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Episode: Shattered Peace

Posted by Story on 09/25/22
With war in the Mourning Isles raging all the hotter, it's no surprise that it's the reigning topic of conversation in Arx. For a time the more prolific gossips attempt to one up each other with increasingly sensational stories of sea battles, heroic ship-to-ship duels to the death, and the unfortunate fate of all the rebels that attacked Eswynd Rock (eaten, of course, as is House Eswynd tradition), only to grow frustrated when they find those stories repeated back to them. In what must have been a truly desperate grasp for relevance from the originator, a story circulates briefly about a hunter from the Telmarch who claims that a sudden earthquake left her half sunk, and she was forced to spend hours digging herself out while the ground continued to shake, and some sort of incomprehensible thundering and smashing went on all around her. Once she finally managed to get free, she found the entire surrounding area full of shattered trees and cracked boulders, along with what she swears on her life was the massive skeleton of...something, with arms longer than its legs, long curved canines and a skull that looked very vaguely human - though certainly nothing so large could actually be - freshly and completely picked clean. Of course, the very idea is absurd, the entire matter swiftly dismissed as the result of a prank or far, far too much drinking, and while the gossips delight in saying so, they can't help but pile on more and more details with the telling, and the size of the fake yet mysterious skeleton is somehow larger every time.

This almost entirely drowns out the brief flutter about a few more sinkholes (and one shallow, collapsed cave system), newly discovered a few days north of Blancbier, as these are, apparently, bereft of fictional skeletons.