“Come on man, I’m begging you guys, I don’t have anyone else I can depend on anymore, the king already slaughtered my family and the rest of my guild, if you don’t help, I might as well go hang myself from the belltower in the center of town!” I uncomfortably roll my shoulders, looking down at the defeated figure of one of my oldest friends, knowing what she asks is treason. Ah to hell with it.
“I don’t know about you all,” I say, tightening the straps on my vambraces and double checking the leather holding my sword to me, “but I’ve got an old friend to check up on in the next country over.”
“You do realize that if we leave now the king is going to oppress the others even more harshly, and you’ll just be abandoning them to their fate.” Always the cynic. I allow a small smile to cross my face.
“I never said anything about we,” I reply.
“You may as well have,” a rumbling, sonorous, voice retorts.
“In any case I leave in ten,” I say, allowing a soft chuckle at the stream of cursing and what sounds like pans banging together throughout the whole building. Say what you will about mercenaries, but know this; a band is like a family, and families have a tendency to dislike it when one of their members, no matter how estranged, is targeted.
***
Magic is common in this world of ours, almost everyone has access to some, but only a seldom few have the affluence required to learn and legally use it, with an exceptional few allowed a place in one of the seven Academies of Magic on merit. Most mages can be grouped into a few categories, and usually, get stronger the more simplistic the power. To this end, mages of the “four elements” wind, earth, fire, and water are usually the strongest, and the more abstract the power, the weaker it gets; without formal training that is. Even the weakest academy trained mages can wipe the floor with even the most powerful untrained mages. The largest two categories, tangible and intangible, divide magic right down the middle in a not so symbolic way. As the name implies, tangible magic directly affects the world around the mage, such as summoning a gout of flame, hyper focusing a beam of light into a piercing death ray, or causing steel to flow like water. They are considered the stronger grouping of mages, however most lack finesse and subtlety, which can get them into trouble. Intangible magic covers basically everything else, such as telepathy, changing one’s perception of time, or even illusion magic. While people are generally only born with one type of magic, it is possible to learn additional abilities, the limitation of this being that it must be within the same macro school as your original magic. Take for instance, a fire mage, to keep it simple. Their fire magic will almost always have the strongest abilities in their repertoire, but a dedicated mage will be able to pick up at the very least the basics of any other type of tangible magic, like earth magic or even water magic. A fire mage cannot, however, learn a skill like telepathy since it is outside their macro school. In short, a tangible mage can never learn intangible magic, and vice versa.
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My magic hadn’t manifested early enough, or even at all when the testing of my generation came through and I had already begun to learn my father’s chosen trade: blacksmithing. No magic, stable job, little risk of death or injury, unless I did something really stupid anyway. Or at least that's where I’d thought I’d end up. We made our living selling things of the most mundane sort, horseshoes and nails, even the odd shovel or plow. But never swords, or any other type of weapon for that matter, to do so is to invite ruin. The nobles are a jealous lot, and like the lucrative trade of weaponry limited to their own estates and personal smiths, where they can make a killing off of selling the things. That’s not to say we didn’t make any. The first time I attempted to pound a dagger from steel, I was close to eleven winters. It took me a week and a half, and the poor chunk of metal fell apart before it looked anything like a blade. Directly after my failure, my father fashioned one in around an hour, a sturdy, flat backed, parrying knife, still warm and with its grip unwrapped. That part, I’d learned to do around the age of six, after my mother fell ill and couldn’t assist anymore. She recovered, but I kept doing it anyway, liking the feel of leather and wire beneath my fingers. That dagger, Seeker, I’ve kept on me ever since. But I digress; as I came of age, with my sixteenth winter just around the corner, the choosing came to our little town, and, as my magic was nowhere to be seen, I was passed over. Our village did have the privilege of having one chosen, however. The one who decided to finally show back up at my band house that fateful night, Della. She was pretty enough back then I suppose, plenty of the others had a crush on her at one point or another, which I continuously gave them shit for, because to me, it was obvious that she had no interest in any of them. She was pleasant to all of them, sure, but she was also extremely driven, which I respected, and endeavored to emulate. Something of a friendship, or rivalry depending on who you asked, grew from our shared sense of self determination. Her mother and brother had been accosted and nearly killed some three years earlier by what they and the other survivors of their caravan described as some kind of hyena men and giant, humanoid spiders. Most people disregarded these tales as embellishment and shame at being robbed by common bandits, but ever since, she had been honing and refining her own brand of magic, which had awoken impressively early. The area where she practiced became a blasted wasteland, just as surely as the posts I practiced on became splintered and cracked, shuttering under the blows of my strengthening sword arm. Life on the frontier begets violence, and many towns like mine were given charters by the crown after the last of the border wars, which expanded the kingdom tenfold. My father, one of the many mercenaries rewarded with land for his participation in the war, set out with the rest of his band to settle down and make a home, some twenty years ago. His decision to teach me to fight was based off of an old adage, “It’s better to be prepared for the worst than to hope for the best”, and many of the former band agreed with his sentiments. The training was not unreasonable, as our training helped to repel many bandit attacks. No amount of training would’ve prepared me for the mess that followed a few weeks after Della was selected by the choosing, and left the town, journeying off to the Seven Colleges.
***
It seems inconsequential now, but at the time, I was fixated on starting the craft of my own blacksmithing tools. They are a rite of passage you know, to craft your own tools from the forge of your teacher, a rite that ends your apprenticeship. It takes years to have a complete chest of tools, capped with the casting of your first anvil, and then, either your previous teacher abdicated their forge, allowing you to control it, or you had everything that belonged to you strapped to a wagon and sent out to a new developing settlement to make a living for yourself. I had been swinging a hammer all day, fashioning a few different pieces of metal into rough shape for a two and a half pound smithing hammer, and I was planning on finishing up and picking the best of my work around dusk. Sometimes, I almost wish that was how it’d worked out, but alas, my plans were brought to a screeching halt.