The skies above the Sword Plains were clear, letting the stars light the village Tzai. The last days of winter had gone to where seasons die and the spring brought frequent rains. Tonight though, the sky was clear and the stars shone brightly. Devos, the green moon, hung low and full in the sky, the waning slivers of her celestial sisters having set hours ago.
Tzai was a small village, by human standards, having fewer than a hundred residents. A barbaric village composed of dozens of yurts and three stone buildings. Dirt paths wound through the village and the smell of horses was thick on the air. A backwater village in the center of plains that no larger nation bothered to claim. To the caldashi though, the half-orcs who ranged the Sword Plains, it was the home of the Gol, their lord and champion, and the Sword Plains was their empire.
North of Tzai, past the yurts, past the horse pens, beyond even the rice paddies and the fields of crops tended by the peasants, lies a circle of blue stones. The stones mark the boundary of Gu Hash Kinnuth, a sacred place which is home to the Monolith of Harmony and Enlightenment. The Monolith is a finger of granite that thrusts itself out of the flat plains as if the earth was reaching for the heavens. Three paces across and almost a dozen paces tall, the monolith is but one of more than a dozen such stone outcroppings like it across the Sword Plains. All are sacred to the caldashi, and tonight, like every night, the monolith burns with ghostly green flames.
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