Beware the Ninny

By: Unknown on 07:51

The Haunted Swords of Cinder tend to acquire more than one name, as they weave their way in and out of history and legend. The Midrealm's most infamous magic blade is called Rekknpychn Inne Møguet by the Adelians, while the Elves know it as Morissё Ninniach. The Common Tongue name for the sword is a corruption of the Elvish moniker. It's just one of the absurd facets of life in Cinder that the deadliest weapon in the land is called Morrisey's Ninny, or just The Ninny.

Several lays have been written about the hero Morrisey (despite never existing) and his Blade of Seven Dooms, another name for the Ninny. One plagiaristic minstrel even took the entire corpus of the Epic of Crugal and clumsily reworked it into the Epic of Morris, ruining some really great alliterative rhymes in the process. But Crugal's popularity as a subject of tales was on the wane, so it was probably a wise move to try to cash in on Morrisey's rising star. But it's unfortunate that the legends of Crugal's blade have become confused with the Ninny corpus. Now no two rhymers can agree on the Seven Dooms, or powers, of the The Ninny. All agree that the blade flashes a different color for each power, but no sage has yet untangled all the threads in the legends to ascertain an original list of powers.

Perhaps it is this ambiguity that fuels the imagination of so many treasure-hunters. In the last quarter-century at least a dozen adventurers have traveled to the Midrealm solely to seek out Morrisey's Ninny. The most recent sword-seeker, a dwarf called Ugrod Rustybeard, disappeared while searching for clues to the location of the Unseen Hermitage, a possible resting place of the Ninny. It is said that he had rented rooms at the Crossroads Inn. Six months ago the proprietor sold off most of Rustybeard's stuff to pay off the missing dwarf's debts. Only a journal, presumably written in Dwarvish, remains unsold.