[Text post] So I got the job.

The longer I stay in the City on the Lake, the stranger things seem. I mean, back home, things were strange because unregulated druids performed ecoterrorism anytime someone sold a cash crop, like tobacco or blood wart. I found out when I came to Rhyhan that mushroom soup is grown as soup in a cauldron. Like kombucha or something. You learn something new every day, I suppose.

I got the job engraving runes for the Sun Warriors. I thought this would be paradise, but these guys make the Endtimes Cult look sane. Did you know they undergo a ritual to erase the feeling of fear from their minds? That sounds badass on paper until you find what is being partially erased is their sense of inhibition, too. They aren’t more logical because they feel no fear, and other raw emotions like anger or sadness or confusion stretch to fill those gaps. I think they want me to engrace runes of happiness to mellow some of them out?

The workshop is fucking tight, though. You wouldn’t believe the setup here. I get to engrave with an adamantite chisel, an elven silver hammer, and a mana tuning fork. Adamantite. I can carve through solid steel with this thing. And the hammer is a dream come true. It sort of feels like swinging a half-empty bottle of cough syrup, but when you swing it just right, ohhhh man. And I can really get around corners for smoothing and into the grooves with the fork without diminishing quality.

Now I just need to tune out the screaming about the sun’s wrath.

I got an invitation to an afternoon tea with Barca the Wise. He talked about having an iron lung, some continent called fey-run or something, and went on and on about ‘another kalpa’ until the tea actually arrived. I heard he had something to do with the Great Conflagration from the other day. He said he checked the mana vessels and warned the different mages and gadgeteers about instability in one of them, but they didn’t listen. I don’t know if he was bragging about it blowing up or trying to act like he was innocent in the whole thing.

Why did Barca invite me to tea? He’s an affiliate of the Golden Eagle Mages Guild and has been partnered with the Sun Warriors and teaching them war magic for about 11 years now, I think. I think the whole thing was a ‘let me get to know you’ type deal so he could see if I’d be any trouble. Which is weird because he isn’t my new supervisor—Fabius the Red is. I mean, I’m not like those mages who summon leeches into your bladder, remove people’s ions, or teleport people to the moon while marketing it as “infinite werebeast form” or something. I’m your everyday working mage, doing my 9 to 5 giving paladins superhuman strength and rewiring glyph lines. I’m more worried about him,

and I’m not saying this to be an asshole,

causing another Great Conflagration. I think after that fuck up, the count is going to send him to the Capital to have him fight the giant lampreys off the coast. Or at the very least boil the ocean until there are no more giant lampreys, which would be a shame, because the cooking oil you get from them kinda slaps.

I found out about the infinite goblin orc ogre shadow army at night thing. Turns out Rhyhan is built on top of an ancient, flooded city beneath the waves of Lake Rhy, which was flooded to stop the growing power of the Brine Priests. It also turns out that city was built over a great metropolis of dwarf mages that suffered a fungal infection that turned all the denizens into mindless slaves to the mycelium that released it. And that was built over a cannibalistic, indigenous cave dweller city where they worship the God of the Depths and perform war crimes on visitors. You’re not gonna believe it, but THAT was built over an infernal palace of a Goetian demon lord known only as the King of Pain.

After learning that, I managed to get my rent reduced by about a third, so that’s good.

Introduction to Rhyhan