Transvestite corpses are coming soon!
Isinzimkel“Hey, over here!” called Kain. He was looking at something. A flower?
“I’ll be damned,” said Vilien. “I didn’t think I’d ever see anything but snow ever again.”
“And over here, it’s a stream!” said Kain excitedly. “It must be spring!”
“Aye, it is,” said Bjorn, walking up. “You’ll be seeing a transformation soon enough. This land is many things, some worse than others, but by the Gods, it’s beautiful in springtime.”
They were on the outer edges of the forest, although it was difficult to tell. A thick bunch of trees obscured their vision.
“Lads, I reckon this be the end of the forest,” called Barbarossa. “Through these trees here.”
They pushed their way through the trees and came out on the edge of an enormous hill.
“Oh…” said Walter, astonished. The landscape was breathtaking. A never ending landscape of soft, rolling hills and small clusters of trees greeted them, as did small villages, smoke rising from many of the houses. To the west, the sea stretched out, enormous and blue. To the north, unforgiving mountains blocked their vision and to the east, the landscape continued on, broken at last at a distance almost too far to see. The entire area seem to be entering spring, as snow gave way to grass, a dark green color. Several dozen miles away, there lay a city, and out side the city, a short distance away, was a camp, smoke rising from it…
(Okay, so this is basically a zoomed in DF map. The towns are actually quite small, even the ones with multiple images. The city is not that big and the lines represent the sieging army, which is not fantastically enormous either. It does look a bit odd, I admit, but whatever)“Sieging force,” said Bjorn after looking at it closely.
“
Shit,” swore Barbarossa. Workerdrone grinned widely.
**
“We may as well go down,” said Bjorn. “We aren’t on the receiving end this time. We’ll just be another mercenary band.”
“How many bands would you say were down there?” asked Kogan.
“Two to three hundred,” replied Bjorn. “If I had to guess, I’d say five to seven thousand men, maybe more. We really need to start recruiting.” He added as an afterthought.
“Five to seven thousand men? And who, pray tell, would be defending the city?” asked Kogan. Behind him, Workerdrone was mouth the words ‘seven thousand’ to himself and grinning like a madman.
“Difficult to say,” replied Bjorn. “But a force of this size is new. They must have tried to buy every company they came across, and you can’t keep something like that a secret. My guess is the forces on the inside number at about five thousand, if their warlord has the gift of planning ahead. But I can’t tell.”
“I think the real question here is, whose side should we take?” asked Workerdrone.
“Well, logic dictates, the ones who pay us enough,” responded Bjorn. “But we’d need to assess who has more people, who would provide us with the most goods, all that.”
“I say we side with the besieged,” said Tamunshin.
“Oh? Why?” asked Walter.
“Because you said this land was productive,” said Tamunshin to Bjorn.
“Aye, this would be one of the most productive lands there be,” said Bjorn. “That’s another thing we need to take into account. They’ll almost certainly be better armed.”
“So there’s that,” said Tamunshin. “But also, won’t their warlord have access to all of this? If this invading force wins, they’ll take longer getting all their new resources together and will probably pillage a bit first. We stand to gain more, if we side with the besieged.”
and I’ll have access to their crypts, during the siege and afterwards, he didn’t add. The crystal was giving him nightmares. He was sure it was doing it on purpose.
“We get down their,” said Barbarossa firmly. “We check it out and only
then do we commit to a side.”
“Alright. We should head out tomorrow,” said Kogan. “They won’t be going anywhere.”
“Aye,” chuckled Bjorn. He became serious. “A force of this size hasn’t been seen for a long, long time. A warlord may be making a grab for power and if so, war could soon erupt.”
“Well, it’s too quite around here anyway,” said Workerdrone.