I do feel a twinge of error in that I don't really have a 'wartorn' story as much as I have a 'cool story that involves characters who were in a war but isn't
entirely about postwar stuff'.
Anyway, sure, I'll post my sampler again. I sent mine in on the 18th.
Chapter One
Hot, dry wind blew dust off the Talenta Plains, and in through the cracked door of the House of Healing. A muffled rattle and a weary creak filled the otherwise silent building as a gust pressed at the door, swinging it inward and out again. Papers cracked and fluttered on the desks of the halfling bookmenders, but they worked on, healing in their own lonely way.
A sudden alarm sounded, and throughout the building a dozen short heads looked up in shock. The magical ring alerted them to an intruder in the House, and they grabbed weapons and rushed to the entrance, fearing brigands, monsters, or worse.
Instead they saw a swaggering human, dressed in a long rumpled coat. He was dark-skinned, his black hair fading to white in patches. Sweat beaded his forehead, and with a smug grin he glanced out the main door to the sandstorm. He shook out his coat with over-exaggerated motions, as if to get dust off of it, but it was apparent that he had not come in from the desert. His boots were wet.
“Hell of a place you got here,” he said.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead as he spoke, revealing a blue design etched on his wrist. The dragonmark glowed faintly, having been used recently. The halfling librarians raised their daggers and wands nervously toward the intruder.
From the office on the opposite side of the entry foyer, the head of the hospital strode toward the human, displeasure on his face. Though only three feet tall, anyone there would have been certain the halfling was staring down at the intruder.
“Parison,” the human laughed.
“Hawkins d’Orien,” said Parison. He shook his head. “You’re not welcome here. I don’t want bounty hunters coming through here chasing after you.”
Hawkins took off his coat and began to fold it, looking down at the crowd of halflings. Bemused, he said, “I thought you all were supposed to be . . . hospitable to strangers.”
“That’s House Ghallanda, idiot. Bums who live in the streets can tell the difference. I suppose House Orien just isn’t that well informed.”
“Oh yes.” Hawkins half-rolled his eyes. “We don’t have time to learn things about people. We’re too busy taking their money.”
Parison chuckled. “Well I see that part of your upbringing has stuck.”
“You kidding? I hate my god damned family.” Hawkins snorted, then looked around again. “Can you call off the hounds or something?”
Parison waved for the others to get back to work, and the group slowly dispersed. He turned back toward his office and waved for Hawkins to follow.
“You look like hell, Hawk. Where’ve you been?”
Hawkins rubbed his wrist, still warm to the touch after the teleport, then tossed a jangling necklace onto Parison’s desk before the halfling could get seated. It was silver chain strung through ten short talons of gold, each sparkling with a different color gem powder.
“No,” Parison said emphatically. “Not a chance.”
“Hey,” Hawkins laughed, “you said I looked like hell. Heal me, then. Help me get better by giving me some money for that. Got it in Q’barra. Interrupted some ritual or another in a swamp. It’s probably not cursed.”
He pulled out a thin, rolled cigarette, and lit it with a cantrip.
“Dammit, Hawk. That’s bad for the books.”
Hawkins took a drag on his cigarette and slid his gaze slowly across the tiny office. Its shelves were crowded with damaged, aged books and scrolls, entrusted to House Jorasco, bearers of the dragonmark of healing. This tiny library, sitting in the middle of a desert near the Talenta Plains, was dry enough to slow the books’ decay, and remote enough that few travelers came without legitimate business.
Hawkins exhaled smoke. “This ‘book’ thing is paying pretty well, ain’t it?”
“You’re out of luck.” Parison tossed the necklace back to Hawkins. “I can’t find a buyer for this. Too many people are looking for you, what since you decided to turn yourself in for your own bounty. That went over well.”
“I didn’t ‘try’,” Hawkins said. “I did. I’m a very hard man to catch. I expected to be well-rewarded for my troubles.”
“Then that’d better last you. You’re upsetting a lot of people, and I’m not going to get in their way when they show up to catch you.”
Hawkins took another draw on his cigarette, glaring quietly at the halfling as his last words hung in the air.
“No one can catch me. I steal from rich people, and they can hire bounty hunters to make themselves feel better about it. I make a point to only upset people who can afford to ignore me.”
“Well that theory doesn’t pan out. You’re irritating me.”
Hawkins smiled, and pressed the stolen gold and silver necklace back onto the desk.
“I’m just trying to make you a rich man, Parison. Anyway, if I do get caught and scuffed up a little, I promise to come to you exclusively for healing.” He chuckled.
Parison began looking over the item, but he kept talking. “You’d be a waste of my time. You know, during the war I healed actual heroes. People who would have sacrificed their lives for others. The best thing you have going for you is that you’re the only person who ever comes out here.”
“Yeah, great job on that,” Hawkins said. “It was really nice of you all to keep everyone alive and fighting so that the war could go on longer. Hell, I don’t know what we could’ve done without you.”
“Was that what you were thinking when your wife died? ‘It’s a good thing no one’s here to stop the bleeding’?”
The windblown door of the House of Healing clattered in the silence that followed. It wasn’t until after Hawkins finished his cigarette that he replied. He dropped the remaining burnt paper on the floor and stamped it out, then stood and leaned down over Parison’s desk.
“I’m heading to Breland,” Hawkins said. “I need accurate maps of a couple of the towns along the lightning rail.”
Parison looked down uncomfortably, then glanced away.
“My wife,” Hawkins started to say, but then he stopped himself. He stood up straight, backing away from the desk. “You must have just loved the war. It gave you something to do, since all you’re really good for is fixing other people’s mistakes.
“Hell, everyone was happier during the war. People cared about what they were doing, because they were fighting for their futures. And you see how that’s turned out. We’re living in that future now, and everyone just has to keep telling themselves that things are better. Everybody’s too afraid to doubt it.
“We got to be heroes during the war. Even I was known to do the occasional good deed. But now all I have are. . . . What? Medals and celebrations from people I don’t know, because everyone I cared for is dead? And you, you’ve got a house in the middle of the desert, and I’m your best friend, so you know your life is worthless.
“If people could be like me, they would be. I suffered through enough
in the war. I’m entitled to take what I want. And no one is going to catch me.”
Hawkins paced for a moment, then sighed and kicked the foot of Parison’s desk. “Great job. Now this is just awkward.”
“Eight or nine hundred,” Parison said softly. “Give me a month?”
Hawkins glanced at the necklace. He nodded slowly. A moment later he was relaxed and grinning. “Sounds good. Now will you show me some maps, or do I have to get emotional again?”
He and Parison laughed ruefully, and the halfling quickly found something sufficient for Hawkins’ needs. The rebel from House Orien tucked the sheaves of paper under one arm and closed his eyes to concentrate on his destination, but Parison spoke before he could teleport away.
“You are actually a friend. I know a lot of your friends end up dead, and I’m sorry I never had a chance to say goodbye to Shela and Kev. There are things worse than wounds that need healing. I hope you’ll come back soon, friend.”
Hawkins smirked. “And that just shows stupid and sentimental halflings are. Oh, and why not look into lowering the ceiling a bit more before the next time I come? Big hero healer’s got nothing better to do than pick splinters out of my scalp.”
Then, with a few short words of magic, he was gone. Again the House of Healing was silent, as it always was. Amid the rot and must of dying books, only the heat pressing in from the summer sandstorms made the place feel alive.
* * *
Labeth Porter’s canoe came to a sudden stop, pressing sharply upon a carved stone that jutted out of the Brelish swamp. Labeth hadn’t seen the obstacle in the haze of humidity and slime coating the marsh, but now she could make out many similar stones just below the surface, stretching away toward the village that was her destination. A week ago this land would have just been muggy, but summer rains had swept over Breland. The land was abuzz with mosquitoes and droning frogs. She had had to boat her way here, with no road to guide her.
Just another thing getting in her way, minor enough compared to what she had faced before. A simple flood wasn’t going to deter her.
She tied a rope to the guide pole and rammed it down through the water, into the muck below as a makeshift anchor. Confidently she stood, slender and tall, rising above the fog over the swamp. She wore the same chain armor that had protected her in the Last War. Her Aundair military overcoat was covered with patches where she had torn off her medals, long-since sold. Her brown hair lay limp from the heat, slumping down to her proud shoulders, loosely framing her face’s otherwise crisp angles. The white crystal pendant her dead husband had worn lay upon her chest, reflecting a glare from the sun up across Labeth’s chin. She reached up and held it lightly, and for a moment her weary blue eyes were free from the strain of obligation.
Then, with a frown, she lifted her weapon and shield from the bottom of the canoe, and began to walk toward the village, using the short stones as steps across the water. The high twang of guitar music soon emerged from the sounds of the swamp, and Labeth walked to its tired beat. Stone to stone she stepped, until an old wooden house emerged from the hot morning haze. A man sat on the porch, bent over a guitar. His feet dangled in the green waters as he played out an old folk song.
“Old man,” she called to him, “I was told this town had a seer. I’m looking for him.”
The man placed a palm on the guitar strings, silencing them. “I am he.”
He looked up, then leaned back and waved her forward. “Come in outta there, if you would. I don’t like seeing visitors desecrate our dead.”
Labeth paused and peered down into the water, noticing now faint writing on each of the stones. Each had a name. She looked back to her tiny canoe, but the boat was hidden by reeds and dense, hot mist. This made her smile.
“You knew I had a boat. Is the rest of your prophesying as good?”
The man laughed, a deep sound that shook his body. Labeth could not help but feel the laugh belonged to a larger man, but the seer looked recently lean, the hunger not yet having eaten away at his spirit. She walked over to him, still walking across headstones until she could step onto the stairs and the porch.
From the porch, she surveyed the rest of the tiny swamp village. Tall grass and weeds surrounded many of the buildings, their owners having long since left. Labeth could tell the occupied houses by the skinned and cut birds and rabbits adorning their walls, hanging to cook in the sun. The scent of spiced cooking filled the air, stronger than the musk of the swamp. A pair of men sat on one house’s porch, content to watch the waters drift by their town.
“Let’s go inside,” she said.
The seer nodded, stood, and showed her inside his home. He left his guitar out on the porch.
The inner room was decorated with the cast-offs of a life of war. Trophies, a dented shield, a notched mace – all hung on the wall like paintings of dead relatives. Floor, walls, and many shelves were covered with unlit candles, and a wasp hovered around its nest in a corner of the ceiling.
The seer circled around the room, lighting candle to candle, closing blinds on windows as he passed them. Low firelight bathed the room, and the man moved to the center of the ring of candles. He tossed a pinch of incense into the air, and the flames suddenly rolled from orange to brilliantly gleaming silver.
“Three hundred gold,” the man said. He gestured to a large empty urn sitting on a windowsill.
When Labeth hesitated, the man added, “I can’t see the question you’re going to ask, woman, but I knew you would come. The price is set. Don’t worry, child. I know you can afford it.”
She smiled angrily, and rummaged through her pack for a few notes of mark. She held them up for him to see the amount, and then placed them in the urn. The man nodded and gestured for her to proceed.
“I need money,” she said. “Several thousand in gold. You’re going to tell me where I can get it quickly. Find me a nice caravan carrying gems, or a rich merchant who’s going to get lost in the woods. Anything works.”
The seer frowned, then shrugged and bowed his head. He muttered words of a spell under his breath, and the incense he had sprinkled on the floor vanished in a burst of silver flame. Labeth laughed to herself at the display, then waited. The man was silent for a long stretch, and Labeth shifted her weight impatiently.
Finally, just as she opened her mouth to speak, the candle flames turned from silver back to orange. She closed her mouth and waited for her answer.
“Southwest of here,” the man said, “near Baran’s Keep, there’s a village called Woodridge. Be there in eight days, at sunset. A man who has stolen a great treasure will be there. He has a great bounty which you can collect.”
“Anything else you can tell me?”
“Sorry, girl, but no. Something tells me you’re not going to pay another three hundred, so I hope that was useful enough. When you leave, try not to walk through the graveyard. They don’t like it when folk do that.”
“I doubt they’re coming back any time soon,” Labeth said.
The man shook his head disapprovingly and turned to snuff out the candles. While he was looking away, Labeth pulled out a short wand from her sleeve. The man began to speak to chide her, but his words were cut off. The room fell into complete silence, lacking even the humming drone of the swamp.
The seer wheeled to look at her, his face full of shock and fear. Labeth rushed toward him and slammed her shield in his face, knocking him to the floor. The man tried to trip her, tried to scream, but the magical silence was absolute. He managed to pull Labeth’s dagger from her boot sheath, but she backed away from his slash. He rolled away and crawled to cover behind a table, but she kicked the table away and slammed down her flail, striking the seer’s arm and knocking the dagger from his grasp. The beaten man glared up to her from the floor, clutching his broken arm. Though he was no doubt a skilled spellcaster, in the silence he could not call for his magic. Nor could he call for help.
It took several strikes before the man stopped moving. She tore through the small house for the next few minutes, finding anything of value she could carry, including the silver urn and the money she had paid him. Before she left, she kicked the man to make sure he was still breathing, and then she cancelled the silence spell. Chuckling, Labeth thought to herself that a seer should have been less surprised.
She stopped outside the door and picked up the guitar, about to take it, but then reconsidered. Money was free for the taking, but she could not bring herself to take the man’s spirit. She gently laid the guitar back onto the porch, then headed back to her boat, walking from headstone to headstone.
* * *
The sky roiled with strange purple energies as the warforged known as Alloy stared down the pacing hellbeast. Alloy’s a weary carver dinosaur mount nearly balked, but the warforged soothed the creature, then sat high in his saddle, raising his glaive high, preparing to charge. No rain fell here in the Mournland, but lightning crackled overhead, and the mist-filled air seemed to tear beneath the roar of thunder.
The misshapen, twelve-foot tall, misshapen monster circled Alloy and his mount. Dozens of arrows pierced its hide, the result of hours of hunting and harrying. Its leonine body crackled with flames, and four jagged horns curled from its head. Its burnt flesh was a rotten black, sloughing off in thin sheets as the creature moved. It was one of the less revolting creatures of the Mournland.
Compared to its bleak decaying presence, and to the lifeless expanse of the gray plains around them, Alloy and his mount stood out in brilliant, colorful defiance. The dinosaur’s scales were striped with the red, yellow, and blue of Talenta halfling warpaint, from its saw-toothed mouth to the six-inch long raking talons on its feet. Seated firmly atop his steed, Alloy too was bedecked in Talenta designs. A mantle of dinosaur hide was stretched across a bow of wood that lay across his shoulders. Two long, sharpened bones came up from the sides of his saddle like spikes, they too painted with dagger-shaped designs. Inlaid wood etched across the warforged’s body of metal armor in criss-crossing lines, and the gleaming turquoise inlaid around his mouth resembled the snarling, toothy grin of a hunting dinosaur.
Lightning flashed again, and sixty feet away the hellbeast reared up to its two hind legs, then roared and slammed to the ground in a charge. A synthetic sigh passed from Alloy’s metal lips, and he spurred his mount to meet the charge.
The hellbeast lowered its head, preparing for a gore, but at the last moment Alloy shifted his weight to the left, and his carver mount swung sideways. Alloy slashed down with the glaive, tearing through the beast’s right flank as it trampled past them. Alloy shouted a short warcry, then wheeled his mount about to face the beast.
Charred black hooves dug into the cracked ground, and the beast twisted in its charge and angled for Alloy. Its tusked mouth distended open, and a gout of flame burst out. The carver leapt upward above most of the flame, and in midair Alloy shifted his glaive to point downward. Still charging, the horrid beast ran straight into their path, and Alloy’s glaivepoint drove into the creature’s shoulder, thrusting deep under the weight of mount and rider. The carver itself grasped with its foreclaws onto the beast’s face, and the sickle claw on its hind foot began to tear at the bony extrusions around the monster’s eyes.
The beast rolled onto its side suddenly, spilling the carver off its face, and Alloy from his saddle. He fell to the ground painfully, feeling an inner plating collapse from the impact. Worse, though, he heard the loud snap of his glaive’s shaft shattering under the beast’s crushing, rolling weight. Alloy pressed himself to his knees and looked up. The hellbeast towered over him, a short shaft of wood sticking up from its shoulder. The massive creature lashed out with a hoof and kicked Alloy to the ground, then planted the full weight of its foreleg atop him, grinding him into the dust of the Mournland plain.
Alloy pulled a shortsword from his hip sheath and thrust it upward, fast enough to keep the monster’s goring horns at bay. The hellbeast opened its mouth and snarled, and Alloy saw a red glow rising up its throat.
With a screech, the carver leapt upon the hellbeast’s already slashed flank. Ignoring the flames that seared out from the wound, the dinosaur bit and tore at the monster, rending huge streaks of flesh from its back. The decaying demon flesh collapsed into black dust as it fell away, and the creature reared up, trying to drive the dinosaur from its back. Its weight pulled away from Alloy’s chest, and the warforged rolled clear.
Free from the monster’s pin, Alloy charged for its foreleg and jumped, digging his metal fingers into cracks of flesh, using for handholds the arrow shafts that still stuck out of its body. He reached the remains of his glaive and tore it free, then began jabbing it down into the monster’s unarmored neck and shoulders, while just a few feet away his mount carved away at the beast’s flank.
Suddenly, the monster lashed its head sideways, and one of the jutting horns struck Alloy. The horn crunched metal and impaled the exposed wood of his shoulder joint. He grimaced, but grabbed onto the horn as the beast tried to pull away. Clinging with his mangled arm, he used his free hand to drive the tip of his glaive at the hellbeast’s eye. Several strikes missed, deflected by bone ridges, but he kept attacking. Another gout of fire breath seared Alloy’s dangling legs, and the creature twisted and tried to swing him free, but he would not let go. Finally, desperately, the beast tried to roll again. Alloy braced the remainder of his glaive, and as the monster’s weight fell upon him, it drove the blade through the creature’s eye and into its brain.
The huge creature went limp, and Alloy was pinned. Fire began to seep from the dead monster’s wounds, and though he struggled, the warforged could not escape. The last sound he heard before he succumbed to the pain was the barking of the carver as it tried to free him.
First came simple unconsciousness, and he felt nothing. But then awareness washed over him. Something crept into the warforged’s mind for the first time ever, and in its presence, Alloy dreamed.
He stood at the edge of a great rift in the earth, black, but alive with the sound of waterfall and wildlife. The ground around him was covered in grass and trees, swaying gently in the sunlight, and in the distance across the rift, someone called to him. A boy, too distant for his voice to be heard.
Overhead, something larger but less tangible than a moon swept across the face of the sun, and the ground shook in shadow. Gray steam shot up from the ground surrounding the rift, and screams called out from below. Without caring how or why, Alloy was no longer in his body, and his will sped through the air above the rift, trying to reach the boy, to save him.
The boy was just close enough for Alloy to see his face when the deadly mist began to roll across him. The boy’s expression showed no fear, and it seemed as if he was waiting for someone. A scar of some sort marked his face, stretching from his left temple, across his cheek and nose, and down to the right of his chin. As the mist began surrounding him, hiding him, the scar began to glow a faint blue. The boy’s eyes still stared out at Alloy from within the glowing scar, and then the gray mist swept over him. The blue glow was still visible for just a moment, but then even that was obscured.
Removed from his body, Alloy floated above the rift, now dark and seemingly bottomless. Mist rolled into it from all sides, and in the depths of the mist, far below in the blackness, he could feel something trying to break free.
Alloy awoke.
His mount had managed to drag him free from the hellbeast’s corpse, which was now just a flickering lump of ash, slowly being blown away by the wind. He was burnt badly, and his mount was injured perhaps worse. He had slain the beast like he had promised, and he knew he could return to his tribe now. But he shook his head. Alloy had never had a dream before, if that was what it was, and he could not dismiss it so easily. Everywhere he looked, he could faintly see the outline of the dragonmark, as if it had been burned across his eyes.
“The boy was calling for help. I need to find him.”
He looked to his wounded companion, and patted the dinosaur’s snout lightly. Then he touched the carved figurine that hung on the chain around his wrist, and with a thought, dismissed the conjured creature, to let it heal.
For a while, he sat quietly on the empty Mournland plain, alone. Then he stood, recovered the remains of his weapons, and turned west, toward the city where all secrets lie, toward Sharn. Hiking away slowly, Alloy sighed.
“Stupid world,” he muttered. “You’re always taking advantage of my good nature.”
