\--==Official Submission==-- FROM: General Debinani Rahl RE: Chapter Two - Victor''s Diary An excerpt from the diary of Pvt. Victor Smithson. Victor was one of our fist recruits when Rhys and I originally set up shop in Minoc. He was a country kid who had never done much but work the forge with his father, but his heart was in the cause as much as any other, and he was a welcome addition to the company. \-Rahl Minoc could never particularly be called boring. Being a frontier town, it was always the source of one conflict or another, the raid of the occasional troll, not to mention that every low-life in the Empire seemed to be skulking around every corner. However, being a smith's son in Minoc was the most boring life one could ever be cursed with. We owned a small shack with a forge on the backside of Mt. Kendall, it wasn't the safest place to practice our trade, but for the most part it stayed quiet. My father and I would pull the ore out of the side of the mountain, haul it back with the help of Old Bessie, and I would stoke the fire as my father smelted it into ingots. Simple. Boring. Minoc was in a constant state of flux, people coming from all over the land trying to make their fortune in the business, and those trying to make their fortune leeching off the success of others. I never really noticed new faces until the Captain came to town. After "arriving" in Cove, I was of course, dead broke. Rhys had been down on his luck as well. Since we both had a little skill with mining and blacksmithy, we marched to Minoc to try and make a little capital, as well as do some recruiting. \-Rahl I first saw them sitting on the shore on the west side of the Mount, two men, lightly armored, sitting by a campfire and cooking some sort of spiced fish concoction in an iron skillet. It's not often you see people making themselves a camp so far out of earshot of the guard, yet so close to the nexus of crime in the Northern frontier. They seemed confident enough. Both had some low-quality mining implements as well as various an sundry arms in varied states of repair. They were talking about something important. The young, dark-haired one was relaying a story of one sort or the other to the older, blonde man, who was nodding thoughtfully. I couldn't resist, I had to go see what they were up to. As soon as I got within earshot, they both fell silent, looking at me plainly with just the slightest hint of distrust. I may have been very young, but I had worked the mines and the forge all my life, I was pretty tough. I walked up to their camp and sat down across the fire from them. They didn't object. In fact, they did nothing but look at me. "Um...Hi...." I ventured weakly. "Hail," replied the older man quietly. "M'Mind if I join you?" "It would appear you already have," said the younger man. "Oh...yeah...umm...right...., " I floundered, "Umm...My name's Victor... umm....what's -" The younger man interrupted me, "Well met, my name's Rahl, this is Cethwyn Rhys," he said somberly. "Do you smell something?" asked Rhys. Rahl looked around questioningly, sniffed at the fish. Then I smelled it...it smelled like a combination of rotted meat and sweaty clothes...it was suddenly everywhere. And then we heard the roar coming from the other side of the Mount. Troll. The two men sprung into action as I hauled myself to my feet and started sprinting towards my home. Rhys was right behind me, brandishing a painstakingly polished blade, tugging a mail tunic over his head as he ran. Rahl was walking swiftly behind us, calmly crushing some sort of smelly ash in his fingertips and mumbling quietly to himself, at the same time trying to juggle a sword onto a baldric on his hip. Rhys and I ran around the side of the rock and I tripped over the corpse of Old Bessie. The poor mule's head had been ripped from her torso and her back broken into two, clearly-defined pieces. I heard the sound of wood being smashed from the direction of my home and I hurried on. Rhys was already there, trying to surgically remove the arm of the Troll that was tossing my broken and bloodied father around like a rag doll. He wasn't very successful. About the time Rahl finally arrived on the scene, Rhys had done enough damage to the beast to make it throw my father aside and concentrate on the man-thing poking him with the sharp stick. I stood there helplessly dumbstruck, not knowing what I could do to help or if I'd just get myself killed. As Rhys was engaging in a desperate battle with the beast, Rahl walked over to the body of my father and checked him for a pulse. He didn't look happy when he straightened up. Rhys was getting beaten pretty bad at that point, and Rahl did something that closed the other's wounds. I'd seen a mage before...but never quite that close up.... Then he clapped his hands together and a bolt of lightning came out of the clear sky and crashed into the beast. It seemed to realize suddenly that it no longer had the upper hand. With Rahl's lightning and Rhys' steel, the beast was quickly falling behind. It decided to bolt right at me. I was frozen in terror as the huge mass of hurt, angered muscle loomed closer and closer. And then it happened. I realized I had picked up my father's pickaxe off the ground. I hefted it. When the beast drew near I sidestepped and brought the pick down on the beast's skull. The shock of the impact jarred my entire body, and when I opened my eyes I was lying atom the beast, covered in blood and grey-matter. My home had caught fire when the beast spilled over the fire and was slowly burning down tot he ground. Rahl was slapping a poultice on a particularly nasty wound Rhys received during the battle. I looked at the body of my father lying off to the side. I looked for a long time. When I looked up I noticed the two warriors looking at me. I nodded. Rahl got up and laid the body of my father into the pyre that was his home. They both settled down back at his camp as I watched my father's body burn. No one had said a word. It was after dusk when I finally turned my back on the embers of my father and home and walked around the Mount to the two men's campsite. Rahl had just finished cooking up some venison (after discarding the burnt and unappetizing fish) and they were eating. A bowl full of the stew was waiting for me by the fire. The silence continued while we ate, and at the end of our meal the stars had come out and the crackling of the fire and the sound of the sea lapping against the shore were the only sounds to be heard. It was Rhys who finally broke the silence. "You move pretty fast for a kid your size," he commented quietly. He reached into his pack and pulled out a bottle of the local whiskey and poured a small amount into our empty bowls. "It killed my da." "I know, kid, and I'm real sorry I couldn't do anything about it, but you've got potential you know." "I didn't know." "'And from great tragedy comes greater fortune..'," quoted Rahl quietly, "We're here on a mission, Victor. A mission to find people to rebuild what was once the greatest and most feared order of all time." "What does that have to do with me?" I asked, confused at the melodrama. He smiled. \-- Thus began my journeys with the two men who were The Black Rose Society. They taught me how to fight, by myself and in a group, on guard and in a line. They taught me how to be a warrior. And they told me our quest: To find Tablenhelm, to return the last remaining book of the Annals to the Great Library there, and to fulfill a sacred oath that the Society will not be disbanded until it is done. Neither men thought it was very viable goal, not even The Captain, that's what I had to call Rahl after I joined up. So we did what we did best, we soldiered. Over the course of the last year I must have been to every city in the world, but Rhys...I mean...The Lieutenant.... tells me there's a few more we haven't gone to yet. We worked for a little bit of everyone, local lords needing to supplant a brute squad with some talent, long-distance scouting, and even the occasional assassination. I had finally got to see the world. Actually, the kid finally got to see Vesper, Cove, and Britain, as well as a few smaller settlements in the area, but we didn't want to burst his bubble. If he wanted to feel well traveled, he was welcome to it. The kid never talked about many of our engagements over the course of that year, nor how he probably saved Ceth's and my bacon with his sheer brute ferocity more times then I'd like to mention. He was pretty humble about soldiering. I skip now to his final entry. \-Rahl Last week we arrived back in Britain, after completing a simple reconnaissance mission into Shadowclan territory for Lord Blackthorn. The Cap collected our pay and got us hooked up with some nice rooms at The Rose and Crown, a privately owned inn and brothel outside of town. We've been here most of the week, but I haven't seen The Cap'n much. Rhys has been drunk for most of the week, and he seems to be sampling all the women the place has to offer in turn. I don't feel so promiscuous, I think Emily will be just fine for the remainder of my stay. Well...maybe Lucile too. Yesterday I actually followed The Cap'n, determined to find out where he was goin' all day. And I'll be damned if he didn't walk right up to British's palace, wave at the guards and get let right in. I went back to the Crown and asked Rhys about it. He said Rahl was working with Old Humboldt on the great mystery, and that it was nothing to worry about. Tonight a bunch of roughs showed up at the Crown, started making a lot of noise and roughing up the girls. I wanted to step in, but Rahl wouldn't let me, he said they had a funny look in their eyes. I don't know, never tried to figure out what a man was thinking, in a fight it's usually pretty obvious. Well, it's about time for me to turn in, Rahl said something's gotten a little hot about a job we did a while back, so we're bugging out in the morning. Well...good night. Victor was killed that night when the as yet unidentified assailants broke into our rooms in an attempt to put us in the dust. Rhys and I barely escaped with our lives into the woods...Victor never made it out. There was a healer's hut a few miles away and we waited there for days, hoping he would come walking out in the death-shroud ressurectees are always wearing when they come back, but he never did. To this day we still don't know what became of Victor, or if anything became of him at all. \-Rahl