Dealing With Regular Issues

Gavin stared at the arming sword before him with a mix of disappointment, frustration, annoyance, and resignation. He had just brought this sword up to competition standards five days ago, now it looked like someone was using all sides of the blade to break rocks and the pommel to tenderize a bear’s hide. He looked over at where the weapons were brought to him from, his fellow squires were easily 6 to 10 years his junior but gave him about as much respect as they did their own weapon, that is to say, about as close to none as you could usually get, to see them snickering to each other around the form of of a feral scouting lizard.

Scouting lizards were large monsters that lived out in the wilds that could also be trained, they usually averaged between 3 and 4 feet tall and 5 to 7 feet long, they usually tended to be hostilely territorial in the wild and untamed. Tamed, the beasts could have their hostility directed towards their handler’s foes, and the fact they were almost as fast as a good horse only made them a reasonable threat. The one that the idiots were snickering around had been wounded by Sir Galthias but had the killing blow dealt by Gavin. Even so, these idiots decided to beat on the dead creature with their weapons to the point that any resources they did get off it would be next to useless.

Even dead, a scouting lizard could be useful. Their hides, when properly stripped and mostly free of damage, could make for excellent leather, sometimes the really high quality stuff if the creature was on the healthier side, and their meat was actually pretty nutritious, even if the stuff smelled foul when cooked but at least it didn’t taste bad or bland when it was cooked. Their tongues made for good weapon and tool grips, when properly treated, their teeth could fetch a decent price in most markets, and apothecaries wouldn’t turn away any of their blood if you tried to sell it to them. Most folks didn’t care much for their bones, but some of the more survival oriented individuals were said to have uses for their bones, even some of the more eccentric mages claimed there were quite few uses for the bones.

Long story short, Gavin was surrounded by idiots, fools, and buffoons of the highest order. He let out a slow sigh before heading over to the small fire he made for himself and getting his portable smithing tools out to get the busted gear back into usable shape, and hopefully close to his usual standards. He knew that the fixing job would take a few hours, per piece, so he would likely be going without any of the rations he was **** into putting into a communal pile when they were sent out on this mission.

Sir Galthias, and by extension his squires, was supposed to be out here hunting a band of bandits that had gotten some notoriety the past few months, people were calling them the “Forest Shadows” due to the fact they always attacked from the woodlands with their leader being given the moniker “Weald Wraith” due to his confirmed record of executing several soldiers. Sir Galthias returned from wherever he had disappeared to after the scouting lizard incident two hours into the four hours it would take to bring the first of the three swords up to a reasonably usable state, Gavin usually went another 3 or 4 hours to bring it up to a more pristine state.

The portly knight said, in his surprisingly refined voice, “I managed to locate the most recent ambush site,” Gavin doubted that, “it looks like it was hit three or four days ago, all provision have been stripped and all known defenders seem to have slain, I think there is a good chance there is at least one collaborator with the bandits but I didn’t spot any signs of such a thing.”

“Did you run into anything interesting while you were out, my liege?” Said Gavin as he pounded away at the hammer in his corner to mend the sword.”

“Just a few bears, but they only got about thirty feet from myself before catching a good whiff of my personage and ran away in fear,” said Sir Galthias. Gavin called bullshit in his head, chances are Sir Galthias had never seen more than one bear and it decided to give up on him because of the metal plates covering all the parts the bear would usually attack. Sir Galthias was infamous for over inflating most things he talked about when it came to his encounters. Sir Galthias looked over at the beaten up swords on the ground, the one Gavin was pounding out, and Gavin’s nearly pristine blade atop its scabbard just to the back and right of Gavin before saying, “Good to see you working to keep the equipment maintained, the blacksmiths are so much harder to deal with and they are nowhere near as fast as you.”

Gavin decided to ignore the backhanded compliment and give his two plines on the matter as he worked on his project, “It would be easier on all of us if my fellow squires actually took the time to pay attention and actually treat their equipment with the care and respect it needs to stay in functional condition. It looks like they were trying to break rocks with their swords, going by the state the weapons are in, but I know they just used them to deal pointlessly hard blows to the dead lizard for far too long. Seems your speech to me about having to maintain my own equipment along with yours either never happened with them or fell on deaf ears, either way isn’t very encouraging.”

“Ah yes, maybe I should consult them on proper use of their equipment,” Sir Galthias, much to the annoyed looks of the four other squires. Gavin knew that discussion was never going to happen, he had prompted it over a dozen times already but the most that happened was Sir Galthias spending less than minute telling the other squires to be more careful with their equipment, as opposed to the half-hour sermon Gavin had gotten over a dozen times his first year as a squire on that very subject. Sir Glathias clearly didn’t like Gavin but he kept at keeping the young man in his employ.

Gavin should have been officially recognized as a knight already but it seemed Sir Galthias had enough influence to keep that from happening. 5 hours later, the first sword was fixed and Gavin moved on to the next one, looks like he wouldn’t be sleeping tonight, something that always seemed to happen when more than one weapon was beaten to Hell and back. He would barely be getting the last one finished just as everyone else began to rise the next morning. If he was lucky, which he usually felt he wasn’t, he might be able to get some of that lizard’s meat to cook while he worked on fixing the swords.

“I will lead the way to the attack site in the morning,” said Sir Galthias, “then we see what clues we can find at the site, although it has been some time, so I’m not expecting much. But for now, it’s much too late for us to do anything they would ask of us properly if we were to head that way this very moment.” Of that Gavin was in agreement over. Besides, it was already the twilight hours, the night would be on its way in what seemed like no time.

While most of the country worshiped the god of the sun, military, and order, Solias, Gavin wasn’t one of them. Gavin was a follower of the goddess of the moon, wilderness, and justice, Junatrix. He wasn’t an open worshiper, while her followers weren’t only discriminated against, seeing as she was Solias’s non-malevolent sibling, many of Solias’s were passive-aggressive at best and contemptuous to the point of being just shy of openly hostile at worst towards her followers. Something about old propaganda about Junatrix when the siblings were feuding a few centuries back had left the followers of the two deities in a somewhat strained relationship. Of course, it didn’t help that Junatrix’s church just took sacred artifacts from Solias’s church and hid them in places only those with her blessing could find them while Solias’s church openly admitted and displayed the act of destroying sacred artifacts of the Junatrix church. Thankfully, most of the artifacts that were openly destroyed were reproductions out for guests to see while the real artifacts were in the place known as the Vaults of Justice, a place that is considered so sacred that only a select few even know how to enter, most of whom are very high in the Junatrix church’s hierarchy.

Even if the persecution had died down to a lull on the surface, Junatrix worship wasn’t openly displayed anymore, even her temples were changed over to something one would not recognize as places of worship on the surface in places where Solias is the official deity of the state. Gavin was her follower long before anything else, she was the patron deity of his family, just one more thing for the country’s ruling class to despise about them. Junatrix is also known as the goddess that more enlightened monsters pray to as well, while Solias condemns all who don’t meet the standards of the majority in the nations he is worshiped in as a primary deity.