Recent content by Hugo Farlance

Hugo watched the two, content to let them tear at each others' throats for a spell. It was a strange encounter, to be sure. Perhaps rival bandits fighting over territory and victims to claim? He raised his sword, pointing its tip in a balanced stance at neck-height, aimed for Mongrel's back. He...

Hugo stayed bitterly silent, though he took in Grul's words all the same. Don't trust your eyes. It can get inside us. It was a good thing Grul hadn't witnessed Hugo's personal illusion. What he had seen had brought out the worst in him, and he had found himself uselessly attacking a broken...

Hugo furiously threw the pot off his head, sitting up from the ground. Disoriented like a drunken bell-ringer bashing around in his own bell, he wiped chicken-soup off his face. He peered at a strand of bloody mucus on the back of his hand, produced from his wet nose. Terrible headache already...

The bandit laughed in his face with unearned confidence. He had the gall to mock him, after dashing his pot and frustrating his journey? Insubordination. He was reminded of the military term for such behaviour, and how he and his fellow officers had whipped discipline back into any wayward...

A metallic clang echoed through the woods. Hugo rose at the sound, his arm cradling a bundle of firewood and tinder. He thought it had come from the direction of his camp . . . Ice gripped his heart. He broke into a sprint, rushing to get back, dropping precious bits of firewood on the way...

Hugo stirred his pot of precious chicken soup with a carved stick. He'd already sold the dagger he used for eating. For his first night in the year, he would have to eat with his hands and this improvised stick he had cut into a primitive spoon at one end, stake in the other. The road to Maraan...

Hugo continued on his strange, charmed journey through the St. Clover's faire. He needed to hold onto this token for as long as possible. No doubt there would be some thieving hand somewhere. An angler, perhaps? He'd heard of those thieves in Alliria, sitting up high in the safety of a window...

Grul found Hugo at the left turn, by a flickering light. The warm glow of the torch touched upon Grul's closed eyelids, urging him to see again. Unshaped earth gave way to worked stone, and a section of collapsed ceiling and broken, rotting timbers mingled with the touch of fungi. Sparse signs...

Hugo came upon two Lazular guards, poised with spears, and an old, fevered woman in rags. She was lashing out at the two with her nails, alternating between this and grasping the wall. So far, they merely kept her back with the shafts of their spears. "Strike her!" one of them cried, a young...

The flames washed over the abberration, and it shrieked with an agony unknown to mortals. The flames purged away the skin and bone from this doppelganger, revealing nothing but hollow vegetation, mimicking a human frame. It twisted and writhed, not in any manner known to a being of flesh and...

No answer was forthcoming for Grul. The goblin had taken his eyes off Hugo for a moment to observe the darkness. And the darkness had gleefuly snatched his sole companion away. Laughter could almost be heard, as if the earth itself mocked him. Words about to form, like unreleased whispers, died...

He offered both a small bow of his head, touching his hat with courtesy. But his chest clenched with worry. A seer and a midwife. These two were not warriors - and what they were facing were some of the deadliest and malicious fighters in Arethil. Still, he recalled the magic she had brought to...

Hugo grunted, a low drone of a sound, like a beast trapped by bars. Indeed, the stones themselves seemed corrupted by some malignant force. He pocketed Darius' medallion in a pouch near his chest and brushed off rotten vegetation from his uniform. "Aye, certainly some foul magic a-foot here...

Hugo kept his eyes shut, weighing their words. Weighing the odds of survival or disaster. It had become an old habit of his. He could hear in Gbáyọ̀dé’s voice the sort of fatigue that came with having watched friends die, along with other plentiful terrors of war. It sounds as though we would...