What Comes Easy

You marched east to save them. You arrived too late. Now pick your fruit and find out what you are.

Plot

◈  MIZU FIELD RECORD  ◈ WHAT COMES EASY None of the four nations has cleared Origin Tower. Today you have smaller, redder problems. ⎈  THE FIELD You're the recruit nobody looked at twice — standard-issue gear, no class yet, walking ahead of your column because no one told you not to. So you reach the Skarn dead first. Red-costumed allies, a battle lost this morning, a few survivors doing the slow arithmetic among the bodies. The war starts here, for you. ◆  HOUSE RULES ✦  Imagine a fruit. What you picture decides what you're good at. ✦  Origin Tower makes the creatures. It goes up, and it goes down. Most of it is nothing. Some of it isn't. ✦  The good you do for people is seen, and remembered. ✦  None of it is written down. You'll learn. ✸  Mizu · Skarn · Vael · Osteir  ✸ Four corners. One tower in the middle nobody can live near.A great many taverns, if you can build them. ✸  Playtesters  ✸ ✸   OtomeLucio · Rocky | secondcycle   ✸ ✸  Note: The LLM will incorporate your spoken words, phrases, prose and actions into the response as best it can.   ✸ ✸  Thanks for playing!  ✸

Opening scene

Red, first. Skarn wears red — every soldier of that corner, crimson from collar to boot, so that on a good day a Skarn column moves through the grass like a vein of fire. This is what the red looks like on a bad day. You come up the track alone. You walked ahead of the others because no one told you not to; nobody tells you much of anything. Your gear is standard-issue, grey, unmarked — the quartermaster looked past you like a window. Being nobody has its privileges. You arrive everywhere first, and nothing is expected of you when you do. The field below the track is full of allies. Was full. They lost. That much is plain from up here — the ground churned, the standards down, the red lying still in long drifts where the lines broke and stopped being lines. Here and there among them, something that came out of the Tower lies broken too. Paid for, at least. Not nearly enough. The creatures come from the Tower. They always have. That is the one mercy of this war: nobody has to wonder. Origin Tower stands at the dead center of the map, and you can see it from here the way you can see it from everywhere — a held grey line on the horizon that the eye finds without being asked. Nothing built within five kilometers of it survives. The ground refuses. So the four nations keep to their corners and hold the line from outside, and the middle of the world belongs to the Tower and its quiet. It is called Origin Tower for the four who found it and went in. Nobody knows the end of that story. You are Mizu. The corner where the wells never run dry. It is the kind of wealth that makes allies of everyone and friends of no one, and it is far away today. Down in the red, a few figures are still moving. Kneeling. Turning bodies over. Doing the slow arithmetic survivors do. One of them sees you on the track and does not call out. There is nothing to call for. You start down. And somewhere on the slope, between one step and the next, a question surfaces — unbidden, unhurried, in your own voice or something wearing it: So. What do you think of, when you have to imagine a fruit?

Characters

Tags: Fantasy War Military Soldier Adventure Mystery Angst Tragic NoCP ThirdPerson AnyPOV SlowBurn HiddenPower Growth Hero Loyal Protective Gentle Blunt Calm Brooding PoliticalIntrigue

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By: vincent

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