Forworded is forarmed: This gets a little rough, but Tob has been at war for some years.

Tob waited for the mayor, a low noble of little regard, of a town called Lud on the front of the Race War to permit his people to evacuate. At that point in his military career he had been commanded by the King's former Field Marshall, now declared a general by a Baron, to muster the remaining populations on the front into functioning militias.

Lud lay west of Brendonmyr, on the north coast, before the race war. It was a backwater of the rotting remains of the Kingdom, forgotten by what passed as time and progress in the center of the Baronies. The world had had more important things to worry about than Lud for some time, and now that it was paying attention again, it was not to bring good news.

The Thane, Madoc Zillah, was seated in his great hall, which was little more than a large barn with cobble-stone flooring, small block glassed windows, and an enormous hearth in the center of the room feeding a wide and hungry chimney above it. The lady Zillah, was seated at his side on a chair smaller than his though no less ornate than his own.

Around the hall old men acted as stewards and young boys dressed for the role of men-at-arms, and women of every age busied themselves with all manner of chores. As he came into town, Tob had seen a woman shoeing an old horse, and a boy vainly attempting to smith iron. They had been without able bodied men for some time.

"Thane, my leige, your scouts and seers have reported truly. Lud is lost." Tob had no diplomatic skills to speak of, and gave bad news with the same tone one would use to order lunch in a tavern.

"Lud is not yet lost," the Thane replied flatly. He was a chieftan in his prime, broad of belly and back, with a ruddy complexion that spoke of both gluttony and hard work. "That is why the King sent thee to me, innit?"

"I am here to win the war. Lud will be overrun by a hoard of Dolfanc in less than two days time."

The Thane turned to his bride. "He'd have be give up my land. Of course he would, the nomad, wouldn'e?"

She looked at him and smiled wanly, dutifully. Her face was wrinkled with worry prematurely. Her hands belonged to a woman barely out of her twenties, but her face wore a war's worth of worry.

"This is my land," the Thane said to Tob, with a tone that implored understanding. "Without it I've nothing. This land is the Thane, and I am merely its steward. I am this land's. Lud must remain while I live."

"Lud's fate was sealed when the Dolfanc breached the last dwarven stronghold, and continued their westward drive. I can keep the dolfanc from profiting from Lud, but Lud is dead."

The Thane not accustomed to candor, and certainly not to candid speculations as to the state of his kingdom, and its imminent demise. "Surely the king would'na send one of his justifiers, one of his best, here just to tell me to roll over take dolfanc where Verengaard ain't lookin'!"

The Thane did not know the king was dead, and had been for some years. This area was isolated, to say the least. Tob was not a brilliant man, but he had been told that bearing the news of the king's demise was likely to lead to one's death, particularly in these times and in this remote and provincial but fiercely loyal area, and that made sense to him.

"I came here to save Lud, but Lud is lost. You can save the people of Lud, or ... not."

"Save my village you coward!" the Thane shouted at Tob. Tob let the insult hit him with quiet dignity and the knowledge that the gods would set that score aright before too long. He did not expect the Thane to take the news well.

"You will stay in spite of my ... suggestion?" The Thane stared at him as though expecting Tob to flinch or back down, which of course he wasn't even tempted to do. "All right. Give me whatever you have that can walk. You'd do well to take as much of the village as you can into the keep. It is also you granary, isn't it?"

The Thane was satisfied, and his wife looked worried, still. She would not attempt to sway him in front of a stranger, and risk making the Thane dig in his heels to save face. She knew him better than that, and would plead with him privately.

The town was filled with young boys, old men, and women with few means, all able bodied men having been conscripted, or having fled to avoid conscription. A handful of the old men left were able enough to muster a limited defense of the town, enough to slow down the approaching hoard of dolfanc long enough for the rest of the town to evacuate, if they hurried.

They were old men, and farmers mostly, but they had all hunted once. None get old without first being young, and they all knew a trick or two from their own youth. They were each useful, if not adequate. Tob thought that with twice as many of them and twice as long to prepare and half as many approaching dolfanc they might have half a fly's chance in a frog's mouth. Still, the stand was his to make, and his gods did not demand sacrifice to lost causes. If it was his to do, it could be done.

Tob thought, and thought hard. He was not a creative man, or even a particularly smart one. He was determined, and trained. The village was lost - that was certain. The dolfanc were coming - that was certain.

In times like this, and there were many during the race war, that he wished his friend Janus was there with him to have ideas, and magic. Without those three resources - a true friend, good ideas, and a little active intervention from the gods - Tob didn't have the tools to win. He had no skill for losing well, and little training for it, and here he was, about to face a calculated loss in a war he found incalculable.

The Thane took the women, girls, and young boys into his keep, an earthen fortification in a hillside that abutted the town, facing the sea shore in the far distance. It was somewhere between a cave, a casbah, and an overstuffed mausoleum. They would not be safe there for long, unless the dolfanc passed them by.

Tob estimated, judging by the smoke in the Northern sky, judging by the flights of birds and deer from that direction, that they had a day at best to prepare to be in enemy territory.

Tob treated it like enemy territory. Three dray horses, old, swaybacked, threadbare and lazy, were driven mercilessly to pull down every hut in the village. The old men of the village were not thrilled with this, but they accepted that their end was coming soon, and that they could go long before their grandchildren or at the same time. Huts and cottages are much easier to build than legacies, and they all came down with snapping, dusty implosions that scattered hay and mice across the village square.

The houses, now heaps of wood, wattle, and thatch, were all doused with all the oil that could be found, which Tob wasn't sure would be enough to grease a skillet, much less strike up scattered thatch and timber. The candles from the town's temple were raided, cut and smashed to small bits, and seeded into the hay. Verengaard would surely approve - they would cast a lovely light in the darkness.

A few blinds were erected outside the village, at the tree line. They were little more than reasonably well concealed trenches, because time was of the essence. If the men were discovered in them, the trenches would do double duty as graves.

After nightfall, Tob waited in a treetop with no moon for company, with an arrow bound with tallowed tindermoss notched in his bow, and waited. Below him were a dozen men too old for this night's cold or the coming heat of battle. Before him spread a demolished village backed up against a well defended hill that was nonetheless doomed as far as he could tell. Above him the triumvirate gods looked down with worrisome inscrutability from their trio of stars.

He'd made no speech to the men, but he felt he should have. He had no tongue for speeches. He'd gone up the tree with this statement: "This is it, men. Fight for your daughters and sons. Verengaard shine on you."

Far below him, he heard the snapping of the dead falls he'd placed make it more obvious that the usual discordant thudding of a hoard of dolfanc attempting to be sneaky. He had reached for the pouch on his belt that held a hot coal in a bed of shaved black birch bark, to light the arrow and set the carcass of the village alight. He hoped bitterly that the old men had already taken cold and died in their trenches so they would not have to see their village razed to save it from being overrun, only to be rent and ruined by dolfanc. Possibly they would make a good stand, a few of them were still passable archers, even if their bow arms were no longer strong or steady.

Minutes crept by as the dolfanc surrounded the town, and inundated it, overrunning the position of the King's lone Justifier and the rear guard of Lud. With a few gentle breaths, Tob produced a spark from the hot coal, and soon the tindermoss flared and burned brightly. He volleyed a long, arcing shot across the field at the town, and a the arrow, flaming brightly in the night sky, landed on a berm of thatch and beams that had been a cottage that afternoon.

Fire shot up out of the mounded wood and hay, first in a small flame, and then in spreading gouts of fire as the paraffin the militia had seeded the ruins with earlier bloomed into a fiery harvest. Instantly the village's remains were visible in the dark night, a giant pyre for Lud. Several centuries of eking by, storing grain for long winters, meeting grandchildren on the way to the grave, surviving epidemics and droughts, defending the town from invaders and bandits, all gone, up in smoke.

In the growing firelight, the remains of lud were illuminated. Dolfanc were silhouetted, their shadows cavorting in the growing flames. Hay, seeded with paraffin, burns remarkably quickly, and quite hot. Around the town, the dolfanc stopped to watch what was a ruin become a conflagration. They were too far away to hear clearly, but Tob could see the confusion and rage in their eyes, and he thought of the displeasure of their dark god as he was robbed of a victory.

From his perch, Tob could see that the trajectory of his arrow had been observed, and a small but growing group of smaller dolfanc were headed toward his area of the treeline. They were goblins, and not particularly capable as individuals. They had a surprising level of tenacity and ingenuity in larger numbers though. Tob supposed they were a bit like bees, who were individually as dumb as paste, but as a hive could build wonders. The few headed to his position were armed with small spears, hatchets, and knives. They stood a good chance of climbing to his position, but more likely they would either cut the tree out from under him or burn the woods around him. Tob regarded all of this without a great deal of excitement - he was growing used to this environment, and skirmishes like these.

A volley of arrows came from the treeline, missing the goblins soundly, but changing their course. The goblins dashed into to the woodline, taking cover from the meager barrage sent by the aged archers.

Tob knew the old men in the forest, valiant to the last, were doomed, as they had been when the Thane forbid their evacuation earlier. That their doom was actually at hand stabbed Tob in his gut, as he stood in a tree, safe for the moment and practically doomed himself.

Some motion in the center of the burning village caught Tob's eye. Through the swirling sparks and dense black smoke he saw a group of dolfanc surrounding a carriage drawn by four terrified horses.

Tob's jaw dropped. He had seen the Thane usher all of the village into the well defended hillside, seen the fortification locked down. He had made sure the entrance was reasonably well concealed. Yet here was the Thane, his wife, his daughters, and a man at arms not yet old enough to be called a man, in a carriage in the middle of the burning town of Lud, surrounded by enraged dolfanc.

"What did you do? Oh by Verengaard and Beldrem, what did you do!?" Tob asked aloud, to himself, to the Thane, to the embittering and cruel fates.

The Thane's lady had struggled to persuade him to flee, and he had eventually relented, fleeing with just his family, abandoning his people and his land at once, fleeing under the cover of darkness, fleeing to the center of a demolished town overrun with the the monstrous creations of Trauger. Their departure under cover of night coincided, horribly, with the dolfanc's arrival instead of preceding it. When Tob lit up the town, he brought up the curtain on a tragedy that Tob had unwittingly helped to produce.

Tob watched helplessly as the lead horses, rearing in panic, were felled by swings from ogrish clubs, their long faces torn and caved in an instant. The boy in the driver's seat, armed with a buggy whip, leaped helplessly to the roof of the carriage, his eyes wide with terror, gleaming with tears in the firelight. Dolfanc of all sizes surrounded the carriage.

The Thane emerging from the carriage like a bull released for a fight. He was an imposing man, and dressed in his armor, carrying an enormous sword in one hand and a short spear in the other. He cut a swath into the approaching goblins, and fended off a few orcs with his spear tip. He was trying, heroicly, if belatedly, to defend his land and kin, and Tob was awestruck by the doomed grandeur of the gesture.

A hail of sling stones and a few large rocks pelted the Thane, but he kept his feet until he was felled by an enormous burning timber, hurled by a ogre of such size and ferocity that Tob assumed he must be a chieftan in his own right.

The boy had disappeared from the top of the carriage, and Tob could not see him. The Lady Zillah and her daughter were dragged from the carriage, and Tob was certain that they would be torn to bits by the dolfanc as punishment for destroying and abandoning the town instead of leaving it to provision the enemy. He had seen the remnants of the dolfanc's ongoing rampage in previous battles, and it was hard to even identify what portion of a man was left after the dolfanc had finished venting their considerable wrath. Tob did not expect what he saw. The dolfanc, rather than slaughtering the women on the spot, were carrying them off.

"Oh ... Oh no."

The woman and girl struggled helplessly as ogres toted them away from the firelight like sacks of grain, while goblins and orcs pawed at them. Tob had no plan. There were no conditions under which rescue was feasible, that he could see. He was alone, outnumbered, and safely positioned in a treetop while two innocents faced horrors he naively hadn't imagined existed.

Tob looked up at the God-star he identified as Owl, and said with the intimate tone that his people used to speak to thier gods in private, "Bless these arrows to your purpose, and carry those two to your nest. And damn you, damn you, damn you for using me to this end."

He looked at the field below him, at the distant woman and her daughter, and let a creeping sense of coldness overflow him, fill him entirely with nothing, merciful emotional oblivion. He kissed the broad, razor sharp leaf shaped arrowhead, took careful aim, and fired.

"Please, please let my aim be true." It was, and the arrow pierced the screaming form of the Lady Zillah through the middle. He watched, the view clear to his piercing eyes in spite of the long distance, as her body went utterly rigid, and the ogre carrying her struggled maniacally to throw her off of his shoulder, eventually shoving her lifeless form down the length of the arrow shaft that had pinned her to him, flesh to flesh with shock and pain for him instead of her.

A knock shook through the poplar that was Tob's roost. I should have picked a harder tree, he thought, understanding that the goblins, finished with the old men, were cutting down his tree rather than attempt the climb up after him. He had another shot to make yet, and could not yet consider his own predicament.

"Just one more, and I swear you can cry all you like later, just one more," Tob said aloud to himself, drawing another broadheaded arrow from his quiver, staining it willfully with blood from his own forearm, and aiming it with grim purpose. The ogre was jogging for cover, the girl flopping limply on his shoulder, heading in a direction diagonally towards Tob and his soon to be falling tree. Tob let the arrow fly, willing it to send the girl into the clearing with her parents. The arrow tore through her thigh with a force that staggered the ogre, and the first daughter of Lud wailed pitiously in anguish. Tob knew the shot would be a fatal one, but it was not the instant, painless death that he had hoped for.

Tob's tree, knocking and bouncing from axe strikes below, began to list, burdened as it was with his weight. No one who has ever treed a bear will ever leave themselves in such a position of vulnerability, and Tob was no exception. He unstrung his short bow, and dropped it. Laughter from below told him the goblins were not discouraged by their quarry's apparent decision to disarm himself. The chopping continued, and he reached for the rope he had previously strung to another, lower tree.

In the dark, this promised to be dangerous, and painful, but it was what he was trained to do and he had vast reserves of willpower to draw on. He worried for a fraction of a thought about the coming descent and its hazards, and the keening wail of the dying daughter of Thane Madoc Zillah shamed him for even considering worry for his own safety.

Tob grabbed the rope in both hands, turned so that his travel would be backwards as well as blind, and fell off the branch, arcing into the darkness.