Entry 15

"You! Stop right there!"

My attempt at making a stealthy escape had failed, and miserably so. Turning around slowly, the remaining Confederates stared at me from their loose formation. A soldier near the front stepped forward, brandishing a mace coated in so much blood that I couldn't even tell the color of the metal beneath.

"Who the fuck are you? You aren't one of mine, and I'm pretty sure that those religious assholes at the other end never take a step without fumbling around in full steel plate. Start talking, or I let some of these savages rip you apart." As he said that last part, a few of the weary soldiers behind him began readying themselves for another fight. Laying his hand on the shoulder of a man near the front, he said, "The battle rush still hasn't faded from Tom here; I'd wager you've never seen someone take a man's arm off and beat him with it."

Tom grunted blandly, giving me the impression that the concept wasn't exactly foreign to him.

"I'm a traveler, from the southern Kyrlund," I replied, keeping eye contact with the spokesman of the group the entire time. "I was trying to cross into Triton territory when I came across that - whatever you call that massacre."

Their leader paused for a moment, easing his stance a bit before continuing with a much softer tone.

"You picked a horrible time to move north, traveler. Bandits been fortifying themselves in this range for months now; damned Bovica left the front door open, didn't do a thing to stop them." he explained, scowling as he mentioned the previous rulers of the Kyrlund. "Triton's boys on their side of the pass have spent weeks trying to push 'em back, but so far they've only managed to piss off a lot of already-pissed-off raiders. We," he said, motioning back to the rest of his group, "got here less than six days ago. You'd think that with all the shit these Tritonian soldiers have been dealing with, they'd be just a little more grateful for our arrival. You'd be wrong; the dickheads tried to kill us almost as quickly as they tried to kill these fucking bandits." His anger radiated as he kicked a corpse that I can assume was once a raider. Hard to tell, given that it's face was mostly cleaved off and the armor torn to shreds. 

"As it turns out," he said, "Maybe there's a way you can make yourself useful. When we arrived here, we had forty men. Now, we've got seventeen. I think. Unless the shaking fool in the back there croaks standing up, seventeen is all we have left. That seventeen doesn't include you, though." He stepped forward at that, meeting me face-to-face.

"You want to get to Triton; we want to live long enough to get home to our families. You're not one of the Confederacy, and you don't have the look of a bandit, so the soldiers may just let you through. But, I need you to get a message to their commander. You'll know him when you see him: tall, muscled, hair the color of horse shit, smell that's even worse. He's got a warhammer large enough to crush a bear's skull, but too much of his mother in him to dare harm one of the creatures. Once you find him, tell him that I'll be waiting at the midpoint for his arrival." 

Returning his mace to it's place on his belt, he began to turn around before halting halfway through. "And tell him this, too," he said, glancing at me from over his shoulder. "These bandits are the priority right now. If we don't work together to wipe them out, then the pass is lost. For both sides."

He walked back over to his men, leading them back to the opening out of the pass. I turned in the opposite direction, wondering at what point life became this complicated.