Starday evening, 15th of Flocktime (the day the party set out from Nulbish on Hestmark Highlands ponies for Duffgordon Manor, the first of a ten day ride) ....
In a dank, lightless oubliette on the deepest level of the donjons beneath the Riverwatch Blockhouse and Gaol, the ancient and treacherous Sword of Kas lies inert on a stone slab amid rat droppings and bat guano. For days it has languished in this "place of the forgotten," its hunger growing ever stronger. It has lain in a torpor like this for centuries in the past, tormented by its own insatiable thirst for blood .... The Blood is the Life .... The very Breath of Life is enshrouded in the Blood .... The blood of mortals .... Their life essence is a delicious mystery, a miraculous substance that imbues them with drive, passion, thought, and the spark of divine fire which the gods have foolishly deigned to squander on their fragile, myopic, insipid creations .... What a waste .... How short is the life of mortal man .... How fleeting and flawed his memory .... How stunted and hobbled his imagination .... These fools have left ME--the mightiest weapon to ever spread red carnage across the fields of the Oerth--in a donjon cell with an idiotic shapeshifting digestive tract, and a pathetic puppet to keep the idiot shapeshifter from trying to eat me .... How did it come to THIS?? Leaving me here, neglected, MADDENED by thirst for blood .... as if I really were no more than a mere SWORD! I am Kas, the Bloody-Handed! Kas, the Betrayer! Kas, the Drinker of Blood! I MUST feed ....
And then, a thing happened that not even the Sword of Kas could have ever expected ....