Dreams in Eldrim; Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The Knight of Gelem



As soon as the last of the ghouls fell, the knights started combing the farmland for more, but none were found.  The whole operation was over in fifteen minutes, after which the knights started to regroup and take an inventory of the enemies they'd defeated.  They seemed to have picked one to function as a commander for the day, and he organized the count of the defeated ghouls, counting up the bodies and asking each of the knights how many they'd killed.  At last count, the enemies lying dead on the ground were twenty-six.  The ones killed by the knights had only been twenty-three.

At first, Don wasn't sure what the purpose of the count was, but as the knights started to gather up the ancient bodies with ropes and drag them away from the fields with their horses, the commander remained behind, looking a little worried.

"It was dangerous to watch us, you know." the knight commander said sadly, and Don felt about ready to jump out of his skin when he realized that that remark had been directed at him.

"Yeah." Don replied from his place on top of the farmhouse roof, too stunned by what he'd just seen to speak with much confidence, "I just had to...  I had to see what it was like...  Real knights, I mean."

However, to Don's amazement, the knight didn't look angry at all.  In fact, he seemed a little amused by Don's refusal to follow the standard emergency procedure.

"I guess I can't blame you for being interested in our work," the knight said with a smile, "but I hope you got a good look during this battle, and I hope you never forget anything you saw.  I want you to keep running every step of that battle over in your mind, because if you ever want to be a knight yourself, or even a guard or soldier, you'll need to know what it means to fight to protect others.  There's a lot that you can learn from what you just watched."

"Of course," the knight continued, donning a very serious expression, "if you don't learn a lot from what you've just seen, you'll have to endanger yourself again, for no reason.  I don't want you doing that, no matter how brave you are.  You can't help anyone if you're dead."

The knight had said that very sternly, but for some reason, Don didn't really feel as if he was being reprimanded.  The knight commander seemed more like he was trying to help him by giving him advice on how to fulfill his dreams, for some reason.

Of course, there was no shame in growing up to become a knight.  It was an honor to be an elite warrior in the human alliance, but it seemed odd that the knight was so eager to encourage a simple boy from Troma, like himself.  Don had expressed the desire to be a knight to many of his friends and teachers in the past, and to his father, and they'd all told him the same thing; no one from Troma had ever become a knight before.

Those words hadn't discouraged Don, however.  In fact, when he'd heard them, it had made him feel even more determined than ever.  Troma was a town of almost three thousand people, but Don had lived there for his whole life, and it didn't seem, to him, as if the people of Troma really felt the way he did.  They didn't really want to fight.

Of course, every human had some desire to protect others and to keep the human alliance safe, but most of the people of Troma were convinced that they could protect the human alliance in their own way; by supplying much of its food, rather than needing to fight in any real battles.

The people of Troma were very peaceful and gentle, and they were convinced that they could live their lives without having to do any genuine fighting.  Don was pretty sure that that was the real reason they'd never become knights or gotten very far in the army.  Their hearts just weren't in it when it came to a fight, because they didn't really feel like they needed to fight anyone.

Ever since Don had realized that, his determination to be a knight had been unshakable.  It was his biggest goal in life; to get the chance to protect his people, to defend the towns and cities of the human alliance and champion the causes that his people believed in; to protect their right to follow the True Law in peace as long as they lived.

Don dreamed of fighting the worst enemies of his people more than anything else, however.  It was a dream that he'd had ever since he was little.  He was the kind of person who could never be satisfied unless he was struggling with all his might to solve the problems he had to face, and his determination had only increased when he'd learned how his mother had died.

However, Don continued to sit on the roof, watching as the knights removed small exorcism knives from their saddle bags and severed a few key points on the bodies of the ghouls before burying them, just to be safe.  It was almost evening by the time the last of the ghouls was buried, but as the knights regrouped and made their final report, they sounded, Don realized, just a bit worried.

"Sir, there's no doubt about it." one of them said, "Somebody killed three of those ghouls before we could even get to them."

"Do you think they were turning on each other for some reason?" another asked curiously.

"This close to prey?  I don't think so." the knight commander replied with a firm shake of his head, "Remember, ghouls are like starving wolves.  They'll never attack a member of their own pack when there's mortal flesh around.  I think it's more likely that there's a marri living in this town in secret."

Don started to feel a little chill travel up his spine when he heard that word.  Humans were hardly reclusive per se, but they almost never had dealings with the other peoples of Eldrim, and it was especially rare to hear of one of them appearing inside the borders of the human territories.  For the most part, humans only heard about the other races of Eldrim from legends and old stories, which were almost certainly outdated, but the stories about the marri had been some of the most terrifying.

Though technically still the same species as other human beings, the marri were said to possess legendary, supernatural powers, which they used to travel rapidly, to wherever they wanted to go, and to kill their enemies with cunning, ruthless efficiency.  Worst of all, if the stories about them were true, then they almost never revealed their true nature to others, unless they were about to strike.  It was chilling to think that a being like that might live among the peaceful people of Troma.

Then again, as difficult as it was to accept, it was equally hard to dismiss the idea.  Don had been under attack by a vicious ghoul before the knights had even reached the village, and the ghoul had fallen to the ground in pieces; killed by something that he hadn't seen.  That, he realized, all seemed to point to the same conclusion that the knights had been discussing.  One of the citizens of Troma could have been a marri in disguise.

Once again, Don knew that he would have felt better if he'd had the ability to defend himself; to fight the threats that appeared instead of having to run and hide all the time.  That was the real purpose of his dream, and the news about the marri was only strengthening his motivations in that respect.  He knew that he couldn't live his life in fear anymore.

Quickly, Don climbed back down from the roof, where he'd watched the battle, trying his best to memorize every single nuance of the fight that he'd just witnessed.  It had certainly been a very impressive skirmish, but he knew that there was only so much that he could learn from what he'd seen on that battlefield.  If he really wanted to be a knight, he thought to himself, he needed practical training of some kind, and the moment he thought of that, he started to feel down again.

Don had brought up the subject of his ambitions a number of times with the people he knew in town, but the only ones who seemed to take him seriously were his best friends and his father, and he definitely didn't want to get stuck listening to another of his dad's speeches.



Unfortunately, from the looks of things, a speech was exactly what Don was going to get as he headed for home that night.  His father was sitting on the porch, waiting impatiently for him to return, and wearing a sour look on his face.  Don could tell immediately that he wasn't going to hear the end of it for a while.

The red-haired boy's father was named Salvatore Brookside.  His first name was fairly common, but as with everyone in Troma, his second name was unique.  No one else had the same second name as him; not even the members of his own family.  That, after all, was the purpose of second names; to distinguish people from one another.

As soon as Don set one foot on the porch of his home, his father spoke, sounding like he was trying to suppress a lot of anger.

"Do you mind explaining where you were today?"

Don knew that there was no explanation he could have come up with that would have satisfied his father, so he just replied "I can't."

"No dinner tonight." Sal replied angrily, drawing an glare of fury from his son.  Don had been pretty active for most of the day, and he was almost starving.

"I know you're upset, but I can't think of any other way to get it through your head." Sal snapped, looking away from his son, so that he didn't need to look him in the eyes as he spoke, "Childhood is a time of mistakes for everyone, but you need to learn from those mistakes and become a better person.  Otherwise, they might as well not have happened.  You don't seem to be learning anything, and I can't understand why.”

“A violent way of life is foolish and shortsighted.” Sal continued, as he got to his feet, looking at his son again, “It robs you of the joys of peaceful living, hardens you to the suffering of others, and in the end, every person who choses that lifestyle winds up being killed by someone, whether in their prime, or when they start to get old and weak.  People who live in peace live longer lives.  Violence just hurts everyone it touches."

Don had heard the speech a million times before, and he knew that no arguments that he put forth would be considered by his father.  In fact, they'd only serve to drag the speech out, which he definitely didn't want.  For the time being, therefore, he kept his mouth shut, but he knew what the truth of the matter was.

The lessons that Sal had been taught by his wife's death had been different from the ones that Don had learned.  Sal had seen that Serenity had been cut down by the enemy, and it had made him the most steadfast kind of pacifist in the world.  Don, however, had heard about his mother's death in battle, and it had taught him the lesson that a person had to be prepared if they wanted to defend the people they cared about.  There was no pacifism in Don Deley's philosophy on life.

When the boy's father had talked about Serenity's death in the past, he seemed to have continually spun the tale into what he wanted it to be; describing it as a simple matter of his wife walking out onto a battlefield and getting killed, but Don had heard other versions of story from his teachers and even some of the other people around town.

Don's mother had been, according to them, a very devoted town guard who'd been struggling to hold off a group of monsters, probably not too different from the ones that had attacked Troma that very day.  She'd been killed by one of them, but she'd taken five with her before she died, and saved a whole family from being killed in the street.

Don had eventually chosen to believe that story, and not just because it gave his mother's death a much greater meaning in his eyes.  When he thought about his mother in that kind of light; as a heroic person who'd made the choice to sacrifice herself for the people of her town, he saw bigger truths about his own life, and about life in general.  The fact was that someone had to take that risk.  Someone had to decide to make that kind of sacrifice, so that people could continue living in peace.  Someone had to be brave enough to decide that the people they cared about were worth risking their life for.

On the other hand, Don knew that just risking his life wouldn't be enough, and the experience that he'd just gone through that day had proven it.  If he went out onto a battlefield in his condition; weak, slow and unskilled, he was just going to get himself killed very quickly.

The knight captain had been right to warn Don about the danger, although he'd been surprised by the warrior's words at the time.  He'd just seemed so supportive of the boy's decision, which was sort of a shock by itself.  When he took a moment to think it over, though, he realized that most of the reason he found it shocking was because his father persistently went in the opposite direction, trying to drive him back away from the kind of lifestyle that he wanted.

Don continued to think about those things as he drifted off to sleep that night; hungry, but still determined.  Respect for one's parents was a fundamental tenet of the True Law, and yet, he knew that if he stayed where he was and continued to obey his father, he'd never get any closer to obtaining the kind of life than he felt he needed.  That was the moment when he truly decided that he was going to leave home.



On the following morning, Don Deley was feeling pretty hungry, and was pleased to find that breakfast was available, though he didn't eat too fast.  His early morning thoughts, however, had more to do with ordinary worries that with his obsession over his dream of knighthood, which had been nearly all-consuming on the previous day.  He knew that he had to finish breakfast, get dressed, and, he decided, finish up his morning chores before heading off to math class for, hopefully, the final time.

The route from Don's house to the school wasn't a long one, but it led him through the middle of town.  Troma was a very pretty little village in a lot of ways; especially in the mornings.  Most villages had some kind of walls around the outside, to slow down attackers, but Troma was different, and most of the people living there appreciated that.  Even Don, who craved the chance to protect others, recognized the beauty of a town with no protective walls.  On a good day, and from the right angle, one could see clear across town to the vegetable fields or fruit orchards on the other side.

Of course, the buildings themselves looked pretty nice as well.  Most of them were made from simple wood or stone; often both, with some bricks or ceramic tiles added in on occasion, for the older houses.  Most houses were designed to support between two and four people, though some houses were larger than normal, and others smaller.  About half of the houses that Don passed on his way to school had a deck or porch of some kind, and the roofs of both the porches and most of the buildings were made mainly from thin shingles, nailed together over strong support beams.

It was still the early morning, and as he jogged rapidly towards school, Don could see that other people were leaving their houses at around the same time, to either go to school as well, or to head out into their fields, shops or other businesses to work.  Most of the people in Troma were farmers, though every town in in the human alliance had some salespeople, musicians, storytellers, record-keepers, architects, guards and so forth.  No matter where people lived, or what they did for a living, there were some things that everyone needed.

When Don got to school that morning, he was told almost immediately that because of the disaster that had happened on the previous day, he'd need to take his math test over.  It was intensely frustrating, since he was almost sure that he'd gotten a perfect score on the last one, but he went through with the test anyway.  Finishing conventional schooling was a big and important milestone, no matter what he wanted to do with his life, and in spite of his anger over having to take the test again, he was pretty sure that he got all the questions right.

When the test was over, Don and a few of the other students were told that they could leave anytime, but that they should return on the following day to find out their final scores.  If their score was imperfect, they'd be asked to take the test again, but if they'd finally mastered mathematics, they'd have another brief class about apprenticeships, in which they'd learn how to train in the specific field of their choice.

Don had been hearing about the job training process his whole life.  As soon as students left school, they'd apprentice themselves to someone working in the job they wanted for themselves, so that they could acquire the skills they needed for that job.  It was a fairly well-refined process.  The only drawback, as far as he could tell, was that kids had to decide what they wanted to do for a living by the time they graduated from school, so that they could apprentice themselves to the right kind of professional and learn the right kind of skills for their chosen job.

However, as Don was headed home from school, later in the morning, he realized that there were a few things about the job system that were somewhat imperfect.  For one thing, knights didn't take apprentices, so it was impossible for him to find an apprenticeship for the career that he wanted.  On top of that, he still wasn't sure what kinds of skills a good knight needed or how to become one.  He found the whole thing frustrating, and he was fuming as he walked away from his school that afternoon, not really intending to head for home, but not specifically meaning to avoid it either.

Don didn't really feel like going home and facing the criticism of his father, so instead, he wandered around town for a few minutes, with no real aim in mind.  That was probably the reason why, after only about half an hour, Neil seemed to have located him, and was running along beside him.  The younger boy looked happy and very eager to talk.

"So, did you see them?" Neil asked enthusiastically, "Did you see the knights fighting?"

When Neil asked that question, it made Don feel pretty good.  He hadn't been sure what Neil had wanted at first; whether he'd meant to convey the displeasure of their teachers or some of Sharon's scolding, but it was comforting to know that even though he'd had followed Don's advice and sought shelter during the crisis on the day before, he still looked at the older boy with admiration in his eyes.  He didn't share Don's dreams of battle, but he still admired the him.

"Yeah.  I saw the whole fight." Don admitted, though he wasn't quite able to bring himself to smile, in spite of how good it felt to be admired by the younger kid, "They were incredible.  I don't see how I could ever get that good."

"Well, just don't give up." Neil said solemnly, "You'll do it somehow.  You're going to be the best knight ever, when you grow up."

At that point, Don couldn't stop himself from smiling just a little.  The younger boy's confidence in his abilities made him feel a lot better.  To Don, most things were frustrating.  In fact, he was considered pretty hotheaded by most of the people who knew him, but he'd never been able to feel that way about younger kids, and especially about Neil.  Neil didn't understand Don, but he was very supportive.  It was one of the reasons why he and Don had been friends for so many years.

"I guess..." Don said at last, not sure how to finish his sentence, "I just don't know how.  It's so stupid.  When those knights showed up, they made the monsters look so weak, but..."

At that point, Don stopped in mid-statement, looking down at the ground, but he still wasn't able to look at Neil, even when he was ready to start speaking again.

"I have to fight those creatures somehow; those monsters that go around hurting people.  I have to cut them down like the knights do, but I can't do a thing because I don't know how to fight at all; not like them."

When Don had been saying those things, he couldn't keep a little bit of sadness from surfacing in his voice.  Even Neil seemed to have recognized that terrible feeling, in spite of his admiration for the older boy.  In that moment, Don was starting to feel discouraged, because he didn't know what to do next.  However, Neil was still trying to draw a smile from him. Clearly, he had every intention of cheering Don up, and his next words only confirmed that.

"Don..." the younger boy said, smiling as best he could, in spite of his friend's sadness, "I have an idea.  Why don't you come over to my place in a few minutes and show me some of the moves the knights used?"

"Huh?" Don asked, confused, "How?  I don't have a sword."

"Don't worry about it." Neil replied with a mischievous look on his face, "I've got a big surprise for you."



At first, Don couldn't believe what he was seeing.  The moment that he'd come within sight of Neil's front yard, he saw an odd-looking, wooden pole with two other poles tied to its sides and a few globs of ink near the top, apparently intended to look like a face.  It was a crudely-designed dummy, meant to look like a wooden person, but right next to it was something that was much less crudely-designed.

Lying in the wild grass next to the dummy was a piece of wood that had been whittled into a specific shape; one that Don found really incredible.  The object was a wooden sword; beautifully-carved and genuinely sharp-looking around the edges.  At once, he'd rushed over to the beautiful, if ineffective-looking weapon and seized it, marveling at its impressive design.

"Neil..." Don said in awe, as soon as his friend had caught up to him, "Did you make this?"

"Well, yeah" Neil muttered, "It took me about a month to get it right.  Try not to slam it against anything too hard, though.  It could break if you do that."

"Wow." Don muttered in amazement, waving the wooden weapon around, "It's really cool.  Let me show you one of those moves they were using out there."

Just like that, Don had cheered up, and aimed his new weapon for the wooden dummy, swinging it around towards the fake creature's head, then tilting it to one side and straightening it again until it was against what would have been the dummy's neck if it had been a real person.

"They dove forward with the sword like that, like they were about to attack," Don explained; an eager thrill in his voice, "Then they twisted the sword to one side, to knock the enemy's attacks away, then they twisted the sword around again to attack in the same motion, like this..."

As he explained the knight's technique, trying his best to demonstrate with the light weapon, Don sighed softly in admiration.  He'd managed to perform a roughly similar attack just then, against the wooden dummy that couldn't really hurt him, but it wasn't enough.  He knew that he needed a lot more experience with fighting before he was ready to put his life at stake, and he wasn't really sure what to do next.  He was still determined to leave town, because he knew that he wasn't going to get the training he needed in Troma, but aside from fighting, he wasn't sure what kind of training he really had to get.  What, Don had to wonder, did knights need to learn?

However, just as those irritating questions were running through his head, he heard a familiar voice making an observation on the attack that he'd just delivered to the wooden dummy; the voice of a grown man who he'd only recently met.

"No.  Not like that.  You can't fight like that in a real battle, or you'll get cut to ribbons.  You need to make smoother transitions between the blocking motion and the follow-up attack.  You'll need to do it faster, too."

At once, both Don and Neil spun around to face the source of the voice, and amazingly, it was the knight commander that Don had seen on the day before.  The man was holding a large cup in one hand, and his armor was gone, but Don recognized him nonetheless.  He had a thin, black mustache, and a face that looked hardened and tough.  It wouldn't have been easy to forget features like those.

For a moment, neither of the young boys said a thing.  Neil seemed to be on the verge of asking the man who he was, but Don had a different question on his mind.

"You?" Don asked, almost too astonished to feel anything but blank confusion, "Why are you still here?  Didn't the knights already kill all the monsters around town?"

The question probably sounded impolite, but Don was just too confused to hold it back.  It might have been an opportunity to learn more about knighthood, or the knight might have changed his mind about encouraging the young boy to join the military.  Don knew that until he was sure what the knight commander wanted, he was going to be nervous, and that only made him feel more irritable.

However, the knight didn't reply to Don directly, at first.  Instead, he turned to face Neil, and what he had to say to the younger boy scared Don quite a bit.

"I need to talk with your friend for a few minutes alone, if you don't mind." the knight said, a sternness growing in his voice that Don hadn't heard there before.  A brief, nervous nod was the closest thing that Neil gave to a reply, and in just a moment later, Don was led away from that house, towards the center of town in absolute silence, really worried, because he didn't have any idea what was going to happen to him next.