“Interlude - Hard Rain”
Ninth - Tenth of Sunharrow, 474
The sun set early that night; a gray wall of cloud swallowed it, spinning in from the southwest. The air was still and heavy, oppressively so. Suddenly, the wind rose to a howl, slamming into the side of the tavern with the force of a giant’s hammer. Dust fell from the rafters and timbers groaned under the strain. The first of the late summer storms had come.
A strange sense of elation filled Alaric; he could feel the hand of Kord in the swirling sky above. For everyone else in the city, though, the storm brought nothing but terror. It was a long, sleepless night, filled with the clamor of collapsing buildings and debris crashing through the streets. Miraculously, the Kraken’s Maw withstood the storm, though the rains spilled through the gaps in the roof and the wind rattled the shutters.
Morning came, and with it, the storm departed to dissipate its fury on Pelaurios and the lands to the north. In its wake, the folk of the Ratrun emerged from their boltholes to survey the damage. Walls were shored up or torn the rest of the way down, while the dead were laid at the edges of the streets, covered in tattered sheets. Carters were already busy in Hillside and Northridge, delivering planks and nails and removing bodies and debris, but they would not come to the Ratrun. The barrowmen could be heard, pushing their rickety wooden carts, to haul the bodies off to be burned, while the living pulled what building materials they could from the detritus. As always, the folk of the Ratrun were left to fend for themselves, and as always, they made do.