High Summer in the Hill Cantons

And now the News from the Hill Cantons...

Prepare the ebon-black skin dyes and four-cornered hats of mourning dear listeners. For it has come to pass that our dear Overking lies mute and gravely ill in The Great Chamber. Now is the time to put away treasonous borderlands talk that His August Majesty failed to acquire a single level in that arbitrary system of personal power gauging popular in the Cantons and unite to help the Lords Temporal, Spiritual and Arcane in their sacred roles as Electors should Raginmud LVIII be called to the fiery orgasm of the Sun Lord.

High Summer has opened a wave of occurrences large and small in Revoca Canton. Strange lights and whoops have been heard from the great mesa in the southwestern hills. Rogue Vlkodlaks have begun spurning the comforts of the “strategic hamlet” they have been generously provided by cantonal authorities and even taken to raiding outlying farmsteads. Lady Draga "Twitterlight's" recent 18^th birthday has dredged up the usual round of greatly begrudged suitors. And visibly shaken reverse centaurs have even been seen at the weekly town fair begging for scraps and mumbling about a “dangerous snake giant ” up in the hills.

Pelgrane trappers in the hills north of Marlinko speak of a bizarre encounter with what appears to be a mutant variation of the sweet-tongued and terrifying deodand. Arrows were fired at a lavender-skinned humanoid in a plain harness who had apparently consumed one of their party members (albeit one not beloved due to his pugilistic and tedious theories about aesthetics). The creature was able to freeze the trappers for a full minute with a cerebral monologue before it made its escape, stating: “I am about a humble creature of thought of the great tribe of Zenodads. Yon arrows that you fired at me. What is the nature of its flight? Surely they failed to strike at me because all objects when they occupy an equal space are at rest. But yet when they are in motion are still occupying such a space at any moment. Therefore those flying arrow are motionless and failed to strike me.”

Mulmak the Unnicknamed, the wildly successful and seemingly unkillable local man-at-arms who has risen to a captaincy in the Feral Shore colony, was in Marlinko last week tersely and briefly speaking at a gala celebrating the opening of his new charity, The Beneficant [sic] Mutual Aid League for the Mild. The new charity house will help aid those afflicted and stigmatized by excessive modesty, a little known yet troublingly tenacious malady in self-aggrandizing Marlinko cultural life.