New material time! Again, not edited, probably bad.

***

Lieutenant Villios called the troop to a halt at Boulden’s gesture. He told the sergeants to get their troops armored and ready, then moved over to where the commander was looking over the map of Northreach with Herndin. Boulden’s thick-knuckled finger was settled on a spot north of Anticus, labeled in a spidery hand with the name of Brethford.

“That’s it,” the commander said, “first place we’ve reached that the Baron’s boy mentioned as a possibility. We might not find a damn thing, in fact that’s what I‘m hoping for. But I want to be ready for anything.” Read the rest of this entry →

Insert standard disclaimer of no editing here.

***

Dam surveyed the wreckage that his home had become. As he’d feared, his slide into the canyon had made it impossible for him to give warning to his fellow villagers in time, and devastation looked complete. The temple had burned, taking the nearby houses with it, and from the quantity of blackened corpses within the smoking ruin, it looked like most of the village had burned inside with it. Read the rest of this entry →

Standard disclaimer: unedited and probably rotten.

***

On the far side of the city, a pair of guards in ill-fighting and cracked leather armor studied the dust cloud approaching them. Already the day had become infinitely more interesting than any they’d experienced before, guarding the least-used gate in the entire city. The gate itself was almost never opened during their tenure, since they used the sally port to get to their station outside the city. Indeed, the only time it was opened was when one particular merchant took a wagon out in spring, and came back months later.

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As before, this excerpt is heavily unedited. It is a flashback of the aftermath of the attack on Daneswall.

***

The flames from the burning town behind Comrick set the planes of his son’s face shifting constantly, giving him the look of a stranger. The old man kept trying to count how many survivors ranged ahead, but the half-panicked and struggling mass ahead of him defied his attempts. Those last moments in the church resurfaced in his mind, over and over, the sacrifice of two men whom he’d come to love sending tears to eyes still stinging from smoke. The desire to honor that heroism kept his legs moving even more than the fear of being caught by the shambling remnants of the horde.

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