Chapter Text
The duty of a city guard doesn’t stop at the well-lit places of the wealthier districts. Those are where the newbies patrol; most of the real work, done by the more experiences guards, takes place in less than reputable parts of town.
Lowtown is as un-reputable as it can get. It’s the poorest district of the city, built by down-on-their-luck outsiders who came to the city in hope of wealth, overrun by the worst the city has to offer, opportunists with loose morals and criminal gangs. It’s dark, dirty, loosely held together by dirt and trash.
Marwyn knows every single of its unlit, twisted streets by heart. He wasn’t born here, but not far from it either—close enough to have had to drag his father out of its cheapest taverns on more than one occasion when he was a teen. He still has friends here, people who jokes about his shiny armor while he carefully doesn’t look too closely at their current occupation, their newly-acquired coins that still have dried flakes of blood tarnishing the grimy silver, indistinguishable from the old copper. None of them have ever held a gold coin between their fingers and neither had he, before.
It feels like coming back home, but he’s never felt more like a stranger than walking those familiar streets in his shiny guard armor.
Falric pulled some strings to get him there. He’s still, technically, a trainee, no matter how skilled with a blade or how close to the crown prince and his right-hand man. But the two of them have hardly ever been apart since Arthas threw him at Falric and told them to get along, and Marwyn’s intimate knowledge of the city’s underbelly proved to be a winning argument on the guard captain who attributes their schedules.
All the guards around him are veteran, used to Lowtown in a way that is both similar and completely different from his own. They have walked these streets before too, but never as anything else than a guard. They are not streets to them: they’re patrol routes. It gives them a radically different outlook on things, make them blind to some details that are glaringly obvious to him and hyper-vigilant to others he wouldn’t spare a glance for. Marwyn hopes they can all learn something from each other—if only the older guards can get that stick out of their ass long enough to listen to him.
Guess he’s a bit spoiled. Falric is a harsh but fair guy, and he inspires so much respect that it never feels like he’s ordering him around, so he lost the habit of blindly following orders from senior officers.
He’s tired of their muttered insults toward the beggars they pass, tired of their judgmental looks toward him and the low whispers that make Falric’s shoulders tense. He noticed a kid trailing after them—unusual, as children are taught early to avoid patrols—so, with a silent encouragement from his direct and favorite officer in the form of a discrete nod he deliberately slowed down his pace. Soon the squad is a good ten feet from them, and he pretends to observe a ‘wanted’ poster nailed to a nearby wall. Whoever hired the artist who made that portrait got scammed: it might be a human or a gnoll, but either way it’s so poorly drawn the person they’re looking for is completely unrecognizable.
The child slows down as well and then stops, unsure, a few feet from him, half hidden in the shadows. From the corner of his eyes Marwyn sees him whip his head between the main group and the lone guard, hesitating.
"You looking for something, kid?" The kid jumps with a squeak. He tries to step back and only manages to stumble on his own feet. That is the clumsiest pickpocket he’s seen in his life. He turns around, raising his empty hands in a placating gesture. "I just want to know why you were following us. I swear I’ll leave you alone after that."
The kid glares at him with all the might of a scared kitten, stubbornly silent. Then he cracks—Marwyn wasn’t mistaken to think he was following them to tell them something. He looks downright eager to talk, once he gets beyond his bloody-mindedness.
"I just, huh—I overheard a talk? I have nothin’ to do with it, swear! Was jus’ eavesdropping, I’m not a criminal—"
"Hey. Calm down. Breathe."
The kid inhales shakily and continues, all in one breath, "I heard that Big Pete was planning to do something to the patrol tonight!"
Marwyn pauses. "What?"
"Yeah, he was talking about sendin’ a message or somethin’, an’ you guys are really helping the people like my ma’ and I so I thought I could help—"
It’s Marwyn’s time to rush. He throws a careless ‘thanks kid’ above his shoulder as he runs the way his squad has gone, but they don’t appear to have noticed his disappearance and continued right on their patrol route—
Right into a trap, apparently.
He’s panting when he reaches them, skin hot under his plate armor. He grabs Falric’s arm and gasps out, "We’re walking into a trap!"
"What are you talking about?" Gilbert barks. He’s the oldest officer—but, to his eternal and bitter resentment, not the highest ranking—of the squad, and probably Marwyn’s auto-proclaimed worst enemy. He hates ‘young upstart’ like him, because he’s a mean old man who’s too stupid to rise above his current rank.
"I talked to a street kid—"
He laughs harshly. "And you believed him? Fool!"
Falric lifts one hand and Gilbert immediately closes his mouth with a click. They’ve stopped in the middle of a side street, lit by the single lantern he holds in his hand. "Let him speak. What do you mean, a trap?"
The voice that answers isn’t Marwyn’s. "Well, isn’t it self-explanatory?"
Falric turns on his heels and the light of the lantern reveals a group of armed men stepping out of the deep shadows. Their leader smiles, sharp and cruel. He’s missing a few tooth. Carran swears; a glance above his shoulder tells Marwyn they’re surrounded.
"You’ve been walking all over our territory, crown dogs." He sneers. "Time to put you back into your place, under the ground."
It should sound stupid but with the darkness spreading around them sends a shiver of icy dread down Marwyn’s spine.
The other guards all focus on the weapons being drawn on them, their rusted and chipped but still deadly sharp edge, the snarling faces of those wielding them. Cutlasses and knives and stolen swords, pipes turned into improvises weapons, a hammer. The street is narrow, impossible to fight in: it would be a bloodshed.
Marwyn notices something else: he notices sparks twisting around one’s fingers, the arcane-blue light of his eyes.
A mage.
He has a second to scream, "Falric!" before fire sets the street alight, and then he has a fraction of a second left to react.
He jumps forward. It’s awkward: there is just enough space for him to drag Falric back by his chest plate, to throw himself in his place and twist around to offer his back to their enemies instead. Just enough time, too.
Then the fireball hits, heat coursing right through his armor and biting into his flesh until it swallows him whole.
The last thing he hears is his name, said in a piercing yell that cuts through the haze of pain before it steals his breath and consciousness away in a sweep of darkness.