BLACK ARROW
11 Tarsakh, the Year of the Dawndance (1095 DR)
A pulverized stone crunched beneath Jotharam Feor's boot as he trudged across gouged and broken ground.
Jotharam's eyes danced with anticipation. His gaze swept past the battered, chipped wall that encircled the city of Sarshel, his home. The adolescent looked without really seeing the earth scarred with months of encamped armies, swift conflicts, and spell-ignited conflagrations. Having never witnessed mass graves before, the mounds of earth dotting the far sward held no meaning for him.
Jotharam's mind was on the war, certainly. When was it not? Since the hobgoblin horde emerged from the Giantspire Mountains, anarchy had ruled the city. The goblinoid armies had overrun all the surrounding lands, but failed to sack Sarshel. Instead, they laid siege.
Only soldiers ventured beyond Sarshel's protective bastions.
But here I stride, thought Jotharam, not a soldier sworn but wearing a hauberk anyway!
He even carried a sword from the Sarshel Armory in a battered sheath. He walked beyond the wall as if on picket duty. As if he were, in truth, sworn to protect all that lay within the heavy walls.
Jotharam patted the messenger's bag slung over his right shoulder. The bag was the reason he wandered beyond the wall. It bulged with orders for the perimeter guards of the north bunker.
The adolescent grinned into the day's failing glow. The sun paused on the ragged edges of the Earthspurs as if to regard him alone. Jotharam pulled the borrowed sword from the scabbard on his belt and whirled it in the golden light. He imagined cutting down scores of desperate hobgoblin raiders.
'My blade will not be sheathed until it finds an invader's heart,' he boasted. 'Your days are numbered now that I have taken the field!'
Finally taken the field, he mentally appended.
His friends had been allowed to fight and defend Sarshel. Not he. It wasn't fear that prevented him from defending the city, nor any particular lack of skill. It was his mother.
A woman of noble birth and connections, his mother asked the city's soldiery to disallow his application, even when Sarshel was desperate to fill the dwindling regiments. They had obliged her request.
His fingers tightened on the hilt as he thought of his friends, who had become decorated and respected defenders while he remained safely at home with his mother.
And now the war was nearly won, without him.
Imphras, the great war captain, had come to Sarshel's rescue. Imphras was here, and with him, his legion of loyal warriors, archers, and war wizards. The man was a living legend. Tavern talk had it the force Imphras commanded had never seen defeat on the field of battle.
Jotharam's opportunity to prove his bravery for Sarshel failed before he was ever allowed a chance; Imphras broke the siege in just two days and was received into the city with adoration and fanfare.
Hope of permanently driving back the hobgoblins was born. Some said Imphras would be made king if he succeeded!
Marvelous, of course, except. .
Imphras's arrival made Jotharam's ambition meaningless.
The boy lost his smile and kicked at a piece of masonry, burnt and broken. A smell of something strange wrinkled his nose. Brimstone, or hellfire itself, he fancied, wielded by a goblin shaman.
The odor reminded Jotharam that he stood, after all, outside the walls without his mother's knowledge or blessing. Some danger remained; no one could argue that.
He nodded to himself. Imphras's breaking of the siege hadn't completely eliminated the hobgoblin threat. Several distinct hordes ravaged the Easting Reach, and more than a few rabid goblin companies remained unaccounted for in the last reckoning. Perhaps even now they drew nigh to Sarshel to renew their siege?
The sun finally slipped completely beneath the western peaks. Coolness touched the back of his neck.
In the growing twilight, he recalled that traveling out shy;side the wall required bravery only true warriors possessed. Warriors like him!
Jotharam's earlier delight rekindled as he ran fingers down his chain link mail.
Earlier that day, luck had deposited him in the right place at the right time. Normally, Jotharam delivered correspondence between merchant houses within the city's inmost neighborhood.
The regular garrison courier hadn't appeared that afternoon. No one else had been available to make the delivery to the edge of town on short notice. Jotharam volunteered. Despite the garrison being far beyond the boundaries set by his mother, the dispatcher gave him the message. Why not? Imphras was here!
Jotharam sprinted across Sarshel to deliver the document. He'd turned over the leather courier bag to the garrison lieutenant with such alacrity the lieutenant had immediately praised Jotharam to the garrison captain.
The captain, impressed, asked Jotharam to run the evening's orders out to the soldiers manning the north bunker. The captain was unaware of Jotharam's interdiction, and that sending Jotharam beyond the Sarshel Wall was taboo.
Jotharam didn't tell him otherwise. The young man had been issued arms and armor.
And here I am, he thought.
Would he be allowed to keep his borrowed panoply? What if-
A blistering, burning ball of flame bounded up from somewhere beyond the far trees. Slender rivulets of fire chased around the blazing sphere, like smoldering snakes eating their own tails.
All thoughts fled. Jotharam's eyes followed the blazing orb of destruction as it arced upward, slowed, then curved back toward the earth. Was it some sort of signal? A spell of warning? Maybe a-
The blazing fist smashed down, striking the city of Sarshel's westernmost wall. Stones exploded away from the impact, and the ground shuddered.
Shrapnel clipped his cheek. Jotharam couldn't hear his own yell over the roar of flames and cracking stone.
Three more points of light popped up from beyond the trees, each arcing up and slowing, pausing as if to look down on Sarshel. As their trajectories, too, slowly curved back toward the ground, toward the wall, Jotharam finally understood.
Sarshel was under attack.
The north bunker was composed of a series of trenches that paralleled Sarshel's northernmost wall. A stone block shy;house squatted at the dugout's western end. The blockhouse was a small, boxlike structure, partially dug into the earth.
Jotharam sprinted along the west wall, running north toward the blockhouse, panting with more than effort. Blind fear propelled him. In the gathering gloom, he couldn't judge his true distance from the gleams twinkling
