NEVER SPLIT THE PARTY: The Adventures of the Creeping Bam (BOOK 4: The Hunt)

CHAPTER ELEVEN: DRAMRATH

When I was fourteen years old, and had been training with blades for less than a year, my father caught me one night playing with some of his own prized weapons. I'd snuck down to his office in the small hours before the rest of the house was awake because my curiosity had long since driven me mad, the standing rule about none of us being allowed in there not scaring me off for a moment. There were various mementos displayed throughout our expansive mansion that we were only allowed to touch while supervised, but he'd long since ruled that I was not allowed to do so until my sword-master had told him I was ready. After more than six months of consistently beating three out of my four larger and supposedly more talented brothers in the circle, I was getting immensely frustrated that, as far as either of them were concerned, I still had work to do before I'd proven myself. So if I was going to break the rules, I might as well go all the way.

So I picked the lock, which I'd learned to do entirely on my own just out of my own curiosity a few months before, and snuck in there quiet as I could around three in the morning, when I was reasonably confident I wouldn't see anyone else for a few hours yet. I remember spending a fair bit of time to begin with just snooping round the room once I'd lit a solitary candle in the corner, since I'd never actually been in here before and it was quite the novelty. I couldn't make head nor tail of anything on the desk, the various scattered papers made no sense to someone who had so little real experience of the outside world as I did back then. But then the siren song of the various swords, knives and other blades hanging in his glass-fronted cabinet became too strong, and I tried a little more lock picking. This one was a bit more of a challenge, but ultimately only took me a minute or so longer than the last. And then I was in.

Most of what he had hanging in the rest of the house were just prizes of his various adventures in his youth, when he was a great knight in the service of Rundao, before he took his wounds and couldn't fight anymore. It made him damn bitter much of the time, I know, he'd never talk about his adventures unless he was deep in his cups, and by the end of a heavy bout it would usually make him seethe enough to turn violent, so I'd usually duck out before it got too far. I was never that sure how much of it I really believed anyway.

The weapons he had in his office, though, were his own, either carried by him in battle or passed down from his own illustrious ancestors, or at least those that weren't taken to the grave with them. It was all pretty fancy stuff, but it was his bastard sword that he prized highest, his pride and joy, the sword he was determined to take to have buried with him. Elven steel, but crafted to a more regimented martial design than normal blades of their type, which in a way made it all the more unique and exotic. It caught my eye quicker than any other that day, and I think I fell in love with it the moment I saw it.

Needless to say this was what I was wielding when he walked in on me, roused early for an emergency business meeting and come to collect some important file. And I was swinging it around with what he immediately took to be immense disrespect, even though I'm sure my form was as smooth and precise at it ever was in the circle.

He beat me bad enough I couldn't leave my room for a week, I had to piss in my bedpan every time and wait for the chambermaid to remove it for me. I never got to touch any of the weapons on display in the house after that, even the ones out in the pen. Long after I'd proven I actually was the very best of his brood he still stuck to that punishment with increasingly petty bitterness, which is why when I left I took the sword with me instead of plumbing for one of the captured prizes like I'd always thought in the past.

I didn't even bother picking the lock to get into the office that time. I just booted the door clean out of its frame and then broke the cabinet wide open. So he'd know how much of a point I was making about it.