Mahtan Elensar

Another day, another job. This is not the thing we usually do, me and my wife. We can make a good living from her good music so we travel from town to town so she can perform and earn us a living. What? No, I work as her bodyguard, but there's not really a point charging my own wife is there? It's a dangerous job for an young bard to travel around by herself, specially when you're the prettiest girl of the Hearthlands. That's kind of how we met in first place, stubborn as she is she was moving from town to town by herself only to get in trouble. Lucky of her I was in the right place at the right time and lucky of me she's been there too, otherwise I wouldn't have met the woman of my dreams. So, after this little gang trying to rob her, we've been traveling together, we fell in love and there we were, doing an unusual job for some extra scields since music haven't been enough to warm up these people's hearts and ease their purses on these cold days lately. The name's Mahtan, by the way. Mahtan Elensar. Married to the beautiful Ireth Elensar and this is what happened to us in our last job.

We were told to meet this guy at this tavern for a quick but safe job. Yea, I know that "safe" is a relative word but I'm not risking my way through the Hellfrost Pass unless I really need to... or unless the pay is really good. So we've met some nice people, they were waiting on the very same table, probably waiting for the same person I was. Nobody would say a word, there was this lady with a snow leopard sitting by the table. Yea, inside the tavern. I really like animals, I had no problem with it but people on the other table seemed to be really uncomfortable, still no one dared to tell her to leave her big cat outside and this made smile inside. There was this other guy with a big nasty scar. I wanted to ask him how did he get it but I might not really want to know.

So he finally got there more delayed than a lover's period. He's a farmer that asked us to run a cart to a nearby village and collect some flour and we'd be paid 50 scields for that. It seemed fair, at the moment. Protect a cart from one village to another, safer investment than not being even sure if we're being paid at all for music. So we all accepted the job, we did buy some warmer clothes before leaving.

On the road we got attacked by a small band of orcs. They were fierce and one even dared to go for my wife when I was standing right there by her side. Stupid pile of green... never mind. They were probably hungry, judging by the way they were mindlessly attacking, they couldn't be intimidated by me. Yea, I can be intimidating. I know I might seem a real gentleman when we're talking and drinking but you don't wanna see me in the battlefield behind my shield. So, I was saying they couldn't be intimidated, but it was their doom. We got rid of each of them without a single scratch, thank Sigel. We resumed our travel after this incident.

We stopped by a tower for the night, it was deserted. As we investigated inside we found someone was killed inside of it. It was a messy room with what seem to be the rest of somebody's skeleton. I started to wonder if the Orcs started to eat people, but that might have been a wolf or something. We spent our night on that tower peacefully, we even took our horses in.

So we finally got to Dunros. And man, there were rats there. Lots of rats. At first I thought there were dozens, then hundreds... There were thousands of them on that town. It's like the rat god told them Dunros was the promised land of cheese and there they were claiming the town as their own. So we started investigating for the cause of all those rats as we proceeded to do our jobs. I even went to the rat catcher, the guy was the only one in the whole town that seemed to be happy about the rats, and why wouldn't he be? I got nothing from him. At the granary we found out that one of the granaries had no rats. There were some sort of magical symbols that I have no knowledge of that seemed to ward it from the rats. All the other granaries seemed to have such symbols too but they were removed. I don't know if the wards are something common in granaries or if somebody knew something about the rats and tried to ward them. Either way as we finished loading the cart I saw something that made me shake in fear: the village was being overrun by rats, they were everywhere. I thought the floor was moving, I said, "Oh, lord Sigel it's a horde!" Then I ran out, I didn't grab no flour or nothing and jumped on the cart, I ran for my life!

So there we were on a cart, running for our lives. There were so many rats in front of us I feared the horses might tumble and fall for them, but the light of my heart (that's my spouse) knows a few tricks about leading animals through music and with the help of the girl with the big ass leopard they kept the rats from attacking the horses. And man, that was a cat that really did his job at killing all the rats jumping on our cart. We've managed to save some people by pulling them into the cart while we fought the rats and taking care to not damage the sacks of flour... The city was overrun by rats and there was nothing we could do. I feel ashamed to say that rats put me to run, but you had to be there to know...