The Mage's Dark Fate: The All Roads Adventures

By Devon Richards

We meet the heroes of Devon Richards' "Where All Roads Lead" - Arnath, Shrakar, Trellith and Garthe - Seven years before that adventure begins. Still with them is Morgosh, the mage who has adventured with them since the end of the Orc civil war and has quite recently brought the boy mage Garthe into their party as his apprentice.

When our heroes travel to find a long lost treasure of Arkonian gold, they endure bandits and inter-personal conflicts along the way.

 

Once inside the Arkonian tombs, they make a horrifying discovery, one that changes the nature of their party forever...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Devon Richards
• Release date: Dec 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215639054

Book preview

Arnath, Trellith and Shrakar stared into the depths of the crackling campfire and wondered how things had gone so wrong. They could hear the boy, Garthe, as he bawled unconsolably nearby in the darkness just outside the firelight.

The elderly mage Morgosh had been their companion since the trenches of the Orkan civil war, near twenty years ago, and just an hour ago he had been killed, horribly. Such a death none of them had ever seen, and as veterans, that was saying something. In the last days of the war, the battle that raged within the Orc borders was a slaughter unmatched in the histories of all four kingdoms. What had just happened to Morgosh was far more disturbing.

Arnath, a powerfully built man, trained by the King’s Guard for war, looked sheepishly up from the fire at his companions. From across the fire, they too – Trellith, a five-foot tall dwarf and Shrakar, a green-skinned, seven-foot tall half-orc – looked up and met his eyes. Boon companions who’d adventured together since wartime, they could easily see the same question behind all of their tear reddened eyes.

What in the bowels of darkness had happened?

Days before they were in a town just to the south, Umdra, one of the northern-most towns in the country of Farsuum. Umdra sat so far to the country’s north it was above the border of the Orc country, Kolgatha, which dipped down like an unwelcoming smile all the way into the neighbouring country of Vallasen, from which Arnath and Trellith hailed. While still Farsuum by rights, people did not dare venture into the far north of the country. Not only did the Orcs freely wander there, it was where the ancient ruins of the once-great kingdom of Arkonia stood, and the none of the lore surrounding Arkonia’s end sounded inviting. The word accursed was used frequently when referring to the empire itself and the land its overgrown remains occupied. Arkonia, however, was once an incredibly wealthy country, and the legends and rumors surrounding that fact drew both brave and foolish adventurers like Arnath and his friends in droves to the lands others so feared.

Word travelled quickly around the common room of the dingy outpost they had stayed in just off the main square in Umdra, of what it was Arnath and his companions were going to attempt to do – Raid the Arkonian ruins, seeking whatever treasures they held. That made peddlers of maps and spells, blessed ancient artifacts and