Prelude
As much as I would have liked to have this session be much, MUCH longer than it is, my google doc of it went missing for whatever reason, and thus I had to resort to writing a new, much shorter version.
In place of what should’ve been a much longer session, however, I intend on presenting a brief summary of what had transpired and how the consequences of those events played out later.
Ready?
Let’s get into it…
Summary
Several astrers had passed, and the Questing Dragons party were no better prepared to fight demons than they were in the beginning of their adventures. Miraculously, Belderyx stumbled upon a hint of great importance:
A hint stating that there supposedly exists a daughter of Kastoloth: the Ancient Silver Dragon who had once bested a demonic incursion before. The dragon drove the demons out of the New Soloastrian Continent as the Hessandrelian Emperor, leading both his country’s and his allies’ armies in a heroic charge against the invaders.
To this day, Kastoloth is venerated as a hero by the peoples of Kolsymir, who have included the dragon in their country’s flag. As a Kolsymirian native herself, Belderyx was ecstatic to learn of the possibility that her nation’s biggest hero might have a long lost relative still kicking around.
As such, Belderyx began stubbornly trying to convince Syndra and Veldris to launch an expedition into the frozen wastes deep south of Kolsymir, hoping to find Kastoloth’s long-lost daughter and defeat the demonic threat with her help.
Lacking any better options, the two party leaders agreed, only to begin arguing over the logistics of their journey.
A little later, Emilia woke up from her regular mid-day nap, only to find Syndra sobbing quietly in the living room downstairs.
When confronted about what happened, the high elf explained how she and Veldris had an argument so terrible it lead to a messy breakup. To add insult to injury, the drow elf said that Syndra — at least in her current state — wasn’t fit for leadership, and decided to venture out into Kolsymir without her.
Veldris, Belderyx, and a bunch of paid mercenaries were already on their way to their destination via caravans. Worried for her now-ex-girlfriend, Syndra urged Emilia to go after Veldris and her crew in order to make sure she returns home safe.
While Syndra would stay home to keep an eye on Clandestine and Kellan, Emilia went to ask somebody else for help.
She stumbled upon the blue tiefling questgiver from earlier: an individual who had previously introduced himself as Surge, the Rider on the Storm.
The airheaded tiefling interpreted Emilia’s call for aid as a romantic invitation to a date of sorts, and swiftly declined. Somehow, Emilia couldn’t muster the strength to explain that this wasn’t her intention.
In her mind, Surge had just answered a question she had been thinking about for the past few astrers that they’ve been hanging out on various sidequests:
“My feelings… Does he reciprocate?”
He, in fact, did not.
Disappointed and frankly annoyed at Surge for leading her on, Emilia blew up at the tiefling with all the pent-up emotions she’s been bottling the entire day.
Still just as aloof and airheaded as ever, Surge calmly nodded in agreement, stating it “probably wasn’t very nice of him” to lead Emilia on and use her romantic interest in him as an excuse to get her to be his pack mule during various quests.
Even more offended than before, the druid stormed out of Surge’s cabin in the port district, immediately looking for the nearest ship to Kolsymir.
As if he hadn’t just ruined her day, Surge went up to Emilia to notify her that the seas around Kolsymir are largely frozen this time of the year, and no ship voyage would get her there in time.
The druid stormed off once again, practically fuming with rage, but somehow still keeping it in.
On her way to a travel agency in Ventasca Centrale, Emilia couldn’t stop herself from fidgeting with the rings on her fingers, almost as if keeping her hands busy was the only thing stopping her from freaking out at that point.
Finally, she managed to get herself a caravan ride to the border between Randwynn and Kolsymir, though paying the toll wasn’t exactly easy.
Luckily, some other adventurer was looking for a similar travel course, and offered Emilia to split the fee.
The adventurer was a dorky drow woman of blueberry skin, painfully reminding Emilia of Surge all throughout the journey.
Even though visually the drow resembled her former associate, she was nothing like him in character. While the two were traveling, she clearly struggled to maintain eye contact or start a proper conversation, sweating profusely and stammering with every other word.
The journey lasted a couple of days, but throughout it, Emilia slowly opened up to her new acquaintance, explaining her troubles from these past few days. The two elves’ genuine conversation did wonders for the drow girl, who stopped stammering as much and seemingly got the better of her anxiety for the time being.
The girl introduced herself as Elynere, a Champion of Nezhara — the Eldritch Goddess of Fate, Balance, and Justice.
She said that her main reasoning behind a trip to Kolsymir was spending some time among the nation’s elementalists in hopes of mastering her druidic magic.
Intrigued by the mention of druidism, Emilia inquired her travelmate about her skillset, half-jokingly stating that she herself is a druid, though doesn’t bring much good to the party. Her “joke” went on to become a miserable tirade on how her party always treats her like a “lesser person”, both physically and intellectually.
Instead of rolling her eyes, Elynere was locked in on the conversation, offering words of wisdom and a reassuring smile to go with them, hoping to better the wood elf’s self-esteem, even if by a little bit. Their heartfelt conversation worked wonders, as for the rest of the journey, Emilia didn’t need to stim nearly as much as she did the previous two days.
Once the two had finally arrived on the border between Randwynn and Kolsymir, they hiked to a small town in the mountains where they would reorganize their belongings and prepare for their respective quests.
After a fun night of drinking and playing games at the tavern, Elynere felt compelled to tell Emilia the truth.
The drow’s Goddess, Nezhara, had told her to seek out Emilia long before she had even entered Ventasca Centrale’s travel agency. Though still not aware of the intention behind her Goddess’s words, Elynere felt a strong sense of urgency to accompany Emilia on her journey into the frozen wastes south of Kolsymir, feeling as if she was supposed to be her guide throughout it all.
Emilia wasn’t nearly as bewildered as her newfound friend expected her to be. The wood elf simply smiled, stating that “surely, a goddess of fate can’t be wrong”.
Elynere smiled approvingly, and the two went to sleep not as random travel acquaintances, but as formal party members.
The following day, the pair of elven adventurers began running minor errands around the city in exchange for gold, as neither of the druids had anything on them by this point. It was at that moment where Elynere revealed her clerical skills, snagging herself a part-time job at the local church.
Several more astrers went by, and Emilia had almost completely forgotten about her initial goal of finding Veldris and Belderyx. Especially when considering the fact she and Elynere have scoured the entirety of southern Kolsymir without finding so much as a trace of her former allies.
Convinced her initial mission was an elaborate ruse to try and get her out of the party, Emilia was fully ready to settle down with Elynere in their cozy little mountain village.
Unfortunately, fate had other plans.
In the area, a horde of mutants inflicted with demonic blight began rampaging from town to town, slowly heading towards the two elves’ place of refuge.
On one fateful day — when Emilia, Elynere, and the local villagers who came to look up to them as heroes all banded together — the village mounted a formidable defense against the demonic threat, though it didn’t take long until it was eventually overrun.
Suddenly, some other adventuring party decided to intervene. Familiar faces to Emilia, not so much to Elynere.
A drow elf cleric, a dragonborn sorceress, and a bunch of professionally-trained knights from Randwynn.
Together, these heroes attempted to best the demons, but not before the mutants’ amalgamated bodies clumped together into one, large monstrosity, big enough to swallow the village whole.
Having remembered the fate of her hometown, Belderyx could not let another settlement fall to demons. Using her breath weapons, she went ballistic on the enemy, splitting the gigantic blob of contorting flesh and ink-dark ooze into several smaller pieces with her draconic laserbeams.
Enraged, Belderyx couldn’t stop rampaging across the village even when the demonic threat had already been cleared.
Chucking icicles everywhere she went, impaling innocents on ice spikes, freezing anyone who looked at her funny with her icy breath weapon, so an and so forth. Total carnage.
Things looked bleak – Veldris was frozen solid, and Elynere’s situation wasn’t much better – she was covered in ice from neck to toe, hardly able to breathe.
Emilia, however, was still holding on. Her veins freezing, the druid crawled towards her rampaging friend, hoping to talk some sense into her. Instinctively, Belderyx kicked her away – but Emilia didn’t falter.
The druid crawled back to Belderyx, only to be flung backwards with a powerful kick yet again. And again. And again.
Finally, Emilia grabbed her friend’s leg, hanging on for dear life. She whimpered:
“Bel, please – It’s me…”
But alas, she was met with a slash that almost sliced her stomach open. The strike sent her reeling backwards and tumbling through layers upon layers of snow.
Emilia kept drifting in and out of consciousness, seeing glimpses of an epic showdown between the freshly-thawed Veldris and Belderyx, before eventually seeing the dragonborn sprout wings and fly away, all while Veldris is shouting something at her from the distance.
Finally, the wood elf had fully regained her consciousness.
Veldris got up from a rock she was sitting on and came up to Emilia, greeting her with a painful kick in the ribs, treating the druid like a stress toy.
“W-Wait…” Emilia muttered, groaning in pain. “I was… I was looking… for you.”
“S-Syndra, she told me to…” she added. “To seek you out…”
Veldris kicked the druid in the face with the speed of a cobra strike, and just as viciously, too.
“Oh yeah?” the cleric scoffed. “THAT WAS OVER A MONTH AGO.”
“WE WERE PRESSED FOR TIME, AND YOU..”
“…WHAT WERE YOU EVEN DOING OUT HERE?”
Veldris breathed a deep sigh in an attempt to calm herself down, pacing a bit around Emilia’s injured body before standing in front of the wood elf once more.
“It’s all your fault, you fucking mutt.” she hissed. “First you ruin an entire astrer’s worth of adventuring…”
Veldris lost her patience again, and continued kicking Emilia mercilessly, venting out her frustrations on her former teammate.
“Then you disappear for another astrer…” she continued. “Having a fling with some tiefling you just met!”
“And now…” she murmured. “That one day, after me and Belderyx had left…”
“You overslept.”
“I told Syndra that you would…” Veldris stammered. “That you would come find us, were we to go missing.”
“…”
“I trusted you.”
“And yet here we are.”
Emilia really wanted to raise her head from the ground right about now, if only to give Veldris a reassuring look of apologetic pity. But she couldn’t, as the cleric’s steel-toed boot was crushing her neck, pinning the wood elf to the snowy ground.
“The one time we actually really needed your help, and you WEREN’T THERE.” Veldris exclaimed, increasing pressure on Emilia’s neck.
“Do you have any idea what we were doing earlier?”
“Before Kolsymir?”
“Please, enlighten me.” Veldris sneered. “I can’t seem to remember.“
Another kick sent Emilia rolling through the snow. By this point, she had been reduced to a doormat for the vitriolic cleric she once called a friend.
“WE FOUGHT A DRAGON.” Veldris erupted. “THRICE.”
“THREE TIMES WE TRIED TO STOP XYLOPYREX… Since our first encounter… You know, the one where you were actually there for a change.”
“And…”
Veldris rolled up her sleeves.
As Emilia was trying to get back on her feet, the cleric interrupted her with a nasty gut punch.
“THREE TIMES SINCE, YOU HAVEN’T SHOWED UP.” she said. “YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW!”
“HELLS, YOU WERE RUNNING AROUND WITH THAT BLUE-SKINNED TWAT, AS IF YOU WEREN’T EVEN IN OUR PARTY TO BEGIN WITH!”
“AND FOR WHAT?!”
“WHAT DID YOU GAIN FROM IT?!”
“IS YOUR ALLY WITH YOU RIGHT NOW?”
Her barrage of punches continued until she became exhausted.
“Though… now that I think about it…” Veldris said, panting. “It’s not like… you would’ve made… any difference.”
Veldris grabbed Emilia by her hair and lifted her face up close, before coldly declaring:
“If there is ANYTHING more repulsive than your work ethic, or your sense of loyalty…”
“It would have to be your incompetence…”
“You are a fool. A bumbling idiot. The world’s laughing stock.”
“You made it here to these frozen wastes in time, and yet… you deliberately CHOSE to stall.”
“…”
“Hah.”
“Haha!”
“…”
“Truth be told, I am GLAD you ran away like the coward you are.”
“Syndra’s good word was the ONLY thing keeping me from teaching you discipline earlier.”
By that point, Emilia had stopped listening. At first, she struggled to understand why Veldris would do this to her. The druid couldn’t possibly imagine what she could’ve done wrong to deserve this — sure, she didn’t find her teammates like she was supposed to, but at least she tried. She searched far and wide, found nothing, then simply assumed they pulled a prank on her — something which had already happened to her on multiple occasions before, so to her, it was reasonable to assume that once again, yet another adventuring party ditched her in the wilderness.
But, with enough kicks and punches, Emilia slowly realized that this whole situation felt strangely familiar.
Back at home in the Duchy of Sen’Caill, in the days of her youth, Emilia would’ve also been reprimanded for things she didn’t even think twice about. At some point, she had learned that trying to understand the reasoning of others is futile. People always exercised their cruelty towards her on the basis that she was “different”, “eccentric”, and “not like the other kids”.
She was a weirdo. An outcast. The village’s laughing stock.
And in this eerily familiar moment, while receiving the beating of her life from a former adventuring colleague, Emilia realized the futility of her existence.
She realized that some people just cannot accept her for who she is, no matter what. That they will never be satisfied with her, no matter how hard she tries.
Worse of all, some people might even use her “otherness” to excuse their cruelty towards her.
…
But was this really all there was to her existence?
Not quite.
This wasn’t going to be the end for Emilia. Not in the slightest.
Having thawed out from her icicle entrapment, Elynere, the other drow cleric whom she had met on her journey to Kolsymir, jumped in to save her friend.
With Nezhara’s voice ringing louder and louder inside her head, telling the cleric to save the wood elf at any cost, Elynere practically threw herself at Veldris before reaching for a needle from her alchemist bag.
A few minutes of awkward wrestling between the two drow elves later, and Elynere had successfully managed to inject her sleeping toxin directly into Veldris’s veins, knocking her out for the time being.
Not willing to let even someone as vicious as her just die in the snow, Elynere loosely tied the cleric up to a chair in the only building left standing in the village, leaving Veldris a warmed-up campfire and some rations.
While dealing with Veldris, Elynere had also cured Emilia’s injuries, managing to squeeze out a few sentences out of the wood elf before she lost consciousness again.
Emilia lamented her pitiful existence, but her newfound friend reassured her that if “Lady Nezhara” considers her important enough to send Elynere on a journey like this, then surely, Emilia must be important for… something.
Before the wood elf passed out, she made her last remaining friend promise to continue travelling together. Elynere agreed, caressing Emilia’s head as she fainted in the snow.
And, just like that, Emilia was no longer part of the Questing Dragons party.
The party itself disbanded once Veldris had finally returned home from her expedition, breaking the bad news to Syndra that “Belderyx had gone rogue”, and that the rumored Kastoloth’s daughter might have as well been a myth from the beginning.
Epilogue
Almost an entire year later, Emilia and Elynere were still living the lives of adventurers, albeit consisting of running small errands for the elderly folk of a Sen’Caillian village on the border with the Duchy of Goldwall, so… doing nothing important, and doing it nowhere important. Frankly, it was quite relaxing to them both.
As for Veldris, her valiant efforts in the many battles fought against Xylopyrex have piqued the interest of Randwynnian generals, who recruited her into Randwynn’s Armed Forces as an army instructor.
In the very same city, Syndra decided to mend her broken heart by opening a private magic academy, where she would teach arcane subjects to youngsters such as Clandestine or Kellan.
Speaking of Kellan, Veldris lets him see Syndra every once and again, but refuses to ever come along for a visit. WIth his mom hating his magic teacher, and both being important authority figures in his life, Kellan’s life became more confusing than ever before.
Last but not least is Belderyx, who hasn’t ever been seen since her rampage and the battle against Veldris that followed it.
Well, maybe it’s also worth mentioning that Rowan is still out there, yearning for adventure, though not pushing Syndra to it now that she’s not feeling too giddy about the whole thing.
Who knows, maybe Rowan — the could-have-been member of the Questing Dragons party that never was — will one day become a questgiver instead?
Maybe somewhere out there exists a reality where Emilia’s story picks up from the low point that it’s in at the moment. Maybe that reality is actually just the future.
And maybe that future…
…is not all that distant, after all.
Emilia’s adventures, as well as some cameos from her former friends, will continue in…
Soloastria Legends:
The illustrated novel based on a TTRPG campaign set in the world of Soloastria – chapter previews will be available in the form of blog posts on soloastria.com.
See you there!
