding it.
All threats from the east hit the Barracks stones and are repelled. Sir Aeron continues to do a marvelous job in that respect – so marvelous that no one needs to know what’s going on inside his walls. With no royalty to keep balance, faith has soaked up all the power it can, so there’s no difficulty in sending heretics to their doom. The story, of course, is that they’re sent to fight for their country, to pay for their crimes, but rarely do they last more than a few hours once inside the gates.
A dank, depressing society trudges on within the City Barracks. The Fourth Company still rule – the world outside believes that their ranks must have changed a little. They were deathly ill when last seen, but no. Their ranks are the same, to a person.
Hope can still be found in the children though. They tell each other stories of escaping one day, out of the never ending gloom.
One such girl is Krishna Youssef. She’s certain that it’s the Fourth Company who are making their lives hell. She’s filled with horror stories from her parents about them, and knows to stay away. Her bravery gets the better of her sometimes though, and she follows them around at a distance.
She watches them more than anyone else dares to. She’s spotted the darkness that seems to leech out of them.
The darkness that hangs over the city is obvious from afar now. For those that know what they’re looking at, it stands out like a beacon.
The man that called himself only Welles entered the City of his own volition. His footprints leave behind oily patches of darkness that the meagre sunlight takes hours to wash away. He holds his cloak close around his face, hiding the mutilated flesh below. A wound that Sir Aeron notices, and immediately feels a familiar pull towards.
He pulls behind him a trunk. Heavy, stained oak with heavier looking padlocks and iron rivets. He drags it along the floor by a dark red rope which threatens to – but never will – snap at any moment.
He opens it for a moment whilst talking to Aeron, the process of unlatching locks taking a few minutes. He chucked in what he came for and then slammed it closed. The glimpse Aeron caught was unimpressive; a roll of twine, maybe, sitting a top a clay jug.
The armor would be returned to Sir Aeron two days after Welles had left, found tossed quite near the edge of the City’s outer walls. It was dusty and missing four of the gems that were previously inlaid in the silver and gold.
In exchange for the armor – or at least the gems, it seemed – Welles shared how he came across his own wound. Creatures of shadow stalked him whilst he travelled and camped. He knew now that they didn’t immediate kill him because he was chewing raican grass. They pounced the moment he spot out his last blade of it. He couldn’t stand the taste of it now. “Neither will you,” he said.
The shadow pack that got him were straight from the other side, he said. “The Alius See,” he said. “They’d probably never seen a human before me. Feral things, the native ones.”
He took a pinch of a chalky, fine substance from a pouch, and dabbed it on his tongue. Immediately the man seemed larger, his shadow darker, his eyes clearer. He was so mesmorising that Aeron forgot to flinch when he smushed a small amount of the stuff on Aeron’s lips.
The world sang around him. Each time the torchs’ flames lasped it sang louder. He was instantly aware of his brothers and sisters of the Fourth. Knew their hungry hearts. Their strength. Their loyalty.
Somewhere off, much further away, there was a wild cry of thirty or forty beasts screaming in … joy?
“That will last a few minutes. It’s hard to come by.”
Sir Aeron has managed to fail upwards remarkably. His punishment for butchering the King and then his own father was to be promoted to one of the most powerful positions in the Empire: a seat on the Round Table.
In the confusion of the leaderless time, he was able to hide away any evidence of his – or his military brothers’ and sisters’ – wrongdoing. The battle had been dreadful and they’d all been wounded horribly. Whoever the attackers were, they were at least gone now. So the Fouth Company lead by Sir Aeron were heroes.
So who better to guard the dangerous Eastern Front?
The Company – leader included – have become savages. They were once pained by their urges, but now swim in them. Their wounds are not healing. Huge swathes of flesh raw and ooze-collecting are not easy to hide. The fact that these clearly terminal injuries haven’t killed them yet is hardly to hide.
The Barracks is a wonderful place for them. There around around twelve thousand people living inside of the City Barracks. It’s a poor city, too far from proper civilisation to be remembered by traders all that often. It’s main function is a garrison for the soliders, and home for their families is secondary. It has high, stone walls which were built by the giantkin when they were allies to the throne.
In the best of times, it’s not easy to leave. A solider abandoning his post is treasonous and their family leaving shows weak faith, which is also treasonous.
So the Barracks is a wonderful place for the Fourth Company to figure out what is happening to them. It’s been two months since they were attacked by the Shadow Pack. The transformation is taking hold.
Lain travelled to the Eastern Front to see how her friend was getting on. It was not a short trip. Two days on horseback, with two escorts. She had hoped to find Aeron resting, or better yet, at work and working through his temper. She barely reached the gates of the City though. There was something wrong there – if her god had ever spoken to her before, it was not as clearly as it was now: you must not enter that place.
The two woman who had accompanied her were an issue, she knew. Odds were that at least one of them was on the pay of the Round Table, and if not then they would gossip nonetheless. They may not have heard the warning she’d been given, but to turn back and not tell them why would be as if they had.
She sent them ahead, into the City, asking them to bring a blacksmith back to fix an issue with her horse’s shoe.
When they were within the walls, she turned away and began her journey home. She had no doubt that would be the last time she’d see them.
The opening prompts for this book are incredibly bloody. I rolled a 1 (5 and 4) to start with. I remember what prompt 1 is, and I thought to myself “no, I’ll skip that one and roll again”. Then I rolled another 1 (7 and 6). Fate clearly wanted me on this path. Let the bloodshed begin.
King Statton was furious with his soliders for failing to protect his lands from the … whatever it was that invaded and messed up a lot of people. He refuses to believe that it was strange shadow creatures and even though his fighters – Sir Aeron’s fighter’s – have come back very wounded he still sees them as failures.
One of the the 4th Company laughs – letting off steam more than anything – about the death of the King. “He wouldn’t be so miserable then.” But the idea catches on the wind. The men and woman of the Company feverishly taste the idea as it passes between them. Sir Aeron knows his duty – he should shut them down and order them to run laps or something – but the taste gets to him too. What the heck is happening? he has time to think, before a switch flips and he’s tearing into the King.
It doesn’t stop there. Lord Cambridge himself comes across the scene, or at least peices together enough of what happened to know who did it. He doesn’t know why or how, really. The 4th Company step in before he can do any real damage. Aeron, right then, realises he has a new family. He’s not entirely sure he’s in charge of them, but they call him Lord Cambridge now.
Side note: Faber-Castell highlights cause Uniball black to bleed. This isn’t the case with Uniball blue.
His friend Lain is too sure of him though. She doesn’t realise what’s taking hold of him. Unsure what else to do to help her friend, she suggests to her husband that young Aeron Cambridge should take his father’s empty seat. “Now is a terrible time for the Council to be broken,” she tells him.
A few Sundays ago, I wanted to start another Thousand Year Old Vampire run but I didn’t fancy doing it alone so I dropped a message into my family chat. “Does anyone want to play a writing game with me? It’s about figuring out what a vampire did over their lifetime.” I knew my sister, S1, would join. I doubted my other sister, S2, would join. I hoped my mom would join.
When the time came S1 arrived eager to play, even though she had no idea what was about to happen. I didn’t hear anything from the always busy S2. There was no sign from my mom either, which upset me a bit, so I messaged her privately asking if she had time to join. “I’m not very good at writing and making things up, I dunno,” she said back. I applied about more pressure, as the favorite child, and she joined.
We had a huge amount of fun, and it’s ended up being a Sunday routine of ours that we’ve done for over a month now. S2 even graced us with her presence which has been wonderful.
This was a very novel experience for all three of them. I don’t believe they’ve done any creative writing since being forced to at school – even for the youngest of us, that’s over a decade ago. It was very obvious that they were … resistant to lean into their imagination too much, too quickly.
The most confusing reaction – that cropped up multiple times – was are we allowed to write this? Both my mom and S1 had this reaction at different points, and I wasn’t entirely sure who they thought would stop us.
TYOV is primarily a single person game. There are multiplayer rules, but I’ve not paid any attention to them. When it’s time to make up a new resource our vampire has aquired, I’ll say “okay, mom, what’s the item?” and she’ll have a think and say “a kettle?” and then I’ll say, “okay, S2, what’s cool about it?”, “it never runs out of hot water!” (“what about booze?”, my mom will say, “yeah! hot vodka!” S2 will screech, “no wait normal tempurature vodka!” mom screeches louder, attempting to keep us sane, “too late – it’s hot vodka,” I decided) and then maybe I’ll figure out the event that meant our vampire aquired it and type it up. We all contribute a bit.
On one occaision the prompt required us to make a new immortal creature. “Does it have to be a vampire?” S1 asked, still grasping around for the acceptable boundaries of imagination. “Could it be Dobby?” There aren’t many things that my sister will nerd out on, but Harry Potter is up there.
“It can’t be Dobby!” my mom decided. “That’s plagorism!”
I think it’s probably closer to copyright infringment, but I was a bit taken aback that my mom’s first thought was that we’d all be thrown in a prison cell together if we wrote down the name of a houseelf. The Google doc we were writing was, after all, just for us. (In the end, we did go with a gnome-like elf, but who went by a different name.)
There were a few other occaisions where one person or another got caught on the idea that we were breaking a rule that their imagination just couldn’t get past. “Well, I’ve never heard of a vampire that can do that,” someone said. It wasn’t that they were against the idea of a vampire that could do a unique ability, it was that there was a door in their imagination that we had to kick open before they thought it was allowed.
The first couple of hours certainly felt like we were hitting those doors all the time. They were opened though; with practice they all seemed to be more comfortable with just making stuff up.
Anyway, at the end of last session we just woke up the Overlord of the Vampires, who’d been in a petrified state for thousands of years, so I’m very excited to play again tomorrow.
Project Work by Shane Preece 