Chapter 2 - Placidity

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Chapter 2 - Kha 1

As I open my eyes to the quiet northern morning, I am met with the unwelcome sight of a rat on the hastily boarded floor. It sits beside my rough cot of wood and hay, looking directly into my eyes with an expression of indecision. I blink sleep from my tired eyes and shift to get a better look at the menace who has surely eaten half my bread already. The cot creaks below me, dwarfed by my unnatural stature. The thing is barely two meters long, a full third of a meter too short and my blistered feet hang off the end like spigots for tap ale. I swat carefully at the little animal, careful not to hurt it. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. The little thing scampers into the darkness before I can even extend my fingers.

As I rise, making sure not to stress any one part of the cot too heavily, the last moonbeams of night flood in through cracks in the wooden wall of my humble shack. They illuminate the crumbs of whatever the rodent was devouring, and I take a quick inventory of the meager supplies in my one-room abode. Only a small chunk is missing from the round ingot of bread at the bedside, and I find happiness in this small bit of luck. I nibble it slowly as I don my only pair of scratchy trousers, made for the second largest man in town, little Earl. They are far too small.

My most precious possession swings from my neck, a faux gold pendant given to me by my Ma. On one side, it displays a design of a length of string doubled over upon itself, right side crossing over the left. This symbol is enclosed within a perfectly drawn hexagon. She claimed to have found it while reaping corn, but I suspect Ma bought it from one of the rare merchants passing through the gully. Every morning I hold it in my bear hands and pray to the celeste above that she is waking too - safe in her bed. It has been six months since her last visit, and I swear the pendant has grown brighter in her absence. I stretch the last piece of my meager outfit over my enormous chest and duck out onto the wide dirt road that runs down the center of Kitford.

Kitford is a small town, a village of seventy or eighty souls brought together by the lush northern ground. Green and golden farmland extends in every direction outside of the town’s sturdy picket fence. To the north lies the Starbane mountain range, just barely visible through the clear morning air. To the south lies the dense Stratesmon woods I work in the fall once the reaping is done. To the west lies a perceptibly eternal forest, the end of which I have never seen. To the East lies my home, the port town of Brown’s Gully where my mother will now be turning over old embers to begin the day’s brew. The gully is loud and full of bustling trade, and my mother insisted over two years ago now that I make my fortune in the wilder inlands. Too selfless to keep me by her side and watch as I blossomed only to burn out like my father, too tender to send me to the Lionskeep training grounds despite my strong physical predisposition, and too proud to admit she needed what little money I would send back. That is the Ma I will love forever. She believes that one day after I have earned enough gold to travel south to the People’s Empire, I will become a great scholar. She will come to live with me amongst a great palace of books and maps that I will build with my strong hands, and finally the world will see me for my mind. Not the monstrous husk that encases it.

The first rays of sunlight crest the horizon and fill the sky with their radiant hazel aura. I watch carefully as the last of the stars are wiped clean from the celestial dome by the pervading orange of the morning. Nothing so beautiful as the midsummer sunrise will ever lose its glamour in my eyes. I lope calmly through the brisk morning towards a group of men already assembling in the streets.

A big man by the name of Sandor greets me with a vivacious smile. I look down into his hazel eyes and take his wrinkled hand in mine. He has something I never found in the Gully. A vivacity only the country can bestow. Even in his fifty years, he still glows like the Gully men do at eighteen. Unlike the others, he is not afraid of me. Even in my third summer as a man of Kitford, I still catch wary glances from the rest of the working troupe. Perhaps they feel intimidated by my size. Perhaps they are emasculated by the fact that I work every job the town has to offer, almost as though I am showing them up as men. I smile at them nonetheless. One day they will make their peace with me and this friendly town will become even friendlier.

Sandor hoists a massive two-handed reaping scythe, feigning ease although I know his back will ache with the effort later. I take it quickly to spare him the pain, twirling it easily in my powerful left hand. The rest of the men are already doing the same, examining their tools as they trek to the fields in a joyfully silent cluster. We are all one as we revel in the clean air, the gorgeous colors, and the waking bustle of the town.