Rebuilding Thunder: Chapter 1

It was stick duty for the Knights again. On the battlefield they’d come to call their home after the YWS Castle had been overrun by beasts and barbarians, a rainy day meant sagging tents. Sagging tents meant knights poking up at the gathered pools of water so the rain would run off the tents and into the grass where it belonged. This day in the unforgiving sheets of rain, the Knights were especially miserable: they’d been up through the night while the storm raged.

Rydia was no better off. She had been woken from her early sleep by the sound of rain and had immediately jumped into action. She sent members of the council off to round up the rain sticks, then walked with them through the drizzle to hand them out to the Knights. She would not let herself hide in her council tent. She would not let her feet dry out on the makeshift wooden floor. She would not take a comfortable sleep beneath the reinforced and un-saggable tent roof. She would pass out the sticks and make herself look at the ragged faces of the Knights, take in their hopelessness, and remind herself that something had to be done.

As dawn broke, she was still sitting by the door of her tent, sticking her feet out in the weather so they pruned as she imagined the Knights’ feet would. In truth, there was nothing remarkable about this day. With the monsoons that had swung in to open the rainy season a month or two ago, stick duty was mostly all anyone could remember. The miserableness was nothing new, either. They’d spent the entire two months picking off whatever beasts wandered out from YWS castle. They’d spent the entire two months looking back at what had once been their home.

And yet, something was different for Rydia this morning. There was a Knight in a tent a few rows over from her own who had, for the duration of their “displacement” as the council liked to say, kept a strong and steady expression. He had always grabbed his rain stick with intent and went straight to saving roofs from collapse. Every day, a strong arm, without fail.

This morning, however, his elbow had been weak and loose. The rain stick had wavered from side to side after Council Member Lauren had given it to the Knight.

It was as if they were all climbing a mountain during a landslide. Their feet were moving, but the sky was getting further and further away, and if they didn’t do something soon, they’d be buried under miles of inescapable mud.

Rydia thought of Nate. There had been so much he’d taken care of that most of those now gathered on the battlefield couldn’t even begin to understand. She’d heard the talk around the fires on clear nights. How on Earth could a company this large have possibly been kicked out of a Castle they’d held and operated with ease for so many years? There were speculations it was intentional, but the speculations were soon abandoned because no one could fathom why anyone would intend for this exile.

Of course it wasn’t intentional. It was simply that so much of the security of the castle rested on one person’s shoulders. Nate made the perimeter checks each morning, fiddling with small machines and odd constructions he called traps -- things no one else could understand -- and Nate invented the system of walls and doors around the castle. And Nate held the secret to securing the basement. And Nate knew the right frequency for the crystal on the roof to vibrate to keep back flying beasts. So when he left, it was only a matter of time before the leaks started.

Now, it had been months since Rydia had seen that crystal, those machines, those walls and doors, and she began to realize that waiting would not fix the situation. The council and the Knights held out hope that Nate would reappear over the horizon as suddenly as he’d gone, but there was a moment when hope ran out, and that moment was now.

“Tell the Knights to pack up and prepare to move,” said Rydia. “Ration enough food for the council and the remaining members for a month, and give the rest to the Knights. Tell them when the rain stops, they are to assemble in the clear space in front of this tent.”

“Yes, of course, Rydia,” said Juniper, “But why?”

“We’re going hunting.”