THE STORY SO FAR: The busty young Dwarven woman Brunhilde and her new human husband Mathir have spent the better part of a year traveling by caravan from the Southern Continent to the North. Along the way, they befriend a handsome diplomat from the Kingdom of Raelen, named Tobias.
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All twenty-two wagons with their seventy passengers, drivers, traders, and families, plus the twenty outriding guards and seventeen free riders attached to Ruckus’s Caravan, set out on the Mad King’s Road shortly after mid-morning. A drizzling rain started shortly afterward, following them along the broad stone-paved road for hours.
The Mad King’s Road was the longest, most durable, and most advanced road in all the known worlds. Legend had it that over eight hundred years before one of the first emperors of the Darlani Empire, Lantis II, ordered it to stretch from his capital city of Algren in the west to the port city of Havenmoor on the east coast, almost a continent’s span away. Then, becoming obsessed to the point of madness, he ordered the road extended south as well from Havenmoor, his vast army pushing forward to conquer and hold many strange lands in an ever thinning corridor so the road could be built. Lantis II spent ever increasing amounts of treasure and manpower on the road, thinking it would bring him some kind of immortality. But as he became older and his grip on the throne weakened, the construction of the road broke his kingdom’s coffers and the Darlani Empire fell into a savage civil war that lasted decades.