>>8946543

She took her first husband at thirteen, and notably wept piteously at the wedding, much to the embarassment of her newly-made in-laws (a powerful and very wealthy family of new-blood lowlanders, merchant barons, descendents of an inquisitor-knight who had been given the province some century and a half in the past). The parents were as unhappy as she with the match; more than anything it had been a desperate bid for political and financial survival in the rapidly cosmopolitanizing scrapfight of post-Edict Northwest. The marriage ended in disaster, plunging the nigh-bankrupt house of Cloudstone further into the shadowy margins of the ducal court. Muna was held responsible for the divorce (itself a scandalous ten-month trial); her husband, a pompous boy of sixteen, claimed that the girl was uncontrollable, violent, and utterly resistant to his touch, refusing her marriage duties. In a noteworthy court incident, the benched magistrates let out a shocked gasp when the boy removed a large bandage from his neck, displaying a massive and savage neck wound which he claimed had been delivered by none other than his lady wife herself. Needless to say, the marriage was swiftly anulled, and Muna returned to Cloudstone Mountain, where she studied uin, what is called by the lowlanders healing and traditional female arts, under the tutelage of her mother, aunt and nursemaid. She spent many long hours deep in the gloomy hillside and mountain forests that surrounded Cloudstone, and allowed few onlookers to see her. Like her mother, she had a fondness for the ancient folk costume of the Northwest, and often strode around the court in elaborate gowns and headdresses of wolfskin, swan-feathers and woven bark.

During her seventeenth year, a witchcraft scandal erupted in the court. Reports had surfaced of lunar fire-feasts being carried out in secret by the courtiers—banned and re-classified as extremis hereticus under the Shieldmountain Edict. The investigating Witchfinder, a feared and hated hardline puritan from Lordstower, discovered nineteen individual cases of extreme heresy in the court of the Cloudstone, and his retribution was brutal. Muna, along with her mother, father, and aunt, were strongly implicated in the trial, but were not executed by virtue of their political importance. Muna’s beloved nursemaid, however, burned with the rest of them in the citadel courtyard, her pyre staff built of wood stripped from the courtyard’s ancient spirit tree. (The inquisitor, refusing all pleas for mercy, declared the six-thousand-year-old lichwood a pagan relic and ordered it chopped for fuel). It is said that Muna, watching her beloved nursemaid die at the Inquisition’s torch, wept bitter tears that dappled the soil at her feet and caused small white flowers to blossom.

>>8946560

Around this time Muna’s parents sensed an imminent coup by a power-hungry cousin, himself an ally of the lowlanders, the merchants and the Inquisition. Fearing for their young daughter’s safety, they sent her off to stay with the Crones of Urgog far away in the northern hills.

The legends of what Muna underwent under the arcane guidance of the Crones vary greatly. Some tell that she was made to carry each one up the Green Mountain on her shoulders every day for three years, to drink one sip of the sweet pure water of the Fountain of Imor that sprang from its summit. Others tell that the Crones gave her a different draught to drink each day until she had drank the lifeblood of every plant that lives and every thing that grew, sensing their power and growing from it. Other legends still tell a darker tale: that the Crones took Muna to the black fens far past even the most distant mountain, where they drowned her in the marsh water where she slumbered long and learned all the dreams of the restless ancestor spirits that haunted those depths.

>>8946586

Muna’s half-uncle, Lord Yrus, Baron of Oakenforge, declared his rebellion against the sovereignty of Muna’s father in 750 Standard Reckoning. His battlecry for modernization backed by wealthy lowlander merchant lords, Oakenforge and his rebel troops were armed with the latest and most costly weaponry, more than a match for the penniless lords of Cloudstone and their antique, rust-eaten armories. The loyalists quickly lost ground in a series of infamous defeats at Iargath Gorge, Swanhollow, and Lommoth Falls (the latter a hideous massacre of hill clansfolk and miryut [traditional women-warriors] whose vile memory continues to haunt the land and its people). It was at the bitterest defeat of all, the sacking of Cloudstone itself, that Muna first reappeared.

>>8946599

It is said she rode out of the woods on the morning of that first day on the back of a great elk, totally naked save for crisp daubs of bright red blood-and-berry paint streaking across her chest, the rising sun at her back, a terrible cry on her lips. Her mouth and eyes were painted red like those of a huiln (traditional folk-demon of dead mothers and grandmothers) and her body was cloaked in the pelt of a giant wolf and strewn with ropes of braided reeds and green yew. She carried no weapons, but her hands swirled in the air like fearsome birds, and she was followed not only by the fierce bright-eyed people of the far north, clad in horns and bark and carrying great bows and arrows, but also by ferocious packs of wolves, keening hawks with beaks like swords, tangles of vines curling and snaring, black storms overhead. Forward they surged upon the terrified ranks of the lowlander mercenaries, leaping and slashing, making swift ravens’ food of the invaders. Within three weeks the wild army—surge, rather—had reclaimed the central strongholds of the Wurian Ridge. Legend tells that Muna, astride an elk of terrifying size, rode into the chapel sanctuary of the defeated rebel Baron, ripped out the cowering usurper’s throat with her bare teeth, spit his traitor blood all over the saintly altar, and rode off north, her work done, never to be seen again by human eyes.

>>8946617

Muna was never heard from again, and disappears from all records following the infamous murder at Thistlecrown Chapel. But her seven daughters went on to take the crown of Cloudstone, and their children have ruled to this day.

Though the vast heretical rebellions of record have all but faded into wild myth, the highland fiefs of the counts of Cloudstone remain a queer, atavistic, and somewhat forbidding backwater; bordering peasants are extremely superstitious, and resurgences of witchcraft and animistic heresies remain a persistant nuisance. The Lords (and Ladies, quite notably) of Cloudstone have repeatedly proven themelves uncooperative at best in the purgation of said heresies, and are consequently monitored at all times by a highly adept branch of the Inquisition.

End of record.

This is a sketch for a setting for a game I'm working on. What do you guys think so far?

>>8946698

>>8946698

>>8946698

I really dig the mythic, dreamy feel to your writing. Good stuff, I'd like to see the game that comes out of this.

>>8946752
>>8946747
>>8946727

Awesome, glad you guys dig it! Thanks!

Thanks for this anon, I liked it a lot. Archiving for future reference, why the hell not.