Filed Away

Notes:

This was first written a good twenty years ago and has gone through a few iterations since then. The names in it are all from my old D&D and Fantasy Trip ITL days. It was actually supposed to be the opening of a gaming campaign, but by then most of our old gaming crew were too far away or too married to manage the four-hours-every-Sunday we had maintained for most of the previous decade. Good times, those were.

Endings- Part One of The Rose

No one truly knows from whence the Horde came. It seemed as if it simply appeared, raging across the length and breadth of the land, destroying everything, everyone. They took no prisoners, no slaves, no plunder- they simply destroyed, annihilated.

The Campbells had a powerful holding hereabouts. The old man, Corwin was his name, entertained himself slaying the nastier creatures that occasionally issued forth from the Temberance Mountains. When the Call went out of course he rallied his men.

But there was more: Corwin’s wife Marla the Red was a Great Mage, as was her twin sister, The Drahlosahde. Together they had created something… the histories are very unclear. Perhaps deliberately so, who can tell these days? They created something, something of immense power. Something the Horde wanted. In all the writings that survive from those days it is named only once: The Rose.

Corwin was no fool. His eldest son, Corwin the Younger, was left behind with fifty men. They took the Rose and secreted it deep within the Catacombs of Campbell Keep. It was then that Marla bound them in an Oath, an Oath so mighty that it set the fires of the mighty Temberance to raging for centuries to come.

As Corwin marched forth to do battle his wife sought to buy him time, summoning Great Ones from the Four Corners of the world and beyond. Gar-shaldi the Troll King; Dark and Mysterious Kane who fought for reasons he would explain to none; sensies Xias and Fujiwara as well as the Serpent Prince (three who could never miss such a momentous fight); Thingol The Mad, Marroc the Masterful, Greywand The Elder, and many others. Together they set out to slow the Horde until Sir Campbell could marshal his forces.

The running battle lasted seven days and in that time, one by one, The Great Ones fell until only Kane, Xias and Vrenti remained, holding the final pass through the Cairn Hills for two days. Kane alone remained when the skirling pipes of Corwin’s legions could be heard echoing through the passes. He surveyed the wreck and ruin, and his fallen comrades. With a smile he vanished across the Threshold of Reality, leaving behind the echo of a whisper: “Right on time, Corwin.”

Corwin met the Horde by the headwaters of the Fale River. At his back were 5000 of the Faithful. Led by Corwin, for the first time a Human Army turned away the Horde. Casualties were horrendous, nearly half the force was decimated, but as the Horde turned to flee Corwin rallied his battered host in pursuit.

It was then The Gate appeared a massive rip in the fabric of Reality spanning the Valley of the Fale. The Horde ran for the Gate, ran for home.

None can say why- perhaps he sought vengeance, perhaps he simply refused to allow the Horde the chance to re-group and return. Either way, as the Enemy poured through the Gate Corwin raised his mighty sword and gave a cry that many say can still be heard echoing in the mountains: “Follow Me!” With that the Host of the Faithful charged in to the collapsing Gate and vanished forever from this world.

The battle was won, but the world lay in ruins. Little remained of civilization, and in the Temberance Mountains fifty-one Men bound beyond Death in an Oath of Unyielding Faith await Deliverance and the Ascension of The Rose…

-From “Great Legends Of The Golden Age” by Aliececas, c.970, Post Apocalypse