Elm

Elm is a small farming village in the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"), lying at the bottom of a forest with a waterfall a little beyond it. Jonathan River, Olaf and Tim came to it on a wild road south that avoided settlements, where they met few people and only small farming villages. It has no proper fence or watch. There are some ten to fifteen houses, several with barns beside them, and in the middle a large house where the villagers gather in the evening, kept by Liam. Everyone knows everyone, doors stand open, and strangers are met with open curiosity rather than suspicion.¹²³⁴

History

Liam says that the forebears of about ten of the village's families went to the war of Victory Day, and that their rewards helped the village come to be; the many barns are a sign of its modest wealth. An old imperial banner with the symbols of the Victory Day alliance hangs in the village house. The Grand Alliance won on Victory Day, but its losses were so heavy that the balance of power was overturned, and after the war the alliance gave way to struggles for power.⁵⁶

The ruin

On the night the companions arrived, a girl went missing, and they followed her trail into the forest to the Vanishing lake of Elm. When they came back the next morning, the village was a ruin where no one had lived for a long time; in the square hung a snapped, melted rope with a skeleton beneath it, as if someone had been hanged there. Only their own cart stood where they had left it. Max said that he had been staying in the village for a week, which made a simple explanation harder.⁷⁸⁹

As they looked at the ruin, all of them felt a stabbing headache for a few seconds. When it passed, the same village stood normal around them, the wells open and the people at their daily work. They agreed that they had all seen the same thing, weighed whether two times were running together, whether the day had begun again, or whether the villagers were something else, and chose to say nothing to the people until they knew more.¹⁰¹¹

The same day again

Signs of change were uneven. Liam greeted them as if they had just arrived, new-looking coins lay in his drawer, Max's loosened boards were whole again and his flasks were in place but empty, yet the cart was unharmed. The companions guessed that the place moved selectively between two times; Jonathan said he could not break so complex an effect with his own magic.¹²¹³¹⁴

Under cover of casting a protective blessing on the village, Jonathan searched it with magic. He found no strong power covering the whole place, only small traces on the alliance banner and in a few houses. One trace led under a bed in an empty house, where he found a box guarded by its own magic, which hid the trace of what it held; he took it away unopened. It belonged to the farmer Lena, and held only simple folk rituals.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

Zarama's account

A stranger who called himself Zarama held that the villagers were not living the same day over again; rather, the companions were seeing a break in time beyond a barrier. By his account time is not merely an idea but a being that journeys, in the form of a man, an orc, a giant or another creature; some call it Orfeus, and some call it a dragon. If its road is blocked or meddled with, he said, it may lay waste to the place where it is and its passage may falter.^18192021

Ordinary people, Zarama said, cannot see such breaks because they are part of the flow; only those bound to some timeless piece can, and an object that is merely old or powerful is not enough. Such a bond, he thought, might draw in others by a single touch. He urged the companions not to add new deeds out of knowledge of the future, but to go on as they would have done before they saw. Jonathan questioned how this squared with foretelling the future to save lives, and Zarama repeated that he was no expert.²²²³²⁴

The Draconic god Arcaneus is the god of time, and many scholars, above all of the Order of Nus’ar, believe that Arcaneus is the manifestation of Orphus, the essence of time, a belief harshly suppressed by the Empire and the Church. It is also held that time energy differs from arcane magic, is harder to control, and leaves lasting consequences.²⁵²⁶²⁷

That evening the companions saw Liam come again with the same words, and saved the girl from the lake's pull. Whether this mended the break, or what Zarama's journeying time made of it, was not known at the time.²⁸²⁹

Spoiler: What became of ElmGösterAçık ettiği: Zincirsiz #26 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

When the companions came back up from beneath the lake, the name Elm and a T were carved on a tree by the shore. Tim told them by magic that three months had passed and that Elm was in a bad way. They found some of the waterways dried up, the buildings rotted as though they had stood under water, and the village emptied. No one hung from a tree, and the dead bore no wounds from blades; Max's examination showed that they had drowned. There were fewer bodies than there had been villagers, and the fates of Liam, Lena, her children and the rescued girl were not established.³⁰³¹³²