Jaques Jeannes's page

ninety-eight...ninety-nine... Hundred. Jaques drops to his his elbows from the finger-tip pushups, and rolls over onto his back. His hour of exercise complete, he stares at the ceiling of his room. listening to his own labored breathing and feeling the sweat roll off his body. He listens to the muffled voices and sounds of motion of the other household members on the floor below him. He really never believed he would see this house or room again. The odds of survival of that last mission were not good, and even should he have survived, surely Knurl would have been overrun, and the house burned with the rest of the city. To be back in his room was a pleasant surprise.

He's puzzled by the exercise routine he just completed again. Somewhere along the trail, after the expedition to the trolls lair, he awoke one morning with the idea that exercise would help build the strength he needed for combat. Not just any exercise, rather this particular exercise regime. He didn't recall planning it, creating it, or even being taught it during his monastary training. Suddenly, it just seemed a good idea, but following it regularly had indeed greatly increased his strength. It was a puzzle. On the trail he had wondered if the gnomes they encountered had somehow inspired him.

There was a good deal to be thankful for, and some real comparison to wretchedness he had seen. There is more to the world than I had imagined, it's not so clear anymore. Jaques remains disturbed by the events of the last month, on many levels. Evil, good, and pragmatism have become stirred together in ways he does not find comfortable. In the city of Spinecastle, so many things had changed. He had seen a fully functioning city, with no "good" in it. No gratitude, no generosity, no concern for others, not even love. Yet still it functioned. There was commerce, there was order (of a sort), there was the usual division of the wealth of the prosperous and the sorry state of the poor, nearly indistinguishable from any city he had known...only with no actual "goodness". Could it be that "goodness" was not what sustained civilization as he had previously believed? The Red Cloak Orcs, surely as evil and pernicious a bunch as ever walked Oerth, were running Spinecastle as a functioning city. There were even "city gaurds" patrolling the streets. That he and his companions had made a "pragmatic deal" with the head orcs of the city would have seemed like an ironic fairy tail, had he not lived it.

Then there were the disturbing feelings in his own heart. I could have let him do it. I could have done it myself; I wanted to. The Drow sorceress. He catches his labored breathing for an instant, before putting it back into rythm. He remembered how her hair smelled. Hate and desire, blended together in a way he couldn't explain. With Shiranna it had always been so different, just awe, kindness, concern for her, wanting her respect, admiration as a basis for attraction. With the dark elf woman, in a moment during their second battle, he had been face to face with her. Inches away from him, she had smirked in his face, and cast her lightining bolt 90 degrees away from him, to blast Agathon down the street. The smug contempt in her eyes, unafraid of him even though his hands were inches from her. He'd never forget that look, and it had made him want to do ...unspeakable...things...to her. That's how he knew what was in Thaddeus's eyes, when they captured her. It was half in his own mind when he'd been shouting at Agathon to "take her alive", at war with the rationalizing half that suggested they could take her for the information she had. The discipline won out, and he guided Thaddeus into following the course of events that needed to happen. They had dragged the prisoner back to Knurl unmolested but for some rough handling. Discipline. That was the only thing that had made the difference though he knew both himself and Thaddeus to have always been "good" men. It was discipline that made Spinecastle work, though they were all "evil". Is the line so blurry? Is it really just "discipline" that makes it all function?

He had heard that some orders believed only in the discipline, that good and evil were irrelevent and to be used equally in furtherance of order. Considering the deals they had made, and what he had felt in himself, were they wrong? He would admit only to himself that it was only the discipline that had gotten him through that trip back to Knurl with his soul barely intact. Szarthelion the drowess, had continued to provoke them, flirting, sneering, teasing. The rough handling they gave her only seemed to egg her on. Agathon seemed immune, as had Belric (perhaps aided by his dwarvish aversion to elves), but he and Thaddeus had been nearly beside themselves. Was Agathon just a "better man"? He had exercised himself into physical exhaustion every night, to keep himself honest. Thaddeus had started having debates with himself near the end, in some language Jaques couldn't follow. I don't know how much longer we could have lasted, good riddance. He remembered the smell of her hair...