PrinceCon XLVIII - Spires
The Call to Action
Centuries ago, the Green swallowed the world. It is well known that any who venture into it die, overwhelmed by the poisonous air, brought down by monstrous creatures that dwell there, consumed, and then reborn as another extension of the Green's all-consuming reach.
Those few that survived did so by fleeing to the Spires, great mountains that rise too high for the Green to spread. There, a new society formed, one that abandoned the folly of the previous age to focus on the development of personal power, unlocking the potential within themselves, harnessing powerful combat techniques, and building a society of warriors the likes of which the world had never seen. But this cannot last. One of the Spires, those great mountains, has collapsed, and more may soon follow. Even the airship clans floating between the Spires are afraid, for below, the ever-hungry Green waits for our fragile world to topple into its grasp.
The Council of Elders has called on all Sect Members, Airship Clansmen, and Wanderers to gather. Unlock the secrets of the forgotten past. Battle your foes with powerful techniques. Save the Spires, save us all.
The conbook, further teasers, and registration will be posted when ready!
Teasers
The Sleeping Hermit
The collected disciples hushed.
The bravest among them rose to her feet. “The Green is still spreading, Jiwuba. How will you stop it?”
The harvest feast was ending, and what they had stored would need to sustain them until the fields awoke again. The Shovel Skulls were lucky. Not all sects were as adept at cultivation on such tight mountaintops.
Jiwuba, his dark visage seeming to fade back in the candlelight like a statue, sat still and quiet for a long moment. Then he smiled.
“I don’t know.”
When the Green came, it choked all life in the valleys and lowlands. All the works of mankind were lost under its thick toxic fog, and every living thing inside was changed in strange and terrible ways. Since then, survivors had prospered—or endured—in the mountains. Under Jiwuba’s leadership, his school, latecomers to the sanctuary Spires, had encamped on the most barren of the peaks. Only with his knowledge were they able to grow their bountiful paradise.
Jiwuba remembered his childhood. Oh, to know nothing and thereby be wise! The humble act of shoveling boar muck had allowed him to meditate on the fertile bed from which springs life. And now he was first among masters here, and he knew nothing.
He remembered loved ones. His sister, who had gone back for their grandfather and never rejoined them. He remembered her and many others.
I cannot think. Too distracted by all the wonderful lives my friends have built. I would give mine to save but one of theirs! It is too much. One cannot work a long year while daydreaming the sweetness of harvest. The goal will wait. I must only find the way. What the body cannot withstand, the mind will hold strong against...
He turned to Kaly, the disciple, and admitted, “I won’t lie to you—I’m not sure I’ll ever know! But when the problems of the world become too vexing, sleep brings new answers.”
And so they resolved to dream on the Green. Though the other elders awoke with ideas to temporarily stall its spread, Jiwuba slept on. And slept he has since. Though his disciples moved heaven and hell to rouse him, he slept. Though his simple room fell into the abyss as centuries gnawed the mountain, he dreamed, uninterruptible.
Who knows what he might say, if anyone can wake him?
Bird and Cat Meet in the Clouds
Clang clang clang clang—“General quarters! General quarters! This is not a drill! All hands to action stations!”—clang clang clang clang, continued the alarm gong.
Red flinched up from her reading. Throwing on her jacket and sun goggles, she emerged topside and made it over the rocking deck in seven efficient strides. She arrived at her ballista with a bolt in hand from the locker and pumped the lever backward. Kachunk-pfwee-kachunk-pfweee…, the steam pistons hissed. She took a step safely back. “Ready!” she called to Lan-gang, the gunner.
A dark shadow passed over them. Red shuddered. A sky-leviathan, its snout lined with a hundred poisoned thorns, its body a curling serpentine. It would rend the Naughty Cat’s balloon like rice paper, and that would be the end of their airship. Even if anyone survived, nobody answered distress calls out here. Below, she could see sandbags falling away, then a few cargo crates. The supercargo would be very upset, but the bosun must have decided altitude was needed—fast.
Twang! Lan-gang loosed the bolt. Off the mark. The huge monster was turning around to make another pass.
“Free the steam,” came a soft but steady voice behind Red. It was that water-philosopher—from the something rats—who was hitching a ride into the Ten Fingers.
“What?” gasped Red in disbelief, but she pulled the emergency vent lever.
“Pure Heart Silver Cyclone,” said the small mousy-faced scholar, and the steam began to swirl around the ship. Just as the monster returned, it met a scalding hurricane.
Red had thought those mystics were useless. At least this one had been intent, it seemed, on hiding away from the noise and the machinery.
Blinded, the beast roared in agony and spun into the murk below. The engines growled and the ship continued climbing. Honk! came a short horn blast. “Stand down from general quarters, maintain readiness two.”
Red leaned on the railing, snatching a few more pages in the evening rays.
“Bubble Margin,” the scholar remarked with a nod, seeing her book. “108 heroes building a paradise down in the Green around a secret lake—I’ve always wanted to be like them.”
The Green carpet rolled on below unending. She shook her head. Down there was a venomous mist of spores through which marched things only known to hell. She was glad she was up in the sky, safe. But after all too short a journey they would land on all too solid ground, the same ground on which the Green crawled and reached its tendrils to grasp at the precious lives above.
She pulled the last candied hawthorn off the skewer with her teeth and sucked on it meditatively. She’d be on shift again tomorrow for landing, and it would be a long day. They made junior deckhands do all the heavy lifting.
Just one more day at work in the heavens.
Two Grandmasters on Peach Mountain
“Every day our ranking members risk their bodies and minds to push back the Green wave. They must rappel down and overturn the vines creeping up the mountainside. But you and your Ringing Hoof are so fortunate as to not need to dirty your hands with hard work. You instead set your disciples to weaving. Weaving pretty pictures and frilly scarves,” Grandmaster Lonnie snorted. “I should lodge a formal complaint with the Council.”
Grandmaster Athena stood firm before him, head tilted forward in defiance. “We weave to preserve our past, as you might know were you not so bull-headed. We weave a thread stretching over a thousand years, to before the Green. But that’s beside that’s not the point. We have always considered a gentler, more harmonious touch than you Digging Oxen, who plough up your spire and only create fresh ground tilled for the vines.”
“We are the Standing Ox,” said Lonnie, bristling at the insult. “I will defend our honor, especially against a Green-worshipper. Gaia’s secret has always been obvious, and your treason must end. Land’s Inexhaustible Armory!” Lonnie stomped his foot, and a boulder the size of an ox rose to meet his forceful palm-thrust and exhaled breath. It catapulted forward at Athena, she dodged, and the boulder fell amid the peach trees.
“Wh-what? Gaia is emphatically not the Green! She does what she can against it and would happily offer her protection, should you only ask.” She too stomped, but as she clicked her iron heels, instead a golden-clear bell tone resounded like a drop of water and swelled rippling around her. “Phonolite Gamelan Crystal Shield!”
“That Gaia is not the Green is a technicality. That all-consuming rot is her work all the same. Eighty-One-Ton Standing Monolith...” To Athena’s eyes, it appeared that the very mountain had risen against her, swelling around his arm into a fist of geologic proportions and forming a concretion of fossils chronicling aeons past.
“Have you no respect? I tell the stories, I teach and offer the wisdom of the past, but nobody ever listens. I bring a cow to water, but I cannot make it drink. Eight-Ringed Gong of Centuries’ Resonance!” She traced with fluid gestures a circular shield before her, then clapped her hands on the invisible boss. A blast of sound erupted …
... and was met with Lonnie’s charge. “... Exploding Fist!”
As they both reeled from the impact, a continued rumbling introduced itself beneath their feet. The very mountain, a vertical pillar of stone a thousand fathoms high, was unraveling. It shivered, fractured, and collapsed.
Down went numberless warriors, scholars, and artisans. In the tapestry of the Green’s survivors, a wound. 47 Spires remained.