session 1
Death of a God: Session One
Section titled “Death of a God: Session One”Boat Ride to the Gods
Section titled “Boat Ride to the Gods”Korha XIX, hesitant as she was, needed to join the Great Convocation due to her position as a Prince of the Ahuriyata. It was a divine mandate written in the Sudras of the Great Ahuriyata himself, ignored at great peril to ones life.
And so she had called upon her high-priest Chian Pashe to make preparations to depart from their palace at the Kolhan capital as soon as possible, and as nondescript as possible—she did not want any… encounters with her siblings’ hirelings.
So the session began with Korha’s unwed daughters, Faivalkhari and Chariharti exploring the bow of the merchant vessel that was hired them, and their sizeable retinue into the Palace in the Isle of the Gods—an island in the middle of the Bay of Gods, Teheseyata.
Fai and Chari were escorted by Fai’s mentor and priest, Matarelha. He was, of course, giving Fai lectures on whatever little thing that came into his mind as they continued on their travels.
Fai, unbeknown to everyone, was not longer the real Faivalkhari, but instead, a face-stealer agent of the Revivalist Church, a religion formed from the ashes of Burtz. Her mission: to infiltrate the Sorhan capital—something that was yet impossible for both the Revivalist, and their rival organization, the Reformist Church.
Both groups wanted headway into their continent for reasons unknown to Fai. She didn’t really care, though. She only wanted to impress her master Tourmaline Sabrege, whose aim was the spread of the Revivalist doctrine across the known world. So she, known to both religious groups by her other face, the platinum-haired Sorscha, pushed to be assigned to the job, despite their hierarchy’s misgivings.
She had actually hoped to take Matarelha’s face instead, but a week before the voyage, the real Faivalkhari died of mysterious causes in an empty palace corridor. The thought of being able to have the latitude of an Ansa royal had so much allure, that she took her face, despite not being able to prepare herself to assume Fai’s identity.
And so, during the voyage, she had to discover Fai’s personality by poking and probing into the reactions of her confidants and family members. Hoping not to be unmasked in the process.
Unfortunately, after a short while of enjoyable mischief with Fai’s sister Chari, the ship was attacked. A gigantic squid had latched itself onto the ship’s bough during a bout of strange weather. The squid had taken Matarelha—Fai calls him Mat—and was bashing him, and the ship itself into bits. She was forced to use her magical abilities in front of Mat, and though she tried to hide it, it seems he was able to see through the deception. Because Fai—the real Fai—had apparently shown him similar abilities already!
Her spells, and the cannons have successfully driven away the monstrosity, luckily, but the ship was still in a state of utter disrepair. The ship’s crew were able to patch it up so that they won’t immediately sink into the Posara Sea, but they still wouldn’t make the entire voyage to the Isle of Gods in their current state. They had to make port in Port Piya.
Detour: Port Piya
Section titled “Detour: Port Piya”The ships docked at Port Piya, with 2 of 3 of their escort ships now gone, taken beneath the waves by the giant squid. Chian sent an attendant to arrange accommodations at an inn in the Provobati ward of the port city. She was instructed to pose as a servant for a Poasan merchant family, seeking passage to a city to the west of the Sorha princedom.
There were legitimate concerns of assassination against the prince and her daughters, and so it seemed prudent to hide their identities, as they attempted to find passage overland to the Gateway of the Gods, a port city with ships to the Isle of the Gods.
Once settled, Fai had taken the face of Sorscha once more in order to gain intelligence on the mercenary groups in the area. She did not want threats to the prince to undermine her efforts.
As Sorscha, she visited an inn near the docks called The Pierced Wave, where she found a mercenary company comprised mostly of non-Ahurian privateers. she posed as a mercenary herself and found that there was a caravan leaving mid-morning.
Next, she tried to find a more seedy sort of hirelings. From her intel, she discovered that a group of people are considered untouchable and beyond the protections offered by the Ahurian castes. These people are called Harsi, literally meaning excrement, and for civic and religious purposes, not considered to have the same rights as people, but are more akin to cattle. Legally, they are not allowed to hold weapons, and so no one hires them as mercenaries in the open. However, because they have very little to lose, they are willing to do more indelicate activities for much less.
Most Harsi gravitate toward population centers less hostile to their presence, and that typically means places with a more cosmopolitan population, such as Port Piya. Foreigners hire Harsi to perform odd jobs including, but not limited to beat-downs, vandalism, more demeaning forms of prostitution, and assassinations.
So, Sorscha found a tavern in the Harsi slums outside the West Gate. The tavern is unnamed and unmarked. The only indication that it was one were the rowdy customers and a huge bouncer that kept the peace inside it. She again pretended to be looking for jobs in the caravan. Any job. The bartender, a large, dark-skinned woman with a buzz-cut mentioned one man looking for a peculiar kind of prostitute—one that was asking for a service that the regular working girls of her tavern was not able to accommodate. He needed a sadistic mistress, and that sort of stuff was not quite so popular in Ahuria. She was told to ask for a man called Troy in an inn within the Provobati Ward, and that he may pay up to 20 pieces of gold a session depending on the quality of the service provided.
Troy Montague, a traveling merchant associated with a large collective of traders, was waiting for someone to heed his call, and utter the phrase “let the mistress enter”. He is a masochist, and one so complete that Sorscha suspected that he might be a member of the Reformist Church. She performed her role as a dominatrix very convincingly—enough that Troy could not even dare to withhold information from her as she asked her questions.
He said that he was to meet with a prince at the Gateway to the Gods for a trade deal. He was to deliver the goods in his possession, in exchange for items that he had no information on whatsoever. After further questioning, he said that the prince was Purha XVIII. Troy then asked, if Sorscha can come with him in their journey to the Gateway of the Gods and continue to torment him as his dominatrix. He said that the caravan he was joining was to leave at 9:40 in the morning, confirming that he was to be part of the caravan the mercenaries mentioned earlier in the day. Satisfied with the information she collected, she returned to her room, took the face of Fai once more, and went to sleep.