Dr Midnight
Explorer
Prologue
On the King’s Road
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On the King’s Road
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Berak was a small, fat, and racially ambiguous creature. He seemed either halfling or dwarf, but was most likely both. No one was rude enough to ask.
BERAK’S FINE TRADE GOODS was painted on the side of the loaded wagon. Two aged mules led the cart. Berak held the reins loosely and chewed a sun-hardened strip of rawhide as he guided his cart, clonking and banging, up the rutted road.
“Fine adventure we’re having, eh?” he laughed. He spat between his teeth. “Think we’ll spot any skeletons that we can fight with magical swords?” Berak waited for his employees to answer, but they’d stopped rising to his jabs the day before. He cackled again.
He had hired, a week back, a small company of unseasoned adventurers. They had been trying unsuccessfully to break into the field of dungeoneering, which Berak considered to be a pointless and overly romanticized occupation that reeked of the kind of muddleheaded thought that got people killed. The group had run out of money and had had to accept the trader’s offer of three gold pieces a week to accompany his carriage as foot guards.
“It ain’t like the songs they sing, is it?” he asked after a time. “All dragons and flying horses and such. No. It’s commerce that drives the world we live in. Commerce! And now you’re finally coming around and contributing to the gain of society. Keep at it and someday you’ll be where I am.” He spat again. “You lot aren’t talkative today.”
The five adventurers had been walking since they’d left Farheyn that morning. They were hot, tired, and irritable. The ghost of their failures as an adventuring party hung over them, along with the gray promise of working for people like Berak for the rest of their lives. Adventuring in the big city had proved ponderous. It was every child’s dream but when you grew up, you saw too late that there were no ways to get started; the existing groups cemented their reputation, and thus got all the contracts. There was no way to get a job without experience, and no way to get experience without a job. This job wasn’t like in the stories.
“Cheer up,” Berak offered. “We’ve got one last stop at Winterhaven, then in the morning we turn back for civilization.” He was right about the first part.
The road kept stretching on for miles, and the company of BERAK’S FINE TRADE GOODS kept walking it.
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