Crypters

Signus arrived at the Hart and Hearth two bells before the time listed on the hiring notice. After concealing a small bundle of black cloth between two barrels of rainwater in the adjoining alley, he entered the building with the subdued, downtrodden look of a fieldhand entering his local tavern, looking to ale for solace after a hard day's labors.

The disguise was more a matter of behavior than appearance-- in a busy tavern like this, the staff wouldn't know every patron, or even every regular, by name. As a result, avoiding attention was as easy as acting like you'd been there before. Taking a seat at a small table backed against the main room's darkened corner, Signus gestured vaguely to a server, who nodded once, disappearing behind the long oak bar to return with a filled mug of something dark brown. Signus muttered something non-committal and placed a handful of coins on the table from his leather travelling pouch, from which the server picked out four hardpence, thanked him in a rote, mechanical tone, and hurried away to another gesturing customer. Leaning back in the sturdy, cushioned chair, Signus scanned the room discreetly, like a general surveying land before a battle.

Eleven tables, differently sized but made of the same dark wood and decorated with simple, identical trim, dotted the flagstone floor of the Hart and Hearth, whose namesake fireplace glowed with red heat on the far side of the room from Signus. The hearty, deep cracks of heavy firewood, the kind too large for single-home use and thus exclusive to the hearths of communal places, added percussion to the hum of lightly intoxicated conversation, which gently rose and fell as two dozen patrons made slow work of their food and drink. The smell of roasting meat and root vegetables, pungent with peppercorn and smoke and fresh-chopped herbs, wafted dark and heavy from the kitchen, overlapping with the sweet, delicate scent of spiced apple cider.

The tavern felt both strange and familiar to Signus. The food was so different here than in his coastal homeland, where a fire would be lit only during the coldest winter nights; despite months spent on the road, he still expected the kitchen to smell of fish rather than venison, the cup to contain wine rather than cider or ale. The people seemed mostly the same, except that more of Obren's residents wore weapons at their sides. Obren wasn't a more dangerous place than the Waning Coast; it was simply that words and swordsmanship were important parts of the barony's culture. Obren was home to Hellar's finest duelists; their craft was the reason Signus had travelled so far from Whiterock Castle. But it was not the reason he had come to the Hart and Hearth.

When the Five Masters had given Signus his Journeyman assignment, he had known it would be a labor of months or years, but the fact had not dissuaded him. On the contrary, after six years of hard training in the Iron Way, then-twenty-something Signus had looked forward to setting out into the wider world to retrieve new combat techniques for the Battle Scholars at Whiterock to study and subvert. The first time he had returned, he brought a heavy, bladed weapon and tales of the wide-stanced Boulder Knights and their highly defensive technique. Four of the Five Masters approved of his findings, but the last dissented, chiding Signus for retrieving such an artless method of combat. The second time, he had travelled farther afield and studied harder, returning with original manuscripts: scrolls which recorded the katas of a Fire Age band of pirates called the River-Eaters. They fought with curved blades and short whips, and Signus had trained until he could recreate their fighting stances with lethal precision. Again, four of the Five had approved; again, the fifth Master, the Master of Winds, had withheld his approval.

If Signus was to become a Master of the Iron Way, his next offering needed to be undeniable: a combat technique of unparalleled lethality and grace. The quest had brought him South by a continent and a half, to the chilly mountain peaks of Obren, where so far, the banal material realities of food and lodging had drained his resources enough to slow his pursuits. To attend the Dueling Arena was a costly thing, and Signus' purse had grown light during his long travels. So, though he felt it beneath him, he had been reviewing a listing of odd jobs for hire, looking for mercenary positions, when he had stumbled across a unique hiring notice: one apparently posted by the Master of the recently-minted Crypter's Guild of Obren, simply signed "Tenvic." No house name meant the Guildmaster was undoubtedly a commoner; a rarity in this strange Kingdom with no class of middling status, like the Merchant/Artisan class into which Signus had been born.

To stumble into an experienced "Crypter," looking to train new recruits, while he was himself on a journey to find unique fighting styles, seemed too good an opportunity to pass up; so, despite his disinterest in a profession which seemed like a combination of gravedigging and burglary, here Signus was, waiting for this Guildmaster Tenvic to arrive at the stated time and place.

Looking around the dimly-lit tavern, Signus concluded that the Master had not yet arrived; of the twenty-some other patrons in the room, only four were ungrouped: one woman, one man with a strung lute across his back, one too old to be in the business of scavenging ancient ruins, and one at the bar, at least three drinks into his night, flirting openly with a profoundly disinterested server. Seeing that Master Tenvic was yet to show, Signus made himself busy with a task which every seasoned traveler learns to perfect: the always-thriving business of eavesdropping. Two young men debated the merits of apple cider, applejack, and mulled wine; a group of women of various ages used hushed tones to discuss which alchemists in town they trusted for their "necessaries" and which had less-than-stellar reputations; an old woman told a group of half-interested younglings the story of the mystical Old Ways, and the Hopeful War. It was one of a handful of stories Signus still remembered from his youth-- it was nice to hear the tale, so similar to how his mother had told it, here in this frozen land so far from his home.

Signus watched a few dozen patrons enter and exit the Hart and Hearth, but it wasn't until a quarter-hour before the scheduled meeting time that a painfully young man with a wisp-thin moustache and a crossbow slung across one shoulder entered the tavern, grabbed the attention of a server, and took a seat at a large table surrounded by four chairs, clearly expecting company, but unsure how many would be joining him. That was a good start. With bustling efficiency, the server brought him a steaming plate of seasoned and roasted root vegetables and a tankard of pale amber liquid, whose sweet, spiced contents Signus could practically smell from his distant table. Signus took a slow sip of his own, dark brown beverage, putting on a thorough performance of nonchalance to deflect attention as he watched the young man, who removed any doubt of his identity when, indeed, he introduced himself to the serving woman as "Tenvic."

When he had begun his training at Whiterock Castle, Signus' first teacher, the Master of Stones, had taught him how to size up his opponents by using animal archetypes: fighters with Strength and Speed were "Boars," those with Strength and Reach were "Bears"; those with great Speed and Reach, like Signus, were "Ferrets." Signus had chafed at the title until he saw that, in practice, having the advantage on your opponent in both Speed and Reach meant that their Strength only ever became relevant if you made a mistake.

There were other body and stance types, too; Vipers and Wolves, Bulls and Owls, Squids, Rays, Stallions. Truth be told, it was Signus' view that the metaphor became increasingly strained as factors like center of mass, upper vs lower body agility, and reaction time became part of the equation; the animals were a better tool for training newcomers in the broad strokes of melee combat than for sizing up actual opponents. But as he watched at the squat, thin-legged, slightly pudgy Guildmaster order and polish off a second heavy plate of roasted tubers, Signus couldn't help but begin to think of him as a Cricket. Lacking strength, reach, or stance stability, small-framed Crickets' greatest strength was their ability to close in and end a fight quickly without ever letting their opponent create distance; the body type favored an overly aggressive method of combat that proved easy to counter by any skilled opponent. During his training, Signus had seen Cricket fighters do well, but it was a rare thing, and win or lose, a fight with a Cricket was always over fast. They simply didn't have the reach to spend any time as outfighters.

Of course, the already-strained animal metaphor lost even more relevance when ranged weaponry became a factor. If this young Master Tenvic was a crack shot with that crossbow, perhaps he wouldn't be altogether useless in combat. One well-aimed shot could fell any human opponent; almost nobody could dodge or react to a bolt in the fraction of a second it took the projectile to close a the distance of its effective range. Almost nobody. Signus' hand twitched as he remembered the last phase of his training with the Master of Clouds; the heat-blisters on his bandaged hands as he tried, and repeatedly failed, to catch the blunted bolts they used to train. He could still remember the feeling of picking splinters and fletching out of his still-bleeding wounds.

Signus was stirred from his memories of Whiterock Castle by the arrival of a new figure in the tavern; a hulking youth with a sword sheathed across one shoulder, who spotted Tenvic, flashed a broad grin, and took a seat at the young Master's table.

Despite sharing an approximate age with Tenvic, this newcomer contrasted the Guildmaster in every way. He was tall, probably closer to six and a half feet than six; his simple, homespun clothes, a loose white shirt with short sleeves over dark, rugged trousers clearly intended for field work and hard riding, showed off an impossibly, almost comically muscular physique. His face, at odds with his tanned body, was more boyish than handsome, under a truly unkempt mop of sandy brown hair. The sword he wore across his back in a shoulder-strapped sheath was the largest weapon one could hope to effectively wield in combat; not a longsword, not a broadsword, not a bastard or even a two-handed blade, but a true Greatsword, broad as a horse's hind leg and no less than six feet from hilt to blade's end. It must have weighed as much as a warhammer, but the young man did not seem encumbered in the slightest.

No animal metaphor came to mind as Signus sized up this youthful newcomer; instead, he thought of children's stories; of Wild Roffy and the Mountainguard. There was a certain character archetype common to those stories; the "Wild Man", or "Ridgeman", or just as often, the "Barbarian." An unarmored warrior, with as big a weapon as he can find, with no patience for diplomacy or magic or moralizing; no tactics, no planning, only muscle and aggression. It was too early to know whether the young man would act in accordance with the stereotype, but visually, he couldn't have fit the bill any better had he been playing the part on a stage.

From his darkened post in the corner, Signus listened in as the two young men introduced themselves. The new lad, who had one leg slung lazily over the arm of his chair, said that his name was "Moose," and that he would like to join the Crypters' Guild; the young Guildmaster introduced himself in kind, and began a series of questions. Signus leaned in closer, turning his ear to listen in carefully; this was why he had come so early, and taken such pains to go unnoticed.

"What skills can you bring to the Guild?" Tenvic asked, reading the question from a small notebook he had produced from his overflowing traveler's bag.

"I'm an experienced swordsman," Moose responded with a confident smile. "Trained under a former dueling master."

Tenvic nodded eagerly, eyeing the sword-hilt over Moose's shoulder. "Are you an experienced duelist, then?"

Moose shook his head. "Not my specialty. Fighting another swordsman is all technique and bluff. Always ends up feeling more like a performance than a fight. Plus, there's too many duelists in Obren."

Tenvic looked perplexed. "So, what is your specialty?"

A wide, boastful smile spread across Moose's face as the young Guildmaster asked the obvious question. "Big Game Hunting."

Signus' brow furrowed unseen under his dark cowl. What could this swaggering youth possibly mean that his "swordfighting specialty" was hunting? Was he claiming to be proficient in another weapon as well? He had the physique for a heavy-draw longbow, but then, why carry such an unwieldy blade?

Tenvic appeared to be wondering the same. "Hunting?" He asked, after a moment of incredulous silence. "With a sword?"

Moose's grin grew wider, his white teeth catching the flickering light of the nearby hearth. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out something heavy and amorphous. Signus' distance and the two figures being backlit by the hearth made it hard to recognize the item until Moose set it on the table-- it was the pelt of a black bear, cut and tanned, ready for use. As Tenvic's eyes went wide, Signus' rolled-- having a bear's furs was insufficient proof that this young man had killed the beast. Even if he had, surely he hadn't felled the creature with a sword. Imagining it, Signus couldn't picture the encounter looking anything less than silly, an armed but unarmored human swinging an ungodly-heavy blade at a charging predator.

Tenvic, however, was clearly convinced. He ran his hand across the black fur, eyes still wide as Moose boasted how he had baited the creature with fish, then stepped out from a hunter's blind to confront it before fighting it to the death on a stony riverbed. Tenvic listened to the tale, enraptured and enthusiastic.

"...but that wasn't the biggest animal I've hunted," Moose finished his story smugly. His eyes glinted in the light as he watched Tenvic process the tale, waiting for the young Guildmaster to ask the next obvious question.

"What was the biggest?" Tenvic asked, mouth agape with childlike wonder.

Moose's grin reached its fullest width as the Cricket took his bait. "Why do you think they call me Moose?"

Signus struggled not to draw attention as he choked noisily on his dark ale. In all the taverns he had frequented throughout his travels, never had such an absurd, audacious boast been met with such earnest, reverent belief. If this man had truly cut down a moose, one of a handful of species of Greater Beasts surviving past the Age of Heroes, then Barbarian was an understatement. Signus simply could not believe such a claim. In truth, he thought less of Tenvic for believing it. His confidence in his plan waned; would he really benefit from such gullible company?

Of course, the fledgling Guildmaster's credulousness didn't really factor into Signus' plans. Even if he travelled with boastful or inexperienced companions, surely the Crypts would have something that he could bring to Whiterock, or that would at least aid his efforts. Even the Castle's own combat arts were said to be fragmented, lost to the twin perils of secrecy and time. These Crypts, these portals to another time, were uniquely Southern-- every time-sealed ruin in the Waning Coasts had been opened at least a hundred years ago. Only here in Hellar had Royal Law decreed the Crypts the property of the Crown; so, the only Crypts left unchecked were here. It was a unique opportunity for research and retrieval, and Signus would not waste it, no matter how questionable the decisions of the Guild's leader.

Silently, Signus recorded Tenvic's questions, and his reactions to young Moose's answers, in his own leather-bound notebook: What is the goal of a Crypter's Guild? What is the best use of the resources we find in the Crypts? What's more important: shoring up weaknesses or enhancing strengths? The last question the boy asked bothered Signus more than the rest: "Are you a good person?" What an absurd thing to ask; a question with only one answer. Everyone thinks they are a good person. Most people are wrong.

As Moose's interview concluded, Signus stood from his ill-lit table, strode silently out of the Hart and Hearth, and turned the corner into the alleyway. As he changed into the clothes he had tucked away, a few paltry grey stormclouds began to trickle rain onto the Hearth's ceramic-shingled roof. Signus took a deep breath, reviewed his notes from Moose's interview, and strode back into the Hart and Hearth to begin his application for the Obren Crypter's Guild.