Wicked Prompts

GIFTS FROM ELVIREY - RELOJANDO CRONICOS

Garrett ran all the way from the marshes, bloodied and limping, the dagger still clenched in his hand. The tower and compound stood on the hill a few fields away but he could hear the rustling of leaves from the forest behind him. They were still chasing.

His gut hurt and his leg felt the piercing of mace thorns pulsing a sharp sting up his thigh but he kept going.

"Thorgon!" he yelled as he neared the gate. The tall stumpy figure stood, leaning on his broadsword as usual, gazing off into the distant blue.

Garrett's crippled pace fell to a panting crawl as he pushed a breeze of dust up from his feet. He caught his breath in five hungry gulps before he could speak.

"Thorgon, help me," he said. The rumbling of feet followed briskly behind. Seven children a few years beyond Garrett's eight seasons stomped their heavy feet upon him, wielding wooden swords and stones.

Thorgon stepped forward in heavy thuds. His manner was lazy and bored.

"Clear from here saplings. Clear from here or I gonna swipe you hides." His voice gargled and growled, the words mostly unintelligible to all but Garrett, who'd known him all his life.

The children stopped and stared. One of them threw his rock anyway and it landed a few inches from the gigantic soldier's feet. Then they backed away slowly.

Thorgon pulled Garrett up by the pit of his arm and stared down at him bemused. "Gotten yourself into another scuff prince. Get inside for your daddy sees. The bard will need to tend that leg."

Garrett nodded, still gasping for breath, and limped past the gate.

"The boy's an embarrassment," said the low base of Garrett's father from the room above him in the tower. "He can't defend himself from his brothers or the village boys. What kind of soldier would he make. He's no prince, that's for sure."

"He's only a boy my lord," said the Bard. Elviry had bound Garrett's wounds and given him a tonic for the sting. Most thought him from the elfin valley though he would only laugh at the suggestion. Elviry was the closest most people in these northern parts, far from the Imperial borders, had ever come to knowing a wizard.

"He's too small," continued his father. "Can't throw a stone nor ride a horse. I got three other sons, what need is there of this runt."

"The boy is smart," said Elviry. "He has a mind, not just a body."

"We're frontier folk, Bard. I could send him to the monks but not much else. Swords are what make princes. Not scripts and tonics."

Garrett started to shiver beneath his bedsheets. It wasn't cold, but the shakes of what his father might decide in anger peeled at him, until he couldn't move from the ball in which he wound his little body.

Even before Garrett's leg completely healed he was ordered to hall water buckets with the servants. Not the first time he'd suffered this indignity. He preferred it to the beatings he took from his brothers training in the field. He thought about things while drudging the drooling wooden bowls, almost as large as his own torso, from one end of the compound to the other. He daydreamed about the sea off in the distance and the barren hills in the other direction. He wondered what the great cities in the old empire were like. Elvirey sometimes told stories before bedtime.

"Garrett," he heard his name called from above. He turned to look up at the tower and saw Elvirey perched on the window of his workshop. "Come up here for a bit. Something I want to show you."

For sure Elvirey was Garrett's favorite and he was made to seem the same with the Bard. Elvirey wasn't like any other person Garrett had ever known. He suspected the same might be said of his father and the rest of the family, including the villagers. Sometimes the soldiers told stories of fantastic barbarians and aliens they'd encountered in their expeditions around the empire. But they were borrowed from all parts of the lands and not entirely reliable in their utterances.