Pressed into Service

Though our focus of late, has been in recounting the sad tale of Delrin, which plays the central part of the Dark Dance Cycle, we enjoin the reader to return presently to the plight of the three Pentarch sailors, newly arrived in the Temple Mount of the Hypergeum. They have watched with great amazement the staged reenactment of these legendary episodes from Quatrian history, at times with tears in their eyes, and at others, with joy in their hearts. For in the hearing, and the seeing, all with the performer and composer are one.

Though they understand not more than scattered words from the Quatrian tongue, they have recognized in the forms, costumes, and songs, even junctions with their own inherited mythic traditions. In Kremel, and the Far Reaches, the tale of Ederron survived, though the personage has been altered slightly to suit local languages, and they know the name more properly of that great lord as Aldron, who came over the sea, gravely wounded, and died shortly thereafter on the foot of that hill upon which the city of Kremel would later be founded. His sepulcher was said to lie buried in cavernous tombs far beneath what is now the Hall of the Five Kings.

Upon the first appearance on stage of the ghoulish Betrayer, too, the Pentarch sailors gasped in fear and awe. For they recognized in him dark and terrible beings from their own tribal histories, the wars against which originally drove the Five Tribes and their kings into mutual aid and later strong alliance. In the Pentarch common tongue, they were known as Deviants — a root in common with the deviations unleashed by Wormwood, and his supplicant servant Morbat, neither of whom Kremellian legends recollected.

After the appearance on stage of the Betrayer Assenzju, the leader of the village entourage which had brought them to the Temple Mount, Garth Al Elum, indicated then that the three should follow him. The sailors did so blindly, with utter faith in their host, and wound their way out through the crowd, and passed through a portal near the side of the stage. They found themselves plunged into darkness, to which their eyes soon adjusted, seeing they were in a small chamber from which stairs ascended up to the platform of the stage.

Three women approached them with halberds of mail, insisting the sailors don the apparel, which they did. The women strapped broad leather belts around their waists, and placed short metal helmets on their heads, and thrust unsharp short swords into their hands. The sailors wondered at the significance of this, but did not question what seemed to them to be a ritual of great importance.

Garth Al Elum then escorted them to the foot of the stairs, and pushed them bodily up those steps til they stumbled out uncertainly onto the stage. Dark chords struck up from the orchestra nearby out of sight, and they walked warily out into the middle. They did not understand it yet, but they had been drafted, costumed, and pressed into service of the Dark Dance Cycle (a great honor in that country) by the High Augur himself. They were to play the Best Men of Delroy, lost in the Great Forest on their way to retrieve Delrin, as the Betrayer approaches.