Some boys grow up wanting to be heroes. Kael grew up being told that wanting things was purely inefficient.
He was raised by six people who hated those in power, in a compound that didn't have a name, for a purpose nobody ever got around to explaini...
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The rain had followed him for three days, and by the second he was already sick of it. Luckily it wasn't sheets of water, nothing biblical, just the low persistent grey drizzle that soaks through everything. The kind of rain that doesn't care about you. He'd stopped trying to outride it somewhere past the last border marker, that being a carved seal of The Crestlands, split down the middle and half-buried in the road mud like someone had meant to clean it up... then decided not to bother.
Three days behind him, a castle had gone quiet.
The oddest part is that castles don't go quiet. They breathed, they always breathed, with servants and torches and the sounds of a working machine that never fully slept. So, when they went quiet it was never the absence of noise, more so likely to be a different kind of sound entirely. He knew the difference, he knew the real reason, yet he wished he didn't.
Riding through the lands of the west put him on edge. The veterans used to say the most ominous things about this place. Things like "The Broken Lands didn't greet you. It just stopped keeping you out" were a constant, near cringing level of dramatics the locals used to dissuade anyone from travelling.
Eventually, the house he was seeking materialized before dawn. From his perspective materialised was the right word, as he didn't see it until he truly did. It was a squat grey structure pressed against squat grey hills, no light in the windows, no smoke, sitting there in the wet dark like it had been waiting without expectation. He'd been told no light was normal. He'd actually been told a lot of things about these people, told by men in a room he was already trying to forget, told in careful and specific language that nonetheless managed to avoid saying anything he could hold onto later.
He didn't dare dismount, not in a shithole like this.
"You're late."
It came from his left flank, accompanied by no footsteps at all. Rather, there wasn't a single warning sign that anything was ever there to begin with. The figure had been there or it hadn't and now it was.
"Roads past Errath were closed," he said coldly as the struggle to keep his voice even battled against his will. "So I found another way."
The figure didn't answer, which was a little rude but expected. It was looking at what he was carrying, and the looking went on longer than it needed to. So, releasing a sigh of unease, he passed the bundle down carefully, far more carefully than the weight required, far more carefully than what was truly professional, and averted his eyes as he found he couldn't make himself watch the transfer happen.
The figure watched it all in silence, really not helping his nerves in the slightest.
Then: "It's smaller than I expected."
It.
Something crossed his face, but he made sure it was wiped clean quickly. "They always are," he muttered, and turned the horse around before letting the disgust show.
There was no confirmation, not even any names exchanged. All of that had happened in the room he was still forgetting. He rode and behind him there was no sound at all except the rain and the soft, final close of a door, and the weight of that one small word... it... sitting somewhere behind his sternum where he couldn't reach it.
He told himself the coin was enough and that he wasn't a fuckwit for doing it.
