NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Carnifex" data-source="post: 1210964" data-attributes="member: 227">Wolf sat cross-legged with his bowl of soup in his lap, quietly observing the others across the dancing flames of the fire. The man felt distinctly ill at ease, though he wasn't about to let that show through to the others. The events of the past day troubled him, and looking at the mercenaries around him he was troubled even further. Such a disparate band, and definitely not the kind of group he'd have normally considered collecting together for the mercenary trade. Kale and Sebastion maybe; both competent fighters even if Kale tended to get carried away with himself and act dangerously, and Sebastion had what Wolf considered a naive suspicion of magic. The veteran ran his fingers around the scars where his arm had been torn off, then re-attached by the Manipulator. No, magic was something to be utilised like any other tool of battle. Yet the rest of the band was so utterly mismatched for the mercenary trade, not hard-bitten fighters but a rag-tag collection of people who... Wolf suddenly realised just how young most of them were compared to himself. Burl must have been one of the oldest of Wolf's band excepting the veteran himself; reasonable enough considering how long it must take to get a solid grip on even the most basic of magic arcanae. Many of the others were barely into adulthood. He felt the responsibility weighing down on him again. He'd fought many times, killed many men, and had his share of failure. He couldn't help but let his mind drift back to the Nightmare Company. The slaughter of well over a hundred men just because he was weak. And now he had to, what, act as guardian for these young bloods. It certainly seemed that half the world and its dog was out to get certain of them. And that worried him too. This wasn't a mercenary company in any normal sense. It didn't work along the same lines as a mercenary company, for starters. Too small and personal, among other things. And their current task? Looting a probably deserted wizard's tower wasn't a job for military mercenaries, though it was the kind of thing that adventurers, as he understood the term, might do. A company. That was a better term to use, not a mercenary band. To the veteran's eyes it seemed that all that held the band together was both the vagaries of chance in bringing them all together when they needed the aid that the others could give them, and the personal relations growing between them, the friendships and not-so-friendly ties that were evident. Wolf watched Sebastion's surprise as Melisande asked for weapons training. The concept of the sorceress with a sword was evidently one that did not fit in the Huronese man's carefully ordered system of how the world should be. Rubbing a weary shoulder, he set the bowl down. The world had just been too strange of late for his liking, and it was leaving him confused. As well as a mercenary by trade, Wolf was, after all, an Azure Blade, and through the channels of information that the Blades used he was recieving worrying information. The Blades did their best at any time to be aware of current events, at least in the Middle Kingdoms and preferably further as well, and they did a decent job of it. It helped them in their attempts to hold back the darker elements where they could, like the slavers underneath Tarravus. The increase in such incidents in recent times was just one worrying sign, and the seemingly random mishaps befalling the party, with Toranite clerics chasing Burl and suchlike, just made him feel more uneasy. It didn't help that while they were out in the wilds he was cut off from any other Azure Blades. He pondered that it might, before too long, be a wise idea to let the party in on the existence of the Blades. If they understood certain key things then they could prove to be a very positive element in the scheme of things. Perhaps. * * *Wolf lay there in the deepest gloom of night, the fire barely even embers. One of the others was on watch, but he was certain they hadn't realised that the warrior was not in fact asleep at all. It didn't suit him to sleep. What Melisande had mentioned about shadows in Kandathra, before they departed for the mountains proper, came to mind in this darkness. Wolf might have been tempted to dismiss it as imagination, if he didn't know that there was certainly at least a grain of truth to the idea of shadow-beings. The Azure Blades knew that much at least. He continued to watch silently in the gloom, uneasy to his very bones about the way things were.</blockquote>

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