When Flinbek introduced himself to me in Victory Trail, he offered a critical clue as to where I might find out more about him. In the islands that comprise the newly established Republic of Midania, there is a far different naming conventions. As I've come to learn, the cultures of Ravager, Sister, and Eagle Peak carry an old Akisian tradition forbidding the use of a name belonging to someone else living on the island. When he declared himself a citizen of Ravager Isle, I could only have been referring to a single living person when I flew to the island to question people about him.
Naturally, approaching people of an unfamiliar culture to question them about one of their own is not so simple. Everyone around was immediately suspicious of me when I arrived in the city of Clawrest on my sky rug. It was then that I discovered their culture is highly suspicious of any magic. This is the sort of information that one might want to have learned before arriving, but this much information about the land was simply unavailable at the time. I paid for my mistake by watching my rug shredded into useless strips of cloth. I was spared any further consequences with an ironic warning: the land itself would punish me for interfering with the natural world. The onlookers left me to gather the scraps of my rug with a chorus of jeers and laughter. I was then expelled from the city and sent into the island's deadly expanse with little more than the supplies with which I had left Tanis.
My first priority when turned upon the wild was to find shelter and repair my sky rug. Food and drink weren't a concern, but to survive on my own in this place, I would need to prepare a means of escape. I found refuge between the branches of an overgrown eucalyptus tree and spent a long and tense, but ultimately peaceful day stitching the shreds of torn cloth back together. By the time I had restored my rug to working condition, however, I took note of another problem: my magic was beginning to fail me. The natural environment was devoid of the magical energy one takes for granted in Mortanis and something there had been draining my own since I arrived.
Seeing no recourse, I rolled and packed my rug the next morning and fashioned a crude staff from one of the tree's branches. I then set out into the wild without my magic to protect me in search of another settlement. The day that followed was fraught with terror as I wandered through a gauntlet of wolves, wild cats, monstrously over-sized spiders and aggressive crows. Exhausted and dripping with blood, I staggered into the outskirts of a smaller village named Stonegaze and collapsed in front of what appeared to be an open workshop.
When I returned to consciousness, I found myself in the company of a young man I would come to know as Takaa. The workshop was his, and he had quite the hobby when it comes to machinery. He made his living there as a gunsmith, providing adventurers with better weapons to protect them from the local fauna. I traded with him for a simple crossbow he had in stock. I was not specifically trained to use any of his weaponry, but I knew that anything he could offer was an improvement over my rudimentary staff. Takaa mistook my desperation for genuine interest, however, and spoke long and passionately about his stores of handcrafted mechanical weapons. After reluctantly listening to him speak, I began to forge a bond with him while recovering from my injuries.
After a week in the village, the Ravagers began to open up to me. It was then when I learned of their patron deity, the Holy Ravager. As I learned more about him, I began to find common ground with them in my own Chaotic values. Just as Chaos demands strength in all mortals, the Ravagers grew up in a land that demands strength in exchange for survival. Fanged and venomous animals challenged these people on a daily basis and they were able to find meaning in this perpetual fight for their lives. If I wanted to earn the respect of the locals, I would need to embrace the very same danger.
So, I began to join Takaa on his hunts in the wild. Whether he sought food, forage and bone he could trade, or raw metals from the nearby quarry, every step outside of the village invited contact with the beasts of Ravager. For my part, I held my own reasonably enough with the help of my new crossbow. Although using a ranged weapon wasn't the same as throwing spells, learning to aim was a simple enough adjustment. I was far from proficient, but I managed not to be a burden to my host. Another month of assisting Takaa had made us more friendly, to the point of casually asking what brought me to the island.
When I asked Takaa about Flinbek, though, something drastically changed our dynamic. He responded that no one named Flinbek lived in Stonegaze. Although there was no getting anything about the man I sought out of him, Takaa was far from a convincing liar. My attempts to impress upon him the importance of finding Flinbek, which went so far as to tell him about Garanda, were met only with repeated insistence that the two men didn't know each other. He ran off then to go on a solitary run to forage some wild greens and I was left alone in his workshop. Curious to discover what Takaa was hiding, I searched through his belongings and found something I never expected to see.
In a deeply-buried box, I found a store of magical objects; paper seals, candles, and a crystal focus, among other things. The most disturbing part of this collection was a vial full of what I recognized as hollowsoul fluid. I had seen this substance only once before, back when I was studying with Broger, and knew it to be the liquefied remains of a once-living soul. Something like this could only exist in the collection of a dedicated and amoral wizard, but how could someone like that live in secret among the Ravagers? I confronted Takaa with these objects, he seemed more concerned with my understanding of what these objects are than with my discovery of them.
As it turned out, the collection did not belong to him, but his estranged younger brother. The two had been at odds since their youth, when their parents both died; their father from a snake bite, then their mother to mysterious circumstances weeks later. Their estrangement would finally come two years previously when Takaa discovered this magical paraphernalia. He had demanded it destroyed, and assumed it had been since he never saw it again until I found it. Although he had tried to put it everything behind him, it was my presence that made his problem began to seem impossible to ignore any longer. For his brother was the one I was looking for.
Having finally found what I needed, I took Flinbek's old belongings with the hope that I could use them to locate him. But Takaa was not satisfied with simply leaving me to follow his brother. After I explained to him more clearly what I believed Flinbek was involved in, he took stopping his brother as a personal responsibility. With a few of his best weapons packed, he asked me to take him with me back to Mortanis in exchange for his further insight on his brother. I agreed to this arrangement and siphoned some of the magic from Flinbek's hollowsoul to power my sky rug so that we could leave the island. My use of magic made Takaa uneasy, but I figured he would have to get used to seeing it once we get back to Resta.
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