Nestled in the heartland of Westerweald, just off the main road to the nation’s capital city, lay the sleepy hamlet of Triant, which was currently waking up to the new bright light of day. Merchants were busily erecting stalls to ply their wares in the marketplace, washerwomen made ready to head down to the river Nelvin to begin the toils of their day, and children were happily avoiding their trek to school. It was, by all accounts, a completely unremarkable day.
Except for eight men who were currently on patrol duty. At least, that’s what they called it.
Their names were not of import, nor were their careers of any particular renown. They awoke from their drunken naps at the village border, and resumed their watchful sentry down the dense forest the surrounded their cozy, if unremarkable, town. Their toll gate was sturdy, defensible, and had weathered the storms that battered the land these past few nights.
It was, by all accounts, a morning as unremarkable as any other.
And it was about to change.
“Another day, another hic! copper for the King’s men, eh boys?”
This was said by the Captain, a man who’s name his men barely even remembered. Mostly, they simply called him ‘Boss’.
“Damn right, Boss,” one of his guards said as he straightened up his greaves in the wake of the morning piss he had been taking against an old withered oak tree. “Ain’t nobody can mess with us.”
The crest on their armor bore the twin headed eagle of His Majesty, King Lysandus, who’s family name still held weight round these parts, even if the King was currently out of commission.
At any rate, when the lads stopped some weary merchant on the road at their toll booth and told him or her to pay the King’s newest toll, most of them listened up. It didn’t matter to the men whether it was because of the King’s crest or not.
All that mattered was that the cash kept flowing, and they even got to crack a few skulls every now and then.
One of them, however, had woken up on the wrong side of the tent this morning. He was a smaller man, jumpy, nervy, and the one most of the others assumed would rat them out if the old Greys ever sent some real muscle their way to clean up this cushy little operation they had going on.
“Guys…I don’t like this.”
The patrollers belched and laughed away the superstitions of their weakest member.
“Bah! Yer babbling again, Glen,” one brutish member of their brood croaked.
But little Glen was not cowed.
“I’m serious! Don’t you see those clouds? And…and haven’t you heard the rumors? You remember, don’t you?”
Glen looked from one ‘soldier’ to the other, seeing that they probably didn’t even remember what day it was right now.
“Come on, guys, that last trader we shookdow-er-I mean – collected the toll from. The one babbling about how the Lightborn and the Greycloak Commander haven’t been seen in weeks?”
“Oh right, yeah…I remember,” their captain giggled as he supped on his morning beer. “Old bastard was nuttier than a squirrel-girl’s arsehole. Bled like a bitch, too.”
As the rest of the men joined their boss in chuckling away, young Glen gulped and shouldered his spear.
“I just…don’t you think they’d have told us if the Archon was dead by now? What if the Four Pillars are right? What if the whole takeover of Lucent was just a power play by the Greys this whole time? What if…what if the Lightborn really can’t kill the demon this time?”
The men shifted uncomfortably.
“Now listen here, Glen,” the Boss said warily. “Don’t be spreading the name of the Four around. You know what they do ta those lying bastards.”
“B-but what if-“
“I’m serious, ya little twerp,” the Boss interrupted, waggling a sausage-like finger in the direction of his errant bandit-boy. “See, this is exactly what happens when ya start reading books. Ya start getting ideas in yer head. Dangerous, dumb ideas. Lemme make somethin’ perfectly clear, lad: I don’t give a Minxit’s tiny tits if the Greys fucked over the King. Just so long as they don’t mess up what we got goin’ on here. Got it?”
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Glen nodded sheepishly; his eyes more focused on the hands of his fellows as they reached for their weapons than on the boss’s words.
“Good,” the Boss said. “Stick with me, kiddo, and you’ll never go wrong. We’ll be set to retire in four or five years time the way this hustle’s going. And by that point, it won’t matter what the world looks like.”
“Listen to the Bossman, Glen,” one of the other rogues agreed, a dumb smile plastered across his barely awakened face. “Bossman’s lived longer than all of us.”
“And I’ll keep living,” the Boss chuckled. “Y’know why? Because I know my place in this world. I’m a taker, and I take. That’s what ol' Kaedmon showed me I was since I was a baby living on the streets. He gave me the ‘Rogue’ class because that’s what I’m meant to be. That’s what we’re all meant to be. If we weren’t, then how come no one’s managed to stop us?”
Glen shifted against the logic of his commander. The boy had no answer against the invocation of a God’s Law.
“Trust me, boys,” the Boss continued, “we’re gonna be eatin’ good so long as Mr Kaedmon’s in cha-“
The Boss’s valiant speech was cut short by a sudden yet distinct sound of gargling to the left of their toll gate palisade. He turned, expecting to have to reprimand one of his boys for drinking on the job again, when he saw a soldier gaps, clutching his neck, before he fell prone before him.
“What the fu-“
A flash of air – a thin line of sapphire shot through the sky and punctured the sword arm of another man. The patroller fell with a scream of pain, and his arm burned with unnatural light…
“By Kaedmon’s shiny ballocks! We’re under attack! MEN! BATTLE STATIONS!”
The remaining soldiers formed up around their Boss as her charged forward, commanding them to keep their shields up as they advanced into the foliage beyond their base – where a distinct sound of rustling leaves caught their attention.
“THERE!” he ordered his men. “Fire a volley!”
The patrollers obeyed without question, leveling their muskets and pummeling the bushes with stray shots that ripped apart not only the grassland but the trees that surrounded them.
And then, all of a sudden, a dark mist spread forth from the forest.
Before any of the men could even cry out in horror, the mist descended on them and wrapped them in a blanket of nothingness. They blinked, they flexed their sword arms, they felt the shudder of the men beside them.
“Oh – oh, oh shit oh shit oh shit…” Glen kept muttering. “It’s…it’s here!”
“Shut the fuck up and let me think for a second!” the Boss commanded. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. This is just some cheap conjurer’s trick. Me pappy knew basic magic like this. Keep yer sword up, and don’t get spooked!”
Glen would have obeyed – he wanted to, really.
But the sudden appearance of his mother’s corpse, shambling towards him like she’d risen from the grave he’d put her in five years ago, had his full attention.
“M-ma!” he yelped, letting his arquebus fall. “Holy shit! M-ma!”
The rest of the men looked similarly bemused. All except the Boss were currently shuddering with such intensity that they were about to lose control of their bodily functions.
“B-b-boss…” one man said, slowly beginning to back away. “This…this is bad. This is…evil. Evil is what it is!”
The sounds of the chirping birds were gone, replaced by nothing but an eerie silence that seemed to stretch across the earth.
And then, out of the corner of the Boss’s eye, something moved.
“There…” he whispered. “Now I’ve got you!”
He charged forward and struck at the moving shadow in the undergrowth. But instead of striking anything in particular, he felt a gust of air lift him, and the rest of his men, off their feet, propelling them right into the wall of their palisade and shattering it to pieces.
Then came another sound – that of a dragon letting loose its most bestial, powerful roar. It was so potent that the men covered their ears as they groveled before the force that was arrayed against them. The roar continued, drowning out their own screams, until they felt their armor come apart piece by piece, shredded into iron fragments that tumbled down uselessly to the darkened ground beneath them.
By this point, the men couldn’t even run. Two of them were wounded, one of them was traumatized for life, and the rest were simply sitting, open-mouthed and paralyzed with fear. They said as many prayers to Kaedmon as they could.
“B-Boss…” one man mumbled through tears. “What do we do?!”
The Boss gulped down his hesitancy, looking down at his now naked body and wishing he’d have elected to put on pants today.
Before he could even get a word out, Glen shrieked like a siren beside him.
“Look!” he yelped. “There…it…it….it’s Him!”
A shadow-wreathed figure emerged from out of the fog. At first, it was just a single creature marching up to the fallen bandits with the carefree air of a child taking an evening stroll towards home. But he was followed by four other shadows – ones far more immediately identifiable: hybrids. A cat, a bunny, a wolf and a lizard. All of them walking right up to the busted palisade wall and its occupants like they were nothing but pebbles on their path.
And that’s when it clicked with them men.
That’s when they knew who was leading the pack.
He emerged before them with a smile – the smiling face of a Salamandrike, a creature native of this part of the country. It was essentially a bipedal salamander roughly the size of an eight-year-old boy, bug eyed and slippery as hell. Once, it had been a local pastime to go Salamandrike hunting during the summer season. But most people thought the little critters were all dead during the winter.
Although, that wasn’t exactly the most surprising thing about this encounter.
What was more pressing, and what really caused the Boss of the Unofficial Triant Toll gate’s voice to finally catch in his throat this morning, was the little pointed hat sitting on top of the creature’s head.
And the voice that, he could have sworn, came out of the thing’s smiling mouth:
“Sorry about your wall,” it said. “We’ll be just passing through.”