The House of Oldenrock

Initiation Part II

Margot had to get up and jog a few laps around the camp sight in order to keep herself awake as the wee hours of the morning ticked by at an unbearably slow rate.  Finally, there was a faint glow on the horizon that grew enough to encompass the sky and end the blackness of the moonless night, and Margot was finally able to wake everyone up to start the day.

            Breakfast was quick, for the Captains refused to allow the time to hunt and go through the messy process of making game edible.  Instead they ate flatbread (what a surprise), and a few dried nuts and berries that still had managed to not be eaten, even though the vast majority of people on the trip were active teenage boys, and they soon were off on the run again.

            The trail continued to get rockier and rockier, and it seemed that the amount of inconvenient rocks was in a direct correlation to the steepness of the trail.  The horses began to have more trouble on the mountain trail, and the recruits realized that, for once, they could go faster than the horses.  They did not though, because they did not know where they were going and they wanted to take advantage of the small rest that they were allotted.  Margot doubted that they would have the same opportunity in any other mountain runs that they went on.

            The morning wore on, and Margot began to wonder just what exactly Captain Meghan had meant when she said that they would get to Tower Outpost during the morning, but her fears of a never ending run were abated when Captain Meghan said, “We’ll reach Tower Outpost in less than five minutes, and when we get there, we expect absolute silence.  There will be no talking between recruits.  There will be no unnecessary noises.  There will be silence.  Is that understood?  What will there be?”

            “Silence,” the recruits all said in unison

            “Good, now show me silence.”  There was no talking for the rest of the run to Tower Outpost, not that any of the recruits had enough air to talk in the first place. 

            Captain Meghan’s time prediction proved to be correct, because in less than five minutes the trees opened up to reveal, not an outpost, but a fort, and Margot had to stifle what would have been a gasp had she had enough air to gasp.  Running while the air begins to become thin can become rather oxygen depriving.

            The fort was large.  Its thick rock walls were built into the sides of the mountains, making it hard to gauge its exact size, and it was difficult to discern where the fort ended and the mountain began.  There were probably tunnels that went into the mountains to expand the whole area that the fort encompassed. Margot looked behind her and realized that the trail they had run on was well concealed between rock outcroppings and trees.  It looked more like a crack between parts of boulders than a trail.  It came to Margot that one could not find the trail, and then the fort by chance.

            Margot then saw many gray figures moving around in the walls, and she finally understood why the Gray Guard wore gray.  They blended in more with the gray and green surroundings with their gray cloaks than they would have had they been wearing another color.  She looked around more, and not far in the distance she could see a mountain that was taller than all the others, but what made it stand out was that it had a ring of clouds around the top.  She remembered seeing a drawing of it in one of the books in the library of the castle. It was Mount Tower, where the Guardians lived.

            The Guardians, the two entities who Good Brother Marn had described as the beings that kept the balance in the land, whatever that meant.  All Margot knew was that their names were Etheldor and Robi, and that they had power over the land and that they would sometimes subtly or secretly intervene in the affairs of The Olgenoct to keep peace.  They also helped keep a full-scale invasion out of The Olgenoct.