Chapter 13

Castle Thoradin Pointe, Northern Lordaeron

Iaes Sundrast looked out across the battlements, the white and blue banners of Lordaeron flapping lazily in the chilly air. The Northern Seas were a dangerous place, what with the ice and piracy. To his left was a stand where weapons were stacked when the guards were off duty, and to his right were yet more guards, fellow-subjects of boredom, and staring into the endless azure sea.

He and his company had long been assigned to the northern coast of Lordaeron to guard the ports and towns against bandits and pirates, many of which had appeared in the lawlessness after the war had ended.

Some soldiers returning from the last war were not able to harvest the ruined fields and had turned to thievery and destruction as their way to survive. Some did it for the greed. Some just did it for the adventure of being a filthy pirate.

This winter had been a quiet one though, though the garrison at Castle Thoradin Pointe had had to suffer through the frigid winter. The Castle overlooked a small, obscure, and relatively isolated port town in the distant north, less sparsely populated than the south and midlands. The north usually suffered cold winters as they had this past year.

Iaes had signed up for the guard when his father passed away, his own mother dying in childbirth, the fields themselves were too large for him alone to sow and reap, so he ended up selling the old farmhouse.

The transaction gave him enough money to try and leave the old lands of the feudal estate of his former Master, and though some small part of him earned for battle and the chance to prove his worthiness in the country, the greater whole of him knew that battle was folly. His father had gone to war as a soldier and came back minus half an arm.

After trying and failing, to make a living as an herbalist in the city of Wallaceburg, Iaes had turned to the military as his last option. At least he was earning a pay here. His due was nearly thirty crowns a month, enough to help get him out of the debt he had nearly buried himself in that damned, miserable city by the end of his first ten terms, each a tenure contract of six months.

The food wasn't too bad; mostly stale fish brought out from last year's storage (or so it seemed), and some rice from the paddy fields far away in places Iaes didn't know about, and bread brought in from great wagons of grain from the western distribution centers, places he had only dreamed of.

He once swore to himself that he would pay pilgrimage to Lordegarde, to the Holy Stones of the Light, to the Grand Monastery, to look upon the rosaries of the capital of not only the nation of Lordaeron, but the chief center of the Church of the Light. But that time was far away.

Another blast of cold air racketed him, and he began to shiver in his chain mail.

"Looks like a good rain may be comin' in. First of the season" his commander, Bailey Master Rorrak Nole spoke up as he made his way across the parapet.

"Yes sir" he replied, voice cracking. After all, he was only nineteen, and still becoming a man. He shifted his legs, the metal covering them clinking, trying to warm up.

A wooden trader lolled its way across the sea to the nearby port, where the news of the outside world would be delivered along with whatever merchandise the vessel had. All that Iaes knew of what was going on right now was that there was a plague spreading in a few counties nearby. The situation was under control, or so said the people of the traders.

He listened to their information every time he was off duty and in the sleepy town. Of what he also heard, there had been isolated incidents where many livestock had gone missing, or horribly deformed and decaying, sometimes even charging their own masters. However, none of the soldiers had been to the town in several weeks, a long kind of military hiatus from the outside world.

Later that day a rider had come to the Castle at full speed, pushing his mount to near death. As the animal frothed sweat, the rider dismounted and quickly reported to the Captain of the Guard in the castle square.

The Bailey Master accompanied the Captain as they paced frantically up and down the square, eventually called out for Second Swords Company, Iaes's group, to report to the square.

"You boys are gonna' march into town and garrison it. Edict came from Sir Dreng, commander of the garrisons in our county to garrison the towns. I don't know why boys, so don' even bother askin' me. I'll be goin' with ya inta' town" the Bailey shouted out as the hundred and twenty-five members of Second Swords Company filed into the cramped square.

Murmurs flew through the lines of the soldiers, most of whom had never seen battle. Why was there a need to garrison the towns? What was going on? Iaes didn't know and didn't want to know. He had signed up to pay off debts, not to fight a battle. Regardless, the column began to move soon after and passed out of the oak and metal-laden gates and into the forests toward the small dirt road toward the port town.

As they continued away from Castle Thoradin Pointe, the copses of trees conjoined into what seemed an eternal stretching forest. Someone had spotted rising above the forest on one or two occasions along the march, and the Bailey had sent out a scout.

The march stopped dead in its tracks and awaited the report of the scout. It took the runner nearly three hours to return from a simple mile's trip. He stumbled out of the forest, helmet lost, face nearly green, scrunched up in an expression that could mean only revulsion.

It wouldn't have been surprising if the man had been violently vomiting only minutes before, giving the man the look as if he had lost his breakfast. As he spotted the Bailey, he whispered something to him that made Rorrak Nole's eyes pop wide open.

Iaes noticed that the march sped up, and changed direction at a fork in the road almost immediately as the scout had returned. He noticed that the trees had become somewhat…deader as they continued, more without leaves, more with twisting, writhing branches that seemed to be decaying and falling off by the minute.

Suddenly, the column stopped. In front of them lay several dozen bodies, all dead. Their bleeding masses sprawled across the ground. They had armor and the badge that marked them as guards of the town.

The men cried out in disgust at the mutilated bodies. Organs and guts were splayed across the landscape, blood covering trees and the ground, which now resembled a type of dry, thick, poisoned and decayed mass covering the ground.

The men were ordered to stay in line by sergeants as the Bailey and his lieutenants surveyed the scene. Rorrak Nole had been the only in the unit to see combat in the Second War, and even though he must have been accustomed to seeing death then, it had been a long time since those dark days he thought would never return.

Iaes bent over along with several other men and vomited on the deathly ground, falling to his knees, when he noticed a half-buried corpse. There was something strange about it, as it looked as if it had been decaying for weeks, not just the hours since this battle in the forest. He pointed out the corpse to his commander, who briefly dismissed it.

"If these Town Guard have been slaughtered, then the town itself may be in danger" the Bailey spoke to himself as he rushed back up the reforming lines. Several men were assigned to stay behind and guard the bodies as the rest of the column continued toward the town.