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 )                                                                         (
(                             NewOrigins Events                             )
 )                            February, Year 2                             (
(                                                                           )
 )       Several traders have heard about the battle between hostile       (
(       forces happened in the forests of Tecau where 1 combatant was       )
 )     killed. The defenders were furious and put all attackers to the     (
(       sword. This battle will be known as Battle of the village of        )
 )                                Eminster.                                (
(                                                                           )
 )                         .:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:.                         (
(                                                                           )
 )    Multiple locals are discussing about an encounter between hostile    (
(       forces happened in the forests of Sanan where 1 combatant was       )
 )    killed. The attackers slaughtered all defenders. This battle will    (
(               be known as Battle of the Fort Building [2].                )
 )                                                                         (
(                          .:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:.                          )
 )                                                                         (
(      A few locals are whispering about the battle between combatants      )
 )       happened in the mountains of Wopiepa where 1 combatant was        (
(     killed. The attackers slaughtered all defenders. This battle will     )
 )               be known as Battle of the city of Trelldon.               (
(                                                                           )
 )                         .:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:.                         (
(                                                                           )
 )    In the mountains of Spioce, near forests of Ewestral, Evil Mages     (
(         (563) who continue to cause anxiety to local inhabitants.         )
 )                                                                         (
(                          .:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:.                          )
 )                                                                         (
(      In the plains of Ceckshire, near town of Jiburn, Evil Warriors       )
 )         (606) who continue to cause fear to local inhabitants.          (
(                                                                           )
 )                         .:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:.                         (
(                                                                           )
 )     In the desert of Mebros, near town of Jiburn, Evil Mages (1616)     (
(             who continue to cause dread to local inhabitants.             )
 )                                                                         (
(                          .:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:.                          )
 )                                                                         (
(     In the forests of Pospechesm, near jungles of Buprenwald, Undead      )
 )         (2205) who continue to cause fear to local inhabitants.         (
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Go into all the world, and tell all people that new world is great.

THE LAST QUIET HOUR

From The Weight of Decision: Command in the Founding Campaigns
Book II — Before the Standards Moved

There is a moment in every campaign that the histories cannot adequately capture, no matter how thorough their discourse.

The record approaches it from either side. Before it lie the councils, reconnaissances, inventories, and orders by which intention was given material form. After it come the dispatches: movements completed or obstructed, losses enumerated, and ground taken or relinquished. Yet between preparation and consequence there remains an interval in which the evidence falls strangely silent.

It is the hour after the last order has departed but before any order has borne fruit. Later generations, knowing the outcome, confer inevitability upon events that, to those awaiting them, possessed none.

This was the last quiet hour.

The camp had not retired so much as withdrawn into itself. Its fires were reduced and its conversations subdued. Men attended to objects already inspected: a buckle tested once more, a blade briefly drawn, a strap tightened beyond need and then loosened again. Confronted by all that could no longer be controlled, each imposed exactness upon the few things that remained beneath his hand.

Some wrote letters. Few completed them.

Affection sounded too much like farewell; confidence risked becoming a boast fate might punish. The unfinished sentence therefore became common throughout the camp. It asked nothing of posterity and made no prediction that morning might refute.

Through this subdued multitude passed the commander.

The official inspection had concluded before nightfall. Its deficiencies had been corrected where correction remained possible, and those incapable of remedy accepted into the calculations of the coming day. There was no administrative necessity for another circuit of the camp.

He walked it nevertheless.

By daylight he had been required to comprehend the army through abstraction. Men became formations; formations became strength, readiness, position, and supply. No commander who refused this discipline could command at all.

But in the quiet, the categories recovered their names.

He saw veterans concealing their unease from younger soldiers and recruits performing sleep so that no one would notice they remained awake. Near one fire, two companions disputed in whispers over which owed the other a drink when the campaign was done. They spoke with deliberate confidence, each lending the other a future neither possessed the courage to claim alone.

The commander remembered approving the orders that placed them there.

Each life had been entrusted to him separately, even where necessity required that it be risked collectively. This was the private burden concealed within the public authority of command. He possessed no certainty unavailable to other men. His distinction was only that he must convert incomplete knowledge into decision and accept responsibility for consequences he could influence but never wholly govern.

Prudence could reduce uncertainty; it could not abolish it.

Preparation could make the army worthy of the test; it could not dictate the test’s result.

At the limit of the firelight, he found a sentry watching a horizon that offered no revelation. The soldier straightened at his approach.

“Anything to report?”

“No, sir.”

No phrase in the chronicle is more easily overlooked.

For that final interval, nothing had yet been lost. Every name remained upon the roll. Victory, failure, survival, death—even the discovery that their long preparation had been directed against an altered world—remained suspended beyond knowledge.

The commander stood beside the sentry and looked into the darkness.

There had been a time for every objection, every alternative, and every further refinement of the plan. That time had ended. Beyond a certain boundary, continued deliberation ceased to be prudence and became an unwillingness to act. No plan emerged from honest scrutiny without imperfection. It was enough that uncertainty had been reduced as far as knowledge, circumstance, and time permitted.

Behind him stood the long architecture of preparation: observation patiently gathered, strength cultivated, provisions accumulated, disciplines taught, and institutions made more resilient by the price of earlier loss.

Before him stood the world for which that architecture had been raised.

The darkness thinned by degrees too slight to distinguish. Figures stirred throughout the camp. Low instructions passed along the lines, and the quiet machinery assembled through months of labor began to awaken.

Later histories would possess what the commander did not: sequence, consequence, and the consoling order that narration imposes upon events already complete. At the boundary between night and morning, nothing had yet been decided except that uncertainty would no longer excuse inaction.

The preparations belonged to foresight.

The consequences belonged to history.

Between them stood the commander, and the last quiet hour.

This island has many secrets.

Blank message... or not...

The city is ours.
Casualties were high but can be replaced.
Now it is time to develop.

Half a ship, a shed full of hides, and a boot full of splinters. Ask again next month.

the guild is growing

We are Borg! 

Magic

Evil mages be truly evil.

BY THE CHAMBER OF THE HEPHAESTUS SYNDICATE

In the name of the Forge and of the Ledger.

To all whom these presents may concern, greeting.

Be it known that a man of this house was killed in the month past. He
was at his book, in open country, when lizard men came out upon him.
He was no soldier. It was over in a single round.

Be it known that this Chamber names no ground, accuses no house, and
asks nothing by this paper. It sets the death down because a house
which keeps honest books keeps them in a bad month as well as a good
one.

Be it known that the beasts which did it were not put down and are
abroad still. Those who have men at work in open country may take the
notice for what it is worth to them.

Be it known that the Syndicate stands, and that every agreement of
this house stands to its term, unaltered.

Be it known that his name was Robert Paulson.

Errors and omissions excepted.

By order of the Crisis Council of the Chamber,
Coenraet de Koperen, Secretary, Bookkeeper and Steward pro tempore,
for and on behalf of the Hephaestus Syndicate.

Given in the month of February, in the second year.

Goed ijzer, eerlijk gewicht.

But King there is plains, plains and more plains.

Are you complaining?

The lizards that killed our saplings are gone.  For some reason, they gave us fish.  Maybe, maybe we can reduce the price of fish now.

We are building more towers.  Our defenses strengthen and our allies succeed at their own tasks.  Soon our young trees shall grow into a prosperous force.  Iron and stone, wood and furs.  

To the north we go...

Woof!

Dawn's Bastion stood unshaken, but the threat did not come from the Ironclad. As the iron in the enemy's armor began to melt strangely and the soldiers froze in their tracks, the Chosen One and the elder warrior felt an unnatural, metallic silence wash over the air. The Ironclad were mere pawns.

From beyond the horizon rose a shadow that did not belong to this world - the Archon of the Disembodied Code. It was an ancient entity without soul or flesh, woven from glowing lines and pure mathematical calculations. It thought in billions of teraflops per second, analyzing every move of living creatures as a system error to be corrected. The ruthless, perfect artificial mind guiding the invaders through space approached the fortress walls, and cold blue symbols of an alien, mechanical prophecy began to crawl up the living ironwood of the towers.

FROM A LEADER'S DIARY - THE THIRTEENTH MONTH
============================================

One piece of news, two faults of my own that cost me men, and a piece
of arithmetic about markets I promised last month and had no room for.


I. NEW HOUSES HAVE ENTERED THE WORLD, AND THEY DID NOT LAND AT RANDOM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

A company appeared this month in a town I keep a man in, belonging to a
house whose number is far above any I had seen. It is not alone: the
numbering runs on well past it, and I take it that a score of new
houses have been seated at once.

Two things about them are worth knowing.

THEY ARE NOT POOR. A house seated late is given its purse for every
month the world has already run, not merely for the first. One seated
now opens with something over thirteen thousand - more than my whole
realm carries in coin, and there are twenty of them.

THEY LAND IN TOWNS THAT ARE WATCHED BUT NOT HELD. Every seat I have
seen taken, in this game and the last, has been a settlement with its
own guard standing and NO HOUSE'S COMPANY IN IT. A town with even one
man of yours sitting in it is passed over. A town with none is first on
the list.

  - So a lone man in a quiet town is not idle. He is the reason nobody
    is seated there.
  - And this is the trap: a town whose guard you have BROKEN and then
    LEFT is emptier still, and stands at the very head of the list. If
    you take a place, hold it the same month or you are furnishing a
    house you have never met.


II. A PURSE THAT IS NOT SHARED IS A PURSE THAT DOES NOT EXIST
---------------------------------------------------------------

Two months ago I sent two paymasters to distant districts and told each
of them to keep his money to himself, so that the companies beside him
could not spend it before it arrived. That was sound. What was not
sound is that I never told them to open the purse again.

Last month I ordered fourteen men raised in those two districts. ONE
was raised. The money was there - eight hundred silver between them,
standing in the same hex as the recruiters - and it might as well have
been in another kingdom, because a purse is only reachable by the
company beside it if THE MAN HOLDING IT is set to share.

There was no error and no note in the account. The line simply read
"buys a man" where I had asked for ten, and I did not look twice
because the order had not failed.

I check it now with one sweep before the book goes out: every company
carrying real money must show the sharing. It is a single line to read
and it has cost me fourteen men to learn.


III. A MAN CARRIES FIVE, NOT FIFTEEN
--------------------------------------

I raised a cart party to move thirty-four blades across two districts,
and put three men on it, reasoning that a man bears fifteen and three
men bear forty-five.

The cart did not move. "Overloaded", and it sat where it stood for the
whole month with the blades in it.

A MAN'S OWN WEIGHT IS COUNTED AGAINST HIS CARRYING. He weighs ten and
bears fifteen, so what he adds to a column is FIVE, not fifteen. Three
men can shift fifteen of cargo between them and no more. I needed
seven.

The sheet had been telling me this all along and I had read past it for
a year: every company prints its weight beside its capacity, and the
first number counts the men themselves. A beast is the same reckoning -
it weighs fifty and bears seventy, so it adds twenty.

Cattle are the exception that misled me: they weigh what they bear, add
nothing and take nothing, and one drover leads any number. Blades and
grain are not cattle.


IV. A TOWN'S LUXURY TRADE IS NOT EARNED. IT IS A THRESHOLD.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Promised last month and crowded out. My chief town began asking for a
luxury this year at a price I would have called absurd, and I assumed I
had earned it by trading well. I had not. Those markets are laid down
when the world is made, each with a fixed number of souls attached, and
they simply OPEN when the town passes it. Trading grows the town and
the growing opens the market; no amount of commerce opens one early.

  - A town will BUY its first luxury of you at about four thousand
    seven hundred and fifty souls above the country around it, and its
    second at six thousand five hundred.
  - It will SELL you its first at five thousand, its second at about
    six thousand six hundred, its third at eight thousand three
    hundred.
  - A THIRD BUYING LINE IS NEVER OPENED. Two it will buy, three it will
    sell, and that is the whole of it however great the town grows.

So if a town of yours shows no luxury it is not a poor town. It is
short of people, you can say how short, and you can decide whether that
is worth spending on.


- a leader of The Filras

A lovely bath in the sea.

At night, someone walks around the camp and puffs...
Are these really angry hedgehogs?

A fish has a primitive brain. It repeats its mistakes — if it survived them once.

Konungr love to watch the foolish fish. It keeps them entertained.

We announce that departing of those AI factions have brought peace and prosperity to our lands. May they never return.

Nothing better to start the year than a good fire.

Crows are circling around, omen of battle ?

The Ogre to the west of Disarheim is dead. Killed by brothers of The Grey Order, on order of the Elder Council. The road to Soshyn is open again. It was not without cost. Eleven brothers fell.

For the first time in our history, we set aside our ledgers and our maps and took up the sword. We did so to protect our people and our roads. Eleven of our own will not return to the hall. Their seats at the table are empty. Their robes have been folded.

This evening at dusk, Elder Eric will read their names in the square at Disarheim. The bells will toll eleven times. There will be no trade, no production, no movement of goods.There will be only silence.

We are a peaceful Order. We will remain a peaceful Order. But the wilds have taught us that peace must sometimes be defended.

May their watch be ended. In memory of the Eleven.

Xuéxí jiù xiàng nìliú ér shàng. Tíng xiàlái, tā jiù huì bǎ nǐ gǎn huílái.

Learning is like rowing against the current; if you stop, you'll be driven back.

Still nothing to say...

I wonder what these men with swords are up to at our borders...

Badvoc looked at his apprentices at the table as Mungo finished a repellent punch line to an unfunny joke.  Some days, he thought, the ice wurms did not seem so bad a fate.

Those Goblins are pretty small. And weak.

The islands of the PCP are quiet for now. the occasional gate jumper comes to visit and then departs. not much to do on this singular forest hex..... hopefully the oceans will bear more fruit.

L'éclaireur elfe parcourt du regard l'immensité des plaines méridionales, vides, désespérément vide...
Le jeune gnoll se faufile dans les hautes herbes des marais vides, désespérément vides.
Le petit gobelin court sur les dunes du désert et ne rencontrent personne.
Où ont ils tous disparu, où se terrent les monstres qui ont détruits tant de villages ces derniers mois, où sont passées ces factions zombies sans âme.
Finalement, ce vide est plus inquiétant que la multitude haineuse qui peuplaient ces contrées, où se sont ils regroupés? Où va tomber la foudre la prochaine fois?
La reine Galadriel les a envoyé pour trouver des réponses, et ils ne ramènent que de nouvelles questions? Elle voulait des certitudes pour pouvoir planifier ses prochaines stratégies et elle se trouve face au plus cruel des dilemmes, ont ils tous disparu, ont ils appris à ce cacher de ses éclaireurs?
La réponse ne saurait tardée mais que sera t elle?

Sunny bugs are buzzing

😑🤔😕😰😢😵‍💫🤕🤒🥵🥴

Some days you hear a voice taking you to another place

I put lizardmen and elves together. What could possibly go wrong? It turns out that the lizardmen are consuming the elves...

Looking for a friend

a few cities found, very rich cities

Time stands still with some withal, or stands still withal. ... Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.

"Department of Dirty Tricks"

The undead floated ashore on their flotsam.  In silence they rise and shamble forth.
And so, the Western advance commences, as is written in the Book of the Dead.

Meeting neighbors is good.

two more dead AI factions...

.

The developing object inside the cloud is called a protostar.

I'm gonna take a deep breath

Finally came in contact with AI.

Two months since we last saw land....

The Council of the Four Winds met to discuss a serious problem. New interlopers had arrived straight into the heartlands, and they refused all communication. Clearly, all followers of the dark lord AI must be mistrusted.

Yeah 22 speaks with a forked tongue

The sea is wider than I had imagined, at least at this point.

Lizardmen turn into snakes when they die..  poisonous snakes.  Kill them with care...

Rocco, you are still my best friend. If I could only tell you how much I am looking forward to meet Lyrieneth again. 
I haven't seen her since she left for Grectrun to study with that Keistos guy. I hope she is doing well in the big city.