Quote Originally Posted by Blueraven's Grimoire
After several days of endless rambling through nowhere in particular, Fireside Company came upon its first city today! First non-orc city, anyway.

It had been completely wiped out.

There were chunks of bodies hanging from leftover walls and makeshift flagpoles. The rest of the bodies in question had usually collapsed to the ground in mangled heaps. Savas was the only one who didn't lose his appetite at the sight of it. There's not a single wall left standing that isn't covered in blood or grit. The further in we went, the worse it got. A lot of mages went down fighting here. Several areas looked as if they had been rigged at the last second for contingency measures; suicide curses that left hundred foot high glass obelisks in their wake, on-the-spot bids for self-resurrection, null zones where the laws of reality broke down for just a little while, and spells that actually cratered the air. They knew they were going to lose but they stood their ground. I can't imagine why. I don't want to know.

I saw a little girl with her body gnawed by bugs and rats and her head smashed in against the remnants of a temple wall.

The city's name, still barely legible on some of the broken signs and posts at its outskirts, was Achu Kintan. Savas is guessing that it had a population of several hundred thousand. Judging by the amount of arcane damage, this place had a disproportionately high number of magic users. Spellcraft doesn't seem to have done them any real good. And did I mention that some of the bodies sport the same kind of artificial bits and pieces as one of our would-be ambushers from a few days ago? The Sideways writing even matched. I'm reasonably sure we wiped out the last survivors of this city, a party of men probably on their way to martyr themselves in the Bay of Long Teeth. Why they stopped to set up an ambush, I don't know. Maybe they saw us first.

Beyond that, there are orc bodies all over the place too. And the wreckage of a few skyships drifting above the city. Broken guns, broken swords, broken limbs separated from broken bodies...

It's like the Corpse War all over again.
When he was done, Caden closed the grimoire and stuffed it back up into his Hat. He put his head in his hands and forced himself to think of clear blue skies and vibrant green fields without corpses in them.

"This is what Larkatz wants to do to Althanas," he said.

A few seconds later, there was a gun resting against his ear.

"Who is the Shadow Drifter and what is this Althanas you speak of?" a tall Kebiran man asked from beside him. Caden almost laughed. Almost.