Lir’s Bow & Arrow

There wasn’t much one could improve on the construction of arrows The People used… Well, almost.

The ability of the arrow makers to carve natural branches into dowels of wood that are so perfectly straight without using sophisticated machining technology seems impossible. And yet, impossibly straight is what they are. I offered a few alterations, including a longer arrow and an alternate arrowhead design which uses a carefully measured weight in addition to the tip itself. Longer, curved feathers, provided by Seeries, were also used in place of plant materials to help stabilize the arrow in flight.

The bows The People now employ were upgraded by me to a recursive design. The old bow was carved from a single piece of wood and were very heavy and stiff. The design I substituted used a series of flat sheets, tapering to the edges and sealed into a single unit with a resin they used to lacquer clay storage pots. The resulting bow was smaller, lighter and far more powerful with a longer draw and greater accuracy at distance. It was also easier to build scaled models of these bows that children with less physical power could practice with and offer fire support to the swordsmen in the field from afar.

Lir’s “Death Rain,” using the new bows, is lethal. This maneuver requires several lines of archers to fire in arcs. The ones in the back fire in the highest arc, reload, then fire in a slightly lower arc. The idea was to have the up to five arrows fired by each archer land at approximately the same time. Multiply this across several rows of archers many men and women deep and the sun would dim with the number of arrows in the air. Only the terror instilled by Erebos and his lieutenants could drive the Muties into the Death Rain.

That the sheer number killed in this manner does not seem to thin the Muties' numbers is of no small concern around here...