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The Great Wall of Cetelt
As told by Dremond the skulker;
And Rollies, a Lady in Waiting
Penned by Grenated.
[A note to the reader: I have endeavoured to bring this tale to you exactly as
it was told to me. Some parts are vague on the circumstance of the speakers that
I was quoting. Other parts were omitted as they bear little on the history at
hand.]
"See, I lived 'round these parts then. I was something of a local hero. Or
maybe, celebrity is a better way o' putting it. All right, I was a well-known
drunk. But that don't change a thing of what I saw in them days; I never got so
stiff that I blacked out, it was always just enough to put the edge off a bit,
understand?"
"Anyhow, Cetelt was one o' them big time adventurer types; always slaying ores
and gnolls and lootin'em. Always tellin' his own tales bigger than they really
was. Now don't get the wrong whiff here; he was a good fighter. He could skin a
kobold with one hand and parry the attacks o' three orcs with the other, all the
while talkin' about how well he was doin' it. But truth be told, he wasn't one
of the greats; not enough ambition.
He never wanted to be a prince or king or called 'highness or majestic like' or
any o'those noble style things. He just wanted to adventure. At least thats how
it was until his sixtieth year."
[At this point Dremond seemed to grow a bit melancholy and began to mumble about
Cetelt's early exploits and the later years had caught up to him. I could not
hear these words well and ask the pardon of the reader in the matter of this
part of the record being unclear. I bought Dremond another flagon and probed him
with this question: What happened in the sixtieth year?]
"Those? Oh, Cetelt. Well, it was in that year that his father died, only a few
months after his aunt that had raised him. He didn't seem right after that. He
started calling for seers and sooths and what not to come to him. This was when
he took up shop in The Misty Thicket, see? I dunno why he decide to live with
these halfies, I never cared for 'em too much, but hey who am I to call a thief
a thief?"
"Anyways you gotta 'member that Cetelt had built up a pretty good following of
other adventurers by this time. Now, Cetty (that's wot we called him behind his
back), Cetty didn't have no apsirations of kinghood or nothin', but his
followers thought of him as such as they would do any thing he asked. They kept
beggin' him to take over this land and conquer that. Well, finally he snapped."
"He said, and I remeber this well; he said, "If you fools want to build
something, build me a castle on Cair Leima." See, that's the little hill just
out of Rivervale."
Continue to
Volume 2 |
