Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 13: Lanky Starving Knights of Percvale

The knights’ barracks was a long, low building, rectangular and stretched out like something built purely for shelter, with no thought spared for anything else.

The walls were old stone, darkened by years (decades rather) of weather and nobody doing anything about it. The mortar between the bricks was crumbling in places and patched badly in others. The roof sagged slightly at one end. The wooden door at the entrance hung at a slight angle.

Inside, one long space lined with beds on both sides, dozens of them, packed close together with little room between one man and the next. Simple wooden frames with thin mattresses, most of them stained and worn flat.

Some had no mattress at all, just bare wood. A few had thin blankets bunched at the foot. Most didn’t.

Darion took in the sight. With a sort of inward shrug, he accepted that he would keep being surprised at this point, because the state of everything in Percvale was the kind of thing that would always manage to shock him no matter how much he had already seen.

The knights were everywhere.

Some sat on their beds, elbows on knees, staring at the floor. Some leaned against the walls. A handful were seated directly on the ground outside the barracks entrance, backs against the stone, faces tilted toward nothing in particular. Several had no shirts, nothing but their undergarments, their ribs visible through skin pulled too tight, their arms thin in a way that made them look less like soldiers and more like broom sticks .

Their faces carried it too: cheeks sunken, eyes set deep, all this sombre details.

The smell of the place was damp and stale too.

This was the Percvale Knight Order. One hundred and twenty-one strong.

"Wow," Darion muttered.

Sir Garren stepped in behind him and went quiet.

Darion was fairly certain it wasn’t because the sight had surprised him. Garren came here regularly, he had been here not long ago to inform the knights of the new Baron’s arrival. He had seen this every day for months. His eyes should have adjusted by now, it should have learned to look at it and see something less than what it was.

But even Garren knew exactly how bad this place looked. Walking the new Baron in to meet the men who would serve under him, that was the kind of thing that embarrassed a loyal man.

For a regular Baron, this would have been enough to reconsider everything, it was enough to turn around quietly and decide this wasn’t what he had signed up for.

How was anyone supposed to protect their subjects from a position like this?

But Darion didn’t particularly mind. As pathetic and desperate as the sight was, after a few moments the initial shock passed.

He looked out at the assembled knights.

"Why have you all reduced yourselves to this?" he asked. "Why not go out and hunt? The forests surrounding Percvale are full of game."

He already knew the answer. Garren had explained it to him. But this was part of what he had prepared actually, a way to open the conversation and let them speak before he did.

A lanky knight near the front stepped forward. He looked at Darion for a moment, then spat on the floor.

"Hunt," the man said, like the word itself tasted bitter and that was the reason he had spat. "Some months ago, my best friend and I went hunting. We went with a group of others too, because we were tired, tired of being hungry, tired of sitting here waiting for something to change when it wouldn’t without us acting!" He paused and looked around at the other knights. "We said Fuck it! Let’s go show the creatures out there who’s boss."

He stopped again.

"Twenty-seven of us went into those woods. Two came back. Two! Me and Jeffery." He pointed at another thin man seated on the ground nearby, who responded with a slow, tired nod.

"My best friend had a wife and two kids. Before we left that morning I walked with him to his house. We told his family he would be back safely. He greeted his children." The man’s voice didn’t waver, but something behind his eyes did. "He’s dead now."

He looked directly at Darion.

"And that wasn’t the first time. We’ve gone into those forests before. Different groups, different times. We come back dead!. Only one percent of us get to survive, like myself. So yes, we would rather sit here and starve slowly than walk into those woods and get torn apart in an afternoon." 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

A murmur ran through the assembled knights. Others began to speak, murmuring in acceptance of what the lanky knight had just spoken. At this point, it was more safer for them to commit suicide than go out to hunt.

Darion stood quietly and listened to all of it.

When the voices settled, he had a problem. He had come here planning to tell them they were going hunting. And now he was standing in front of men who would genuinely rather starve.

He thought for a moment.

"Is there a particular creature causing most of the losses?" he asked. "Or is it everything out there?"

The knights exchanged looks. The lanky one spoke again.

"Bogoarts," he said. The word landed like something strange, and quite frankly it was, Darion thought.

The fuck was Bogarts?

Back on his own Earth in his previous life, their was no animal named Bogart.

Several other knights nodded without needing to add anything to the name.

Darion raised a brow and turned slightly toward Garren.

Garren stepped forward.

"A Bogoart," he said, "Is best described as something between an ox and a goat, large, heavy and built like something that was designed specifically to cause painful damage. It has a long tail, serpentine, like a snake’s, that it uses as a weapon." He paused. "But the worst part, the part that makes it genuinely dangerous and absurd too, is that it’s completely blind."

He let that sit for a moment.

"It hunts entirely by its other senses."