View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
The time for preparations is over; now is the time for adventure! Dyva has loaded all of her possessions into a carriage whose top supports a creaking mass of pots and troughs full of various plants, several of which are already beginning to sprawl down it's sides and over the windows, and whose interior is filled with chests and bags containing everyone's equipment and possessions. It is drawn by a pair of large and gloomy-looking Oxen, though it turns out this is more a product of the shape of their face than their temperament, which is stoic and easily-pleased. Ossa walks alongside the carriage , unconcerned by mortal matters such as exhaustion, but the others can join Dyva in sitting on the front bench (It's crowded with three people, but not uncomfortably so).
The road they travel down is built straight alongside the river, which runs itself in a nearly straight line up into the hills, carrying boats the whole way. Some of those boats are small and pushed by small number of rowers or allowed to drift as fishermen work upon them or allowed to flow downstream, but larger number beyond that are dragged upstream by teams of men, oxen, or stranger things upon the road. The least strange of the stranger things are rothé, a sort of semi-domesticated cave bison or musk-ox used by dwarven grain-traders, but there is even a small boat which goes past at great speed, dragged behind a team of air elementals.
For the first day, the urban landscape alongside the river gives way to gardens and orchards, where people of all sorts work to produce cash-crops that will be consumed in the city. The rotting-season is well-upon these farms, and most of the trees have lost their leaves, but there's always a few more tasks that need to be done before the snows set in well and truely, so people are still hard at work.
As it nears sunset, the party arrives at the first way-town outside the city, being thus the best-appointed as well. On one side of the road is the grand inn, of both expense and quality, and one the other is the lesser inn, built like a low stone fortress around a central common room, as many of it's fortifications facing inwards on that room as outwards. If one is truly impoverished, many of the smaller houses alongside the road are used to taking guests in exchange for payment or labour. Or you could set up camp somewhere, if you were really desperate. It hasn't snowed for as much as a week now!
