FrivYeti/BastionStory
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The Tale Of Glorious Bastion
So, guess I’d better start at the beginning. I grew up in the city of Chiaroscuro, on the southern coast of the Inland Seas. My mom, she was one of the whores that live in pretty much any big city, and I was a mistake. Lucky me, I guess. Mom did her best, but hell – any city’s pretty much a rough place to live growing up poor, and she was stretched thin enough just taking care of herself. Still, she tried, and that’s worth saying. Never grew thinking nobody loved me.
Anyway, Mom died when I was twelve. Sickness, it was. One of the plagues that swept through the city, not anything about her job, but that was it. I was just one more street rat in a city full of street rats. Weren’t no fun, not at first. Learned to beg, then I learned to steal. I was a big kid, so I didn’t get picked on the way some of the other kids did. Then I met Jekkab.
Jekkab ran a gang – the Glass Lions, he called ‘em. He weren’t too old himself, maybe 20 at most, but he was good at what he did, and the neighbourhood he ran, he ran tight. Didn’t steal, didn’t hurt folks. Just took money to protect ‘em from other gangs, and let his rep do the rest. Anyone didn’t pay up, Jekkab could play rough, but if they did, they had better protection than the guards’d give. Anyway, Jekkab saw somethin’ in me. Maybe just that a kid as big as me’d be a bigger adult. Maybe he just saw a poor kid and decided to help out. Either way, soon I was a member of the gang, and they were a new family for me. Life with the gang was hard, but it was also kinda fun. At first, I was one of the scouts, the runners. Pretty soon I was part of Jekkab’s muscle. I probably coulda take him in a fight, really, but then what? Jekkab was the gang’s heart, and that included me. We were family.
Problem was, Jekkab wasn’t maybe as smart as he coulda been. He had a brain – the guy in the gang that plans stuff for us – fellow named Harren, but Jekkab didn’t always listen to Harren, and he was real ambitious. He ran afoul of some guardsmen decided maybe some of that kickback from our protection racket should be filtering up to them. Harren thought we couldn’t take them, Jekkab thought they wouldn’t push us that hard. Jekkab was wrong. Guardsmen burst in on us one night, and they were playing for keeps. Their swords were out, and they was cutting down everyone got close to ‘em. Jekkab yelled and went at them right off, and got cut down for his troubles. A few of the were running out the back way – Harren, he was smart enough to have had an escape route prepped months earlier just in case, and the guards didn’t know it. I stepped into the path, letting our boys past and stopping any guards coming after ‘em. Pretty soon, there was just me, whaling around with a table leg, and five guards coming at me with their swords while the rest finished off any boys didn’t get out. I figured I was a goner, honest truth.
Then, suddenly, there’s light everywhere, and the leg’s light as a feather, and I hear this voice. “Glorious Bastion”, it says to me, “This world is corrupt. Darkness enshrouds it. Bring back the Light of Righteousness.” And before I know it, the guards I didn’t drop are screaming in fear and running like all of Malfeas is one their heels. I don’t wait for them to figure it out – I hightail it out the back way. In the back alley, I find the other boys, only they shrink back too, looking like they want to run again and aren’t sure they’ll make it. Coming down off the adrenaline high, I put the light and the voice and the feel together, and I remember.
Solar. Sun-King. Lawgiver.
Well. After that, it was a story of getting out of town. I talked to the boys, told them the truth, that I weren’t no demon. That I was going to start building a new gang, and travel around for Righteousness, like the Sun told me. We weren’t gonna be mercenaries, but we were going to solve people’s problems. Make the world a better place, you know? Told ‘em anyone wanting to come along was welcome, anyone else could disappear on their own. Six people decided to come with. Knives. Teego. Python. Geva. Oka. Irvan. Four more, they didn’t, including old Harren. The rest were already dead. The seven of us what were together hightailed it out of town before the Wyld Hunt could figure out what was what and come after us, heading south.
What came next was a whole string of trouble. We worked our way south, fighting bandits and monsters where we could. Once, I scared the crap out of the gang when I just hightailed it into the desert, following a half-remembered image. We came across an old stone temple, wrecked for years. I remembered it the way it used to look, back when it was a big ol’ Manse, but any power it ever had was long gone, and everything was in ruins. Down in the basement, past some broken statues that used to be alive if I remembered right, I found a tomb. And inside, some beautiful golden armor and this pair of smashfists here. I remembered they were mine once, sort of. And then we left the tomb, and said a few prayers, and kept moving.
Everywhere we stopped, we did some good. And everywhere, a couple of people joined up. By the time we hit Gem, we had more than thirty people in the crew, and we hadn’t lost any. Times were good, even if we were moving a step ahead of the Hunt.
They got less good when we moved east, into the desert. Out there, there was more trouble, and less support. Worst of the battles was when we ran into the armies of a Lunar bastard by the name of Seven Lightning Storm. Storm, he had a crew of jackal-men that he used. Hundreds of ‘em. We saved a town – nice little place named Kithis – that we ran into from their attacks, and then stayed to wait for the next wave. Took about a month, and I spent the time getting the locals ready for a fight. Storm came the way we thought, and we made him pay in blood for every step forward, but he had ten times our army. Finally, I managed to corner the bastard and get him into a fight. He was faster than me, but not quite so tough – it was close for a while, but I hurt him bad and he buggered it out for the hills. Didn’t take long past that to shatter the jackals and get victory. When we tallied up, we’d lost close to two hundred out of a town of a thousand. Would have been a lot more, but the local gods helped the wounded recover. Lost Oka and Python, too. Both of ‘em died fighting, though. We stayed in Kithis another month, just in case, and then we moved on. When we did, we did it with fifty more men than when we came in.
The next while was better fights and fewer losses, until we got here to Ranavir. When we did, I knew it was time. The best Righteous thing we could do was stop, and save the place. And we did. Walked in and kicked ass across the Tyrant’s forces, and took over. Now here we are, royal guard for the kingdom of Ranavir. Ready to go.
