Revision as of 14:33, 3 June 2017

Author's Note: There is a particular potion shop in Westgate that mixes tinctures as you wait. So it was that I found myself whiling away an hour with a pearl-trader from the Shining South, who himself sought a concoction most helpful in his enterprise. The conversation yielded a tale, which I have done my best to record faithfully.

It is related by men worthy of belief that there lived in Estagund, amidst the tented stalls of Chavyondat, a generous and open-palmed merchant. And that, in a year of hardship and tumult, this forthright merchant did not dis-own his debts as his fellows did. Instead, he paid each of his creditors their honest due and in so doing impoverished himself.

Having become destitute, he could not sustain himself but by laborous exertion. One night, as he found respite resting beneath a fig tree, he saw in his sleep an apparition dripping wet. The figure took a coin out of its mouth and said:

"Verily, thy fortune is in Dambrath, in Maarlith; therefore seek it and repair to it."

So the impoverished merchant journeyed to Dambrath, meeting on the way all the dangers of road and ship, of pirates, of idolators, of wild beasts, and of rivers.

The merchant was Durpari-born, a peaple gracious and friendly in a manner so extraordinary that they seem out of place in hard Toril. And foreign truly this merchant was in Maarlith, of the land of Dambrath where mongrel Cintri, bred of man and drow and elf, rule a population of pure-blooded races deemed to be their lessers.

The poor merchant, having expended all his coin, found no hospitality in bustling Maarlith. Exhausted from trek and tribulation, he discovered an empty shrine in which he curled up and slept.

Now there was, adjacent to the shrine, a manor. And that very night, a party of robbers entered the shrine, crept over the sleeping merchant, and thence passed to that manor. A watchful neighbor, awaking at their disturbance, raised cry.

As the robbers fled upon the rooftops, the Honglath and her guards entered the shrine and found the man of Chavyondat sleeping there; so she laid hold upon him, and inflicted upon him a painful beating with her Shebali troop until he was at the point of death.

The poor merchant was imprisoned, and remained so for three days, after which the Honglath caused him to be brought to her to be judged in the Temple of Loviatar. She asked of him, "From what country art thou?"

The merchant answered, "From Estagund."

"And what affair," said the Honglath, "was the cause of thy coming to Dambrath?"

He answered, "I saw in my sleep a person who said to me, 'Verily thy fortune is in Maarlith, therefore repair to it.' And when I came here, I found the fortune of which he told me to be the blows delivered by thy men, and that I have received from thee."

And upon this the Honglath laughed, so amused this Cintri was at this fool of a merchant. She said, "O thou of little sense, /I/ saw three times in my sleep a person who said to me, 'Verily in Chavyondat, in such a district, and of such description, hath in its court a garden, at the lower end of which is a fountain, wherein is wealth of great amount: therefore repair to it and take it.

"But I went not; and thou, through the smallness of thy sense, hast journeyed from city to city on a count of a thing thou hast seen in sleep, when it is only an effect of confused dreams."

And so the Cintri dispensed the occasional mercy so pleasing to the often-cruel, who think themselves more because of it. She gave the Durpari mercant some coin and said to him, "Help thyself with this and return to the pig-stalls of thy city."

So the merchant took the coin and returned to Estagund. Now, the house that the Honglath described, in Chavyondat, was the house of that man; therefore when he arrived at his abode, he dug beneath the fountain and beheld abundant wealth. Thus the gods did enrich and sustain him and this was a wonderful coincidence.

Thus ends the story of the Two Dreamers, as heard by Shäalira, the younger. This tale was committed to ink on 5th day of Alturiak, 76 AR.