Thorne Brickwood stood on the balcony of his home smoking a small tobacco roll as he gazed over the golden Temuli countryside. The evenings in Temul were cool and dry compared to his seaside hometown in Iv, and they lacked the salty smell of the sea. Yet if he closed his eyes, he could pretend that the wind rushing across the golden fields of wheat and sorghum was actually waves breaking against the white sand beach behind his mother's cottage, the croak of frogs actually the rough squawk of gulls.
Thorne ran his fingers across the smooth metal of the newly constructed balcony. The Temuli craftsmen had done an excellent job on the villa. Whether that was because of, or in spite of, his wife's constant supervision over their work was still up for debate. The two-story home in eastern Temul near the border with Iv, just on the outskirts of Palamine was his wife's dream ever since she was a child. She had spent her childhood in the cold walls of Palamine proper, learning propriety and manners and uprightness as the daughter of a lesser lord. Each night, though, she dreamt of trading lives with a street urchin, escaping to the fields, and living a free life.
At first Thorne had thought her dreams ridiculous, but the more he learned of her family, the more he understood. Having grown up in a small cottage with his family of seven, Thorne thought her delusions of the freedoms of poverty seemed naive. Sure, the children could run through the fields every morning, but they also had to work the fields, sleep off their hunger, and worry about thieves in the night. She suffered his stories for months as he explained the reality of his childhood, yet never once thought less of him for it. In fact, she almost seemed envious.
"Now you're here, though, with me," she had said as she caressed his stubbly cheek. "Wouldn't you do it all over again?"
Thorne blew out a large cloud of white smoke and flicked the tobacco roll from the balcony. He picked up the longsword that leaned against the balcony and slung it across his back before returning into the villa.
Susanelle "Su" Brickwood, née Vribranta, sat at the bedroom desk within, head craned over an ever-growing stack of letters she had written throughout the day. Announcement letters to her friends and family about her new marriage, and invitations to their first villa-ball, a popular tradition in eastern Temul where nobles preferred to hold celebrations outdoors. Thorne didn't have a drop of noble blood in him, but he was an officer in the Red King's army, so Su never lost her claim to nobility after marrying a commoner. He didn't quite understand the details behind the nobility system, especially since Temul was technically conquered now and under the Red King's control, but she assured him there would be no issues.
Thorne moved slowly over the desk and gathered Su's writing hand into his own, massaging her the fat of her palm between his forefinger and thumb. He wished his soldier hands were softer and not so abrasive, but she didn't seem to mind.
"Are you sure you're okay with this? I know you're not too keen on villa-balls, and just sending these invitations through courier will cost a month of your wages," she asked as she sunk backwards into her desk chair, sighing loudly with eyes closed.
"Of course, little bird. You should be prideful of the life we have, I would not rob you of that," Thorne replied. Yasha knows if he had any living friends he would want them to visit too.
"You're too sweet on me," she said, looking up with her deep brown eyes and grabbing his face in her hands. "Be careful. I'll take everything you've got if you keep this up," she added with a laugh.
"I would happily give everything to you, if only you asked," Thorne replied. She giggled and kissed him before closing her eyes and sighing again.
"I know you have to leave. Night training, right?"
"Yes. I will return just before dawn. I will send Caralon to check on you after the first rotation," he answered.
"No, let me enjoy my first night in our new home. I can't have your infantrymen muddying up our foyer before I've even sat in it," she reprimanded him softly.
"As you wish," Thorne said as he removed her hands from his face and headed for the stairs to the foyer. At the door to the bedroom he turned around to take in her smiling visage for a moment. She winked at him, and he left down the stairs.
Happiness welled up within him as he opened the front door with a smile. As part of the Red King's occupying army in Temul, he thought his life would be hell at the Palamine outpost - never would he have guessed he'd find his perfect life.
As Thorne stepped through the threshold of the door and his eyes adjusted to the evening sun, he noticed a band of armed men standing a little ways down the road from his home toward Palamine. Their pauldrons bore green and yellow colors - the colors of the Vribranta family.
Thorne unsheathed his longsword from behind his back and placed the tip in the dirt, leaning against it casually.
"I don't suppose Lord Vribranta sent you with a housewarming gift, did he?" He called out to the men. The group began to advance toward him, six in all. They wore regular clothes, of course. Dressing in armor and traveling out to Thorne's home would have been too conspicuous even for a nobleman's retinue. Thorne recognized the man at the front as Walten, Lord Vribranta's favorite lapdog.
"If you had sent me a letter, Walten, I would have happily invited you for a tour of the new villa," Thorne taunted again. He wasn't afraid of these men. He was a trained sergeant in the Red King's army, battle-hardened since the beginning of the Reunification War. Some nobleman's lackeys in rags stood no chance, even if they outnumbered him six-to-one.
Walten stopped around fifteen feet away and finally answered the taunts, beginning with a thick wad of spit between himself and Thorne.
"You Ivans think you can terrorize our country for generations, claim dominion over our lands, occupy our cities, then steal our women and get away with it? Are there no repercussions in that barbaric land you call home?" He frothed angrily. It was strange when men, through no blood relation, became so worked up over their employer's honor. "You steal Susanelle, the jewel of the Vribranta family, and flaunt your crime right at our doorstep, and expect us to invite you to the family with open arms? Forget it, Ivan scum."
With that, the entire group unsheathed their weapons. Some with shortswords, one with a dagger, another with a mail-breaker, a small metal hammer with a spiked head for piercing mail.
"If this is how family reunions work in Temul, then I would hate to break tradition," Thorne said with a wry smile before charging at the right flank of the group. He swept his two-handed longsword at the group with a powerful swing, knocking the shortsword from one of the men's hands instantly, leaving him unarmed. Thorne followed up with a cut across the man's chest from above, felling him. The others backed up with a jump and began sidestepping around Thorne, trying to encircle him.
They're weak, but I guess they're not idiots, he thought.
Footsteps advanced from behind, and Thorne spun his massive blade, severing the attacker's dagger-wielding arms at the elbows, before finishing his spin and facing the other four in front of him. Walten tested his defenses with a few tentative thrusts of his shortsword, which Thorne lazily sidestepped.
"End him, you morons!" Walten shouted to the other three. Two men with shortswords advanced on him from either side. Thorne faked a move forward, and the two instantly flinched backward. He laughed heartily. It had been nearly a year since he saw true conflict on the fields of battle, and the thrill of death returned like an old lover. Taking his longsword in one hand he swept across both men with a mighty swing. They both advanced after dodging, thinking he was open, but this was what he had hoped for. Thorne tossed his sword to his other hand and swept again the other way, this time cutting both men down across the midsection.
Walten, sweat now pouring from his brow, turned to flee, but Thorne raised his sword overhead with two hands and threw it, impaling it into the man's back and sending him rolling to the ground.
One man, the one with the mail-breaker, began backing toward the door to the villa. The door behind him opened suddenly, revealing Su.
"What is happening?" She shouted, her hand covering her horrified mouth as she surveyed the bodies below her. She caught the remaining man's attention.
"No, Su!" Thorne shouted from behind as he sprinted toward her.
"Iv will never conquer us! Long live Temul!" The man shouted before ramming the spiked hammerhead into Su's abdomen. Thorne scooped up a shortsword from the ground and thrust it into the man's chest, sending him reeling, his eyes bulging. Su collapsed in the doorway, her blouse stained in crimson.
Thorne raged, trying to reach her, but a force held him back. It felt as though a rope had been tied to his waist, pulling him away like a horse hitched to a runaway carriage. He strained, grunting as his feet slid backwards through the dark Temuli dirt. His fingernails were black and full of grime as he clawed forward, only to slide further away from Su.
"Why, why?" He screamed, realizing tears were falling from his eyes. Finally, the rope tugged him back hard, through the air, and everything went black.
Thorne opened his eyes in an unfamiliar, decaying village, surrounded by young faces. His abdomen ached like hell, and his hands were crusted with dried blood. Whose blood is this?
"He's awake!" Someone yelled, though it felt muffled to him. He was so tired. Where was Su?
A tall woman with purple hair approached him and held a canteen to his lips, from which he happily drank.
"Take it easy," she said while wiping his eyes of tears. "You took a mail-breaker to the abdomen, but you should be okay."
Thorne looked down to see a thick bandage wrapped around his midsection. Suddenly his memory came rushing back to him. An ambush in the ravine village. A few siccs had leapt from the rubble after that scav, Ioren, called it out from the rooftops. It would have been no problem, usually, but then he saw the woman with the mail-breaker. She was Temuli, with dark hair and dark eyes, and he swore it was Su standing before him. He let his guard down for a moment, asking her to surrender, when she slammed the weapon into his gut. She lay now, eviscerated, across the dirt road from him.
As he pressed along his abdomen to locate the wound, Thorne sighed in relief as he found it to his side. He likely wouldn't die from it, but he would be out of fighting shape for at least a few days.
"You're not out of the woods yet," the purple-haired woman said, seemingly reading his thoughts. Violet, he thought her name was. "It was a triple-edged blade at the end of that mail-breaker, so I couldn't stitch you up very well. You've got a hole in you, and you'll have to avoid anything strenuous for the next few days if you want to keep it from leaking all of your blood out."
"You're very strict," Thorne responded. "You remind me of my wife."
"Your wife sounds like a very strong and respectable woman," Violet quipped with a laugh.
"She was," Thorne said before closing his eyes again. Violet hummed softly.
"He dead?" A voice sounded to his right, making him laugh. Such blunt words from a child.
"No, Petra, he's still alive, and could you suffer to be more polite?" Violet asked kindly, sounding very much like a mother.
"Jus' wondering. I like his sword," she answered callously. Thorne didn't blame her, though. He remembered his years of poverty vividly, and if he saw a rich man dying in front of him, he would curse him for dying too slowly just the same.
"We will make camp here for a sleep," Linoor announced. "In six hours we head out again, so if you would like to search the area, do not dally."
Another figure emerged from the same house as Petra and passed Thorne, but he ignored it as he drifted off into a deep, exhausted sleep.