Keepers of the Realm

Daryn

The sun was beating down on the open desert, a great city with stone towers so high they touched the sky could faintly be seen ahead. Horses pulling carts of prisoners advanced down a stone road, ancient and half-covered with sand. Daryns lips were cracked and bloody, his pale skin blistered and red. He struggled to open his eyes, being half blinded by the relentless gaze of the sun above him.

"Daryn!" a voice beside him whispered. "Daryn!" the voice repeated.

"Juree?" Daryn struggled to get the words out of his mouth.

"What happened? Where you think we're headed?" Juree was fidgeting visibly as he spoke, likely still traumatised from the night before.

Daryn squinted and looked down at his hands bound by iron chains and back up at the city ahead.

"Desert in every direction, city up ahead with towers as high as I've ever seen," Daryn pondered for a moment, then continued "Only one place I know with buildings like that. This is the slave road, we're heading to Old Gescae".

Juree panicked. "They mean to sell us into slavery?".

"Aye, slave pits most likely". There was despair in Daryn's voice, however much he tried to hide it.

A Lorey sellsword opposite Daryn and Juree was rocking back and forth, muttering under his breath. 

"Thems are demons, the Gescaii. My mother always said. Not a drop of humanity in thems. Using black magic. Freaks I tell ya".

Daryn quickly chimed in. "No such thing as black magic" he said with confidence.

Juree jumped into the conversation "My old Nan, bless her soul, once told me of a pirate fleet that raided her village when she was a child, said she saw a man lift both his hands in the air, and the next moment, every fighting age man in town went mad. Took them weeks to get their senses back. And my old Nan was no liar".

Daryn frowned, "that's enough talk of black magic" he snapped.

"SILENCE!" screamed a slaver on a horse behind their wagon, cracking his whip across Jurees hands.

"If I was unchained with a sword in my hand" Daryn thought to himself, clenching his jaw.

He was an honourable man, a rare thing in the world these days, and the sight of an unarmed, bound man being struck by a whip caused him great pain.

The slave carts approached the southern gate of the Old Gescae. Weeping mothers lined the outskirts holding their babies in their arms, hoping passing merchants and slavers might spare a coin or two, or perhaps even just a crust of bread. Daryn locked eyes with one of the beggars, and thought back to his mentor, Ser Barrin once again

"War isn't a game, boy. It's not all battles and glory, what do you think happens when crops are torched and larders emptied? People starve, children starve"

Daryn looked back fondly at his time with Ser Barrin, however grim the conversation was. "Sometimes I wonder if the old man remembered he was talking to a boy of six" he thought.

"State your business!" Shouted a voice on the ramparts atop the decaying sandstone wall.

Old Gescae was once home to the Great Lake Elae, it's only source of water for its massive populace, but that had long since dried up, and now Old Gescae relied fully upon regular trade wagons, wagons that arrive markedly less frequently since the war began.

"Prisoners for the slave market" a Gescaii commander shouted from below.

The soldier atop the wall signalled the guards to let them pass.