PBEM Game: Yarnspinners 2 (Running)

[Sedna]

Great fun to hear from Pythium/Quantum again.

Marignon Turn 57 is here:

Esclave

The floodwaters of Marignon's enemies have covered the land. Now the deathless roar of their pounding surf laps at the few remaining rocks of resistance: Ermor, Fort Doom, Camelot, and Marignon herself.

Muszinger and Gawain are dead, their bodies eaten by the lizards who sacked Pythium.

The Archbishop of Elkland is dead. Madness took him, and he marched forth from Camelot against the Manish army, leading with him into death the last of the knights of the Chalice. Now the city on the hill lies empty and defenseless. If my son is there perhaps Man will spare him when they take control. Perhaps not. He is the spawn of Afti-el. Will an infant's cry be enough to save him?

Afti-el is/was dead. But Hell could not hold her and Heaven did not want her, so she has returned to slay more innocents at Marignon, and perhaps, if we're lucky, to butcher the lizard horde which tears and claws at the gates of the holy city.

Archbishop Polgrave is... undead? We heard he was killed when the lizards overran the broken tower, but we have also heard that he is now in Marignon, aided by two mysterious acolytes who fled T'ien Ch'i's destruction of the Shadow Watch. God's holy fire continually blasts this heresy, this man who used magic to cheat death.

We will not hear further news of the war. A vast company of Man's troops surrounds us, and slowly breaks down the defenses of our mountain stronghold. There is no way that Afti-el will be vanquished and peace made in time to spare us.

Wic remains as cheerful as ever, somehow still believing that the death which comes for us all swiftly will pass over him. He thinks demons will come to our aid and hold death at bay. But we are death. Marignon is now the corruption the LORD charged us to fight. The sound of daily prayers is a death rattle. And Man, like an unstoppable force of nature, will break through and kill us all.


Foen

I can no longer see. The blackness of Ermor has finally robbed me of sight. This is what I hear:

My fellow druids have abandoned the corrupt faith of Marignon and turned to our old ways. We have brought forth great vine ogres and summoned the spirits of the old trees of Ermor. These ghosts and mindless things mix with the awful snakes still crawling out of the body of Marignon where it hangs, chained before the Soul Gate.

There is no more than a half dozen living left in the land of the dead, but that is good, for there is no food. We sustain ourselves on an endless supply of foul wine. The Ulmish army sieging us is not so lucky. With nothing to eat for miles and a great force, the mass of living men out there are slowly dying as the twin horsemen of disease and starvation hunt them day and night.

The Soul Gate laughs as these, near death, kill themselves as they tear down the gate of Ermor in order to kill the few living within.

Perhaps I am not blind. Perhaps there was just no light. Now great arcs of fire flow from the Archbishop's withered form. It is Ulm, they are in the gate. I cannot but fight, and it is a simple matter to convince them that the air they breath is poison, for it is. The mass of fire snakes boils at the entrance. A once mighty charge of sacred knights falters, breaks. Poison and flame. Ulmish infantry roast in their shells and bile pour from their mouth. Most welcome death.

Now mighty stone crushers come forth and meet our ogres at the gate. There is stalemate: rock and vegetation fight their ancient, slow battle. But Marignon, crying each time in pain -- for he longs to be cut down and killed -- summons forth unearthly flame, melting the very rock of these creature ones by one by one. The granite melts and pools.

We watch, without emotion as the Ulmish magicians and priests on the other side of the wall who had fainted in the choking dust are trampled by a few rampant ogres.

But a new Ulm army has us under siege. They will break through again, storm again. We have no more power to restore the vine men. There are no more spirits to call forth. Death comes.

[puffyn]

Coming up on the final turn here... I believe the plan is to host turn 60 as our last one, but not 61? Which means, after turn 59 hosts (which most of us have already submitted), we have but one turn left to play...

--- C'tis, Turn 57 ---

As the army rolled out of Pythium, the leaves of autumn were falling fast. Laph was one of the last lizards to leave the former capital, detained with harried last minute correspondences and other minutiae that fell to her as the senior non-military lizard. It was late evening when she mustered the final few troops, barely more than an honor guard, for the march north. Her mind was filled with a thousand details of things she should have done or might still be able to persuade other people to do for her, and so it was mere happenstance that her eyes caught upon the fountain.

She had walked through this courtyard, between the scholars' quarters in the center of town and the temporary camps of C'tis high command, many times in the weeks following the defeat of the Marignonese squatters, and had never thought much of it. But now that she stopped and looked around, she realized that it had once been quite a grand courtyard. Come to think of it, perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that all the grand boulevards in Pythium converged here; and she paused for a moment, imagining the massed hordes of soldiers crowding the streets, harangued into their final deadly war. The courtyard had been deserted as long as Laph had been in the city. But with the original Pythite residents long since supplanted and suppressed by first Mannish and then Marignonese conquerors... perhaps that wasn't surprising.

It certainly didn't look like much now. The former heart of the empire was now weed-grown, and here and there cobbles had been pried from the streets, probably to rebuild houses destroyed by war after war. Half a dozen stray dogs and iguanas slept in the fading sun. And the fountain in the center, heavily chipped, long since dried of water, though remarkably devoid of pigeons or other nasty scale-leavers so common in these lands, shouldn't have really caught her eye, except for the way it seemed to wink at her as she walked past.

And not a friendly wink, she thought absently, before whipping her head around to get another look. The fountain remained resolutely stony, worn, with no trace of any carvings that could be considered the face of any creature, or even eyes; it was, therefore, completely incapable of winking. But she stared at it nonetheless for a good long while, until one of her bodyguard finally prodded her forward, to the last conflict with Marignon and the inevitable destruction of their forces on this front.

It was just a broken fountain, after all, and Laph had a long march to the Saran Forest. She shivered a little, and blamed the nightfall, and the impending winter.

---

Time weighed heavily on Lugal's shoulders.

Or at least, it really should have. Hema knew he was far and away the oldest lizard in C'tis. He had lived through more wars than he could count, even considering that she suspected he couldn't count past five. To hear him tell it, he had lived through the end of the world more than seven times, and Hema wondered, as so many had before her, just what was the plural of "apocalypse".

He certainly looked scarred and ancient enough for Hema to believe that at least some of his stories of survival against impossible odds were real, even if she doubted that he had single-handedly defeated a million squids in the Caves of Time, as he had claimed just that morning before the council at the High Rock. Last week, he had gone on at some length about how he was the sole survivor of the Silver Forest Massacre, in spite of being set on fire by the great dragon Astairr himself, whom he had then cursed with the total annihilation of his realms. And so forth.

These days, most able bodied lizards were out at the front fighting, or holed up in their towers frantically devising clever ways to liberate Marignon from the tyrannous theocracy of the Inquisition. The council of elder lizards was the domain of the very old, and consisted, on most days, of half-mute revenants. Lugal loved the amount of floor space they gave him to propound his ideas, and how nobody ever interrupted him any more, and Hema had learned more about his past than she had ever wanted to know. He should be well on his way to senile obsolescence by now, barely able to muster up a good harangue.

But he remained remarkably untouched by the ravages of time.

Hema herself had woken up one morning to discover a mysterious wound – and not fresh, but long-ago scarred over, the memory of some distant battle she had been in, except that she had never seen combat in her life. Her most challenging day-to-day experience was surviving the job of Liaison to Crazy-Elder-Lizard, which had, admittedly, brought her close to death on more than one occasion. (The incident with the herd of rampaging dead elephants still stalked her nightmares.) But she had, remarkably perhaps, completely escaped permanent harm. Until now.

It wasn't just her. The streets of C'tis, though mostly deserted, saw more and more newly-made cripples, and reports flew in from all around the world, not just in lizard lands, that the young were aging and suffering maladies far sooner than they should, and the old dying prematurely. She had tried to see a healer, when she had first noticed her own malady; but he merely shook his head. "I fear that wound will never fully heal," he sighed. And he stared sadly at her through his remaining good eye, the other lost to forces unknown.

Laph had sent a cryptic letter trying to make sense of it, that Hema puzzled over. "... and at Saran Polgrave was killed in battle, run down by undead horsemen, but the few Marignonese we could question seemed overjoyed at his death, and cackled about him becoming 'more powerful than you could possibly imagine', before taking their own lives in an attempt to join him. Rumors are that he has been 'born again' in Marignon of all places, but it is hard to determine reality from religious hallucination with these people..."

So perhaps this was one final attempt by Marignon to hurry on the end of the world, and somehow they had sped the hands of time itself for everyone, as they had also hastily precipitated their own demise. Or perhaps Hema had really been in battle, in the AYE wars maybe, and had simply... forgotten her war wound.

It all seemed as likely as Lugal, walking jauntily down her path with a brace of coneys over his shoulders, come to borrow her spices or harangue her into working on his latest doomsday weapon, who could say? Perhaps even time recognized that this was not a lizard to be trifled with, and quietly left him alone.

---

Cole paused in his garden. His agapanthus had grown to such enormous height that even in dragon form he could stop and admire them without stooping too low; which was good, because his back ached these days. Cole's wounds, he cheerfully admitted, were entirely legitimate, the penalty for roasting one too many knight, and gladly paid.

He turned to his roses. He had had great hopes for this breed, a brilliant shade of orange, but the plant seemed on the verge of death. Perhaps a little more fertilizer, he reflected. He would have to remember not to eat all of the cows for lunch, though it was hard. The C'tis mountain cow had such a delicate flavor.

In the fort, where the dragon sometimes resorted to human form, there was a stack of letters from everywhere in his dominion. It seemed the small lizards were marching on Marignon itself, while Man and Vanheim and even T'ien Ch'i (such a cute little civilization, such quaint notions they had about dragons) were marching on all of Marignon's lesser fortresses. Epic battles were being fought, full of derring-do and stunning heroics.

Cole moved on to the gold roses. He had been too negligent of late, and little pyrite weeds were slowly encroaching on his magnificent creations, the finest of all the flowers of his garden. The dragon hummed happily as he puttered. Wars came and went; and after the last knights had disappeared from the land, Cole had frankly lost interest. But roses, now...

[djo]

edit: all removed; stupidity on my part regarding timing

[puffyn]

Hey Tauren,

Is anyone still missing a turn? I was hoping I could get Turn 60 (the final one I might add) to play before I start traveling on Saturday.

If someone still hasn't played, by all means wait for them, but I'd appreciate it if they could try to get their turn in. Marignon's getting stormed this turn, and my lizards are getting restless...

Thanks,
puffyn

[The_Tauren13]

Sorry... I've been really busy of late. I'll try to get it out when I get back home later tonight, like 5-10 hours from now.

[puffyn]

Yay, thanks Tauren. You've been a good host, and very soon now we'll stop bugging you about our turns

[The_Tauren13]

puffyn said:
Yay, thanks Tauren. You've been a good host, and very soon now we'll stop bugging you about our turns

Ugh... sorry... got a little distracted last night.
So, this is the last turn; the world is coming to an end.
Obviously, though, if anyone is interested in continuing to play, I would be happy to continue hosting. Even if people are tired of writing yarns, we could continue on as a normal game, and maybe I'll try to enforce an actual schedule.
Whatever you guys want to do...