>>6320523
Now you lie shackled beneath the town you’d been sent to protect: once called Chiffchaff by the colonists, it is now known to its new management as Al-Duarah.

For the last year, you’ve shared a cell with your party’s dwarven axeman, Brorfor Granitechest. Of course, in his current condition, he’s unlikely to be doing his duties as frontliner in the near future… assuming you ever get free. Still, it’s a better fate than your other fighter, your fellow Northman, Tyson Handler. Handler had fallen ill with a fever, made worse by this damnable region’s oppressive heat, until finally his miserable wailing had grown intolerable to the guards, and they’d hauled him out. You’d hoped, for a time, that they’d seen sense and taken him to a healer… but he never came back. You’ve since come to suspect that the giggling gaolers of this awful place simply butchered and ate him.

And that’s to say nothing of your party’s female members, Enid and Denise. The Southrons seem to take a strong stance against the intermingling of the sexes—ha! Imagine employing maneaters as mercenaries while pretending at morality!—and so have stowed the distaff members of your adventuring company elsewhere. You haven’t seen them in many months, and fear for their fate.

Only in your dreams are you free—you shaggy face shorn of this prisoner’s beard, your wrists unburdened by chains, your future still bright. In your dreams you are with her again: with Zith-Zi. You and she had parted on bad terms—not your first fight, no, but probably your worst. You only wanted the best for her: safety, stability, the sort of proper civilized life that a goblin girl like her could never have dreamed of.