Eidolons: Awakening, pt. II

Gareth Stormbane 

                                                     

THE SWORD CAME AT HIM WITH SPEED AND STRENGTH that Gareth knew he could not really match, not for long. The more experienced knight advanced on him confidently - and brutally.

So Gareth gave ground, again and again, grateful for the spaciousness of the stone halls around him. His opponent was half again his weight, a head taller, years older and considerably more skilled. A silvery winged helm concealed his face, but Gareth remembered it well enough – the arrogant mouth, the proud nose, the contempt in his eyes…

Despite this, Gareth knew that Albion was enraged now. How did this up-start, barely a year into his knighthood, dare to challenge him, the champion of the Silverlance?

Foolishly, that’s how. For a girl who doesn’t really care for me, and friends who would not help me…

Gareth wondered briefly how he knew all that, but there was little time for pondering. He worked his blade desperately, looking for some opening, but his arms were growing more numb with every parry, the sword becoming heavier…  He knew he was younger and more agile than his heavily armored opponent, but he felt old now, old and tired. Every hit seemed like it was inches from cleaving his skull, he held on somehow, but for how long?

Despairing, he stretched out his hand and spoke the words of the one really useful spell he found in his mother’s book. A snaking crimson lightning struck his advancing foe on the helmet.

Albion stumbled back, stunned and crying out in shocked pain. Gareth didn’t lose the chance, he rushed him. His first strike managed to disarm the still dangerous knight, then he took a firmer grip on his sword and struck the knight on the head with its heavy hilt.

The champion of the Silverlance knights refused to fall yet, so Gareth kicked him and pushed him for good measure, knocking him down. Victory… but where are the cheers?

Gareth looked around. He was in a large circular room of the Halls of Commandments, where he had spoken his knightly vows on the day he was anointed. So long ago… Or was it yesterday? Trials and duels of honor were held here as well, and now, there were many people gathered there. The master-at-arms, the magister, all were there, witnesses to his treachery. They were silent, eyeing him with shock and contempt. His father was there too, but he for one did not meet Gareth’s gaze.

Then they began conversing, murmurs rising to outraged whispers, then shouts.

They will know about others, they will find the book and all will be known!

“Who taught you this sorcery, Gareth Stormbane?”

I must lie, make them believe I am a monster, only then would they not look for more… I cannot expose them… my friends, and… mother, she never wanted this… no, this must remain secret, better admit to something far worse.

And so he spoke, and he lied, and saw how disdain on their faces turned to fear, then terror, then dark resolve.

“Execute him! His mere existence is a stain on our Order!”

“No! He may be a monster, but he is still a son of the Stormbane line…”

“This creature is not my son. Cursed be the day when I took a witch to wife.”

“Be that as it may, his veins are filled with the blood of Old Eresia. We cannot take his life.”

“Exile then.”

“Yes… And there is only one place where his kind belongs. Ravenwing, Mist-Grave, Ersidria”

“So be it.” A voice said with finality, and Gareth saw his father standing next to him, cold and unmoving. Never a man for kind words, Gideon Stormbane looked more like a statue now. He came alive though, as he tore down his son’s purple cloak, and Gareth fell to his knees, weak with shock and despair. He noticed that he was crying.

Strange, I thought I’d lost that ability long ago…

Gazing down, he looked at the magnificent purple cloak, bestowed upon him by the Silverlance Magister on the day of his initiation, when he returned victorious from his first quest…

Then he remembered that in reality, his cloak was a tattered rag, more brown than lilac…  He looked up, confused. A figure stood before him, dressed in the grey robes of the Lore-Keepers. She took her hood off, and he saw a face, soft and smiling, an angel of sweet sorrow and blissful sin. Was it his mother? Was it Juliana? Or was it the girl that was the cause of it all.

The mist rose around him, like a thousand tendrils of a monstrous octopus, and he was pulled back and down, down, down… Cursed and abandoned, disowned and nameless…

No, merely the last of my name. Mother, is it finally over?

Gareth woke in pitch black darkness. He was drenched in cold sweat, while hot tears were running down his face. Tears?

I thought I’d unlearned that some decades ago. Apparently not. So that’s what the bottom really feels like?

It took him a while to remember where he was, so uncommon was the sensations he experienced. By the gods, this must be a real soft bed I’m lying in...

That explained how the sleep had found him, albeit wrought with nightmare. Instinctively, he reached for his box, but pressed his hand down with force. Better stay on the bottom than fall straight to hell… And I have a job to do yet. The master of the house was generous to him, and so was his wife. Out in the wild, it was too rare a luxury, sleeping in a real house.  It would be poor gratitude if he risked their lives by another of his experiments…

His host, Aethren Deckard was what they called a stash-monger in the Hinterlands. There weren’t many bold enough to live too far from the walls of Riverend, some out of well-grounded fear of the mist, made worse by superstition, others because of the growing threat of the robber gangs.

But Deckard’s business was not entirely legal and required him to be close to the road. The man earned his living dealing in supplies and information. Food, drugs, loot – all that an ordinary Hinterlander could not be trusted not to run away with.

People came to him when they needed to hide something, or retrieve what he’d kept safe for them.

He also watched the roads for accidents and offered help for a price, a safe place to spend the night, a simple meal worth its weight in silver on the dangerous road… Or, if there was no help to offer, he took what was left to a stash of his own. If his ‘clients’ had nothing to pay, he took secrets as payment too. That was what kept him alive, after all, his secrets. If anyone from the Hinterland underworld took him in for a little friendly chat, they would be receiving many other visitors soon. For if Aethren Deckard talked, no one’s secrets would be safe, and in Ersidria’s underworld, everyone had secrets.  

Once, however, a few overbold renegades decided to take their chances and kidnapped the aging stash-monger.

They tried to blackmail the gang leaders with threats of handing Aethren over to the authorities. That would have been a hefty blow for the Hinterland crime lords, and Riverend wasn’t an easy place for bandits to operate, so they had only one option left – hire a legal professional.  

Gareth didn’t like working for criminals, but he didn’t refuse good offers, and he liked to stay neutral, meaning anyone could task him. That was his only principle. That, and being professional.

‘It is more than my life that you saved today, Gareth Stormbane.’ Aethren told him when he looked at the mutilated corpses of his captors. 

That was true. His two boys were soon to become Ravenguard, a rotten but safe path in life, Gareth new. And if their father’s dealings were to be revealed, it would be a miracle if his sons would be still alive the next day – Reive Malforn, governor of Riverend, was a paranoid psychopath who killed anyone who wasn’t on his side.

So Aethren and his wife did their best to repay Gareth with their hospitality, though nothing they could do now could give Gareth back what he paid for saving the cache-monger’s neck.

He is not to blame for what this job had cost me in the end. But still I cannot look the man in eye and say I don’t hate him…

Despite these feelings, Gareth knew to appreciate their help. Normally, the mercenary could find a place to spend the night in the wild, but in the last few weeks, the mist grew thicker and more restless with every day.

There is going to be a Mist-Storm…

Gareth remembered the first time seeing the hallmark phenomena of the Cursed Land. It was as if the clouds descended on land, too tired of carrying the weight of their own deep grey bodies… And they drowned all in mystery, wonder, then terror and finally, madness.

There were always those whose minds were already at the point of breaking, and they seldom endured a Storm. It wasn’t that bad yet, but it was growing worse fast.

If I don’t find her before it breaks loose, I must stop... When I die, I want to die with my sanity well in hand. 

Gareth strapped on his leathers, donned his steel, took his sword and his coldfire torch, then threw his ragged cloak over his back and went for the door. He noticed there was a small pack stuffed with provisions lying next to it, and recalled that Aethren’s wife promised him as much, despite the ‘hard times’. He hesitated to take it - it was bordering on plunder, given how handsomely he had been paid by the bandits for Deckard’s life… Yes, surprisingly their notorious greed did not exceed their respect my ‘future usefulness’. But then, being practical is the rule of the land.  

The mercenary slapped the pack onto his shoulder - the road to Greentorch was long and hard. Already at the door, he heard Aethren’s soft snoring. The man seemed to sleep well for someone who knew so much and had so many nooses wrapped around his neck. Gareth left into the starless night, glad he did not have to say farewells.

GARETH WALKED THROUGH THE MIST, head down, careful with his footing in the moonlit gloom.

It was pointless to look down of course, even with his enchanted torch in hand he could not see the ground. The mist swirled beneath his feet, forming shapes that mocked his hard-pressed sanity, luring it into the ocean of twisted visions and blissful oblivion, and it was impossible to tear one’s gaze away.

Not a stranger to Hinterlands, Gareth knew that underneath the mist, the place was barren and featureless. But the shifting veil lent it a different quality, filled it with shapes and omens.

It was dangerous to wander alone as he did - two people could keep each other awake with conversation, at least. Even a horse could do, and most people took with them the hardy ersidrian Nalthies, black ponies bred and trained specifically for long journeys through the unnatural mist.

But he had nothing much to carry, just his sword, a pouch of silver and his box…

It was well that he set out shortly after midnight, as the newly risen Tempest, the Storm Moon revealed, its deep yellow glow surreal and mesmeric behind the shredded, twisted clouds. Even the spring’s harbinger seemed wistful and forlorn in the ever-veiled sky of Ersidria.

Gareth knew from experience that it was better to take the risk of a little unpleasantness early on, than of ending up a dozen leagues short of his destination when the night-mist settled in once more, and the night hunters woke, ravenous after a good day’s sleep.  

The few times when Gareth found himself far out in the wilds with night close on his heels, he survived by hiding in caves, cellars, old crypts. Once, he spent a night listening to nameless creatures prowling around as he lay in a sealed sarcophagus, praying he would not suffocate before the pack diminished enough to give him a fighting chance. He didn’t, but nothing would convince him to try it again.  

He walked in near darkness by now - his bluish cold-fire torch was already burning out despite the enchantments he used, doused by the mist that did not take kindly to light, no matter its nature. It didn’t take kindly to him either, Gareth knew, but it would have suffer him a bit longer.

The dawn was close, and the mercenary welcomed the croaks of the ravens that came with it - they kept him from falling too deep into the mist-induced trance, a thing as subtle as it was deadly. Those who went out and never returned weren’t often slain on the road - the mist spoke to them, and they wandered off into the wilds, and there they would not long search for their deaths.

Besides, as long as the ravens were around, it meant that nothing else probably was. They were a wise man’s unwitting sentries.

He fought on, but with every step he fell deeper into the murk of his contemplations. Visions came, things half-remembered, half-imagined… The mist knew every man’s fears, every man's dreams, and it knew how make them one.

Gareth had long known what effect it could have on a man, and that one could never really prepare against it. He knew that certain drugs could help overcome these effects, clear his mind for a while, albeit for a price. All he needed to do was reach out for the box…

How did he end up like this? No, we was not wondering about how a nobleborn knight had become an exile and a mercenary in a land that was the worst of the worst - he pondered that long enough.

It was the latest twist that kept him up every night… Now it came back before its time, making up for the one night it had allowed him to be at peace. Juliana’s phantom so real and tangible he could never believe it was not real, and so it ravaged him every time.

‘I waited for you, but you didn’t come. So I finally gave in to the call.’ Her voice was sad and distant.

‘What call?’ Gareth said aloud, loud enough to provoke an angry response from the ravens taking flight. There was something underneath it though. Yes, there were dozens of quiet voices all trying to reply, merging into a maddening cacophony.

Voices… So much for being Gareth the Professional, damn it. A stupid girl disappears, and the unsung hero of Ersidria loses his shit...

But of course, Juliana wasn’t just a stupid girl. She was a fallen angel, an angel sent to this hell just for him. Wasn’t she?

Perhaps she went to where there was light. I should be happy for her… Why didn’t I go with her? For her, I could swallow my pride and take a new name, become a common guard for some petty nobleman, take orders and be looked down at – anything. And now I have wasted everything… except my pride.

Out of habit, the mercenary shook his head and tried to resist the weakening sentimentality, but in vain. He was caught too deeply. Perhaps it was love, more often it felt like pain. Before she came into his life, he may have been close to suicide, but he wasn’t really suffering, just apathetic and hopeless. Now… he almost recalled those times with fondness.

To the world, Gareth still played the professional mercenary, but his facade was crumbling. I only have to play a little longer, then the Soul-Eater blade will have what it was promised. But now while the stupid hope lingers, I am too far gone from sanity – and dignity - to take the proud man’s way out. If I am to end this torment, it will be in cold blood, with a clear mind. I won’t repeat the mistake I made in Neugard… The weight of regret can be damned, I am not making a fool of myself again. After all, Gareth Stormbane is too proud to be anyone’s fool, is he not?

With that, the lone mercenary finally broke his torpor, and swung his sword at the mist, snarling. The sword that he named Mistbane, if only for irony’s sake. There weren’t many ordinary storms in the Hinterlands.

The veil parted for a split second before closing back in, mocking his efforts. The thoughts would come back, too, Gareth knew. But for the moment, he smiled – because he saw a familiar emerald glow up ahead, flickering and making the twilight seem surreal.

Greentorch, at last. Enough darkness, it’s high time I met some old friends.

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