When someone tells you to go North, its usually not considered good directions, unless its like "Go north thirty feet and boom there you are." Which is to say when Toneron suggested I go North it was a lot like telling me "just go over there find a guy." I mean if I went too far up North I'd wind up in the damn Lunar Empire (which was a few weeks away from being wiped out at the time, I'd go into it, but why bother it was a tiny little group not connected to the war that got wiped out for being stupid, Nidget calls himself the last emperor of the Lunar Empire, that tells you how crappy it had to be). Also it wasn't like I wasn't WALKING THROUGH A DAMN WAR ZONE! So to say I had difficulty getting to the group that Toneron wanted me to assist was putting it mildly! The only nice thing to happen during that time period was the Red Hand had doomed themselves before I had even gotten directly involved!
You see one faction in Red Hand territory that was content despite their war nature to let the conflict go on by were the Followers of Fire. They worshipped war, and had a large army amongst their "priests", but they did not want to be involved in a territorial war, nor did they think it was their place (they had learned of course from Ronerawth kicking them out of the country after the last conflict). There was of course a conflict within the Followers though about which side to support should they had to support a side, and much like the overall conflict it came down to who could use magic and who could not. In the Followers they had distinctions in their priest hiearchy between magical users and non magical (non magical were thought of as lessers due to not being as adept at physical combat). Obviously each side wanted to support their own faction in the overrall Red Hand conflict, but the elders at the top forbade it. That was until the magical followers allied with the Red Hand to murder the Elders (a plot so stupid if I wasn't completely unaware of it I would have thought it was my plan to end the damn war myself!). It actually worked, the magical group in a brilliant blitz attack killed all of the elders in one go. The problem of course was the magical followers (known as the True Priests of The Fire God) have less membership than the none magical, and killing off the Elders didn't lead to the none magical just accepting the True Priests as their leaders.
It actually lead to the none magical to unleash their trump card; the Sins of the Fire God (I know this entry has a lot of different factions, I'd apologize, but if I started to apologize for every confusing entry I'd never tell you anything original again, sin is short for Assassin, because calling them asses would likely get you killed). I wasn't aware of their existence and neither was the Red Hand, until their judges and leaders started showing up in pieces or on display. Sin's are nasty to begin with, these guys took it to a new level, supposedly raised from birth within the church to murder for whoever they were pointed out, they were maddeningly efficient and horribly brutal. There was a story shortly after the Followers formally entered the war, where a True Priest was hiding in a town and a Sin was sent to find him. The townsfolk were pro Red Hand and so they hid the True Priest from the Sin, until he murdered everyone. And I don't mean like murdered just the men, he killed everyone in town and burned it to the ground. All told it was over fifty people, including several children.
Point being, the Red Hand had pissed off a faction that unleashed remorseless killers on them, and an army of men who literraly lived for conflict. It was beautiful in stupidity, probably go down as the all time boneheaded move of any war ever. I like to think it was Morley who did it, but I know he's too smart to be that dumb. None of that of course dealt with me WANDERING NORTH FOR TWO FREAKING WEEKS! See I wrote all that down to excuse being lost for a couple weeks. You're welcome.
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