Wardensweave

Description

Tightly woven leather scale and lamellar are popular with the Wardens of Varushka. This armour is not as encumbering as the heavy steel armours favoured by the schlacta, but allows for move manoeuvrability - a trait that is particularly prized by the traveling 'heroes' of the Varushkan roads. As many wardens are artisans themselves, they often make and maintain their own Wardensweave. Some fellowships receive gifts of raw materials needed to keep their armour enchanted from the vales they help, or the Imperial Magistrates they work with.

Elsewhere in the Empire this armour is known as a Bloodgold Guard and is worn under plate by some Dawnish knights errant, Marcher captains and Freeborn warriors. The enchanted leather helps cushion the force of blows, while the plate offers greater protection to vital areas.

Rules

• Form: Armour. Takes the form of a suit of medium armour. You must be wearing this armour to use its magical properties.
• Requirement: Any character can bond to this item.
• Effect: Gain two additional ranks of the endurance skill.
• Materials: Crafting a set of Wardensweave requires nine ingots of orichalcum and seven measures of ambergelt. It takes one month to make one of these items.

The headless corpse in the dim glade was by no means the worst sight the Warden Company of the Burnt Rose had ever seen, but it still gave Lydiena Filipova pause. She recognised it instantly from the armour it wore, and the array of talismans and amulets it had once worn, even though these now hung from all the trees of the copse, by way of a grim warning. The claw-marks on the trees nearby suggested that she’d strayed into the edge of a Sovereign’s territory, and it must have been nearby and angry at the time.

“She was the most ferocious Warden I ever knew,” Lydiena sighed, “She was warded, she was sensible, and she wore a... a damned fine suit of Wardensweave. This shouldn’t have happened to her.” She grimaced as she began to strip the corpse of its possessions, including the armour – things for which the woods and their denizens had no use.

“We’re pulling back to the road,” she said, when she’d finished. From the beating her armour had clearly taken, the appalling wounds on her body, and the battle-scarring of the trees and the ground, it had clearly been a long fight, a valiant fight. Lydiena surveyed the damage with – pride would be the wrong word, but at least a certain vindication.

She gripped the leather armour tightly, barely noticing its points and edges digging into the flesh of her hand. Lydiena had given Mariam the armour, a parting gift when the younger woman had left the Burnt Rose’s employ to work alone again. If it was an expensive gift, then that only stood for the depth of the affection between them.

But now she walked the walled roads of the Labyrinth, where nothing would get her. Lydiena felt her throat tighten, and her grip with it, and it was then that she became aware of her deputy talking to her.

“My captain? We’re not going after it?” Juliana Ivanova repeated.

“Oh, we’ll see about coming back,” Lydiena said, forcing out all of the unhelpful emotion in a hard sigh as she set her mind back to the task at hand, “But first I want to talk to the local Volhov and find out what they know that Warden Trevelyan didn’t, and find out what, if any, rituals and paraphernalia they use to keep this thing at bay.” She carefully didn’t say anything about killing it with an army at her back, just in case it was listening. Lydiena hadn’t remained a Warden for over a decade now by saying things like that where Sovereigns could hear them.

She slotted the talismans into an empty pouch in her armour, and handed the armour off to Juliana, who hefted it over her shoulder with a grunt. “Oh, and without disrespect to the dead, I want that armour checking, repairing, and refitting. It’s going on you next, girl,” she said, trying not to think about what that meant.