23 The Daily Bread

It's all fine and good to keep earning one's daily bread at the taverns. Elven poetry is always a big hit in human towns, even though people don't understand a word of it.. just like bawdy human drinking songs make an elf almost smile.

Obviously a good bard mixes many kinds of material, light and serious, prose and rhyme, classic and local. At times I even play the role of a dwarf curmudgeon in song or play. Usually with no actual dwarves in audience, as their kind fails to see the humor in that. For them there are other songs, of oak and malt and steel and gem - but it was time to get some new material, and the best place for that is the adventurers' guild, an exotic place of plentiful opportunities for wealth and glory, and...


...well, lots of empty space today. Both on the notice board and in the halls. Apparently an orcish menace against the farmlands has coincided with pirates preying on the coastal seas and an earthquake opening a new entrance to monstrous depths. Or maybe it was a policy call from the powers that be, but the halls of glory were empty and the notice board clean. Or something, it was not something we could do anything about nor something that would affect us at the moment. What did, however, was the vacancy at the halls of the brave. The only signs of life were a mouse, which scurried away, and a clerk, who scurried to us.

The clerk told us of a confidential mission, to be handled with utmost discretion. Why someone would trust strangers with such was unusual.. especially strangers from out of town, one of them very obviously a professional gossiper and entertainer.. but like all good gamblers we go with the cards we get, and this hand looked interesting, so we run with it and see where the chips will land. The only instructions we got was to head for the temple.. that was obvious enough, while "a temple" could refer to many places, The Temple could only be the one devoted to the Grandfather God of Dragons, Bahamut. A very impressive building, that.. and for obvious reasons, the only place in town where Drai truly felt at home. No one there looked at his golden scales and wings with anything but reverence. So there we went, in search of someone called Father Argyle.

The good father proved to be easy to find, and our divine team member Valeria was actually already in his company, drawing meditative patterns in the temple sand garden. To the rest of us the acolytes told us to be careful as Argyle was very old, hard of hearing, and - though they said it with utmost respect, senile. They were happy and surprised that young people like us would come to delight his day, and guided us towards the sand gardens. Father Argyle informed us that the sun was making him feel dizzy and asked for a cup of mint tea, as well as escort to his quarters inside the temple. Apparently the rumors of his venerable frailty were accurate.

Behind closed doors, though, Father Argyle shed the appearance of being daft. He straightened his back and power radiated from him, making it very clear that being the Venerable High Arch-Priest of the Platinum Dragon was, despite the thoughts of many in town, much more than an empty honorific. He informed us that there was an inconvenience taking place at the cemetery around the temple, and asked us look into it. We of course promised to do so. Having a somewhat-dragon and a dragon priestess in our group made it a holy mission for some of us, whereas I was there to look for a good tale and Leila probably a way to make a name for herself. Presumably a very wealthy name.

An inconvenience sounded innocuous enough and in a manner most innocent we took a stroll in the peaceful cemetery without proper preparations.. something to keep in touch next time. It was clear where the trouble was coming from as a full fifth of the cemetery looked rather.. well, dead, even more than was appropriate for a final resting place of the deceased. The grass that was green elsewhere was brown closer to that area, and brittle and grey near the middle of it. Not even the bushes and trees had been spared, and in the middle of it all, among tombstones and lesser graves, were mausoleums and crypts of the once-wealthy and powerful, now just as dead as the poor around them. One of the mausoleums had a guard in front of it, so that's where we started our search. It's always better to ask someone about the horrors of the area than just walk into it and experience the horrors personally. Tales and songs can of course claim otherwise later on.