Over the past moons strange and dark things have been happening in the kingdoms. To summarize simply: a small group of people in the kingdoms attempted a ritual to summon the demon lord
Rahu from Chongun lore. The nefarious
Rahu covered the lands in years or darkness and cut swaths through the population with his armies, forcing the remainder of humanity to hide in scattered clusters. His summoning would surely shatter civilization as we know it, plunging us back into this darkness.
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A journal with four "key" prophecies was placed on the Chronicles of the Wind. The prophecies were as follow:
The blood of a guardian
Black silken strands of death flowing through silvery streams of life
Defiling of a God's temple
A captured song bird's strains
Shortly afterward, several heinous deeds were committed that clearly became linked to the prophecies.
The poet and pirate known as
Silenus and a drunkard that wanders around town attacked and gravely wounded the Guardian turtle Chu Rua. Before the eyes of a battalion of Druids and Chonguns, the two men took the blood that flowed from the turtle and fled. Druids saw to the guardian and were able to undo the damage.
Not long afterward we received intelligence that the waterways of the Wilderness were being poisoned. To investigate we immediately set out and found
Silenus pouring a dark liquid into the waterways. Though we tried to detain the now known suspect of the Chu Rua incident, the poet escaped. The Monk Pitseleh performed a cleansing ritual in the Dark Hollow to purify the water.
Silenus later struck the Merchant shrine to the luck god Kubera, defiling it with unlucky items. The Merchants and Chonguns attempted to stop him but the shattered luck in the room thwarted our efforts to lay hands on him. It was eventually restored with an enormous amount of items blessed by the spirit of fortune Lucky.
Frustration in the Chongunate was mounting. It seemed we could only respond to these plots and not prevent them! The three incidents were unmistakably connected by their perpetrator. The posts on the COTW board continued, erasing any further doubts that the acts were unconnected to the prophecies.
Lastly, the Muse Odile was kidnapped and held in the crypts. Attracted by her cries, the Kugnae Royal Army and the Chonguns followed to find the drunkard who had assisted
Silenus with Chu Rua holding Odile captive and.. making her sing. After she croaked out a song he fled. Odile was restored to the Muses and departed.
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What does all of this mean? What could the prophecies predict? They were surely some harbinger of further evil. Many Chonguns and Aspirants gathered in Immortal's Gateway, hoping the wisdom of the place would help us decipher the puzzle.
Not long afterward, the criminal
Silenus himself slinked in. He declared that his intent behind these dark events was to resurrect the demon lord
Rahu.
Rahu, the Slayer of Men, the Leader of Dark Armies, the Scatterer of Humankind When we attempted to strike him we found ourselves utterly incapable, as if a wall separated us. He brazenly declared that
Rahu had granted him immunity to harm until the ritual had been performed. He departed, his mocking laughter echoing through the hall.
Utterly bewildered, the small group pored over the story of General
Claw and
Rahu (found in the Kwanhonsagje) for any hint of how he could be defeated. The only idea that came forth was to consult
General Claw, the immortal tiger of our legends.
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The tiger was silent.
General Claw, the figure of Chongun Lore, had defeated the Demon lord
Rahu and his armies once before. In the final battle against the demon king,
Claw defeated
Rahu, sacrificing himself. Chongun lore holds that the gods favored his sacrifice by granting him the immortal tiger body.
Perhaps
Claw had never been much of a talker, even in his mortal form. We laid our problems at his paws, for even the strategic training of Sun Tzu left us with few options.
We beseeched
Claw to aid us. After several long moments, his feline form turned away and uncovered something in a corner of the Den. It was a trigram key...
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Silenus' ritual to summon
Rahu was held boldly in the Sacred Battlegrounds of the Chongun home. The Chongun Avatar Guldar and walkers ThoRrR, HoGG, Ellinia, Duer and myself along with Aspirants Ambar, Goku and even a Barbarian Nejiijen confronted
Silenus as he prepared his ritual.
We approached him boldly, confident in
Claw's newly bestowed advice. He had instructed us carefully on how to use the Trigram keys and how to take on mythic form to the barrier of invulnerability that surrounded
Silenus.
His invulnerability that had stopped us previously protected him while he worked, pouring the blood of Chu Rua on the ground, the poisoned waters of the wilderness following. A sliver of luck represented the desecrated temple of Kubera and a Kayagum Odile's stolen song.
The ground began to shake. We did not have much time! The group of warriors surrounded him on all sides in the shape of a circle of power, slamming down the trigram and totem keys we had assembled and crying out to
Claw!
Darkness fell like a shroud across the group.. But suddenly light burst forth to reveal the warriors had taken on the form of dragons, granted by the totems that had favored
Claw. Silenus' invulnerability crumbled; the ritual had been interrupted;
Rahu had not been summoned!
We lashed out at him, smashing the summoning circle and silencing his final words that promised he would be back..
Silenus' body disappeared as soon as life had fled it.
At last it was finished.
Rahu's resurgence had been prevented. This is a tribute to the
quiet tiger that sits in his den in East Buya and the second catastrophe he put to rest.