Lea Monde-- a castle town with 2,000 years of history. At its height, over 5,000 people lived within its walls. However, 25 years ago, a very large, very localized earthquake struck with no warning. In one night a thriving city whose strong walls had never been breached was reduced to a ruined haunt of the dead.
The city's beginnings lay in the Kiltian Age, legend attributing it's founding to a sorceress of extraordinary power named Mullenkamp. The price for fooling with the evil magicks she possessed came in the form of a great earthquake, visited upon her descendents. Ashley remembered hearing that when he was a young boy.
Young Ashley had thought that a very strange thing to say. How could one be punished for using something that didn't exist?
But God existed. Yes, Young Ashley was a very devout believer in God-- an omniscient, omnipresent, benevolent deity who watched lovingly over the doings of Mankind. That God would not stand for evil magic like that which Mullenkamp supposedly used. That God would have destroyed such darkness instantly. Young Ashley absolutely would not believe that his God would meet out any retribution that looked like a "curse". Besides, present Lea Monde was the heart of the pious Iocus sect.
Supposing it were true that Mullenkamp existed, then the sublime being that lived in Heaven, whose omniscience the church priests always preached about, would most certainly not be omniscient.
The guileless Young Ashley who had so fully believed in a just, kind God had long ago vanished into the realms of the forgotten. The Ashley who lived with the harshness of Reality didn't believe one whit in god or miracles. He had understood that both were simply tools by which priests controlled the uneducated masses. In a sense, that made the clergy similar to Riskbreakers, warriors charged with keeping the peace, albeit they used religion and faith instead of swords and bows.
Yet now, having stood in Lea Monde and witnessed the magic, the Dark, that permeated every pebble, Ashley began to think believing in God might be a good idea. Not an all-seeing, all-knowing nice God mind you, simply one that was a counter-power to the Dark.
Hence the tragedy that struck Lea Monde 25 years ago may well have been divine retribution, just from an imperfect god. But whatever that punishment was, Ashley was convinced it wasn't some natural disaster like an earthquake. Something else set all 5,000-plus inhabitants of Lea Monde to standing on the banks of the Styx. Why? Because for an earthquake that theoretically killed everyone in the city, it had left the buildings surprisingly well intact. An earthquake assuredly had happened, but it wasn't one of a great enough scale to annihilate an entire city. Another, far more abominable disaster had fallen upon the place and turned it into a haunted wreck.
The power to snuff out several thousand lives in an instant--- no matter how evil that power was, mankind would certainly hold it in awe, naming it the manifestation of a god's divine might. As for the true reasons for it's use in the unjust slaughter of a city, others could search for it at their convenience.
Perhaps that reason was the otherworldly power of the Dark itself. Whoever could attain it would, in the eyes of the superstitious masses, become a god. It would not be a far stretch of the imagination to believe that the Cardinal had sent his Crimson Blades, led by Romeo Guildenstern, into Lea Monde in defiance of the Parliament for just such a reason. Capture the sorcerer Sydney and torture all the secrets of the Dark out of him, then make its might the property of the Church. That would make the Church even more powerful than all of Valendia.
Of course, the VKP would not just sit idly by and watch that happen. Thus they sent Ashley to permanently silence the voices of all who knew of that plan, down to the last Crimson Blade.
In the end, this whole trumped up affair in Lea Monde boiled down to something no different from a normal mission; a lethal battle between men. So Ashley thought as he examined the battered edge of his sword. He didn't have to listen to Sydney's confusing words or fear the hallucinations of his past. All he had to do was take sharpened steel to the enemies of the VKP.
Discovering the city's buildings intact held an unexpected bonus for Ashley. In the residential districts, the Cultists had found and restored several places that were indispensable to any militant organization; workshops. With the fire laid in the forge, the shops' interiors looked almost as they would have prior to the Great Quake.
In the process of his fights with monsters
and especially the armor-clad Crimson Blades, Ashley's weapons had sustained
significant damage. Striking the metal armor had left countless nicks in the
Fandango's blade and warped the head of the Tovarisch enough to seriously affect
the weapon's balance.
Even the Seventh Heaven's string was stretched to the point where the crossbow's
piercing strength was severely lessened.
Finding an unoccupied workshop, Ashley promptly set about repairing his arsenal. Fortunately, the Cultists had been considerate enough to leave behind plenty of neatly arranged tools.
First, dismantle the blade by removing the thick nail holding the blade to the grip. Exchange the damaged grip for a new, better one. Repair the damaged blade simply by heating it in the forge and pounding out the flaws. Sharpen the new blade with a whetstone and reaffix it to the new grip with a new nail to replace the one bent by the initial removal process. Secure it tightly enough so that the blade did not rattle.
Ashley gazed into the silver flat of his repaired sword. That ritual was one he always followed before any mission, so that he could find the right frame of mind to kill--- so that he too could become simply a sword. Holding on to that idea, he set to work repairing all the weapons he carried to better-than-new condition.
In the mirror-like face of a blade he caught a glimpse of his own dead eyes. Then, as if they stood behind him looking over his shoulders, he saw the eyes of his murdered wife and child. They too stared down at a sword that had drunk gallons of blood. Just polished it gleamed red in the forge's light, as if it had just been pulled from another dying body. But the body wasn't that of a terrorist and the wet blood red was not that of a fallen knight.
It was the body of a beloved wife and the innocent blood of a son…
A wordless scream echoed hollowly off dead stone walls.