The cuff to the side of Kre’s head made his ear ring for several seconds.
“Back from daydream land then, eh?” Lowil used to box his ears at least three times daily just to get his attention back to the classwork. He had tried just about everything else before it came to physical violence, but none of it seemed to work past the first couple of attempts. “Where were you this time?”
Kre sighed, “Thinking about the military and their former adventurer contractors.”
Lowil nodded and Braun snorted derisively. The magistrate clearly had a personal opinion on this matter and it was highly likely he would be sharing it with the two of them, regardless of their own desire to hear it.
“Lowil, take the leads,” the weaselly-nosed man muttered. “This bench is giving me a stiff back.” The two men traded positions awkwardly and with much trouble trying to arrange themselves satisfactorily. The horses, for their part, cared little if the reins were slack or taut. They simply plodded along on the path they knew so well.
This time though, Braun didn’t adopt his usual sneer or his haughty style of speech. He seemed to be a bit more relaxed than usual, as if the stick that was usually shoved up his rear was now gone. “You obviously know my distaste for the military. That’s a different topic entirely but suffice to say that I don’t believe the military is managing their resources effectively.”
He jabbed a finger at the large spot that marked Fort Cowl. “See here, for instance. They have twenty times the land that Sandort has, all prime pasture with clean mountain river running right through. That should have been the capitol of the region.”
This time it was Lowil who snorted. “You know why we couldn’t build the capitol there… the ruins. How would it look if we had another city-full of civilians swallowed up by the hellish denizens of the ruins.”
“And here I thought you were a learned man. You know full well that those disappearances were hoaxes. Tall tales told from bar to bar to impress each other; fables told from mother to child to scare them into obedience; fabrications by the military to hide their ineptness at protecting our citizens from the natives and to cover up their desire to plunder the ruins for their own personal gains.
“That’s why they got rid of the contract adventurers,” Braun spat, clearly on a roll now. “The adventurers were doing all of the risky work while the generals were taking all of the profit. When a group of them banded together to argue for better working conditions and to ensure the historical artifacts went to museums and public collections for further study, the military cut their contracts and moved in. Fort Cowl was built on the largest ruins we’ve seen yet and not a single civilian will reap any benefit from their plundering of our history.”
Lowil shook his head sadly. He had clearly heard these arguments before though likely not from Braun. It seemed to be a prevailing theme, this type of conspiracy theory regarding the military. “I know better than to argue with someone who is debating from emotion and not logic. For Kre’s sake though, let me just say that one should do one’s own research before taking a stance on a topic. I have seen firsthand the horrors that the ruins hold and I wouldn’t wish the life of an adventurer, as short as those lives are, on anyone and I’m thankful a thousand times over that Fort Cowl is where it is, keeping the darkness in the ruins from emerging.”
“Firsthand? What do you mean?” Kre asked. His teacher, however, simply waved his hand dismissively and shook his head. He clearly wasn’t going to discuss the topic any further. They rode in silence for a while with Braun dozing in the bed of the wagon, a smirk on his face. In the quieter moments between the bumps and creaks of the wagon, Kre thought he could hear soft murmurs coming from the driver’s seat. Murmurs that sounded either like a song being sung in repetition, or a prayer being chanted over and over again. Deciding that Lowil deserved his privacy, Kre simply wrapped his ugly orange cloak around him and, despite the heat of the sun and his distaste at emulating Braun, tried to follow the weasel-faced man’s example.