The Awakening of Fergus Drakshade

Fergus awoke after a restless and painful dream. Still fairly young for a Dwarf, his face already bore scars from the burns covering his eyes. They seared with intense pain from the moment he awoke. Straining to open them, no light filtered in, and no clue was given to his surroundings save the bindings on his wrists and ankles. Fergus thought back to his dreams from the night before; nightmares again. He had been away from the Clan Monastary, sneaking out to climb along the cliffside at nighttime. He loved to look at the Glint at night.

While he was Glint-Gazing a scouting party of Scaleborn fell upon him. Sworn enemies to the Drake Clan, who were renowned Dragon Slayers surviving since the time of the Old Kingdoms, fourteen-thousand years ago. The Scaleborn put Fergus to the flame but took care never to let his wounds get severe enough to kill him before healing his wounds and starting in again. They plied Fergus with queries about the Monastery and its defenses. For two days he held fast until the Scaleborn grew frustrated with the lack of progress. They took the flame to Fergus’ eyes. Through the searing pain, Fergus finally broke, spewing the secrets of his Clan’s defenses, but this time no healing came. They had what they needed from him.

These visions of memory from his younger life would later become rare and striking reminders of this loss he had suffered at the hands of the Scaleborn. More than his sight, the Scaleborn had taken from him his home and his beloved clan. It would all be gone, because of him.

As night fell on the Scaleborn encampment they prepared to assault the cliffside Monastery. In the night he awoke to the sound of tearing leather, as the canvas side of the tent was sliced. Fergus heard a figure slip quietly into the tent, his ears already compensating somewhat for the loss of his sight. His breath caught in his throat and he awaited his doom. Finally, the rasping whisper of an old dwarf’s voice came into his ear. “My poor Fergus, these Scaleborn have no sense of code! To do this to a child…”

Fergus was shocked, he thought he heard the old man weeping for a moment. Before now, he could not recall ever hearing or seeing old Master Robai display any emotion at all. The only emotion Fergus was used to hearing was fervor as the old man would recite the Drake clan words of ‘Blood, Balance, and Brawn’ the three embodiments of any respectable dragon slayer. He couldn’t believe the old Master had found him, had come for him.

“Come now,” the Master said, “you have endured far too much already, but I must ask you to endure much more.” The bonds were cut from Fergus’s wrists and feet, and a pair of strong wrinkled hands grasped him and pulled him to his feet. A satchel was slung over Fergus’ shoulder. It was heavy. Robai led Fergus out of the slice in the canvas wall of the tent he had entered through. Fergus did his best to step quietly but his knees buckled as his ankle caught on the canvas, barely able to stand from the days of torture and malnourishment. As he fell he slammed into a rack of polearms which clattered to the ground. Soon, cries of alarm were carrying through the whole encampment.

In the end, all that remained of the sacred Drake Clan tablets were those his master had placed in Fergus' satchel moments before shoving Fergus off the cliffs of their ancestral home. He must have thought it was the only way to preserve the ways of the Drake Clan. For years the desperate strain of his master’s tired and haggard voice echoed again and again through Fergus’ dreams.

“Survive.”

It was the last word he heard before his master’s palm drove into Fergus’ chest. The air left his body as he was launched from the high cliffs. Save for the grace of his training as a boy, the fall certainly would have killed him. As it was he managed just barely to avoid his end by finding the sides of the sheer cliffs with his hands and gripping with such intensity as he plummeted to the mushtree forest below. Were he not a dwarf, his body likely would have succumbed quite quickly to the stress and trauma of falling down the jagged and sheer cliffside. Even with all of Fergus’ luck, fortitude, and training, he lost consciousness near the bottom of the cliff and awoke some days later, on the ground. The exact length of time he had been unconscious for was impossible to know for sure. Fergus felt as if he had been asleep for at least a day, but maybe more. He opened his eyes, half expecting to see the familiar rocky ceiling of their dwarven realm, but was met once more with a darkness that would accompany him to the end of his days. He lay there for a while, hot streams of tears running down his face. Thinking of his master, his friends, and his family, the great monk he thought he had been destined to become. He cried for all of them. Then he kept on crying in the mud for the shame of betraying those he loved. Even after everything he had done, Master Robai still came to save him. Now he's dead.

Finally, the tears stopped flowing, and the ache began to set into his body as Fergus lay there in the mud. When he tried to move, the dull aches morphed into sharp pains running throughout Fergus’ Ribs and his left arm. Lucky to be alive, Fergus groaned in pain as he rose, finally catching his breath from the long fall as he drew it sharply inward. Fergus scrabbled around for the satchel Robai had given him. Clamoring through the soil finally, he found it and slung it over his shoulder before checking it for supplies. What felt like rope and stone tablets brushed his fingertips. 'Good enough.' Fergus thought to himself, then using the rope he bound the tablets to his broken arm and ribs to try to offer them some protection as he walked through the wilds. It was clumsy, but he didn’t have time to fashion much else.

Fergus stumbled through the mushtree forest far from the cliffs that once held his homeland. He carried on like this for the better part of the day. Finally, he was exhausted and fell more than lay in a mossy dell near the base of a giant mushroom tree. His hand came to rest on a small fleshy cap as he lay there. Grasping the little mushroom he uprooted it and felt it, trying to examine the tuber. He couldn’t tell what kind of mushrooms these were or whether they were poisonous, but his rumbling stomach decided for him. Fergus took a deep breath and bit into the fleshy mushroom. Its sweet earthy taste was familiar, and Fergus breathed a sigh of relief, devouring the rest of the mushroom. Over time, this turned out to be an effective method of identifying mushrooms for Fergus, who became able to identify poisonous mushrooms, or at least unfamiliar ones by taste, and spit them out before taking on any harmful effects beyond the occasional numb tongue.

After a few days of walking, Fergus figured he had gone far enough from the monastery and the Scaleborn. He found a small clearing between a glade of mushtrees and a large craggy outcropping. Fergus could hear a creek nearby. This seemed like a promising location. The rest of that day was spent finding an appropriately sharp rock that Fergus used to carve out a short length from the trunks of the giant mushroom, which was springy but rigid. Using a length of rope he fastened his sharpened stone to one end of the stick and gave it a few swings. It wasn’t much, and the handle was so soft it would bend as he swung it, but until he could find some metal or ore this was the best he could hope for. That night Fergus sheltered in the moss below the mushtrees and slept.

For the first time since losing his sight, his dreams were black. Fergus still dreamed, but he dreamed of running through the forest. He felt desperate to escape from something or someone. He could sense its presence, and hear it racing behind him. No matter how fast his feet carried him he felt the distance between them steadily closing. Suddenly, Fergus’ foot caught a fallen mushtree log and he careened forward until he felt the soft moss hit his face as he awoke. He awakened sweaty and feverish on the floor of the mushtree forest.

Fergus steadied himself, his cracked ribs and arm still tender and sore. This morning he allowed his body a reprieve from the ramshackle splints that had been holding him together until now before struggling to his feet and hacking some long, thin strips from the mushtree with his makeshift axe. He took the ropes that were bound to the stone tablets and tied them now around his new, and much more wieldly mushwood splints. Fergus knew he would have to work while his body was still recovering, so he also fastened some smaller strips of mushwood with two ropes. One rope at either end of the mushwood strips and a loop at the ends, which could be fastened by a small tab, of spare mushwood. Satisfied with his craftsmanship, Fergus placed the sophisticated brace in his satchel so it would be ready for tomorrow's work.

For now, Fergus grasped a mystery mushroom from the mossy floor and bit into it. A sweet odor erupted from it, but the cap tasted rotten. Fergus spat the mushroom out and grasped for another cluster. This time the taste was light and earthy, and Fergus recognized it as one the cooks would use quite often in the monastery kitchens to make bread. Then he began taking precautionary bites out of a few mushrooms until he had amassed enough food to last the day. Then he sat below the scarred mushtree and grasped for the stone tablets with his good arm. They were the only other contents of the satchel than the rope. 'Why did Master Robai bring stones on his rescue attempt?' wondered Fergus. He ran his hands over the tablets and felt the ridges that had been carved in them. He quickly understood it was either words or a picture carved into the tablet. It took him some time to be certain, but he discovered that the etchings were, indeed, runes carved in the style of Dwarven literature.

Fergus spent the rest of the day trying to make out the runes on the tablets by tracing them with his fingers, but it was quite late in the afternoon by the time Fergus had managed to make out the first few runes on the tablet. He had discovered this was a segment of the Drake Clan's sacred texts; The Tablets of Exaltation. Frustrated by his lack of progress and the importance of the relics entrusted to him, Fergus fastened his rib brace around himself and wielded his mushtree Axe in his right hand. He spent the remainder of the day cutting down the mushtree that had been giving him shelter. Exhausted and sore, Fergus lay down against the hewn mushtree and fell asleep. He dreamed longingly of gazing toward the nighttime Glint.

Fergus decided his tablet deciphering duties demanded more work and traced the tablets with his fingertips as he rested against the trunk snacking on a fresh collection of mystery mushrooms. It took Fergus two more days of tracing runes to begin to decipher even one of the tablets. This one held the core tenets of the Drake Clan and the ethos behind their importance. It used to be mandatory learning for young Derfs at the monastery. Once he had identified it, Fergus reverently placed the tablet back into the satchel with his sling, thinking back to when Master Robai had first brought them to his classes years ago. After making some progress on the tablets Fergus decided it was time for him to get back to his plans from before he discovered the nature of the tablets. He would spend the morning performing manual labor, chopping down three more mushtrees by the end of the next two days, and segmenting the first one into smaller logs on the third day. That night, for the first time since leaving the monastery; Fergus enjoyed a fire. His eyes no longer pained him but still, he flinched when he first felt the warmth of the flames on his face. Now that he was certain he held the relics of his fallen clan, Fergus resolved to construct somewhere to house them and keep them safe, and in doing so if he would himself become housed and safe in the process; all the better.

For the next week, in the mornings Fergus would separate the caps from the trunks of the mushtrees. When they had been left out in the Glint for an afternoon, they would deflate and become flat and easily pliable, yet durable at the same time, not unlike leather. Fergus cut down some 50 more mushtrees over the coming month, separating the logs from the caps before he let each of them dry in the glint. The progress was slow, but as Fergus’ body healed, his determination grew. Before long his blind movements were deft and agile, at least, as far as mushtree logging was concerned.

Fergus threw down his axe and took a piece of cap leather shaping it into a curved rectangle, except for the point on one of the narrow ends. Fergus also took a mushtree sapling and dried its much smaller cap in the Glint. Placing the mushtree leather bowl over the fire, Fergus was able to fill it with water from the nearby creek and boil the rectangular piece of mushtree leather until it became much less pliable and more firm. This also seasoned the inside of the mushtree cauldron Fergus had created and a thin crust developed, while the outer leather had become charred and cracked. While the leather boiled, Fergus cut an even longer length of mushwood and smoothed it out with a flat rock. He fastened the hardened leather onto the end of the long stick and Fergus had made himself a makeshift shovel. "my skillcraft with mushroom leather is nearing that of the ores beneath the rock!" Fergus proclaimed, triumphant. Tomorrow, as the frosting season begins, he would start construction on Oathbroken Hall. He had broken the oaths of secrecy he'd sworn to his clan when the Scaleborn captured him, but resolved never again, to feel an oathbreaker's shame. "No other oaths shall I sunder from my honour." He swore quietly, as he traced his fingers over the Tablets of Exaltation; and by the Gods, he was heard.