Fort Rannick
Fort Rannick was everything that Jokad and Jovik had hoped it would be, but each for very different reasons.
Jovik fit straight in with a crowd of the younger Black Arrows. He took to the patrols, took to the archery, took to the illicit trips to the nearby backwater where a little backroom gambling and illegal moonshine drinking became his evening norm. He took with great delight to the rather unexpected romance with Shalelu. She seemed genuinely puzzled by him. Where she was quiet, serious, and diligent, he was ... not.
And the most unexpected thing for Jovik was that he actually started to fall for her. Sure, the amazement of his fellow Black Arrows that he had 'scored' with the famously distant Shalelu, bought him some kudos that he didn't exactly avoid, but he was quick to defend any suggestion that he was just sleeping around with her. She wasn't some soft company to him.
So he started to miss out some of the trips into town. The new place that opened, some den of iniquity called Paradise that offered a little more than just gambling, would once have been a second home to him, but he ended up never visiting it. Sure, he still went out gambling and drinking with his mates, but there were certain pursuits he avoided.
He wasn't a scholar is relationships, but he felt that perhaps it was her own fiercely free spirit that made him drawn to her. And by god she was the most beautiful creature naked he had ever laid eyes upon, by miles!
And so he spent his days out and about, a representative of the Black Arrows. He found that they were much loved amongst the farmsteads and hamlets. His job was to speak with people, to gather information, and most of all just to make their presence known. There had been some horrific, barbaric ogre atrocities in this area in the past, and it was only recently, with the formation of the Black Arrows, that they had been driven off. Driven off, but not defeated. That much became clear during his time there.
Two months in, the air was touching freezing, but the snows were still perhaps a week or two away, and he had been on patrol, moving north to take in a small logging camp nestled in the forest that lay in the shadow of hook mountain. He found only one of the three loggers there. A gibbering wreck, driven close to starvation, and hiding out in the forest.
His two friends, young loggers born in the nearby village, had been slaughtered and taken by a single ogre. "A man mountain, all flesh and boils. Roiling skin that seemed to hang off him in folds. A monster, 10 feet. No 20 feet tall." The truth was probably somewhere in between.
Jovik had taken him back to the Fort. Word spread quickly. A single ogre. They liked to hunt in packs. This may just be a single outcast, or a remnant of the last tribe who decided to stay behind despite the danger from Fort Rannick.
For a few weeks patrols were doubled. Each outlying farm and camp checked. Nothing. And then the snows came, and the Fort bedded down for winter.
A winter that for Jovik would have been painfully dull, had it not been for his welcome distractions.
---
Jokad did not have the luxury of any such distractions. He saw how easily Jovik fell in with Shalelu. He envied them their easy warmth, but he saw how genuine it was, and he was happy for his friend.
He, on the other hand, did what he did best. He became a bit of a legend.
He worked himself into a sweat each and every day. Before long his muscles were stronger than they had ever been before.
He took extra tracking duty. He went on the hunts, catching deer and grouse, rabbit and pheasant with seemingly increasing ease with the magnificent bow he had picked up on his previous exploits (a bow, it should be added, that most of the other Black Arrows took to calling the Barbarian Bow, as the pull on it was too tight for most of them to budge an inch, let alone draw full back like the crazy Shoanti managed). He generally avoided the local village. It was a cess-pool of down at luck townsfolk and people seemingly hiding from civilisation. The drinking and gambling dens held no attraction to him where once they might, even if only through morbid fascination. Instead he took such energy from his physical exertions that he grew stronger, faster, and more skilled with bow and sword.
He may have been hiding from his thoughts by keeping himself busy through labour, but it worked, and it left a fantastic clarity in his mind that he grew much more at peace with himself.
On occasion he would eat with Shalelu and Jovik, perhaps joining them for a drink or two afterwards, but otherwise he slept, ate, and worked with the contingent of rangers that made up the core of the Black Arrows.
And when Jovik brought back the sole logger, it was Jokad that led the tracking party out to try and hunt down the ogre. They did not expect to find the men alive, but they hoped to at least neutralise the threat.
They found no sign of the Ogre. But then the men always seemed to keep within a certain distance of the fort, away from Hook Mountain. It was bad luck, that place, they told him. Ogres don't live up there, just evil spirits. It was a statement made as if undeniable fact. A statement the locals echoed.
He never got to actually fight anything in fury. He worked himself to exhaustion each day, rebuilding fortifications, rebuilding homesteads and perimeter traps that had been damaged in the previous ogre raids before they had been driven off. He cleared land, and then when the time came, he cleared snow.
When the winter was over, Jokad had never been in a better physical or mental state. He loved it here. He loved the simplicity of this life, and the great reward in helping people, and the fact that his skills were actually, genuinely needed.
They took to calling him 'Axe'.
