My name is
Jon. Along with my childhood friends Jace, Kate, and Ray, we have decided to
oppose the shadow in our village. We have chosen thus because we are on no
records, official or otherwise. Why, we do not know, as we all remember
growing up here in Gladehaven. We remember playing at Pop’s home, playing
hero and bandit in the yard. Pop was a great man. He passed on last winter
though, which merely fueled our hatred of the Shadow. He died because the
Shadow took all the extra food in our village, for two reasons. For them,
the more important of the two was probably to keep us weak, to see that we
didn’t have the strength to rebel. That the food could be eaten by their
human mercenaries and other traitors was probably just a side benefit.
The four of us always seemed to have plenty
of food though. It wasn’t until after his death that we learned why. He had
been giving us most of his food for a long time, keeping just enough for
himself to keep going.
Pop was not actually our father. A grizzled
veteran loved by the town, he had no children of his own. He adopted the
four of us when we were very little, only three or four, after he found us
alone in a burned out building during his last battle.
While raising us, he made sure to instill
certain virtues in us. Among them being courage, loyalty, and a sense of
justice and compassion. He also trained all of us in the art of war, telling
us it was a dangerous world and that we needed to know how to defend
ourselves.
I took Pop’s advice to heart, and spent
nearly all my free time training. Whether working out, building up my
endurance, or beating on a wooden dummy in the barn, my friends always
teased me and said I was obsessed. I told only Ray why however. Small and
slight of build, Ray had always been my closest friend. When I told her of
my dreams, she laughed at first. Then she saw the look on my face and could
tell I wasn’t joking.
I told her of my nightmares, where hordes
of the living dead swarmed all over the land. I told her of dreams where
beacons of light were slowly devoured by the blackest night. I told her of
my nightmares of my death. Those were always the same. A pale, gaunt man
with white hair and hawkish features always stood above me, always held a
sword to my throat. Always held me down with his foot while he pulled his
blade back. Always he shoved it into my chest, and always the pain woke me.
Ray paled herself when I told her of those. After that, she was always there
when I needed her. From that day on, whenever the nightmares woke me, Ray
was there. She would soothe me, put me back to sleep, and I would be free of
the dreams for the night.
For those reasons I trained without cease.
Even household chores became training when approached a certain way. A
simple trip to gather wood became a test of endurance. I went deep into the
forest, bundled large amounts of wood together, and strapped it to my back.
I then jogged home, up the steepest paths I could find, dodged in and out of
trees, and then went home to practice with my homemade mace. Little more
than a sturdy branch with a large rock tied to it, it nevertheless worked
rather well against the straw dummies I made.
Each of us ended up training with a
different weapon. Jace, a man who looked so much like me that even we
assumed we were brothers, took up the sword…well, it would have been a
sword, but right now it was made out of carved wood. Though sharpened as
much as possible, it did not cut well, but was useful more as a club than
anything else.
Kate, our tall, blond, precocious friend
took up the bow. That surprised the rest of us because the bow is
traditionally a difficult weapon to learn, and yet Kate never practiced. She
mastered it quickly, spending only a little time in the morning practicing,
and spending the rest of the day pestering the rest of us into playing hide
and seek with her, which she always won. No matter how often and thoroughly
we searched for her golden locks among the trees, we never found her until
it was time to go in.
Finally, Ray took up the art of the staff.
While not really much of a weapon, it was good enough for her; and though
she spent even less time practicing than Kate, neither me nor Pop ever
really fussed about it. She was always so serious. Though she never said
anything, I suspected she suffered from nightmares as well. I don’t know
where she found the inner strength to deal with them, but sometimes, late at
night, I would glimpse her on her knees in her room, bathed in moonlight
from her window, and I swear I heard her whispering.
Enough of our childhood. Pop’s death convinced me that we could
no longer sit on the sidelines and let the Ceyah do what they wanted in our
home. The Ceyah and their “Shadow” had cost us the life of a dear friend of
mine, a man who was like a father to the four of us. The sense of justice
that Pop had instilled in me railed at the Ceyah and their actions, and I
decided that I had to do something, and home was as good a place to start as
any. Informing our group of my intentions, Ray invited herself along almost
immediately. Of us all, her sense of compassion was probably the greatest,
and she knew that if she did nothing that more would suffer and die as Pop
did. Kate, whose courage extended well into the foolhardy area, nearly
jumped at the chance to do something as dangerous as fight our oppressors.
Finally, Jace’s loyalty to our group won him over and he joined our planning
as well. With the four of us together opposing the Shadow, there was no
chance we could be stopped.