Role

Chapter 5

My memories are filled of battle scenes, the dust of the melee is the breath
of my nostrils, my mind can think of no other images save the hundreds of
near shaves with death, the glint of the axe blade as it sliches through my
eye lashes, the glory which will gild my sepulchre. I am young and yet it
feels like I have fought a hundred thousand battles and there are as many yet
to be fought.

Other memories are faint. I never knew my mother, and I had no other
siblings. My father had been a fierce warrior once but had since been turned
into a drunkard, fit only to charge at empty casks of ale, always lost in the
fog of drink, subsisting on the charity afforded to him by the village in
appreciation of his sterling services. I do not know what weakened him. But
his conduct turned me from the ale. I no longer worship the drink.

Other memories flood in. Of long moonlit trails winding down the mountains,
while I sat safe in my brave fathers' lap, before the drink had ruined him.
He would ask me to close my eyes and hear the mountain spirits talking
amongst themselves. I would close my eyes and serenity would flood through
me. I could hear the ancient lord of the earth slumbering peacefully, his
breath resonating in the winds which rushed through the valleys. And I would
feel so happy the tears would come to my eyes and he would look down upon me,
concern flooding through his countenance.

He taught me to worship the earth which provided so much for us. To put it
above all and to tend to it, for it would tend to us. He taught me to be
patient like the earth, at the same time to store its immense power within me
and to unleash it should the need arise.
I know why the lord wrecked his wrath upon the village. He was wrathful that
the dwarves allowed the mana to defile him. To steal from him an essence that
was rightly his. We should not have let it happen and yet we did. The taint
had blinded us.

He was angry we suffered the taint in merriment. The taint that would awaken
his beloved children from their eternal slumber while they rested peacefully
in his arms, that would torment his eternal mountains and the impregnable
valleys, that would defile the images of those who had been cast in his
mould.

Those hellish days when the order purged the mountains are still with me.
Staunching unstaunchable wounds, purging the disease, watching the brave ones
embrace the lord with their mouths wracked with sores and the poison.

The village needed the services of the veterans. And they rushed to the order
to enlist. All save one.

My father told me this. Win at all costs. With honour if necessary, but win
all the same. The enemy must know no quarter. Not an inch of ground, of this
good earth to stake claim to. Drive them from the lands. Purge them and those
that stand with them by not standing with you. An all encompassing victory
which leaves space for only one thought. That the foremost warriors of Thera
have taken it upon themselves to return the mana to the heavens. And to do
whatever is necessary to reinforce this. Be it slitting the throat of their
children to their eyes. This is a hard war and there is only one path to
victory, that of victory. He told me this before he slept. Swayed into the
eternal slumber where he will need no drink to drown his pain, safe in the