Fable - Ask Duty Calls

(OOC: The thread is open to all characters wanting to become members of Alliria's City Watch/Standing Military)

The courtyard of Allir Keep yawned like a stone mouth, teeth of white masonry gleaming in the noon. The barracks doors stood flung wide, exhaling the breath of oiled leather and old drill—an animal scent that promised order. Tables had been set like confessionals beneath pennants of the Watch, and officials in dark half-capes bent over ledgers, their quills pricking names into the city’s living hide. Beyond the arch, the bridges hissed with foot traffic, the city’s twin hearts pumping faces from Inner to Outer and back again. Here, in this brief pause between the walls and the markets, Alliria measured its protectors like a jeweler weighing coin.

A placard on a pike made the invitation plain: ALL CITIZENS OF EIGHTEEN YEARS OR MORE—IF INTERESTED, PRESENT YOURSELVES. PHYSICAL TRIAL REQUIRED. The letters were fat with fresh ink, still wet enough to smudge on a nervous thumb. In the shade of the towers that housed them, the Watchmen moved in small knots, mail whispering, voices tarrying in low, pleased murmurs about the Merchant Council’s promised increase in pay and the new lodgings—dry rafters, real windows, the mildew driven out like a bad spirit. Their satisfaction had the mild, feline warmth of men who had slept poorly for years and at last smelled soap. They watched the would-be applicants the way lighthouse fires watch the sea: steady, appraising, a little hungry.

The line itself was a cross-section cut from Alliria’s own flesh. Dockhands from the Inner City with salt still caking their cuffs; leather-fingered smiths of the Outer City, eyes like quenched iron; a trickle of slum-thin youths from the Areck camps, and a few slick-heeled fish from the Shallows, their smiles as narrow as canal water. Between them all moved the promise that made this city throb—work, coin, the safety the Watch sold by the watchtower—because prosperity here was not a virtue but a mechanism, and someone had to keep it greased. The officials stamped seals, measured chests, made men run until the stone shone with footprints. And the Keep, last bastion and first bureaucracy, looked on with its patient, mercantile gaze, as if to say: be fit, be useful, and we will make a wall of you.

In a city that straddled continents and strangled the strait with bridges and chains, the Watch’s smile was part welcome, part warning. Come in, it said. Stand the test. Join the rows of polished steel and iron will that keep the markets bright and the nights mostly quiet. The ink dried. The mouths of the barracks stayed open. And Alliria—old, wealthy, beautifully practical Alliria—kept counting.

Hugo Farlance
The man at the table inclined his head, a slab of green-brown muscle given the courtesy of a nod. He was built like siegework—broad-shouldered, neck thick as a bull’s yoke to keep the skull moored—and his tusks shone with a butcher’s polish. He lifted one arm, forearm the girth of a tree stump, and idly scraped along a tusk with a little length of metal, a toothpick turned tool, a glinting tick-tick that matched the scratch of the scribe’s quill. Around him the recruitment tables breathed ink and leather; banners hung like skinned colors; the Keep’s mouth stayed open to swallow names.

“Aye, somethin’ like that,” he rumbled, voice gravel in a bucket. “Everyone got a raise, an’ new kit, an’ new lodgin’s. We got real beds this time ’stead o’ straw-filled mattresses.” The words came with a grin that didn’t quite reach his eyes; those stayed hooded and busy, skimming Hugo the way a butcher pats a haunch—testing age, guessing weight, measuring the set of the shoulders. He smelled foreign coin and old travel on the man and, in that whiff, made the easy arithmetic: mercenary.

“Rumor has it our new Lord Commander strong-armed the council into payin’ for the lot, hah, hah.”

Hugo Farlance

The orc’s mouth spread in a carnivore’s smile, lips peeling back to show four tusks crowding his jaw—mercifully, the rest of his teeth were a near-human picket. His knuckles, knotted like river stones, drummed once on the ledger before him; the quill stood ready like a thorn.

“Right, then,” he said. “You tell me yer full name, race, age, yer trade, an’ where ya lay yer head. I’ll scratch it down an’ pawn ya off to the nearest senior leftenant. They’ll weigh ya—mass, height—an’ put ya through a few tests. Run. Lift. Push. See if the meat holds. If ya don’t fold, the leftenant’ll tell ya the rest.”

He clicked the little metal pick against a tusk—tik—then angled the quill, the page waiting like pale skin for the needle. The banners above gave a slow, breathless stir.

Hugo Farlance

The orc snorted—one blunt, bovine huff that stirred the fringe of the ledger—and set his quill gnawing the page. Ink spidered from the nib in hungry strokes as he ground each syllable of Hugo’s answers into the parchment, like a butcher working salt into meat. When the last letter lay pinned, he snapped the quill upright, lifted the sheet to the light, and squinted along it with a single baleful eye, as if the words might wriggle and try for escape. Satisfied, he gave the page a curt shake, then jabbed a knotty finger toward the Keep. The gesture had the finality of a gate slamming. Off you go—into the machine.

Inside, the Keep was busy the way a heart is busy. Corridors pulsed with men in layers of iron and ink: clerks with lips blue from sealing wax; sergeants whose mail whispered like rain on a tomb; orderlies ferrying bundles of spears as if feeding wood into a furnace. Ledgers flapped, seals kissed parchment, boots drummed a tattoo that traveled through stone and bone alike. Brass plaques gleamed like well-scrubbed teeth. The whole place smelled of oiled leather and old decisions.

Amid this tide, one figure held like a pilaster. Tall. Armor worked in rich relief, gold picking out beasts and vines; a dark gorget at his throat; a red mantle folded with miser’s precision across one shoulder. His hair was winter-pale and receded to a patrician brow; his beard close and exact, as if trimmed by a ruler. He was finishing a quiet flaying of words with two soldiers—no raised voice, only a measured cut here, a stitch there—when his gaze slipped to Hugo. Those eyes were coins struck from cold metal; their weight did the summoning before his hand did. Two fingers beckoned, economical as a ledger line.

“Come, come,” came the man’s voice.

Up close, the gold on his breastplate showed tiny hammered scars, like an old lion’s hide that had learned to heal without fuss. He accepted the orc’s parchment from a waiting adjutant, read without moving his lips.

Hugo Farlance

The Marshall's eyes, blue as artic glaciers and twice as rigid, tracked their slow appraisal down the length of Hugo's frame. From crown to boot, the inspection moved with the methodical precision of a man who had assessed ten thousand soldiers and found nine thousand wanting. The scrutiny lasted perhaps five seconds, no more, but in that brief span Hugo felt the weight of judgment settle upon him like mail across weary shoulders.

When the examination concluded, Baelor Rothfuss gave a single, approving nod, curt as a blade's kiss, and extended his hand.

"Baelor Rothfuss. High Marshall." The words carried the unmistakable cadence of Aniria, each syllable measured and deliberate, as if speech itself were a resource not to be wasted.

The Marshall's attention shifted to the parchment in his other hand, the document the orc scribe had thrust upon him earlier. He studied it with the same cool assessment he'd given Hugo's person, as though weighing the ink itself for truth. His jaw worked slightly, a muscle tightening beneath skin weathered by years beneath sun and storm.

"This says you were a mercenary." Rothfuss raised his gaze from the paper, and those blue-grey eyes found Hugo's with unsettling directness. He let the silence stretch for a breath before continuing, his tone flat and factual. "Your posture suggests otherwise. Army proper, I'd wager. Not some cutthroat battalion."

The statement hung in the air between them, neither quite accusation nor compliment, but something of both. It was the sort of observation that demanded honesty, delivered in a tone that suggested lies would be identified with the same ease the Marshall had identified military bearing beneath tattered cloth and unkempt beard.