A Tattered Coat Upon a Stick

Lucius Rufinus– his barbarian friends called him Rufio– was far too young to remember the short reign of Valens, and too low of station to have taken part in the many machinations of Church and State since. Yet, the tide of grand, world-shaping events since the end of that short reign, long before he was born, had conspired to put him in front of the fireplace of a shadowy inn far from home, alone, the last of his money just handed over for room and board, with only the clothes on his back and a sword he barely knew how to use on his hip.

Rufio was a Rhatian– not a subject of the rump state called the Rhatian Empire, but a native of a city called Catonium, in Rhatia, whose ancestors had lived there since well before it was conquered by the Aleani. He was also, by trade, an iconographer, a journeyman of an artisans’ guild that dealt mainly in a process involving a mixture of gilding and painting on a wood-panel medium. This was used to depict saints, scenes from the Sacred Traditions, and abstract representations of the angels, the Transcendent Feminine, or the King on High Himself.

Naturally, business had slowed to a crawl not long after the exiled heretic bishops arrived in Rhatia from the Empire. The King of the Aleani hadn’t formally endorsed the Nikaphorean Heresy yet, but the mere act of taking them in made the whole of Rhatia hold their breath. It didn’t help that the Aleani, before their migration to Rhatia, had been first evangelized into the faith of the King on High by fringe preachers whom the Rhatian Empire had exiled as heretics. They were still looked on, even in their cultural self-perception, as susceptible to unorthodox teachings.

His guild had never dealt in much volume, at least not since the Aleani swept in nearly two centuries ago, but Catonium was a large city, and somewhere in or near it, there was always some bishop, Rhatian patrician, or barbarian lord paying good money to have a church, shrine, or sacred grotto built, renovated, or expanded. Since the Nikaphorean heretics had found acceptance in the Aleani king’s court, however, any such projects had largely omitted the commission of new icons, and only the guild’s most skilled masters could find any work at all. Young journeymen like himself were being left out to dry.

So, around the beginning of autumn, he found he had a difficult choice to make. If he remained in Catonium, a slow descent into poverty was the best he could reasonably expect. To improve his prospects, he would have to leave his friends and family, and go far afield for work. This meant leaving Rhatia, and soon, though the beginning of spring would have been a much safer time to begin a long journey. Rhatia was surrounded by sea on three sides and high mountains on one, any of which would need to be crossed before the winter storms began in earnest.

Leaving was a difficult choice, in his heart, but at least his head had a clear idea of where he ought to go: Aureliopolis. Rhatia’s loss, where the art of iconography was concerned, was the Empire’s gain, and Emperor Alexios had commissioned a grand new basilica in the eastern capital, to be laden with as much sacred art as the most brilliant architects in the known world could design walls and ceilings to hold.

Now, with autumn gone and winter well underway, he had managed to gain the worst of both worlds: he was destitute among strangers, and stuck only halfway between Catonium and Aureliopolis. He paced nervously in front of the inn fireplace, trying to work out how much money he would need from doing odd jobs or asking charity from the locals to make it the rest of the way. He was in a walled town of moderate size in the east of Lyria, the Imperial province just across an inlet of the Inmost Sea from Rhatia. It was far enough into winter that the local farmers wouldn’t be looking for extra hands, but this place was maybe just big enough for some of his skills as an artisan to find demand.

“Relax,” he demanded of himself under his breath, “you’re an able-bodied man, twenty-four years young, and not stupid. There’s something for you to do, wherever you go. You’ll survive digging ditches or cleaning latrines for a little while, if it’ll get you back to your real craft soon enough.”

He looked down at the sword on his hip. It was the last of his possessions, but certainly not the least. At the end of desperation, he could sell it, get enough supplies to push to the next major city… and pray no highwaymen singled him out as an easy mark.

He took a deep breath, made peace as best he could with not seeing Aureliopolis before spring, and looked around the inn’s main hall.

Most of the other guests belonged to one of two groups: one spattered with paint and plaster-dust, the other with a pile of arms and armor laid at one end of its table. The first was promising. Rufio stood straight, forced a friendly smile, and approached.

“Hail.”

The oldest of these men held up a hand in greeting. “Well met… King's grace, you've had a rough time of it, haven't you?”

“Do I really look that bad?”

“You’re caked in mud, your face says you’ve hardly slept in days, and your gait says you’re taught as a bowstring. Something went horribly wrong getting here, didn’t it?”

“...I joined up with a caravan, as soon as I made port in Lyria. It was going all the way to Skesthes in Temonia, but… well, what you see is what’s left of it.”

“Sadly, tales like that are getting more and more common, these days. Come, sit. Was it the Bolthoi, or some manner of shadow-spawn?”

Visions swam before Rufio’s eyes, of bowmen on horseback and a creature at once wolfish and mannish, but too large and twisted in form to match the tales of werewolves that cropped up here and there in backwater villages. “Both.”

The artisans met one another’s eyes nervously.

“Look here,” Rufio said, “I don’t mean to beg charity, if I can earn enough to get back on my feet, but I do at least need someone to give me work. I’m an iconographer, and I gather by what you’re caked in that the lot of you are coming off a day of work on the interior of an affluent home. I can do frescoes, or spread lime over a wall, whatever sort of work you need.”

“We are.” another man, a little younger, said. His green eyes had a heightened, luminous quality to them, like sunlight shining through a forest canopy. The older man’s, Rufio now noticed by the contrast, were dark brown, but seemed to stir and eat up light like the murky depths of the sea. Surreal eyes like these were a feature of strong Nephilic blood, and by no means rare among the Rhatian patrician class, but Rufio was still getting used to how common they were even among lowborn Lyrians. “But, alas,” the younger man went on, “I don’t see us having much for you to do. We’re fixing up a vintner's villa outside of town, see, and that job’s almost done. I’m the painter touching up the frescoes, and I’m making plans to head home in about two, three days.”

“What about the local church, then?”

“Still has its old icons. Seems they were taken down and hidden, back when the Nikaphoreans took power, rather than destroyed outright.”

The older man nodded to the armed group at the other table. “If you want to make enough to get back on the road to Aureliopolis in a hurry– I can only assume that’s where a traveling iconographer would be headed, after Skesthes– talk to them. The short man over there is Hadrian, he sounds like quite the expert on Nephilic ruins and how to extract treasures from them; and their leader, the big fellow with the gray stubble, he’s a renowned monster-hunter.”

“I… see. Thank you.”

Rufio turned to face the other table, and steeled himself. The short man– who wasn’t much shorter than Rufio; these Lyrians averaged a little taller than Rhatians– had the attention of a gray-haired man whose arms bulged out of his lamellar cuirass, weathered and knotted like the trunks of old oak trees. As the two of them poured over an old manuscript on the table, three of the other four were distracted by a conversation of their own, but a young woman sitting on the old man’s other side looked up at Rufio.

Her blue eyes lit up, as a figure of speech, for in literal terms they were already glowing intensely. “Oh, hello!”

The energy of her voice, too, was intense, and… oh, King’s grace, she was beautiful.

Rufio knew two archetypes of feminine beauty: Rhatian women, slight and olive-complected with curled dark hair, and Aleani women, tall and full-figured, marble-pale with flowing blonde locks. The ideal Form of the Lyrian woman, it appeared, took the best of both; wavy dirty-blonde hair in a bouncing bob cut; skin with just enough color to seem to glow with health; cheeks just full enough to accentuate her smile with dimples; and a figure that, even through a thick gambeson and a vest of mail, showed a perfection of ratios the sculptors of antiquity had striven through great toil to capture in idols of pagan goddesses.

The moon, in the language of sacred symbology, was associated with the Transcendent Feminine, as was the Discipline of magic called Lunar, yet here sat an image of the feminine who seemed ready to ascend to heaven, and her glow was more as the sun.

“H-hi.”The last time Rufio had been this flustered by a pretty girl, he had been fourteen; feeling the exact same sensation at twenty-four came as a shock. But, in all fairness his experience in this area had grown little in the last decade, and merely calling this one a pretty girl was a disservice. “My name’s Rufio… or, Lucius Rufinus, rather. You have Rhatian names yourselves, here in Lyria, right?”

Rufio’s mind flicked back to a time he had called a cute Aleana a barbarian to her face. She reacted nearly as badly to that as his fellow Rhatians did, if they sensed he was softening his language about the Aleani in their company.

The Lyrian woman in front of him giggled– a pleasant sound, in itself, though soured somewhat by its ambiguity of meaning. “After a fashion. I’m Atia. Just Atia. What brings you to Lyria, Lucius?”

“I was trying to get to Aureliopolis, but I had a little run-in. Lost my pack. So I’m staying long enough to earn money to replace my supplies… or the entire winter, depending how bad the mountain passes of Temonia are.”

“You can cross even in the worst of it, with a good enough guide. Though, that’s yet another travel expense for you to fret about. Tell me, Lucius, can you fight?”

“Well, I… uh…” He puffed out his chest and gripped his sword-hilt, but if anyone gave the display any credence, it certainly wasn’t him.

“...You’ll do what it takes to prove yourself. We can work with that. Any magic?”

He deflated. “I’ve practiced the Fire Discipline, a little, but I don’t have enough Nephilic blood to make more than a few sparks or some hot air.”

She turned and tapped the shoulder of their leader, the burly gray man. “Father.”

Father?

The enormous monster-hunter turned to face Rufio. “You lookin’ to hunt a Leupin, son?”

“A Leupin, sir?”

“Tall creature, kinda naked-looking on account of its wispy fur and lack of a tail. Looks a bit like a man, bit like a wolf, with just a pinch of bear. Long gangly legs with too many joints.”

Rufio’s breath caught, and his palm on his sword sweated coldly. “I know the beast, sir.”

“How well?”

He looked towards the fire. “I know enough to want every last one of the demons dead.”

The old monster-hunter’s eyes held on Rufio until he met them again. They were blue and luminous, like his daughter’s, except for a thin streak running horizontally across each– in line with a scar across the bridge of his nose– where the iris was dull and the edges of the pupil jagged. “Then you understand why we can’t let it get away with live prey. I’m Valens.”

“Valens? Like that palace guard who was emperor for all of… not quite two years?”

“You know your history. You and Hadrian should get on nicely. Yes, like the emperor. I have some spare armor stored near here, used to belong to my nephew. I think you’d fit in it. You’ll be ready to head up into the mountains tomorrow morning?”

“...I don’t have any camping supplies. Lost my pack on the road.”

“We can outfit you with that, too. Welcome to the company.”