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King.
    When the old King Tarnis had surrendered
the kingdom, had opened the gates for Pandesia, Merk had felt deflated,
purposeless for the first time in his life. Without a King to serve he had felt
adrift. Something long brewing within him had surfaced, and for some reason he
did not understand, he began to wonder about life. All his life he had been
obsessed with death, with killing, with taking life away. It had become
easy—too easy. But now, something within him was changing; it was as if he
could hardly feel the stable ground beneath his feet. He had always known,
firsthand, how fragile life was, how easily it could be taken away, but now he
started to wonder about preserving it. Life was so fragile, was preserving it
not a greater challenge than taking it?
    And despite himself, he started to
wonder: what was this thing he was stripping away from others?
    Merk did not know what had started all
this self-reflection, but it made him deeply uncomfortable. Something had
surfaced within him, a great nausea, and he had become sick of killing—he had
developed as great a distaste for it as he had once enjoyed it. He wished there
was one thing he could point to that triggered all of this— the killing of a
particular person, perhaps—but there was not. It had just crept up on him,
without cause. And that was most disturbing of all.
    Unlike other mercenaries, Merk had only
taken on causes he believed in. It was only later in life, when he had become
too good at what he did, when the payments had become too large, the people who
requested him too important, that he had begun to blur the lines, to accept
payment for killing those who weren’t necessarily at fault—not necessarily at
all. And that was what was bothering him.
    Merk developed an equally strong passion
for undoing all that he had done, for proving to others that he could change.
He wanted to wipe out his past, to take back all that he had done, to make
penitence. He had taken a solemn vow within himself never to kill again; never
to lift a finger against anyone; to spend the rest of his days asking God for
forgiveness; to devote himself to helping others; to become a better person.
And it was all of this that had led him to this forest path he walked right now
with each click of his staff.
    Merk saw the forest trail rise up ahead
then dip, aglow with white leaves, and he checked the horizon again for the
Tower of Ur. There was still no sign of it. He knew eventually this path must
lead him there, this pilgrimage that had been calling to him for months now. He
had been captivated, ever since he was a boy, by tales of the Watchers, the
secretive order of monks/knights, part men and part something else, whose job
was to reside in the two towers—the Tower of Ur in the northwest and the Tower
of Kos in the southeast—and to watch over the Kingdom’s most precious relic:
the Sword of Flames. It was the Sword of Flames, legend had it, that kept The
Flames alive. No one knew for sure which tower it was in, a closely kept secret
known by none but the most ancient Watchers. If it were ever to be moved, or
stolen, The Flames would be lost forever—and Escalon would be vulnerable to
attack.
    It was said that watching over the
towers was a high calling, a sacred duty and honorable duty—if the Watchers
accepted you. Merk had always dreamed of the Watchers as a boy, had gone to bed
at night wondering what it would be like to join their ranks. He wanted to lose
himself in solitude, in service, in self-reflection, and he knew there was no
better way than to become a Watcher. Merk felt ready. He had discarded his
chain mail for leather, his sword for a staff, and for the first time in his
life, he had gone a solid moon without killing or hurting a soul. He was
starting to feel good.
    As Merk crested a small hill, he looked
out, hopeful, as he had been for days, that this peak might reveal the Tower of
Ur somewhere on the horizon. But there was nothing to be found—nothing