Darius Chapter 1

The Erinstone dining hall was filled with the clamor of soldiers and the aroma of a feast. Great candelabras lined the perimeter, their tall flames grasping for the tendrils of the navy banners above them. At the far end of the hall, a band played a merry tune, indicative of victory, and the shouts of drunken soldiers permeated through the music like wind through a valley.

A large man, still clad in emerald-green armor rose, knocking his chair onto the polished marble slab, brandishing a leg of mutton above his head. He turned to his left, teetering on one foot as he fought against his inebriation for balance. Squinting, he found his target only a few seats away, and a grin lit up his weathered face.

“Heldy!” he yelled. “Our Captain and savior! All you stinkin’ lot, raise your mugs for our Heldy!”

The men cheered, spilling large quantities of mead across the table, floor, and each other. Heldrus smiled, pleased with the praise, but wanting to maintain a slight distance from himself and his subordinates. As a young captain, his conduct was under constant monitoring, even more so as the son of a powerful noblewoman.

The drunken man, Falsith, continued.

“Awww I tell ya wot, sir, cancelling that wedding of yours was a travesty. A travesty I reckon! Brings tears to my eyes thinkin of the wedding feast we’re missing out on, eh?”

The smile of Heldrus’s face disappeared, and his knuckles turned white as he gripped his knife and fork. He gave Falsith another chance.

“Falsith, I’m not sure you would’ve gotten an invitation. It was to be a small ceremony.”

Falsith didn’t catch on to the opportunity he was given, and went on full force, the brazenness brought on by liters of mead erasing any inhibition and sense he had left.

“Wellll, I got an invitation to the wedding of Lady Silfor and your replacement, Prince Marth, and now we’re even getting a festival and a feast and all kinds of celebrations and entertainment! He sounds to be a great man, this Marth.”

The mention of that scum prince of Barringvale tipped Heldrus over the edge. ‘Constant monitoring’ be damned, he thought, and he rose, lifting his plate and tipping the remnants of his food onto the table. The men gave confused glances at the waste of good food. Heldrus took slow, measured steps towards Falsith, who was beginning to realise the effect his words had on his boss.

“Agh shit, sorry sir I’m sorry I - “

Heldrus swung the plate in an underhand motion, slamming the edge into Falsith’s jaw. The armored man felt nothing, saved by the numbing effects of mead, but he was standing up one moment, then on his back on the cold floor the next. Heldrus leapt on him, battering his nose and blackening his eye until two courageous men pulled him off the drunken Falsith. He shook them off, and stormed out of the hall, his boots clacking on the bluestone bricks.

When the excitement died down, the hall was quiet except for Falsith’s shallow huffs and puffs. As he sobered up, the pain began to rear its ugly head, and a group of four men had to lug him out of the castle and down the paths to the barracks. He learnt a valuable lesson that night.

Don’t poke the bear.

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The paths of the Great Road were not nearly as great as the name suggests. Centuries ago, it was a wide, paved trade route with serious Erinian soldiers stationed at guardhouses every mile. At eight-mile intervals, a group of fifty military men and women had manned large forts which could be called to battle by the sound of a great shining horn, if the smaller guardhouses were attacked.

Darius traversed one of the routes of this ‘Great Road’, now a dilapidated ruin. Days ago, he had decided that it would be best if he were to use the faint walking trails imprinted on the sides of the Road instead of the crumbling sandstone pieces waiting to claim another sprained ankle.

Ahead of him, he saw a guardhouse with something resembling a roof still attached. Given the rarity of this occasion, and the pangs of hunger punching through his stomach, he decided it was a good spot to camp. Walking up the small steps to the shelter, rats scurried from beneath his boots.

“You’ll do well to find any scraps here, young fellas.” He said to the rats. They didn’t reply.

Settling down, he lifted his hammer off the loop of his belt and set it aside. He opened his pack and scooped his hand around the bottom but between then and lunchtime nothing edible had magically appeared. At the start of his journey, the rough, green canvas pack had burgeoned with preserved meats, crusty loaves and various sweet morsels to encourage him in the first few days of his journey. Darius ate the last strawberry puff three weeks ago – a rather stale affair - and the final husk of bread had gotten wet four days ago after a spontaneous bath at a river crossing.

“First bath I’d had in six months.” He chuckled to himself. He figured it was probably the last bath he’d have in as many months, considering his new appointment at the forges of Erinstone. Not known for their cleanliness, the forges were stationed by a haphazard mixture of peasant boys eager for the grandiosities of war, and contracted blacksmiths like Darius. The noblemen and noblewomen inside the walls did not concern themselves with lowly efforts like blacksmithing.

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Despite this, they appeared to Darius to be magnificently adept at the business of war. The prolific rise of Erinstone hundreds of years prior – not long before the Great Road was built – was largely due to the battle capability of the first few ‘royal’ guilds.

He stood, teetered a little due to tiredness, then stepped out of his temporary home to water the grass around the back of the guardhouse. The structure was surprisingly solid, he noted, considering the embarrassing remains of most of the other lookouts. The wooden slats showed no signs of splitting, and the weapons rack outside, still supporting a well-maintained pair of sword and spear glinted in the last light of the day. A light blue ribbon was tied around the base of the spear.

Darius continued into a nearby field and foraged around for various roots and tubers – he figured some of them must be edible – until he reached a small clearing, hidden by a deep grove of bushes about two-hundred meters from the Great Road. He only stumbled across it because he had been parting the branches of one of the large bushes while he foraged.

He wandered into the clearing. The canopy of the trees above created a scattered light that made him feel like he’d stepped into a dusty autumn evening. For a while he admired his surroundings, but as he went to return to his camp, he discovered a band of creatures blocking his way, all holding gnarled clubs and rusted swords. Darius reached for his hammer, small as it was, but realized he’d left it at the guardhouse.

“Shit.”

The creatures approached faster than Darius expected. Their hairy feet made almost no sound on the grass, and their green-brown skin made it difficult to see them in the waning light. When the first creature lunged at Darius, its club glanced off his shoulder. Darius took the opportunity to grab the club and rip it from the grip of the offender. He tried to swing it himself, but fighting was not a strength of his, and the club slipped from his hand and went spinning through the air out of the grove. His luck didn’t last long. Dealing with the first attacker had left Darius exposed, and now the creatures circled him, stepping inwards and poking with their crumbling swords. He felt hot blood on his calf as a sword sliced down low. A club caught him on the side of the head, and he fell to the ground, knowing what was next.

He curled into a ball, protecting his head, however the battering he expected never came. As he fell, a spear sailed into the grove and impaled two of the creatures together, the force of the throw clearing straight through the first body. A young man leapt into the clearing shouting nonsense and fighting with ferocity. His second blade darted into the creature's thin armor while he ridiculed them and made senseless accusations.

“I bet your mother is even uglier than you!”

“You haven’t eaten your veggies, have you?”

“Wrong day to go muggin’, boys!”

The Trenks, as Darius later found them to be named, had become a sorry sight indeed. None left living, they somehow looked uglier dead than alive. The young man began picking through the bodies for anything worth keeping, but found the weaponry unsatisfactory, and the various bits of stolen jewelry even less appetizing.

He picked his way towards Darius, who had wrested himself off the ground and dusted off.

“You picked a pretty place to die! Lucky I heard your squeals, eh?” The young man smiled and took his glove off, offering his hand.

“Aye, I owe you my life sir, the name’s Darius.” Shaken from the experience, Darius took a moment to emerge from his adrenaline haze. The sun had dipped low in the sky, and the clearing took on a mystical light as deep shadow spread beneath the thick foliage.

“Pleased to meet you Darius, I’m Marth and I’m damp as a snail’s bed so let’s get ‘round a fire, shall we?”

Darius had been too preoccupied to notice the patter of rain outside the clearing. The two huddled down under their cloaks and hurried back to the sanctity of the guardhouse. As they came closer, Darius began connecting the dots. The sword and spear that saved his life were the same that he passed as he left to forage. In hindsight, he felt a fool to not think twice about finding perfectly maintained weapons in the middle of nowhere. He supposed it was equally quaint that Marth left them there in the first place.

Darius lifted his head and shouted to the young man ahead of him.

“Say, Marth, what would you have done if I had taken your weapons earlier?”

“I would’ve prayed you knew how to use them!”

Darius fell quiet, thankful he hadn’t tried his hand at wielding a sword. He forged them well, he knew, but a peaceful upbringing in his hometown of Karringlock hadn’t taught him much more than ‘stick’em with the pointy end.’

They came round the side of the guardhouse, opposite where Marth’s sword and spear had been stored earlier.

“Darn, the wood’s wet.” Marth motioned to a small stack of firewood of varying sizes, stacked neatly outside the hut. Luckily the rain had only breached the first few layers of wood, so the pair dug down and pulled out an armful each of dry fuel and took it into the guardhouse.

Once the fire had been lit, Darius and Marth took turns complaining of empty stomachs. Like Darius, Marth had underestimated the length of the journey, and after finding his pack to be ‘full of air and not-much-else', he decided to ditch the pack and travel light, surviving on foraged berries and the occasional polah if he was quick enough to catch one.

“The polah is an interesting creature.” he told Darius, “It has no sense of smell, but such great eyesight that I had to camouflage myself by climbing into hollow trees and rubbing mud on my skin and through my hair if I wanted a chance of catching one. Not worth the effort, they’re about as large as a baby Trenk, and not much tastier.”

“What on earth is –”

“A Trenk? You had a rough first impression, they’re actually quite ni –”

“No, what on earth is that?!”

Darius rushed to the entrance to get a better look. Thundering down the ramshackle Great Road was an array of men, horses, donkeys, calpahs, and behind them, carriages. Bright torches suspended in metal braziers lined the four posts of the carriages, creating the picture of wildfire careening toward them. The large wheels barely kept traction through the mess of the Great Road, with most of the unladen animals travelling on the small dirt routes on the sides of the roads, also walked by Darius just an hour earlier.

Marth strolled over to join Darius, an out of place grin on his face.

“Aha! My entourage has arrived. A shame, but I’m sure they’ll have some good grub for us!”

Darius turned to him, dumbfounded.

“Who are you?”

“To you, I’m Marth.” He continued the charade a bit longer until it was clear Darius was not impressed.

“To them -“ He gestured to the approaching horde. “I am Prince Ranvost of Barringvale, next in line for my father’s throne.”