"I, for one, have an idea that he will never bring this journey off…" – The Odyssey of Homer
“If you’re going to shoot me, boy,” Gralt said, gruffly shifting off his slightly age bent back the bundles of fire logs he’d been carrying up to the good witch’s house. “I’d kill me before Nyleth sends her wolves for me. Been feeling them at my heels these days.” Looking out at the burning village, he almost forgot his anger at the Shepherd’s son for being late to pick up his mother’s wood-share.
Edward was rarely ever someone people would go to for answers. He was barely a stable hand, barely a man in the eyes of the warriors that often stayed at the Hill Reaver Inn. And as far as the villagers were concerned, he might as well have been invisible most days.
They had to trust the boy. They had no other choice. But as the night fell, and the chill came with it, the growing fear in Galdaya and Agatha’s chests grew hard to ignore.
Her eyes were not what they had been years ago, when she hadn’t had the weight of wrinkles almost forcing them closed. But she saw three shadows. Their outlines were cast by flickering orange light coming in through the windows. Men were ransacking her home without a care for her presence or for her hollow boned fear.
When I looked down at myself and saw other stab wounds, I knew both that my sense of the straining was right and that at least one Savv at this camp had lived. Their bodies hadn’t just walked away on their own, sure. But if someone had happened upon the camp, they wouldn’t have cared about the seemingly dead skinny kid laying nearby. Not enough to stab him a half-dozen times.
My left leg was bent oddly at the knee and I stood on the other, precariously balanced on the edge of a crumbling cliff path. I was so angry with myself. Snot and tears burned my cheeks and lips only for the first moments of gut wrenching pain. Then the wind chill of the height was seared away by a simmer of haze, born as much from my embarrassed shame as it was from my self hate.
“You know, I can understand how you feel, Muinn,” The High Chief said, his voice suddenly wistful and distant. “The me of today, of course, knows your feelings as an unpleasant memory; a reminder of why I am who I am. But reach far enough back and every bear was once a cub, every wolf a pup, and every falcon a chick. All of them were once things that could easily be crushed under club, under boot, or between finger and thumb."
Maltimor smirked and shook his head, taking the boy’s near shoulder in hand. He stood like a father, or perhaps an uncle, giving a lesson. “I used to feel the same way, when my father and brothers used to tell me such things. It all sounded like riddles. Like in those annoying parts of the stories, where the druids or wise mages always seemingly said two things at once and called it wisdom. A load of horse-shit, I’d call it.”
“Yes, I apologize,” the man said easily. He snapped with one hand, almost like it were a shrug for someone else. Galdaya winced at the arrival of light from several torches, carried by Savv warriors who had gone unnoticed behind the central man’s frame. Then the new warriors, silent and grim faced, spread out within the smithy to evenly disperse the light their master had ordered them to make.
“Don’t touch me,” Muinn said, flinching away from his mother again. He brushed her shoulder briskly as he walked around her to go back to flames of the forge. Galdaya could only blink a moment, anger instinctively rising, but being met with increasing confusion. She couldn’t understand what could make her son act like this. It made her chest ring on the inside.
Vault of Orendathos 