We waited until the kid realised the game was up and he turned up in front of me covered in dust from his spiderman foray under the cart. He couldn’t have been older than six years old. I think he chose to stand in front of me hoping for some leniency seeing that I was new. I knew that moment would mark my relationship with the other kids in future. It was easier for me to start from a hard foundation marked by respect, whereas looking like a pushover would make me a target for life. And kids were merciless.
“What’s your name son?”
“Kris.”
“Go sit up on the wall Kris, until I tell you to come down.”
His tasselled blond hair hung to his shoulders, as his snotty nose ran like a gravity fed river to his mouth. His clothing betrayed his poor parents’ heritage along with his dirty feet and hands. Even then he didn’t dare talk back or argue with me. Trying to sneak past the guards was one thing forgiven by punishment, but disrespect to a guard was inviting a whole universe of pain. He wordlessly hung his head down in defeat and headed for the wall, kicking a stone on the ground along the way.
“You were a bit harsh on him you know?”
Said the other guard.
“Perhaps.”
I compensated my guilty feelings against the realisation that I was saving myself more frustration later. None of the other kids tried to get past me after that day, and the little one spent the rest of the day up there. During my lunch break I took a bowl of food up to him and handed it to him. Initially he looked at me with hidden contempt, but when he noticed the food, he seemed confused.
“If you take your punishment like a man, you’ll gain my respect.”
He didn’t say anything, but he accepted the food and his demeanour improved afterwards. I liked that kid; he had a lot of promise. I released him a couple of hours after lunch. It was a long time he sat on the wall, possibly one of the longest for any kid his age. If you thought that it was light discipline for a kid just to be sitting on the wall, it was nothing to what he would be facing for missing his tasks that day. Having been punished for something wasn’t seen as an excuse for missing one’s responsibilities. In some ways it was a double punishment for Kris.
Other than that, the day was over faster than I realised. The relief guards arrived, and we could eat dinner and freshen up before bed. Since I had started being more physical during the day, especially with the blacksmithing work, I discovered I felt better when washing at the end of work but found myself doing a fuller wash in the evening followed by a lighter wash the following morning.
Around that time my beard became a problem. I increasingly looked like a grizzly bear as my bushy beard morphed into something Blackbeard the pirate approved of. Since safety razors were unknown in that world, I decided to make a straight or flat-blade razor. I used the leftovers of a kitchen knife past it’s sell-by date and when I wasn’t sharpening axe blades I was industriously hammering or honing away at my razor blade. For its handle, I used the remaining piece of the ogre ivory from my knife. The retractable blade slotted into the ivory piece parking the blade safely away. That time I spent a bit of time carving the likeness of the ogre onto the handle with my old whittling knife.
“That’s not a bad piece of work for an amateur.”
Said Grenfell.
“There must be a blacksmith in you, and here I thought you were just a useless woodcutter.”
Sheesh I wished the old man wouldn’t say that aloud. Perhaps a woodcutter overheard it and mistook me for saying that? Didn’t he realise woodcutters worked with deadly sharp instruments that could easily pass as weapons?
That night around the campfire I asked Orilay why the men cut wood while there were large monsters in the area.
“It’s not that we don’t want to leave Shane. We’re compelled to be here for the mayor’s sake.”
I learned enough up to that point, to understand that talking about the mayor seemed to be a bad idea. That he was my employer left a bad taste in my mouth, especially since the more I heard about him, the more reason I found to dislike him. That night, as I lay in bed, I couldn’t help but wonder about the unusual events that shaped my life. Thinking about strange things, my mind shifted to the necklace I wore, mainly because the bulky pendant I wore hung around my neck. My discussion about the rings while at the river with Haruhime came to mind. My silver necklace threaded through the three rings and a metal eye on the top of the green pendant. While looking at the pendant I carefully tried to find out what material the ring consisted of and discovered it was related, in part, to my knife.
“Eh?”
Every time I investigated the material of the pendant, I felt as if I were pouring water into a sponge that would eventually at some time get full. What would happen then I didn’t know? It was around then that the pendant started to glow a dull green light.
“Oh crap!”
I exclaimed absentmindedly. A sleepy voice piped up.
“Are you kidding me? Are you still up to weird things Shane?”
It seemed I had managed to wake up my room mates again.
The next morning, Haruhime greeted me in the kitchen.
“Eh, what happened to your face Shane?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
My face looked like I had a fight with a lawn mower, and I lost. I couldn’t think of a better way to describe my shaving encounter with my blade razor. Given that the best I could do for a mirror was a bit of buffed metal and there were all the ingredients for a health and safety close call. I bet no one listed that on their hazard ID that morning. Terrible to think that I had less damage fighting an ogre general.
“Um, Shane. If you would like, I could help you with that?”
I shook my head. It would be a travesty if I couldn’t shave my own face.
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I wouldn’t appreciate it, but it’s something I need to do for myself. Besides, it would be like me shaving your legs.”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Huh, why would anyone want to shave their legs? That would be dangerous.”
That seriously dented my puritan vision of women in that fantasy world. I seriously needed to invent safety razors. She giggled at my dejection while she continued peeling the windroot.
“You seem to have a knack for knife making.”
She said eyeing my newly made bush knife but then voiced a side thought.
“You’ll probably need something better than that cloth wrap for your knife. Is it okay if I make a small leather scabbard for it?”
“Could you do that for me? That would be very generous of you.”
Haruhime felt a little relieved. Ever since their trip to the river, something had changed in their relationship, as if Shane were more guarded around her. His acceptance of her help went some way to offsetting her unsettled feeling. Was it possible that he’d picked up something about her past? She wasn’t ready to talk to him about that part of her yet. She wasn’t sure if she could ever speak to anyone about it because it still held a lot of painful memories for her.
“I’ll need to take that knife from you for a while to make sure the scabbard fits, would you be willing to part with it for a short while?”
“Ah, yes, yes, no problem.”
Why on earth did I feel so self-conscious about that?
After I finished helping in the kitchen, a voice interrupted my short trip to the blacksmith after breakfast.
“Hoi, Newbie.”
The supervisor called me over to his tent. He looked a bit more edgy than usual, something terse in his tone.
“I’m giving you your own tent to sleep over in future. You can shift your stuff over as soon as you get the chance.”
“Really, my own tent?”
“Yeah, don’t get excited about that or anything. It’s just that the guys are complaining that you’re keeping them up doing all sorts of things in the middle of the night, or something like that.”
I understood the sudden change. Well, I couldn’t blame them after all those weird events. But honestly, it suited me down to the ground.
“I’m sorry that it came to that Boss, but thanks for helping me out.”
“Yeah, like I said. You’re lucky that we have a tent available for you soon. Seeing that you have so much energy at night, I’ll find something to keep you busy.”
Now why didn’t I like the sound of that?
“Oh, by the way. I’ve rescinded any non-work-related excursions outside the camp. The scouts picked up wolf-sign around the camp early this morning, so I hope you enjoyed your trip the other day, because it’s likely to be your last for a while.”
“Wolf-sign?”
“Wolves are common in this part of the woods, but they can sometimes act as scouts for the goblins especially when operating in large groups, as we noticed.”
Dad said something like that once to me. Wolves came in two sizes, the normal grey wolf and the much larger direwolves. Grey wolves hunted in packs, and on the odd occasion there would be the odd loner wondering around. It was easy to handle one grey wolf on its own, but the difficulty level increased exponentially the larger the pack you were facing. Direwolves on the other hand were as large as horses and far more menacing.
Dad once related a joke to me about a captain of a pirate ship on the seven seas that always used to ask for his red shirt when fighting British frigates. When asked by the bosun why he always used a red shirt and if the red shirt gave him luck, the pirate chuckled that it was nothing that flamboyant. The insipid truth being if the British wounded him in combat, his men’s morale would drop if they noticed him bleeding. The red shirt hid the blood from the eyes of his crew hence keeping their morale high. Imagine the bosun’s surprise when the crow’s nest reported the fast approach of ten British frigates, and the pirate captain quickly requested his brown pants. I would imagine that even facing a single direwolf would require something of the same.
I had no desire to face direwolves. I was sure our bold palisade fence would be incapable of keeping direwolves out. When news of the discovery of wolf tracks spread around the camp, it muted the lively atmosphere. I’d enjoyed the vivacity of the camp up to that point and was disappointed that news of grey wolf tracks in the area could jeopardise that camaraderie. Perhaps Haruhime could consider using a certain herb again, the only problem with that it affected everyone, including the guards.
One advantage of having my own tent was that I had another turn to try my hand at the green pendant. I was itching to see what would happen if I kept up with what I was doing the previous night. Learning from my lessons in the past, I didn’t try to do everything at once like I did with the blade, where I unexpectedly passed out. That time, under the cover of my blanket, I only applied a little bit of pressure at a time. It started to feel like I was pressurising a cylinder that had an emergency vent valve which would operate only when it reached a certain pressure. Slowly I pressurised the pendant little by little with whatever was passing from me to the pendant. As a result, it started to permanently shine a green light. Since I didn’t want the whole bloody camp to know what I was experimenting with, I wrapped the pendant in a soft leather wrapping and kept it under my shirt. That way I slowly charged the device throughout the day until I could somehow sense the pendant was close to collapse. I was very eager to see if the pendant met my expectations when that night, under the cover of my blankets in my own tent finally I had an opportunity to try it out. Had I known what would follow next, I would have been far more careful when playing with fire.
A noiseless green colour flashed so bright it blinded me for a split second, but it was by far more intense in my brain. Any concern that someone might have seen the green flash, promptly overwritten by an almighty pain in my head. It became the mother of all migraines as I barely held onto consciousness. I felt something alien penetrating my brain like a bullet train smashing at full speed into a wall. My thoughts shifted from pain to basic survival as I tried my hardest to breathe, biting hard into my blanket as I teetered on the edge between sanity and madness. A calm female voice said to me,
There was so much pain in my eyes and head I tried following the voice’s advice. Like an arcade game of centipede, I watched nerve cells of my brain popping as the centipede ate its way through my brain. Every time a nerve cell burst; I would paste and copy it with another one nearby. The game rules were simple, replace the nerve cells as quickly as they burst or face the possibility of me reacting slower. Instinctively I knew that missing a nerve cell would accumulate the damage, slowing me down further. Not knowing when the game would end meant that I couldn’t afford to slack because the centipede would kill too many nerves and if that happened, I understood I might never wake up.
Whether it was seconds, minutes, or hours I no longer knew. It felt like an eternity and eventually, even those more capable than others have limits and I blissfully blacked out.
I was rudely awoken when a gruff voice, coupled with Grenfell’s curt looking face appeared at the door of my tent.
“Why are you sleeping when you should be working? If you carry on like this the boss is going to dock your pay you know.”
I groaned as my muddled brain tried to make sense of my circumstances. I knew enough to know that I was in trouble if Grenfell had to get me. I groaned again when I realised that I had missed the breakfast kitchen duty again. My bed was wet with something, sweat or urine, I wasn’t sure. Grenfell misinterpreted my groaning as my moaning.
“Stop moaning and get on with it. I swear you look like you’ve been drinking last night if I didn’t know you any better. Go wash your face before you turn up, and don’t let the boss see that you’re late or there’ll be hell to pay.”
Luckily, my poor attempt to keep a low profile wasn’t noticed as I shuffled to the ablutions. Hiding behind the partition, I slowly tried to piece my last memories together again. Slowly the jigsaw puzzle I called a memory came together again and I recalled everything up to the point of me passing out. But what happened after that? Was that perhaps just a bad dream, did I drink too much that I passed out? I would have eagerly gone with that premise had it not been for the next shock that sobered me instantaneously. The pendant wasn’t green anymore it looked like clear-cut crystal.
“What the…”
Where did the greenness go? Eh, you might be thinking what I was thinking. That green stuff went inside of me. Thoughts of “The Thing” or “Aliens” entered my imagination. I didn’t seem to have any unusual stomach problems, at least not at that time. The rest of the day I spent manically checking every nuance of a potential physical or psychological problem to the point of becoming clinically OCD. That evening when nothing happened, I finally collapsed on my bed and sighed a sigh of relief.
“Whatthebloodyhellwasthat?”
I looked around me because it seemed the female voice came from everywhere at once. No, it was inside my mind like 3D sound. Come to think of it, I remember that voice before I previously blacked out.