Steel and Shadow: An Epic Fantasy

             
“What are you?”  The muscular blonde Adonis in leathern armor hissed as he held a bloody sword up between him and the kneeling boy that didn’t look quite ten and six. 

             
Behind the warrior stood over forty men of his own ilk, blooded, and ready to fight.  Unfortunately, before them, and quite dead, were over a hundred more bodies of such men.  All who had attacked the small community now smoldering in dying flame and thick smoke.   The villagers dead to the last man, woman, and child.

             
Except for this pale, thin creature that looked up at him with sad, dark eyes.

             
“Sgt. Markes,” a younger warrior hissed from behind one of the few older warriors to have survived.  “I vow, he must be a shadow!”

             
“Superstitious tripe,” the big warrior growled, and raised his sword.  “If you’ll not lend your tongue, boy,” he swore.  “Then I’ll carve out your…..heart,” he faltered, feeling the cold, hard steel he had just buried in the boy’s thin chest pierce his own chest.

             
“H-How,” he choked before falling dead despite the fact there was not a mark on him.  Or his intended victim as his blade fell free of that thin chest.  Again, without leaving a mark.

             
“Nay,” the young warrior who had spoke earlier when several crossed themselves in the Maker’s name, and started to lift their own weapons.  “You cannot slay a shadow with mortal steel,” he warned them as he moved forward to stand between his surviving comrades, and the still silent boy that knelt virtually naked before him.

             
The attacks on him had left no mark on his pale flesh, but they all but shredded his clothes.  What little he wore.

             
Jengus Sanz was a man raised on the frontier of faraway lands, far from the civilizing teachings of priests and scholars.  He still knew, and followed the old ways.  He knew a spirit walker when he saw one.  Even if the lad were not aware of it himself from the look of him.  Just as he knew the villagers must have feared and abused him, too, from the look of his scrawny body.

             
For they might not have been able to touch him, but that did not mean they had to care for him, either.

             
“Lad,” Jengus pointedly buried his own blade in the bloody mud before him before reaching out his empty hand to him.  “What’s your name?”

             
The hollow eyes looked up at him, and the young boy sighed as he eyed him in what seemed resignation.  “I don’t know,” he said in a voice so soft, so low, it almost went unheard. 

             
“Have you forgotten,” Jengus asked as he knelt before the shadow when the boy did not reach for his offered hand. 

             
“I….was never named,” he said in the same quiet manner.

             
“Were your parents here,” he asked, looking around the ravaged village near the border of the kingdom he and his fellow mercenaries were supporting in these raids into enemy lands.  By ravaging their fields, and destroying supply lines, they made sure the cities and garrisons would soon be weakened, and fall easy prey to the coming sieges when the king that hired them moved his legions into place.

             
“I don’t know.”

             
“You did not live with them?”

             
His head dropped a little more, and he gave a tiny shake without saying more.

             
“Come with us, lad,” he told him impulsively.  “You cannot stay here.  ’Tis not a fit place for anyone.  Not even you, young spirit.”

             
The dark eyes rose to search his face again.  “How is it, you do not fear me?”

             
“I know of your kindred.  In the high mountains of the north that my own folk call home, we know the ways of the winds, and we still heed the cry of manbeasts.  We listen to the spirit-talkers, and ever regard their wisdom concerning those who walk betwixt worlds.  As you, young spirit,” Jengus concluded, his companions listening to every word without commenting.

             
“I do not know myself,” he admitted.

             
“I can tell you what I know of your kind.  And I can offer you food, and sanctuary.  Just as I can promise that none of these men here will try to harm you.  Aye, lads,” he turned to demand of the men left with him.

             
They all eyed their fallen comrades, and while they were devout, and honest men for the most part, warriors had their own codes and superstitions.

             
They quickly echoed his vow without hesitation.

             
“Come,” Jengus told him, rising to hold out a hand again as he stood before him.  “At the least, we can feed you ere we march again.”

             
“Warrior,” the lad asked as he reached out to take the muscular man’s gnarled, calloused hand.  “Why do you fight?”

             
“Ah, well, lad, the reasons for that vary.  Still, at the heart of the matter, we are paid this time around.  Paid by men that do not wish the initial dangers of invasion themselves.  Being men paid to fight for others, we therefore fight.”

             
“Why?”

             
Jengus easily tugged the slight young man to his feet as he stared at him with bright, blue eyes common to his race, and to few others, and said somberly, “Because, lad.  Long ago, my folk learned ’tis all too easy to die in the mud if you can not, or will not stand on your own feet.  Better to die fighting, my ancestors decided, than to live and die in chains.”

             
The dark head nodded thoughtfully at that.

             
“So,” Jengus smiled.  “Will you come with us?”

             
“Aye.  I would ask a boon of you, though, warrior.  If I might,” the lad said as he stared up at him with those seemingly empty eyes.

             
“What could I offer you other than knowledge,” he asked honestly.

             
“Skill,” the lad said with sudden determination.  “Teach me to fight.  I shall serve you as long as you will it if you teach me to fight,” he said with surprising conviction.

             
“After seeing this day’s work, you wish to learn war’s art,” he asked him plainly as his comrades murmured behind him as Jengus gestured blatantly at the carnage about them.

             
“After living in mud and alleys all my known years, I wish to learn how to stand,” the lad told him grimly. 

             
Jengus nodded soberly.  “Now, lad, you sound like a man.  Come.  We shall scavenge what might be found that the flames have not yet claimed, and then leave this pesthole to the carrion eaters,” he told his men, taking command by virtue of his boldness.

             
Such was the way of their kind. 

             
No one complained that much of the plunder came from their own fallen comrades.  That, too, was the way of their kind.

             
“Back to the borderlands, dogs,” Jengus shouted after loading the horses with their plunder, and leaving the dead for others to tend.  Be they survivors that might have fled, or scavengers of another kind.  “We’ll let them stew in their fear ere we return for Trylls,” he said, naming the small trading post not much farther away from the farming village they had just leveled, along with the crops that were fated for the enemy king’s legions.

             
The pale, hollow-eyed lad was set on a warrior’s horse with a borrowed cloak from a fallen man now covering his thin, pale body.  He followed without a word as he watched the men around him in silence.  Simply watching. 

X

             
“You called me a shadow,” the lad said as they sat around a fire later that evening.

             
He had not been commanded, but he had helped gather wood, water the stock, and even tend the fire that now roasted the venison from a slain doe when the men set camp late that evening.  Now he sat with the thirty-and-nine warriors, staying close to Jengus, as if unable to take his eyes from him.

             
Jengus heard some of the men complaining he had cursed himself with a second ‘shadow,’ but none of them touched the boy.  They had all seen Markes’ blade stab deep into his heart.  They all saw the bold sergeant fall dead without a mark on him as his blade slid bloodlessly from the boy’s flesh.  This, they had to concede, was a creature beyond their experience. 

             
“I shall tell you a tale of the northern mountains,” Jengus said, as the men around him listened just as closely. 

             
Priests might command nobles and freemen in the cities and towns of men, but warriors knew you listened to experience just as closely when traveling the wild barrens beyond the touch of civilization.  They had long since learned there were indeed things in the world that even priests and scholars could not explain.  Things they often refused to even admit were real.  Likely because they feared them, too.

             
“When I was but ten and two, I saw another like you in my village high in the peaks of Xandara,” he said, naming a land far to the north of the flatlands where they now rode.  “He came out of the night, and walked among my people, and he was revered by those that understood.  For my people are, as I said, close to the land, and listen to the winds.  That wisdom taught them of manbeasts.  Of spirits, and….shadows.”

             
“Tell me of those,” the lad asked quietly.

             
“Shadows are spirit-walkers.  That is, they are more spirit than flesh.  Usually, they are born after one of two means.  First, they might be summoned into being by someone that desired their service.  Someone, such as a powerful mage, might wed spirit and flesh as one to create a shadow to serve him.”

             
Jengus eyed the boy, and shook his head.  “As you recall naught of family, or service, I rather doubt that happened with you unless someone slew them ere you could rise to protect them.”

             
“And the other means?”

             
“Ah.  At times, some say, a spirit newly dead refuses to go on to the Great Maker’s hall, and wanders the lands seeking new life for itself.  It can sometimes take flesh anew if it finds a sickly, or newly dead form not bound to another soul.”

             
“My…..first memory is about my fifth year, when I woke in a dirty alley, and looked up at the stars visible in the night sky,” the lad told him in the same quiet tone. 

             
Jengus only nodded.

             
“Then ’tis more than possible you are such a spirit.”