Chapter 7: Fellius, the Rider

We all stood still and said nothing for a moment. There was no real way to tell whether or not the speck on the horizon was coming closer, but the suggestion made it stick. It seemed so far away that it could never arrive at South Hall, but we were probably all thinking of the blobs that the soldiers had been when they were so far away. We knew that this was important. Even then, we understood that this was the most important thing we’d ever experienced. As if led by a thought we all had at the same time, we took off running for the soldiers' cabin.

They were working to put up a wooden watchtower that was barely the height of the upper floor in my parents' house, but I had never seen anything like it, so it was very impressive to me. Most of the neighbors I had heard speaking about it believed that they were trying to get a better vantage point to look into the Carrowind. However, having been in the army and knowing how flat the ground is around there, my guess is more that their commanding officer gave the soldiers something to do to keep them out of trouble. Two of the soldiers had removed their jerkins and were working in the crisp fall air, muscles rippling with effort against the heavy wooden trunks that they were securing in the ground.

“Something's coming!” we all shouted at once.

“Who's coming?” a soldier with a big black beard called out to us, his head snapping in the direction of the Carrowind, as if by reflex.

“Where?”

We explained about the speck on the horizon and began yelling a dozen different things. He looked at the other soldiers who pulled out their own spyglass and passed it around, nodding.

“We think it’s getting bigger!” said Garren.

“Coming this way,” said Farras.

“What does it look like Elgren?” asked one. “I can't see anything at all.”

“They're right. There's something there,” said another.

They slowly set down the timber they'd been working on and went into their cabin. They barely took their eyes from the horizon. All of them emerged with swords.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about it little one,” said one soldier, with long blond hair and a mustache. His eyes were fixed on the spot. “If it’s what I think, it’s nothing to worry about.”

“I'm going to tell my parents,” said Farras.

The soldiers paid attention to us more or less for the first time. We stopped what we were doing and the commander turned to the tallest of us, Farras.

“It’s surely nothing.” he said, “There’s no reason to interrupt your parents and neighbors for a dot on the horizon.”

“Do you know what it is?” he replied.

The commander old, wiry, and thin, immediately averted his eyes. Didn’t he know that things on the horizon were always to be watched? Always. What if they were dangerous? How would anyone know? What about the missing livestock? The tales of travelers never reaching towns close to the Carrowind? There was something to his lack of response, to be sure. That this man would tell us not to worry about it, to not bother our friends and families about it, seemed wrong.

“No,” he said. “But we’re here; it won’t be anything that we can’t handle.”

Looking back on this, having commanded men myself, I can tell you that this was the worst thing he could have done. We were a group of countryside children. We had only seen soldiers for a little while. The idea that there might be a fight that “wouldn’t be anything that they couldn’t handle” with something from the Carrowind was more excitement than South Hall had probably ever seen.

Still, afraid of leaving him without some sort of permission, we continued to stare. Would he explain himself more? The soldiers looked at their commander and spoke in clipped phrases. I could tell, even then, that they were doing this to conceal the meaning from us.

“Dispatch?” said one of them.

“Probably,” said the commander. “Must be important, whatever it is.”

They seemed so unconcerned about the dot on the horizon, and the fact that it might be coming toward us, that I started to sense they had been expecting it - or at very least, were unsurprised by it. How could anyone expect something to come from the Carrowind?

The commander took his eyes off of the dot with resignation, realizing that, short of tying us down, he was not going to stop a group of children from telling their parents that something was happening.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Tell anyone you think you need to.”

With that, we scattered into South Hall, sprinting back to our homes and to the fields and houses where our families were going about their daily chores, mending clothing for the colder season ahead, milling grain into flour, and half a dozen other things. The word spread across the town like a flood. By the time we returned to the soldiers' cabin, a huge crowd had gathered and was murmuring several things nearly in unison. The few spyglasses that South Hall could muster – after all, we weren’t a port city – were being passed around from neighbor to neighbor. The commander was standing on one foot and then the other, casting glances at the crowd from time to time.

The blob on the horizon was definitely, though almost imperceptibly, larger. Whatever it was, it was coming toward us. Or as Garren had said, growing. Still though, this had happened before, been watched with breathless anticipation, and evaporated into nothing but rumors after a black spot disappeared.

Regardless, everyone was watching it expectantly, and no one had a good feeling about it. Some of the men had brought what crude weapons they had available to them. Old rusted swords from one of the wars in Korskovyr, wooden spears, large hammers used break rocks; some even just had very big pieces of wood they thought to use as clubs. There were a few bows and arrows. We had only first noticed the spot about five minutes before. But now, there was nothing to do but wait. South Hall’s citizenry leaned on their spears, kicked stones at their feet, and every few moments looked toward the horizon. The soldiers seemed unconcerned with the townspeople and were spreading out in front of us. One of them mounted the horse. I suspect now, that if there had been real trouble, he intended to ride to Hammercleft as fast as it would take him.

After a minute of this, someone yelled, “It's a half-man, half-horse!”

Everyone strained their eyes, and finally there was a cry of, “No, no, no… It’s a man riding a horse!”

Those who hadn't been able to see it right away soon agreed. The spot on the horizon was a rider, and he was galloping toward us as fast as he could go. The crowd’s babble had retreated to whispers and prayers. Eventually, the rider’s boots could be seen with the naked eye, and hoof beats could be heard if one was far enough from the crowd’s babble. He was coming to town as quickly as he could and was not looking back.

Within a matter of moments he had splashed across the Vo, out of the realm of our fear and into our world. He saluted the commander and dismounted right in front of him.

“Fellius,” the commander acknowledged, “what news?”

The commander did not seem to notice that the population of an entire village – true, it was a small village – was staring at his subordinate as if he had just dropped out of the sky. Fellius’ only acknowledgement of the situation was to look from side to side for a moment, as if to signal to the commander that, by the way, a every man, woman, and child present was looking. The commander, who I now know was merely a sergeant, and an old one at that, began to walk toward the small cabin with Fellius.

I don’t think that I ever learned the commander’s name.

The people of South Hall moved toward the cabin, as if the whole town meant to follow the two men inside. The door was shut and there was a thump of a crossbeam being put over it. The soldiers assembled in front.

My neighbors and friends fell to grumbling immediately. It took several seconds for them to even realize that they were being shut out of whoever this man was, what he was there for, and what it meant for them. No one knew anything.

Finally, a “Who is that!?” rang out from the crowd.

“Who is this that you’ve brought into our town!?” bellowed someone else.

There was no response from the cabin.

“What’s going on here!?” people started yelling in different ways.

The soldiers merely stood quietly in front of the door, uneasily regarding us. They stared at the collections of makeshift weaponry that had been gathered for the rider when he was still a speck on the horizon. The crowd began to press in on the soldiers and yelled things like, “What are you not telling us?”

After a few moments, the door opened, and the commander did not walk out, instead, he angrily shouted out the door, “We know nothing more of this than you do, and we are addressing the situation as it stands! By power received from King Clanton III under Civius, I command you to leave right this moment!”

The villagers of South Hall were shocked. No one had ever been given an order from the King of Arkana. We didn’t know what to think. The muttering had stopped. There was so little authority in our village that no one really knew what to make of it, except to just do as they had been told. The crowd gradually floated back to their various tasks, questions burning in their heads like coals in a sack. To come into our village and tell us what to do, but in the name of the King – it seemed wrong, but how could it be? The King was the ultimate ward of Civius in the kingdom of Arkana.

I saw Caedrus and Sarcen walking back toward the house: Caedrus mumbled as they went, and Sarcen trotted alongside him as if it were an interesting conversation. I turned to Farras and Kabil, who looked at me.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” they said, almost in unison

At first, I thought they meant my little brother and his winged puppy.

“I heard them,” said Garren. “They want to take over the Carrowind! The man was a scout! He said that there is a town of monsters living just over the horizon.”

We all rolled our eyes so hard that I think Garren heard it.

“What?” he said. “It’s true!”

Years and years later, I can say that what Garren was telling us was a bold-faced lie. What none of us knew, though, was how close he was to the truth.