Info[]
This blog lists the introductory pages for Cloud Wolf, The Stone Pilot and The Lost Barkscrolls. These pages were only included in their respective books, and weren't transferred to later editions like the stories themselves. Similarly to the single-page stories from the 2007 reprints, these are rare, and most people don't have access to some/all of them.
Cloud Wolf[]
Far far away, jutting out into the emptiness beyond, like the figurehead of a mighty stone ship, is the Edge. There are many who inhabit its various landscapes; from the trolls, trogs and goblins of the perilous Deepwoods, to the phantasms and spectres of the treacherous Twilight Woods. The main town is Undertown, a seething urban sprawl which straddles the Edgewater River. Above it — fixed in position by the great Anchor Chain — is the floating city of Sanctaphrax, home to the academics.[1]
In the distant history of the Edge, the only battles recorded arose from land disputes. This changed when the first Deepwoods explorers stumbled across the Stone Gardens and discovered the buoyant rocks which, used as flight-rocks, were to make skysailing possible. Today, it is up in the sky that the greatest Edge battles take place.
The first to take to the air in the new skyboats, were bird-catchers, small traders and some of the more fashionable families. Yet as Undertown grew bigger by the day, the sky was soon thronging with merchants in their barges and tugs bringing in all manner of Deepwoods produce; from food and drink, to textiles and timber.
As time passed, individual merchants started to group together, partly for mutual protection, partly to fix prices. Before long, there were dozens of them — leagues for every type of trade. Eventually, their leaders signed the notorious Alliance Treaty and formed the League of Undertown Free Merchants.
From this moment on, no business could exist and no trade could take place without going through the leagues — and the cost of the goods they handled rocketed. Many went hungry while the greedy leaguesmen grew fat.
The origins of the sky pirates, in contrast, are shrouded in mystery and romance. Some say that Wind Bear — a giant of an individual dispossessed[2] by his Leaguesmaster brother — was the first sky pirate; that he waged war on the leagues out of revenge. Others claim that Little Jode, a humble tallow-trader, was the first to assemble a pirate-crew and take to the sky, in an attempt to undercut the crippling prices the leagues were demanding for candles.
What is certain is that the sky pirates opened up the skies again. They bought and sold cheaply, dealing directly with Deepwooders, Undertowners and Sanctaphrax academics — and cutting out the leaguesmen in the middle. And when the opportunity arose, they were not above attacking the infamous league ships — run by corrupt tyrants and crewed by slave labour — relieving them of their cargo and distributing it to those in need.
The sky pirates became folk heroes and stories of their exploits were told far and wide. There are several tales about Wind Bear, and Little Jode, but none more than about Cloud Wolf, whom many believe was the finest sky pirate captain that ever lived.
What follows is but one of those tales.[3]
The Stone Pilot[]
Far far away, jutting out into the emptiness beyond, like the figurehead of a mighty stone ship, is the Edge. A torrent of water — the Edgewater River — pours down from that lonely promontory in a great, noisy surge that marks the end of its long journey.
Upstream lie the mysterious Stone Gardens, where the buoyant rocks that keep the sky ships airborne grow in tall stacks. On further, and the river passes beneath the greatest buoyant rock of all, upon which the floating city of Sanctaphrax has been built, as it winds its way between the docks and jetties of Undertown, and the factory and foundry outflow pipes which pump their filth into the turbulent water.
Beyond Undertown sprawls the perilous Mire, a vast bleached wasteland of swamps and shifting mudhills. Here, although the river sinks deep under the ground, it has left the land above it pockmarked[4] with areas of sinking-mud and, when the pressure beneath the surface becomes too much, violent blow-holes that erupt with no warning. It is underground, too,when it crosses the Twilight Woods. Some claim that this is because the treacherous half-lit forest — a terrible place which robs those who get lost inside it of their senses and reason, yet denies them the peacefulness of death — allows nothing that enters it to find a way out.
It is only when it reaches the Deepwoods that the river reappears, dividing and sub-dividing into countless tributaries which fan out across the endless forest, gradually making their way back to the source of all water in the Edge: a place known as Riverrise. It is this maze of waterways — brooks, streams, rivulets, now tumbling down rapids and gushing waterfalls, now sprawling out as woodmidge-infested marshes, now forming deep, crystal-clear lakes — which is the lifeblood of the Edgelands, a lifeblood that attracts creatures in all their various forms.
Waifs and woodtrolls, mobgnomes and cloddertrogs, and goblins of every type — tusked, tufted, pink-eyes, lop-eared and grey. Some are ferocious, like the warrior hordes of battle-scarred flat-heads and hammerheads. Some are peaceable, like the web-footed goblins and their gentle cousins, the gyle goblins. But all of them — each and every one — are[5] dependant on the water that passes through their dark forest homeland. An explorer to the Deepwoods would discover countless strange creatures — from solitary banderbears to swarms of snickets; from halitoads that kill their prey with noxious breath to logworms that rise up and swallow it whole; from garrulous gabtrolls with their eyes on stalks to bearded prowlgrins; bodies like barrles, legs like a treefrog's and nostrils on the tops of their great round heands.
And perhaps strangest of all, a tribe of creatures that few but the most intrepid explorer could hope to encounter. These are the shyest, most secretive of all the denizens of the Deepwoods — so reclusive and hidden that many scholars doubt their actual existence and believe they are the stuff of myth and legend.
Such scholars, however, are wrong. This hidden tribe does indeed exist. They are called termagant trogs and, like so many others in the Deepwoods, their history has been passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. Tales of individual bravery, fortitude, adventure and exploration.
What follows is but one of those tales.[6]
The Lost Barkscrolls[]
TO DO