Excerpt: Final Fantasy XI: The Age of Adventurers

The heavy Wivre-drawn cart rumbled slowly down the road in the thick forest, vine tendrils occasionally brushing the broad, muscled shoulders of its driver. He paid them little mind; the Galka was the sort of solid, implacable person whom little seemed to affect, with a squat, square head, a black well-trimmed beard along an iron jaw, and a flat, chiseled face that rarely changed expression. His tail drooped behind him over the bed of the cart, where a Hume man lay snoring faintly, lying on his back with a black tricorne hat draped over his face and his armed crossed behind his head. The Galka rarely paid the man a glance, idly flicking a leather whip over the back of the large beast of burden with its armor-plated back and clubbed tail ahead of him. Such efforts only produced a grunt or snort of displeasure, and did not increase the cart’s rambling pace one bit.

At length, the Galka spoke, reaching back with one enormous, three-fingered hand to pinch the leather-booted foot of his companion. “Better get up, Garath. Will need your eyes open for this stretch, I ‘spect.”

Garath awoke with a congested snort and sat up, his hat slipping down over his face. “We there yet?” he mumbled sleepily, adjusting the hat and looking around, brushing a passing vine out of his face.

“Not just yet. Still a few more hours before we reach La Vaule.”

The Hume stretched with a deep yawn. He was, at first glance, a strikingly ugly man, with a broad nose that dominated his deeply tanned face; long gray hair fell to his chin on either side of his face, combed only enough to keep it from snarling. He was garbed in leather pants with knee-high boots of soft cured hide, a broad buccaneer’s belt, and a corsair’s frockcoat with bits of bedraggled lace at the sleeves and neck. His clothes were all rumpled and travel-stained, clean enough but having seen better days; the only well-kept items on his person were his black leather tricorne hat, and a shining hexagon hanging almost innocuously on the opposite hip from a slim rapier. Despite his casual appearance, he carried himself with the practiced, easy deadliness of the trained adventurer, and his dark eyes as he looked around at their surroundings were alert and wary.

“You could’ve let me sleep, Brok.” Garath hoisted himself with some effort up into the cart’s passenger-side seat, knuckling the small of his back; he had been lying on various luggage thrown about carelessly in the bed of the cart.

Brokkul, for such was the Galka’s name, rumbled a thunderous chuckle. “You’d sleep all day if I let you.”

“What can I say, my nights are busy!” Garath winked broadly. “Anabielle back in San d’Oria is always a friendly wench whenever I slip on through.”

“Alamielle,” Brok corrected absently, flicking the whip.

“Is it? I can never pronounce those Elvaan names.” Garath held his hands up to his ears, fingers out, miming the long, pointed ears of the Elvaan race, and pitched his voice up high in mimicry. “’Oh Lord Garath, a pleasure to meet you! I am Sir Jousewhosecanny, Temple Knight of San d’Oria—“

“First off, ‘Lord’? Secondly, I think you’re talking about Jousephante.”

“Yeah, they never get it right. It’s not ‘lord,’ it’s CAPTAIN! Or failing that, Your Majesty.”
Brok rolled his small, dark eyes but did not comment; his face was long-suffering as Garath continued with expansive sweeps of his arms.

“It’s not that I CARE particularly about winning the Brugaire Consortium’s support, but you’d think those Elvaan-types would be a bit more open to the idea of someone new on the throne of the Kingdom of Ephramad, seeing as there hasn’t been a king of that country in hundreds of years.”

“Well, hopefully you’ll receive a better welcome in Norg,” Brok commented stoically, then suddenly yanked hard on the reins. “Whoa! What’s this?”

A small form was huddled up against a tree just off the road. Garath peered closer as well, then swung down from the cart in a single practiced motion. He approached the slumped figure. “It’s a child!” he called back, surprise evident in his tone.

“What?! This far away from a town?!” Brok swung down as well, shaking the ground with the heavy impact of his body, and stumped over to Garath.

The child seemed to be a Hume boy in a ragged black shirt and baggy pants, with sandals so worn and beaten that they hung off of tattered feet; in addition to being filthy, the child was smeared in blood, perhaps his own. He had tousled, overgrown blond hair and his eyes were closed; his chest rose and fell in faint breaths, and his face burned with fever to the touch. “Can’t be more than ten or twelve, can he, Brok?” Garath observed, gathering the child up in his arms. “Hardly anything to him, either.”

The Galka laid a single thick finger alongside the boy’s neck. “He’s definitely still alive, but he’s pretty sick.”

The boy stirred slightly at being moved, and his breath caught in a deep sob as he clutched at one leg. Garath immediately glanced at it and shifted how he was supporting the boy. “There’s the problem, I think his leg is broken. Hang on, kiddo! We’ll have that trussed up like a Bhefel marlin in no time.”

“Please…” the boy gasped, grasping feebly at the front of Garath’s shirt. “Please…. I need…. To get to Windurst…. Please….”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you to La Vaule as soon as we can,” Garath said soothingly.

“He said ‘Windurst,’ not ‘La Vaule,’ Garath,” Brok noted, returning to the cart and sweeping the luggage to one side to make a space for the boy to lay comfortably in the bed of the cart.

Garath shrugged. “He’s way too weak to make it that far, you know that. We can drop him off at La Vaule and be on our way.”

“Have it your way, Captain.” Brok set the broken bone with a twist of his big arms; the boy’s entire body jerked and he gasped, but made no other outcry. Garath nodded approvingly and handed the boy a small flask.

“Good man. Drink this up, kiddo, you’ll feel better. I’m Captain Garath of the Opaline Swan, and this here’s my bos’un, Brokkul. We call him Brok. What’s your name?”

The boy pressed the flask tightly to his face and drank deep, some of the color returning to his face at the healing benefits of its contents. “Kao’nir,” he said unsteadily as he lowered it. “Of… of Selbina.”

Brok raised an eyebrow, but Garath just smiled pleasantly and took the flash back from the boy, stoppering it and tucking it back away into his pack. “Well lie down Kao’nir, and try to get some sleep; we’ll take it easy into La Vaule, then we can get you to a doctor.”

Kao’nir laid back against the floor of the cart. “Windurst,” he insisted, his voice tapering off as the medicine continued its work. “I need to get to Windurst….”

“It’s dangerous to be traveling in Jugner Forest alone, boy,” Brok rumbled, hoisting himself back up into the driver’s seat. “If the fiends don’t get you, the beastmen will. A little kid like yourself couldn’t possibly hope to make it out of this forest without guidance, much less all the way to Windurst. That’s hundreds of malms away.”

“Don’t care,” Kao’nir mumbled, his head sagging. “Must… must get to Windurst…”

Garath shot Brok a warning look, then resumed his seat as well. “Well, when we get to La Vaule, we’ll see if we can get you passage to Windurst in a trader’s caravan or something, alright? But it’s a dangerous trip to be sure.”

Kao’nir nodded faintly, but he seemed to be resting more easily. “Th… thank you…” he said, his eyes falling completely closed, then his arms fell from around him and he slept deeply.

“Poor kid,” Garath muttered to Brok as the Galka snapped the whip to get the cart moving again. “What on Vana’diel possessed him to try to walk to Windurst? And if we’re supposed to believe any kid that pale is from a fishing town out in the middle of nowhere, I’ll eat my hat.”

“So you caught that too, eh?” Brok chuckled faintly. “Probably running away from home, has family in Windurst.”

Garath shrugged and leaned back, studying Kao’nir’s sleeping face, then a flash of gold and sapphire-blue caught his eye. A strange amulet was lying on the floor of the cart by the boy’s slackened hand. Garath reached out and grasped the amulet, still warm to the touch. It was small enough to fit into the palm of a child’s hand, a deep blue gem that sparkled unnaturally framed with an ornate gold setting, and it tingled in the palm. He nearly released it immediately. For a moment, as he held it, feelings swirled in his mind and he could see a tower in the wilderness, stretching up to a gray, tormented sky; a stately woman with a queen’s face, ageless and wise, staring out alone at the sea; a rainbow arching over the wind-swept grasslands to the west of Jugner Forest, and Kao’nir running as fast as he could toward the shelter of the forest as hulking Orcish pursuers chased him—

“Captain? Garath?”

Brok’s voice snapped him out of his reverie, and the amulet tumbled from Garath’s palm. “Huh? Oh… uh….” Garath glanced down at the sleeping child, the amulet having fallen back onto the wooden planks of the cart bed, and for the first time felt a prickle of unease about their new passenger. “Let’s just get to La Vaule and get him off our hands,” he mumbled, yanking his tricorne down a bit. “I don’t wanna get mixed up in anything I can’t get out of.”