Carnival: A celebration combining some elements of a circus and a public street party. Some people wear masks and luxurious costumes during the celebration, allowing them to lose their everyday individuality and experience a heightened sense of social unity. Excessive consumption of alcohol and food is extremely common. Other common features of Carnival include mock battles, food fights, social satire, games of chance and dancing.

The inn, known as Fort Rendezvous, was busier than usual. Decorative flags and banners hung from the rafters. Various bands played in rotation insuring the festive music was continuous.

Karver sat and people watched, as he often did. He found his new companions particularly entertaining. The elf who called himself Mr. Keys, was beginning to become a regular attraction at Fort Rendezvous and could often be found entertaining revelers with song and dance. The dwarf ate a lot, the ranger drank a lot, and the tiefling seemed fond of showing off; particularly to females. It wasn’t lost on him that the ranger and the tiefling were both named ‘twin’. Different languages but the same meaning. The stone man enjoyed competitions, especially feats of strength. He called himself Guts. Karver envisioned him having a chest cavity full of sand.  

The companions were all gathered around a well-worn oak table. Karver enjoyed the company. They took an interest in him as a person instead of treating him like a thing.

“So you have no memory of where you’re your from uh?”  Asked Mr. Keys as he accepted a fresh glass of elvish wine from a serving girl.

“Aye! I’ll wager the blessing of Moradin will jog ‘is memory!” said Ovid has he rapped his fist on the table.

“I do have some memories.” Offered Karver.

“So spill!” Said Tamsin as she emptied the remaining contents of a whisky bottle into her tumbler.

“We were build long ago during an era called the Collapse.” Karver began.  “There is this tower where we were born. It stands on a black plain. Behind the tower is a notch in the mountains where the sun sets. The teeth of the mountain cut the sun into fractal shapes and the light that comes down at evening paints shapes on the ground. Usually it’s evening when we come.”

“The ground is fertile. This is a good land. We go to the tower in dreams but that does not mean it’s not real.”

“Some of us go to the tower in peace. They walk through a field of golden wheat and a low warm wind blows in from their back. I don’t know why this is because the rest of us meet an army. We have to kill this army to get to the tower. Usually this starts bare-handed, and somewhere along the way you take up a weapon. Most of us don’t make it.”

“The army is made of everyone we have met. The people we work with, the people we see in the streets, we kill them all. I think because we were made to kill and this is the part of us that thinks about nothing else.”

“Often I kill people I don’t know, but I think I knew them once, in the time before one reset or another when my mind was younger and less terribly scarred.”

“Reset?” Asked Geminias.

“We were meant to be fixtures, objects, unwanted necessities. But we were sentient. We could think and feel. So they would reset us. A type of mind-wipe to keep us unthinking, but the soul grows back. The resets, they don’t wipe it all away. Not everything. And the new life-plus the Light-does something to what is left. Amplifies it, scrambles it reshuffles the fragments like a dealer rifling a deck of cards, putting the hands we’ve already won and lost back into play.”

“What Light do you speak of?” asked Ovid through a mouthful of pork.

“I’m not sure how to explain it. It is a force, a power. You can’t see it but you can feel it.  When we were no longer necessary we were set free. With our new freedom some turned away from the Light and turned on their masters and subjugated the people. Some were re-forged in the Light and continued to serve.”

“Who did you serve?” asked Mr. Keys.

“Something greater than ourselves.”