Avengard: The Fall of Senvia

Chapter 1 - Crossroads

Winter came with the new year, and I celebrated my birth with the turn of the calendar into the year 322, as all Kindred did. Individual birthdays were for people who had surnames, families, and legacies.

My legacy was supposed to be forged from blood.

Lucian, the owner of that inn at the crossroads, hired me, probably thinking I'd either scare away all the bad customers or draw in some of the richer ones. I wasn't exactly a small, timid, nondescript woman. He'd had the perfect candidate for a bouncer delivered right to his door.

He gripped my arm like a man might grip a beam of wood to feel its density. "The muscle on you," he had uttered in a hoarse voice. At that point, my being Kindred was just a bonus.

"There's a war coming," he said, heaving an axe down on a log. "Sure, things are holding together a bit for now, but it's all going to collapse. Merity Point will turn on Durn. Ibolan will try to annex Espara. All the provinces will be at each others' throats."

I blinked. It had only been a week at the time since Senvia had vanished. I couldn't imagine the total collapse of an empire that spanned most of the continent. I took the log from him, set it down, and split the wood in half with my bare hands.

"And a war means thirsty soldiers," he continued, a hint of alarm in his voice. "I'll need help in the tavern, just across the road."

He was an extremely short fellow, and too often got pushed around for it.

It didn't help that the inn made him look poor. It was centuries old, and it looked the part. He could have renovated it, I'm sure, at least sanded and revarnished the wood, but I know he liked the roughshod look of the place.

They weren't bad enough to cause splinters, and they were sturdy, but the stairs creaked like something haunted. Over the main entryway was a burnished diamond pattern that reminded me in a way of the triangle of Pathoticism. The doors looked rough, but held against all sorts of weather and abuse. The hardwood flooring was well-used, enough so that the shoes of countless travellers had smoothened it far past the original grain, and there were odd dips where people walked most often.

It was, in a very real sense, the epitome of the phrase, "they don't make them like they used to."

Still, it was a rest stop. We were the inn at the crossroads that just happened to be near where Senvia once stood. Nobody gave us any merit for the age of the place. There were plenty of old things about, and we had all manner of customers.

Normal folk, as Lucian liked to call the underserved of society, used us as a place to sleep on their travels. There weren't that many of them though. Most of the poor didn't have the luxury of frequent travel unless they had a specific skill that made them more desirable to employers, or unless Senvia decided to relocate them for military reasons.

Merchants were our most frequent customers, and we had stables and a staging area designed for them. One of my duties was to clear it of weeds and saplings.

The nobility were frequent too, and they often looked at me, sometimes recognising me for what I was, but never who. They had the training to see that something was off, though they often reasoned that there was no way a Kindred would be working in a place like this, not with a dozen wars breaking out across the continent.

At the very least, they figured me a lost soldier. They weren't far off.

I recognised so many of them from my time in the royal court, and it gave me a chuckle that they didn't recognise me in turn. Lewyn Moss, not nobility, but a very renowned merchant of spice. Lord Iblis and the Lady Lasset, the twins of Delheim. Numeria of the Kor, the last family of goldsmiths outside of Merity Point.