SwagVault MMO Blog

“Heroes”

Joag couldn’t feel his arms. His vision was a blur, he could feel himself sweating. Something was terribly wrong. It had just been a headache this morning.

He needed help. He knew that much. Silver Hand paladins had been seen outside the city, and they were known as gifted healers. The paladins would help him.

Joag kept that thought firmly fixed in his mind, stumbling forward. He’d take the back way, the cut through the Crusaders’ Square. The paladins would help him. The paladins had to help him.

He tripped as he reached the fountain, sprawling forward. He heard a crack as his knee hit the stone, but his head was pounding too hard, his fever raging too high, for him to feel the pain. He barely registered that he’d stopped himself from going in the fountain all the way. Cold water up to his elbows. So cold. His whole body was a fire, but so cold.

He stumbled to his feet and pressed on. The paladins would help him. They were just outside the city. Through this alley and then out the main gates.

Joag had almost cleared the alley when he met the other man. He was tall, unusually tall, a balding gray-haired man- a human, no elfling or dwarf- dressed in richly bejewelled purple-and-gold robes. The tell-tale scintillation of magic, powerful magic, glimmered at his shoulders and around his hands, flowing up even around his mace.

Paladins carried maces. Perhaps this man was a paladin- or a priest, priests wore robes. This man could help him. Tranquility, calm assurance, flowed from the man almost as obviously as his magic. Surely this was an agent of the divine.

“Sir, please,” Joag said humbly- or tried to say humbly. His tongue felt thick and swollen in his mouth. “Hurraghfl,” he heard, in his own weary voice.

The man drew back, his eyes cold, his mace lifting.

Joag fumbled for his coin-purse. “If it’s money you want…” he tried to proffer it to the man. “Iifrmneeaaa,” he heard himself say, his arms outstretched as he staggered forward.

The man stepped forward, swung once. Joag felt the sickening crunch of the mace impacting the side of his head, lurched, his vision spinning. He clutched at the man, his groan of agony making it out of him, for a miracle, ungarbled. The man brought his mace up and back, and Joag saw a flash of purple-white light, felt an impact, and saw no more.

The man wrinkled his nose, looking down at the burnt corpse of the plague victim. A moment later another man, this one clad in gleaming plate, jogged up. “That’ll teach you to get ahead of me, Llanion. These zombies are tenacious.”

The robed man nodded, strapping his mace to his belt. “Earth mother have mercy on Stratholme, past and present.”

This is my entry to Anna’s challenge over at Too Many Annas. Hope you like it! I changed things up a bit by making my own character the ‘mugger’, and I’m pretty sure this wasn’t on the original list of cities… but can you honestly see a mugging in Thunder Bluff?