Carpe Diem, Page 17

You decide to stay with the bandits and become a part of their rebellion.

Over the years, your band experiences its ups and downs, but you manage to overcome all challenges. You become a respected member of their community: someone that people look up to other than Tani.

After suffering several losses to your guerilla fighters, the baron’s forces stop patrolling the mountain. It seems the perfect opportunity and spurs your people into action. You muster as many men in the camp as you can and march upon the village!

You are met by an ghost town. The only thing that remains is the bones of its prior inhabitants, scattered wherever they fell. When you enter the baron’s estate, you are met with a similar sight. The servants and guards all remain where they fell, their flesh long rotted away.

When you finally enter the baron’s chamber, you can’t even recognize a human anymore. There is something wrong in the air here, very wrong, and the other bandits make holy signs of protection across their chest as they look down at the corrupted body. The fumes coming off of him were worse than putrid, and you finally recognize what had taken hold in the sorry man. Demon-inspired sin and malice had riddled his mind and body, driving him to the worst excesses, before taking his life away when the demon inside decided it was time to move on.

In quiet pity, the bandits silently file back out of the manor. It is unknown where such a creature had come from to torment the man, but with the baron’s death, the danger is past… Together you burn down his estate, with his body inside it. You can do nothing for the dead, and you wonder if maybe their fate would have been different if you had taken another path. The bandits gather together for a last silent vigil in the town square. They each vow to rebuild, but most of all, to never accept such evil acts again — lest the same fate befell them all.

The End