Role

Chapter 3

THE BEGINNING

His earliest memory: Bound.

His hands were tied behind his back and his mouth was
filled with his own blood. He felt a hard ragged stone
beneath his tongue and realized it was a shattered tooth.
He peered up through his hair and felt as much as saw
the bright flash when his head swam and his eyes hurt.

There, in a white mist of his memory was a reed mask
slashed with red paint and a malevolent look to the eyes
behind the masked slits. A disembodied voice spoke
from behind the mask in a language he did not
understand but the intent was clear: the mask belonged
to a body with two arms and two hands and these hands
held a bowl carved out from the husk of a massive
swamp plant seed. The bowl was filled with a sweet
smelling milky liquid and the hands held it beneath
Sirfalas mouth. He felt his head pulled back and the
liquid pour down his throat and then the world was all
white mist.

BLOOD MAGIC, SPIRITS, SACRIFICE

And then his memories come and go in flashes of white.
He lived with the people he knows now as human in
Whistlewood. The Whistlewood swamplands as he
recalled were filled with nature spirits so dense he could
see them when he squinted his eyes. He learned from
this human tribe that every living being had a spirit that
was released when it died. Most spirits, like high elvish
spirits or moss spirits, are inert. They rise and fall and
lie around the living world, feeding the living much like
how a rain forest nourishes on dense piles of fallen
leaves. But some spirits are more active and malign, and
may be hostile and dangerous. To appease these spirits
and harnass their power, witch doctors must make blood
sacrifices, usually of the witch doctors enemies.

In fact, Sirfalas learned that sometimes he could control
the spirits power through cannibalism and fetishes.
Witch doctors consumed the flesh of their enemies so
that they may weaken their spirits and protect
themselves from harm, or use fetishes, like shrunken
heads, of their enemies bodies.

The blinding flashes fade away as he recalls his training
and increasing power until a day when he and the
tribesmen prepare a dwarvish for the blood ritual
different from the other sacrifices. This time, the
tribesmen cut and feasted on the dwarvishs flesh while
it still lived. Sirfalas bent down with them while the
dwarvish screamed in unnatural terror, and tasted the
dwarvish blood. As it passed Sirfalas lips he could taste
the living spirit and the accompanying rush of dark
power and lust. But then his body jerked and his
muscles convulsed.

A few years can only do so much to overcome a wood-
elfs inherent nature and aversion to unchecked black
magic, and though Sirfalas could not pinpoint this as the
cause of his sudden nausea, he retched with the extreme
discomfort. And in the days that followed, he began to
see the tribe differently, as distant Others. Though he
hunted with them still he thought often of escape
through the mist soaked days and nights until he fled
them and the Whistlewood & only to find a worse
horror awaited.