Runesworn Brand
Only one wall of the burnt cottage remains, saved by the sudden downpour. The heat is long gone from the blaze started by the Spark in your band when his errant casting penetrated the thick clay daub of the walls that the enemy soldiers were using for cover. Against the lone remaining wall stands an open cabinet, sprinkled with ash from the thatch roof, with worn linens spilling from the lower door. As your fellows search the bodies of the fallen enemies and poke about for valuables the farmer may have hidden in some cubby in the floor, you find within the flimsy cabinet a collection of the former owners prized posesions, and offer thanks to Storm Eye for sparing you some plunder. Along with the usual trinkets common folk in this region display like ivory figurines traded from barbarians across the Bornaes Divide, or silver plated candlesticks, you see an old styled spearhead with silver inlay proclaiming fidelity to Azpauh the Unbound in the language of your contrymen. Either this cottage was home to a blessed soldier retired in enemy lands, or this Runesworn Brand was taken as spoils from your country by an enemy and displayed as his trophy.
Prized by troops across the region, a Runesworn Brand is most often found in the hands of an officer who failed the training to become a Spark but held his faith. You've heard many tales around the fire in camp during the lord's campaigns, and in ale houses frequented by old soldiers back home, of a spearman weilding a Brand breaking through enemy lines singlehandedly to save his fellows from crushing defeat or escaping capture. A line of spearmen will rally around a brother holding a Brand when it begins to crackle with lightning, and even a lance of heavy knights would scatter in the face of a foe who holds the beacon of Storm Eye.
When the band's commander call's your name, for the second time you realize, you turn holding the Brand and everyone becomes still for a moment as they look at it and you with more than a little jealously. Military pillage custom dictates an officer may take a large share of the plunder collected, and likewise pass the bounty up the chain of command, but everything your brothers in the company under Sir Girard have found in the first month of this campaign would not equal the spear head in your hands. The commander calls out "Find the best stave you can" to the band's seargent as he steps up in front of you, glances in the cabinet and sweeps its content into a satchel. "The new Tip of the wedge is going to need it" he finishes, turning away, as you realise you were just promoted for not being struck dead by lightning when you picked up the Runesworn Brand, and likely for the same reason he won't try to take it from you by force.
As the days of the summer campaign continue, the attitude of your brother spearmen becomes very wary. You overhear questions of "why would Storm Eye need to put a Brand in our company if it wasn't about to fall under an attack by a larger enemy force" or "is there an enclave of our people nearby that the Collar Breaker wanted you to lead a charge to liberate?" Aside from the potential wealth it represented, your commander and his captain seemed wary at times, as you had come to know in your youth working for the abbey, listening to tales the monks passed time with, that a Runesworn Brand is an especially formidible weapon in the hands of a rebel.
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