Author: Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

The smell of charred wood and flesh had reached his nostrils a full mile before he’d reached its source – each step closer making it impossible to not assume the worst.

Corin knew the tangled, unmarked paths of the Black Jungles like he knew his own name – intimately and without effort, moving swiftly towards his worst fears realized. He’d spent most of his one hundred and sixteen years exploring the jungles, hunting them and protecting them, from human exploitation and yuan-ti desecration alike. The jungle was his home, where he felt the most comfortable and the most needed. Over the last twenty years, however, he’d discovered an unnerving longing for a different life eating away at him from the inside.

Tashluta, the human merchant city on the coast of the northern sea beckoned him, tantalizing him with its exorbitant riches, decadent culture and civilized lifestyle.

He’d first visited twenty-five years ago, the youngest of three representing his tribe on a fact-finding mission to identify the supporters of a band of yuan-ti raiders that were destroying crops and livestock in the northern section of the jungle, a fertile valley sitting in the middle of the Hazur Mountain range long contested by the two races. Their actions were nothing remarkable, a regular tactic in their perpetual war against the elves; rather, it was their equipment, finely crafted steel weapons and wands capable of spitting balls of fire, which had suddenly appeared in the hands of the raiding parties, tipping the scales in battle. Such equipment was beyond known yuan-ti capabilities, suggesting an allegiance of disturbing intent.

The elven trio was warmly welcomed in Tashluta, a cosmopolitan port city that was home to peoples of many of the civilized cultures of Faerûn. A representative of the Merchant Council heard the details of their quest and put them up for the evening at the Tashluta Terrace, one of the City’s finest inns owned by the Urthadar family, where they rested luxuriantly from their half-a-tenday-long trek. The ornately carved furniture, the cushioned beds and silk sheets, the gluttonous meal and intoxicating wine – luxuries Corin had never dreamed of but reveled in. He was left awestruck by the view from their room on the fourth floor of gleaming towers and bustling streets; by the tall ships in the harbor and the hectic pace of the docks; by the diversity of the people and their relative wealth. It didn’t leave an impression as much as it carved a permanent place in his brain…and in his heart.

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Tashluta, Ches 1st (The Claw of the Sunsets), 1372 DR (The Year of Wild Magic)

Turtle Harbor lazily slapped against the Tashlutan docks, raising a welcome mist that splashed across Shann Tharden’s tan, unlined face. Standing in front of a small warehouse building at the end of the docks, she turned east to look towards the city’s skyline with its gaudy towers – impressive monuments to the various merchant families that had long ago established Tashluta as the major trading port on the Shining Sea’s southern coast, as well as the nominal capital of the Tashalar. Her gaze was gradually drawn north and west, past the market district and the city center and the Hazur River that separated them from the residential districts, across Turtle Harbor to the lone tower jutting up from the city’s northwestern peninsula that was home to the Urthadar family, the infamous spice merchants who wielded an inordinate amount of power on the Tashlutan Merchant’s Council, the city’s ruling body.

The tower, an impossibly straight column ten stories high, was made of the finest Duergar Marble from the Hazur Mountains and polished to an almost supernatural sheen that reflected both sun and moonlight, serving as a beacon for ships coming to port. There were numerous rumors of its origin as well as of what resided in its upper floors – an evil wizard ancestor of the Urthadars, imprisoned fey creatures whose magic kept the tower shining, a black sheep relative whose secrets threatened the family’s grip on power.

The latter was the most unlikely, she thought as, if there were such a relative it would be the man walking down the boardwalk towards her leading the oddest assortment of men she’d ever seen.

Lord Belgeon Urthadar was most definitely the black sheep of his family and, as much as some of his relatives might have liked to lock him away in their tower, since his ascension to High Cleric of the Tashlutan Reform Church of Waukeen, he’d become a virtually untouchable thorn in their side. He walked with the confidence of someone that was in fact untouchable, as if Waukeen herself were there by his side guarding his every step. His thick dark hair was locked and pulled back exposing a high forehead and prominent cheekbones. His eyes were nearly gray and a perfectly manicured goatee, which was beginning to sprout some gray of its own, surrounded his full lips. That he was relatively young for his lofty position in the fledgling church at 39 years old, not to mention extremely handsome yet unmarried, belied the depth of his devotion to his deity (and hers to him) and often led to his enemies underestimating his capabilities.

The assassins from two tendays prior had found that out rather painfully, returning to their unknown employers to report their failed mission, each with a prominent and permanent limp, one no longer possessing the ability to procreate. Belgeon had not escaped unscathed, though, proudly sporting a thick, ragged scar across his left forearm which he took as a sign of the righteousness of his chosen path.

He was tall, even for a human, but seemed a giant in the company of those trailing behind him – an elf, a Halfling and two dwarves.

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