Weekly Wordcount: February 1 - 7
Because I thought I was going to have more time/energy to write this week, naturally nothing of the sort happened.
1890 / 2500 words. 76% done!
Finding Keldris and Talia proved to be considerably more difficult than he had hoped for.
Shadowglen, even under present circumstances, was not a large village, covering only a few dozen acres of the Tirisfalen hills and forest at the very edge of the vast, dark expanse of Silverpine, its homes and roads and businesses clinging to the sides and floor of the valley. Most of the town's hundred-odd souls had made their living in its major enterprise -- the mines they worked under royal charter, from which they extracted the metals that fed the capital's treasuries and minting-house -- and its associated tasks, the smelting-house, the smithy, the charcoal yards. A handful of sharecrofters helped work the local farmsteads and orchards, a handful of foresters helped keep the royal game lands clear of poachers, and a pair of well-known and highly sought after artisans, who preferred to live close to the source of their favored materials and who served as the village's headmen, were the only other permanent residents. Then the Plague had come, and the dead had risen, and the refugees from the East had begun pouring in, first as a trickle, then as a flood. Shadowglen, with its steep, narrow road and equally narrow entrance into the valley, its back to the wall of the mountains, became something other than a simple, sleepy hill town: it became a defensible strong-point, a place to send the overflow of exhausted, terrified easterners encamped in the shadow of the City's walls. And so, one fine early autumn morning, the weary, frightened folk of Shadowglen had woken to find a detachment of the King's soldiers and an equal-sized detachment of Church-trained knights marching into town with a squad of siege engineers and three hundred refugees in their train. The engineers had built a swiftly constructed but strong wooden palisade across the mouth of the valley, reopened and reinforced the played-out mine shafts, and then returned to the City; the soldiers and the knights had remained, to settle the refugees, to establish the field hospital, to help maintain the cordon that stretched from Brill to Silverlaine Keep to Fenris Isle to the City, to soothe the ruffled feathers of the locals, whose thoughts on the project had not been solicited prior to its execution.
Solivar himself spent the majority of the time either in the field hospital or assisting with the refugees, most of whom had arrived on the other side of the Bulwark in various states of exhausted, injured, and sick with both illness and fear, often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and what little they had managed to scavenge along the way to aid their survival. Necessities -- food, clothing, blankets -- had been distributed to them at the City, but there were some ills and deprivations that no material gift could address: most of the refugees had lost someone, either to the Plague or to the dead, some had lost all, and many were the parents bereft of children, the children lacking anything other than compassionate strangers to see to their care. He went among them, tending injuries not severe enough to require a Light-blessed healer's hands, making certain illnesses that were not the Plague did not lead to a general panic, coaxing the despairing to eat and move and care for themselves as best they could. The children, in particular, required gentle handling, especially the youngest ones who had no family left to protect or advocate for them. Of the knights, he was among the best with the children -- an artifact of the years he had spent in service to the Sanctum of the Moon and its orphan's asylum in Quel'Thalas -- who found him a mythy as a dragon, his ears and hair a source of constant fascination, and the stories he could tell of heroes and wizards of whom they had never heard were a source of comfort far out of proportion to their actual entertainment value. Many of them needed that simple comfort of a warm cup of milk and a bedtime story, the lamp left burning to chase away the shadows, someone to hold them when they woke frightened in the night. He had been alone and frightened enough as a child himself to wish it on no one else, especially when the cause was so terrible.
The situation was substantially complicated by the attitude of the locals which, even a month on, tended to be standoffish at best, actively quarrelsome at the worst, and at nearly no time at all inclined toward helpful or neighborly. He supposed he could understand the tension but, at the same time, had little sympathy for it: had Shadowglen fallen to the dead and its people were forced to flee, he wondered how they would feel as refugees in their own homeland, treated as poor and unwelcome relations likely to steal the silver once they found a place of safety? He principally left liaising with the headmen to Aretegos, who possessed the authority lent not only by his knighthood but the noble Lordaeran title he would inherit on his next birthday, held his tongue as best he was able, reminded himself that patience and compassion were the higher virtues, and that it was not very knightly to shout "What is WRONG with you people?!" while administering a sound beating no matter how obdurate others were in their unpleasantness. He had cause to remind himself of those very salient facts at least six times that morning, searching through the town, being greeted by villagers inclined to pretend his accent was totally impenetrable and harassed civilian support officials who were entirely too busy to answer simple questions. It was the best part of an hour before he found one of the objects of his search, as she rode in through the palisade gate at the head of her patrol.
"Talia!"
She reined her mount off to the side, turned in the saddle and spoke quietly to her lieutenant, offering a final salute and sending the soldiers under her command on their way. She did not object when he reached up and took the reins from her, and even accepted his hand down, so obviously stiff and tired from the hours she'd spent in the saddle that she actually leaned heavily on him for a long moment after her feet touched the ground. Together they walked her horse to the makeshift tent-stable without a word passing between them and from there to the mess, where he required her to sit and eat something before he would tell her the source of his errand.
"Now. Tell me, already." Her vivid green eyes were still heavily underlaid by weary circles, dark even against the warm brown of her skin, but she no longer looked as though she could fall asleep on her feet.
"The master is here. He wishes you to attend him in the chapel as soon as you can." He knew he was grinning like an idiot but could not help it.
Talia's eyes widened slightly. "Then I probably should. Had you been looking long? Oh, he'll be vexed."
"Not long, no. And I suspect he'll forgive me the liberty of making certain you're awake for what he wants to tell you." They rose together, and he gathered up her plate and mug. "Have you seen Keldris anywhere?"
"Our paths crossed just above Brill late last night -- his patrol was on its way in at the time." She snatched back her mug and finished off the last swallow of her tea. "I believe his long-term plan was to get something to eat and sleep for a few hours."
Keldris and Talia had both been riding back-to-back patrol shifts for whole days at a stretch, and so this plan was not surprising. Unfortunately, there was not a drop of mornbrew left in the mess, and so he settled for making a mug of the blackest tea possible, unadulterated by milk or honey, and set off to the pavilion that served their detachment as sleeping quarters. Also unfortunately, Keldris was not there, though his bedroll had obviously seen recent use. The officer of the watch grumped that it wasn't her job to keep track of wayward knights but confirmed that Keldris wasn't actually scheduled for a duty rotation until some time after midday. The mug of tea was stone cold and half empty despite the tongue-curling bitterness of it by the time his travels brought him to the refugee camp, tucked back hard against the hill and clustered around the unused mine shafts that had been reinforced for their use as shelters, a somewhat warmer and drier supplement to the multitude of tents both small and large that filled the far end of the valley.
Keldris normally claimed a violent allergy to small children brought on by being the eldest of six and having been sorely distressed by his younger siblings until he ran away screaming to Lordaeron. The affliction did not appear to be bothering him too greatly that morning as he crawled about on his hands and knees, three children under the age of five winters clinging to his back uttering savage war-cries as they slew imaginary ghouls right and left, another half-dozen cheering in a wide circle around them and demanding their turns to ride the horsie. He absolutely could not help the laugh that emerged from him at the sight, and Keldris got to his feet grinning his easiest grin, promising the children he'd come back to play more with them later.
"I wanted to bring you some mornbrew, but I'm afraid I got there a bit too late." He handed Keldris the half-empty mug. "And I wanted to give you a full cup, but I'm afraid it took me forever to find you and nature took its course."
"Excuses, excuses." Keldris, nonetheless, drank down the mug's contents in three swallows. "For what it's worth, I thought I'd find you over here when I came looking and instead discovered that your absence from your bedroll was not entirely the fault of adorable moppets."
"Not entirely, no. The master came in from the City late last night. He wants to see you in the chapel as soon as you can get there."
Keldris handed back the mug and automatically ran a hand through his disorderly mess of short-cropped auburn hair, rendering it even more messy than it was before. "Really? I'm astonished he found the time what with everything else that's going on. Did he say what it was about?"
"I think you'll be pleasantly surprised." He replied and turned back down the path, Keldris stretching his long legs to keep up.
"I other words, 'yes, but I'm not supposed to say.'" Keldris gave him a sidelong look. "Are you...feeling well? Your eyes are glowing more than normal this morning. You haven't taken a fever from one of your ankle-biting companions, have you?"
He laughed again, the sound catching the attention of passersby and earning glares in response. "No, no, I don't have a fever. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I felt this well. You'll understand in a few minutes, I suspect."
"Very well, preserve your air of exotic Quel'dorei mystery if you must." Keldris replied airily. "I'll find out soon enough."
He absolutely could not stop smiling. "Yes, yes you will."
Weekly Wordcount February 8 - 14
/ 2500 words. 0% done!
1890 / 2500 words. 76% done!
Finding Keldris and Talia proved to be considerably more difficult than he had hoped for.
Shadowglen, even under present circumstances, was not a large village, covering only a few dozen acres of the Tirisfalen hills and forest at the very edge of the vast, dark expanse of Silverpine, its homes and roads and businesses clinging to the sides and floor of the valley. Most of the town's hundred-odd souls had made their living in its major enterprise -- the mines they worked under royal charter, from which they extracted the metals that fed the capital's treasuries and minting-house -- and its associated tasks, the smelting-house, the smithy, the charcoal yards. A handful of sharecrofters helped work the local farmsteads and orchards, a handful of foresters helped keep the royal game lands clear of poachers, and a pair of well-known and highly sought after artisans, who preferred to live close to the source of their favored materials and who served as the village's headmen, were the only other permanent residents. Then the Plague had come, and the dead had risen, and the refugees from the East had begun pouring in, first as a trickle, then as a flood. Shadowglen, with its steep, narrow road and equally narrow entrance into the valley, its back to the wall of the mountains, became something other than a simple, sleepy hill town: it became a defensible strong-point, a place to send the overflow of exhausted, terrified easterners encamped in the shadow of the City's walls. And so, one fine early autumn morning, the weary, frightened folk of Shadowglen had woken to find a detachment of the King's soldiers and an equal-sized detachment of Church-trained knights marching into town with a squad of siege engineers and three hundred refugees in their train. The engineers had built a swiftly constructed but strong wooden palisade across the mouth of the valley, reopened and reinforced the played-out mine shafts, and then returned to the City; the soldiers and the knights had remained, to settle the refugees, to establish the field hospital, to help maintain the cordon that stretched from Brill to Silverlaine Keep to Fenris Isle to the City, to soothe the ruffled feathers of the locals, whose thoughts on the project had not been solicited prior to its execution.
Solivar himself spent the majority of the time either in the field hospital or assisting with the refugees, most of whom had arrived on the other side of the Bulwark in various states of exhausted, injured, and sick with both illness and fear, often with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and what little they had managed to scavenge along the way to aid their survival. Necessities -- food, clothing, blankets -- had been distributed to them at the City, but there were some ills and deprivations that no material gift could address: most of the refugees had lost someone, either to the Plague or to the dead, some had lost all, and many were the parents bereft of children, the children lacking anything other than compassionate strangers to see to their care. He went among them, tending injuries not severe enough to require a Light-blessed healer's hands, making certain illnesses that were not the Plague did not lead to a general panic, coaxing the despairing to eat and move and care for themselves as best they could. The children, in particular, required gentle handling, especially the youngest ones who had no family left to protect or advocate for them. Of the knights, he was among the best with the children -- an artifact of the years he had spent in service to the Sanctum of the Moon and its orphan's asylum in Quel'Thalas -- who found him a mythy as a dragon, his ears and hair a source of constant fascination, and the stories he could tell of heroes and wizards of whom they had never heard were a source of comfort far out of proportion to their actual entertainment value. Many of them needed that simple comfort of a warm cup of milk and a bedtime story, the lamp left burning to chase away the shadows, someone to hold them when they woke frightened in the night. He had been alone and frightened enough as a child himself to wish it on no one else, especially when the cause was so terrible.
The situation was substantially complicated by the attitude of the locals which, even a month on, tended to be standoffish at best, actively quarrelsome at the worst, and at nearly no time at all inclined toward helpful or neighborly. He supposed he could understand the tension but, at the same time, had little sympathy for it: had Shadowglen fallen to the dead and its people were forced to flee, he wondered how they would feel as refugees in their own homeland, treated as poor and unwelcome relations likely to steal the silver once they found a place of safety? He principally left liaising with the headmen to Aretegos, who possessed the authority lent not only by his knighthood but the noble Lordaeran title he would inherit on his next birthday, held his tongue as best he was able, reminded himself that patience and compassion were the higher virtues, and that it was not very knightly to shout "What is WRONG with you people?!" while administering a sound beating no matter how obdurate others were in their unpleasantness. He had cause to remind himself of those very salient facts at least six times that morning, searching through the town, being greeted by villagers inclined to pretend his accent was totally impenetrable and harassed civilian support officials who were entirely too busy to answer simple questions. It was the best part of an hour before he found one of the objects of his search, as she rode in through the palisade gate at the head of her patrol.
"Talia!"
She reined her mount off to the side, turned in the saddle and spoke quietly to her lieutenant, offering a final salute and sending the soldiers under her command on their way. She did not object when he reached up and took the reins from her, and even accepted his hand down, so obviously stiff and tired from the hours she'd spent in the saddle that she actually leaned heavily on him for a long moment after her feet touched the ground. Together they walked her horse to the makeshift tent-stable without a word passing between them and from there to the mess, where he required her to sit and eat something before he would tell her the source of his errand.
"Now. Tell me, already." Her vivid green eyes were still heavily underlaid by weary circles, dark even against the warm brown of her skin, but she no longer looked as though she could fall asleep on her feet.
"The master is here. He wishes you to attend him in the chapel as soon as you can." He knew he was grinning like an idiot but could not help it.
Talia's eyes widened slightly. "Then I probably should. Had you been looking long? Oh, he'll be vexed."
"Not long, no. And I suspect he'll forgive me the liberty of making certain you're awake for what he wants to tell you." They rose together, and he gathered up her plate and mug. "Have you seen Keldris anywhere?"
"Our paths crossed just above Brill late last night -- his patrol was on its way in at the time." She snatched back her mug and finished off the last swallow of her tea. "I believe his long-term plan was to get something to eat and sleep for a few hours."
Keldris and Talia had both been riding back-to-back patrol shifts for whole days at a stretch, and so this plan was not surprising. Unfortunately, there was not a drop of mornbrew left in the mess, and so he settled for making a mug of the blackest tea possible, unadulterated by milk or honey, and set off to the pavilion that served their detachment as sleeping quarters. Also unfortunately, Keldris was not there, though his bedroll had obviously seen recent use. The officer of the watch grumped that it wasn't her job to keep track of wayward knights but confirmed that Keldris wasn't actually scheduled for a duty rotation until some time after midday. The mug of tea was stone cold and half empty despite the tongue-curling bitterness of it by the time his travels brought him to the refugee camp, tucked back hard against the hill and clustered around the unused mine shafts that had been reinforced for their use as shelters, a somewhat warmer and drier supplement to the multitude of tents both small and large that filled the far end of the valley.
Keldris normally claimed a violent allergy to small children brought on by being the eldest of six and having been sorely distressed by his younger siblings until he ran away screaming to Lordaeron. The affliction did not appear to be bothering him too greatly that morning as he crawled about on his hands and knees, three children under the age of five winters clinging to his back uttering savage war-cries as they slew imaginary ghouls right and left, another half-dozen cheering in a wide circle around them and demanding their turns to ride the horsie. He absolutely could not help the laugh that emerged from him at the sight, and Keldris got to his feet grinning his easiest grin, promising the children he'd come back to play more with them later.
"I wanted to bring you some mornbrew, but I'm afraid I got there a bit too late." He handed Keldris the half-empty mug. "And I wanted to give you a full cup, but I'm afraid it took me forever to find you and nature took its course."
"Excuses, excuses." Keldris, nonetheless, drank down the mug's contents in three swallows. "For what it's worth, I thought I'd find you over here when I came looking and instead discovered that your absence from your bedroll was not entirely the fault of adorable moppets."
"Not entirely, no. The master came in from the City late last night. He wants to see you in the chapel as soon as you can get there."
Keldris handed back the mug and automatically ran a hand through his disorderly mess of short-cropped auburn hair, rendering it even more messy than it was before. "Really? I'm astonished he found the time what with everything else that's going on. Did he say what it was about?"
"I think you'll be pleasantly surprised." He replied and turned back down the path, Keldris stretching his long legs to keep up.
"I other words, 'yes, but I'm not supposed to say.'" Keldris gave him a sidelong look. "Are you...feeling well? Your eyes are glowing more than normal this morning. You haven't taken a fever from one of your ankle-biting companions, have you?"
He laughed again, the sound catching the attention of passersby and earning glares in response. "No, no, I don't have a fever. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I felt this well. You'll understand in a few minutes, I suspect."
"Very well, preserve your air of exotic Quel'dorei mystery if you must." Keldris replied airily. "I'll find out soon enough."
He absolutely could not stop smiling. "Yes, yes you will."
Weekly Wordcount February 8 - 14
/ 2500 words. 0% done!