Lieutenant Dragonfire

I didn't set out to be a hero. I never respected them. I watched them blow through town time and again, full of ego and totally lacking in anything resembling foresight. They would burn down taverns and stir up trouble. Sometimes you would run into a "good one", a group that stood up against something awful and stopped it when nobody else could but most of them were just loudmouth thugs that steal from shops and cheat at cards.

When I thought of someone who made an impact, I thought of Captain Thorn. She stood up against the thugs in the sewers and she stood up against the puffy shirts in the Salzheim city council. Everyone who knew what was good for them pretended she was human but we all saw the dull grey sheen to her skin, the tusks that she kept filing down. Anyone dared call her Orc-blood in earshot got a dark look from her, but if any of her men heard it, they would make a mission to "correct their ignorance". Her men would die for her. Most of them did.

My dad was a merchant in Salzheim. Not a good one, or a smart one, but he tried. Captain Thorn had to tell us when his body was found in the river. She was the one who found me after I ran away. Everyone else thought that I would be hiding in a tree crying somewhere but she saw the rage in my eyes, she put together the report of a break-in at the pawn shop just up the road from our place, a break-in that took no coin or valuables, just an old shortsword hung over the register. That was the first and last crime I ever commited.

Thorn found me in my nightshirt with that beat up sword, a nine year old boy stalking the sewers looking for revenge. She saved me from myself that day. She got me boarded at the Guardhouse, put me in the apprentice rolls as a lamplighter. She got me through my anger, taught me the difference between revenge and justice. She made me into a Watchman.

For some, guard is a job. For people like Thorn and me, it was our life. I swore the Oath of the Crown, the same oath she swore thirty years ago. Keep your watch, hold the line. Remember who you are protecting. The council didn't care much for us. They knew we weren't theirs. They couldn't buy us or keep us on their leash.

When Salzheim fell to the rats, there were these adventurers. They cracked it, they called the alarm. But when the city was lost and the evacuation order was set, they showed us all who they cared about. They got the nobles out and the slums fell like wheat before the threshers. I got what folks I could to the docks but with no barges it was down to who could swim. I broke the logging chains so people could have something to hold on to. I have to believe that it helped.

I spotted a merchant trying to load a canoe with silks. I don't know if they were his or if he stole them but with all the people dying everywhere around me I didn't care. I threw him in the water and his silks after him. He probably lived. Shit floats you know.

Thorn was there, she saw the scuffle. She calmed me down and then she gave me my last order. "Get them somewhere safe" she said. I knew who she was talking about.

Lady Aelion didn't rightly belong anywhere near the slum docks, but she had made that choice long ago. Walked away from an arranged marriage to a "respectable family", the lady scraped by in the slums and proved her nobility to everyone around. She took in urchins and saw them fed and protected from the world a bit longer, converting a family warehouse into an orphanage of sorts. Of course her family had no space for her on "their" barge, so there she was with a throng of dirty-faced toddlers scared out of their minds as the city burned around them.

I got the Lady and her wards on that canoe and I ran the rapids with children screaming in my ears and one short paddle to keep everyone alive. Somehow I managed it. I got to a safe shore and asked the Lady where she wanted to go. She told me she had a cousin in Dunmere, a week's ride north by horse. Only we didn't have a horse. We had a boatload of children who were not going to survive a march.

I pulled the canoe like a sled for as far as I could, then we came across a farm. The farmer traded us a goat cart for the canoe and two of the older lads. Said they could work the fields with him and he would see them boarded and sheltered. They were happy for it, it was a better offer than the city had ever given them.

Once we made Dunmere I got ready to make the return trip, see if Captain Thorn survived anywhere. They told me that the gates were shut and I was needed on the wall.

The report just said Ratfolk.