Fantasy RPG Forum - Standing Trials

”It was just lyin’ there on the path!” Skai chirped brightly as Oram examined the dirty, tarnished silver nel the old ex-Ranger had brought him. There was nothing remarkable about the coin apart from its moderate intrinsic worth; it was also mildly interesting that Skai had found it out here. It had probably been dropped by some logger after receiving his wages from the paymaster who had presumably worked from this office. The hunter could probably have figured out the date of mintage with some more perusal and research, but it was not his coin. Skai had found it, after all. He handed it back, whereupon the caretaker scuttled off with it happily, leaving Oram alone in the large room he had taken as his workshop.

Oram sat in thought for a few trills. He understood the excitement of unexpectedly finding something old and possibly valuable, particularly a coin. Not that Skai’s foundling nel was particularly exotic or unique. It might well be older than Oram himself was, but probably not by much. Certainly not older than Skai was, the hunter guessed. And probably not as old, nor as exotic, nor intrinsically valuable, as the gold coins he had found in that lair last Saun.

While Skai stumped grumbling up and down the corridor, Oram went through the adjoining door to his bedroom to fish out those coins, then returned to the workroom and sat down at his table to consider them. There were five of them, all gold coins, each worth more, Oram would guess, than that silver nel the old caretaker was so happy about finding. And they seemed old. Oram peered at the details to see if he could make out lettering on them, putting on his reading spectacles to see if there were any inscriptions he could understand, or at least recognize.

Skai ambled past the workroom door, singing tunelessly and indistinctly as he headed to the privy. Briefly distracted, Oram glanced up at the doorway, watching the shifting shadows on the wooden panels of the corridor as Skai carried a rushlight into the bathroom. Coming to a decision, the hunter rose and shut the door. What he was about to try next would require concentration. Sitting back down at the table, Oram set aside the reading spectacles as well as, to the best of his abilities, his earlier preoccupations and feelings. After doing his best to clear and mind and relax, Oram would draw, in sequence, upon two different abilities from the Shirvain mark he had lately received from Ralaith: Eyes of the Antiquated, followed by Psychometry. The former should tell him how old was the coin he held, the latter, with luck, might tell him something about whoever had last carried it before him, possibly telling him something about whomever left the coin in that lair for him to find.

”You okay, Chief?” came Skai’s concerned voice some time later.

Oram raised his head from the table to look at the caretaker standing in the doorway. Yes, I’m fine,” he answered. ”Just suddenly tired. Hit me all at once.”

Skai gazed at him curiously, then grunted. ”Well, you take better care of yourself, Chief. I won’t have the Chief Ranger runnin’ himself ragged on my watch and catchin’ fainting spells. People’ll say it’s my fault.”

Oram shook his head and rubbed his temples. What he’d just told Skai was no lie; his attempts to employ his Shirvain abilities on the coins had drained him more than he had expected, and he was unsure if the results had been worth it. ”Is there any coffee left in the kitchen?” he asked, partly because he wanted to change the subject away from himself, and partly because he could really use some coffee right now.

”I think so. I’ll go check.” Skai stepped out of the doorway and puttered towards the kitchen.

Oram sat up and looked down at the coins, which had stirred slightly from their lined-up positions on the table when he had lain his head down. He quickly stacked them and put them away before Skai returned to see them. While the Chief Ranger did not think Skai was necessarily dishonest, he nonetheless found himself not wanting to confide in him about this particular mystery.

There was coffee, although it was only lukewarm. Oram drank it appreciatively, anyway, while he tried to revive his tired mind. With effort, he pushed his buzzing thoughts about his coins away, willing himself to take a break and just relax, calm down. As the two men finished off the last of that morning’s coffee, and wondered whether they should make more, Skai started talking about some of the projects he wanted to do around the property, particularly fixing a section of the rails on the side of the bridge that was showing some dry rot. Oram nodded non-committally as the old grump spoke, grateful for the chance to turn his thoughts briefly in a new direction. At last, Skai asked if he would be able to use the workroom for any carpentry he might need to do today.

”Give me one more break,” Oram pleaded. ”Then you can work here all afternoon.”

Oram spent most of that break rubbing his temples some more, and waiting for the coffee to kick in. He thought he might get a headache, but didn’t, for which he was thankful.

At length, he decided to take a walk. He went down to the Whisker and checked his fish baskets, even though he did not expect to find anything in them. As he did, he encountered Gandersauce on the water, in a little eddy outside the river's current. The goose honked happily when it saw Oram and swam towards him. It came onto shore, watching with interest as Oram put the fish baskets (free of any catch, just as he had expected) back into the water, then followed the Chief Ranger on foot as he walked back towards the house.

The sky shone blue through the spindly, sparsely-leaved treetops, and the sun was high and bright. A good trial for catching the glint of a silver nel on the path, Oram thought. That gave him an idea. Walking to the veranda that connected the house to the stables, he took the coins out and lined them up atop the handrail, so as to look at them in sunlight. They were different sizes and shapes, and Oram wondered if the coins were actually currency at all. Perhaps they were charms, or decorative medallions, or something intended to commemorate some long-forgotten occasion.

He had already discovered that he could not decipher the lettering on the coins, yet he doubted that the markings were nonsensical. In the sunslight, he examined them more closely, paying attention not so much to the symbols and letters as to their physical features and condition. For this, he used the rainbow-sand hand glass he had gotten during the aborted Sweetwine expedition. The coins did not move or make noise, so they would not interact with that particular feature of the glass, but simply looking at them under magnification, and under better light, might show Oram something he hadn’t noticed before. He would look, for example, at the holes and edges. Were there wear or scratch marks on those? Such wear marks might suggest, for instance, that the coins had been threaded onto a string or something once, or whether they had been handled extensively.

Oram knew the coins were quite old, that they had traversed many arcs more or less unscathed to reach the hoard where he had found them, and he knew that they had lain in that hoard undisturbed for at least a full decade. There was not much else to be discerned about their origin, though. He would have to take them to Scalvoris the next time he went, and do some research, most likely involving sigh books.

Oram discovered more details on the coins on inspecting them in sunslight, but it was not in a way he had been expecting: additional symbols appeared on the coins. The characters didn’t make much more sense to him, either by themselves or in conjunction with the the original inscriptions, than they had before, but it was an additional piece of information that might provide a clue as to what these coins betokened. There was something else as well, not a letter, but an image: a star that seemed to twinkle in the light. He checked each coin, twice, to be certain, but it was definitely there, on all five of them.

What did it represent? What did it mean? And how was it that these letters and images appeared at all? They weren’t stamped normally, or else Oram would have seen them right away. Was it some sort of magic? Alchemy? Or just some really advanced metalworking technique? Most puzzling to the hunter, though, was why? Were these sun-lit symbols just some ingenious way to foil counterfeiting? Or was the information encoded in these sun-lit symbols important to some larger message or picture?

Oram sighed, knowing that he could not possibly puzzle these things out right now. What he could do, was record all the information he found. He went back inside the house, past the workroom where Skai seemed to be sanding something, to retrieve from his room his notes, his glasses, something to write with, and one other item, one he had nearly forgotten he had.

This sat over the mantelpiece as a curiosity; he had glanced at it once or twice, but had not had occasion to consult it for any serious purpose: it was a small glass sphere that Saoire had given him nearly two arcs ago, at the Cylus Dusk reception she had held for the heroes of Faldrass. Supposedly, it showed the current position of the stars overhead. Oram’s father had told him as a child that there were always stars overhead. Oram was intrigued by the fact that the star would reveal itself on the coins in sunlight, as opposed to moonlight.

Was it a star that was in the daytime sky? But that varied with the season; whoever fashioned these coins could not know when somebody would look at them, or in what part of the world. Still, Oram didn’t have a better idea, so he took the globe, along with the coins and his writing supplies, back out onto the porch. He looked at the globe to see if it might supply any hint as to what star the coin might depict, albeit without much hope of success.

When he was done with that, Oram took out pencil and paper and copied the lettering he found on each coin, including the sun-lit symbols which he set off from the others with brackets. While the coins felt somehow like a set, that did not mean that they were. Perhaps the lettering on the five coins were all meant to be taken together as part of some larger message, or perhaps not. He might or might not possess the entire sequence, even if there was one. He had, after all, simply grabbed the coins at hazard from a pile in that treasure room.

Something tugged his intuition towards the notion that the symbols were some sort of coordinates, but that didn’t help. Coordinates in what system? What sort of chart or map were they plotted on if so? Were the sunlit letters and the stamped letters part of the same coordinates, or were they different, complementary pieces of information? The fact that the sunlit letters and the stars appeared together suggested maybe that a particular star was supposed to be in a particular location at a particular time, whereupon something important happened?

None of this meant much right now. Oram simply did not have anywhere near the context to figure these things out. He should probably take the coins to Scalvoris, to see if he could figure out their provenance. If Oram could find out generally what the coins were, and who likely had made them, that might go some way to suggesting what sort of information its makers were likely to have stamped or inscribed on them. Yes, he would definitely take the coins with him to Scavoris Town on his next trip there, and make time to do some reading and inquiring.

For right now, after making his notes and peering at his star globe, Oram would set the coins aside and attend to his afternoon business. He had one more thing he wished to try here at his house -”Gandersauce Gables” as his brother had nicknamed it-: take the coins out in the starlight and moonlight, on the off chance that they would show something interesting then as well.

Saoire’s globe revealed nothing new to Oram, at least nothing that bore on the mystery of the coins. It was nice to see confirmed what his father had told him all those arcs ago about the stars in the sky even during the daytime. He even looked for Nero the Hound, his birth sign that, according to Oleg, should be overhead in the sunlit sky this season. Once he was done with that, it was time to attend to the trial’s business.

Come evening, the hunter again took the coins out, this time to examine them under moonlight. He had not expected to get more from this than he had from the star globe, yet to his pleasant surprise, additional symbols appeared. What was more, these symbols seemed to complete a picture that suggested an order for the coins. With this, Oram started his notes over on fresh sheets of paper, now with the coins in their indicated sequence, with the sun-lit symbols underlined and the moon-lit ones circled. He could not be sure if which were which would prove important, but he felt it important to mark them nonetheless.

When he had done that, he turned the coins over to look at the other face in the moonlight, as well. He would mark anything of interest he found there the same way he had the obverse side. Just to be extra careful, he would even examine the rims to see if anything had changed.

When he had done *that*, Oram would take the coins back into the house and then have a sit and a think. The symbols on the coins definitely seemed to mark some sort of coordinates. Some might even be some sort of mathematical notations, or perhaps a cypher. The Chief Ranger was not sure what to do in the latter case. Perhaps show the symbols to Jim? He decided to wait on that. It might not be a cypher, at all.

Even assuming they were straightforward coordinates, however, they would only be immediately meaningful to whomever had marked these coins. And since the coins were ancient, that meant that the coordinates, if they went to any sort of map, would be to one that might well not even exist any more.

Oram blew out his cheeks and rubbed his temples. He needed to find out where these coins came from, who made them, when and where. These markings would have meant something to the people who made them, after all, and to whomever would have used them. Figuring out who those were would go some way to finding that meaning.

Who knew about ancient coins? Well, money changers knew about coins, but usually only ones that were actually in circulation. Perhaps somebody at a bank knew. Or perhaps -what were those people Darius had mentioned?- archaeologists. People who specialized in old artifacts of various sorts. Was there anybody at the university that knew ancient coins? There was one way to find out, and it meant that the traveler had some traveling to do. It would take him a trial to make arrangements, but then Oram would journey to Scalvoris Town to do some research into ancient coins, and also, possibly, into the history of the region he had found them in, outside Uthaldria.

On the 60th trial of Vhalar, Oram set out for Scalvoris Town. He had left the house and goats in Skai’s care. For some reason, however, Gandersauce had been insistent on coming along; he lit on Mule’s back and refused to move aside when Oram tried to saddle him. The hunter got out the traveling basket he had used to transport the goose in the past, and Gandersauce immediately flew into it and began honking at him insistently. Relenting at last, Oram hooked up the basket to Mule’s side, and added a small blanket and some feed. If the goose wanted to make the long trip to Scalvoris Town, he had better behave himself.

Once he got to Scalvoris, the Chief Ranger would visit the university and inquire as to who there studied ancient coins, and who also knew anything about the history of Uthaldria.