"Men who can and will fight, then do so"
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Thalin snapped his head up as a flurry of small birds swirled overhead. Their furious forms blurred away from the tree line in a cacophony of squawks.
Rising from his crouch next to the sleeping knight, Thalin slowly guided his hand to the hilt of
Shard as he scanned the dense foliage.
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“By all the gods, demons and devils,” exclaimed a portly priest as he was helped to his feet, his eyes full of incomprehension as he surveyed the burnt ruins of the hall. Torious gripped the hand of another villager from the darkness of the basement and hauled them into the afternoon light.
A young woman passed a crying baby into Torious' waiting hands. As she pushed the infant to safety, Torious saw a dirty red cloak was slung around her shoulders. Before Torious could react, she had ducked back into the darkness. A moment later, the woman’s head returned into the pool of light.
“There are only two more left now. A grandson and grandma,” said the woman with the red cloak as she squinted up at Torious from the shadows of the basement. Torious gazed back, his words suddenly lost in the woman’s steely brown stare. She let the stare linger a moment too long before dropping back down.
A rasping voice drifted up from the darkness, “I’m not his grandma. Simply a guardian…”
“Whatever you say, but you still need to get out of this pot boiler,” said the disembodied voice of the woman in return.
A young man of about seventeen appeared in the spotlight of sun, his black hair wild and unkempt. He looked up as Torious offered a hand to help him, but instead he jumped and gripped the basement edge, hauling himself into the light without a word.
Milo chatted excitedly to one of the halfling villagers, happy to have found a fellow half-man in a situation such as this. Keeping half an eye on the basement exit, Milo suddenly trailed off his sentence as a young man with black, unkempt hair pulled himself out of the basement.
Milo blinked once, then looked again.
I've seen him somewhere before… but where?
- - - - - - - - - -
Thalin pounded up the steps to the town hall, skidding to a halt in the doorway entrance. A loud, guttural roar echoed past Thalin and everyone in the hall turned in surprise to look at the silhouetted ice mage.
“Ettins! In the village!” shouted Thalin before ducking back out of the door in a flurry of robes.
The villagers began to panic, their momentary sanctuary from the marauding knights shattered by this new threat. The women and children rushed towards the back of the town hall with a symphony of frightened screams, picking their way across the scattered debris in the hope of finding a hiding place.
The woman in red snapped her head back into the darkness as she heard the mages warning, “Curses. The old woman can wait. Here, help me up”.
She extended a gauntleted hand to Torious, who faltered for a moment then helped her into the light. Her face was coated with a sheen of sweat from the heat of the basement and her hair was plastered against her forehead. Despite this, a few slivers of beauty shone through from beneath her overworked exterior.
“Wait… there are ettins… you might get hurt,” uttered Torious, doubting his own words as he looked at the tarnished half-plate and the longsword slung at her side.
Pushing herself to her feet, she threw a playful glance back at Torious, “Don’t worry about me. You can stay here and help out the old woman if you’re scared.”
With that, the woman in red dashed out of the hall. Torious stood unmoving for a moment, his thoughts reeling as he tried to sift through his own judgements and the dead priest’s warnings about the woman in red. The distinct hiss of Thalin’s icy bolts followed by a thundering roar of pain from outside brought Torious to his senses. He unsheathed
Freedom’s Edge.
“Men who can and will fight, then do so,” shouted Torious over the chaos of noise around him, “women and children take shelter at the rear of the hall.”
Surveying the beginnings of the skirmish at the base of the steps, Torious watched as five men rushed out of the hall to join the fray. Stepping into the light, Torious glanced back to check for any remaining volunteers. Instead, his eyes met the sight of the wild-haired man carefully helping an aging woman from the basement. Her wiry body was draped with sleek red robes. A heavy hood shadowed her face from the afternoon light…
To be continued in…
Ice, Luck and Honour
Chapter 9: Eye of the Blizzard
The heroes valiantly defend against the maraudering ettins, but as the combat rages, a bizarre twist of fate snares the attention of a deity. As tempers flare and suspicions clash over the true identities of the mysterious women in red, the heroes attempt to guide the homeless villagers through a deadly mountain pass.
