Kenzo’s Memories of Hraglar

As the party plans and begins to discuss how to make their way safely into the storm, you reach out, testing the waters, seeing if you can calm Hralgar, drawing on your connection to his soul developed the last time you were in this place.

Suddenly, you are caught and in a moment your sense of yourself as Kenzo disappears. You are a giant, a storm giant, Jorundr, and your friend Hralgar, your mentor is in trouble. You have received word that he was captured, somehow, by Drankorian trickery, whether in aid of Apollyon’s rule, or some desperate attempt to fight against him, or something else entirely you do not know, or care. You must help him. So of course, you enter the storm, which is no bother for you. The weather is nice, actually. It is difficult to run, as your legs don’t work the way they should. But you hurry the best you can.

It is hard to think straight, and as you run you feel your mind drift, wider and wider, until you are the wind, these pesky small minds imposing on you. You laugh, wild, toying with them, asking one of the minds what it would like to see, showing it a vision of Orcs wearing a glittering mantle of rainbow thread, for some reason. You are free, you can see, it is glorious.

Running up the tower, suddenly your memories come rushing back. Chains, growing out of the wall. Powerful magic, binding you, forcing you to relinquish your body of wind and rain, turning to flesh. An incantation, a wizard chanting: “I bind you now forever here, with chains unbreakable, until magic fails or until the first words of Nelawe’s Lament for Lost Thunder are spoken by a human of these lands to free you from your prison.”

Then all is dark. You have scattered memories of your mind being split, being forced into a statue of yourself, a representation cast with magic to be your eyes and ears and mouth. The wizard, questioning you, asking how to restore the crashed ship, Vindristjarna, The Star on the Wind. The magic traps you but does not compel you, and you are silent.

Brief flashes come to you. A memory of the rage swelling within you. The impotent anger, with no where to go. Time passes, in brief flashes, but mostly you step outside time, reach out even in your trapped state to the power of the phasing stone and warp the Dreamworld around you. Time passes, but not for you, forever in your mountain realm.

Until searing pain, and you can no longer see, and you can feel the angry ghost you forced into the statue looking for you. Sometimes it takes control, and you lash out, the wind and lightning growing strong. Sometimes you fight it off, keep your mind in your dream haven.

These memories rattle in your mind, and you see them as flashes, somehow knowing they are Hralgar’s, not yours. You are Jorundr, come to save your friend. But you remember a red mist, spreading across the land. Death, and sickness, and passing beyond the Land of the Dead to the home of your ancestors. You feel displaced from time, unstuck, confused.

Until your mind clears suddenly, and you find yourself standing in Hralgar’s dreamscape in the mountains, Kenzo once more.