Re: The crap I write at 2:30 a.m. (post two hours later when I can't sleep)
I rewrote it. Just because. *cough*
***
Jarom yawned as he eagerly waited for his shift to end. Being the latest soldier to be assigned to the remote military outpost, Jarom was assigned the midnight shift – the worst shift of the night. Jarom had only been woken for his shift an hour earlier and already he was tired. He sincerely regretted asking to be assigned to the outpost. “So much for the easy life,” Jarom muttered.
The outpost was little more than a glorified cabin with a miniature wooden tower located more than a week’s ride from Garoth, the nearest town. The outpost was established near 50 years ago when the dark knights rebelled against the paladins. In those times the outpost had been heavily funded and guarded. As the threat waned, however, so had the support and need for a guard in the middle of nowhere. It would not be too long before the outpost was closed and destroyed or converted into a small inn for travelers. This was assuming the council did not turn the area into a tourist attraction; they were fond of doing that with battlefields of past wars.
Jarom chuckled at the thought of civilians paying money to stay up all night on guard just like the soldiers of old. He was beginning to think of other attractions the entertainment committee would come up with when he noticed the faint light from a lantern approaching the outpost. Jarom took a pebble from the basin near his feet and dropped it into the chute that led to a small bell located into the cabin – the signal to alert the captain to anything strange or unusual. The captain was a man hardly more experienced than Jarom himself; some said the captain only received the command position because the council drew his name from a hat rather than another’s. Jarom did not care; the man was his rank superior and ordered the soldier on guard to signal when he spotted anything abnormal.
Jarom continued to watch the flame, too far away to distinguish any details about who held the lantern, as he heard the cabin door open and the captain stumble up the ladder to the tower. When the captain reached the top, Jarom pointed out the light now considerably closer than it was before. Jarom could almost make out the profile of a man behind the lantern. But no horse, he thought.
“This is what you woke me up for?” grunted the captain. “A man with a lantern?”
“You ordered me to wake you up if I noticed anything unusual,” Jarom said.
“And you consider a man taking a leak in the middle of the night unusual?” mocked the captain. “I thought you had prior guard experience before being stationed here.”
Jarom sighed. “Does it not seem strange to you that a man would approach a military outpost in the middle of nowhere? And look, you can see he doesn’t even have a horse. How could he have possibly survived walking here?”
The captain chuckled. “He obviously broke off from a larger group to ask us if they could camp near us for protection. You’re greener than a toddler. Come on. I might as well welcome him personally now that I’m awake.”
Jarom disagreed with the captain. If the man had come from a larger group, a bonfire should be visible. Jarom did not argue, however. Despite being obviously less experienced and intelligent than Jarom, the captain was his superior. Although he felt it best to humor the captain, he could not help but feel a slight tingle of fear at who could possibly survive a week’s ride trip without a horse.
The captain and Jarom climbed down from the tower and waited as the strange man continued to walk toward the outpost. As the man neared, Jarom could faintly make out his attire. The man was wearing plain brown pants and a dirty white tunic. A thin blue cloak was fastened around his neck. The cloak’s hood was pulled over the man’s head hiding his features. Jarom knew there was something missing, but he could not quite place what. Suddenly, he realized what should be there but was not. He has no weapon! thought Jarom. No protection! There’s no way he could survive in the wilderness without a weapon. Unless…
“Captain,” whispered Jarom, attempting to mask his voice from the man getting nearer with every step, “what if this man is a sorcerer? We should wake the other men.”
The captain laughed loudly. “A sorcerer?” he near shouted. Jarom winced. “What do we have to fear from a sorcerer? Most mean no harm. My own brother’s a sorcerer.”
“Most sorcerers still resent the military after the attempted Dark Magic Purge,” Jarom warned. “You never know what one could do if drunken and roused by idle talk.”
The captain laughed again. He turned back to the traveler. “Ignore my guard here,” the captain said to the man as he entered easy hearing distance. “He’s new and a little paranoid. You have nothing to fear from us if we have nothing to fear from you, as I suspect.”
The man smiled and gave the captain his hand to shake. “Perhaps you should have listened to your guard,” the man said in a calm and cool voice when the captain took his hand. The captain’s laugh at the assumed joke quickly turned into a horrifying shriek as his arm suddenly burst into flame. The man, now unmasked as a sorcerer, raised his other arm and aimed it at Jarom. The young guard swiftly turned to run, but was caught by flames hotter than anything coal could produce on his left side. His arm was instantly incinerated in the fire. Jarom fell to the earth and kept conscious only long enough to watch the flames spread over the captain’s body.
The sorcerer quickly burned the cabin before the other soldiers could rush out to meet him. As powerful as he was, the sorcerer couldn’t defeat multiple armed and prepared soldiers in combat. He smiled as the men inside the cabin burned in the flames. His work done, the sorcerer walked up to the young guard. The guard’s arm was now a pile of ashes near his body, but he still lived. The sorcerer smiled again. He reach into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper and place it in the hand of the guard’s remaining arm.
The sorcerer took one last look at the carnage he had created. The cabin was already near collapse and the dead captain was still burning. The sorcerer nodded with satisfaction and began walking to his next target. Maybe next time I’ll use ice, he thought amusedly.
When Jarom regained consciousness several hours later he noticed the paper in his hand. Ignoring the pain from the left side of his body, he laid the paper flat against the ground and read the name written on it. “Garawk Tane,” Jarom read.
Jarom carefully and painfully picked himself off the ground and looked around. He was not surprised to find the cabin in ashes. “I have to get help,” he gasped while dreading walking the distance to the nearest town, especially with his injuries.
Jarom steeled himself against the pain and started stumbling toward Garoth.
***
*shrugs and walks away*
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Where is it? 
Hybrid Mode
