Death of a Friend

Many years past when I had traveled in a far off land I found myself faced with a curious creature.  A jungle cat I called it, a pest the natives would correct me.  Orange with a crooked tail, smaller than the lot that plagued the forests, it still a babe could only stare up at me with its yellow inquisitive eyes.  I was instantly on guard for a mother, no animal would be without one at this age but as I stared at the diminutive creature curiously looking left and right I knew it to be alone.  I considered leaving him then but a moment later the cat was at my leg, sniffing once then butting into me playfully.  It would not survive on its own.  It had decided on its path.  I had as well.

Domestication was easy.  That cat took to me unnaturally, willing to suspend its baser instincts in exchange for simple things such as food, water, affection.  In return I gained a hunting companion.  Many a day was spent in the forest hunting for all manner of beasts from the great lizards of Tuc'sone to the chitinous mantises that sullied the cliffs of Denton.  Side by side we stalked our prey, well in all honesty, he stalked.  I would frequently have to still myself long before we reached our quarry or face a disgusted look from the noble beast at my lack of stealth.  He did not like to run after all, a fact which he had made clear to me many a time as he lazily ignored the castle roaches just out of his reach.  He preferred instead to pounce from close distance, which is perhaps a side effect of his lavish lifestyle.  I had spoiled him greatly.

His own effect on me was much greater.  A strategist by nature, my thoughts frequently turn to paranoia and self-interest.  Allies are such in that there is a benefit to our acquaintance.  There can also become a weapon for your enemies.  I have spent a decade using people for my ends, dangling them from strings as if some street-side puppet master.  Never letting them close, giving them just enough to push them in the directions I need.  Over ten years I have come to care about few things.  Indifference brings you a type of freedom not many can know.  Your motivations are truly your own and can't be mediated by external influence.  Yet I am not truly indifferent to all things.  I have cared about that cat.  More so than many people I have known.  He is loyal, easy to read, and wants so few things from me in return.  In a life where I frequently move from kingdom to kingdom, sometimes on a whim, he has been a constant for over a decade.  I have people in my life now that matter to me.  He kept that window open.  He showed me that even after all the betrayals, after all the battles I have fought in, after all the horrors I have witnessed it was still possible to care about something.  Without that surly feline I would surely have traveled a much darker path.  My party of adventurers, the Apprentice, and the Woman were able to use that window that he kept open in order to become part of my life.   Whereas before they may have only been a means to an end, they have instead become an end in themselves.

The cat died last night.  He had lived a full long life for a jungle cat, wanting for little.  He had traveled farther than most people I have known to get to this place.  I know I did everything I could to keep him with me for a few seasons more but it was just his time.  I buried him in one of his favorite hunting grounds, churning the earth with my bare hands till they were raw.  May the gods take him now or at the very least allow his spirit to haunt those woods chasing every metallic tiger beetle and bird as he did when just a kitten.  That is how I will remember him.  My cat, my Hunter.              

Listlessness and Intrigue

It's been creeping on me as of late that I need a change.  A waking dream I wander through quietly, my outward exterior rarely betraying my true motivations.  I received a missive of censure from the Council of Alchemists.  The note read simply that I had failed at some small attempt at bureaucracy that these people so loved.  The consequence of failing to remedy the situation would result in a loss of gold...had I been paid by these fools, as some of the other alchemists are.  My profession is my currency,  my passion for transmutation is everything else but the Council's rules are not for one such as me.  I will go rogue soon, practicing without their consent.  They will send their dogs for me in the short term but I can outlast them.  I can endure.  My skills are many, I can find employment in other lands should the fires of the coming war reach my liege.  My failing, my strength is that their consequences have no power to guide my hand as they think on such small levels.

Also of note is that I soon could be fighting war on two fronts.  I have heard strange tidings and seen queer things in the last few days.  Connections being drawn between my Lieutenant and Rival.  I had known of their past, he as a student and she his mentor, but those days had long past I had believed.  I now believe them to be on friendly terms which bodes no great fortune to me.  Also of consequence, another in the field of the transmutation of insects,  a person I had identified early on as a possible ally due to our common goals and similar interests has taken to the Rival romantically.  Whether it is indeed a true romance or another attempt at me, another of these constant attempts to redefine our battle it will need to be answered.  We are cordial in public and scheming in private and I find that it is becoming wearing.  Like those undead sailors, the Vampirates, that have long troubled the shipping lanes she has begun to suck at the last vestiges of my strength.  I have clearly played this game too long. Maybe this can no longer be just a game for me.  Maybe it is time for open warfare.

In times such as these I would turn to the Woman, my own princess, for guidance and solace but she is gone.  Fighting her own battles in far off lands I can only wish her luck.  Skilled and ferocious in competition, I expect nothing less than news of victory as well as no shortage of battle wounds to be displayed proudly.  My resolution without her counsel is that I aim to maintain both my duties for the Kingdom and the facade that I am still in league with the Council until it is time to break with them forever and strike out on my own.  This will be a complex betrayal and I will need more time to put my pieces into place.
                              

Betrayal and the rise of another

I was summoned early.  As I passed the portcullis of my liege I knew something to be amiss.  Not just for the simple fact that I was rarely beckoned.   My liege knowing me to be capable allowed for my independence.  No there was something else that forced me into cautious paranoia, forced me to begin devising plans and counter-plans, to anticipate my lord's demands before they left his mouth.  It was as if there was an unnatural crispness to the air now, every strangers face a mask of someone that knew a great secret.  I could not pin down where the feeling came from but in it I knew one truth.   Something in my world was about to change.

My liege greeted me warmly.  Any other person and I would have remained on guard looking for any falsehood, but I had known him many years and while his whims could sometimes be fanciful, his actions were not.  His demand was simple and to the point.

"I am taking your Lieutenant."

The smile on my face never wavered but in my mind I reeled as if hit.  I had no plan for this, no stratagem by which to use this to my advantage.  This could only be construed as a loss.  The hard season had barely begun and already a defection.  He continued speaking but my mind was already whirling in other directions looking for the best way to salvage this situation.  We spoke at length, or to be more precise he spoke at length, while I continued to nod and plot.  When the gathering was over I had come to the only solution I could manage.  I would need a second Lieutenant.  I would need someone I could trust.  It was time to elevate another of our band to a station of importance.  The Barbarian could not be trusted with power, the Ronin had no long term stake in our affairs, the Giant while capable would be leaving our lands before the end of the hard season.  Only one person had the experience I needed, had the wisdom to get our tasks finished, and had the loyalty to ensure my will was done.  It was the Mage's time to lead.
There was much uncertainty in this route.  Enough so that even a strategist like myself, one who preferred the riskier path for greater glory, was having doubts.   While capable, the Mage had never been tested.   He had survived the machinations of his dark arts but would he be tempted by the trappings of power that too often plague those of the flesh?  Would this absolute power corrupt him?
Every plan leaves dangling questions as if yarn from a tattered shirt.  Loose ends which once set in motion would be answered in time.  I had already decided my position so I determined not to dwell on them.  A second more immediate problem lay on the horizon that overshadowed the first.  The Lieutenant was not leaving for a far off kingdom, he was not sailing across the ocean.  He was merely serving another for our liege.  Would our secrets be safe?  I had underestimated his ambition, perhaps his loyalty as well.  His move while not upward was still strategic.  It had given him an ability to showcase his particular talents where as before I had used those talents to bolster my own.  Perhaps this was a play for my position.  Perhaps this was a move worthy of a counter move.                
      

The Woman

At the heart of every story there is a conflict.  At the center of every great conflict there is a cause worth fighting for.  I find I am not prone to the machinations of others.  I am rarely a follower by belief.  Perhaps all men say this before they truly realize how far they have been manipulated in their path.  However in spite of such a truth I believe my path to be my own and therefore my travails are my own.  In my youth I fought in many battles, for reasons both fallacious and true.  It is easy to be an idealist when you are young.  Every outrage to be met with force. Now I find that there are few things in this world that I allow to stir my sympathies.  A weakness to some, a trait I have long heralded as a strength.  There is none who can have leverage over me.  I will not be manipulated.  I will not be threatened.  I will scorch the earth beneath me rather than yield.  I had thought no cause was worth my soul.

The Woman
How many great men have been undone by the affections of a woman?  So many that it is a truth.  A hard logical fact that underpins this world.  Whatever your ambitions, whatever your path, when you start down that road, you will end up somewhere completely different.  I am weak, as men frequently are in these matters, but I like to think it took an extraordinary woman to break me.  It's not simply a matter of beauty, of which she possess more than her fair share.  Nor can I attribute it only to her brilliance.  Trained as a Mage in their arcane sigils and numbers, ideas and theories the like of which I have no hope of deciphering, she has turned to alchemy now in an attempt to fuse her previous training with that of the natural world.  While I very much enjoy having someone of a similar background for lively discourse, it is her spirit that draws me in.   Much as a moth to a flame, it is an unquenchable fire that will surely burn me and yet I can't turn away.  She shrugs off her hardships with a smile, her gaze is both commanding and reassuring in one pass.  The wits of a mage, the resolve of a warrior, she is an army in herself.  Traits that have won her many friends but have also gained her powerful enemies.  Enemies we now share.  A few among those that I once counted as companions.                                  

The Rival and the Apprentice

I have many skills.  I have had many professions.  While I toil for the kingdom I am also a student of the world.  A naturalist by heart I seek the understand the mysteries of this realm.  I am in no small part an alchemist.  I am of those that would seek to unlock power through the natural processes of this plane of existence.  I am not alone in this pursuit.

The Rival
There is a woman whose position rivals my own at the academy.  Her skills are beyond mine but her  inexperience keeps us as equals.  Her ambition is raw, unyielding, a thing to be rightly feared, however her clumsy attempts to rise through the ranks have revealed her nature amongst our masters.  Where once they had mistook her intellectual challenges for reasoned debate they now know it to be born of simple ego.  This is one who will not be reasoned with, who will not be challenged, who will rise above them and should the moment come, crush them into the dust of oblivion.  We had been traveling companions once, our days filled with discovery and new challenges, laughter and stories, on a common path to the future.  Now our days are spent on subterfuges, tiny intrigues designed only to provide pain, to show that we can still hurt the other.  In this we are not equals.  While her skills in the art are impressive, it is my years of experience, my lifetime of enduring horrors that she could not even begin to fathom, my ability to rise from even the most untenable of positions that will carry the day.  She has chosen her enemies very poorly.

The Apprentice
I can not even remember the exact moment I knew that this was my path.  The simple curiosity tugging at my every thought, never letting go.   The longing to know every tiny fact about my chosen alchemical field, the transmutation of insects.  The weakened grub to the durable beetle.  The slowly moving maggot to the swift fly.  The homely caterpillar to the stately butterfly.  My protege does not share my interest but does share my passion for questioning this universe.  Integral to the workings of my attempts at decrypting these mysteries I have come to rely on her greatly, nearly as much as she relies on my reasoned advice as I walk her through the path she has chosen.  Boundless enthusiasm, unwavering loyalty, and an ability to smile in the face of adversity have endeared her to me in that our interactions have become something akin to friendship, if I am still capable of such an act.  Her nervous nature and our frequent odd conversations have pushed us to the fringe of our colleagues but it is a price worth paying.  She is a staunch ally.  

         

The Giant

The intrigues of the kingdom sometimes require a strong hand to be played.  The politics of the castle keep us constantly vying for position.  Each of my colleagues straining for the ear of their dukes and lords, willing to step over each other to get that attention.  I am in no way vilifying their intentions as I too have done hard things in my own quest for upward mobility.  Our own tasks however require more than just planning.  We have a wealth of cunning, strategy, and wisdom with no small share of trickery and deceit.  To elevate my status, to accomplish more for my lieges I needed more strength than my injured Barbarian could muster, more than just the raw skill of my Ronin, more than the feral cunning of my Lieutenant.

The Giant
Visually this man is a powerhouse.  With this man at my back no other could challenge me.  None other would dare.  A gladiator by trade he battles for the amusement of the populace.  Coliseums have been packed on his name alone however he rarely fights alone, his specialty is fighting with companions.  It is this quality that has brought him to my attention.  His years of experience in the arena have shown him the value of a team.  I sought simply at first to control him but his large frame belied a gentle soul and I seek now only to understand him.  Not only does he bring the power I wished for, the simple power of intimidation by sight, but his quiet easy going nature also strengthens the bonds that this group is forming.  I had wanted a fist but I instead received a shield, which has far more value for me now.

            

The Ronin and the Lieutenant

You can't keep a cadre of talent such as this moving in one direction without help.  My prestigious skills aside I just don't have that ability.  This means I frequently have to recruit from outside the kingdom.  This means I need a good right hand man.

The Ronin
A wandering sell sword.  A quiet mercenary from far off.  Hired during the hard seasons when I need a trusted steady hand when the work gets rough.  His quiet nature and enormous skill set frequently force him to the outside of our little group rendering him invisible.  This is just another of his valuable skills.  The ability to be discrete is always worth paying for, especially in our line of work where being seen in the wrong place can quickly lead to war.  His years of service have gained him many friends and few enemies, that along with his own familial connections in the kingdom have also benefited us greatly in our tasks.  Analytical, unassuming but always interesting, he provides a bedrock of experience for the newer members of our team.  The fact that he has hit me with a horse and still has continued employment speaks far more to his worth than any description I could conjure.

The Lieutenant
A man of no small skill, his indifference frequently allows him to make the hard decisions that sometimes even make myself pause.  Experienced, more than competent, and with an eye for detail he takes to each task with an energy I find myself lacking.  He has the ability to manipulate each personality in our group with the responses they need ranging from flattery to intimidation in order to put them on the most beneficial path.  There is not much that this man would not do in order to accomplish our goals.  His own lack of ambition is all that stops me from sleeping with a blade at night for fear of being replaced.  Whilst the frequent threats of the barbarian now ring hollow should this man find that he desires my position I have no doubt he could quickly take it from me, accounting for no small amount of unpleasantness in our little part of the kingdom.          

The Barbarian and the Mage

My work while mundane is necessary.  I am a surveyor by trade.  I manage the Kingdom's resources.  I ensure the torches light at night pushing back the darkness, the refuge of brigands and even more monstrous creatures.  I ensure the warding's on the town doors are set against the thieves that would stealthily enter.  I quest for my lieges when their sometimes capricious ways demand this of me.  To this end I have employed a party of adventurer's to help me in my tasks.

The Barbarian
A fighter by trade  Wounded from his time at sea he has become ill tempered and brutish.  Or perhaps that was his personality before the war.  I did not know him then.  This man is quick to anger and sometimes slow to think.  His manner offends but his heart is true.  A reliable soldier, he follows my orders after a bit of good natured prodding but refuses to accept command from any other, save my Lieutenant.  His swarthy manner and his constant threats that he "will stab you" have ceased to be offensive but instead have become a part of how this motley group functions.  He is easily seduced by small amounts of power and while trustworthy to myself is watched most closely for signs of betrayal against the others.            

The Mage
I've known the Mage the longest of my adventurers.  Diminutive but quick of mind.  A man of order, quick to point out rules and regulations, quick to point out the short comings of my plans.  He is well read, well traveled and provides enlightened conversation.  His ostentatious garb marks him as Mage from first meeting.  Wide brimmed hat, scarf and longcoat he stands out amongst my simpler dressed men.  His weapon of choice the rapier, he is a master fencer, but his true weapon will always be his mind.  A religious man at heart, he is gentle until riled.  Like all Mages his handwriting is chicken scratch making his frequent written reports frustrating yet intriguing, making the simplest scroll a mystery to be solved instead of a simple listing of resources.  The Mage can be difficult but is always interesting.                       

Storm

A storm is coming.  Thunder has been booming in the distance but only now are the clouds starting to darken.  It's been a while since the last squall.  Almost too long since I felt the rain on my face, the moments of complete blackness, the lightning breaking the darkness.  All the things that get my blood pumping, keep my  mind sharp, replace the mundane thoughts that constantly fog up my subconscious.  That single bolt of light that will make everything clear again.
The kingdom stands oblivious at the moment.  Only a few people have guessed what is coming and have begun to prepare, but for the rest there is only the peace that ignorance brings.  This storm will split the world but as always there is calm before the catastrophe.  This is a good place for our story to begin.