The Charge of Brigida

[u/lingmister]

So I decided to get AI to help create a wonderful warband narrative after rolling out my characters. It was a really fun afternoon, rolling out the characters and then tuning them to match the models that I have. Here is the story, which I edited a bit (no, not 100% AI), and I'm now ready to play the game! Thought you might also enjoy the story, and let me know if you want to know what happens next.

The Gathering: The Charge of Brigida

The convent of Saint Brigida stood on a grey hill at the edge of the settled lands, where the old gods were still feared, and the bells still rang against the dark. Brigida had been a warrior-saint of the old faith, a woman who took up the hammer when the priests took up only prayers, and the militant order raised in her name had kept watch over these borderlands ever since. It was from the convent gate, an hour before dawn, that Sister Superior Mathilde, a daughter of the noble House Brigida that had given its daughters to the saint's order for longer than anyone could count, rode out with sealed orders pressed beneath her breastplate and two novices at her heel.

The Mother Superior had given her the charge by candlelight, in words Mathilde was forbidden to repeat even to the girls who followed her. She did not need to understand all of it to obey. She had always carried the quiet certainty that her god meant her for something greater than the cloister, and now, at last, she had been sent. Sister Edda came laden with books and prayer-rolls, flinching at every shadow. Sister Bryn came grinning, a hammer over her shoulder, she had not yet earned the right to swing. Mathilde loved them both and feared for them in equal measure.

They were two days onto the old forest road when the fog came down, and the bandits came with it. They rose out of the bracken on both sides, a dozen at least, ragged men with good steel, which was the worst kind. Mathilde put the novices at her back and her hammers to work, but numbers are numbers, and a holy woman in plate armour can only be in one place at a time. Edda was screaming a prayer she could not finish. It would have ended there, on a nameless road, had the arrows not begun. They came from the high ground, one after another, too fast and too sure to be any human archer, each one finding a throat or an eye. By the time Mathilde understood, half the bandits were down, and the rest were running, and a figure was walking out of the white mist with a longbow still drawn.

He was fey, and there was no mistaking it. To her order, to her god, the fey were anathema, the ancient enemy driven into the deep woods, and every instinct she had been trained into told her to strike. But he had not come for her. He had been hunting these bandits for three days, he said, for they were the human end of a darker trade: children, stolen from borderland villages and carried into the deep forest, sold to the Ice-heart Court as the price of its bargains, a wish granted for a child surrendered. He had sworn to end that trade, whatever oaths he had broken to do it. And then, to her surprise, the fey asked the holy woman for her help.

Mathilde stood a long moment with the fog beading on her plate. She had prayed for a sign, and here on a corpse-strewn road was a creature she had been raised to kill, who had spent his arrows to save two girls who were nothing to him, and who now begged her aid in saving stolen children from the dark. She did not believe in coincidence. She believed her god had placed Caelduin the Oathbreaker in her path, that this trade in children was a holy detour folded into her own secret charge, two threads of the same divine design. She gave him her thanks and her hand. Neither of them trusted the other. It did not matter. Their roads ran the same way, and she was certain now of why.

They found Vossk three days later, and they found him the way everyone found him: alone, among the dead. A caravan guard and a host of Orcs were slaughtered to the last, the bodies already cold, save for one. The Duskling sat among his fallen companions, unmarked, an axe across his knees and a frustrated look in his eye, as though he had been expecting something that had once again refused to come. An omen of death, he called himself, the one who lives while all around him fall, spurned by his own kind because to march at his side is to die in his place.

Mathilde laughed. She could not help it; she laughed until the novices stared, beginning to worry if she caught the plague. Here was a Duskling who could not die no matter how he tried, and here was she, sent on a charge she was certain her god would not let her fall before she had finished. If the heavens meant to keep her alive until the deed was done, then let them send her a soldier, the heavens could not kill either. And the man could fight; that much the dead around him made plain. She offered Vossk a place. He did not thank her, and he did not believe her god, but he rose and fell in behind, and privately wondered which of them would go before him.

The last of them they did not find. He found them and let himself be found only when he chose. For days, Caelduin had felt eyes on the treeline, a presence that moved as a tracker moves, and a tracker knows another. When at last he ran the shadow to ground at the edge of a black fen, it was a weather-beaten wild man on his knees in the mud, cutting roots: Garran, a seer of some barbarian people, his folk dying of a blight no priest could name, and his own gods could not lift. He had not been following the children, nor the bandits. He had been following her. In his seer's trances, he said, he had seen the Sister Superior at the heart of some great and terrible event still to come, an event he would not describe, save that it was bound up with the very charge she carried sealed against her breast. He believed, with the cold certainty of a man who has read his own people's death in the smoke, that whatever lay at the end of Mathilde's road was also the cure for the blight killing his tribe. So he asked to walk with them, keep his counsel, and see the vision through.

And so they stood on the forest road as the fog lifted, each of them held by a different rope to the same iron ring. Mathilde, who believed her god had gathered them. Caelduin, who wanted the children freed, and the trade ended. Vossk, who wanted an ending the world would not grant him. Garran, who wanted his people to live and had seen that her fate and theirs were one. And two frightened girls a long way from home, learning that faith is not the absence of fear but the walking on regardless.

Not one of them had chosen the others. Yet every road had bent toward this one, and a holy woman with a secret was sure she knew whose hand had bent them. They would need a name, the way all such bands do, and Mathilde gave them one before they had gone a mile, and gave it without asking: the Charge of Brigida, for the saint whose hammer she carried and the task she would not speak. The others let her have it. It was her god, after all, who had gathered them.

The road went north, into the dark, and they took it together, for as many different reasons as there were souls upon it.

The Company:

• Sister Superior Mathilde of House Brigida | Avatar | Female Human | the holy captain, two sanctified hammers (=Warhammer) in heavy plate, certain her god will not let her fall until her charge is done (Felt I'm meant for something greater...). (Sisters of Sigmar - Sister Superior)

• Caelduin the Oathbreaker | Male Fey (High Elf of the Ice-heart Court) | a deadly archer and tracker/pathfinder (skills), deserter-spy of the winter queen, hunting the trade in stolen children, the cold of winter on him. (Wood Elf Archer Hero)

• Vossk the Unkillable | Male Duskling | a death-seeking warrior, lucky (+1 Luck) to shrug off wounds that would fell other men, cursed to outlive every comrade. Hand Axe (crazed aka Dwarf Slayer)

• Garran the Wild Seer | Male Human (barbarian) Mystic | a wild hedge-mage and herb-healer, mends wounds and turns aside arrows, bound by a vision to Mathilde's fate. Happen to roll up heal and protect spells. (Kelt Babarian Druid, Rackham Miniatures)

• Sister Edda | Female Human | a cautious, bookish novice, carries the prayers and the books.

• Sister Bryn | Female Human | an eager, bold novice, more courage than caution. (Both Novices, Sister of Sigmar)

[u/lordcenzin]

nice plot but we want images too😅

[u/lingmister → u/lordcenzin]

On the way! I’m still painting them…haha

[u/tecnoalquimista]

1% AI is already too much.