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An Imperial in Rone Wehnimer’s Court
by Tempus Thales

He arrived in Wehnimer’s Landing with the merchant caravan that had originated in Fairport and had slowly worked its way northward along the coastal Merchants’ Road. He was clad in the standard issue armor of the Turamzzyrian medium infantry, which served to draw a few glaring stares from some of the locals who had gathered near the main gate to watch the arrival of the caravan. A leopard-skin mantle, fastened by a length of titanium chain, draped the broad shoulders of his tall, sinewy frame. Shoulder-length hair, the color of golden wheat and cut in a fashion favored by most mercenaries complimented his icy blue eyes and lean chiseled face. No other distinguishing characteristics marked him, save for the fact that he was very much human.

He followed the last of the wagons through the gate and turned sharply left onto the North Ring Road. Following the directions etched into his memory, the tall Turamzzyrian continued down the street until he reached the fortress-like building that housed the Guild of Mercenaries. The duty officer never looked up as the *clacking* steps of military boots on flagstone echoed throughout the great hall. Buried in paperwork, he waited until the Turamzzyrian came to a stop before he spoke…

"Name?"

"Crendallen Thales," the soldier replied, mentally noting that the duty officer’s ears were shaped somewhat oddly, despite the trimmed auburn beard.

The duty officer scribbled the name in a leather-bound ledger. "You have a warname, Thales?"

He had been prepared for that. "They’ll ask you for a warname," his fellow soldiers had warned. "Mercenaries tend to identify themselves with aliases, garnered either through merit, jest or out of plain desire to hide their true identities." Crendallen had pondered that at some length during the travel from Fairport. One word seemed to have had burned itself into his mind for some odd reasoning. Temporam. It was of an old dialect, a language of the humans that was several thousand years older than the Kannalan Empire, and one confined more appropriately to dusty old tomes these days rather than upon the lips of scholars. It’s meaning simply meant time, or the passage there of. It was something that Crendallen seemed to have a lot of these days.

"Tempus," the mercenary answered. He altered the ancient word somewhat. Of course, he could have easily given the duty officer his other warname, that given by his fellow soldiers, but Crendallen wasn’t too keen on letting folks know just yet that the Riddler had somehow found his way up north. The name was the result of Tempus’ habitual banterings about the philosophies of war and magic, and of gods and men, and of war and men and their gods. Most of his philosophical orations were in the form of questions, designed to make others think upon the subject at hand. The questions themselves were often vague in content, almost riddle-like in behavior, and sometimes nearly outright perplexing.

The duty officer made a few more notations within the ledger and inquired as to whether or not Tempus would be needing lodging at the guild. Tempus declined, opting instead to stay at one of the Landing’s inns or taverns. Although he was a mercenary, he did have access to small fortune of funds as a result of his family’s trade dealings. Finding adequate lodging would not be too difficult.

"You’ll have to lose the armor," the officer said flatly.

Tempus looked at his own panoply momentarily before responding, "The rest of my gear won’t be here for another fortnight."

"Go to the armory. It’s down that hall," the duty officer, without looking up, pointed toward the hallway off to his right. "We’ll give you a fair trade and add the balance to next month’s dues."

"I don’t need new armor."

"And I’ll not have any fights breaking out," the duty officer began as he raised his head to stare at Tempus for the first time, "because some Imperial caught the bad side of a T’Kirem Clansman’s temper! This is a Mercs’ Guild, not some Turamzzyrian outpost. Lose the armor. Got it?"

Tempus nodded. He wasn’t one to argue with authority.

A short time later he was back on the North Ring Road, looking more like one of the locals rather than the Imperial soldier he had arrived as. He made his way westward, past the main gates, and turned south onto Talon Street. As he traveled along the thoroughfare toward his destination, Tempus took note of his surroundings – especially the people. Wehnimer’s Landing, he had been told, was technically outside the protective scope of the Empire. Imperial patrols rarely ventured this far northward, even though the whole of the territory itself was said to have been in the hands of the Turamzzyrians for quite some time.

It was considered to be too remote and very much wild. Marauding bands of orcs and trolls still made settling the area a nightmare. Tales of fell creatures arising from their graves to snatch the unwary and carry them away to unimaginable deaths circulated around a vast majority of Tamzyrr’s taverns and alehouses, hinting that some grave force was at work here. And then there was the Krolvin, a known seafaring threat that kept the Imperial navy busy year round, who had seemed to develop a curious interest in using the territory as a staging area for their inland raids. All of this and more made the area currently undesirable in the eyes of the military, who were caught up in enough troubles of their own. And without a military presence, Turamzzyrians were hesitant about settling the territory.

On the other hand, the mercenary noted that the majority of people who inhabited Wehnimer’s Landing appeared to be either Elves or Hathlyn. Tempus had a feeling that the Elves who resided here most likely did not make the journey from their homelands on the other side of the DragonSpine. Like the Hathlyn, they must have been refugees who were fleeing the Empire’s policy to, in layman’s terms, make life as miserable for them as the Elves had for the humans several millennia ago. No wonder they looked upon Imperials, or any human for that matter, with such disdain. Not that it mattered much to Tempus. He had been raised in a culture that didn’t forget its past very easily. To see that the tables had finally turned upon such an arrogant group of people who had no compassion, even amongst themselves, was a bittersweet sight to behold.

His racial views, however, were somewhat muddied by the fact that he was a mercenary. "Only a man can define himself," Tempus had mused. "No other influence can be more defining than that of an individual’s deeds, regardless of race, religion, or upbringing." Service to the Empire stressed cohesion among the ranks while downplaying an individual’s worth. The mercenaries, on the other hand, lived by an unspoken code of moral ethics that, in effect, stressed an individual’s worth and trust. A mercenary had to be able to rely upon that person defending his right. There were no exceptions.

The true nature of his dissent with Elves, then, was not the fact that they were not human. Rather, he distrusted them because of their ties with the arcane. Tempus abhorred wizardry, in all its forms. He had seen its devastating effects firsthand as part of the advance force that had been sent to relive the Third Legion after its initial encounter with the Chaos Lord and his minions nearly twelve years ago. It was foul magic that had conjured up the demons, their claws and teeth sharper than the keenest blade and capable of ripping into armored infantry with unearthly ease. Those who had survived either died horrible deaths because of their physical wounds, which no healer or cleric could resolve, or were driven insane by visages brought to bear against them. It was unacceptable that mortals be allowed to tamper with forces that were supposed to be the sole province of the gods. And it was the Elves, and their insatiable appetite for the arcane, that had led to such a foul proliferation of wizardry.

"The gods gave men magic," Tempus had once said, "why do sorcerers allow men gods?" He had made that remark the day three Imperial Drakes came strutting through the outer bailey of the Ninth Legion’s headquarters in Brantur. The manner with which they had held themselves led the young philosopher to draw upon that conclusion when he considered the astounding advances made in arcane research. Sorcerers were adulterating the Natural Law of Order, tipping the scales of balance, in the hope of attaining such power as to make them appear as gods among men. "When one has the power to manipulate the impossible," Tempus mused, "then one has no need for gods or the faith to believe, since such faith can be manipulated to conform to the will of individual."

As he approached the point where Talon Street emptied into the town’s central square, Tempus considered the contempt he held for such who would foolishly tamper with that which should not be tampered with in the first place. It wasn’t limited to just the Elves. It was one of the reasons he quit the military and chose the life of a mercenary, rather than allowing himself to become associated with the Empire’s indoctrination of the arcane into the affairs of the military. Tempus didn’t think that the province of warfare precluded the use of the arcane. It was a view shared by many amongst the mercenaries, who considered such brash adulteration of the Art to be equivocal to hypocrisy within almost any given religion. By diluting the pure concept of warfare with the poisonous aspect of sorcery was to ensure certain death of an Art that had been refined, not by scholastic sages pouring through pages of tomes, or uttering unearthly words of power, or promising their souls in exchange for godlike powers, but by the blood, sweat and tears of soldiers, mercenaries and warriors.

As he checked into his room at the Raging Thrak Inn, Tempus let the thoughts of the arcane subside and, instead, reflected upon the notion that he had arrived in a town that had, over the course of the last two centuries, developed into a haven for those displaced by certain policies of the Empire. It was no longer just a settlement along the fringes of the Turamzzyrian Empire. As the mercenary considered the possibilities of the Empress’ goals for expansion, the chilling thought of being caught in the middle of a political hotspot once again resurfaced. He was, for all intent and purpose, an Imperial who had found himself lost within Rone Wehnimer’s proverbial Court. If the Empire was really all that keen on pressing onward with its expansion into the Northern Territories, would Tempus join the ensuing fray on the side of the country he had once served? Or would he join the growing resistance that was developing in the face of harsh Imperial mandates? "Pressure a cornered dog hard enough," one of his commanders had once said, "and it will bite, regardless of how well trained it is." How much more badgering, then, would the people take before they struck back?

He considered, briefly, the person for whom this town was named after. Rone Wehnimer had been one of the first explorers to venture into this area and, like most adventurers, had probably set out with the notion of making some sort of impact upon the world in which he had lived in. Crendellan Thales, the Turamzzyrian noble-turned-mercenary, wasn’t quite sure of what it was he wanted to accomplish in his lifetime. The one thing that he did know of, however, was reminiscent of an adage he had developed some time ago…

"War is ours in common, in that through strife there is justice. All things come into being and pass away through strife."

He was a warrior living in a world wrought with conflict; a world where dark forces seemed to give birth to even darker creatures that prowled the lands like a plague; a world where godlings walked among men, whispering into the ears of any who would follow their cause; a world where sorcerers and their arcane powers strived to become gods themselves; a world where man and elf lived in segregation, divided by a hatred of one another so deep that no amount of reconciliation could ever seem to resolve. He harbored no illusions of grandeur, but Tempus was confident that, no matter how miniscule it might be, he would leave his impact upon this world.

An Imperial in Wehnimer’s Landing was a good place to start.

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