Icarus's blog: "Augurs, Martyrs, and Agnostics"

Several people nodded and raised their hands.

"Good, so you know what they look like, red eyed, covered in spines and slick barbs?"

The smaller children gasped, the ones old enough to reach cabinets and counters nodded bravely.

"What if I told you, there was a band of men that carried the same way? Head to toe in sharp metal, breathing plumes of hot smoke and clanking toward you with pure hate in their eyes?"

Some of the crowd recoiled as Byron leaned in gnashing his teeth a bit as he spoke.

"It was a decade ago, I was a bit lighter on my feet, a bit better paid, and a damn site stronger- but while I was on contract in Toreahl I met these men in battle. They had no great hoarde or army, no stampede of footsoldiers. Only five men to their formation."

Byron paused and stroked his face, thinking back to the day in question.

Had it been one decade or two?

Were there five or seven?

Was it Toreahl or Rozjeck?

What he remembered clearly was the smoke on the field. The cool damp opressive dawn air. Thick with humidity, screams and clangs.

Was it this sword or the last?

The first?

"I was on the frontline that day, we hadn't slept in a keep, or in camp for weeks. All my contract had provided was a wet muddy trench and the occasional bone to put in my soup. It was horrible. Wet was everywhere. In my boots. In my blankets, in my socks, in my head.

Everywhere.

I was suffering through the worst headcold of my life as a result. Sneezed so loud you could hear me over cannon and report.

Didn't make me too terribly popular with the others. They were worried I was catching, or that I'd give away our position

as illustrious and cozey as it was in that hole."

The crowd chuckled uncomfortably.

"I think my fever was getting to me, or maybe all the rain, and mud had seeped into my brain, because one morning it occured to me, that my boots and socks wouldn't get wet

if I just took them off

and threw them over the trench."

Byron took off his boot and flipped it to the crowd, a frontrow groundling caught it to cheers and applause

"that wasn't the sound my boot made when it landed. It made more of a..."

the crowd chirped in

"a bang?"

"a clunk?"

"a thud?"

One child decided to make sounds like a howling dog.

"More of a big, dull chink- like it had landed on a pile of rusty swords"

There were murmors and gasps.

"was it the razormen?"

"Aye." Byron said taking off his other boot. He placed the heel next to his forehead "and it landed and stuck to him just like this."

When the jabber and giggling subsided he continued.

"He was none too pleased about it, but by the looks of him, he had never been none too pleased about anything- he was big, bigger than you, and you, and you, and me, and especially you. And he had spikes and jagged metal coming off him in every direction- I thought it was some kind of beast, a smoke breathing monster from another land, another world maybe- one where everything is terrible and untouchable, poisoned and sharp!" He caught a glimpse of the shivering front row and leaned almost off the edge of his chair to menace them "like a world with no mothers to hold you, for fear of cutting you up or choking you with rotten incense coming out of their necks!"

There were a couple screams at this- which Byron guffawed wickedly to.

"I knew my mother, and I knew what it was like to be held, and sung to, so I decided that moment that I'd fight against any creature from such a terrible place- in the name of all that was good, and all that was cozey!"

He guffawed from his belly, croaking like a great, puffed up toad. The younger crowd was turning. Thoughts of immenent spikey death and a life without mothers had been dispelled by laughter.

"Maybe it was the wet, maybe it was the fear, maybe it was the tired and starving, I'd like to think it was the fact that I had only one shoe in the middle of a battlefield- but I charged that dread terror of a man, stinking, burning smoke choking me and burning my eyes the closer I got, and I layed into him with all of my might, knocking him back with each strike from my furious blade!"

"what happened what happened!?"

"... I got my boot back."