The Tale in a Nutshel: Part II

Book I: Part 1

So far in Book I: Part 2...

Jarthen and friends went through the Vinkenti gate....

...and are headed to the City of Mages...

...where they hook up with odd travelers to take them through the mysterious Dark Lands...

...where they battled the nefarious nybbas! A battle which cost poor Tlin his life.

Jellihondor's company is lead through yet another magickal gate (this one, though, is a feat of astounding clockworks)...


...and soon after, Jarthen bids a fond farewell to his first love, Leila the Inalan girl, and heads to Susselfen with Rethnaki and Elcrona to spy on the Imperial Army.

Meanwhile...
While in Perejin, Bertronius, Nelhoepher, and Lem follow a lead from a shady bartender...



...the pressures of spydom weigh heavily on McNab.



The stealthy quartet are then transferred to Susselfen....


...where Bertronius continues his search for the nefarious Larthon Ractor!


But, alas, he makes little progress. Instead, he stumbles on the movements of a small group of rebels on their way to the city by way of a drunken elf!

Featured Jarthenpedia Post: Hephaestion Gorn

Gorn and a young friend

Hephaestion Gorn, though now a fixture of the West Fethil garrison of the Imperial Army, has not always led a life of acceptance and ease. Gorn was born in the fronteir town of Fennilmar, in the province of Perejin to a stern, disapproving father, and his cowed wife. Although his mother loved Hephaestion and his four siblings a great deal, she was unable to defend them from the capricious humors of her husband. Hephaestion, as the oldest child, suffered the brunt of his father's beatings and verbal abuse, and grew into a sullen, retired young man.

Nevertheless, Hephaestion was enamored of children and, after a stint as a blacksmith's apprentice, began working in a local school. Always a clever lad, he helped teach arithmetic and grammar -- subjects he had mastered on his own in the dark, dingy kitchen of his parents tenement home.

Young Gorn was forced to suddenly leave town when he got into a row with the parents of one of his students, after rumors began to circulate about the propriety of his methods. On a whim, Gorn joined a traveling circus where he worked as a very popular clown, bringing joy to countless children and townfolk throughout the eastern realms of the Empire. He was known for his deft acrobatics and hilarious capering.

However, trouble again managed to catch up with the luckless Gorn, this time in the form of the drunken circus master. According to Gorn, he was innocently helping the circus master's young son with his lessons, when his enraged employer burst in reeking of wine, accusing him of the most vile acts. Needless to say, Gorn thought it best to make an expeditious departure from his place of employ for more hospitable circumstances.

Gorn worked his way across the empire through a variety of jobs over the next several years. During this time he developed the mean, hardened aspect that is so common among those who must toil for their bread and do not know where their head will rest next in this life of wandering. Eventually, Gorn grew tired of never having enough to eat and scrambling for ldging and decided to trade his impoverished freedom for the rigorous regularity of the militarity.

Gorn joined a regiment that was sent to the front where Gorn witnessed firsthand the horrors of war. He fought valiantly with his battalion in a number of different engagements. In one particularly viscious battle, Gorn bravely rescued a fourteen year old drummer boy who was in grave peril of having his head crushed by a mace wielding gnome. Gorn saved the lad, and fought off a dozen other rebels before making receiving a nearly fatal wound to his leg from a battle axe. Nevertheless, Gorn dragged his crippled body back to safety, and was evacuated to a field hospital.

Gorn lost his leg, and withstood a very dire case of sepsis before recovering. In view of his heroic surface, Gorn was granted a lifetime position as quartermaster of the West Fethil Garrison. These jobs are highly sought after by veterans as they ensure a decent pension, safety from the dangers of the front, and all the conveniences of living in a town. Today, Gorn is a respected member of the West Fethil community, frequently volunteering to work at the school and performing other charitable works. Despite a few of the nagging rumors that always seem to follow him, Gorn is well liked among his fellow townsmen.

Featured Jarthenpedia Post: Mundayne Hegemony

Gramski's Prison Notebooks

First proposed by the great political philosopher Gramski of the Round Open Patch near a Stand of Birches, a hunchbacked gnome taken prisoner by the Imperial Army for his revolutionary behavior. Gramski first attracted the ire of the authorities while openly trying to recruit both the magickal and mundayne beings of a small frontier town to join the rebel cause. Gramski was detained and charged with being a general nuisance and not wearing wooden shoes¹ within imperial bounds.

Because of his belligerent behavior before the military tribunal that considered his case, Gramski was given the sentence of 30 years in prison, to be served in a workshop making weapons for the very troops that he had worked so hard against. Of course, Gramski was deeply demoralized by the ruling and, in particular, the sentence that he was given. However, with his intimate knowledge of woodcrafting the rebellious gnome found subtle artifices to undermine the efficacy of the weapons he was forced to make with what he hoped would be deadly results for their imperial wielders.

During his time in prison, Gramski, who had always been a prodigious talker, set down to record his thoughts on and justifications for opposing the Elothninian Empire's seemingly insatiable appetite for expansion. This labor yielded several important concepts, including the landmark notion of Mundayne Hegemony. According to interpreters of Gramski², Mundayne Hegemony describes Elothninian society as systematically devaluing and destroying magickal beings' culture, rights, and even their lives on the belief that the use of magick corrupts the morals and internal ethics of beings. Magickal creatures, in the view of some anti-magick demagogues, are lazy, morally deficient, and dishonest because magick allows its practitioners to skirt the kind of labor that keeps humans honest. This, in turn, is used to justify the systematic disenfranchisement and devaluation of all magickal beings.

In his strange, often cryptic writings Gramski argued that if mundayne and magickal beings were ever to have peace with one another, mundayne beings would have to be compelled to abandon their anti-magickal beliefs -- only then could a just society be created.
______________________________________________________________________
¹Following an edict by King Gimmelthorpe all gnomes dwelling within the confines of the Elothninian Empire were required by law to wear wooden shoes at all times, "for the sake of public decency and order." This law has been viewed by many in the gnomish community as being both discriminatory and naive.
²Because of the strict constraints on his activities and the danger of being found with anti-imperial rantings by prison guards, Gramski elected to write in a form of code, which only the most astute and initiated readers are able to decipher.

Jarthenpedia Reaches 100 Posts! In Celebration, Peruse the Life and Times of Eldernoth Furblog

That's right, dear readers! The cornucopia of delicious knowledge morsels about Elothnin and the surrounding lands has grown to truly grand proportions. We here at Jarthen HQ can scarcely think of a better way to commemorate this momentous occasion than by letting Jarthen's father, Eldernoth Furblog, tell his tale in his own words. We hope you enjoy it (and don't find it terribly depressing)!
___________________________________________________________________


The screaming. That was probably the worst part.

We had been part of the column of Imperial troops sent into the Erkenheld to root out the rebels once and for all. Sure, you would think that if it was so easy as that -- just a quick walk in the woods combined with the wholesale defeat of an enemy that had succeeded in flouting the authority of the empire for more than a century -- we wouldn't have taken so long to get down to it. At the time, of course, I didn't think such things. I was just a farm boy, caught up in something much bigger than me or anything I have seen or ever will see. I was perfectly content believing that this would be the decisive blow, and I was proud that I would get to be a part of it. What honest Elothninian wouldn't?

I was so naive.

The first night at the front we were as full of elan as ever a group of young men bent on slaughter and bloodshed was. We joked and caroused, many of us getting our first taste of the firewater soldiers are so fond of drinking. The older soldiers watched our revelry with a sort of mute sadness, which, at the time was easily dismissed as the recalcitrance we associated with all of our elders. Their fatalistic melancholy, the result no doubt of their knowledge of what was to come and simultaneous inability to in any way affect the future, did nothing to sober our ignorant joviality.

The pride of youth, or the folly of war?

I remember writing a letter to my young wife that night. I told her how much I missed her mush, and how I hoped to make our as yet unborn child proud with the same deeds of bravery that all youth dream of before seeing their friend's face smote in twain by the cold blades of some eerie battlefield specter. But I digress. I wrote to her that she might name the child after herself it was born a girl, but that if it was a lad I wanted him to be called Jarthen.

I didn't know then, that love can be tragically fragile in the face of war.

The subsequent 8 months completely vanished from my recollection. I am told that I was found three days after the battle ended in a small pit where four of my comrades from the Fethil had been slain by the rebels. I was chattering away like a madman -- why shouldn't I have been? -- seeking solace from my fallen friends. After a month in hospital I was at last sent home to West Fethil, where only the birth of my son was enough to rouse me from the stupor that consumed by weary body and tortured mind.

Of course, I tried to regain some semblance of normality for the sake of Jarthen and his mother, but I don't know that they ever bought into my feeble facade. There always seemed to be a strangely piercing look in the lad's calm, measured countenance -- it was as if he was able to see the constant fear that felt like my only companion.

I feel a tremendous amount of guilt for Jarthen's mother. Before I left for the front, we were just a pair carefree young lovers, but, after my convalescence, it was all we could do to make it through the protracted agony that was our day to day existence. Her, slaving over a steaming vat of mush with a young son constantly tugging at her apron strings, and I, startled by the scarecrows in a field that would yield no fruit, condemned to wander the earth as specters of despair and vanquished dreams.

I knew that they would come for me again some day. The war, it never ends -- not on the borders of the empire, and not in my mind. I knew that I would be unable to answer the call.

Oh my dear boy! How I have failed you! I may take comfort, at least, in the knowledge that yours was a quick end. I, on the other hand, must now live not only with the ghosts of those young soldiers who died so violently in the forest, but also the blood of my own child upon my conscience. Perhaps you are the lucky one, Jarthen. Perhaps you are the lucky one.

A father's despair