Roleplay from Grathe Geg (25 days ago)
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After Kellan's departure, Grathe turned his attention back to more pressing business. The Ogrocs were becoming more bold, their attacks more frequent, and closer to the more populated areas of the region. Even after the fall of the Remanants’ empire they remained, like a cancer that could never be fully removed from the land. There had always been rumors that the Dark Elves never truly left Rapael, and the first men had stayed vigilant against their return.
As he watched Kellan depart into the woods, his captain, Reinolt, approached from the lower parts of the city. The local bars still proved an effect network for communication across the region. Though it bothered the current rulers of the Dark Isle if he spent too much time visiting the lowborn haunts, there was no such taboo for his captain.
Grathe lookd at his captain, not wanting to hear the answer he expected. “Tell me Reinolt”
“It was Stangard this time. Same as the others. A local boy who had been out hunting found the village.”
Grathe turned away towards the ocean, trying to keep his face from showing his emotions: anger, sadness, and fear.
Each Ogroc attack coincided with the same, terrible event. They stuck towards more populated towns, and at the same time, a smaller isolated town disappeared. An outsider would approach the town to find all of its citizens gone, even down to the smallest babe, all their resources, the food, the collected materials, stripped. All that remained were skeletons of houses, and sometimes barely even those. Huge cornerstones vanished without a visible trail as to where they were drug to. No one ever came back, no one witnessed the actual disappearance and lived to tell of it.
There was no way to tell which small village would be struck. The Ogroc’s could not be allowed to plunder around populous towns while Grathe and his men hunted phantoms. Grathe’s hand was forced in response to every one of their attacks.
He knew though, it had to be the Remnants. “Reinolt, ready the horses, grab supplies, it’s time we put an end to this.”
Only the old ways could help him defend his people. It was time to put his lip service to the Sartanists aside. Everyone of the mainland religions was the same, do some long, fancy, prescripted rituals from a book, and maybe the god would answer your calls in some indirect fashion which you had to interpret abstractly…at best. At worst, they were just excuses for humans to kill more humans, for church elite to horde gold and resources from their mostly destitute peasant followers.
The old ways were different. There was a tangibility to them. Blood for blood. Power for power. They bound together humans and spirits in a network of reciprocity.
He would find his answers to the south, in the first cities of First Men, now barely recognizable as anything but oddly placed hills clustered together in strange formations. It was time to find out what happened to the Taken of Rapael.
