Not for the first time since getting his injury, Tibs was annoyed at the restricted motion. The bracer he was oiling sat on his p and kept sliding as he used the cloth on it.
“I can help with that,” the young man to his left eagerly said.
Too eagerly for everyone around the campfire.
“I can manage,” he replied, repositioning the bracer before taking up the oiled cloth again.
He’d sat apart from the others, as he usually did, and had pnned on using essence to help with this, but the young man, Jeremy, one of the guards who had joined at the city, had sat next to him. Then one more, and another, and a firepit was dug, a fire lit and now it felt like every guard was sitting with him, instead of their respective fire.
“My first caravan,” Jeremy had said, the first time Tibs had come across him. “I’m going to show the Chief I’m really good at the job.” He’d smiled with the eagerness of a kid believing in the promise he’d made so hard, he hoped others had no choice but to believe him.
“Too damned eager,” Graiden had muttered ter that first day, as they’d unpacked the tents and Jeremy was running around helping everyone, but not actually accomplishing much. “Don’t know why I even took him on.”
Tibs didn’t comment on how, under the gruff exterior, the chief of the guards was a good man. Tibs had gotten his start with a caravan much the same way. She’d been older than Graiden, scarred from all the fighting she’d had to do, and hadn’t been impressed with Tibs’s young age, or his cim of being able to pull his weight no matter what needed to be done. But she’d taken him on. Everyone deserved a chance to prove her wrong, was how she’d phrased it.
Tibs hadn’t worked out if he’d proved her right or wrong. He’d gotten underfoot more often than not, believing he was helping. Especially when he took on tasks he had no idea how to do.
Horses had been…a discovery.
Before that time, they’d been things he saw, not interacted with. They pulled wagons, nobles and adventurers rode them. He…was nearly trampled by the first one he touched.
It earned him a scolding and orders to keep away from them. But he hadn’t listened, just like Jeremy rarely did when told to leave it be. He’d been there the next time one needed to be harnessed, or saddled, and got in people’s way. Half the guards were annoyed at him, the others amused. It depended on how they felt their first days had gone, Tibs suspected.
If he wasn’t injured, Tibs would have more patience for Jeremy’s eagerness. He would be down right amused by it.
“You know,” Loren smirked, “I don’t think that even dunking that thing in a barrel of oil is going to help. I’ve got a set you’re welcome to.”
“Be nice,” Jeremy warned, earning himself chuckles and one gre.
Tibs ignored Loren, or his would-be rescuer. The recruit would learn the danger of being on the man’s bad side.
He carefully rubbed the oil into the leather, wishing he’d understood what the failing enchantments meant. Books talked of failing weaves on the scale of centuries, not one decade. Of course, when he’d questioned schors about those kinds of enchantments, he’d learned that those books had been talking about big magic. The weaves that made a sorcerer’s tower survive wars and time. The smaller enchantments, those put on weapons and armors? They never sted that long. Armor was expected to be damaged in battle. Weapons would eventually grow dull, so why spend so much effort on them?
His bracers were dungeon made, and Tibs had thought it mean their magic would be stronger. Bards sang about items brought out of dungeons sting beyond kingdoms. But Sto was younger than Tibs. And he’d come to learn that dungeons also started not being able to do their best work.
Tibs’s next questions had been about the reserves on those items. What happened to them? What happened when the weaves of an essence amulet failed?
They didn’t, the schors told him. At least not unless someone purposely caused them to fail, and that happened explosively. Crystals were used because the way the essence formed in them, along with their ‘closeness’ to the element, lent them a resistance to degradation.
He’d considered searching for a sorcerer to remake the enchantment, or fix its weave, but he had no idea how to find one who’d be able to see through the attunement that made it only Tibs could sense its weave or the reserve it hid. And how would he know if he could trust them not to steal the bracers because they were dungeon made?
Anyone clever enough could deceive even someone who had Light as their elements. Tibs had done it to the old guard leader in Kragle Rock. And sorcerers were very clever.
They were cracked by the time he understood time was damaging them, and he endeavored to maintain them, using the same methods as everyone else did.
“But he is right,” Jeremy said, hesitating. “They are old. Why do you spend so much time on them?”
“My mother gave them to me.” He turned it and oiled the underside, along with the leather ces.
“Wouldn’t she understand?” he asked. “We’re guards. Our things get damaged when we defend the caravan.”
“And if she’s the kind of woman who won’t hear of things like that,” Loren added, “Just have the leathersmith score the new ones to look like these. It’s not like she’ll know the difference.”
Tibs paused the oiling to gre at the man. He banked the embers of anger. He wasn’t the one deserving of having it unleashed, but he used it to ensure he never forgot the men who had wronged Mama; robbed her from him.
“Leave him be,” Jeremy said in a heated tone. “I think it’s nice that he cares enough about his mother to work hard like this. I wish…”
Tibs gnced at the young man, but he was looking away. Maybe they shared more than an eagerness to please on their first caravan.
Loren left the fire to good natured jabs from the veterans, and Tibs finished with the oiling. He carefully dried the inside, slipped his forearm in, and winced as he moved his restrained arm. With Jeremy on his left, to ask anyone else would basically say he sided with Loren about how the young man should be treated.
He stifled the sigh and offered his arm. “Can you ce it for me?”
If it had been essence, that smile would have powered an etching rge enough to break through a city wall. Once it was tight, and the sleeve was pulled over it, Tibs finally stopped feeling the gaze of the recruits. It was the first time they’d seen the bck of the ‘ink’ that covered his light brown skin, and Tibs did his best not to show it.
The etching that hid the brand was as small as he could make it, had refined it from the earlier version. But it still reached up to his elbow and always became a curiosity.
“How did they do that and not show the needle work?” a lean girl asked.
Tibs shrugged.
“Do you have a matching one on your other arm?”
Tibs took his other bracer from the pouch and set it on his p.
“How did you get it? It looks good enough, it has to have been expensive. You don’t look rich,” she added, accusation in her voice.
“Like one of them would ever lowered themselves to the work we do,” a veteran replied, and other ughed.
Tibs sighed and let the oiled cloth rest on the bracer.
He might have the stories, but having to tell one of them each time he was asked got tiresome. And he’d already told this one, not long after he’d joined this caravan. He also needed to remember, so he’d convey the right feelings. And while he needed to remember, he didn’t enjoy it.
“My—” He swallowed. Forced himself to remember her cooling body, as he sought comfort against her; not yet understanding what that meant. What those men had done to Mama. “My mother died when I was young.” He uncovered the bracer. “Those are all I have left of her.” He closed his hand on it, wishing it was her hand. “We didn’t live in the best part of the city.”
“What city?” Jeremy asked, and Tibs couldn’t keep the images of the broken walls of the hole they’d lived in from surfacing. Of the decrepit buildings surrounding that one.
“Artakon,” he said, pushing those images down. “I fell in with people and they helped me stay alive.” He looked at the girl who’d asked. “You wouldn’t think they’re good people, but they were all I had. The city doesn’t send help to the streets we lived on. It wasn’t worth it, since we had nothing left for it to take.”
Tentatively, he pulled the sleeve up so the portion of the ink above the bracer became visible. “They put this on me a few years ter. Once I’d proven myself to them. They had this strange woman who did their ink. Her eyes….” He swallowed. “It hurt, but I didn’t show it. I wasn’t going to show weakness after the things I’d endured. With them, admitting to pain was failing this test.”
He hurried to cover it. “I had to kill a man after this. Not because he’d stolen from me, or might hurt me, but because they told me to kill him. I’d known they weren’t good people. My street kills good ones. But I hadn’t understood how bad they were until that moment.”
“Did you?” she asked, a mix of apprehension and awe in her voice.
“I had to.” He winced as he tried to rub his left wrist. “It would have been a betrayal not to. And I’d seen what happened to those who betrayed them.” He let out a shuddering breath. “But that’s when I made my pns to escape them.”
He picked up the cloth, but didn’t use it. Usually, this was enough, but sometimes—
“What about her eyes?” she whispered.
He didn’t respond immediately. When he did, he kept looking at the cloth, and spoke even softer. “They were broken.”
“How?” she whispered, leaning forward.
“The way a shop window’s broken when you tap it hard enough cracks spread, but the pieces don’t fall. Her eyes were filled with those cracks.” He shuddered. It had taken time to come up with a way to describe someone with Crystal as their element one of common folks might use. That would convey how unsettling it had felt the first time he’d looked into the guild leader’s eyes.
He didn’t move. This never ended the questions.
“I don’t get it,” another of the recruits said. “Eyes don’t break.”
Tibs was surprised at how little some people knew about adventurers at time; about what the elements did to them. The bards sang about them, but everyone thought of them as nothing more than stories. Magic was real, but even in a dungeon city, like Tarven, how many actually interacted with it? People could live there and not understand what being a Runner meant, what becoming an adventurer implied.
“She was one of them,” the girl whispered, clutching something. “She was taken by the elements.”
And even those who knew something rarely knew enough to understand. Maybe she’d caught a glimpse of an adventurer, noticed the odd color of their eyes, asked around and been told the stories bard sang. Hardly anyone went to those adventurers for answers. So, people didn’t have audiences, they were taken. Anyone who acted strangely could be called touched.
“That’s not how it works,” a veteran said. “They have to go look for the element. That’s why they go in the dungeons. Somewhere in there they find it, and then they can do magic.”
And even those who knew close to the truth rarely got it right.
Without living through it, Tibs wasn’t sure they could understand what it meant.
But more importantly, he thought, as the guard was shushed, and the girls asked questions about what she knew. The truth was rarely as exciting as all the stories build around them. Even the truth of magic, the elements, dungeons, Runners and Adventurers.
People preferred the bards songs over what schors had to teach.
So the discussion around the fire turned into what each had heard, knew to be true, cimed to have experienced.
Tibs stayed out of it, focusing on oiling his bracer and ignoring Jeremy’s awed looks in his direction.
AnnouncementBottom Rung is avaible on KU: https://amzn.to/3ShmXzW
You can read the previous arc in Tibs story here
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Thank you for reading this chapter.
If you want to watch me writing this story, I do so on Twitch: https://v/thetigerwrites Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 8 AM to 11:30 EST
If you want to read ahead, you can do so by finding Stepping Wild, on Ream Stories where the story is multiple chapters ahead even at the lowest tier, and the support helps ensure I can work with a minimum of real-life interruption.
