LOCATION: THE CRUCIBLE, 50TH FLOOR
PLANET: LAPIS DIVINUS, ORION LUMINARY INSTITUTE
YEAR: 1 | DAY: ?? | TIME: ??
The sun beat down on the training yard as two dozen guards went through their forms. They were arranged in four neat rows of six. Sweat glistened off of each one of the shirtless men.
Kaela stood out in the front of the group, facing them and running through a mirrored version of sequences of punches and kicks.
“Hah!”
They shouted at the same time in nearly perfect uniformity. There were always one or two that fell behind, but all in all, Kaela was pleased with their progress.
“Hold!” Kaela shouted. She noticed them shaking as they held their partial crouch in place. She walked toward the back and corrected the posture of one of the guards, then raised another’s arm so it was straight.
“Tighten your core, and feel your power extending down into the ground beneath your feet, like the roots of a tree holding it steady in the wind.”
She returned to the front.
“Next pose!”
The Guard Captain had scoffed at the idea of unarmed training at the beginning.
“We have swords and axes. Why do we need to learn how to fight without our weapons?” he asked.
It was the first day of organized training, and Kaela had prepared for some pushback.
Despite it coming from the Captain himself, she was glad for the question.
“We train unarmed first so we feel how our bodies can move. We train unarmed so we can never truly be disarmed,” she said. “Our bodies remember the motion, and the weapons then become extensions of our bodies.”
She punched a training dummy, and the men watched it shake in its mounting. Then she reached into the aether and pulled her Phantom Blade into reality, swinging it and cutting the top inch off of the dummy before dismissing it.
“This way, a weapon is only a tool. One that amplifies power already inherent in you, but not always required.”
Once they were satisfied with her explanation and understood the reason for the training, Kaela began teaching the sequence. It was the first one she had learned, a truncated Tai Chi form that moved fluidly from one stance to the next.
It took a few weeks of daily training, but once the guards all learned the sequence, she began teaching the martial moves hidden within the graceful dance. Once the men saw those, they really began enjoying the hard work.
They would meet in the yard early in the morning and train for several hours. At mid-day, the guards would select ten young men from the village, different ones each day, and head deep into the woods.
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With axes in hand, they would team up, pick trees, and cut them down.
The physical labor was, of course, part of their training. But the trees were not meaningless work. Once they cut down a tree, they would chop the branches off, clean it up, and saw the logs into ten-foot lengths right there on the forest floor. Then the teams would lift and carry the logs back through the woods to the lumbermill in town.
The scent of sap and fresh sawdust mixed with the earth, while sounds of curious wildlife echoed through the trees. These daily excursions to the forest were among Kaela’s favorite memories from her time in Greyhaven.
Mayor Halford and his council had finally approved a wall, and Kaela was anxious to get it started.
Through the spring and summer, she continued working with the men of Greyhaven: training guards, cutting trees, and building the wall.
The village was not the largest she had seen, but it still took quite a bit of time to encircle it.
Meanwhile, the wolves continued coming every night.
The more of the wall they completed, the easier it became to predict which direction the wolves would come from.
And by the time snow began to fall on the land, they raised the second wooden gate, closing off the town and marking the end of the wolf threat.
Or so they thought. Because protecting the villagers was only part of the problem. They had still to make any progress on the root cause of the whole thing.
At the start of all of it, Kaela helped the Guard set up an alarm system throughout the town. It was simple, consisting of a few dozen large bells that could be rung by anyone.
When night fell, they placed small groups of men and guards at each potential entry point. When the wolves appeared, someone would ring the bell and hold the wolves off until help arrived.
It was heartening to see the entire village coming together in its own defense. At first, the beer flowed heavily on a nightly basis. Celebrations were in order, after all, and Kaela had no intention of breaking the sense of camaraderie that was growing on an almost daily basis.
But when more people began taking part in the early morning training Kaela was running, most of them became less and less interested in drinking heavily at night.
Because Kaela did not go easy on them, and when you’re still foggy in the morning, but have to exert yourself under the bright morning sun anyway, well, let’s just say it’s all a lot less painful when you’re not hungover.
At first Aveline was concerned about her lost revenue, but when she saw her morning coffee and tea sales going up, she worried less.
Possibly Kaela’s favorite part about this period in Greyhaven was the pride she saw in the people’s faces. It started with the Guard Captain himself.
After the first day of training, he took her aside and apologized for leaving her alone with the wolves that night. Kaela tried shaking it off, but he wouldn’t have it.
He made her look him in the eyes and listen to his full apology. An apology which she found surprisingly sincere.
She chuckled a bit at the way he stumbled over his own words, clearly not used to apologizing to anyone. But she nevertheless accepted it, and they began working together with a shared purpose.
She still noticed Marris Halford and Edric whispering together from time to time, but hadn’t been able to find out what sort of secret they were keeping.
At any rate, it didn’t seem to be holding her back from making Greyhaven a safer place to live, so she decided not to trouble herself about it.
When the snow began to fall and the village walls kept the wolves from attacking, they would still come at night, howl outside the gate for a while, then retreat.
With the village able to handle things on its own now, Kaela stood on the wall looking at the tracks, paw prints leading back into the woods.
While the trail was fresh, she decided this was the night she would follow those tracks and see where they led.