Conversations faded as I moved for the dais in front of everyone. Nobody else was daring to wear red and black like I was, so I stood out easily enough, and if I was pale enough to give milk fits of envy, it was what it was.
Also, Cirruluxul leisurely moved over and positioned herself behind . Dragons are wonderful for making people pay attention.
So, there was already absolute attention on when I stopped and turned to the very intent and expectant gazes of those who’d co here.
All of them had blood on their hands and knew how to kill. None of them had racked up a death toll as high as mine in as short a ti. The Free Company’s exploits while undergoing their own training had further cented the fact that I was soone who had very high expectations of those who followed , and they were dangerously competent.
“Before we begin,” I started calmly, “there are things here which will be revealed which are not to be spread about. Thus, this eting will be held in strictures equal to that of the Regent’s Council, and what is spoken of by here will not be spoken of or revealed to others without my express permission.
“This Oath will be enforced by Mass Geas. If you do not wish to agree to this Oath, then I bid you farewell. Get up and walk away, I have no use for you, and your trip was for nothing. You are not necessary to what is going to follow.”
I could see several of the more independently-minded sorts, especially among the alyn elves, almost tossed out everything and got up to leave. In the end, they looked at their cousins among the unmoving Ceruil and stayed where they were.
“Those who remain, raise your right hand in confirmation that you are accepting this Oath: Nothing of what I say shall be revealed to any other without my express permission.”
My Free Company shot their hands up. The Ceruil were slower, but right behind them. The humans from the Duchy of Elb were also quick to raise their hands, grimly enthusiastic about joining the one who had freed their people.
The Regent of the Halls led his people in raising his hand. He was already familiar with the Regent’s Oath in this regard.
All the hands went up as I waited, and I slowly nodded as a massive black skull with great crimson roses in its sockets rose out of the ground behind . I watched them grimace and clutch at the arms of their Force-chairs as its jaws opened and black rose petals billowed forth in a thick cloud, spreading over and past everyone, caressing their minds and souls as they did so.
Strong n and won shuddered as they felt black vines and tender flowers settle around their souls. This was an Oath, not a secretive thing. They would know it was there, and what it might an to attempt to break it.
Colors swirled up around from the heads of each and every person present, falling down to the empty black pate of the skull behind , decorating it in hues of blue, white, yellow, orange, gray, and even green roses.
No reds, blacks, or purples.
Adorned with a head of flowers in brilliant hues, few of them tallic or crystalline, the Skull of the Oath sank away into the stone behind as they all watched it, a little wide-eyed as they felt the touch of my magic upon their souls.
“ and my Free Company are from the future. Four thousand years in the future of this world,” I began, dropping that bombshell on the lot of them imdiately, causing many to gape in astonishnt. “The land we co from is located within the bounds of what you would now call the North, but four thousand years from now.”
I paused a mont to let that sink into them, then continued, “The things that will happen in our ti will not happen here.” Behind , an Illusionary river flowed up into the sky. “You may have heard that the King of Darkmoor was kidnapped and returned recently. In the bottom of the Thisbean Inn is a Portal through ti. His kidnappers fled far into the future to escape pursuers… to my ti.” I pointed up at a red dot in the river of the future. “The enchantnts of the Inn form a prison you cannot exit without permission of the owner… and as one might expect, the owner of the Inn was dead and with no successor that far in the future.
“Anyone who entered the Inn for thousands of years was unable to leave it, save by the Portal through ti in the basent.”
Above and behind , arcs in scarlet began to jump down the line of ti. Here and there, faces popped up next to the arc, as years lit up and counted down; humans and a hyn, dwarves, a dragon, elves.
Faces visible behind .
A thousand years from this day, a red ball ignited. “Sowhere about a millennium from the present, there is a great cataclysm, scouring the land of life and plunging it into an Ice Age for over a thousand years.” Icy flakes billowed up alongside the river of ti. “The Portal was disrupted for nearly forty years. My Company spent that ti as statues, while I remained a prisoner inside the Inn until the Portal could reform and send us further back.” The arc of red notably started ‘later’ then when it had ‘arrived’.
“Our jumps backward continued, but ahead of us was the disaster known as the Doom of Darkmoor.” They all blinked in astonishnt at . “This is a Code Black event, sufficiently disastrous to wipe out all life upon the face of the world. It blew the Inn itself into stray atoms, and turned all of Darkmoor into a crater swallowed by the sea, blasting the world off its axis and changing the face of continents all across the world.”
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A great globe of the world in my ti spun up above them, pulling back from the lands of the Known World to rotate and display the entire planet, the first ti any of them had ever seen such a wondrous thing.
Then a second image of it dropped down four thousand years, and abruptly spun over and about on its axis, as the land masses on the spinning globe sank and grew as everything revolved about that one spot which represented exactly where we were standing.
They watched a sea and a great round crater all around this point, surrounded by icy lands, lted from a broken land of mountains, and they understood this was being undone…
The crater of the sea vanished instantly, the changes shifted in an instant, and suddenly they were looking at the lands of Darkmoor and the North as it was known today.
And then, slowly and stately, the flowing river of Ti behind split off, and the one I ca from flowed off to the side and faded to a ghostly version of itself.
“This is not the past of myself and the Free Company,” I reiterated to them. “We… are here. We were not there, in the past of our own tiline. This is a new course, a new way of doing things… but, history has given us many, many lessons to look at. Your future may no longer be our past, warriors, but that does not an that the sa things that happened to us are not going to happen to you.
“Indeed, if any of you believe in Fate in the slightest, many of those things are going to happen regardless of how hard you fight them… and if you try to trick them, avoid them, or battle them, you will probably bring them on far harder and faster than before, the exact opposite of what you wish to happen.
“The greatest of these is the Doom of Darkmoor.”
The cataclysm faded back into view on our tiline. There was an explosion on the globe, and it heeled over. Lands sank and rose, and the whole world changed.
“Fifty-four years in that tiline’s future, sothing happens. Nobody knows what, or how, but I am showing you the scale of it, and the devastation it wrought.” I was freaking so of them out as they stared at it.
“It shakes the world entire. It reduced the Empire of Iberon to a crushed mory and Darkmoor to a whispered legend wiped from the world. The people of my ti have no idea where Darkmoor actually was, and even the location of Iberon is hotly debated, its na surviving mostly because so of its distant colonies survived the Doom, and refugees passed on word that the Doom originated in Darkmoor.
“Of your nas and faces and deeds and legends, nothing remained. What was wrought here, was reduced to less than ash. All the glory of Darkmoor died in fire and ruin, and elves blad humans for its fall, while humans blad elves, and what had been joined in harmony fell in fire.”
I watched them fidget, shifting eyes indicating that so of them were already planning to run.
“This event was aided, abetted, and encouraged by Immortal powers. If you run from it, you bring it on the faster, and Fate will work to kill you regardless if you’ve fled halfway around the world or not.
“No, no, you cannot take your family and run. You must defy it, you must survive it… and because I am here, and because the Portal through Ti is here, that can actually be done.
“We also know that one of the great survivors of the Doom were the Beast-folk.”
The map of Darkmoor expanded, rotated to the horizontal, and expanded down into the earth.
The n and won there watched very closely as things began to be drawn below the lands of the North!
“By the Hamr!” Regent Himlstern blurted out, staring as squiggly lines and pools of red snaked into existence under all of the North, leading ever further north. There were great caverns down there, tunnels wider than rivers, actual rivers and underground lakes and seas… and then, to the disbelief of many, they extended completely under the Dark Sea that Darkmoor City was built upon, and further and further north they flowed and extended, a thousand miles or more… and there they joined a massive network of caverns that dwarfed the ones beneath us right now.
“You have discovered the holands of the Beast-folk,” Elder Wyander spoke up in his quietly musical voice, carrying over the murmurs of the rest of the crowd and quieting them.
“Yes, Elder,” I confird calmly. “Approximately five hundred-so years ago, the race of beast-folk were brought into being out of nothing and nowhere by an Immortal. Which one, I do not know. But they did not co from elsewhere. They were made whole cloth from nothing, given life and souls and directions by an Immortal whose only moral guidance for them was to grow strong, kill anything that defied them, and rage across the world.
“There is no species for its size that has been responsible for more death and destruction, both to itself and others, as the beast-folk have in the short years of their existence. They do not build anything. They take, they fight, they survive, or they die,” I inford them, “and this fact does not change in the future.
“What does change in the future is that they give birth to or attract Immortals of their own, and instead of the exceedingly random mutations that afflicts them with such chaos, they settle down into disparate, yet still related races.”
The pictures of the tribes of humanoids rose up behind one by one, and the people here examined them keenly. The clever looked to my people, who all had flat stares and eyes that held no rcy for those I was displaying.
“Orcs. Goblins. Kobolds. Ogres. Trolls. Hobgoblins. Bugbears. Gnolls. Flinds. Xvarts. There are subdivisions among them, as there are different breeds of elves, n, and dwarves,” multiple skin colors and builds rippled out from each example, often with different attire and tribal markings, “but they are all fundantally the sa.
“What I wish to do is prosecute a war upon the beast-folk, and spare this entire world and all its future generations the depredations of their kind. They are an Immortal’s curse upon the world, ant to sow chaos and cause destruction without ever needing a hand to guide them, and that design proved true and well-made for four thousand years.
“I am here, and I would spare the world of the future this scourge, by killing them all in this ti and era.
“But not with armies.” My voice lowered as I looked over them all. “With you who are gathered here.
“There will be no great battles under the sun, there will be deaths you are sick of counting, there will be blood, and there will be slaughter. If the Immortals care to watch, it will be down in the dark and the depths where things are decided, and we return the beast-folk to the land and the earth they were made from.
“We will be the greatest heroes this world has ever known, and precious few will ever know it,” I told them all calmly.
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