Soon to be titled.

[Hallum]

The rising sun lit up the harbour city of Cale and caused the ocean to sparkle with ripples of reflected light. The sky was clear but for three white gulls gliding across thermals, eyeing the blue below for signs of prey. A handful of sailors busied themselves securing the ropes of a small shipping vessel that was dwarfed by its neighbours, two large three-masted frigates flying the yellow and black colours of the Royal Navy. Other vessels were moored nearby, every type from tiny fishing boats, to galleons that made even the frigates look small by comparison, to cutters that while armed were built for speed.

The city itself was only just beginning to wake up, in an hour or so the docks would be packed with traders come to pick up their goods or merchants seeking vessels to transport their own or passengers seeking transport to distant shores. There would be old women come to sell cures or preventative balms for all manner of ails and young women with bangles on their ankles and silver about their necks seeking to provide company, for a price. But for now, all was quiet, almost muted.

It was amidst this tranquility that Hallum stood, leaning against the King's Office for Trade, his blue eyes never leaving the name in fading gold letters on the side of the small trading vessel, The Swanelle. He was absentmindedly chewing his lower lip, a habit he had whenever he felt particularly nervous or anxious. His long thin fingers were continually raking through his thick blonde hair, occasionally tugging on a lock or two as if he saw to pull them from his head.

Not everyone came to the docks for money. Some came for news. Hallum needed news. Every day for six days he had walked the long trek from the hills and down into the city, past the Duke's Square, and along the Ship Way to the harbour. Each day he had walked back, his heart a little heavier, his mind working up new and more unlikely explanations. His father had promised him a month ago by letter that he would return soon. It had been almost a year. Just the thought of seeing his father again had been enough to spur him back and forth.

He shivered pulling his cloak about him as he watched the gangway being hoisted out onto the dock, then felt a chill run down his spine as he watched each person disembark. Not one was unmarked. He saw an old man with short grey-white hair, shirtless, his side bandaged and the cloth soaked red with blood, leaning heavily on a younger woman with long raven-black hair, her once pretty face marked by burns and her dress torn revealing thin wounds that could only have been made with a blade. They were followed shortly by a middle aged man with a large paunch and a thick brown beard, one hand holding the cloth that covered his eye, dried blood in rivulets on his pale white face.

He watched each one step off with rising terror, ten, twenty, thirty. Finally the flow stopped and the wounded waited at the bottom as one of the dockmen ran off towards the city. A moment later a man stepped into few on the gangway, the only person Hallum had seen stepping of the ship that held himself high. His garb, hardy leather studded in places and the sword at his side marked him as a soldier, and Hallum recognised him immediately.

"Victor!" He shouted the name, jumping up and running until he reached the bottom of the gangway, gentling squeezing past the casualties until he could make himself seen."Victor! What happened? Where's my father? What happened to these people? Victor!"

Victor Avornath was one of his father's guards. A grizzled veteran of the last war, Victor had retired and hired himself out, sick he had said of war and the bloodletting of man. He had instead turned to training soldiers for others and Hallum's father had said once that the fair haired southerner was worth all the men he had at his command.

Avornath closed the distance without a word. When he was finally a pace from Hallum, towering over the boy by a good head and shoulders, he shook his head sadly. "The provinces were over-run. The barbarians from the western wastes broke The Great Wall a week ago, it happened so fast your father couldn't prepare an effective defence... I saw him last at the city gates with a detachment of his lancers trying to break through... I'm sorry Hallum.. he didn't make it."

It was like all his nightmares had come true, he felt his world crumbling around him like shattered glass, the shards tearing through his flesh and biting into his heart. The wood beneath his feet seemed to bob back and forth like the motion of a ship at sea and it was only the firm steadying hand of the veteran that kept him standing up. But the grip did not stop tears from welling up in his eyes and cascading down his cheeks or his stomach twisting in half. He choked back the tide and finally found his voice, though shaky and stuttering it was.. "Tell me... tell... tell me everything..."