◆ Chapter 1 ◆

The heroes of old all had one thing in common: None of them were alone for very long.  Whether joined by like-minded heroes, or pursued by heroes with different ideas of morality, they never had a lack of companions.

Krisa’s Treatise on Heroes

17th of Thentor

Year 418 after the fall of the Rastinal Empire

        Aelach adjusted the sword at his hip as he walked across the porch and into the three story, wooden building.  A hanging sign in the front of the building simply read, “Tavern,” so he assumed it was the only tavern in the small outpost town of Mournegard.  Aelach stopped after he had walked a few steps inside and took in the scene around him.  Light coming in from large windows on either side of the door as well as the two windows opposite the door allowed plenty of illumination for the main room.  A man sat at the bar.  He was slightly larger than average, and he assumed the man to be an old veteran from some far-off war by the looks of him.  He wore a coarse, undyed wool shirt with fraying and broken seams on his sleeves.  The man’s wide shoulders hunched over the bar, and his head rested on his arms.  He could only see a tiny part of the man’s pale forehead due to the way he laid his head.  A wooden mug sat near the man’s head, which was covered by shaggy red hair, and a matching red beard.  The bartender busied himself with cleaning mugs and wiping down the counter.  

The barman eyed him with practiced indifference and went back to his work, revealing the top of his balding head.  The man sitting at the bar did not raise his head, and Aelach couldn’t decide whether he was asleep or simply bored with the small village.  He brushed his shaggy brown hair out of his eyes as he looked around the room, and he noticed a disgruntled looking young woman sitting across the tavern.  Her pale face looked hard and displeased about something that he couldn’t really guess at.  She wore light green robes of some kind, which were tattered at the shoulders and slightly dirty down the right side.  Her blue eyes were staring blankly ahead, and her arms were crossed in front of her, covered in purple sleeves that were a distinct contrast to her robes.  Her straight, blonde hair went a little past her shoulders, as dirty as her robes were, but relatively clean as things went.

        Aelach noticed her pointed ears rising out of either side of her hair, and placed her as an Elf.  Oh, he thought, she doesn’t look disgruntled.  She’s just an Elf, and her thin, angular face makes her look that way.  Thinking that she could use the company, he approached her table and asked, “May I join you for a drink?”

        When her eyes remained unfocused, he rethought his previous assessment.  Maybe she’s irritated about something, he thought.  For a brief second, he thought that she somehow knew about his less-than-straightforward parentage, which made him a half-elf, and that she ignored him because of it.  His jaw length hair obscured his slightly pointed ears, which he’d made sure of, so didn’t know how she could have guessed.  Her expression hadn’t changed since he’d come into the room, though, and she still didn’t seem to have even noticed him.  Might as well try to find out what occupied her mind.  He pulled out a chair, and the scrape of the legs made more noise than he expected.  The Elf woman jolted, obviously surprised by the sound, and she looked at him as though she hadn’t seen him walk up.

        “What are you doing?” she asked incredulously, giving him a disdainful look.

        This surprised him a bit, “I asked if I could join you for a drink.”

        “You most certainly did not.”

        “I did.  You must have heard me.  Anyway, you’re causing a scene, and I don’t want to disturb the other patrons.”  He looked around and noticed that no other customers occupied the space with them except the sleeping man.  “Well, the other patron, anyway.  He seems like a regular, and I don’t want to cause any trouble.  You see, I just came to this village because…”

        “You talk too much,” the young Elf woman said.  “Sit down, and order something already.”

        Her sudden change from anger to a grudging acceptance of him confused Aelach.  He sat down and called to the barman, “Do you have any wine?”

        The barman looked at him over his shoulder.  “Oh, are you two done? My daughter Sophie will be around in a minute to get your order.”

        Aelach eyed the young Elf, and he didn’t see anything he liked.  Her angular face made her slightly unappealing, and her blonde hair had a flat quality to it.  The robes concealed her figure, but he couldn’t imagine her looking any prettier wearing something else.  From the look on her face, she seemed none too pleased to sit at a table with him either.  “Since we’re here, we may as well get properly introduced.  My name’s Aelach, and I come from…”

        “Introductions don’t require life stories,” the woman cut in.  “I’m Aryanna.  There, we’re introduced now, so you can stop talking, right?”

        Aelach sat in silence, but luckily, Sophie came out just a few seconds later.  She was thin and well-shaped, for a country girl, her skin lightly tanned and a little flushed from working. Her long hair had a rich reddish-brown color, and she had it pulled back into a ponytail.  Her simple, light brown dress did nothing to hide her shapely figure, and she had the kind of smile that could stop all the conversation in a room.  Not that he’d had any actual conversation here.  She looked into his eyes, and Aelach noticed they held a dark green color, like the forest in summer.

        “What would you like today, sir?”

        He tried to keep her good looks out of his mind when he answered.  “What kinds of wine do you have on hand?”

        “We have some wine, but it gets a little expensive,” she said confidentially, leaning in a little closer.  “We have some beer or mead if that sounds alright.  There isn’t really a lot of variety since Mournegard’s so far out from the rest of the kingdom.”

        Aelach stroked his goatee as he thought it over.  He didn’t have enough money to go buying glasses of wine, and he’d always heard about mead from Virich, one of the monks who had raised him at the monastery.  They only kept wine at the monastery for some reason, but some of the monks had reminisced about mead, and its sweet, honey flavor.

        “I’ll try the mead,” he said with a smile.  She smiled, said she’d be back in a few minutes, and walked off to the back of the tavern again.  Aelach looked at Aryanna and thought about trying to start up another conversation, but she looked to have gone back into the same state as before he sat down.  It looked like some kind of trance.  He continued surveying the tavern and noticed that the man at the bar had raised his head, revealing the rest of his shaggy red beard that Aelach had seen part of earlier.  He conversed quietly with the bartender, and held his mug out for the bartender to fill with some sort of dark beer.  So, either he had feigned sleep, or he’d just woken up.

        Then something really strange happened.  A pair of travelers walked in the door, but normal walked out the door after that.  The first one was a Fetrin, and the other a Durlith.  The Fetrin had gold scales and stood close to seven feet tall, but he did it lankily and without powerful muscle.  His smile, composed of fang-like teeth, flashed a little bit menacingly at the end of a short snout.  He had a tail that dragged lightly along the ground behind him.  He carried a curved sword at one hip and a hammer on the other side.  The tip of a bow peeked over his right shoulder.  He wore well-used traveler’s clothes dyed in greens and browns, and his taloned feet grated against the wood floor.  The Durlith behind him had pale skin for his kind.  According to what Aelach knew, they usually had reddish skin. The pale Durlith wore a dark cloak which seemed to move slightly once he stopped in the middle of the tavern.  He had brownish-grey horns similar to ram’s horns, but the ridges running their length were less pronounced, and small protrusions hinted at spikes on his chin.  His hands, just barely visible past the sleeves of his robes, bore tattoos.  Aelach couldn’t get any idea of the design, but he could see their black, faded swirls going from the back of his hand up onto his arm.    

        He’d never seen a member of either race in person before, and though their appearances unnerved him, he mainly wondered why they would come in together.  The monks hadn’t taught much history, but he remembered learning about the empires that these two races had built.  He also remembered that they had destroyed each other many centuries ago, and not many of either race had survived.  They both surveyed the bar as Aelach had when he first came in.  He looked back at them, trying to imagine what could have brought them here together.

        At this point, Sophie came back to the common room, and she flinched when she laid her eyes on the Fetrin.  She stopped for a second, and then went to the table where Aelach sat and put down a small ceramic mug filled with pale golden liquid.

        “There you go, sir.”  She tilted her head forward, and then raised it back.  Turning to Aryanna, Sophie asked, “Are you sure you still don’t want anything, miss?”

        She jerked out of her trance at the question.  “Yes, I’ll be fine.”  She paused, “Thanks.”

        “My pleasure.”  Sophie walked up to where the odd pair of travelers stood and said, “You two gentlemen just have any table you like.  I’ll come around in a few minutes to take any orders for drinks or food.”

        They picked a table several feet away from where Aelach and Aryanna sat, and the Fetrin muttered something that made the Durlith smile and shake his head the way that someone normally responds to a dirty joke.  The Fetrin laughed good-naturedly and a little louder than the room could handle.  Weird, Aelach thought.  He took a sip of the chilled mead and found its flavor very sweet, but he liked it.  He put the mug down on the table and heard the Fetrin chuckle at something the Durlith muttered.  He saw the Fetrin’s clothes bulge on his back and remembered that they had wings.  He wondered if it might be uncomfortable to keep them contained, and why the Fetrin wouldn’t simply keep them outside his clothing.  Seeing a chance to start a tavern-wide conversation, Aelach turned his chair as quietly as he could to face out into the tavern.

        “Hello,” he said tentatively.  “What business might you have out this far from the cities inside the Beshim Mountains?”

        The two travelers looked up, and the Fetrin said, “We heard about some trouble at the castle up here.  Just came to see if it needed checking out.”  He had a gruff, forceful voice that carried throughout the room, but he spoke in a jovial tone.  Aelach thought that if the Fetrin acted this way all the time, they could get along pretty well.

        “What a coincidence,” he said.  “I came for the same reason.  You see, I grew up in a monastery where the monks taught me to fight.  We’ve fought Goblins coming down from the north for the past few years.  Since I came of age, I’m supposed to decide if I want to live away from the monastery or return to it someday.”  He introduced himself and asked for their names.

        The Fetrin replied, “My name’s Terrog.  I’m a scout for hire, and a group that I was supposed to be guiding from Onyx to Ulthas bailed on me because of the news about Mourne castle.  I figured that if there was danger, I may as well help take care of it or less people will want to travel through here, and I’ll lose money on the deal.”

        The Durlith spoke up next, “My name’s Retribution, but you can just call me Ret if you like.” He paused as though trying to think of why he came.  “I came with him.”  His voice was harsh.  Each word he spoke sounded painful, and Aelach wondered what could have happened to him to make his voice like that.  It didn’t seem right to ask right after they met, so he didn’t broach the subject.

        “Who’s your friend?” Terrog asked.

        Aelach turned to the Elf sitting across from him.  She hadn’t seemed to take any interest in their conversation, but when he looked at her she turned her gaze on all three of them.  “Aryanna,” she said.  “Strange that we’ve all come here for the same thing, don’t you think?”

        Aelach said, “You didn’t tell me you came to check out the castle earlier.”

        She looked at him with a completely serious expression, “You didn’t ask.”

        “I’m having a hard time telling if she’s joking,” Terrog cut in.  “Is she always like this?”

        Aelach turned back toward their table and whispered, “I have no idea.  I just met her myself.”

        Sophie came back around to the common room then and asked for Terrog and Retribution’s order.  They looked at each other and shared a grin.  The Durlith said, “Sorry, I don’t think you have the things we’d normally drink.  We’ll take some food though.”  They proceeded to order, and Aelach put in an order for food as well.  By this point, another few people who called the barman by his name, Stevan, had come in.  Regulars, he thought.  They wore simple, undyed linen or wool clothes, and most had dirt on them from working in the fields.  One man that came in spoke loudly and had coal dust on his clothes and face.  Probably the blacksmith.

        When the next man came in, Aelach had to make a difficult choice about what was stranger.  A Fetrin and a Durlith traveling around together as friends already made his head spin, but this man had purple skin.  His skin didn’t have the translucent look of someone who hadn’t seen the sun in years.  It had a light, muted purple color to it.  He wore light grey robes cinched with a thick brown belt, and a plain-looking sword at his left hip.  He bore a very serene but attentive look on his face.  Though Aelach was sitting down, he thought that the purple stranger stood significantly taller than him.  Probably about six inches taller.  He noticed that the purple man’s skin bore no blemishes, his head was smoothly bald on top, and that his eyes had no pupils.  Regardless of this last fact, Aelach felt the new man’s eyes come to rest on him.  The purple man walked past the man at the bar, and then to the table that he and Aryanna sat and pulled out a chair for himself.

        “Greetings,” the man said in a formal tone as he sat down.  His voice was soft, but had a determined air about it.

        Aelach saw no reason to be rude.  “Hello.”  He paused for a few seconds, unable to think of anything to say, “Care to join us for a drink?”

        The strange looking man glanced around at the tavern, looking vaguely in the direction of Retribution and Terrog, “You and they have come here on the same purpose, have you not?”  He spoke softly enough for only Aelach and Aryanna to hear him.

        He leaned forward, “What makes you think that?”  The purple man turned back to face Aelach, and their eyes locked, though he still couldn’t explain how he knew.  It was just a feeling.

        “You stand out.  Everyone else is here for a drink after a hard day’s work.  They dress in simple clothing and drink ale.  They had their meals before coming in to save money.  You eat here, though the villagers wouldn’t, and drink chilled mead, even though it’s quite cool outside.  To a trained observer, these things alone make you stand out from the regulars.  Not even taking your armor and weapons into account, you clearly aren’t regulars,” the man finished his speech and folded his hands on the table.  His hands bore the same purple color as his face.  “The only man more conspicuous in this tavern than you four sits at the bar, nursing a pint of ale.”

        “What makes him conspicuous, when he isn’t doing any of the things you mentioned that made us stand out?” Aelach asked doubtfully.

        The purple man looked over his shoulder at the man at the bar then back to him, “Among other things, none of the regulars passed within ten feet of him.  Several of them looked my way when I walked close behind him.  They seemed concerned for my safety.”

        Aelach looked at the man still sitting quietly at the bar.  Whoever this purple stranger was, he had a good eye.  Even without any pupils.  “So,” he said, “What’s your name, and what brings you here?”

        “My name is Rahaieem,” he replied.  “And I have come for the same reason as you.  I feel more confident knowing that I will not have to investigate the castle by myself.”

        Terrog and Retribution, having finished their meals, walked over to Aelach’s table.  The bit, gold Fetrin said, “Well, Violet, are you coming along with us to the castle?  Me and Ret are ready.  Too much waiting for our taste.”

        “Your taste,” the Durlith grumbled behind him.

        Aelach looked around at the four others and said, “So, are we all agreed to go together and check the castle for signs of disturbances?  We can split up if we want to after that.”

        They all looked at each other and murmured their agreement.  Aryanna and Retribution seemed like they would prefer to leave after they searched the castle, and Aelach wasn’t sure how well they would get along.  He searched the eyes of all his new, temporary companions looking for signs of their personality.  In Retribution, he didn’t see anything like bravery, but he and Terrog had come in together, so Aelach assumed they wouldn’t split up easily.  Aryanna scowled at him when he glanced at her, but she seemed intent on going, and he wouldn’t turn down the help.  Rahaieem and Terrog seemed like they could hold their own in some tough situations, and the Fetrin flashed a toothy grin at the end of his snout.  He wondered what they might see in his eyes and how he would do when he had his back against the wall.  Having surveyed the whole group, Aelach, Aryanna and Rahaieem stood, and they all made their way out of the tavern and toward the nearby castle.