Breachill

evening

I’ve been in Breachill for two nights and… OK. Fine. It’s weird.

I’d been holding out hope—perhaps optimistically—that it would feel something like Macridi, which is the only place I truly felt at home after leaving Kerse. I know now that the life I built there was largely a facade, but the town wasn’t. Macridi was earnest. The people were practical and mostly decent, and the town had a kind of grounded honesty to it.

There are parallels. I feel like I can walk the streets of Breachill without looking over my shoulder. In Macridi, I felt safe from the people (most of them, anyway), though the Forest loomed over everything, and if you valued your safety, you always kept that in the back of your mind.

Macridi was, at its heart, a logging town. Every settlement near a forest cuts timber, of course, but there it was an entire industry and everything revolved around it. That gave the town a rougher edge: people worked hard, drank hard, and expected the same from everyone else. In contrast, Breachill is so polite, civic-minded, and community-oriented that it’s almost wholesome. Folks here talk about council meetings and public notices the way others talk about the weather. It’s hard to believe a town like this exists at all, much less in Isger.

So I guess you could say that it is like Macridi in the ways that matter, and different in ways that are probably better, or don’t matter at all.

I still don’t know why I’m here. I spent so much time fretting over getting to Breachill that I forgot to fret over what I was supposed to do once I arrived.

The only lead I have is something the town calls “The Call for Heroes”, which is about as vainglorious a title as I can imagine. And rather ironic given what it really is. According to those I’ve spoken to, it’s just a glorified work-for-hire notice for tasks the city needs handled, but which fall outside the scope of the town guard. It happens monthly. In a town of barely 1300 people.

You might be asking, “What sorts of monthly, heroic tasks have they contracted out in the past?” Well, I asked that, too, and received less-than-heroic answers. They include—and I can’t stress enough that these are the highlights—a merchant whose expected shipment of goods didn’t arrive on time, a shepherd whose herd of goats mysteriously died in the night, and a farmer whose entire season’s harvest was ruined.

As near as I can tell, not a single person has achieved great fame or fortune by answering this call. Tradition seems to be to get paid, then blow their earnings at the Wizard’s Grace, the most expensive tavern in town.

I don’t know what to make of this. If I’m being honest, I don’t feel particularly heroic. There’s nothing valiant about climbing a tree to survive the disaster that killed everyone I cared about. It feels very much like the opposite.

On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that norns sent me on a journey of some 400 miles so that I, and some unknown number of fated strangers, could solve mundane problems of agriculture.