by Jabie » February 18th, 2025, 9:21 am
From my Remastered Heroquest series:
MANY STORIES, MANY ENDINGS
Everyone has a story of that day, the day the Empire drove Morcar from the land.
In the slave mines of Makron, the captives see the explosion rent across the sky. The slavers drive their whip twice as hard the next day, but hope – true hope – is impossible to extinguish once ablaze.
There’s a confession that the palace gaoler keeps in his desk and likes to read when he needs a little cheer. It comes from a P. Disingenuous claiming that he was on board The Venture inspecting a cargo with a view to purchasing some rare jewels, when he and the crew were caught in a gust the likes of which they’d never experienced. As it bore them along, they heard it sigh a sing-song chorus: su-sa-no-wo. Thanks to his expert seamanship – Disingenuous stresses this point most vigorously – they eventually manage to break free, but that night every one of them dreamt of a far-away land, where the knights wore red leather armour formed of interlocking bands and where the ladies of the court wore magnificent silk robes of pale yellows and greens and moved with an unalloyed grace. In the morning, the deck was covered with cherry tree blossom. After that the crew of the merchantman were convinced that the jewels were cursed and were only too happy to give them to Disingenuous, so long as he took them off his hands. And that’s how they found their way into his possession.
Some of Lorric’s Lions swear they saw Prince Magnus stumbling clear of the ruins. The Prince doesn’t contradict them.
And did you hear the one about the Royal Composer? She was trying to write a new battle anthem and had taken refuge in one of the classrooms. Even back in the capital they felt the blast when Castle Darkheart exploded. The blackboard fell from the wall. When she picked it up, she noticed that it had fractured in such a way as to form a rudimentary stave, complete with a sequence of crotchets,
minims and quavers. We know that piece today as Hope Overcomes from The Triumph of the Empire. Supposedly, on opening night, one of the contraltos insists that she sang a duet with the opera house chandelier.
Thegn Toran is often heard entertaining his men with the tale of how he was delayed that day. When he arrived at Oxen Ford, one of the huscarls asked if he had any spare rope. An entire section of Chaos Warriors surrendered to Mentor’s fyrd of largely untrained shepherds and labourers.
Hinsgrim cuts his hand and watches the blood drip down onto the corpses in Golder’s Gully, then looks to Makron in the distance. He still has unfinished business with Rantler. Eshlil tells him that the Emperor is calling the Dark Company home. Fool of an Emperor! Perhaps that captive mage could help? What was his name again? Delzarron?
My favourite story is the one about the street urchin who lost her parents in the war. She had been engaged in a war of her own against the palace cook, a war of nutrition. The cook finally managed to catch her stealing one of his apple pies and brought her before the Emperor, but the Emperor had just heard the news from the front and was in such a good mood that he told the cook to make her chief taster.
The Champions don’t like to speak of that day, but if you catch them in the right mood, perhaps at the Winter Solstice around the fire after the Great Feast, but before the mead has flowed too freely, they might tell how, without his magical lieutenants to anchor the mystic energies, Morcar’s infernal device became trapped in a feedback loop. The Champions managed to escape just as Castle Darkheart was utterly destroyed, its once-great obsidian masonry reduced to grains of black sand, drifting in the wind.
They rarely tell the full story though. They usually leave out the part of how, through the debris cloud, they saw Milnik, Morcar’s most loyal servant, open a portal to Morcar’s realm across the Sea of Claws and carry his wounded master through. Perhaps they don’t want to give you nightmares.
Everyone has a story to tell of that day. And every one of them is true.
