The Caverns of Kronos

The Chamber of Discourse - Part 2

     “Skava was a priest of Samnos,” said the old priest. “He lived about two thousand years ago in the Pinatian Mountains, in a valley called Millin Dell which was, at that time, inhabited by about a hundred thousand people. Most of them in three medium sized cities and the rest in several towns and villages scattered round about. The land outside the valley was arid desert, inhabited only by a few wandering tribes of nomads, and the nearest civilization was three hundred miles away, so for all intents and purposes Millin Dell was cut off and isolated, with virtually no contact with the rest of the world.

   “Skava came to Millin Dell as a young man, a missionary, travelling with a nomad caravan, and he stayed in the valley for most of the rest of his life. He built a fortress monastery for himself, which he populated with young men from the local population, some of whom came to be accepted into the priesthood in due course. None of them came close to equaling Skava himself, though, who, as his years advanced, became one of the mightiest of our order there has ever been.

     “The priests were kept busy fighting the bastlins who came out of the mountains to raid the outlying towns and villages, and for thirty or forty years everything was as good as could be expected in the valley. When Skava was in his early sixties, however, and thinking of accepting promotion, the bastlins began to increase in number and became a real problem. Several of the smaller towns and villages were abandoned to the evil humanoids, their inhabitants fleeing to the protection of the larger cities, and the priests were hard pressed to hold back the threat. The numbers of the bastlins continued to increase, and the tactics they used in taking one town after another led Skava to believe that they were being led by some evil force. Some power of darkness that was using the humanoids as a tool to rid the valley of human civilisation. He prayed to Samnos and sent spies into the mountains, and eventually discovered that he was right. The bastlins were being led by a coven of priests of Marash, the evil God of Destruction.

     “Skava confronted the high priest of Marash and did battle with him, but the evil priest was half his age, in the prime of his life and strength, and like most evil priests he was well gifted in unholy power, much more so than priests of Samnos. Our God prefers that we depend more on our skill with weapons. Our intelligence, resourcefulness, our own strength and stamina than on...” His voice suddenly broke off and he cocked his head as if listening for something.

     “Is anything wrong?” asked Sorrell in concern.

     “Did someone just call my name?” asked the old priest, frowning in puzzlement.

     “I don’t think so,” replied the Major.

     “I thought I heard someone calling my name,” said Resalintas thoughtfully. “Maybe I just imagined it. Where was I? Yes. Skava confronted the leader of the priests of Marash but was defeated by him and only just managed to escape with his life. He won his way back to the fortress monastery, where he was forced to lie in bed for weeks while his injuries healed, and during that time he could only watch helplessly as the three cities were surrounded and besieged and the younger priests fell in battle one by one. By the time he was able to rise and take up the sword again he was the only priest of Samnos remaining in the valley, as he was when he first arrived.

     “He knew he could not stand against the priests of Marash as a living man, but neither could he bear the thought that the human civilization he’d lived in and helped to defend for half his life would soon be destroyed. There had to be some other way of defeating the evil priests and so, knowing that the three cities could endure the siege for several months, he left the valley and went back into the world to find it.

     “He visited many other priests of Samnos during the next few weeks, and called upon the leaders of several neighbouring kingdoms and city states, but everywhere he went the forces of evil were on the march and everyone had too many problems of their own to spare any help for a valley kingdom most of them had never heard of. He gradually came to realise that no-one could save Millin Dell unless he did so himself, so he turned his back on the civilised parts of the world and turned his attention to the wilderness areas beyond, searching for a secret that no priest of Samnos before him had ever dared to pursue. No-one knows where he went or what he did, but when he returned to the valley, three months after he’d left, he had transformed himself into a rak.”