My Grand Entrance to Fort Locke.
Fort Locke created a mixed first impression with its muddy track, the unmistakable offal stench, and the commendable wooden palisade. The logs already lost their warm hue under the onslaught of the elements. Wood just doesn't age gracefully in the great outdoors. Even the town's one claim to liberal arts – the rough carving of two arms bound with a rope – was starting to crack and what I judged to be red dye was peeling off of it. It did not have a neglected air about it exactly, but the upkeep was for function, not nicety. It was on the gates of a fort after all.
"So, Khelgar," I started conversationally, "do you reckon it was carved with an axe?"
The dwarf squinted at the masterpiece: "Might be. Chisel's more likely."
The guard at the gates gave me a hateful look. Fort Locke expected hordes, all right, but they figured the art connoisseurs would be few and far between. A gamble, if you ask me. Speaking of the games of chance, Neeshka slipped in hooded, quiet, while I ponderously and loudly revealed my doubts about the chisel to more glares and frowns from the good soldier. I had to remember for the future how quick the girl was. The thought put a grin on my face, so I took my first steps through the Fort smiling.
And why would not I? I write this memoir long after the events, a man with more experience behind my belt than I care to admit. Yet, even my young self would have no part of the 'peasant boy in a town for the first time' routine.
Firstly, but for its wall, Fort Locke was no different from the West Harbor. I was raised in a village, but I was not raised a village idiot.
Secondly, I left you in the dark regarding what had happened to me before the dwarf and I met the redhead. Well, read on.
About a tenday before I set out, my village – the West Harbor, yes?- was attacked by the other-worldly creatures. Vicious bastards they were too: bladling, druegar, and a scarred mage who killed Amie. It was not nearly as much fun as it sounds my very first real battle… but I digress (I do it a lot lately. Senility, you understand).
After defeating the intruders, my father, Daeghun, sent me to retrieve an artifact, a silver shard of some kind. The all-important silverware was hidden in a local bog. Not under a grassy hillock, obviously. The Mere, if you like the romantic words for mud and decay, cradled a ruin thousands of years old in its slimy embrace.
Hard to believe, I know, but stick with me. The silver shard, the bog, the ruins, the outsiders - it will all make sense in the long run, and you can console yourself with a thought that it will take you far shorter to piece it together than it did me. Much shorter, I am sure, since I am spoon feeding you the choicest bits. Frankly, I am already telling you more than Daeghun had revealed. Though he did hint that we were attacked because of that very shard. He had to. Otherwise, sending me to the bog would have looked a touch more than pointless.
As a dutiful son, and a curious youth to boot, off I went to the bog, with Bevil in tow. Bevil was another friend of mine, and he didn't die. It took a lot of work on my part to keep it from happening, and every healing incantation I could muster back in the day. But he didn't die. Just Amie.
We hopped from a grass tuff to a grass tuff, holding our noses, and taking a swing at a lizardman once in a while. Killing them. We thought we were becoming pretty good at it. Bevil even chatted a little about enrolling with the Neverwinter forces. Well, he had shoulders for it, and little wit. Me, I could see numerous trade-offs for seeing the world as a soldier. For starters, wars manage to turn the most picturesque places into the small-scale Nine Hells, and the preoccupation with saving one's own skin detracts from sightseeing. And when the wars aren't on, a soldier's life is the many shades of boring. I was just starting to explain it to Bevil when we came upon the ruin.
I will spare you the account of Bevil's and mine meandering through what must once have been a dungeon of a great palace complex, mostly because I can't remember much of it. Echoes through the dump halls, lizardmen's arrows knocking off crumbling mortar next to my head, the enormity, the overwhelming enormity of the place… if you've ever been to a place like that, you could easily imagine it, and if you haven't… stay home, friend, stay put and stay out of troubles.
Yes, a few thousand years back, people in my parts didn't content themselves with log cabins and a couple of paintings in Lathander temple. They knew beauty and grandeur.
You might be surprised that I didn't scale the ruins as a boy, but I have never been that kind of a boy. When my father took me hunting, I saw how difficult it was to kill a quail or a rabbit. I quickly figured out that killing a lizardman would be that much more difficult, even impossible at my age. So, I was not among boys and young men who ran off, to never return and provide a decade or so long deterrent to everyone else. In West Harbor, the goodwives have long memory, and far longer tongues.
This very goodwives still tell the story of Bevil and me coming back, dirty, bloody, with a bright metal sliver tacked behind my belt (not to mention a score of ragged trinkets taken off the dead lizardmen as trophies). They still click their tongues at Daeghun for sending the boys to do men's job. But I was the man (or the boy, if you wish) for the job.
My memories are skewed by what came after, but I think that the very moment the lizardmen chieftain handed over the silver shard, I knew I had a destiny to fulfill. My skin tingled and I thought that the silver looked both like silver and like something else. I told so to Bevil, and he replied that it would be just fine once we get to the Lathander's blessed light and out of the bloody dungeon, and the bloody bog.
It didn't.
For starters it wasn't tarnished, and I doubted that lizardmen were good at polishing silver. I decided to keep this thought to myself. And I wasn't at the very least surprised when my father declared that my journey had just begun. I was to take the shard to Neverwinter, to my never before heard of uncle, Duncan.
Ha, that's quite a long scroll, but now you are with me, fresh from my first kills, a mysterious silver shard hidden away on my person, a dwarf and a redhead at my heals, standing there, unimpressed by the Fort Locke.
Just a stop on the way to the glories and wonders of Neverwinter.