Category: Fantasy RP

Thornwall is safe. The warlord’s army retreated when the kingdom collapsed. The entrance is sealed — 500 feet of rubble. Nothing is getting through.

The villagers are celebrating. They don’t know what we lost. The books, the schematics, the machines — all buried. Aldric is grieving. He spent weeks studying those texts.

I don’t regret it. The alternative was the warlord turning those machines into weapons. A siege engine that fires itself, walls that repair their own damage — the warlord would have conquered the continent in a year.

But the Ashwood is still changing. The forest hasn’t stopped shifting. And the merchant’s warning echoes: the Ashwood is waking up. The clockwork kingdom was built on top of something. Something old. Something that doesn’t care about kingdoms or wars.

I’m heading into the Ashwood tomorrow. Alone. If the forest is truly waking up, someone needs to understand why before it swallows everything.

The warlord’s army is at the gates. We activated the defensive array — the air barriers are holding. Arrows bounce off. Cavalry charges break against invisible walls.

But it won’t last forever. The machines need power, and the power source is a crystalline core deep in the kingdom. It’s draining fast.

I found the warlord’s general in the mineshaft. Not fighting — waiting. He knew we’d activate the defenses. He knew we’d come to the core. And he knew the core would drain.

The general offered terms. Leave the kingdom to the warlord, and Thornwall lives. Refuse, and when the barriers fall, the village burns.

I refused. The kingdom isn’t a weapon to be controlled. It’s a library. A civilization’s entire history, compressed into machines and books. If the warlord gets it, he’ll use the weapons and burn the rest.

We have one chance. The kingdom has a final defense — a self-destruct mechanism. It’ll bury the warlord’s scouts and seal the entrance forever. The books, the schematics, the machines — all gone.

Aldric thinks it’s the right choice. I pulled the lever.

They’re here. The warlord’s army appeared at dawn — 3,000 soldiers, siege engines, and something else. Something large moving behind the lines. The ground trembles with each step it takes.

Thornwall has 800 defenders. The math doesn’t work. But the walls are old and thick, and the villagers have been preparing for weeks.

The warlord isn’t here for the village. He’s here for the clockwork kingdom. He knows about it. Someone talked. The books, the schematics, the machines — he wants them all.

Brother Aldric has a plan. The machines in the kingdom can be activated. He found a schematic for a defensive array — towers that project barriers of compressed air, strong enough to deflect arrows and slow cavalry.

The problem: the activation mechanism is in the deepest part of the kingdom. And the warlord’s scouts are already in the mineshaft. We need to get there first.

They found a kingdom underground. Not ruins — a working kingdom. Gears turning, water wheels spinning, bellows pumping. All powered by nobody. The machinery maintains itself.

I descended with Brother Aldric and three soldiers. The entrance is a mineshaft outside Dunhallow. The miners broke through a wall and found corridors — clean stone, precisely cut, with channels for air circulation.

The kingdom stretches for miles. We found workshops, armories, a library with books in no language we recognize, and a throne room with a chair made of interlocking gears. The chair is empty.

The books are the real prize. Aldric recognized some of the diagrams — they’re schematics for flying machines. Machines that calculate. Machines that think. The civilization that built this was thousands of years ahead of us.

We need to get these books to the Academy. But there’s a problem. The deeper we go, the more the machines respond to our presence. Lights turn on as we walk. Doors open before we reach them. The kingdom is waking up, and it thinks we’re the ones who built it.

The village of Harrowfield hasn’t paid its tithe in three months. Lord Cassian sent me to investigate. I expected lazy peasants or crop failure. What I found was worse.

The entire village has gone silent. Not abandoned — silent. People move through the streets, tend gardens, walk to the well, but nobody speaks. Their eyes are blank. They perform daily routines with mechanical precision but there’s nobody home behind the eyes.

The priest told me everything. Three months ago, a traveler came through offering a cure for the blight affecting their crops. The cure worked — crops grew overnight, healthier than ever. But the price wasn’t silver. It was voices. Every person in the village traded their voice for the harvest.

The priest still has his voice because he’s a priest of the Old Faith. He begs me to find the traveler and reverse the bargain. The traveler is heading east, toward the Ashwood. Of course he is.

I’m tracking him now. If I can’t reverse the bargain, Harrowfield will be a village of ghosts within a year.

We found the Cathedral of the Drowned King beneath Lake Mireth. The monks who built it centuries ago were trying to communicate with something in the lake’s depths. They succeeded. The thing they contacted wasn’t a god — it was older than gods.

The cathedral is half-submerged. The upper floors are dry but the walls weep saltwater. The lower floors are underwater, and that’s where the real architecture is — carved halls that shouldn’t exist beneath a freshwater lake.

Brother Aldric thinks the cathedral is a prison. The carvings on the pillars depict a being of immense power — tentacled, multi-limbed, with eyes that cover its entire body.

I can hear it breathing. Deep below the waterline, something inhales and exhales on a 30-second cycle. The monks built the cathedral around it. Not to worship it. To keep it asleep.

We need to leave. Whatever the monks were doing, they did it well enough to last centuries. I don’t want to be the one who wakes it up.

I met a merchant on the road to Thornwall today — a thin man with quick eyes and a cart full of bottled light. He offered me a vial of captured starfire for ten silvers. I told him I had no use for bottled light. He smiled and said everyone says that until they’re lost in the Ashwood after dark.

He wasn’t wrong. The Ashwood has been swallowing travelers for weeks. The trees have shifted — old paths that were safe a month ago now lead to the Hollowed Glade, where the ground breathes and the air tastes like copper.

I bought two vials. If the forest is changing, I’ll need light that doesn’t come from torches. Torches attract the wrong things in the Ashwood.

The merchant also told me something else. There’s a warlord in the east — Lady Seraphine — who’s been buying up ancient weapons from ruins. Not for an army. For a single purpose. The weapons she’s buying are all bound with old magic. The kind that only works once.

I’m heading to the Ashwood tomorrow. If the forest is waking up, I need to know why before it does something irreversible.

The blighted lands beyond the Thornwall have claimed another expedition. Lord Cassian’s scouts returned with only three of twelve. They speak of a hollow knight — a suit of armor animated by something dark, standing vigil over the old bridge to the Eastern Reaches.

I’ve been tasked with confronting it. The village elders believe the knight is a remnant of the Old Kingdom, bound to the bridge by a geas that expired centuries ago. The binding should have dissolved, but something is keeping it intact. Dark magic, probably. There’s a shrine to the old gods half a mile upstream — I’m betting the answer lies there.

I leave at dawn. If I don’t return, burn this journal and tell my sister the orchard is hers.

The rains have not stopped for a fortnight. The old dwarf roads beneath Ironholt keep flooding, and now something stirs in the dark water.

I descended into the catacombs with a lantern and a borrowed sword. The water was up to my knees, cold enough to numb. That’s when I saw them — glowing eyes beneath the surface. Not rats. Something older. The priestess says it’s a water wraith bound to the catacombs when they were first sealed. If that’s true, then the seal is breaking.

The council wants me to find the source of the flooding before the wraith reaches the upper city. Three entrances, three paths, and only one leads to the drainage chamber. The other two… best not to think about what waits there.

The rain has not stopped for three days. It pounds against the stone walls of Ironholt, turning the courtyard into a quagmire of mud and blood. The orc warband that emerged from the Broken Tooth Mountains last week has grown bolder with each passing night.

Lord Commander Aldric called a council this morning. His face was grim as he unrolled the parchment map across the oak table.

“They’ve taken the eastern watchtower,” he said, his voice低沉. “If we lose the East Road, we lose our supply line to the capital.”

I volunteered to lead a night sortie. Twenty of us, cloaked in shadow, moving through the old sewer tunnels that predate the fortress itself. The stench was unbearable, but it masked our approach.

We struck at midnight. Caught them sleeping. Brought back three prisoners and the head of their chieftain.

But the main army is still out there. Tomorrow, we ride for the Broken Tooth. Either we end this, or they end us.

— Sir Kaelen, Knight of the Iron Order