Ridh

Ridh was a village of about two hundred people on the grassland of Idir, two days’ ride and some seventy-five miles north of Haudh-Gwenn, and it sat under a wyvern’s flight path. That was its one claim to fame. The Wyvern’s Tale traded on it with a sign that misspelled the word, and the sign was better known than the village. Gnolls burned the place off the grassland in a single afternoon.

The tavern was too large for the place and falling down. On a slow night it held a drunk who had passed out, a patron who did not speak, and a horse standing behind the bar; Brindle kept it and traded free drinks for news off the road. Besides the tavern there was a general store with very little in it, scattered farmhouses and their barns, and fields. No council and no captain. What civic weight Ridh had sat with its militia, which one farmer served twenty years in and which could put thirty people in a lane with pitchforks inside a night. A village of two hundred that called its militia a town militia was saying something about itself.

Nobody counted it past the two hundred, and the village never gave itself a name for its own people or a year to date itself from.

Koa kept it as home, having worked the thorps around it as a jobbing hired sword and been raised among the Free Folk who camp the forests east of the village. Those same woods carry Orsugo’s name, and it was in a Ridh tavern that travelers first passed it along. Three days’ ride north stands Wraithblade Keep, which was known for a long while only as the old keep north of Ridh.

Campaign Updates

Ridh has taken deaths that were decided elsewhere. The Peren spearwoman Nazeera was one of two survivors of the crew that went into Wraithblade Keep, and she did not survive long. Her helmet was left outside the keep’s gates and she came down the mountain without it, and it was here that her wounds finished her.

A riddle-poem in a dead alchemist’s notebook turned on the spelling of the village’s name, and the spelling was the answer. Under the floor-panel of a barn stall near the Wyvern’s Tale lay the cache of a slain explorer band: two clasped books, a crate of sealed vials, a doctor’s kit, an armored alchemist’s coat, a sling staff and the band’s own sacks. The party came back for it and took it.

Their other business in the village went less well. Mikhail arrived a night ahead of the others and killed the hours in the tavern on his lute, weathering a local tough named Dan, then spent the dawn in a barn with a farmer’s daughter who had watched him through the window all night and admired his horse. Her father, a twenty-year man of the militia, came after him over the daughter and over a horse he took for stolen, and he brought Dan, whose wedding to the girl had just been ruined, and some thirty townsfolk with him. They came for the Valiant Few by name. Nobody died, and nobody was meant to: Koa met them with a club rather than a blade, and Mikhail rode in at a gallop and put six of them to sleep where they stood. The rest scattered. Dan had demanded the fight one to one, so he was woken for it and headbutted unconscious. The girl came afterward to apologize and offered the party her farmhouse floor, and they took it and left two silver for their breakfast.

Then the gnolls came. Koa was riding north for Wraithblade Keep with Hinta and Jaden when the smoke came up over the grass, too much of it for a few buildings and no foundry in the village to account for it. Late summer in Idir burns of its own accord often enough that a burning horizon proves nothing, and it was only from close in that the crop fields and the buildings could be told apart in it. The outlying fields and farms had been fired well before the town, almost as though the fires from around were herding the people together, and the bodies in the road had ash merely settled over them and blood pooled black underneath: those had been killed by hand. Nobody was fighting the fires.

Koa spurred his horse and went in alone, ahead of the other two and without a word to them, on the reasoning that anyone still alive would not be alive long. He cleaved down two gnolls in one pass, was bitten off the horse by a hyena and set alight by a gnoll whose own hands and wrists were charred from the casting, and killed the last of them from the ground. What had been left of the village was shut inside the inn. Ridh’s standing answer to a wyvern overhead was to shelter behind its stone walls, and the gnolls had known enough to drive two swords through the door timbers, snap the handles off, and pile debris against it so the bar inside could not be lifted. Jaden fought a gnoll alone at that door and took a spear through the side before she put it down. Koa smashed the blades through with a hammer, and when the smoke rolled out there were far fewer people than he had hoped. He went back in for one more. Hinta followed two who had run north to a house with two more inside, and sent all four after the rest.

He sent them south to Haudh-Gwenn: leave your belongings, drink from the river, fish on the way, go now. Jaden turned south with them rather than ride on, on the grounds that a refugee column with no soldiers behind it and hyenas somewhere behind that needed somebody who could hurt a hound badly enough to make it stop. East of the burning there was a mass without tents in it, large enough to read as a whole tribe, and neither Koa nor Jaden went near it. Whose it was was never established, though both of them assumed the same name. Koa’s arithmetic was Jaden wounded, Hinta no fighter and himself at a third of his health with no potions left, and his answer was that Orsugo was a problem for another day while what he was riding north to do was a problem for Idir forever. Riding out past it, Jaden said what it looked like: that he had just taken Ridh off the map.