Mad_Jack
Legend
I just signed up for D&D Beyond... Wow, that really is useless unless you start throwing money at it, isn't it?
Edit: Huh... Just found an old piece of writing I did for one of the Character Challenges on the old WotC forums... Sweet - I lost the original copy of it when my previous puter drowned in the basement flood.
I writes some good stuff at 4 AM, lol
Edit: Huh... Just found an old piece of writing I did for one of the Character Challenges on the old WotC forums... Sweet - I lost the original copy of it when my previous puter drowned in the basement flood.
I writes some good stuff at 4 AM, lol
(copypasted from an old Reaper forum post)
This is my entry for the Character Challenge V: The Betrayal over on the D&D character development forum...
We were given this as an inspiration, and asked to explain who the character was and how he came to that point....
"How is it that one mistake can so ruin a man's life? I was a child when I experienced my greatest failure and still it haunts me. I am tossed aside, a useless, broken tool because I was foolish as a youth. There is no choice for me anymore. Or rather there is but one choice. I can choose a life of service and duty; struggling, forever in vain, to regain their approval. So too, could I run and hide, lost forever in my own shame. But I will bear this shame no longer. I will tear down those who would never forgive me. I will show them their own weakness and what a strong, proud man I have become. I will show them that they are not better. And when I have crushed them with a strength they refused to see in me they will know what they lost in turning their backs on me.
Your challenge is to tell me who this man is and how he came to be."
This is the story I submitted, that fell out of my brain at around 5 am... lol
Disclaimer: I hadn't planned to write a minor novel, but it was 4 am when I started and that's usually when I end up writing epic sagas....
"The Silent One"... Senjen Brook, NE ranger
Fourteen years.
That's how long it has been since any in the village spoke my name, or that I spoke to them at all.
Fourteen years have I been silent, and ten of those have I wandered the vale and the forest beyond, fending for myself. Thriving on my own after they turned their backs to me and cast me out. Not with clubs or strong hands upon my shoulders, but with silence. With cold stares and half-heard whispers born of the knowledge that I would indeed hear them. Never would they lower themselves to banish me for my crime, but they thought not twice of lowering me so that I might banish myself and trouble their consciences no more.
For it is indeed in their consciences that the true crime took place - that they judged me for the crime of being a child too small to know better.
It was in my fifth year that the raiders came. My father and oldest brother worked the fields to the north of the village that day, and my mother and sisters sat in front of Mother Darbet's cottage and shelled peas while my brother Sarn cleaned the house. He was being punished that day for breaking Mother Darbet's window and was not allowed to accompany the men to the fields as the rest of the boys of ten seasons did. (He was always being punished for something, and seemed to prefer me as his victim above all others, as I was to blame for his loss of our mother's dotage upon him as the youngest child.) I sat at my mother's feet and played in the dirt more frequently than I helped her shell the peas.
The sun was dropping in the sky, slowly tinting the blue sky with gold when the first cloud of dust rose over the trees that ran along the trade road until it turned to skirt our village before the river bridge. (Of all the horrors of that day, I can most clearly remember the image of that magical sky that exists only in the brief hours before the sun truly begins to paint the sky red as it sets.)
No one bothered to look up to see who it was that rode so thunderously into our midst - riders came at all hours of the day and sometimes at night, always rushing along on whatever their business was and we never asked what that business might be, as it wasn't ours and thus not our concern. We were farmers and craftsmen before the trade guilds built the roadhouse that made our village one stop among many on the trade road, and we were farmers and craftsmen yet. The travelers on the road held no great interest for us.
And so we were taken by surprise when the thunderous sounds of hoofbeats surged towards us rather than slowing to a stop at the roadhouse. I heard a long high scream shatter the everyday noise of the village, pitching up into a banshee wail before it cut off abruptly with a wet gurgle. The sounds of shouting, angry men were all around us, and the stink of leather and horses assaulted my nose as I looked around in confusion. Mother screamed and dropped her basket of peas. My sisters began to cry. Suddenly, Mother shouted something at me...
But I couldn't hear her - my senses were overwhelmed by the sight of an enormous black horse stamping its hooves furiously into the dirt before me, my eyes barely at the top of its foreleg. Atop the horse, like some furious god sitting astride a mountain, sat a man easily a forearm's length taller than my father (who to me was a giant with his head scraping the clouds). The horse surged forward, and I was nearly trampled as my mother pulled me to her tightly, taking the brunt of the horse's impact which threw us both to the ground. The man on the horse, helmed and bearded, clad in dark armor with bright studs and vicious spikes, yelled something at my mother in a language which hurt my ears before turning and violently spurring his huge horse off in another direction. I remember the sensation of Mother wrenching me up from the ground by my arm, then I have a sense of running, being half-dragged, as she gathered my two sisters and I and fled toward our own cottage, at the opposite end of the lane from Mother Darbet's.
As we fled in blind panic toward our cottage Mother held little Mirren in her arms and clasped the hand of Madden, who at twelve was nearly old enough to birth children of her own, while Sarn gripped my hand fiercely and nearly ripped my arm from my shoulder as he dragged me stumbling toward home. Nearly every cottage we passed held scenes of indescribable bloodshed and horror as the raiders crashed their huge black horses through the doors of our homes, riding them right into the cottages themselves in order to drag the occupants screaming and thrashing in unholy terror from the safety of the dwellings that held what had previously been their lives. A horse thundered past, nearly running Mother down, then another, and yet a third thundered past, dragging the torn body of Smith by a rope round its neck. Near to the raider's goliath of a horse, Smith's body looked even frailer than ever - no hewed-from-stone hard-muscled blacksmith was he, despite the name. Smith had been the scribe who kept the books for the roadhouse, and who taught us village children our letters and figures. As I reeled from the sight and fled again towards home, I suddenly giggled, bizarrely struck by the thought that today I wouldn't have to listen to that snotty brat Sabrah, who was legendary for preening and showing off the bright red apple that Smith bestowed upon the best student of the day, which she was awarded with sickening regularity.
My surreal musings were interrupted by the sight of Feldan, the village glazier, our neighbor, being hurled bodily through the large window he'd so lovingly crafted for the front of his cottage. Mother hurried us into the kitchen of our own cottage and overturned the table for us to cower behind. We could smell the sharp smoke of our village being set aflame as black wisps drifted slowly in through the shattered front door. Though it had been no more than a single bell since the beginning of the apocalypse our village had become, it seemed like we'd run for bells on end. We huddled, shaking and tearful, behind our table for an eternity that was in truth no more than fifteen minutes. The tattered form of Feldan, our neighbor, lay facedown in the lane outside, blood slowly dripping from a horrific wound in his temple.
We began to catch our wind as we curled together in a tight ball of shattered souls, minds blasted into numbness by the enormity of what we had witnessed. Minutes ticked slowly by, every second a thousand years of torture as we listened to the sounds of our friends and neighbors dying and the only world we'd ever known being burned to ash, praying to any gods that might choose to listen that no one returned to our cottage to finish ravaging it.
As time passed, we became aware of a low moaning coming from the lane. It was Feldan! Alive! His head weakly turned back and forth as though the strength to stand up might be found lying somewhere in the dirt next to him. Again he moaned, louder this time, more clearly against the falling noise now that the raiders had dismounted to search for survivors and loot. We willed him to silence, but still the dreadful noise issued from his lips, until, with a last turn of his head, his one undamaged eye swiveled towards us and locked fully, horribly, onto my face as I peered out from under Mother's arm. Slowly he began to reach out his arm towards us, beseeching our help, and groaned all the louder. Half mad from shock, he didn't recognize the danger he was drawing ever closer to putting us in.
Mother tried frantically to gain his attention, gesturing wildly for him to be quiet, but he seemed fixated on me, as though gaining my acknowledgement would mean his salvation. Louder and louder yet he called out, finding the strength somehow to call our names. Indecision clouded Mother's face for nearly a hundred beats of my thundering heart before she arrived at a decision. She stared deeply into each of our eyes in turn until she was sure that she had our fullest attention and told us to stay hidden. She drew the small yet sharp work-knife she always carried tucked into the pocket of her apron and quietly began to slip away towards the door. I threw my arms around her leg and gripped it with all my strength, terrified that she was never going to return. I cried like I had when I was Mirren's age, sobbing and begging her not to leave us. She pried me loose from her leg and handed me to Sarn, telling us once again to keep hidden. And then she was gone.
Sarn clapped his hand over my mouth as I screamed for Mother, fighting him fiercely to break free and call her back or run to her side and cling to her forever. With a blend of quickness and stealth she hurriedly crept toward the front door, then darted her head out into the light to glance both left and right. Seeing no one, she darted out into the lane and knelt beside Feldan. I thought she meant to check his wounds, or to grab him under the shoulders, as she had done to me so often when she twirled me around through the air pretending I was a bird, and drag him to safety in our kitchen. But she hesitated for but a brief second before a steely look arose in her eyes and she drew the sharp blade across Feldan's throat, spraying bright red blood upon her dress.
She never saw the mailed fist that crashed into her head from behind, sending her sprawling in the bloody dirt. The raiders surrounded her, laughing and saying things in their harsh tongue. I struggled mightily against my brother, trying to break free to run to my mother's aid, but he held me fast. I lost sight of her briefly, but then I saw the raiders standing around her, as one of them held a knife to her throat. I remember little of the next half a bell beyond vague images of them doing things to her I was too little to understand, my mind pushed beyond the limits of understanding.
Through all of it, Sarn held me fast, hand clamped tightly over my mouth as I wailed in silent hysteria. The raiders dispersed, wandering off to tear apart any remaining homes in their search for coins and plunder. Though I know that I could see my mother lying there, my mind yet to this day refuses to hold an image of her thus. Suddenly, Sarn pulled me and my sisters even closer, ducking our heads down nearly to the ground. A raider, tall and bloodthirsty-looking, was standing in our kitchen, pushing broken pottery around with the point of his sword. After a few minutes, he climbed the short, steep staircase that led up to the room where I and my brothers slept.
Sarn's grip on me relaxed just the slightest bit, and with a strength born of unimaginable anguish I lunged forward, slipping through his grasp. I ran over to the doorway, and stopped as though blocked by an invisible, impenetrable wall. My mind refused to acknowledge what my eyes saw, but I can clearly remember something inevitably building inside me and clawing its way up my throat, which croaked out a single word in a small, tattered voice...
"Mama?"
With that one tiny little word, more enormous than mountains, I had sealed our doom. A hand nearly the size of my head grabbed hold of me by the shirt collar and dragged me from the doorway. I heard Mirren cry and Madden scream as the rest of my siblings were pulled from under the table and roughly thrown out into the street next to me. One of the raiders strode forward and slammed the back of his mailed glove into my face hard enough that it drove two teeth from my head.
And that is where my memory ends. I do not recall what happened to my sisters, nor do I know how my eldest brother died in the fight to reclaim our village. All that I do know is this... Sarn told my father and everyone else that I was responsible for their deaths.
Although no one in the village accused me of that responsibility, I knew in my heart that everyone left in the village felt that it was my fault that my family had died. In the following year, we rebuilt the village and the roadhouse, and tried to return to some sense of normalcy. I grew up a quiet child, saying little other than when I fought bitterly with Sarn. I had few acquaintances and no true friends, as my father's and Sarn's coldness towards me gradually seeped out of our cottage and into the other villagers.
At the age of twelve, things finally came to a head. After his latest round of harassment, Sarn received a beating from me that left him bedridden for days. And my father, a bitter, broken man who had for so long kept his feelings toward me bottled up, finally flew into a drunken rage and yelled at me in the village square, telling me in certain terms that he cursed to the darkest depths of the Hells the day I had learned to speak, and never wished to hear a single word escape my lips ever again. Before I could reply, his fist cracked across the side of my head, as the raider's had done seven years earlier, and he roared, "SILENCE!!!!!! You are DEAD! As dead to me as your mother and the brother and sisters that YOU MURDERED, you sniveling, whimpering COWARD! Never speak to me again - you are no son of mine, MURDERER!"
"But...Father..."
With a murderous roar, my father threw himself at me. I remember nothing but pain. It took three men to pull him off of me. That was the last time I spoke a clear word to anyone in the village. My father had fractured my jaw in several places, and I was never able to speak again without a slight slurring in my words after that, but that had so very little to do with my eternal silence. In the moment when my father hit me, he had become inextricably linked in my mind to the raider who had knocked me senseless. Who had killed my mother. Killed my sisters and brother. Who had ruined everything. I would not speak. Not to him, not to anyone. I would never again let a word pass my lips. I would be strong.
For the next four years, I slept in the stables of the roadhouse, mucking them out for a few coins and a bit of food, and wandered far and wide in the wooded areas far outside the village. I hunted and trapped and learned to track. If on occasion a bandit or fugitive from the city found their way into my traps, I failed to mention it to anyone.
And not a single coherent word was heard from my mouth, responding when necessary only with a mumbled "mmrmm" or "nnnn". None of the villagers would speak to me in civil fashion without dire necessity, and I was shunned by all but those who delighted in torturing me by taunting me with my sins. In my sixteenth year, I took up my few possessions, strung my bow, and walked out of the village rarely to return except to trade for supplies.
I was five when the raiders came to my village.
I was twelve when my father struck me, and I stopped speaking.
I was sixteen when I left my village, and I have spent ten years in the wilderness.
Ten years in silence, with nothing but hate to make me strong.
And now, in my twenty-sixth summer, in those few brief magical hours before the sun truly begins to paint the sky red, the hoofprints before me in in the dirt of the hills near the village bear a terrifying familiarity, unsettling me to the very depths of my soul.
I know these tracks.
Raiders.
I could warn the village.
I could.
But they passed judgement on me. They called me a murderer. A coward.
A murderer? Perhaps.
I'm about to let all those people down below die.
But a coward?
No, I'm going to be strong this time.
I won't say a word.
(the end)
This is my entry for the Character Challenge V: The Betrayal over on the D&D character development forum...
We were given this as an inspiration, and asked to explain who the character was and how he came to that point....
"How is it that one mistake can so ruin a man's life? I was a child when I experienced my greatest failure and still it haunts me. I am tossed aside, a useless, broken tool because I was foolish as a youth. There is no choice for me anymore. Or rather there is but one choice. I can choose a life of service and duty; struggling, forever in vain, to regain their approval. So too, could I run and hide, lost forever in my own shame. But I will bear this shame no longer. I will tear down those who would never forgive me. I will show them their own weakness and what a strong, proud man I have become. I will show them that they are not better. And when I have crushed them with a strength they refused to see in me they will know what they lost in turning their backs on me.
Your challenge is to tell me who this man is and how he came to be."
This is the story I submitted, that fell out of my brain at around 5 am... lol
Disclaimer: I hadn't planned to write a minor novel, but it was 4 am when I started and that's usually when I end up writing epic sagas....
"The Silent One"... Senjen Brook, NE ranger
Fourteen years.
That's how long it has been since any in the village spoke my name, or that I spoke to them at all.
Fourteen years have I been silent, and ten of those have I wandered the vale and the forest beyond, fending for myself. Thriving on my own after they turned their backs to me and cast me out. Not with clubs or strong hands upon my shoulders, but with silence. With cold stares and half-heard whispers born of the knowledge that I would indeed hear them. Never would they lower themselves to banish me for my crime, but they thought not twice of lowering me so that I might banish myself and trouble their consciences no more.
For it is indeed in their consciences that the true crime took place - that they judged me for the crime of being a child too small to know better.
It was in my fifth year that the raiders came. My father and oldest brother worked the fields to the north of the village that day, and my mother and sisters sat in front of Mother Darbet's cottage and shelled peas while my brother Sarn cleaned the house. He was being punished that day for breaking Mother Darbet's window and was not allowed to accompany the men to the fields as the rest of the boys of ten seasons did. (He was always being punished for something, and seemed to prefer me as his victim above all others, as I was to blame for his loss of our mother's dotage upon him as the youngest child.) I sat at my mother's feet and played in the dirt more frequently than I helped her shell the peas.
The sun was dropping in the sky, slowly tinting the blue sky with gold when the first cloud of dust rose over the trees that ran along the trade road until it turned to skirt our village before the river bridge. (Of all the horrors of that day, I can most clearly remember the image of that magical sky that exists only in the brief hours before the sun truly begins to paint the sky red as it sets.)
No one bothered to look up to see who it was that rode so thunderously into our midst - riders came at all hours of the day and sometimes at night, always rushing along on whatever their business was and we never asked what that business might be, as it wasn't ours and thus not our concern. We were farmers and craftsmen before the trade guilds built the roadhouse that made our village one stop among many on the trade road, and we were farmers and craftsmen yet. The travelers on the road held no great interest for us.
And so we were taken by surprise when the thunderous sounds of hoofbeats surged towards us rather than slowing to a stop at the roadhouse. I heard a long high scream shatter the everyday noise of the village, pitching up into a banshee wail before it cut off abruptly with a wet gurgle. The sounds of shouting, angry men were all around us, and the stink of leather and horses assaulted my nose as I looked around in confusion. Mother screamed and dropped her basket of peas. My sisters began to cry. Suddenly, Mother shouted something at me...
But I couldn't hear her - my senses were overwhelmed by the sight of an enormous black horse stamping its hooves furiously into the dirt before me, my eyes barely at the top of its foreleg. Atop the horse, like some furious god sitting astride a mountain, sat a man easily a forearm's length taller than my father (who to me was a giant with his head scraping the clouds). The horse surged forward, and I was nearly trampled as my mother pulled me to her tightly, taking the brunt of the horse's impact which threw us both to the ground. The man on the horse, helmed and bearded, clad in dark armor with bright studs and vicious spikes, yelled something at my mother in a language which hurt my ears before turning and violently spurring his huge horse off in another direction. I remember the sensation of Mother wrenching me up from the ground by my arm, then I have a sense of running, being half-dragged, as she gathered my two sisters and I and fled toward our own cottage, at the opposite end of the lane from Mother Darbet's.
As we fled in blind panic toward our cottage Mother held little Mirren in her arms and clasped the hand of Madden, who at twelve was nearly old enough to birth children of her own, while Sarn gripped my hand fiercely and nearly ripped my arm from my shoulder as he dragged me stumbling toward home. Nearly every cottage we passed held scenes of indescribable bloodshed and horror as the raiders crashed their huge black horses through the doors of our homes, riding them right into the cottages themselves in order to drag the occupants screaming and thrashing in unholy terror from the safety of the dwellings that held what had previously been their lives. A horse thundered past, nearly running Mother down, then another, and yet a third thundered past, dragging the torn body of Smith by a rope round its neck. Near to the raider's goliath of a horse, Smith's body looked even frailer than ever - no hewed-from-stone hard-muscled blacksmith was he, despite the name. Smith had been the scribe who kept the books for the roadhouse, and who taught us village children our letters and figures. As I reeled from the sight and fled again towards home, I suddenly giggled, bizarrely struck by the thought that today I wouldn't have to listen to that snotty brat Sabrah, who was legendary for preening and showing off the bright red apple that Smith bestowed upon the best student of the day, which she was awarded with sickening regularity.
My surreal musings were interrupted by the sight of Feldan, the village glazier, our neighbor, being hurled bodily through the large window he'd so lovingly crafted for the front of his cottage. Mother hurried us into the kitchen of our own cottage and overturned the table for us to cower behind. We could smell the sharp smoke of our village being set aflame as black wisps drifted slowly in through the shattered front door. Though it had been no more than a single bell since the beginning of the apocalypse our village had become, it seemed like we'd run for bells on end. We huddled, shaking and tearful, behind our table for an eternity that was in truth no more than fifteen minutes. The tattered form of Feldan, our neighbor, lay facedown in the lane outside, blood slowly dripping from a horrific wound in his temple.
We began to catch our wind as we curled together in a tight ball of shattered souls, minds blasted into numbness by the enormity of what we had witnessed. Minutes ticked slowly by, every second a thousand years of torture as we listened to the sounds of our friends and neighbors dying and the only world we'd ever known being burned to ash, praying to any gods that might choose to listen that no one returned to our cottage to finish ravaging it.
As time passed, we became aware of a low moaning coming from the lane. It was Feldan! Alive! His head weakly turned back and forth as though the strength to stand up might be found lying somewhere in the dirt next to him. Again he moaned, louder this time, more clearly against the falling noise now that the raiders had dismounted to search for survivors and loot. We willed him to silence, but still the dreadful noise issued from his lips, until, with a last turn of his head, his one undamaged eye swiveled towards us and locked fully, horribly, onto my face as I peered out from under Mother's arm. Slowly he began to reach out his arm towards us, beseeching our help, and groaned all the louder. Half mad from shock, he didn't recognize the danger he was drawing ever closer to putting us in.
Mother tried frantically to gain his attention, gesturing wildly for him to be quiet, but he seemed fixated on me, as though gaining my acknowledgement would mean his salvation. Louder and louder yet he called out, finding the strength somehow to call our names. Indecision clouded Mother's face for nearly a hundred beats of my thundering heart before she arrived at a decision. She stared deeply into each of our eyes in turn until she was sure that she had our fullest attention and told us to stay hidden. She drew the small yet sharp work-knife she always carried tucked into the pocket of her apron and quietly began to slip away towards the door. I threw my arms around her leg and gripped it with all my strength, terrified that she was never going to return. I cried like I had when I was Mirren's age, sobbing and begging her not to leave us. She pried me loose from her leg and handed me to Sarn, telling us once again to keep hidden. And then she was gone.
Sarn clapped his hand over my mouth as I screamed for Mother, fighting him fiercely to break free and call her back or run to her side and cling to her forever. With a blend of quickness and stealth she hurriedly crept toward the front door, then darted her head out into the light to glance both left and right. Seeing no one, she darted out into the lane and knelt beside Feldan. I thought she meant to check his wounds, or to grab him under the shoulders, as she had done to me so often when she twirled me around through the air pretending I was a bird, and drag him to safety in our kitchen. But she hesitated for but a brief second before a steely look arose in her eyes and she drew the sharp blade across Feldan's throat, spraying bright red blood upon her dress.
She never saw the mailed fist that crashed into her head from behind, sending her sprawling in the bloody dirt. The raiders surrounded her, laughing and saying things in their harsh tongue. I struggled mightily against my brother, trying to break free to run to my mother's aid, but he held me fast. I lost sight of her briefly, but then I saw the raiders standing around her, as one of them held a knife to her throat. I remember little of the next half a bell beyond vague images of them doing things to her I was too little to understand, my mind pushed beyond the limits of understanding.
Through all of it, Sarn held me fast, hand clamped tightly over my mouth as I wailed in silent hysteria. The raiders dispersed, wandering off to tear apart any remaining homes in their search for coins and plunder. Though I know that I could see my mother lying there, my mind yet to this day refuses to hold an image of her thus. Suddenly, Sarn pulled me and my sisters even closer, ducking our heads down nearly to the ground. A raider, tall and bloodthirsty-looking, was standing in our kitchen, pushing broken pottery around with the point of his sword. After a few minutes, he climbed the short, steep staircase that led up to the room where I and my brothers slept.
Sarn's grip on me relaxed just the slightest bit, and with a strength born of unimaginable anguish I lunged forward, slipping through his grasp. I ran over to the doorway, and stopped as though blocked by an invisible, impenetrable wall. My mind refused to acknowledge what my eyes saw, but I can clearly remember something inevitably building inside me and clawing its way up my throat, which croaked out a single word in a small, tattered voice...
"Mama?"
With that one tiny little word, more enormous than mountains, I had sealed our doom. A hand nearly the size of my head grabbed hold of me by the shirt collar and dragged me from the doorway. I heard Mirren cry and Madden scream as the rest of my siblings were pulled from under the table and roughly thrown out into the street next to me. One of the raiders strode forward and slammed the back of his mailed glove into my face hard enough that it drove two teeth from my head.
And that is where my memory ends. I do not recall what happened to my sisters, nor do I know how my eldest brother died in the fight to reclaim our village. All that I do know is this... Sarn told my father and everyone else that I was responsible for their deaths.
Although no one in the village accused me of that responsibility, I knew in my heart that everyone left in the village felt that it was my fault that my family had died. In the following year, we rebuilt the village and the roadhouse, and tried to return to some sense of normalcy. I grew up a quiet child, saying little other than when I fought bitterly with Sarn. I had few acquaintances and no true friends, as my father's and Sarn's coldness towards me gradually seeped out of our cottage and into the other villagers.
At the age of twelve, things finally came to a head. After his latest round of harassment, Sarn received a beating from me that left him bedridden for days. And my father, a bitter, broken man who had for so long kept his feelings toward me bottled up, finally flew into a drunken rage and yelled at me in the village square, telling me in certain terms that he cursed to the darkest depths of the Hells the day I had learned to speak, and never wished to hear a single word escape my lips ever again. Before I could reply, his fist cracked across the side of my head, as the raider's had done seven years earlier, and he roared, "SILENCE!!!!!! You are DEAD! As dead to me as your mother and the brother and sisters that YOU MURDERED, you sniveling, whimpering COWARD! Never speak to me again - you are no son of mine, MURDERER!"
"But...Father..."
With a murderous roar, my father threw himself at me. I remember nothing but pain. It took three men to pull him off of me. That was the last time I spoke a clear word to anyone in the village. My father had fractured my jaw in several places, and I was never able to speak again without a slight slurring in my words after that, but that had so very little to do with my eternal silence. In the moment when my father hit me, he had become inextricably linked in my mind to the raider who had knocked me senseless. Who had killed my mother. Killed my sisters and brother. Who had ruined everything. I would not speak. Not to him, not to anyone. I would never again let a word pass my lips. I would be strong.
For the next four years, I slept in the stables of the roadhouse, mucking them out for a few coins and a bit of food, and wandered far and wide in the wooded areas far outside the village. I hunted and trapped and learned to track. If on occasion a bandit or fugitive from the city found their way into my traps, I failed to mention it to anyone.
And not a single coherent word was heard from my mouth, responding when necessary only with a mumbled "mmrmm" or "nnnn". None of the villagers would speak to me in civil fashion without dire necessity, and I was shunned by all but those who delighted in torturing me by taunting me with my sins. In my sixteenth year, I took up my few possessions, strung my bow, and walked out of the village rarely to return except to trade for supplies.
I was five when the raiders came to my village.
I was twelve when my father struck me, and I stopped speaking.
I was sixteen when I left my village, and I have spent ten years in the wilderness.
Ten years in silence, with nothing but hate to make me strong.
And now, in my twenty-sixth summer, in those few brief magical hours before the sun truly begins to paint the sky red, the hoofprints before me in in the dirt of the hills near the village bear a terrifying familiarity, unsettling me to the very depths of my soul.
I know these tracks.
Raiders.
I could warn the village.
I could.
But they passed judgement on me. They called me a murderer. A coward.
A murderer? Perhaps.
I'm about to let all those people down below die.
But a coward?
No, I'm going to be strong this time.
I won't say a word.
(the end)
Last edited:
