Spectre Of The Black Rose

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The story of Lord Soth brought Gesmas Malaturno to Sithicus. Like most travelers who entered that spectre-haunted land, he became entangled in the tale of the thrice-cursed knight in ways more awful than even he could conceive. This was no mean claim, for Gesmas was a man of substantial imagination.

A talent for recognizing corners where others saw only solid walls had manifested early in Gesmas. Not long from the nursery, he envisioned a system of hillside terraces that tripled the output of his father's failing vineyard. His family considered such flashes of inspiration adequate compensation for the twisted leg with which the boy had been afflicted. Gesmas questioned neither the crippled limb nor the sudden, unexpected turns of thought that rendered the world so lucid. He understood neither, but recognized that both, in their own fashion, served him rather well.

The twisted leg saved him, some three years before he entered Lord Soth's domain, from conscription into Malocchio Aderre's forces as an infantryman. This often-terminal fate was one shared by many of Gesmas's fellow rustics. They bore the suffering wrought by his ambitious campaigns against both the rebellious factions within Invidia, led by his deposed mother, and the armies of the powerful lords that surrounded his thickly forested demesne. In this, if in nothing else, Aderre saw eye to eye with the grim and mysterious tyrants who ruled those neighboring states-Alfred Timothy of Verbrek and poison-lipped Ivana Boritsi of Borca, Count Strahd von Zarovich, butcher of Barovia, and, most enigmatic of all, Lord Soth of Sithicus. To them, peasants were nothing more than specie, coin to be spent in whatever fashion they saw fit.

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