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Jon's Tale - Part I

by Kyle "Nairoci" Roahrig


          
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.

 

 

[ Jon's Tale Part I ] Jon's Tale Part II ] Jon's Tale Part III ] Jon's Tale Part IV ] Jon's Tale Part V ] Jon's Tale Part VI ] Jon's Tale Part VII ] Jon's Tale Part VIII ]
[ Table of Contents ]

 

 






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