Kanah Belflower

So. Things hadn't exactly gone according to plan. A speartip pressed into the small of my back as I was "escorted" to the captain of the soldiers protecting this side of the border. It'd been pure luck that the guards decided not to kill me on the spot - for them to also lead me directly towards their commanding officer, my message's intended recipient, proved nothing short of a miracle. The spear dug deeper, urging me out of my thoughts and quicker in the direction of their encampment. As I neared the exit out of the pass, this "encampment" seemed just a bit more fortified than that. High stone walls, a portcullis gate, and archers lined along the battlements made their outpost feel more like a fortress. At seeing the two guards guiding me at spearpoint towards the portcullis, I heard an archer atop the battlements yell something down to an unseen gatekeeper within the fort. The gate slowly began to raise up, grinding painfully the entire time.  Rust fl...

His face...I had seen it somewhere. Somewhere recently. It couldn't have been Garved; rebels made up the attacking force at Garved, with a few Bovican deserters here or there. Triton wouldn't be stupid enough to send their men toward the front lines of a foreign land, much less a land built on mutual hatred of Tritonian "virtue". If I hadn't seen him at Garved, it could only have been at Fort Meddon. The battle of Fort Meddon, the Frozen Keep, marked the first stage of the rebellion's plan to undermine Bovica.  And it absolutely worked. Six years before finding myself as a Confederate's errand boy, Triton forcefully commandeered a border town on their side of the mountains. Little hamlet which once thrived on travel through the peaks. Their leaders turned it into a military installation, keeping vigil over the various mountain passes that connected the Kyrlund and the lands of Triton Five years later, Triton funneled over two thousand troops through that f...

Traveling alone had always been a double-edged sword. The feeling of isolation, of lonely freedom in your own thoughts could be pleasant at times; and at other times, when wolf howls became louder and snarling emerged from the nearby bushes, pleasant couldn't be further from the truth. But as I trudged through stiff-limbed corpses, moving aside any dead men attempting to block my path, the atmosphere was neither peaceful nor terrifying. It was eerie. Seeing their faces, the hollow eyes and sunken cheeks of souls taken too early, sent a chill passing through me; and not from the freezing mountain weather, either.  The pass grew much calmer following the battle, resulting in an overall uneventful journey to the end of the pass. Upon sighting a wooden gate guarded on both sides by pairs of Protaxian soldiers, I believed the hard part to be over. I was wrong. Strolling up to the gate guards, I stopped a few feet out of range of their barbed spearheads. The one on the left asked, "...

"You! Stop right there!" My attempt at making a stealthy escape had failed, and miserably so. Turning around slowly, the remaining Confederates stared at me from their loose formation. A soldier near the front stepped forward, brandishing a mace coated in so much blood that I couldn't even tell the color of the metal beneath. "Who the fuck are you? You aren't one of mine, and I'm pretty sure that those religious assholes at the other end never take a step without fumbling around in full steel plate. Start talking, or I let some of these savages rip you apart." As he said that last part, a few of the weary soldiers behind him began readying themselves for another fight. Laying his hand on the shoulder of a man near the front, he said, "The battle rush still hasn't faded from Tom here; I'd wager you've never seen someone take a man's arm off and beat him with it." Tom grunted blandly, giving me the impression that the concept wasn...

I needed to make a choice. Either I could intervene in this massacre, or I could turn around and return to a land that may not want me around much longer. Reaching down to pick up a somewhat unused sword from a body, I noticed an insignia emblazoned along the front of the corpse's leather chestplate. It resembled a sword pointed down, with a half-sun shining above it. A memory rushed to the forefront of my mind: a page in some book in the Academy's library, showing that exact insignia as the mark of Triton. Of course there would be Tritonian soldiers in the pass; if was a major border trail between their land and that of the Kyrlund.  Yet, the Freehold Confederacy had worked with Triton to trick Bovica during the final stages of the rebellion. Bovica's rival nation obviously desired the Kyrlund for themselves, but an outright conflict between a group who allied with them only a short time prior would be seen by many as dishonorable. And if there was one thing the leaders of...

"Archers along the ridge! Shield wall!" Each shield went up in quick succession, with the soldiers caught near the center of the grouping raising their wooden bucklers overhead to fill in the wall's gaps. Heavy breathing and quiet prayers swept through the line, heightening the anxiety that had taken hold of these fighters.  There I stood, holding a weathered shield and surrounded by a mix of desperate soldiers and terrified farmers, readying myself for the next few moments of adrenaline-fuelled scrapping. It took less than a month after leaving one army for me to get drawn into the machinations of another; but I suppose it may be necessary to explain how I ended up in this situation, first. After finally leaving Tresin behind, for good, my next move came easy as the Kyrlund proved too volatile to remain in. The rebellion played their cards right: temporarily allying with Triton helped to trick Bovica into drawing their main force to the northern border, allowing the rebe...

I didn't stay for the execution. Not that the townsfolk would have let me, of course; the people of Tresin saw us as part of the problem. Despite the fact that I had been back in the village barely a day, I already found myself staring out over the ancient oaks at the bright glow of the pyre. Her screams rang out in the night before quickly fading away; but in my mind, the sound of my mother burning at the stake never left. I still hear her sometimes. Silent evenings like this tend to draw those painful howls out, forcing them from their hiding places amongst all the other blood-soaked memories. The next morning, I walked back slower than I intended. Not many find pleasure in gazing upon the charred corpse of one who raised them; not many whom I had the misfortune of meeting, at least. Upon arriving in Tresin, my mother's body had mysteriously vanished. I suffered through enough unpleasant conversations to discover that following their joyful immolation of another human being, ...

The noise in the hall was loud enough to send my ears into a feverish ringing, one which I'm not entirely sure I ever fully recovered from. Voices vied for dominance, each in a rush to have their own experiences added to the list of grievances my mother would need to atone for. One woman screamed about her son's conscription into the Bovican army, only for a two-sentence letter to be sent back a week later informing her of his death. One man explained, rather calmly given the circumstances, the life of his late wife under military rule; she was passed around and used like an object, forced to serve the soldiers sexually while her husband was worked nearly to death in the unyielding fields. She committed suicide after two months of being an abused sex slave. More stories like this compounded upon each other, each stemming from my mother's decision to hide from the scouts when they came asking for the daughter of Reevan. In their eyes, her surrender would have spared the peop...

It wasn't difficult to connect the disappearance of Madi with that of essentially all of Fort Sinder. In the days when Tresin remained a minor farming village, the best place to search for answers would have been the main hall; where the village leader lived, and where all major decisions were made. As if much governance was really necessary in such a small, impoverished backwater. Our walk back to the central courtyard proved much calmer than the previous one, meaning James finally had the opportunity to talk rather than simply wheeze and pant like a sickly mutt. He took that chance rather quickly. "Empty fortress, Madi disappearing...what if those two are connected?" He walked with a slight limp; apparently the catching up process had included a hard landing for his ankle. Despite that, our pace remained steady. Caution seemed a better path than reckless abandon at the moment, as it happened to support the main goal of keeping our heads in their proper places. We carefu...

The sound of dried leaves crunching beneath me went unnoticed, as my mind focused heavily on the questions I had. Why would Bovica still search for a man who was presumed dead? They wouldn’t, which means he must be alive. The reasons a nation would have for hunting down a dead man are so few, I could likely count them on one hand. And still leave two fingers unoccupied. Buried in my thoughts, I failed to notice James finally closing the distance between us. I had left him sitting there beneath that oak, no doubt confused and a bit overwhelmed by my sudden shift from passive listening to active running. His labored breathing was loud enough to pull me out of my own head - not to mention nearly driving me mad in the process - but I couldn’t stop now. Answers would not be handed to me easily, and time grew short. “Hey! What are - why are you running so damn fast?” asked the exhausted and athletically-handicapped James, as he desperately used whatever strength that remained to prevent hims...

"What does he have to do with this?" At that point, I had no idea what to expect. The name Reevan hadn't cropped up in conversation for over a decade; not since my mother grew tired of repeating the story to me every night before bed. Why my mother had decided to regale James Parson, a wayward farmboy returned home, with Reevan's practically unimportant tale was beyond my understanding. James gestured to a copse of trees off the main road, which we hadn't moved away from after I stopped to hear him out, and both of us made our way to a well-shaded spot to sit down. Facing one another, with him resting his back against the trunk of a large oak and me a few feet to his front upon the grass, the explanation began in full. "When the Bovicans took over Tresin, they didn't do so all at once. It started with a small scouting party, maybe six or seven people, arriving at the old wooden gate," he said, tilting his head back in the direction of the fort. ...

Half a century ago, there lived a man named Reevan. He built his life beneath the vast craggy slopes of the Kradellan Mountains, carrying nothing more than a pick, an axe, and the perseverance to transform that little mountain valley into a place called home. The fleeting few who knew this story well enough to tell it always conveniently forgot the part where he had nowhere else to go; the man had been exiled from his city of birth, pushed to civilization's edge for some crime which has long since been forgotten.  Yet Reevan's solitude was soon interrupted by fate in the form of a wagon train, intent on establishing a mining colony within the valley. Land rights for the entire mountain range belonged to Bovica, but their previous lack of interest in the area had allowed this exile free reign - so long as he refrained from attracting unwanted attention to himself. The prospective miners immediately began work setting up camp and scouring the range for viable tunnel spots, much t...

"Phillip!" The sound of leaves crunching underfoot as I trudged along the eastbound road were broken by a voice; I barely paused to hear him out, wanting nothing to do with whatever excuse he wished to give for his involvement in all this. He could have followed the army and found me, told me that my mother yet lived. But he didn't. And thus, his empty words and soulless apologies meant nothing to me. Yet, the Parsons were never the kind of folk to roll over at the first sign of trouble. That tenacious bastard only hastened his pace, lightly jogging until he was within a few feet of me. Seeing no way out of this interaction, I stopped abruptly and turned around to face him. For someone who had traveled so far to reach Tresin, he lacked endurance; which became quite apparent as he stopped shortly behind me, with sweat-soaked clothes and a face so red that I feared all the blood in his body had magically floated upwards to set up shop upon his brow. "Phillip! I just wa...

Silence commanded the room. Seated beside her bed, I thought about what she had said. How was I supposed to handle that? Within a day of being back in my birthplace, of setting foot in the fort they built over top of it, I found my mother alive; but not for long. I had already lost her once, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to suffer that pain for a second time. I didn't know, and I didn't want to. She turned her head gingerly, with great difficulty, and fixed her eyes on me. The same eyes that I see, to this day, in the unwanted reflections which find their way to me. The shades of blue in my own gaze aren't as vibrant, but a close match nonetheless to the stark lightning flashing behind hers. Yet, I never looked her in the eye. She kept staring at me, no doubt wishing that I would catch her gaze for a moment; a single moment was all it would have taken, and then I could return to my own thoughts. But I couldn't do it. I was ashamed, so incredibly ashamed of ho...

How? The biggest question, the elephant in the room waiting to be answered. But no answer came. Not from James, as he glared at me from the far wall; not from the room itself, which suggested no foul magic or necromantic purposes waiting beyond the darkest reaches of candlelight; and not from her.  She only gazed at me with a look of confused and disturbed melancholy as the minutes passed by, neither of us speaking for fear of shattering the tension like glass. But sometimes you need to break something before it can be fixed. "You were buried. They showed me your grave; told me it was a peaceful passing, that you felt no pain when the end took you. How are you here? How is your survival even possible?" My rush of questions seemed to resonate with her for a moment; just a moment. Tears started to well up in her eyes before she composed herself quickly, managing to hide that internal strife better than most trained killers could ever hope. I suppose she had a bit more experienc...

The last time that James and I had crossed paths, he was living in that two-room farmhouse out past the wheat field to the east. His mother died the winter prior from some affliction or another, the kind that sends perfectly healthy people into fits of bloody coughing within days. His period of mourning lasted longer than was normal, but no souls in town were willing to confront him about it. He was completely alone, and every bit of responsibility that his mother once shouldered had now fallen upon his own. That kind of weight can't be healthy for a person in such a fragile state to handle. Apparently he thought the same thing, as he disappeared into thin air around mid-March. Whether he'd been kidnapped or simply ran off in the dead of night, Tresin did its best to forget about him. To the people who knew his pain, knew the emptiness that the town brought him, wherever he went had to have been better than here. Which made me all the more confused as to why he had returned. Hi...

Most surviving members of the Tresin community had long since moved on, finding new places throughout the continent to call home. The few who remained in the area did so as workers: slaves to the soldiers who failed them, serving drinks for men who had let their people starve while they themselves ate roast duck and spiced meat. Sadly, the abandonment of the fort and collapse of Bovica didn't have the joyful reaction shared by other oppressed peoples of the Kyrlund. Without a fighting force in the walls, or even the government regulations in place to feed them had they remained, those who established residency within Fort Sinder met the swift revelation that their food stores would run out by the end of the month. No new supplies would be coming from the dead monarchy, meaning any and all food would have to be rationed and that discovering new sources of sustenance would need to become the top priority. I arrived at the fort in the middle of this transitional period; wanderers stum...

The Kyrlund. A land of great beauty and awe, but one marred by a history of war and suffering. I lived there long ago, many years before your time, during a period in which everything I loved, everything I knew, and everything that ever mattered to me was in a constant state of flux. At the beginning of that point in my life, I was a boy of seventeen. By the end I was only twenty-four, but those seven years were, without a doubt, the most impactful. No experience since has changed me as much as that time did. The purpose behind this story isn't to recall those transformative years, though. Be patient, as those moments take a bit more than spare hours in the day to capture properly. Instead, I'll be telling you of what came after. I used to be a soldier, believe it or not. The end of that seven-year period marked the end of my time as property of Bovica, allowing me to set out on a life of my own choosing. Unfortunately, that freedom translated to a lot of tavern hopping. I had ...