For the King

Scroll One - I

The Bright Star was unbearably hot on Alec's collar though it wasn't even past day's crest and his neck bent to its warm touch; It would soon be Frost and though no longer in the fields he knew not to waste these remaining weeks of warmth. Despite his gratitude for the almighty star, the pits of his messengers uniform soaked through with dark maroon patches and his head-wrap appeared shriveled and distorted from the sweat.

However, even if he were in the cool reprieve of a Marsi Lagoon or Cras Cave, his appearance would not be faring any better than it was now. Alec's boots were at the end of their life. The once thick, well-treated leather now scuffed and faded, the rubber soles, once with more breadth than a boar's tusks now paper-thin. The boots had carried him hundreds of lengths in the last cycle, and, though reluctant to part with them he had known this day would come. They were the last item he owned from before: a time when he'd been a man raised on the same parcel of land his mother had been born on, fated to live and return to the same soil his forefathers had tilled. 

They were a sentimental artifact of an epoch of waking up at the cock's earliest crow, working the fields, singing the plowmen's song and returning home to the scent of his mother's sickly sweat and sweet Kilna Weaver preparing dinner in her stead. When Thylaria O'Fowl nee Smiths succumbed to the same disease countless others had, Alec suddenly found himself unbound to a village his family had occupied since before the war and before there were nations to war with. His mother had given into boils and blood-lung all too quickly and Alec, urged by his grandfather, prepared to leave at the 'ere of dawn the next day; not staying for the performance of death rites and purging of the corpse. 

Between then and his departure Kilna Weaver's godparents also fell to the disease, and Alec knew it was time to make his one last good-bye. By verbal contract, witnessed by his blacksmith grandfather and two apprentices, Alec sold the O'Fowl land. Then, his last living relation patted him with a strong, calloused hand and sent him on his way with a pair of well-made boots as a Lucky token for the arduous journey.

They carried Alec to the only other place he could name: Pelham. Through the Ashen Mountains, one step after another, he discovered unfamiliar sights, learned how to share a campfire and connect to those who had far more expansive minds than his. In Pelham, the lack of mud and animals astounded Alec at first; once the satrapy had been a backwater: rotting and crowded by its own filth. He could remember as a young boy having to steer a two-wheeled cart up a thin dirt path. But now, he could walk abreast with two carts atop a clean, cobbled road.

Armed with little-remaining coin and his lack of abilities outside of raising livestock, the anvil's luck found him earning keep as a parcel runner for a local drug lord. For most, a period of acculturation to big-city life would have taken months, but for Alec, within weeks he knew the city's alleyways with the familiarity of a slum-born rat. As Harvest tied into the Swelter Season he'd made a name for himself as a quick-footed, trustworthy, runner: well-renowned enough to be snatched up by a Lord-General presiding over an inner-city borough. Within a cycle of arriving in Pelham with nothing but the homespun clothes on his back and a pair of hardy boots, Alec had been enrolled in the Duke's Domestic Services as a war courier. 

And it was the message he was delivering today, to the Duke himself, which would set into motion the convoluted series of events that brings rise to not only to this one great hero but three. But Alec is the type of boy to not deliberate anything but the present and was oblivious to his future as he continued through the lavishly carpeted hallways of the Duke's manor; a bright flush tinging his face red and eagerness driving him forward.