January of the year 459 H.E.
Northwatch Tower
Army Incident Report
They call what happened an "incident." I guess that's all twenty dead men—good men—are to these people. They didn't train with them, fight beside them, dig out latrines with them, or huddle around a fire with them while we were exposed, without a fort, during the dead of a northern winter. So to them, twenty dead men are just twenty fewer soldiers, and a convenient excuse to blame someone other than themselves for what happened.
They tell me I have to write down everything that happened that day…from the beginning. Well, when exactly is the beginning? When we woke up that morning? Or when my squad joined the First? Maybe even when we were first sent north to protect the border from the growing Scanran threat?
I don't know where to begin. The loss of those twenty men does not start with the morning of their deaths and end with the setting of that day's sun. Those men were brave, and good, and trying to justify their deaths with this report—calling their deaths an "incident" like they died from some accident or misstep of their own doing—it's wrong. Do you know the saying I learned from my years in the King's Own? "In the Own, never alone." So why did I find myself alone in a forest in northern Tortall that day? I should never have survived that attack.
But, if this is what it takes for me to get out of here and back to the Own, I guess I'll start at the very beginning.