Evil Overlord 1: The Makening ebook

EVIL OVERLORD: THE MAKENING

Michael McClung

Copyright 2021 Michael McClung

DEDICATION

For my crazy chickens.

CONTENTS

PART ONE: NOBODY

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

PART TWO: WASTREL

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

PART THREE: FUGITIVE

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

PART FOUR: WANDERER

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

PART FIVE: FERAL

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

PART SIX: PITILESS

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

PART SEVEN: SCOURGE

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

PART EIGHT: OVERLORD

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Epilogue

Author’s Note

PART ONE: NOBODY

Chapter One: Tax Liability

Everyone has heard the story of the farm boy who grows up to save the kingdom and marry the princess, after traversing a harsh road of trials. Names, faces, details change depending on where you hear the story and who is telling it, of course, but he is the prototypical hero, his story as familiar as it is exciting. Even I enjoyed them, in my youth.

They’re propaganda, those stories. Wish fulfilment at best. Also, you ever notice how it’s always a farm boy, and never a farm girl? I mean, you might hear about a spunky princess now and again, but you’d have to search long and hard to hear about a milkmaid who defeats the Big Bad Evil. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why that might be the case.

Anyway, back in reality, no farm boy every grew up to marry a princess. Well, not without forcing her to the altar, at any rate. Farm boys do regularly save kingdoms, it is true – because they are drafted into armies. By spilling their blood and guts into the mud of the battlefield en masse, they do indeed defend the very institutions which keep them down in the mud in the first place.

As for the harsh road of trials the hero faces… have you ever worked a farm? Harsh trials are what’s for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night snack.

What I’m getting at here is simple: A farm boy who actually manages to escape his place in society and, through tests and trials and suffering, gains a measure of power isn’t going to be hailed as a hero. The powers that be will see him as a threat to the order of things, and want the little shit dead, soonest.

The hero’s story is, in fact, the story of the villain, suitably altered for public consumption.

~ ~ ~

I was twelve years old when my father found out I was a tax liability, and consequently decided to murder me.

If you’re looking for the seed, the single incident that ultimately transformed me into the infamous Evil Overlord that I have become, then I suppose that’s where it all started, really. Before that day, my fate would most likely have been grubbing in the dirt for a very poor living until the day I died.

The origins of most Evil Overlords are shrouded in mystery. You just don’t hear much about where they came from, or why they do what they do. They are, for the most part, secretive creatures who seem to spring forth essentially from nowhere by the time you hear about them, fully evil and at the height of their malign powers (barring usurping princes and the like.)

Oh, sure, perhaps they were locked in a mystic prison for millennia until freed by some hapless dolt or what have you, but their past, what little is known of it, is always chock full of ill-portent and dark omen, and light on detail. The heavy, hairy-knuckled, hovering hand of destiny can always be sensed, even if the details are, for lack of a better word, sketchy.

Mostly that's utter rot.

Myself, I was born the son of a poor sharecropper on a dismal little farm at the ass-end of the kingdom. I didn’t come into the world as Gar the Pitiless; that came much later, after a long and bitter road of trials. For the first dozen years of my life, I was just Gar son of Gar, Gar Garson, or simply Puny Gar, the youngest of thirteen.

My father raised mostly weeds, and bruises on his children. (Yes, I (still) have siblings. No, they are not in the Evil Overlord business. We exchange the occasional holiday greeting card, when the situation allows. I understand that I am an uncle thirty-seven times over, at last count.)

If fate had gone another way, I would likely still be on the farm, plucking chickens, slopping the pigs, and pulling stones out of the ground to prepare it for the plough. But fate did not go another way. Fate put it into the head of old sir Pettigrew, our landlord, that any family that had more than a dozen children probably had it in them to cough up more in the way of taxes.

The logic was sound enough, I suppose. Any peasant who managed to feed that many mouths must be putting something away where the tax man couldn’t see, and consequently confiscate it. Sir Pettigrew couldn’t have known just how improbably hearty my father and his offspring were. My siblings often ate dirt and bark even when there was actual food, just because they liked the taste.

Myself, I took after my mother. Smaller, less disgustingly hale, and orders of magnitude smarter. There was no truth to the rumor that father’s side of the family had orc blood running through it, but I can’t really fault anyone who lent it credence.

It was my misfortune that the taxman arrived to announce the new levy while Mother was at the neighbor’s farm, helping the farmer’s wife to deliver. She was no midwife, but after having thirteen children, she knew her way around, so to speak. And it was in her own best interest to see the village’s population grow, if she was to have any hope of marrying off her own brood.

Without her presence, however, the combined intelligence and common sense on the farm dropped precipitously – which, come to think of it, was probably why she rarely left.

His name was Hemritch, the tax man, and he had quite the long mustache, eminently twirlable. Not that I ever saw him twirl it, which honestly, I don’t see how he kept himself from doing, considering his profession. Anyway, he rode into the yard while Father was chopping wood. I, being the youngest, smallest, weakest and least useful, had no particular chore to be about, and consequently I was up in the solitary and mostly barkless tree nearest the house. It was always a good idea to stay out of reach of my brothers and sisters, especially when Mother was away.

“Goodman Gar,” said Hemritch.

“Taxman,” grunted father. “’S not tithe time yet.”

“Sir Pettigrew has announced a new levy, goodman. It is called the Overly-Plentiful Family Levy. Any household blessed with more than a dozen children is obliged to show appreciation for their bounty by paying for it.”

Father split another cord and grunted.

“How much is the levy?” he finally asked, putting the next cord on the stump.

“Three guilder.”

When Father brought his ax down this time, the blade went into the stump so deeply that barely any metal was visible.

“Call your children, please, goodman, for the headcount.”

Even I knew that was a formality. Sir Pettigrew was a stickler for the census.

Father sighed. Then he drew a deep breath and let out his bellow.

“ALL YOU SPAWN GET YER ARSES TO ME NOW!”

Leaves shivered off the tree at the brutality of his voice. It echoed off the hills and came back, still violent. His voice would find all of us. Reluctantly, I shimmied down the trunk. The rest came pelting into the yard from all around the farm. Quicker than seemed probable, we were all assembled before the man who had sired us.

Hemritch dismounted, counted, and scratched a note on a scrap of parchment with a charcoal stub.

“That’s thirteen, Goodman Gar. You are blessed with an overabundance of offspring, and no doubt. I’ll need the three guilder in my hand now.”

“I ain’t got it, Hemritch, and you know it.”

“I know no such thing. I do know you’ve got a baker’s dozen of children, and the lord needs his levy.”

Father put his palms to his temples and rubbed furiously. “Why is this happening?” He wasn’t asking Hemritch, but the taxman saw fit to reply anyway.

“Probably because you won’t get off of your wife, goodman. Why did you have so many children? It’s not my fault you had so many children.”

“Well, I’m a farmer,” Father replied, now rubbing at the center of his forehead with a massive, filthy thumb. “‘S what we do, innit? Besides, some of ‘em were s’posed to’ve died by now. ‘S what they do, innit? ‘Cept they din’t.” Father turned and looked back at us, his monobrow low over his beady eyes.

“Oi! One of you lot needs to die. Decide amongst yerselves, and be quick about it.”

My brothers and sisters had me trussed up and at Father’s feet before his bull voice finished echoing from the hills.

“You want us to do it, Da?” asked Rikert, the eldest. He hefted a hoe.

“Nah. It’s me what brung him into the world, it’s me as should take him out.” Father went and pulled his ax from the stump. Shoulders slumping, Rikert threw the hoe to the dust next to my head and stomped off. The rest of my brothers and sisters didn’t move. Entertainment was hard to come by on a dirt farm.

The taxman cleared his throat. “You can’t actually kill one of your children to avoid the tax, Goodman Gar.”

“Why not? Thirteen minus one is twelve, and Bob’s yer uncle. Besides, this one aren’t much use anyhap. Even the chickens bully ‘im.”

This was true, if not something that I thought should be shared with strangers. Our chickens were brutal, fearless, and had beaks of steel. If they’d been larger, they would have made wonderful war beasts, come to think of it.

“I can’t argue with your arithmetic. However, you’d then either be executed for murder, or be forced to pay werguild for your offspring’s life.”

“How much is the werguild?”

“That would be up to sir Pettigrew. But it would definitely be more than the levy.”

Father scratched at his noggin some more.

“What if it were an accident, like?”

“I think we’re beyond that, now.”

“You could just… turn ‘round. I’ll be quick about it.”

“No, goodman.”

Mother finally returned, then, thank all the dead gods.

“Gar,” she said, her voice as flat and sharp as a blade.

“Wife,” my father replied.

“Why is Little Gar tied up and lying in the dirt?”

“…reasons.”

“Speak up.”

“I said there’s good ‘n sufficient reasons, woman.”

“Your husband wishes to avoid the Overly-Plentiful Family Levy by reducing the number of children you have by one,” the tax collector supplied. “Specifically, that one.” He pointed to me.

Father looked at the man, the sting of betrayal evident in his small eyes.

“I thought we were together on this,” he whispered.

“Not even slightly,” replied the tax collector with a frown.

“Gar, go mend the south fence like I’ve asked you these three days running. Brega, untie your little brother. The rest of you find something to do in a place that I can’t see you. Now.” She turned to the tax collector.

“Hemritch, won’t you please come inside for a cup of tea?”

Nobody argued. Nobody dared, not even the tax man. He went inside with mother. Father went off to mend the fence, Brega reluctantly untied me and slouched away without a word, likely to do what she liked best, which was to pitch stones at whatever small animal she could run down. I scuttled back up the tree.

I was not privy to the conversation that passed between Mother and the tax man. But half an hour or so later Hemritch left smiling and my mother called for me.

“Pack your things, dear.”

“I don’t have any things.”

“There’s that, yes. Come along as you are, then.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’re off to become a priest. Isn’t that exciting?”

I frowned up at her. “But I don’t want to be a priest.”

“Would you rather be a farmer? Or a corpse? No? Let’s be off, then, honey.”

While the news could only be called surprising, I knew better than to argue. I also had a strong feeling that if I somehow argued and won, I was not likely to see the next sunrise. So I followed my mother down the mud road to the village proper, which was called Thrudd.

Father Viker was the village priest, Beloved of the Light, Tender of Its Flock in our village. He was also a raging drunk and a massive lecher. He was not best pleased to see me, since I had done… things during his weekly services that the Light was not approving of. He was, however, more than happy to see my mother.

Despite having thirteen children and living a life of rural hardship, even I knew that the woman who had born me was striking in both her appearance and personality. It was one of the great mysteries of the village how my father of all people had gotten her to marry him.

At any rate, when we entered the kirk Father Viker was passed out in the front pew. Mother woke him with a sharp kick to the shin. He fell from the pew to the flagstone floor and made sort of a mewling sound, then looked around blearily. He saw me first and his eyes bulged and his face reddened with rage.

“It was me, father,” Mother said.

Viker tore his deathly gaze from me, and his whole personage underwent an amazing transformation once his eyes found my mother. He went from a shriveled, drunken goblin of hate to a straight-standing messenger of the Light in no more than three heartbeats.

“How can the Light brighten your path this day, my dear?” he asked her.

“No need to bother the Light, father,” she replied. “You can help me without Its intervention.”

“And how can I do that?”

“By taking Little Gar here as an acolyte.”

His eyes cut to me and his lip curled in disgust, just a little, despite himself.

“Oh, I’m afraid that’s quite-”

Mother placed a finger on his lips and straightened his wine-stained stole. “Let us discuss it somewhere more private, Father. Little Gar, you wait here.”

Viker led her into his private rooms behind the altar. I sat on the pew and kicked my heels. Time passed. When my mother eventually returned, her hair was a mess and her kirtle was askew. She sat down on the pew next to me and put an arm around me.

“Gar, there is no force in the world as powerful as a mother’s love. Sadly, when a mother has to divide that love thirteen ways, it’s not always apparent, but know that it is real.” Then she kissed me on the top of the head, told me to be an acceptable priest, kissed me once more, and walked out of the kirk. She didn’t cry; Mother never did.

I, however, bawled like a baby, until Father Viker stumbled in and gave me a clout on the ear to shut me up. Then he handed me a mostly empty bottle of wine and told me to drown my sorrow like the rest of humanity.

Chapter Two: Look, People Die all the Time

I come from a long line of dirt farmers. We were poor as dirt, we labored in the dirt and we were constantly covered in dirt. When the harvest was bad or the taxes were high, we supplemented our meager meals with dirt. Nothing wrong with dirt, I say, as a starting place at least.

You won’t find too many Dark Lords who will admit to humble origins; mostly, I suspect, because they think it gives them some sort of intriguing aura if they hint (or boldly lie) about a special lineage, a noble if shadowed bloodline that they can trace their worth back to.

I’ve never felt the need. How is anyone going to look down on my common ancestry from their knees, or a mass grave? The angle is all wrong.

I’m from common stock. We were de facto serfs. The local lord 'let' us live on his land, grow his crops, and raise his animals. And in return, he let us keep two-tenths of the product of his hard work. And old Lord Pettigrew was considered a decent sort. He sponsored a feast every midwinter and midsummer where all us peasants could eat his food and drink his beer for free. And he hardly ever had anyone hanged. In fact, his tax collectors weren't even allowed to laugh maliciously or twirl any part of their facial hair when they came around to collect half of that two-tenths I talked about earlier, that Pettigrew so generously let us keep.

Good old Pettigrew. I learned a lot from him.

~ ~ ~

My career as an acolyte of the Light started inauspiciously. There was no clothing in the kirk suitable to my size, and so Father Viker gave me an old sheet, cut a head-hole, and painted the rays on the back. Then he showed me where I was to sleep – in the kitchen, under the table. Then he locked himself in his bedroom with a bottle and a whole roast chicken, and didn’t come out until morning.

I learned the first night that kirks are not somehow magically immune to the depredations of rats or roaches, and thereafter I slept on top of the table once Viker was passed out for good. The kitchen was at least warm, and as long as I didn’t touch the wine, I could have whatever else I wanted of the daily offerings brought in by the villagers. I put on weight rapidly, and soon enough I was as healthy as I had ever been up to that point in my life. Bark and grass and worried-over bones had far too often been what was on the menu, on the farm.

My duties were few. Chief among them was to stay out of Viker’s sight as much as possible, which was a simple matter. The kirk had an abundance of hiding spots, unlike the single-room hovel where I’d been born and raised. I soon discovered the rafters of the kirk were practically made for me. It’s amazing, really, how seldom people look up in their lives. Certainly Viker never did.

There was a woman who came in daily to clean and cook, by the name of Gertis. She was a widow, and disliked me. Mostly she disliked me because my presence meant that the extracurricular activities that she and Viker got up to had to be practiced more circumspectly. No more humping at the altar, in other words, in case I should wander in.

Viker wasn’t a bad sort. Well, he was, by any objective measure, and his views on the opposite sex were simply barbaric. But he could be urbane, witty and learned when he wasn’t completely cabbaged – not to me, mind you – and he did grudgingly build on the foundations of literacy that my mother had given me. For the first time in my life, I read an actual book, and wrote on real paper with pen and ink rather than scratching out letters in the dirt with a stick.

Viker was a canker sore on the mouth of the Light, but he did give me reading and writing. Also the worst imaginable advice on love and romance, and uncountable bruises, but the literacy is what matters.

On service days, I was the one who lit the candles and collected the offerings. Sometimes the offerings consisted of money, but most often it was root vegetables, eggs, milk, baked goods and the like. All the hard coin went for Viker’s booze, of course, unless it went to Lisabet, the village trollop. She was quite nice. She showed me how to bake a pie, once.

All in all, I could have remained Viker’s acolyte for years, more or less content with my lot. But six months later he died, the bastard, his liver finally giving out.

The new father dispatched to Thrudd from the Capital wasn’t like Viker in any way, shape or form.

Father Breen actually believed in the Light, for one thing. For another, he believed an acolyte of the Light should endure harsh trials to strengthen their faith. He was, put simply, a zealot and an asshole of the highest order.

I spent a lot of time in the dark on my bare knees on the stone floor of the kirk’s cellar, ostensibly praying for the Light to fill my soul. In actuality I was praying for Father Breen to fall down a deep well.

I endured him for a month before deciding the Light was taking far too long getting around to my prayers. The Book of Light tells us all prayers are answered, and that sometimes the answer is ‘no.’ But it also tells us that those who help themselves are helped in return. So I decided to help myself out of the situation.

Going back to the farm was not an option, of course, and after half a year away I had no desire to return to my grimy roots and my fratricidal siblings. So I plotted my first murder.

Breen lived by a schedule. He awoke at four, prayed, washed, prayed, ate, prayed and then oversaw me as I cleaned the kirk. When dawn finally arrived, he set me to knee-praying and went out into the village on his pastoral duties, returning to the kirk for lunch and some more praying. The afternoon saw him harassing villagers to enter the kirk for evening services, and then officiating said evening service, the Lament of the Loss of the Light, where folks got harangued about all the bad things they did in the dark and how the night was a symbol of our own mortal shame.

That one was sparsely attended, however hard he tried to round up villagers to fill the pews.

After that I got half an hour of religious instruction, which consisted of memorizing passages from the Book of Light, then I got to prepare dinner (generally bread and water for the both of us) and then we prayed again and then it was off to bed a full two hours before anyone else in the village.

I was quickly going insane.

Once a week Breen made an inspection of the kirk, to ensure its soundness and cleanliness. Winter was approaching, and after a month concentrating on the interior of the kirk, expunging all the filth built up over Viker’s reign, he then moved on to the exterior.

Winters were harsh in our village, and the kirk old and very poorly maintained. The wooden shingles of the roof were in an atrocious state. Breen wasn’t liked enough to convince any of the villagers to repair them for free, and I wasn’t handy enough to do the work, so he carved out an hour a day from his schedule to climb up onto the roof to replace the shingles that would not withstand another winter.

If there was a chance to… eliminate him, I thought, then that was surely it.

Let us pause for a moment and discuss morality, shall we?

Murder is wrong, you say. What sort of twelve-year-old monster would set about murdering a priest?

The kind whose knees were black and blue with bruises from kneeling on a cold stone floor for hours at a time, that’s who. The kind who had begun to lose weight from a bread and water diet, weight that he could ill-afford to shed.

Look, people die all the time; roughly as many as are born, in fact. And most deaths are more or less meaningless – they further no end, they are just… an end. But when you deliberately kill someone, you give their death purpose and meaning. It’s not some random event, or some natural, mindless process. You’re elevating their death, plucking it out of a sea of mundanity and pointlessness.

What I’m saying here is that premeditated murder is actually rather noble, if you look at it in the right light.

Of course, I didn’t put all that much thought into making meaning from death at the time. I just wanted Breen dead.

At the age of twelve, my instinct for cunning had not yet fully matured into the force of nature it is now, but I knew that Breen’s demise had to be made to appear an accident. The kirk’s roof was high and steeply pitched; a fall from it would at the very least break bones and, with a little luck, kill him outright. I figured that even if he did survive a fall, he’d be bedridden, and I could come up with some other way to finish the job.

So one night I took a jar of goose fat from the kitchen, climbed the ladder that he’d told me to put back in its place and I hadn’t, and slathered the area I thought he’d be working on the next day. I greased the top rung of the ladder for good measure. Then buried the jar of goose fat, cleaned myself up, and went to bed, imagining a Breen free future until it was time to start my duties once more.

When the next day dawned, I went out to survey my handiwork after Breen left for his pastoral duties.

The kirk’s roof now had a giant, messy, glistening spot on it for all to see. It hadn’t glistened in the starlight. My heart sank. Nobody looked up, as a general rule, but Breen couldn’t help but notice it once he climbed the ladder.

He wasn’t going to slip and fall. He was going to want to know who had smeared goose fat all over the kirk’s roof. And the first person he was going to question would almost certainly be me.

I considered running away then, but decided to brazen it out. Nothing could be proven. Anyone in the village might have done it; Breen wasn’t particularly popular, after all. And if growing up with a dozen putative murderers had taught me anything, it was to deny everything and deflect suspicion onto someone – anyone – else.

I decided Gertis, the cleaning woman that Viker had regularly tupped and Breen had fired for incompetence, would be perfect. All that day I went over what I would say and how I would say it when Breen discovered the attempt on his life.

As it turned out, my day of gut-churning anxiety was for nothing.

Living at the ass-end of the kingdom, hard against the Quang Hills, meant that we occasionally suffered the depredations of monsters. Usually it was some solitary beast driven from its hunting rounds by some other, greater predator. Occasionally the village might be troubled by a band of goblins grown large and bold enough to think it could challenge a human settlement. But once every decade or two, the kingdom’s peace was troubled by an orcish horde out of the east.

This time they cut a path through our village.

It was midafternoon when Breen ordered me to set up the ladder. I did so, my stomach flopping like a landed fish. He rolled up the sleeves on his robe, put on an apron, put the hammer and tacks in it, then grabbed a bundle of shingles tied up with twine and started to climb the ladder one-handed. When he grabbed the top rung, I heard him mutter “what by the Light…” and then he shook his head and made his way onto the roof proper.

Now, the kirk was the tallest structure in the village, and it occupied the highest ground in the village. The point was that it could be seen for miles in any direction, a sort of guidepost for the faithful, I suppose.

Breen, now on the roof itself, had just noticed the discolored, greasy shingles. He certainly wasn’t paying attention to the surrounding countryside. But as it turned out, the countryside was paying attention to him. He was the single-most visible human for miles around, after all.

Breen reached out and touched one of the glistening shingles with a forefinger. Then he sniffed it. Then he turned his head to say something to me. That’s when an arrow found his neck, followed by three more in quick succession.

Breen tumbled off the roof.

A distant, unseen orc let loose a “waaaargh!” followed by dozens, then what sounded hundreds of others.

I stared open-mouthed at Breen where he lay twitching in the dirt.

“Waaaaaargh!”

Some small part of my mind noted that it felt like the ground had begun to tremble, and wasn’t that strange.

“Waaaaaaaaaargh!”

Breen stopped twitching. I could hear people shouting now.

“WAAAAAAAAARGH!”

Arrows had begun to fall randomly in the street around me, and they were on fire. That’s what finally snapped me out of my shocked torpor. I snatched Breen’s signet ring, his ring of office, from his finger (the goose fat helped in that endeavor, so it wasn’t a total balls-up) and fled into the kirk.

“WAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”

I stopped to bar the kirk doors, but then realized there was no point securing a building that would soon be burnt to the ground. I raced into Breen’s private quarters and ransacked them, gathering up his personal papers, a sealing wax stick, pen, ink and parchment. Then I ran as fast as I could for the cellar.

“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”

As I closed the trap door, I heard the village above me dying.

Chapter Three: Pimple-Faced, Big-Headed, Cack-Handed Piece of Dribble

There was no psychic trauma in my formative years that set me on the path to Utter Domination; no single event that made me thirst for the blood of my enemies. There was of course a first step on that path, but it was a small step down a long slope, really; not a precipitous drop.

Looking back on my deeply humble origins, there are a few lessons that I picked up unconsciously in the dull drudgery of days spent digging rocks out of the dirt, milking goats and cows, killing and plucking chickens, and listening to interminable arguments about the best way to despatch and pluck chickens, milk cows and goats, and pull rocks out of the sucking mud. Two-and-one-half lessons, to be precise:

1) I have absolutely no interest in how my chickens come to be dead and featherless. It's the destination, not the journey.

2) Hard work is nothing to be afraid of.

2a) Hard work is nothing to be afraid of, especially if you have someone else doing it for you.

~ ~ ~

One thing I neglected to bring with me into the cellar was a light source. Another was food. A third was water. I sat in the dark in a corner of the cellar behind a barricade of broken pews and an ancient bed frame and prayed to the Light that I pretended I believed in that I wouldn’t become orc food.

The kirk above me burned – I heard the roar of the flames, felt the heat even through the stones, and choked as quietly as I could on the smoke that found its way in. The only good thing about being in a burning building was that the fire was loud enough to mostly drown out the screams and the waarghs. Eventually, I fell into a broken sleep.

When I woke for good, the sounds of destruction had abated. I heard nothing. No fire, no screams, no waargh. I had no idea how much time had passed. My stomach said forever.

I decided to wait a little longer, just to be safe.

Eventually hunger drove me out of hiding. It took me a long time to get the trap door open, as it was blocked by debris, but I eventually managed it.

The kirk was a charred wooden skeleton, open to the light it had been a place of worship for. The village was cinders.

I resolved to be very careful and specific about what I prayed for in future.

There were no survivors that I saw, nor even any corpses. There was just the occasional limb or digit. I later learned that an orc horde was a hungry beast, and by and large devoured any flesh it came across.

I, too, was ravenous by that point, and spent the remains of the day picking through the ruins for anything edible. I came up with a handful of charred turnips and a miraculously preserved loaf of bread, which I devoured, and filled the rest of my stomach with water from the well. Then I sat down and tried to decide what to do with myself.

The reason I’d taken Breen’s signet ring and stationery was because I’d had some inkling of faking a dismissal from the Light’s service. Being an acolyte really didn’t agree with me anymore. The problem was, there was nothing much else I was suited for. Now, what with the village being a smoking hole in the ground, it all seemed rather a moot point.

There was no one to show my notional forged papers to, which was freedom of a sort, I suppose. There was also no food and no shelter. I thought briefly about going to see if old Sir Pettigrew was still alive up in his manor. He might feed me. Or he might just have me whipped out of his sight. He’d never really been a stable sort.

Then I thought about going to see if the family farm was still standing. But as much as I would’ve liked to see my mother if not the rest of my clan, I emphatically did not want to see what was left of her if the orcs had passed their way.

And then I thought about just leaving. There literally wasn’t anything left to stay for, that I could see.

The question was, where was I to go?

Preferably some place big enough to be safe from orc incursions, was my immediate and understandable thought. And the biggest, safest place I knew was the Capital. I was an acolyte of the Light, if a dismally terrible one. Surely the Grand Temple of the Light would have to take me in if I showed up and explained my situation?

Even at twelve years old, I laughed at that thought. No, I had to make sure that they were obliged to make a place for me.

The kirk had lost its roof, and the stones of it were cracked and blackened for the most part, but the rooms in the back had suffered less than the rest of the place. In Breen’s chamber, most of what little furnishings there were had been more or less spared. The narrow bed was soot-covered but mostly whole, his writing desk the same, though the stool was unusable, and his chest of personal effects was practically untouched. Until I bashed it open with a rock, anyway.

There wasn’t much in there, either. His life savings was a total of six pennies. He had a stack of papers, bound up in twine. Most of them were letters from his mother who, it must be said, may have loved her son, but carried a low opinion of his ability to do much of anything – every letter I bothered to read ended with admonishments to do or not do the simplest of things, such as brush his teeth regularly and ‘avoid diseased harlots who will give you the rot and see your soul in hell.’

In Breen’s personal papers I also found his assignment to Thrudd. I modeled my forgery on it. Father Breen ‘commended’ me, ‘an acolyte shining with faith and promise, to the care of his fellow Brothers in the Light, in the hope that a place could be found closer to grace than the sadly benighted village of Thrudd.’

Then I signed it with a very good facsimile of his illegible scrawl, and sealed it with his signet ring which I subsequently tossed down the well.

* * *

My journey to the Capital took three weeks, and there is little worth recording about it beyond the fact that I learned most farmers were far more generous than my father when it came to feeding strangers. That might have been due to the fact that most farmers were far better at actually growing edibles, but I don’t like to assume. I never had enough to eat despite the fact. Growing boys and such.