April 12, 2026
22 Khordrak
Dastrux City
The Pink Unicorn crew received their results: all have passed and entered the Golden Talon society. They headed to the members’ lounge for the first time. The barkeep toasted their success. The lounge was filled with all sorts, including two bohemian spellcasters with fine scales and reptilian frills whose species Annais had seen before but couldn’t place.
In the lounge, they made two acquaintances. A monolingual dwarf approached and showed them a bundle of trinkets he found “across the sea,” and from what Gerald could glean he was inviting them on an expedition. A sorceress named Zhu Shun, an evident rival of the dwarf, displaced him and told the Pink Unicorn crew to keep an eye out for a major Society-sponsored expedition in the next month. She also offered them work guarding her supply train during an excavation next week. They told her they might accept if their schedules remain open.
After leaving the guildhall, they were called to officiate a duel. The parties were a canny merchant with xenophobic things to say about Lord Amarauth and a knight who defended Amarauth’s honor in the name of basic decency.
The duel was with daggers, and the merchant had the better of it. The knight yielded and stayed with the Pink Unicorn crew as they patched him up. He introduced himself as Sir Rupert.
As the crew checked out the sites of prospective theaters, they spotted a column of the Palatine Guard marching down the main thoroughfare to the city gate. Scrambling to a promontory by the Tower of the Stars, they looked out over Dastrux Garth.
Calloway’s soldiers had formed a protective arc in front of their camp, armed with the hafts of polearms with their deadly heads removed. The Palatine, armed with truncheons, formed a wedge and charged the line. Of equal skill and fresh from the barracks, they drove through the line and split into three columns. One on each flank continued beating back each half of Calloway’s army, while the third plunged ahead into the camp, ravaging the noncombatants there. Even as rain began to fall, the camp went up in flames and the Palatine withdrew.
With an oath, Gerald changed into his most clerical outfit and fashioned crude tabards for each of the Pink Unicorn crew, each painted with the chalice that indicates “medic.” Waiting at the inn, Annais invited Marcus along.
They did not pass a returning Palatine column, but found the forces clustered in Fowlersville engaged in celebratory looting, helping themselves to the pantries of all the taverns. They slipped past by the back alleys, close enough to hear one Palatine say he can’t wait for the order to kill all the campers.
In the Garth, they checked over the bodies at the line of contact. Both Palatine and campers were dragging their wounded back to their respective sides. Gerald triaged the wounded while Annais led a search party into the camp.
Gerald treated several soldiers who otherwise would never have walked again. He found two dead and several dying, including a Palatine. He stabilized most of the dying men. When a Palatine medic came to collect the unconscious soldier, they shared a moment of peace amid the horrors of battle.
Two dying camp soldiers remained. It would take magic to save them, and he only had one healing spell.
Annais found the ruins of the camp caltropped, but she led the party to drag several unconscious camp followers from the flames. When that was done, she searched and recovered a cache of supplies that had not been despoiled.
The Pink Unicorn crew followed the campers as they gathered along Millpond Lane, a road near the edge of the Garth. Apparently, the campers had been ordered to relocate beyond it, to a spread of marshy land that would bring disease come the summer.
Joining the edge of the group, they caught their first sight of Legate Sowenna Calloway. Her face showed more wear from the field than the years, and they guessed her in either an early- or a very healthy mid-middle age. Her voice was deeply emotional and her affect magnetic.
She was finishing a speech to her soldiers, telling them that, though a terrible tragedy, the expulsion of their camp was a setback the like of which they had overcome a hundred times in the field. She acknowledged their pain and the despair with which they looked at their new quarters, but assured them that they had made less comfortable camps before, and that they were tough enough to persevere. And she reminded them, evidently, that in only two days, at the end of the week, they would march on the city.
Reaching the end of the line, she found the Pink Unicorn crew in their medic garb and quickly appraised them. She thanked them warmly for their help and shook Gerald’s hand, telling them that what hospitality the camp had to offer was theirs.
The campers began fashioning sleeping platforms out of cut saplings and rushes. Gerald looked over his two comatose patients, trying to decide which to save. One was a young man with a new family and the other a 20-year veteran entitled to his land grant upon mustering out.
Annais helped a camp doctor clean up his equipment and asked which of the two would make a better martyr. The doctor hesitated, and then said that the older man’s face was unbloodied, and would look better carried through the streets.
Annais returned and quietly told Gerald to save the young father.
Oskraks found that an old acquaintance was serving as an aide in Calloway’s tent. He used this connection to get Calloway to agree to in interview in the morning. Later, he bedded a woman soldier and used the encounter to gauge the mood of the camp. The courage of the campers had wavered, but they were determined to go through with their march no matter the cost.
Gerald didn’t know why Annais had made a triage decision for him, but he felt somehow dirty. He retired to a tent he would share with a chaplain. There, two young legionaries approached him and thanked him for saving the younger man, Liam. They gave him a bottle of Herz des Tals ’09, a vintage of apple brandy that had been popular among the legions in happier times.
