Beyond the Western Deep

This week, in the run-up to our January 15th release of Wintersdawn in the Deep on itch.io, we’re proud to present this short story that serves as a prequel to the events of our upcoming adventure game! Enjoy!
-The Western Deep Team

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The Lost Wintersdawn

“You’re serious?” Quinlan felt a tightness in his chest. He tried to maintain his composure, but tears began to well up behind his eyes.

“I’m afraid so.” Scout Captain Reed looked pained herself, clearly not relishing her role at that moment. “Orders from… well, I think you know.” The tamian captain held up a piece of parchment and presented it to her newest scout. “You’re being pressed into service. Immediate deployment to the Western Deep.”

“On Wintersdawn,” Quinlan said. “I thought feast days were volunteer-only.”

Captain Reed grimaced, clearly knowing that and clearly wishing Quinlan hadn’t asked about it. “Yes, that’s normally true.”

“Normally.” Quinlan sighed. He knew what was going on better than anyone.

It had been three months. Three months since he’d told his grandfather he wasn’t planning on joining the Terrian Guard and would instead become a scout. His grandfather, unfortunately, was Captain Caldus of the Royal Guard: a legend in the service who spent his entire life working his way up the chain of command, making a name for himself during countless skirmishes and then the infamous Oran Uprising. And while Caldus and the Terrian Guard joined the Lutren Sea Guard to fend off the ermehn incursion from the north, the tamian scouts remained within Terria’s borders.

“They’re a bunch damned cowards!” Caldus had pushed aside a rack of weapons, scattering them to the floor, the moment he saw his grandson in the doorway wearing his new green tunic—the mark of a scout. Quinlan knew his grandfather wouldn’t approve, and stood in the threshold, stone-faced, as Caldus threw insult after insult toward him.

“You’re going to spend your life sitting in trees, scaring away bugs. That’s not what we do. That’s not what this family does.” He picked up a steel helmet and flung it into the wall. SMASH!

During the whole tirade, Caldus had never once asked why Quinlan decided to join the scouts. His entire life, Quinlan had been brought up by his grandfather to fill the role he occupied as head of the Royal Guard. But Quinlan had a problem: he didn’t like killing. He didn’t like conflict. He hated it. He hated needing to prove his strength. He hated the idea that someday he might need to take another’s life.

There was a moment he often remembered from his youth, after he’d lost one of many tesque fights against his childhood bully—a burly and brash tamian named Crim. Lying there miserably in the dirt, Quinlan tried to keep his composure as his grandfather disapprovingly stood nearby.

“Why’d you hold back?” He had asked.

No response. Caldus knelt down and put a paw on his grandson’s shoulder. “Quinlan. You are going to hate me your entire life. Right up until the moment when it’s your life or another’s.” He stood, clapping the dirt from his knee. “Then, and only then, will you ever understand.”

“I don’t want to understand.” Quinlan whispered it to himself, perhaps a bit too loudly. He saw Caldus hesitate for just a moment as he walked away, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t turn around.

The truth was, Quinlan joined the scouts to get away from his grandfather. He’d had enough of the training, the constant beratement, and generally feeling like the only purpose to his existence was to live up to Caldus’s sky-high expectations. But Quinlan didn’t want to get deployed into battle against some neighboring kingdom and die in a ditch all in the name of upholding his grandfather’s legacy. He wanted to stay in Sunsgrove, to live a simpler life.

And to Quinlan, Wintersdawn perfectly encapsulated everything he wanted out of that life.

The Wintersdawn festival had been a part of Sunsgrovian culture since the founding of the jointly-ruled kingdom and took place right on the cusp of winter. As the story went, it commemorated the very first joint feast held by the Queen of Lutra and the King of Sunsgrove—though more cynical minds believed the feast itself was scheduled to remind the lutren and tamian people that their kingdoms were, in fact, unified, and reports of recent rises in violence between them would no longer be tolerated.

Whatever the true reason, Wintersdawn had since grown into a premier festival day that both the lutren and tamian looked forward to all year round. Family members who were living in neighboring kingdoms (usually merchants or diplomats working in Aisling, Cenolau, or Nessa) would often make the journey back to Sunsgrove to celebrate the festival with their elders and extended family. 

The trip was worth it every time.

The festival was intended to encourage kinship between the tamian and lutren people—and the best way to do that, many generations of Sunsgrovians learned, was to make it about the food.

Food and the partaking thereof were great equalizers, no matter the social context. Sharing food built camaraderie and trust, and so Wintersdawn transformed over the years from a celebration of the joining of the two kingdoms to a celebration of lutren and tamian cooking, putting their culinary creations on full display for everyone to partake in. 

Many of the dishes made for the festival were items of considerable complexity, not often presented on menus during the rest of the year. They also tended to use ingredients from the fall harvest, though as the years passed more up-and-coming chefs decided to store special ingredients from the summer harvest as well, as the competition to craft the most memorable foodstuffs increased.

Quinlan looked forward to dishes like the whipped mint sapmilk on almond biscuits, walnut butter bread drizzled with fresh honey, razor clams dredged in flour and fried in oil with herbs and spices, and his favorite Wintersdawn treat: the Sunsgrovian stuffed sweet tomato, which was actually a deliciously mad concoction devised by a tamian chef named Varden who worked in the kitchens of Nessa’s Vulpin Council. Varden’s skills were in such demand that his employment contract was actually included in various backroom deals between members of the Council, shuttling him from Great House to Great House every few months.

The Sunsgrovian sweet tomato was a tiny little thing bursting with flavor: a cored tomato filled with chopped fruits and nuts then basted for several hours in boiled sugar and sapmilk. It was decadent, and of course very difficult to make. Half of the ingredients were so rare in Sunsgrove that Varden’s family had to keep a garden specifically to grow them for the Wintersdawn feast. And even then, there was never a guarantee that you would secure one before they ran out. That was why Quinlan always got the sweet tomato first.

Well, two of them: one for him, and one for his best friend, Dakkan.

Except this year.

This year there would be no feasting. There would be no celebrating.

Instead, Quinlan would be patrolling the wilds of the Western Deep on Wintersdawn. Alone. Caldus’s orders. The one festival he looked forward to every year had been ripped from him. Captain Reed certainly knew better than to go against her superior—which Caldus certainly was as Captain of the Royal Guard—but she knew just as much as Quinlan that this was highly unorthodox.

“I’m sorry, Quinlan,” she said. “I know how much this festival means to you.”

“So does my grandfather, apparently.” Quinlan sighed, finally accepting the parchment with Caldus’s written orders. Without another word, he turned and headed into the outskirts of Terria, to a small stone folly where he and Dakkan were meant to meet up to plan for their Wintersdawn plan of attack. Quinlan would normally be going to Varden’s stall first, while Dakkan secured two large mugs of Maple Ale—a Wintersdawn speciality brewed in a small enough quantity that it was only available during the festival.

When Quinlan broke the news to his lutren friend, Dakkan was crestfallen. “Yer jokin’.”

“Wish I was.” Quinlan sighed and perched himself on a broken stone column. “Caldus is still…Caldus.”

Dakkan cursed under his breath. “You skippin’ out? Need my help to put together an excuse or somethin’?”

For the briefest of moments, Quinlan considered this. Then his shoulders slumped—reality taking control as it always tended to. “Again, wishful thinking. Caldus is doing this to make my life miserable. He’ll know if I get out of it, and all I need to do is give him an excuse to get me kicked out of the scouts and he’ll take it, no question.”

“Fff.” Dakkan crossed his arms, leaning against the stone folly, deep in thought. “All right.”

“All right what?”

“All right, I’m goin’ with ya.”

Quinlan nearly fell off his seat on the column. “What? Dak, no. C’mon.”

“C’mon what? I’m doin’ this. WE’RE doin’ this.” He pushed himself off the wall and began to march back towards Terria proper. “Gotta get some supplies, a’course.”

“Dakkan, seriously, I can’t ask you to throw your Wintersdawn away just because mine’s ruined. My grandfather has it out for me.”

The lutren spun around, leveling a claw at his friend. “He forces you out, he forces both of us out. He knows we’re friends and that I ain’t about to sit around all Wintersdawn chowin’ down on food while you’re out there doin’…” He stopped and blinked. “Gosh, y’know what? I have absolutely no idea what it is you do out there.”

“We patrol the-” 

“Too late!” Dak spun around again. “I’ll meet you back here in an hour. An’ that’s final.”

Quinlan couldn’t even move. The tightness in his chest was there again.

“Did I just ruin Dakkan’s Wintersdawn, too?” He thought to himself.

Silence. The sounds of early preparations for the festival were beginning to carry through the trees. The smells of maple ale and fresh herbs being seared in sapmilk wafted under his nose.

He breathed it all in. Then breathed it out in a sigh.

“This is going to be a very different Wintersdawn.”

 

Experience Quinlan’s eventful Wintersdawn patrol in his very first adventure game: Wintersdawn in the Deep, available on itch.io for PC January 15th!