Virryn woke him with a plate of fresh fruits and a bowl of something mushy, brown, and steaming.  “Eat up,” she advised.  “This was all I could save from Beleg.  That man has an appetite like I have never seen.” Kre nodded and accepted the food gratefully.  He wasn’t too sure of the mush at...Read More

“Barry, huh?”  Beleg muttered to himself and shook his head.  “I should have guessed that rat would pull something like this. “This one’s on me,” he continued ruefully.  “I shouldn’t have left you here by yourself.”  He took another long look around the room, now well lit after Virryn found a couple of unbroken lamps...Read More

A flash of steel. A spray of blood. A howl of pain. The melee was finally over.  Barry lay curled up on the floor clutching at the back of his left leg with his free hand.  Kre held both of his blades again, though he had no idea how.  Barry tried to climb to his...Read More

“What happened to…” Barry’s voice trailed off as he looked down at the sword in his hand. “I’m not afraid of you anymore,” Kre whispered, almost a little too low for Barry’s ears. Barry’s head and eyes slowly rose until he was glaring down at the younger man.  His lips curled up into a sneer...Read More

If Tralagar said anything more, it was lost in the immediacy of Kre fighting for his life.  Barry wasn’t going full tilt as far as Kre could tell.  The strikes were precise, but always seemed to be pulled just shy of a decent hit.  Kre had felt Beleg hit with full force once at his...Read More

‘No!  You cannot hope to beat him like this,’ Tralagar urgently hissed in the back of Kre’s mind. “Now you decide to talk?!” Kre snapped back.  The fury of his retort caused Barry to pause in his advance and look at the boy quizzically, but the pause didn’t last long, and he took another step...Read More

Of all the things that he imagined might happen while he was manning the base, this hadn’t been on his list.  As he considered his luck and the odd way in which the absolute worst things seemed to happen to him lately, he supposed that he really should have anticipated this. “Master Beleg stepped out...Read More

They weren’t gone long before Kre started to imagine all the ways in which this whole thing could go wrong.  Aside from the obvious one where any one of them could get caught out of doors after hours, which would have serious unknown repercussions, there were at least a dozen others that started to fog...Read More

They had come up with a decent plan, as far as Kre could tell. Admittedly he had no prior experience with situations like this, so he had no baseline for what they should be doing or how they should be doing it. Still, Beleg, Dain, and even Virryn seemed happy with the plan, so he...Read More

“That said,” Beleg rumbled, “we need help too.  There are just the three of us, and this is a job for an army.  Yahaestra is quite possibly the worst place in these lands to do what we intend, but we have little choice of our own.  We are looking for friends of ours and can...Read More