Hoske Barra's page

"The road from Matharyn to Daveryn
lies for miles and miles
between the mountains and the azure sea.
Where south Talingarde lasses
curls and caresses
ease the journey's hardship for me.

But grim Branderscar,
lies often too far
from the road and my heart
is thus free.
If you tarry ere long
Too dark grows this song
And not a guest but a prisoner you'll be."

- Penny limerick/Traditional attributed to the minstrel Zayn Half-hand.

"The Dorras plague,
gives you pain after ague
and final rest is denied you.
If you wake after death
and are left quite bereft
It's surely Taxos' crime that's inside you."

- Gutter rhyme attributed to the darkchanter Xosef Hangue.

*****

The creature awoke, or more truthfully, opened his eyes. His gleaming green orbs took in the cell just as his other senses welcomed other information. The dank atmosphere. The smell. Darkness.

Ah. He knew his fate. Welcomed it. Anything was better than the time before. A squalid life of boredom and indentured servitude that had followed a short brutish existence as an arena slave. That had followed...vagrancy and orphanhood...

Now he was…something. Something more than a mere man. Gone were the aches and pains of mere skin and flesh. Sadnesses sloughed off like so many unimportant motes of fragile human concerns - longing, hope, despair.

Now he was pure. Bright, in his darkness. Strong in his will, his mind. His soul. He closed his eyes and wondered how his present condition, his fate and destiny came to pass…. Heretofore lost memories flooded back to his foggy mind. He swam in recollection momentarily….

*****

"Kthoo!" Taxos spat on the ground and rubbed his staff-end in the muck as if to impress the point on his truculent bodyguard.

"A short trip. To Daveryn. We take the bolts of cloth to Daveryn, get our pay and return with wallets full of venison and pouches bursting with coin from every land and region. I have a colleague there who wishes to try my process out. And having successfully.... Are you listening slave?"

The apothecary's wheedling tone set Hoske's teeth on edge, but the big man remained impassive.

Taxos looked again with discontent at the hulking man decked out in mismatched, baroque armor and the countenance of boredom and lacklustre initiative.

It wasn't Hoske's fault - Taxos was a penny pinching apothecary with a dark sense of humor and a decidedly twisted bent. The unclean linen in question smelled…unpleasant to say the least. Like the contents of the grave were boiled up and poured over it. Which is almost exactly what had happened.

Hoske didn't want to think back to the moonlit night he and Taxos had rummaged around in the small cemetery plot on the outskirts of Dorost, a fishing hamlet north of Matharyn on the coast of the Cambrian Bay. Didn't want to think about the putrid gelatinous remains of the young woman's head and shoulders they had scoped into a bucket, the corpse's trunk sheared off at the midriff by, according to hysterical rumor, some kind of nightmarish aquatic beast. Nor the rumors that the beast was plague-ridden. He remembered the itching that assailed him almost constantly upon leaving Dorostt, and that the nights of discomfort were only slightly alleviated by Taxos' surprisingly careful ministrations.

Too soon on the road to Daveryn they were apprehended by the authorities and taken to Branderscar - their grim activities at the Dorras cemetery had been noticed, and investigated. Taxos was charged with grave robbery - the pretentious little upstart had the temerity to criticise his captor's protocol and cast aspersions on their intelligence, heritage, virility, sanity - anything and everything - a veritable smorgasbord of empty insults and vague threats of untimely demise and lingering death. Anything to forestall his own end and justify his own existence. All in vain.

Hoske had sullenly watched the apothecary's execution, and with stolid determination had awaited his own - his sentence commuted for a period as his charges were of a lesser severity - as an indentured bondsman he was afforded less responsibility for his own actions.

It mattered little. Hoske fell heavily sick with a strange malady that attacked every muscle, joint, nerve and organ in his body. His skin become translucent and finally, also gelatinous. He grew so ill the warders were frightened of him - suspecting quite rightly that he had the plague. And then, some months ago he had passed away completely. Or so he, and all others had thought. Soon he had risen again, much to the despair and horror of his captors. The Mitrans had pronounced him unclean, yet had kept him here for some unknown reason…..

*****

The skeletal creature paused in thought - his eyes burned with dire consideration. He was not angry. Nor bitter. He was determined. And somewhat...unliving. But he would find a way out of this bondage, and forge his own destiny anew. And something else occurred to him - he remembered.... An appellation, designation….something. Ah, that was it. Hoske. His name…