Warrior's Rest
Session: 2024-11-20
The fight was already loud when Vath found himself in the middle of it.
He would have trouble placing the beginning later — the sequence of it, how they'd come upon the burning house and the woman standing her ground against the surf. What he had was pieces: the smell of smoke and salt and something fouler underneath; the shape of things coming in from the water with too many limbs; a woman fighting with everything she had and not quite enough of it.
The party hit the line and the math changed.
Fish-things from somewhere deeper — too many joints in the wrong places, eyes that caught the firelight wrong. The kind of creatures that came up hunting and didn't distinguish much between categories of things that could be taken. There were a lot of them. More than comfortable.
In the middle of it, he registered the man on the ground. He could tell by the way the woman fought — not the usual quality of someone defending a home but the particular fury of someone with more to lose than the house. The husband had gone down somewhere in the first part of the fight. He wasn't dead, just out of it.
Eventually the things from the water understood they'd chosen the wrong stretch of shoreline. Their weapons they left behind — junky, none of it worth the weight. The bodies dissolved where they fell. Not quickly, but steadily — into the sand and the wet, until there was nothing to account for them.
The woman's name was Dallah. The man was Serk.
Two children: a girl named Hannah, and an infant too young for a name yet.
Serk was on his feet by the time they sorted themselves out — shaken, but upright. The family helped him along.
Land Ho was ten minutes inland.
The town announced itself by its doors.
Not the buildings — those were functional, weathered by coast wind that didn't apologize. But the doors and lintels and the frames of the windows had been worked. Forest imagery carved into the wood beside anchors and netting patterns, and between those the iconography of Tempus: swords, shields, the fighting life made domestic and decorative. Not a temple. Just a people who'd decided what they believed and put it on their houses.
He liked that.
Mord greeted them from across the square, the way a person greets someone they've been expecting without quite knowing it. Svala was near the docks with her back to them when they arrived, watching a group of fishermen haul something in.
A marlin. Large enough that the crowd around it had opinions.
She turned when they got close enough and looked them over without particular surprise.
Svala's tincture went around later — a small vial each, pressed out with the manner of someone distributing medicine rather than a gift. Warrior's Rest, she called it. A domain of Tempus.
Vath drank his.
He was asleep before he found a comfortable position. When he woke it was past five in the afternoon and the light had changed completely and he felt, genuinely, quite good.
The feast hall was square, with sand on the floor of the central area. That told him something about how evenings went here before the food came out. Patios off the sides, chairs everywhere, the kind of arrangement that invited staying a while.
Mord came in later with Svala and a group of warriors and fishermen — furs on now, the shift of dress marking the move from the day's work into something else. They took up space comfortably. These were people who knew how to fill a room.
Pedro had found someone to fight.
The match was impromptu, in the sand, for the right to say you'd won. Pedro won. He was gracious about it in the Pedro way — which was to say he announced it clearly and then shook the man's hand with genuine warmth. The hall approved.
Zephyr had a long evening and eventually needed steering to bed. This was not a surprise.
Vath passed some of his smoke around the table. It went well with the food, which kept arriving — more courses than he'd been tracking, ale enough that he'd stopped counting mugs some time ago. He was comfortable. The hall was warm.
At some point in the evening, someone across the table looked at Beau and asked about the armor. Then the sword. There was a name in the question — Berno — said with the ease of someone naming a person they expected to be known.
Beau's face did something.
Vath filed it and kept eating. Whatever that was, it had a shape to it. He put it on the list of things to ask about on a quieter night.
The food kept coming. The hall stayed warm.