A Thousand Miles From Here to Tomorrow

Kieran oh so slowly places the ball of his right booted foot on the stone floor, shifts his weight and lifts his left leg practically to his chest and oh so slowly lowers his left foot too. glancing at the beasts layer, puffs of white breath float from within, the tower of dishes in his arms rattles slightly and he goes still as a tiger for a moment. He has to tip toe like a fool in order to avoid two rows of teeth sinking into his leg and dragging him into that stinking, bone riddled wooded shack.
The door to the kitchen lies about 200 feet ahead to the right, he’ll reach it eventually one agonizing step at a time while his fellow guardsmen snicker in the background at him serving his sentence.
Take it a few at a time they said.
He’d be here all night.
All this because he has an enterprising mindset, because he wanted to help the people of Mythrite. No good deed goes unpunished and all that.
“Subterfuge, Rebellion!” Kieran throws himself to the ground as something else comes flying at his head. A stool. It shatters on the wall behind him. He looks at the splintered wood in shock. He’s beginning to think Kordra actually wants to hurt him.
“You’d be hanged for this in a Dwarf army, nay, drawn and quartered,” she says. A thousand green veins in her pale face turn terribly dark as they swell with blood. She’s a tunnel dweller, she can’t stand in the summer sun, or the spring or the fall one for that matter.
“I had to wrestle merchandise the other day from two thieving scoundrels just after noon in front of two hundred people!”
“Exactly!” he throws his arms in the air.
She points a meaty finger at him. “One of your friends was murdered this week and you’re sewing the seeds of destruction in your own troupe.”
“He wasn’t my friend,” he mutters.
The last he saw Leatherspine was in the wilderness between the mines and walls of Mythrite, smiling and digging in the mouth of a dead orc trying to hack off its bone tusk with a sword. He heard Leatherspine ended up taking the whole head and a few fingers. He was insufferable and nobody was his friend but he was a caravan guardsmen and someone did bludgeon him to death in the halberd.
In the beginning there was an excited hopefulness that loosened tongues and introduced people to each other. He tore himself from everything he knew to be a part of it. People doing vicious things isn’t so uncommon these days.
He’s a hero in the S&T, a few weeks ago he tackled a gigantic brute making trouble and all the shop owners came out and applauded him. Just because the bloated town guard won’t let him in their ranks doesn’t mean he can’t serve the people privately. His abilities have already been proven but he’s just one man, with the state of things now one guard isn’t enough to deter a band of hooligans so his services must not seem very appealing which is why no shop owners accepted his offers. So he asked his fellow guardsmen if they’d be interested in making some extra money.
No big deal.
“There’s word of a caravan guard trying to extort businesses,” she tells him.
Kieran puts a hand on his chest, shocked.
“Oh my God that’s terrible!”
“It’s you, idiot,” she says, “the wine merchant thinks you were giving him a shake down and he’s told everybody.”
He wants to think there’s some mistake but he knows the truth of these things, that he can have hands patting his back one day and be called a criminal the next.
The caravan guard wasn’t his first choice but after just one day he thought This is my life now and was perfectly content. He and his bunk mate Sarah who could only bear to speak in sarcasms and dry witticisms, and their friend cheery whose name was Roland but they quickly got to calling him Cheery would make up songs make up songs about each other, pool their coins together for a bean pie and huddle around it and take the daintiest bites. They’d sprinkle firesalt on the cot of whoever tried to ruin their fun and smother their laughs in their pillows when the screams started. He never found it so easy to hop out of bed before dawn and he went to sleep ready for tomorrow.
Coming back from the caves with tired cranky miners, he remembers one tried to bite Cheery, they heard screeches first then someone yelled “goblins” and to the north a small horde of them started spilling from the tree line, it felt like a million at the time. No less then two were on him at a time, holding a sword in one hand and a mallet in the other he swung blindly until someone grabbed his arm and told him to run.
Sarah didn’t make it back to camp. He and Cheery waited but none of the stragglers were her. The next day they went to look for her body because no one could survive a night outside of the walls but she wasn’t there either. Cheery left two days after that and since then Kieran goes to bed troubled and wakes up slowly. All that happened within a fortnight. Everything about Mythrite was volatile.
Now he’s hauling fifty dishes past the guard dog who doesn’t know friend from foe to the kitchen to wash them all by himself. They’re swaying from side to side, he sways too trying to keep under them but one of the clay dinner plates just wouldn’t listen and slides off the top. He see’s it happen in slow motion, even if he stuck his foot out it would save the plate shattering but the noise would still wake the beast.
If he starts running now he might make it.