Wymund: Chapter Two

Wymund

Chapter Two: Taking Stock

I was jolted into semi-consciousness by the twin sensations of my own movement and a pain in my hip. When I woke up fully, I kept my eyes shut, trying to remember what had happened. A flash, a shockwave, and a bang. An explosion, I thought, was the only explanation. As it later transpired, I was right. My head bounced off a lumpy piece of earth on the floor. I opened my eyes reflexively, wondering what was now going on. It turned out to be Eldgrimr dragging me across the floor by my ankle.

"Eldgrimr, what are you doing? Let me go!" I shouted at him. He promptly dropped my leg and it fell to the floor. My kneecap hit a large pebble with quite some force and I stifled a grunt of pain. Eldgrimr walked away and began to walk through the town. "I'm looken fur a gut place to sleep dis night," he called. I sat up, rubbing the fresh bruise on my knee. What I saw was a scene unlike any I had ever witnessed. The town hall had been obliterated. All the furniture inside was reduced to ashes and I do not doubt that some of the roofing slates ended up half a mile away. Only a charred skeleton of the support beams held up. Behind it was a small pile of rubble. As I watched, the support beams leant dangerously. Scorched, blackened bodies lay inside the skeleton and crushed and mangled ones, the ones blown through windows or doors, or worse, the walls, lay outside.

Magdalyn, thankfully also alive, was kneeling down behind a tall man, who was sitting up. I went over to see what was going on.

The man had been hit on the back by a burning piece of wood. A half-foot wide patch of burn blisters cut a red-brown strip diagonally across the back of his shoulders, where he had lifted his shirt to allow Magdalyn to burst the blisters and rub a salve on the burnt skin. He had long, straight, dark hair. I went round to face his front, to have a look at him. His face, body, arms and legs were very thin, he had blue eyes, and he was betrayed as an Elf by his distinctively pointed ears. He was drinking watered wine from a waterskin. He was in a bad way, but Magdalyn looked up at me and said "He'll live."

"Greetings, young one." the Elf struggled to say. "My name is Torendror, and Longstaff in the Elvish tongue. By what name do men call you?"

"I'm Siegfried." I'd have been more polite, but my eyes were already roving towards the site of the explosion. You couldn't live long as an orphan without picking up scavenging skills. And with bodies to loot, maybe the odd usable weapon or two on the adventurers...well, I was tempted. So I walked over and started to rifle the pockets of the nearest crumpled corpse.

It was a man's body. He was five and a half feet tall and built fairly heavily, and dressed in leather armour that had been boiled in oil. It was in nobody's size, so I put my hand into his pockets and found a couple of handfuls of loose change. I stuffed the clank into my pouch and rifled his backpack. A broken lantern covered in its oil, a tankard with the handle knocked off and the bottom holed, a dagger with the blade bent, passed through my hands before I decided to get all the people's backpacks together and see what was worth keeping, rather than sift through. Torendror stiffened and groaned loudly as Magdalyn lanced a particularly large blister with a needle.

I went round and collected the backpacks up. There was a pouch or so's worth of change, a long coil of rope, a hammer with seven metal spikes, three daggers that had not been broken or bent, four torches, a kindling hatchet and a metal tinderbox, and best of all, a sword that matched my size and strength. I found it on the body of a particularly large Halfling. I strapped the sword around my waist, shoved the rest of my collection into a backpack and heaved it onto my shoulders. Now I thought I would go into the remains of the hall and look around. Not wanting to get burnt any more than was necessary, I found a corpse wearing a pair of boots that weren't much too large and put them on, then walked in wearing those.

It was awful, the state of things. Bodies were blackened and scorched everywhere. Their skin and flesh peeled off in red layers like an onion. Most of them had broken bones, and some of them showed through the skin. One man, who I guessed had been standing near the explosion, had had nearly every bone broken and was a crumpled wreck. Another had had everything from his stomach down blown out by some flying debris. The entrails sizzled on some of the red-hot coals that lay strewn across the floor, like a macabre string of sausages. The mayor himself had been launched against the front wall in a strange, almost-sitting position. His velvet robes had been burnt down to black rags and his chain of office was now a splatter of molten gold around his neck. I was sick on the guts, a gruesome stew. My vomit slapped against the organs and splashed, the coals hissing, the man's last meal oozing from his stomach to mix with mine. I left the place as fast as I could, violently shaking my head to remove the bodies from my mind's eye.