It's been exactly six days since I got out of the Citadel, and I've already killed three people, assaulted a Warden, and escaped custody twice. One murder got me a ten-year sentence, and that was lenient on the Justicar's part. With my current list of crimes, I'm looking at a hanging sentence with no hope of leniency, without question.

Sun's blood. I've killed three people in the last six days. One was a lawman, just doing his job, trying to catch a dangerous criminal. Another, the one that started this whole mess, was just protecting his home from an invader. The third? I don't even know. Wrong place at the wrong time, I guess. Just someone who got in my way. How did I get to this point? How did things in my life go so horribly awry that I got caught in this downward spiral that I now can't get out of? I wish I knew.

Later, I have a vague recollection of running through town, people staring at me and shrinking away. There are gunshots, but they sound so far away that I barely pay attention to them. I'm staying low and trying to use cover, running primarily on pure instinct, my mind kicked fully into flight mode. I remember screams, and I remember thrusting out with my knife and a wetness on my hands. I remember running out into the darkness, sounds of pursuit behind me.

There are bushes to the right, and I dive into them, looking out through the branches into the inky wet blackness around me. My pupils are so big right now that I can see just fine, despite the lack of light, and I see several armed men—five, maybe six—fanning out and looking for me. Things are suddenly so clear right now, and the rest of the world seems to be moving at a crawl. They won't find my footprints in the dark and the rain, but they might find my hiding place; I should stay mobile.

I get on my feet, hunched down almost doubled over, and I lope along the shrub line, always keeping something between me and the search party. I'm starting to run out of cover, though, and one of the watchmen has placed himself directly between me and my path of escape. I move quickly, stealthily up to him while his back is turned, my bloody knife in my hand, my other hand outstretched. I stand straight up and cover his mouth with my free hand, bringing my blade up and dragging it across his throat in one smooth, efficient motion. He stiffens for a moment, then I feel all the fight go out of him as his muscles slacken and he falls limply to the ground. He's got a mace on his belt and there's a rifle on the ground in front of him. I already have a knife and I don't really like bludgeons that much, but a rifle could come in really handy. I pick up the sodden firearm, then I quickly check all the likely places for spare ammo. For my trouble, I score a belt pouch full of bullets, which I'm sure I'll put to good use. I tie the pouch to my own belt and hold the rife in my free hand, my other hand still clutching my knife.

The other watchmen have moved off in different directions, so it's time for me to make a run for it. Still trying to stay somewhat low, I run off in a direction that looks promising, hoping it won't put me too far off course for Pullic.

The Crying Forest is one of the few places in the Demesne where you can still find the Folk. When the Empire's armies and settlers came to Jeril four hundred years ago, they started grabbing up chunks of land pretty quickly. The Folk resisted, but there weren't enough of them to do anything but delay the Empire's expansion by a few years. Eventually, the vast majority of the Folk were pushed up north, in what's now known as the Folklands. A few are still bumping around the Demesne, though; some of them live among the rest of us, just normal folk—no pun intended—trying to get by, trying not to attract too much attention with their gifts and little uniquenesses. There were quite a few, though, who weren't content to be pushed off onto some barren stretch of rock, who wanted to stay in their ancestral lands. So, they did the only thing they could do: they grabbed a piece of land for themselves.

The area where I'm walking now used to be called the Fields of Gold, about two hundred, two hundred fifty years ago. One night, though—overnight—a forest sprang up, completely eclipsing the Fields and swallowing up two towns and more than a few encamped armies in the process. Most of those people were never heard from again, and there are a number of theories about what happened to them. Some say the Folk killed them, or ate them, or turned them to stone. Others think that those who were caught within the Forest became Folk, themselves, forever turning their back on their humanity. The most prevalent opinion, though—and this is not without a little bit of evidence to back it up—is that the people who were occupying the Fields when it happened became the trees. The theory goes that the Folk collectively cast a mighty incantation, one that took the souls of everyone in the Fields and cast them about the land, turning them into the very trees that now make up the Crying Forest. This is partially supported by the fact that the trees tend to move about and, at night, seem to have a near-sentience about them. Mainly, though, it's because you can hear them weeping under the light of the full moon.

At any rate, I'm giving you this long-winded bit of local history not because I think it's interesting, but because I'm now walking through the middle of what is widely considered to be the single most haunted place in the Demesne, and I'm pretty sure it's a full moon tonight. And that is really freaking me out.

This is the way your world begins to unravel.

You're not poor, but you're not rich, either. Your parents can support you, but they have to work pretty hard to do it; this, of course, is something you take for granted right up until the day the both die when your house burns to the ground.

Two emotions dominate your landscape: the deep and abiding grief of loss, and the dull red anger of abandonment. You wander around for a while, trying to parse this new world in which you're utterly alone, until a third emotion—desperation—comes to roost in the hole that was your life. It's not all bad, though. Desperation gives you strength, pushes you to survive, goads you into doing things you wouldn't have even considered three days ago.

You steal things, first to survive, then because the distinction between right and wrong has started to erode. You fall in with that crowd, the ones your mother always wanted you to avoid, and you learn new ways of stealing. You fight, you lie, you cheat, you swindle, you rob; you tell yourself that you're surviving, but you're starting to enjoy it and, deep down, you hate yourself for it.

You're sixteen, and you're getting ready to roll some young dandy in the wrong alley on the wrong night. You don't realize that he has a pistol until he's recovered from your blow, sucker-punched you, and pinned you to the wall with its muzzle in your face. He sees the fear, the stark hopelessness of someone who had always believed that he had died a long time ago but is now facing his own mortality for real. He takes pity.

At first you hate him for his weakness, but over time you start to respect him, to like him, and eventually you become friends. He teaches you things that your other friends can't: how to read, how to fence. He shows you that people are people, not just marks waiting to be rooked.

But you've still got your other friends to worry about: petty, violent, selfish. You're with them, lying in wait in an alley again. A figure comes into view, wobbling unevenly through the shadows. A drunk? No, an old man, barely able to stand he's so arthritic. The predators, your friends, pounce, and you don't even think. You move, knife drawn, and you plunge it home, blade into flesh. The old man trembles, then backs up, looking down at the fourteen-year-old boy you just stabbed in the back, the one who had, just a moment ago, been advancing on him with a gnarled wooden cudgel. You look at the others, and they scatter, shaken, unsure of what to do when faced with such sudden betrayal. You usher the old man away from the alley because they'll be back. You know they'll be back.

You've got blood on your hands and on your clothes, and you're pushing an old man through the streets—an old man who is also blood-stained (though it's not his own), because of your earlier handiwork. People point and gasp. What he doing to that old man? Stop him! Guards, guards! The guards come, and they haul you away.

At the hearing, the old man speaks on your behalf, as does your friend, the nobleman's son. Even so, it's not enough. Unlike you, the boy you killed has parents, and they want vengeance. They demand it.

You're eighteen years old, and you're going to spend the next ten years in prison.

Something tells me to stop where I am. You might think that I mean some instinct or intuition gets triggered, and I stop where I am, but that's not what I mean at all. I mean I'm walking along, completely oblivious to the world around me, when suddenly I hear something say, “Stop where you are, please.” So I do.

I look around and don't see anything, and hope really, really hard that my mind is just playing tricks on me. It's never played tricks like this before, but I did just fall off of an airship, and I probably hit my head at least once on the way down. Careful not to actually move, I turn in place, taking in my surroundings. Now, I consider myself to generally be a pretty observant guy. When you live on the streets and steal for a living, you tend to hone your instincts and your senses to a razor edge. Even so, I'm caught completely flat-footed when a creature that's got to be at least nine feet tall steps out from behind a tree that can't possibly have been hiding it.

The creature is, like I said, about nine feet tall. It's covered in hair and it kind of stoops a little, and while its arms and legs look thickly muscled, its abdomen looks kind of soft and pudgy and it seems to have a pot belly. The hands are truly massive, disproportionate to the rest of the gigantic body, and they've only got two fingers and a thumb each. The face is what really grabs my attention, though. The creature's head is kind of small—again, not in proportion to the rest of its body—with huge, tufted ears, a long, thin nose, and enormous, saucer-like eyes that reflect the dying light like huge pools of water. And, as inhuman as this thing looks, there's something very human about it.

“Uh,” I say, stupidly.

“Thank you,” it says back, not blinking.

“Uh?” I repeat, though more as a question than a statement of general cluelessness.

“I asked you to stop, and you did. Thank you.” The creature cocks its head at me, as if it's not really sure what to make of this short, skinny creature with tattered, blood-crusted clothes. “Are you of the blood?”

Whitehorse. Sun's blood.

Back when I was a sixteen-year-old hoodlum, before the Empire took it upon itself to reform me, there were stories about Whitehorse. If any of them are to be believed, he's been a Warden for at least twenty years, and he's arrested or killed more than a hundred lawbreakers. By my estimate, the guy's got to be pushing fifty or sixty, but it hasn't dulled his edge. According to the stories, in fact, it just makes him meaner, more ruthless, more efficient. The guy was a legend when I was a kid, and I used to figure that was all he was, some sort of urban rumor told to scare punk kids like me straight. If Cor's on my trail, though, and he really did tell Bergen that he was partnered with Whitehorse, that means that the guy's real, stories or no. I'm not sure I believe everything I've heard about him, but I figure if even a third of the stories are true, then I'm probably just as fucked as I think I am.

[Current word count: 8155]
[Edit: You can now see my current word count over on the sidebar to the right.]