choose your own adventure, episode 22b

You race forward, drawing on Heartwarden’s power, and spring into the air as Gotha kicks at Hamus’s corpse. The dead knight falls free from her barbed legs, and the urdmordar focuses upon you, but it is too late. You slam into her, plunging Heartwarden’s glowing blue blade into her chest.

The blade sinks to the hilt between the crimson chitin covering her breasts.

Gotha rears back and shrieks in pain, her cry ringing inside both your ears and your head. She goes into a mad dance, her legs digging into the earth, and both her clawed hands come up and plunge into your chest and stomach, the talons sinking deep into your flesh. Pain erupts from you, and Gotha shrieks again and flings you away, ripping Heartwarden from her chest.

You land hard upon the ground, blood splashing from the gashes in your side. Gotha convulses once, black ichor dribbling from the gash in her chest, and her glowing eyes meet yours.

“A herd animal,” she whispers. “A herd animal. That’s not…that’s not…”

Then the green glow fades from her eyes and she slumps into a tangled, motionless heap upon the ground.

Everything goes black a moment later, and you feel yourself sinking away…

Then blazing white light fills your vision, and agony wracks your body. You sit up with a gasp, Heartwarden clutched in your right fist, and see Magistrius Richard stooping over you, the white light of a healing spell glimmering around his fingers.

“It worked,” you hear Richard say. “He will not die.”

Strong hands help you to stand. You look at Gotha’s motionless husk, dazed. You faced an urdmordar and lived.

The possibility never crossed your mind.

“Good,” says Ulacht. “Good! He has fought like one of the great orc kings of old!”

You look around and see the villagers hard at work tending to the fires, trying to save what yet may be saved.

“God’s hand was upon us,” says Father Linus. “If you had not come when you did, Sir Ridmark, we would all be slain.”

“Aye,” says Sir Thomas, looking at his father’s corpse. “We have lost much…but we could have lost everything.”

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After the battle, the men of VICTRIX and the orcs of RZOLDUR went to the mines. There they discovered Gotha’s lair…and the missing human and orcish children wrapped in her webs, drugged and in a deep sleep. Magistrius Richard was able to awake them from their comas, and the children returned to their parents.

SIR HAMUS was buried honorably in the graveyard of Victrix’s church. In later years, his people remembered him not the foolish man seduced by a spiderling, but as the knight who died defending his lands and people from the wrath of an urdmordar.

SIR THOMAS became the new lord of VICTRIX with his father’s death. The village had suffered great harm, but only a few lives had been lost in the fire and the attack of the undead. The men of the Northerland were hardy and resilient, and Thomas vowed that they would rebuild.

ULACHT and FATHER LINUS set aside their quarrel. Both priest and headman had seen firsthand the harm that could result from fighting between man and orc…and how things darker and more powerful than mortal creatures could use such fighting to their own ends. The orcs were free of the urdmordar, and Ulacht would see to it that his people would never be the slaves of the spider goddesses again, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

After recovering from his wounds, RIDMARK ARBAN, Knight of the Soulblade, resumed his journey north, and at last arrived at the court of the Dux of Castra Marcaine.

Already he found that a legend had begun growing around him. Before leaving Tarlion, he had been a young Swordbearer, untried and untested. Now he had faced an urdmordar, aided by only an elderly Magistrius and a few local knights, and triumphed. More, he had even lived!

Few Swordbearers in their Order’s centuries of history could make such a claim.

Once he would have gloried in his new renown, but Ridmark only felt troubled.

The “great culling to come.” What had Gotha meant by that? What had the urdmordar, in the black depths of her evil wisdom, had foreseen?

Would the Frostborn truly return, as she claimed? They had been annihilated by the Swordbearers and the Magistri centuries ago…but could Gotha have foreseen their return?

Ridmark didn’t know, but he intended to find out.

THE END