Dedicated to the sidehall kids’ kids —
may they have lives full of adventure, and always return home safe.
by J. T. Minor
v.3
© 2017
The world of the Quartered Tales is a single great continent. At its center, a massive volcano, the height of Everest, casts its shadow to the four directions. During the time documented here, it was in a state of discord, a dark era that was darkest just before its end. But end it did. These maps and hero’s tales document a struggling world evolving into a more peaceful, prosperous world. The first seeds of a great awakening. Four heroes, among many, adventuring their world towards the light.
Northwest
In a small village, not too far from the coast, a boy named Owen, by nature curious and brave, followed a bird of unusual plumage. Flying from treetop to treetop, it seemingly waited for him to catch up, until they ended up, together, on a rocky beach. There, Owen spotted the glint of a green glass bottle among the pebbles. In the bottle was a note. Being too young to read it, he stashed it in his box of most precious treasures, kept hidden under his bed.
A few years after he found the note, he became a squire, training to become a knight, but still unable to lift a broad sword. He was not considered to be a good candidate for knighthood, however, because he spent his free time roaming. Rather than practice sword and lancet, or play dice with the other lads, he would go out alone, birding and fishing. During this training, he saw a tutor with a scroll in the same writing as the message in a bottle. Suddenly he recalled the note, and brought it to the tutor to translate. He discovered it was a series of dated verses, the first of which lay a few months in his future. It began with the verse:
The Amber Squire
passes the story
to the Green Lordling
lost in the West Hills.
Convinced that “the Amber Squire” referred to him, in the appointed month, he set off to wander in the nearby West Hills region, in search of a lost “Green Lordling” (whoever that was). Living off the land, sleeping under the stars, he wandered the back roads and foot paths of the hill country. Along the way he met people, mostly locals about their business, but also ramblers and vagabonds, gamblers, show folk, and even a few people from distant lands. Eventually he came across a well dressed young man camped by a small pond. His name was Weston. He was a young lord, lost in these unfamiliar hills, and looking for the way back to the moors of the Green Lands. Recognizing this all from the verses, Owen invited Weston to share an ale, and hear about the message in a bottle.
After seeing Weston off with the message he returned home. But he had enjoyed the outdoor life, and meeting so many other interesting travelers. So, Owen’s taste for further adventures abroad was stoked. He soon told his family he planned to travel north, along the mountains. He would take the old high trails to the Amber Castle. Knowing there was nothing they could do to stop him, they threw him a farewell picnic. Then off he set, on his next adventure, north into the hills.
He quickly learned he was ill-equipped for life alone in the mountains. Unlike the plentiful streams, nut trees and friendly farmers that sustained him in the hills, the mountains offered much less easy pickins’. At night, he almost froze in his thin sleeping roll. After a few nights, he met a small group of travelers in a caravan. Joining in with the group, he helped to push their wagons over the peak of a pass. In exchange, they agreed to shelter him as far as the next crossroads. He made quick friends with two of the travelers, quickly learning the essential tools and techniques for life lived outdoors, at high elevation. He took a stable job at the crossroads village, until he could buy the gear he would need. After a few months labor, he was back on the trail, better prepared, and ready to complete his journey north.
During this time crossing the mountains, he would, from time-to-time, spend the evening at a public house along the trail. On one such evening, he found himself in an inn full of lovely young ladies and a couple old men. He wasn’t complaining, but it was unusual for this kind of mountain tavern. After drinking the house cider he began to feel woozy. Waking up the next day, he found himself in irons, chained in the back of a covered wagon with three other young men. When the wagon stopped, the driver told them they were now all foot soldiers in the Great Army of the Amber Castle. The king was paying a bounty for young men, and they had been sold to march east, to war.
Unable to escape without risking a quick death, Owen is marched east, joining a colossal army preparing to attack the Tower of the Owl. Although the Tower is impenetrable and unconquerable, the King had been convinced to raise an army to take the Tower. Already a smaller force, sent to survey and parley, had been slaughtered to the last man by the Masters of the Tower. Now a massive new siege got underway. In the chaos, Owen, assigned to field medic duty, came upon a legendary Amber Knight. A victorious champion of many tournaments, he was a man Owen and the squires back home admired as a living legend. Recognizing his banner, Owen ran to his aide. But too late, as the knight had taken on too many foes, who had landed too many blows. Dying, he tells Owen a secret: that a group of scheming blacksmiths had provoked the war, to sell arms to both sides. He demanded Owen swear to find their factories, somewhere near the Volcano-at-the-Center, and expose their plot to the king and populace. With his last breath, the Amber Knight bequeathed Owen his famous blade, Eyestabber, and his black horse, Nightspeed, the fastest in the Amber Lands.
Determined, now, to stop the war and reveal the truth of its origins, Owen rides Nightspeed east in the dark, away from the armies and anyone who might identify him, or his famous horse. He rode only at night and didn’t speak to those he passed on the road. During the days he slept and trained, practicing the sword drills he recalled from his squire days with Eyestabbber. When he reached the River Sap, he turned south towards The Volcano-at-the-Center. By now, he was far from the fighting, and far from the reach of the king of the Amber Castle or his slave army. He could have returned to traveling by day. But he couldn’t sleep, and still often rode through the dark.
Just before the foothills of the volcano, the River Sap runs though a wide flat lowland. Carrying effluvia from the Volcano-at-the-Center, the swamps here are noxious, with minerals collecting in places, causing particularly toxic pools, with even the fumes able to kill grown men. Owen, not knowing the danger of the place, entered this bog riding Nightspeed. Choked from the smell and short for lack of air, he was barely able to find his way back out of the swamp before he passed out. Once recovered, he used the scouting and trailblazing skills he’d learned in his wandering days to plan a way though the swamp. As he began his exploration, he noted that Nightspeed would slow and flare his nostrils if he went too near the worst patches. Combining this with his skill as an outdoorsman, he was able to safely traverse the murderous swamp and began his ascent towards the Volcano-at-the-Center.
Cresting the last foothill below the volcano, he spotted a faint road, crossing the valley floor and turning up the visible side of the Volcano-at-the-Center. He decided this would be his first line of exploration for the cabal’s hidden fortress and forges. Coming to a massive chasm with a raised draw-bridge on the other side, he feared his journey might be at a dead end. But after securing Nightspeed out of sight from the road, he began to climb. Although the volcanic rock scraped at his hands and feed, the rocky surface also made it easy to climb up and around. Crossing above the chasm’s end, he descended down and quietly entered the fortress from above. It was nearly empty, apart from the forge workers and their overseers. At the center of the compound was an ornate red brick tower. Sneaking in that night, he was able to find the library and accounting rooms, and collected key pages from the cabal’s record books. He climbed back to Nightspeed, and rode quickly down the volcano in the dark. Badly hurt, drained from his long and arduous travels, and longing for home, he decided he had had enough adventure. He found a squire in the first town in the foothils, gave him Eyestabber and the records, and told him to take them to the King as proof of the true origins of the war.
Riding Nightspeed west without stopping, he finally returned home, torn and weathered from months of rambling and war. There, his parents cared for him, and never pressed him on where he had been, or what he had done. Weeks later, with his recovery nearly completed, news arrived in the village that the great and bloody war against the Tower of the Owl was over, and that the burdensome extra war tax paid by the village would come to an end. In the proclamation, the deceased old Amber Knight was credited with bringing the war to its end, and exposing a group of traitors and war profiteers. Not wanting to take attention away from his hero, and thinking no one would believe him anyway, he celebrated this alongside everyone else, as though it was all news to him. Although he came close a few times in old age, Owen never claimed credit for his heroism, or explained where he had gone, when he went traveling in the Amber Lands.
Southwest
Lord Weston of Cole was born the first child of minor provincial nobility in the highlands of the Darkwoods. His family being leaders in that county for many generations, their connection to the land ran deep. By a quirk of history, part of that heritage was not just land in the high country, but the duty of care for a set of ancient, half-collapsed, stone circles far to the west, on the the moors that border the Amber Lands. To fulfill this largely ceremonial tradition, the eldest son would spend late adolescence in residence at a small tower on the moors.
Young Lord Weston, though, was an independent sort, even as a toddler. He chafed at the elaborate, and, in his view, pointless, ceremonies of his home life, and dreaded his noble duties. As he grew he feared for his future: mostly alone for months at a stretch, sitting in a lookout, defending a bunch of silent old stones from no real danger. He determined to avoid that awful appointed fate. He conspired with some friends to run away to the city of Maft Burgouch, on the delta of the Great Green River. There he would blend in, as just another migrant to the big city. But, as his little gang made their escape on the River Road, they encountered a tiger pacing on the road. His fair-weather companions quickly vanished, leaving Weston, thrown to the ground by his spooked horse, facing down the tiger alone.
Expecting to be mauled, Weston screamed at the tiger, hoping to scare him away. When the tiger opened his mouth, rather than a roar Weston heard a human voice say, “So rude!”. Shocked, he watched the tiger pace before him, silent and swinging its tail like a friendly house cat. “What?”, Weston eventually asked in quiet confusion. The tiger again spoke, but this time he explained that the stone circles were in peril. Soon, the tiger warned, a great earthquake will happen, and cause the circles to fall completely. If that happened, the Volcano-at-the-Center would erupt, devastating not just county Cole, but raining ash to the four corners of the world. The tiger roared that Weston must save the circles. Shock overcame him and Weston collapsed, unconscious.
Late that night, Weston woke up lying in the road alone, no tiger in sight. Although unsure if what had happened was real, he decided to return home. After hearing Weston’s story, his father forgave him for running away. He also revealed that the circles had long been rumored to be protecting the world from an eruption of the Volcano-at-the-Center. The family always thought it was a superstition, or old legend. When Weston heard this, he knew the tiger must have been real. He set out for the circles, unsure how to prevent their destruction, but determined to do so.
As he rode alone along the Old North Road, winding towards the moors, Weston was attacked by bandits. Although he fought them off, he sustained a concussion and passed out. Awaking hours later, alone, and with no memory of the last few months, he was unsure how he got there and where he was going. Was he running away from home, or on his way back there? That night he dreamt of the tiger. Although the big cat didn’t talk, he roused Weston, then sprinted away to the northwest. Waking, Weston set out in that direction.
After a time wandering on the borders of the Amber Lands, he decided to make camp at a small pond, to rest and try to recover more of his memory. After a few days, he did feel better, but still could not remember the details of his recent past. Then, a young traveler happened on his camp. After a brief conversation about the area, the adolescent told Lord Weston he was the man the traveler had been looking for. Over a shared ale, Weston learned this young squire, named Owen, had found a strange message in a bottle. Owen told him about the story as it had been translated for him, and the fate it told for Weston.
With his noble education, Weston was able to read the script of the Silver Shores. The note was a series of verses, each with a month next to it. Although symbolic in its language, his memory was instantly jogged, and he immediately comprehended its meaning. He gathered that he had been given a uniquely vital choice: to replace a broken crystal high atop the Tower of the Angels, calming the veins of the earth; or leave the gem to crumble, unleashing a quake that would topple the Stone Circles, and thus awaken the Volcano-at-the-Center to reset the world. His first task was to travel to the lonely island of Sentibu, where the tower stood on its highest point. Overjoyed at the revelation, and energized to finally have his duty made clear, he thanked Owen and headed to the coast to arrange passage on a ship to Sentibu.
Weston arranged transport on a whaling ship. Although the seas further south were well protected and at peace, the Whaler Bay was unprotected, and notoriously dangerous for merchant ships. Slavers were known to capture boats and sell the passengers in other lands. One such cruel ship fell upon Weston’s transport, and despite a valiant fight, the whaling crew and Weston were taken as slaves. After a few days in the hold as captives, Weston and the whalers heard a commotion on deck. Realizing the ship was under attack, they were able to arm themselves, and escape to deck. There, they found themselves in a standoff with the slavers and a crew of pirates from the far away Fjords of Tame. But, before a massacre could ensue, a young, handsome, and charismatic pirate persuaded the mobs to let each other go, with the whalers freed to go with the pirate crew.
The young pirate was later revealed to be a young woman in disguise, now renown in legend as the adventuring Captain Maya, Bright and Fair. Eventually Weston and the whalers aided Maya in a mutiny, and the crew were freed to disembark at Castle Green. There, Weston was able to call on his family’s name and nobility to arrange a proper naval escort to Sentibu. At the Great Green Bazaar he also acquired a hammer and a crystal. It was only a short jouney, and he had finally made it to the island. But he found the road to the Tower of the Angels abandoned, the paths weathered away. The stairs and bridges used to reach the summit had been washed out in a long ago landslides. With the appointed month for the quake near its end, he had no choice but to climb on. He sought help from local boys, then followed the paths of mountain goats. Finally he grappled his way to the base of the tower. With the last of his strength, he climbed its crumbling circular stone facade, until he found an opening, granting access to the stairs inside.
At the end of the note he received from Owen, the last month had two verses:
And the choice is his to crack the crystal hammer out the found then put in the new or leave all as is to see the circles tumbling to the ground old world gone from view
At the top of the tower he found a chamber. Its roof was caved in, and a single window opened to the Northeast. He could only see ocean, but beyond that his far away home, and the circles, lay awaiting his choice. In the chamber’s center a small stone pillar held a gem atop a metal tripod. It was a carefully cut and polished light green gem, very different then the rough stone he had brought. He wondered if he was not as prepared as he needed to be. But he had come all that way. It felt like a lifetime since the tiger talked. He looked at the gem on the pedestal, this time noticing a massive flaw forking like lightning from a single crack. He struck that spot with his hammer and the gem crumbled instantly. As he set the replacement gem in the tripod, the earth began to rumble, and the tower began to shake. He thought he had failed, or even caused the quake, and fell to his knees, crying. After a few moments of light shaking the quake passed, while the new gem remained in place. In shock, he stood, wiped his eyes, and realized his job was done.
A minor quake had come and gone without catastrophe. First he returned to Castle Green. With his prophetic song, crystal shards, and noble name, his story quickly became a sensation in the city. The King made him a royal knight, and raised his family’s nobility to a higher order, even bestowing new lands and titles on them. This meant Weston had to create and register a formal coat of arms for his family. Without hesitation he chose a shield, with tigre proper rampant affronté. And under this new sigil he returned, finally, home, having done his duty as protector of the Sacred Circles.
Southeast
In a small village in the Palm Lands far up the river Sudolyn, a young girl named Sierra lived with her parents and siblings. One day, walking home alone from the neighboring village, she saw two men at a distance, standing in the road over a crouching figure. Wary of the strange scene, she hid in the irrigation channel next to the road, peeking over to watch. What she saw broke her young heart, as the men robbed an elderly villager. She could hear the woman’s cries and pleas, but as a small girl, there was nothing she could do. She hid until the men ran off, then ran, crying, home.
From that sad day on, Sierra withdrew from the world, focusing on books and learning and wary of the world. She was a pretty girl, but avoided boys’ attentions, and kept friends mostly with the small animals of the village. The one exception being the annual library festival. Each fall the town celebrated its free library, and the children competed in a contest of speech and rhetoric. And every year Sierra won.
Near the end of her schooling, Sierra began to experience something strange. At first, it sounded like a little bird in her right ear, chirp chirping. Within a few weeks it had become a whisper, a rush coming a few times a day in either ear. Then it stopped, and she assumed it was some passing illness in her ears. But just before her graduation, she heard a quiet whisper. A benevolent female voice in her ears gave her advice, helping her finish her school exams. She kept this to herself, though, worried she will be shunned, or thought ill.
Soon after her graduation from the village school, she told her family she wanted to go south to the City at the Mouth of the Sudolyn, to enroll in the famous Flower College. She told them she wanted to advance her knowledge in rhetoric to become a teacher. But secretly she also hoped to learn about the quiet voice, which by then had again gone silent. Was it an illness? It was so kind and helpful. Was it a spirit? Why didn’t it identify itself, or answer her questions? She hoped to learn the answers in the concrete cloisters of the Flower College.
At College she thrived, immersing herself in study and meeting many people from all over the Palm Lands and even the Silver Coast. But, after a bit more than a year of college, the voice returned. This time, mixed with bits of advice about school and her dorm mates, was a song. Every day the voice sang the song, its verses as a story, each verse a month and an event. Instead of the whispered comforting kindness of before, now the voice sang with insistence. Upon finally dictating all she was hearing, the voice stopped, and she collapsed.
After a week in a coma she awoke. Her friends urged her to return home, to recover from this illness. But the voice said to go to the Silver Castle with the song. And fearing her professors and friends will think her mad, she skipped out one night, and found her way to the docks. There, the voice told her which ship to sneak aboard to sail to the Silver Castle. Once under way, the voice again left her. Now she was afloat on the Great Bay as a stowaway. Realizing what had happened, she suddenly panicked. Perhaps she really was mad to leave school and safety because of a voice in her head! She threw the message overboard in a bottle, deciding once and for all to be done with it. While doing this, she was discovered on deck. Unfortunately, the ship’s gross old captain took a liking to her. It saved her life, but she was now a prisoner, at sea with no means of escape.
Just days later, off the notoriously rough northern side of the Silver Peninsula, the ship rammed a reef in dense fog. She used the chaos of a listing ship to escape overboard. She eventually washed up on shore, exhausted but alive. Discovered by local tribespeople, she was, at first, deeply afraid. These are people she was taught to regard as backwards and wild, prone to cannibalism. In reality, she discovered, they lived off shellfish and pine nuts. They used local plants to nurse her back to health. During her recovery she also learned the basics of their language. She came to appreciate their culture, and its unique way of seeing things. One day, she heard some women in the village talking about people who hear “the gracious voice”. She confessed to them how she came to be on their shore, and her own experience with a voice in her head. Rather than shun her, or treat her as ill, they taught her to embrace it as a gift. And they taught her how to keep it from causing fugues, like the one that brought her to them. She learned how to cherish it, to be true to it, and to listen.
During these weeks, she was not aware that she was not the only survivor of the wreck. The Captain and his officers also survived. Landing up the coast, they feared the locals deeply, and built a fortified camp to protect them from the imagined savages. Soon they decided they must strike first, take the local’s camp by force, and enslave them until they could be rescued. A local, however, saw them reconnoitering the camp, and alerted everyone. As the sailors approached, the women of the camp put a special mixture in the camp’s fires. Soon the local camp was cloaked in a black fog. Lost in a thick miasma, the sailors fear what they think is witchcraft, and run in panic, never to be seen again.
Once fully healed, Sierra determined to return home, carrying back what she had learned about her voice. Taking the road over the mountains to the Silver Castle to find a ship to take her home. Immediately on arriving in the outer slums of the city, she learned all was not well. A greedy and corrupt group of thugs had taken control of the castle, city and its surroundings. Calling themselves The Wildmen, they ginned up fear of pirates and foreigners to raise a huge new navy. This brought even more unruly young sailors, gangs of toughs and other rough types into the city. She found regular folk had been run out of their homes by this soft invasion. Her first night in the city, after watching thugs proudly walk the streets, she had a nightmare. She saw the city, full and lively, but all the people looked like the old woman she saw attacked as a girl. She bolted upright, awake, and the voice, now full throated, and with the tone of a mature woman spoke: “You can help. You must.”
Immediately the voice began dictating an oration: a plea and condemnation, an appeal and rebuke. More glorious than any of her work in the Library debate competitions, a speech to make even The Wildmen take stock. To tell them regular folks outnumber them. To make them scared, but also ashamed. To get them to see the humanity in the people they had exploited. To extort them to turn on the psychopaths among them who couldn’t be persuaded, to remove them from high office to put them in a low dungeon. On a day of great public feasting, surrounded almost entirely by Wildmen, she snuck her way onto the Heart Stairs, the high place of oratory near the Castle, and delivered the sermon the voice had dictated. And it worked! The regular folk were reminded they could band together and fight back, and the Wildmen came to see their greedy masters were better shunned than elevated. Within days, the Silver Castle was back at peace. It was a miracle of words.
The sermon was immediately memorized and transcribed, spread along the Silver Coast, and around the Great Bay, even deep into the Palm Lands. Finally, now able to get free passage, she sailed back to the Flower College, and the City on the Mouth of the Sudolyn. She discovered her sermon already being preached there. Her old friends welcomed her enthusiastically, telling her that the city was a better place because of her words and ideals. After a short stay at the College, bidding school and friends goodbye, she finally returned home, now a hero and esteemed wise woman. Named the Chief Librarian of the Palm Lands, Sierra settled into a life of learning and teaching; never hearing the voice again, but occasionally catching a little chirp in her right ear.
Northeast
Now known in legend as Captain Maya, Bright and Fair, she started as just Maya, a small girl born to a family of performers. Her extended family toured the free cities of the Fjords of Tame as the Flying Pudding Birds. She was the only child of a pair of tumblers, born just after her parents had retired from the act, due to an injury to her father’s leg. Even with her father’s shortened career, her mom encouraged her to learn the family business. But despite a natural dexterity, and unlike her eager cousins, she never took to the public attention and pressure of the act, had no interest in joining the touring show.
Unlike most members of her family, as a young girl Maya was also a bit shy. Although she enjoyed practicing her tumbling, she grew to young adulthood never leaving her parent’s small hill town. She attended the village school for girls, and learned the arts of language and the home expected of middle class wives in those regions of Tame. Near the end of her schooling, she decided to settle in the same town. Partly to stay close with to her ailing father, but really because she valued its cozy ways and familiar comforts. She began to get courted for marriage by two young men, one a farmer and the other a shoe maker’s apprentice.
After she finished her education and, as she is thinking of who she will settle down with between her suitors, she begins to have a series of vivid dreams. Almost nightmares in their intensity, but ecstatic in their emotion, they began with her standing in a mask before a cheering crowd in a performing tent. After a few nights of this, she assumed these are lingering thoughts of joining the family business. But then the dreams began to change over successive weeks. The tent became a ship. The crowd became seamen. Then the ship changed into a castle parapet. The crowd morphed into an adoring mob, chanting her name. Then back in the performing tent, but now the crowd is her family. Each time she woke and thought, “that will be the last time, my nights can go back to normal now.” But within a few nights she found herself standing somewhere new, looking out though her mask at a sea of new faces, all smiling and cheering.
A year after the dreams began, Maya’s mother traded places with her aunt in the family show. Maya’s mother rejoined the act as a coach and caretaker, and the aunt stayed with Maya and her dad, helping around the home and garden. As they work together, Maya heard stories of all the places her aunt had traveled. She heard of the different foods, and all the handsome men the aunt had met. During this time her dreams also became more intense and frequent. One day, she asked her aunt if she could join the next tour without having to perform. Her aunt agreed to take her along on next season’s tour, as an apprentice coach and stage hand. Maya’s dreams disappeared, and despite her anxiety, she now had no doubt she had made the right decision.
The next season, Maya learned what it is to live life in a traveling show. The family was joined in this tour by a troupe of freaks, a pair of twin fire jugglers, a magician and his young son, and a man with big cats. Traveling with “The Cabinet of Awe”, she spent her afternoons helping to set up for the show and her evenings helping with the camp dinner and chores. Her mornings were free, and despite her shyness she gradually made friends with her fellow travelers. From them she learned skills that would serve her well in her later adventures, such as makeup and disguise, sleight of hand, lock picking, voice control and presence. With the support of her family, and the other acts, she began to perform solo interstitial acts, combining these skills in short displays of magic and mystery, hiding behind a magnificent mask, to help with her stage fright.
After a second year of touring, the Cabinet of Awe broke up, and the Flying Pudding Birds accepted an invitation to bring their high wire act to the great port of Flodenworl, at the far northeast of Fjords. Retuned to stagehand duties, Maya joined them on the tour. One evening while she is walking alone outside a small village, a group of young men stopped her. They accused her of being a woman from a nearby town, wanted there for murdering her family. Despite her protests, they took her kicking and screaming to the town magistrate. He was desperate to calm the townsfolk and claim victory, so he overlooked the mix-up, paid them the reward, and slapped Maya in chains.
Unable to find her, the tour had to move on, with a strict schedule of shows to keep and no hands to spare. Off the path of the show, Maya sat in a tiny town jail for more than a year, in shock, unsure what to do. Although she was confident she could escape, she waited in hope that justice would come soon and she would be cleared. Finally she is told the day had come for her to appear before the town council, to be sentenced and executed. Summoning all she had learned about persuasion and showmanship, she pleaded her case to the assembled elders and onlookers. Her powerful performance made them quickly realize the terrible mistake, and they freed her immediately. She saved the cord of rope that had been used to bind her hands, wearing it the rest as a belt and reminder to remain grateful for her freedom.
Now penniless and alone, she decided to finish the short journey to Flodenworl, to get a passage home, or temporary employment, there. At that time, though, the great port was in an economic depression, resulting from recent cold winters, which slowed trade in the fjords. With no options for legitimate work, Maya disguised herself as a boy and signed up to be a seaman. She hoped to make her way towards home by working on the boats that travel the fjords. After they set sail, though, she realized that she had joined up with a crew of grey market mercenaries. Mixing some legitimate shipping with more piracy, extortion and smuggling, they made their way west along the North coast towards the Amber Lands, whose bloody war had left its coastal cities vulnerable to plunder.
Now far from the fjords, Maya, living as a boy, had become a popular member of the crew. He commanded respect for a no-nonsense way of working, tempered with personal kindness. While sailing Whaler Bay, off the Amber Lands, the captain decided they should board a slave ship sailing unprotected nearby. Usually, they would raid ships for cargo and set them adrift, avoiding the hassle of dealing with crews and slaves. And, indeed, the slaves of this ship used the raid as an opportunity to escape. Meeting on the deck, three armed groups came to a standoff: the pirates, the slavers, and the escaped slaves. Again summoning her powers of persuasion Maya convinced the groups that the best way to resolve the situation was not to fight each other to the death. Instead she convinced them all to allow the slaves to join the pirate crew, while both would leave the slave ship’s crew alive and with their ship. The mobs grumblingly agreed to the compromise and the two ships set sail with opposite headings.
The ship continued south, the crew keeping up its ways. But in the seas of the lands of Castle Green the pickings were slim, and coastal shipping routes better defended. Maya was approached by the freed slaves and some crewmen. They wanted to mutiny, and make her the new Captain. She agreed, and the old Captain quickly resigned, rather than fight the crew. Maya’s first order was to let all those who wish to leave disembark at Castle Green. Those who wished to stay would head east to the Silver Coast, and eventually return home by sailing around the world! But, unknown to her, the Silver Castle had a large new naval fleet, and soon after entering their waters the suspect ship is forced into port. There, Lady Sierra had recently given the Sermon of the Heart Stairs. Maya used the tolerant sentiment in the city to reveal her real identity as a young woman. Despite their shock, the crew pledged to follow her to the end.
After telling her story to the leaders of the Silver Castle, they were amazed this small young woman had nearly circumnavigated the world, as Captain of pirates and rescuer of the slaves. After days spent telling stories of adventure and close escapes, strange places and even throwing in a mermaid or two, she and her crew became popular heroes. Word of the ship, and Captain Maya, Bright and Fair, even preceded them back to the fjord lands. They were allowed to sail back north, and as they tacked into the great port of Flodenworl they were hailed as heroes. Allowed to keep their booty, and given pardons, the crew decided to go their separate ways to enjoy their new celebrity and wealth. Maya returned home, still that homebody young lady at heart, but now the most well travelled and famous adventurer in all the Fjords of Tame.
Living in and around the Fjords of Tame. Pale, most often with dark black hair, but some fairer haired towards the north. Literate, advanced culture built on fishing, with a strong preference for local control and a xenophobia towards the peoples of the Great Bay.
Living in the river valleys and small towns of the eastern dry regions. A short-statured, ruddy-skined people with large facial features. They are a poorer, less developed culture, very much under the influenece of the more prosperous peoples to their north and south.
Living in the river valleys and coastal areas of the Palm Lands. A tall, olive skinned people with almond eyes and curly black hair. Although a desert, the rich sediments and ample waterways make the Palm Lands quite fertile, and their culture is one of the most complex and studied in the world, with a long history.
Living on the southern, meditteranean side of the Silver Paenensula, these peoples are closely related to the Palm Landers and are among the world's most prosperous. The area's agriculture and mineral wealth has produced a complex culture, but one which is often focused on wealth over other values.
Living in the low hills in the middle south of the world. These are peasant farmers, ethnically similar to their Green neighboors, but ruled over by an aristocracy of Silver Landers. Although fertile, their culture is agriculturally focused and literacy is practically unknown.
Living in the Darkwoods, and coastal areas of the southwest, this is a pale, fair haired people. Having inhabited the same area for longer than most peoples, their culture is very stable and complex, although their technology and social development are stagnant, with a strong feudal class system.
Living in the hill country, moors and plains of the central and western parts of the world, they are similar to the Greens. Pale, with frekles and most often brown curly hair. Their ethnic spread is actually far greater than their territroial control, and they form signficant minorties in most of the western lands.
Living in the Amber, Council and Owl Lands, this is the largest and most diverse people in world. Ambers come in all shapes and sizes, but share similar very round eye shape and dark complexion. Amber culture is somewhat advanced, but very preocupied with prestige and power, including warfare and the martial arts.
Living among the hightest and steepest terrain in the center of the world, these peoples descend the earliest spread of hummanity. Displaced or isolated, these groups vary widely in their ethnic and cutlural makeup. They share a lack of literacy and a geographical and cultural isolation from the more developed societies that surround them.
Living in the central northern highlands, these tribal remnants of the original settlers of the Fjords of Tame, are a short, stocky and pale people. They live with their domesticated goats in communal log home compounds. Their subsistance economy and evergreen forest based agriarian culture have remained largey unchanged for hundreds of generations.
Living on the northern, dry side of the Silver Paenensula, these darker skinned tribes subsist on shellfish and coastal forraging. Although quite expert in some ways, such as medicine and horticulture, they are pre-literate and their populations sparse and semi-nomadic.
Living on the Ancient and Sentibu Islands, off the west coast, these are an ancient, but waning peoples. Similar to Palm Landers in appearance, they speak languages and have traditions quite unlike anything else in the world. Generally subsitance fishers or farmers, their culture was once quite advanced, but has declined through depopulation.
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