Loremachine – The path of Menoth
Faith can be a source of comfort, a reason to endure, or a fire that drives people forward when everything else has been taken from them. In this week’s Loremachine, we turn our eyes to the Protectorate of Menoth and the righteous who walk in his name, exploring a story of faith, sacrifice, and survival as one family journeys towards the Protectorate. Along the way, we meet the faithful who guide them, the warriors who stand between them and danger, and the leaders whose actions have helped shape Menoth’s kingdom.
The Pilgrimage
Act One – Sanctuary
By Matt Goetz
Is sanctuary a place, or is it the people who surround you? Is a wall a physical thing, or are its stones formed by a unity of purpose? If you can, I encourage you to be a stone in the wall of your community; not all of us have the strength to be a stone. It falls to the rest of us to be the mortar that binds the stones together.
--Sovereign Aysha in her Sermon at the Sovereign Temple, 582 AR
Imer, 623 AR
Nadia slipped through the heavy curtain which separated the cool chamber of her temporary home from the city streets, already growing hot under the early morning sun. Light had just begun to paint the tips of Imer’s sandstone towers, but it glinted off the buildings’ bronze trim and cast downwards, baking the pale stones and turning the streets into an oven banked over low coals.
The press of bodies in Imer’s streets didn’t help. Just in leaving her shelter’s stoop, Nadia had to elbow her way through a cluster of confused pilgrims, who had gathered to discuss how to reach their destination. As it was for many others who had also come to the city recently, their speech was unfamiliar to her, punctuated as it was by trilled consonants and broad vowels. She offered apologies in her best approximation of Sulese as she wormed between a potpourri of people whom had been on the road for weeks between baths.
Imer vibrated with the throng of its new occupants. They had arrived from across the entirety of the Iron Kingdoms, drawn to the Protectorate by the promise of security and prosperity. Nadia overheard a dozen regional dialects as she weaved her way through the streets. She envied those she considered the true citizens of Imer, who seemed to duck into one alley only to emerge from another several blocks away. Those learned individuals understood how to navigate the city in a way that humbled her. She herself had only been in the city for a few weeks, and deciphering its maze of streets and passages was yet beyond her grasp.
Nadia was slowly learning, though. She’d already discovered how to orient herself by the towering form of the Sovereign Temple, which rose like a mountain peak at the city’s heart. Depending on how its shadow fell across Imer, she could guess the time of day within a quarter-hour. She knew that when its shadow touched the granite steeple of the Reclaimant’s Altar, she should return for her midday meal. By the time the House of Truth was entirely in the shade, she should already be home for the day.
It was her family’s first time in a place with more than a dozen families. Nadia knew her mother grew worried if her children left their shared accommodations for too long, but the city offered Nadia more sights, sounds, and experiences than she had ever imagined. At every other street corner there was a new troupe of Idrian fire-breathers spewing plumes of blue and green flames, a mendicant Sovereign of the Menite faith offering the Lawgiver’s blessings to the faithful, or a debilitated veteran of the Infernal War who would trade stories of battles against creatures from beyond the material world for enough clay talents to purchase a meal.
Nadia spent most of her mornings attempting to master the city’s layout. She liked to imagine a map of the city with the streets she had walked marked out in thick lines of ink. Between those trails she added thinner lines to define the paths she’d navigated, which moved through alleys, shallow plazas, and the small rooftop gardens favored by households around the city limits.
Expanding her mental map was not on Nadia’s agenda for today, though. She had heard that an important pilgrim planned to speak near the city’s center later this morning, and she wanted to know what this person had to say.
A sudden blare of trumpets sounded as Nadia swam between the islands of slow-moving pedestrians, and the street’s occupants compressed themselves to either side along the main avenue. She did what she could to avoid being pressed between bodies, eventually clambering atop a small altar at the roadside. From her perch she saw what the throng was responding to. A phalanx of Exemplar Knights marched in a box formation, preceded by junior knights blowing into brass horns. Their white plate armor gleamed even in the Sovereign Temple’s shadow. They held their blades in a loose but ready grip, free from their sheaths. A masked figure walked at the center of the box, slightly hunched by the weight of the ceremonial bronze and gold it wore, white and crimson garments trailing behind it.
One of the visgoths, Nadia assumed. Only one of the most influential members of the Protectorate’s clergy could command such sweeping and immediate obedience, and the people crowding the street did everything in their power to make way for the procession. She watched the group as it moved past her and deeper into Imer’s streets, parting the crowds in the way a boat’s prow parted the surface of a lake. Their destination seemed to be the Sovereign Temple, and eventually they turned a corner and vanished from sight.
Nadia waited for the mob in the street to recollect its senses and start moving again before hopping down from her perch. Weaving between bodies, she headed in the direction of the Temple of the Flame. A pickpocket could do good work in Imer, she mused, as she slid between oblivious pedestrians.
A conversation nearby piqued her interest.
“Did you hear? Stallos is speaking in the Plaza of the Faithful today.”
“Stallos? The traitor?”
“Keep your voice down. They don’t call him that anymore. He’s the Shield of the Righteous now. Makes sense he’d speak there, doesn’t it? It’s where hundreds of faithful had their old lives burned away on the wrack. Seems he left behind his old ways, too.”
As Nadia rounded the corner toward the plaza, a layered swell of voices spilled from the open archway of a nearby shrine, drowning out the discussion behind her. It was one of the local choirs, their rich voices rising in harmony, chanting a familiar cadence of the Menite liturgy. The solemn notes cut through the noise of the bustling street, striking a sudden and resonating chord in Nadia’s chest. The grand sandstone towers flanking Imer’s street blurred for a moment. She could almost smell woodsmoke and damp earth. The language the hymn was sung in was strange, but it was the exact same one her father used to hum in the quiet mornings back home, long before the war reached their doorstep.
--
25 Miles east of Cherov-on-Dron, 623 AR
Nadia struck a match and stuck it inside the lantern. As the wick lit, she shuttered the lantern’s iris. It threw a pencil-thin beam of light that allowed her to see the contours of the one-room home she shared with her mother and younger brother Maksim. Lit by the gentle illumination, she filled a kettle with fresh water and set it atop the shack’s iron stove. As she worked, she murmured old words under her breath.
There is no pain unbearable upon His path.
Our suffering is an offering, our endurance bears witness.
In the fire of trial, the heart remains pure.
The grace of Menoth bears us toward the everlasting dawn.
It had been her father’s favorite hymn. He would hum passages of it as he chopped firewood or mended the fences of their goat pens.
Nadia remembered him as a sweet and simple man. He cared for her, her mother, and her little brother. When he was frustrated, he would take it out on the pile of unsplit wood outside their cabin. When it seemed like he wanted to raise his voice, he would walk the perimeter of their fields and mend the fences where they’d begun to sag.
Nadia remembered a specific moment from when she was around six years old. Her mother and father had been arguing, and he’d come out to chop wood. She sat on an unsplit log and watched him work through his frustration. After a while, he had slung his axe into his splitting round and wiped the sweat from his brow.
“Want me to fetch you water?” Nadia had asked. Her father shook his head in response, failing to conceal the smile that her offer brought to his face.
“I’ll live,” he said.
“Father,” Nadia asked after a stretch of quiet, uncertain about how to phrase her question, “why were you and mother arguing?”
Her father had sat down on a round of timber, sighed, and run a hand over his face and through his hair. “I don’t know, love. I… your mother and I don’t always agree when we talk about… faith. About god.”
“You mean Menoth?”
Nadia clearly recalled her father hesitating. His jaw had worked a few times, like he was trying to form words he couldn’t quite say out loud. Eventually he spoke. “The priests in the city talk about Menoth like he’s a giant made of judgment and fire, watching to see who stumbles so he can strike them down,” his voice was lowered, and he looked out toward the trees. “Your mother finds comfort in the order it brings. The idea that if you aren’t good, you’re bad. But when I look at the fields, or the river, or when I hear a good song... I think the Creator can be anywhere. He’s in the quiet work we do. In keeping things together when the world tries to pull it all apart. Not in fear. Not in good or bad, so much as… here and now.”
He paused, catching himself, and gave her a gentle smile. “Something like that, anyway.”
The rest of their day was like so many of the days they spent together. They fished on the Bitterrock River and stood in the grass fields south of it, watching as clutches of bats emerged from the trees along the river to devour fireflies that flew up from the grass.
That was Nadia’s clearest memory of her father. It was also one of her last.
Three years ago, a group of soldiers showed up at their doorstep and told him that he was ordered to wear the uniform of the Winter Guard and defend the Motherland. Before they took him away, Nadia’s father told her to look after her mother and brother. She had sworn to him that she would. It had been the last time she’d seen or spoken to him. With how violent the Troubles had been, she seriously doubted he was still alive.
Back in the present, the kettle started boiling.
The conflict which had stolen her father away had ended, but a new one had begun and was still raging. It sounded a little closer each day. The thud of firing artillery made the cups rattle in their cabinets, and the once-quiet nights were spoiled by the distant sound of cracking rifles and the shrieking howl of falling shells. On nights when the wind blew from the west, the smell of blasting powder made the air sour and rank. Some mornings rising smoke would turn the sunrise into a deep orange, and she would know that another village had burned in the night. Nadia did what she could, caring for her mother and brother, but every day felt even more unbearable than the one before.
There is no fear that faith cannot conquer.
In Menoth are our strength and our refuge.
When night descends, and the smoke rises,
We sing and do not fear. Menoth is sovereign.
Nadia hummed the hymn’s tune as she poured out three cups of tea and set the last of their shortbread on little saucers. Her mother and brother were beginning to stir.
A fist pounded heavily on the door. Nadia’s tune died in her throat, and tea sloshed over the rim of the cup in her hands.
Across the room, her mother bolted upright, suddenly fully awake. She reached across the rough cot and grabbed Maksim, pulling him tight to her side. “Shutter the light,” she hissed urgently, eyes not moving from the door.
Nadia closed the lantern’s iris. Darkness swallowed the room, only held at bay by the red glow of the stove’s coals. Nadia heard a scraping sound as her mother pulled the family’s Menofix off the wall and shuffling blankets as she tucked the small piece of wood away. The fist struck the door again, rapping a quick triplet. Nadia blindly groped for the iron poker next to the stove.
After a moment, a man began to sing. His muffled voice was hoarse with exhaustion, and he treated the notes more like suggestions, but he continued Nadia’s hymn from where she’d stopped.
There is no word but the word of Menoth.
It is the light within the darkness of the beyond.
There is no ending and no death in the life of Menoth.
For all people, there is a place at the feet of Menoth.
Nadia’s mother swung out of bed and stood. “Who taught you that song?” Her tone was accusatory.
“My mother,” the stranger answered from behind the door. “And hers before her.”
Nadia’s mother’s breath seemed to catch in her throat. After a moment, she spoke to Nadia. “Open it.”
Nadia gripped the poker tight as she approached the door. With trembling fingers, she lifted the latch and opened the door no farther than the breadth of her hand.
The man outside filled the doorway like a barricade. Mud spattered his boots almost to the knees. A weather-stained cloak covered his shoulders, but beneath Nadia saw overlapping plates of stained white armor, the edges scratched down to bare metal. A heavy crossbow was slung beneath one arm, wrapped against the weather in an oilskin. A sword rested on his opposite hip.
His face looked older than he sounded, cut deep by worry lines and baked taut by the sun. A short beard covered his jaw, and fatigue had hollowed the flesh beneath his eyes. “How many live in this house?” he asked.
Nadia’s knuckles turned white around the poker. “Why?”
“Because I need to know how many might leave it.”
Her mother came to stand behind her. “There are three of us. My two children and I.”
“How many can walk?”
“All three.”
“How far?”
“As far as we must.”
“Why would you care?” Nadia asked.
The stranger’s eyes darted between Nadia and the west.
“Before he fled Cherov-on-Dron, Sovereign Bogoyavlensky sent his ledger to Imer. Your family was one of three in the village who still sent tithe to Krepoctya Temple in the city. You might be of the Old Faith, but you are fellow Menites.”
He took a breath and weighed his next words. “The Orgoth crossed the western road two days ago. The bulk of their force is preparing to besiege the city. Their outriders will reach this valley tomorrow. Perhaps sooner.” The stranger kept his voice even as he spoke. “If you remain here, they will decide what becomes of you.”
Nadia’s mother gasped. “Where would we go?” Her voice wavered in fear.
“South. Faithful households have prepared a route to the Black River. There are boats waiting at the crossing. Beyond that, the Protectorate is accepting displaced Menites in Imer.”
“Is the road safe?”
“No.”
The answer came so readily that Nadia almost recoiled from it. The stranger continued. “I can tell you that the road is open. I cannot promise that it will remain so after sunrise.”
“What would you have us do?” Nadia’s mother asked.
“Fill every vessel you can with water from your well. Bring food that doesn't require a fire to eat and will keep. Bring warm blankets, sturdy boots, and anything you can easily leave behind if it comes time to run.”
His attention returned to Nadia. “Are you the eldest child?”
“Yes.”
“Pack for the little one. Count everything twice. Your mother will need her mind clear and her hands free.”
“He can carry his own things,” Nadia said.
For the first time, something softened in the stranger’s expression. “Good.”
Nadia’s mother noticed the battered armor beneath his cloak. “Are you an Exemplar?”
“I am Brother Gavril. Exemplar Errant.”
Her mother looked at him with faint suspicion. “An Errant? You speak like a Khadoran.”
“Because I am Khadoran. I was born in Rustrad, a few miles east on the river. It’s why they sent me here.”
Nadia hesitated. “Why who sent you here?”
“The people who want to make sure you and your family are safe.” Brother Gavril stepped back from the threshold. “You have one hour,” he said. “When I return, you must be ready to leave.”
The hour passed in a blur. Nadia and her mother stuffed three satchels with a mixture of practical and sentimental items. A small sack of dried beans went into one satchel, Maksim’s ragdoll argus into another. They packed as much as possible while leaving behind as much as they could bear. Partway through the flurry of activity, Maksim woke up, bleary-eyed and yawning as he asked what was happening.
“Hush and do as you’re told,” Nadia’s mother said. “Get your trousers and shoes on, and fetch us water from the well.” Maksim groaned and hung his head as he moved, but dutifully obeyed. As Nadia’s mother poured their meagre savings into a pouch, Nadia weighed the cast-iron skillet she always used to prepare their breakfast. It would be the heaviest thing she’d carry with her, but Nadia discovered that she couldn’t bring herself to leave it behind. With a scrap of fabric, she tied its handle to the outside of her satchel.
Maksim had struggled his way back into the house bearing the weight of the well’s bucket three times before Brother Gavril knocked again. Nadia and her family were ready, each wearing a oilskin cloak over two sets of clothes, dark-brown farmer’s boots on their feet.
They left their small home without ceremony. Brother Gavril was no longer alone in the muddy street outside. Vasily Verigin, the village’s widowed cooper, accompanied him along with another family—Jakob and Anna Toews, and their infant daughter Anya. Anna held her daughter close, bouncing and shushing her.
Brother Gavril looked across them all. “Are we ready to go?”
There was a soft murmur of assent, but something occurred to Nadia. “Start walking! I’ll catch up.”
Brother Gavril scowled but gave her a sharp nod. “Don’t be long,” he warned.
As the Menites started moving east, Nadia went behind her small house. There, in a modest wooden pen, four goats slept under a lean-to. She opened the pen’s gate and started to make noise, clapping her hands and shouting to rouse the animals.
“Hey! Wake up! Wake up, you idiots!” she cried. The animals were slow to stir, but they eventually began to move. “Get out of here! Go, go!”
Nadia swatted at the animals and stomped behind them, driving the goats toward the open gate. Once outside, they stopped and did not go far, but she was content that they were no longer imprisoned. Whatever threats they would face in the wilderness, Nadia was certain it would be more merciful than that which approached from the west.
--
The days that followed ran together so much that Nadia had difficulty telling them apart. They walked east along the south bank of the Bitterrock River until the road forked, and then turned south. Along the way they stopped for shelter in a string of rural homes. Sometimes they would gather in a single bedroom, cramped so tight they could hardly sleep. Other nights they would sleep in drafty barns that stank with animal musk. From what Nadia could determine, many of the people who sheltered them were Menites themselves who would soon make the same journey.
Many, but not all. In the home of an elderly widower she noticed the Morrowan Radiance displayed on the wall. When she asked Brother Gavril about it the following day, he grunted. “Charity is not the virtue of just one faith. There are some who, when they see another in need, are compelled to offer aid, no matter what god they pray to.”
Some nights there was no home or barn to shelter in. Those nights the group would need to huddle close under their blankets for warmth. When asked, Brother Gavril warned against lighting fires that might draw the attention of brigands, telling them that going unnoticed was worth a few damp and dreary evenings. When he noticed how Nadia’s skillet kept knocking against her hip as she walked, he made her wrap it in the extra shirt she wore to muffle the dull metal ringing.
The worst part of the journey was baby Anya. Unable to understand the peril they were in, the infant child bawled day and night. She cried when she was cold, when she was hungry, when she was wet, and when she was tired. On the broad and flat wet country highways they walked her voice carried a mile. All Anna could do in response was walk with the child pressed against her chest, beneath her coat.
Brother Gavril set the pace at the front. He remained mindful of the refugees he led, but kept their passage as brisk as was possible. To Nadia it looked as if he were a tightly wound spring longing to release. Having to stay as slow as old Vasily or young Maksim must have seemed like torture.
On the eighth day they arrived at the outskirts of Dubovny, a small village which served as a way station for trains coming down from Skirov and moving south to Korsk. It was four streets, with a Morrowan chapel, a coal chute, and a water tower with a dangling spout like a broken arm. Brother Gavril made them wait in a stand of alders while he went into town alone.
He came back after dark, accompanied by a reed-thin man bearing a lantern. “Symon tells me the Korska V train is expected to arrive by morning,” Brother Gavril said.
The man called Symon lifted his lantern and passed it across the group. “Six of you plus a baby? It’ll be ten koltina.”
Brother Gavril drew his breath in a sharp hiss. “That’s twice what we paid last time.”
“You didn’t have no baby last time. If that thing cries when the railway bulls are inspecting the train, that’s you with no ride and me with no job. Ten koltina for if I need to start looking for work tomorrow.”
Brother Gavril counted the coins in his pouch, seven in total. Sighing in defeat, he turned to the group. “Can any of you contribute?”
Before old Vasily or Jakob Towes could go for their pouches, Nadia’s mother spoke up. “I can pay the rest.”
Brother Gavril’s eyes softened as her mother handed over the balance of their fare.
Nadia was pulled awake by the sound of an approaching train the next morning, shaking her head to loosen the twigs and leaves stuck in her hair. It was an impressive, yet also slightly sinister sight. Great clouds of warm steam billowed out from the engine and drifted down into the cold valley, occluding the train and making it seem as if it were an enormous serpent. Any last vestiges of her drowsiness were banished moments later, as a shrill metallic screech pierced the air and the train’s brakes brought it to a stop, filling the air with a faint stink of hot metal.
Nadia could just about make out a firefly of light in the gloom, which she knew would be Symon’s lantern. Straining her ears, she heard him making small talk with the engineer and stoker, showing them where they could relieve themselves and then suggesting where to find something to eat. The voices went quiet shortly after and all she could hear were muted footsteps, crunching through the grit around the track.
The lantern’s light reappeared, bobbing along the train’s side. Beneath the hiss of the engine and the pops and pings of cooling metal, Nadia heard Symon slap his hands on the siding of the train cars. After he’d done it four times, she saw the light of his lantern wink on and off, producing three short flashes. Then it went dark as he walked away.
“Let’s go,” Brother Gavril said under his breath. “We’ve not much time.”
The Exemplar led the group to a cargo car with its western door slightly ajar. Gavril and Jakob helped the others up into it before jumping aboard themselves, carefully sliding the door shut behind them.
The train car smelled of mold. Sugar beets had been hauled in it at one point. The floor was tacky to the touch, and a handful of discarded vegetables rotted in the corners. There was no light except for a few anemic slivers that shone through gaps in the siding.
“Get comfortable,” Brother Gavril whispered. “We’re going to be in here for a while.”
They waited for what felt like hours before the train’s shrill whistle startled them. Nadia imagined the train’s crew hearing it and leaving whatever patch of Dubovny they had been hanging around in, converging on the train like ants upon a dropped sweet.
Then the knocking began. It started a distance away, the sound of wooden batons thumping into the siding of the train cars. Nadia could hear gruff-sounding men going down the line, knocking on the cargo cars to startle away rats or skiggs that might have climbed aboard.
Her eyes widened, and she looked to Anna and the baby. She could hear Anna’s soft shushing. The knocking grew closer. Nadia’s heart was hammering, and her head felt light. Instinctively, she closed her eyes and prayed.
There is no fear that faith cannot conquer.
In Menoth are our strength and our refuge.
When night descends, and the smoke rises,
We sing and do not fear, for Menoth is sovereign.
The double knock of batons on either side of the train car made Nadia jump. Eyes still squeezed shut, she waited for the baby to shriek, waited to be ripped out of the car and thrown to the ground.
No sound came. The men continued down the line, the sounds of their knocking growing distant. Nadia realized she had been holding her breath and heaved a sigh of relief.
“I think I just pissed myself.” Vasily whispered.
“Me too,” Maksim said.
--
They rode the train south for many days, sleeping in shifts at Brother Gavril’s order. While she was awake, Nadia would press her cheek against the wall and squint through one of the tiny gaps, watching the landscape roll by. When it was her turn to sleep, she found the car made for a poor bed. It was impossible to find a place on the floor that wasn’t sticky, and cold rose up through the boards to settle into her hips. As uncomfortable as it was, however, weariness and the train's rolling rhythm would eventually allow her to get a few hours of deep sleep.
The train stopped for a time in Korsk, where the towering structures on either side of the railway blocked out the sunlight. Nadia trembled as the train shifted forward and back several times, jolting back and forth as their train was reconfigured, the crew shedding some cars before coupling replacements. Thankfully, theirs remained hitched. Every one of them held their breath while the cars endured another pass by the railyard bulls, but by this point little Anya was too exhausted to do anything other than squirm in protest.
They rode three more days east. Early on the third day, Brother Gavril moved away from where he’d been pressed against the car’s northern wall, a sliver of light reflecting off his eye while he watched the countryside flit past them. Their time on the train was almost passed, he advised. The train had passed through Rorschick and they would need to disembark before the train reached Merywyn.
Upon hearing his words, the refugees shared uneasy looks. No matter how uncomfortable they had been, whilst onboard the moving train, they had felt a degree of safety. They were about to be returned to a hostile world once more.
Sure enough, Brother Gavril clapped for everyone’s attention a few hours later. “We’re approaching the last way station before the Llaelese border. When the train stops, wait for my signal. Once I give it, I need all of you to move as swiftly as possible.”
The Exemplar looked at Vasily. “Can you do that?”
The aged widower nodded.
He turned to Jakob and Anna. “And you?”
Anna hid her thoughts behind a nervous smile, but her husband replied. “Like the wind.”
Brother Gavril looked at Nadia and her family. “Swift as the wind?”
Nadia spoke before her mother could. “Faster than you, at least.”
The train began to slow a few moments later, just west of the Widow Barrens and the Llaelese border. Before it had come to a full stop, the refugees pitched themselves out of the car, falling in ungainly heaps and rolling away from the tracks and into the long grass. Thankfully, their only injuries were grazed knees. With the smoke from the train hiding their presence, they rose and hurriedly resumed the journey south on foot.
While still onboard the train, Brother Gavril had explained that there was a narrow gap between the Llaelese border and Khador’s fortress, Ravensgard. From there they would continue toward the Black River.
Nadia smelled the river long before she saw it, the stink of soot and rot they had wallowed in for days finally abating to reveal air filled with the cool scent of water and wet soil. To the west she saw the start of a massive forest that stretched all the way to the horizon, and to the east she saw distant mountains in the foggy air.
The land inclined down into a damp valley. After a few hours of walking, Nadia noticed what looked like a plateau with a series of irregularly shaped dark stones atop it. “What’s that place?” she asked Brother Gavril, pointing.
“Aliston Yard. I was told it was a fortress once, during the Occupation. The first Occupation,” he corrected. “The warder who commanded my first mission said that twenty years ago it was home to some of the fiercest fighting between the Cygnarans and Khadorans. Elements of the Northern Crusade fought there too, and all that fighting eventually drew the Cryxians like carrion birds.”
Nadia squinted, studying the old stones and trying to picture what the fortress might have looked like before it fell into ruin. She was so caught up in her imagination that it startled her when Brother Gavril’s arm blocked her passage and he moved to stand in front of her.
“Stay behind me.” His voice had dropped low, his tone turned harder than she had heard from him before.
Before Nadia could ask why, she saw what stopped him. Less than a hundred yards back along the narrow trail they’d followed, a group of men, six in total, had appeared. Although they didn’t seem to be pursuing the refugees, their pace was easily faster, and they wouldn’t be long in catching up.
The men wore a motley assortment of frayed uniforms in clashing colors of red, blue, and gray, all unified by a season’s worth of filth. Even at a distance, Nadia could see the men were not keeping well. Each of them wore a head of greasy and matted hair, and a ragged beard upon their chin. One of them kept scratching at an angry patch of red skin that emerged from under his collar and up one side of his face. They each had a rifle slung over their shoulder, but like their uniforms, the weapons were an odd mismatch of models, even to Nadia’s untrained eye.
The first man appeared to notice them just as Brother Gavril called out in Khadoran. “That’s far enough.” His hood was up, and he kept his hands loose at his sides.
One of the men toward the back elbowed his way forward and replied in a thick accent, “Not many travelers by this way lately. Where is it you’re headed?” Their leader, Nadia assumed.
Brother Gavril didn’t respond at first, instead watching as several of the men unslung their weapons. Nadia heard the harsh metallic snap of bolts being pulled back and set into place. Alongside their leader, two of the other men broke off and advanced, holding their rifles in ready positions.
“A ferry on the river,” the Exemplar eventually said. His tone was steady, but Nadia could sense his reluctance to reply.
The bandit leader spread his hands and smiled, revealing he was missing most of his upper teeth. “Well, that’s lucky, isn’t it? To get to the river you’ll have to cross over the border, and that means you’ll want an escort to protect you. Isn’t that right?” He stopped about ten feet from Brother Gavril, while the other two men walked past on either side, proceeding toward the refugees. “It’s a good thing our fee is so reasonable.”
“Purses,” demanded a man with dark hair peppered by gray, his accent equally thick as the bandit leader.
Nadia’s mother handed over her remaining coins without a word. The man weighed it in his palm, sniffed, and dropped it into his coat.
“Boots,” said the second man. He had a bushy copper beard and, Nadia noticed, sacks tied to his feet instead of proper shoes.
Jakob Toews started to argue. In a flash, the man whipped the stock of his rifle across Jakob’s forehead. The wood made a loud crack where it met flesh and bone. Jakob dropped to a knee as the man yelled at him, repeating his demand.
The first man moved on to Anna. “Ring.”
“It doesn’t come off,” Anna said. Her voice grew higher and more panicked with each word. “My knuckles swelled with the baby. It hasn’t come off in over a year. It doesn’t come off!”
The man drew a knife from his belt. He reached for Anna, which caused the baby to start wailing. The bandit grabbed Anya’s blanket with a grubby hand to rip the child away.
Nadia didn’t plan to do what she did next—she startled herself, even. The skillet came off her satchel in one smooth motion as she span and hurled it with all of her strength. It caught the unsuspecting man in the temple with a dull thud and his body collapsed to the road, a puppet with all its strings cut at once.
Every rifle rose and swung in her direction as Nadia stared in disbelief at her trembling hands.
Brother Gavril’s cloak fell to the mud, revealing his tarnished armor. Even under gray skies, the enamel seemed to catch what little light there was and glinted as he turned, lifting and firing his crossbow. The man with sackcloth shoes took the bolt in the side of his neck, blood erupting from the wound in a fountain the color of dark wine. As the bandit fell, the Exemplar didn’t reload, instead dropping the crossbow and drawing his sword as he rushed the leader.
“Get to the boats!” Brother Gavril shouted, as the pair clashed in the middle of the road.
Further up the track, Nadia saw the remaining men shoulder their rifles to aim.
Nobody among the refugees moved, frozen to the spot.
“The boats! Go, now!” Brother Gavril repeated, as he parried the bandit leader’s blade with his own.
The second warning shocked them into moving. As Anna helped Jakob to his feet, Vasily got a hand on Maksim’s sleeve, dragging the much younger boy with him as he lurched toward the river. Nadia and her mother joined them. The refugees dashed off the road and into a wet ditch, running eastwards along it with their heads down to get clear of the riflemen, who had started taking shots.
Nadia didn’t dare look back when she heard a man yelling in pain, nor a moment later when she heard the sound of bullets impacting against armor plate.
Remembering Brother Gavril’s final words, she ran.
--
The refugees stumbled across the boats after dark had fallen, having found the river some hours earlier and followed it southward. They were exhausted after suffering a haphazard journey through soggy wetlands, sometimes as deep as their knees. Each of them were soaked through, but they hadn’t dared stop moving or return to the path. Fear had kept their limbs moving. They had no idea if the bandits were still searching for them, and had to cover as much ground as they could.
The boats were two flat-bottomed river barges, lashed together and pulled up to the riverbank. A boatman stood on the black tarred deck of the lead barge, leaning against the railing of its small shelter. “Is this all of you?”
“We-we were one more,” Vasily stammered as their group boarded the barges. It was all that needed to be said.
Nadia sat at the stern of the rear barge, watching the bank growing distant as they slipped into the dark and glassy water of the Black River. Beside her, Nadia’s mother put her arms around Maksim’s head and held him against her, comforting the boy as he wept.
They traveled in silence. Nadia found shame had settled upon her like a shroud, smothering the words she wanted to say. They’d abandoned Brother Gavril, the man that had led them, without looking back. She didn’t need to ask if the others if they felt the same way. When she looked into the eyes of her companions, she saw the same anguish staring back at her.
The journey took six days, during which the raft stopped only a handful of times. If the boatman found their silence strange, he kept his council. It wasn’t until the sixth day when Vasily asked the man where they were going that they heard him speak again—and even then, only a single word.
“Sul.”
--
Imer, 623 AR
Bright sunlight bathed the Plaza of the Faithful, shining down on the largest assembly of people Nadia had ever seen in one place. She guessed their numbers were in the thousands, packed shoulder to shoulder from one corner to the next. Some had even climbed the stones at the fountain's center for a better view.
On the east side of the plaza a wide set of stairs climbed up as high as a rooftop back home, leading to the entrance of a grand temple. A row of men in white tabards stood on either side of the steps, each bearing a tower shield and bronze-colored spear. Braziers burned at regular intervals along the stairway, the smell of incense wafting over the waiting crowd.
A number of the attendees began singing a hymn, and it soon spread, the voices of so many joining together creating a sound that was at once joyful and deafening in its fervor. As the last note faded, the men on the stairs slammed their spears against the stone underfoot, three times in unison and the crowd hushed to a soft murmur.
A moment later a severe man, Stallos, Nadia assumed, emerged from the temple.
Stallos’ skin was the leather of an old and neglected sheath, baked dark by untold hours spent under bare sunlight. Where it cracked and split around his eyes and in the lines of his frown, pale flesh was visible beneath. His hair and beard had been shaved down so close to the skin that they left a faint shade of blue-black behind. A pale, silvery scar welled up from the skin of his forehead in the shape of the Menofix. Light glistened off the scar tissue like a cattle brand.
When he spoke, his voice was a gravelly baritone. “The faithful rejoice to walk in the streets of holy Imer. For those who do not know me, I am Stallos, the Shield of the Righteous. By Menoth’s will, I was given the ability to walk the path of the warcaster, and it has been a long and bloody path.
“On that path, I have seen both great suffering and miracles that could have come only from the Lawgiver himself. I am no priest, and this is not a sermon. It is an account of a man who saw, with his own eyes, what it took for many of the faithful to walk within Imer once more. This is the story of how Feora, Priestess of the Flame, brought us out of the wilderness, and back to the seat of Menoth’s kingdom.”
The path continues
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And this is only one chapter in the Protectorate of Menoth’s long and bloody history. From the faithful who carry the Lawgiver’s word to the warcasters who wield his power on the battlefield, many more stories await discovery. Follow the path, and see where it leads.
