I wouldn't be able to help them. I knew it and they knew it, but still, here they were on my step, their proverbial hats in hand, hoping that, by some unknown logic and reasoning, I wouldn't be one man and the Scarlet Crusade wouldn't be so many, or so powerful.

"I understand what you are saying and I agree... But this changes nothing. I am still but one, and they are still many well armed and armored fanatics, regardless of who is right. They are out of control... But what would you have me do? Storm their Monastery alone?" Despite the self-control I was exherting, I could feel the derisive dismissal that I felt for the townsmen creeping into my tone, biting into the man's argument.

The plain, drab-garbed man before me released a quiet sigh, a farm-calloused hand reaching down to rub absently against one wool-covered leg as he responded, some of the fight for the argument already leaving his shoulders, "No... I know nothing of war, and I know that that would help nothing. I just... I thought you'd be able to do something, that maybe you still had friends amongst the Lord's troop, or that..."

He trailed off, leaving it hanging, the unspoken ...or perhaps your name still resounds with them. My fingers on the wooden door of the cottage clenched, brow furrowing with suppressed anger as I responded with a hard, barely-polite curtness, "No. There is nothing I can do. Now please, back to your families... I can do nothing here." Against my will, my grip on the door tightened as I spoke those last words, felt the schism they produced.

The blunt dismissal savaged what was left of the discussion's spine and, after a few murmured good-byes and similar, empty pleasantries, I watched as the village's elder led away the few men that had come with him. It had been heavy on them, as blatant as the setting sun's red-tinted light and as rough as the wool of their dirt-marred clothing, that ever-present question... Will you fight? When will you fight? When will you DO SOMETHING?

I released a quiet sigh through pursed lips before I step back into the cottage, releasing the deathgrip I'd had on the door to push it closed. It'd been like this, about one thing or another, since I'd settled here. Even before the Plague came, the ever-present questions were always there, slipped in between the How Do You Do?'s and How Fares The Children?'s --

"Will you kill the wolves on the southern Hills?"

"Will you take that O'Haran boy in hand?"

"Could you please accompany us on our trip to the city?"

And all manner of other, vaguely-disguised requests for protection, for aid, for help that I no longer had the capacity to give. The Plague, and then the rise of the Crusaders, had just made it worse, made their prey-like eyes and timid mindsets all the more scornful.

As I moved back through the rather spartan house, I was suddenly, guiltily, glad that Mari and the children were out, though due back soon. She'd never been quite comfortable with the way that the rest of the village regarded me, the way that I was treated as a useful annoyance, a tool for a job that was no longer required.

The Plague had changed that, though -- had changed everything. On the far eastern edge of Tirisfal, news began to arrive that the village of Darrowshire had been taken by the Scourge, without a single inhabitant remaining alive. It had spread westwards, then, the Scourge attacks increasing at an almost exponantial rate with, farms, villages, and homes falling swiftly. It took a fatal amount of time for the truly dire nature of the situation to come to light. Most of Western Tirisfal had fallen before the true horror of the Scourge invasion became clear: that the villagers, the farmers, the civilians, that fell to the Scourge rose again as them, having been infected with their Plague.

The dire news took time to settle in, that not only were the Scourge with their armies of the walking dead, their skeletal mages, and black magic attacking once again, but that they were spreading the Plague as their vanguard. The Scourge Plague was unlike anything that had been seen before -- left untreated, it was almost always fatal, and every man, woman, and child that fell to the Plague gave control of their souls to the leader of the Scourge. Their bodies, rotting and still wearing the garb of life, would rise to devour friends, families, and former allies.

Defensive forces were mounted by Lordaeron, the capital of Tirisfal, but half of the country had fallen before a line was eventually established, and The Bulwark created. Even now, the technical lines of battle between the Scourge invasion and our defenses were ever-shifting, very rarely concrete. Whenever I had originally arrived in the village of Brill to rest, recover, and work after the war, it had still been a small settlement just north of Lordaeron. Even now, a dozen-odd years later, the town's inn was still the talest building by far.

The reports and bits of soldiers' gossip that I'd been able to pick up from the couriers moving back and forth between Lordaeron and the Bulwark had not been heartening. They'd been having a harder and harder time finding able-bodied soldiers to keep the hordes of the Undead back, and there were whispered rumors that there had been breaks, shatterings of the line where raiding parties of the Scourge were slipping through.

While the physical danger and loss of life itself were bad enough, the leaders of the Scourge directed their invasion almost as an art form, designed as much to terrify as to decimate. They would cast narrow, needle-sharp incursions against the Bulwark, slipping as few as a handful of their own past the defenses and loosing them into the countryside. The rumors of finding slaughtered families, of Plagued children gnawing on their own siblings, of once-friendly pets driven insane with the Plague, were growing, and people everywhere were terrified.

In this vacuum of fear, of paranoia against the chance of infection, the Scarlet Crusade emerged, with promises of salvation. In their gloriously tailored crimson cloaks and well-polished armor, they made a grand showing wherever they went -- the sun shone from them, and it seemed that the Light had indeed blessed them with a divine mission of vengeance against the Scourge. They were based out of their Scarlet Monastery high in the northern mountains, but they ranged everywhere from the Bulwark westwards to the Agamand Mills, offering aid, supplies, and travel escorts as they could.

The people loved them, and they were lauded as the heroes of the people, of being divine saviors. The regard in which the Crusade was held in those early days was fanatical, hope finally given to doomed people. In the days when you had to fear your own children turning on you, when your neighbor could rise after their death to devour you, they had brought hope -- and the people worshipped them for it.

In time, they began to become more confident in their role as the people's chosen champions, and grew bolder in their hunt for the minions and spies of the Scourge. They began to arrest citizens on grounds that they could possibly be infected with the Plague, or that they were well-placed agents of the Scourge, taking them to their Monastery in the north. At first, these people usually returned, telling stories of the greatness of the Crusade, of the light-bourne rituals that were performed on them, to cleanse them of their infection, or to aid them in breaking away from the Scourge's hold on them. Their regard amongst the already worshipful public grew.

As the Scourge pressed against the eastern Bulwark and the number of their raids getting through increased, the number of citizens, and even now some of the low-ranking soldiery, being taken by the Crusade increased. Few weeks passed when one of the red-toned Inquisitors were not leading a group of soldiers into one house or another, dragging out its occupants and throwing them into one of their black-painted wagons, the flame symbol of the Crusade marking its sides.

The Crusade's word soon became law, and proof for their accusations were no longer required in the panicked, near-on crazed minds of the populace -- After all, they were the Scarlet Crusade... If you couldn't trust them after all of their good, Light-blessed work, then who could you turn to? Doubters as to the validity of the Crusade's cause were swiftly turned in, and the Inquisitors were soon brought to the traitor's door.

I had watched all of this, and done my best to keep myself, Mari, and our children out of the upheaval. As the reports of the Scourge began to intensify and the hysteria began to rise, the Inquisitor from the Crusade came forwards and proposed to the Council that it would be a better idea, for all intended, to raise a palisade or walls of some kind around the village. Since the Councils of Brill were village-wide, I had been there to see the Council leap at the idea, snapping at any little bits of supposed wisdom that they could clutch from the man's jaws. The idea was passed, and soon the villagers set to work clearing the forest from around Brill, their crops left in the forest, always promised again and again that they would have time to finish them later.

The work on the palisade actually seemed to be under some kind of perpetual delay, be it an infestation of termites inside the trees or rumors of Scourge patrols close to the village. Work was completed only at a miniscule pace, drawing on well into the harvest and beyond, on into the winter. The crops rotted in the field as the Scarlet advisors reminded them time and time again that the Bulwark wouldn't hold forever, and that getting the palisade up would be their only defense against the massive hordes that would be released when the Bulkwark fell. Completing the palisade became an all-consuming goal for the people of Brill, being driven with verbal goads and whips from the Scarlet advisors that moved about the town to supervise.

On the first day of winter, the palisade was perhaps some halfway done, and the crops had long ago rotted away. The lust to complete the palisade had risen to a fever amongst the other villagers, goaded on by the gruesome reminders of the Scarlet taskmasters, reminding them of slaughtered families, or massacred friends, and of entire villages turned into the Scourge.

Like any other day for the past several months, the villagers had spent from sunup to sundown felling trees, sharpening them, and then digging the holes to put them into place around the village. All of them were weary, dirty from the work by the time that sundown came and they were finally given permission to move back to their houses and sink, exhausted, into their beds. I remember that I had spent the day in Lordaeron, attempting to get some news out of the regulars there about what the Crusade had been up to in other regions of Tirisfal. The news there had been sparse pickings, and I had decided to head back to Brill before night fell, and made it there nigh on the same time that the sun left.

As I moved into the village from the southern road, I met the elder who had came to my cottage and asked for aid on the way, a thick smudge of dirt plasted against the man's cheek. I offered him a brief, neutral nod and he the same to me, his features faintly hollowed out from weariness, from overwork and the perpetual stress of the ill news that the Crusade spread about the state of the war. The sun had died some quarter hour before and full dark was already beginning to settle in, turning the forms of those walking about into dim, grey-toned shades. My eyes ticked amongst them as they headed towards their houses, the beginnings of a thought beginning to rise. The Crusade... The Crusade... I felt the shock of my suspicions, of my realizations, erupt through my mind in a blinding, hot sensation that arced from my mind throughout the all of my body.

I could see it now as I looked over the grungy, thin-bodied forms of the villagers shambling through the dusk. They were weary, tired, emaciated ... and defeated. The harsh reminders of what horrors supposedly would befall them should they fail the palisade had taken their toll, robbed them of something. They had worked too hard for too long in too dark conditions, with the ever-present threat of the looming invasion hanging over them. Fear can only be driven so far before it must be carried, and these people were breaking beneath it.

With the threat of the Scourge invasion and raids ever present, I had taken to wearing my suit of light mail when I traveled and was wearing it still as I moved through the exhausted villagers and towards the steps of the town hall. I could feel the muscles in my jaw clenching, their counterparts in my right hand spasming to reach for the sword at my hip and slay, rip apart those who had sinned against me.

The lights of the town hall were ablaze, casting the area surrounding the stairs in a brief illuminated glow in the now-dark. One of the younger children was moving around the edges of the village to light the perimeter torches for the Watch as I moved up the stairs, rage riding my countenace. I glanced aside from my path to watch the wraith-thin form of the teenager move from post to post, lighting each torch in turn. I was about to glance away from him when my eyes rode past him and towards the darkness of the forest around the village -- and directly upon a pair of reddened, smiling eyes.

They glowed in the dying light, becoming ever-brighter, ever more amused as the last of the sunlight was killed off. My eyes were sucked into them, frozen, caught on the insane, manic laughter, the pleasure, the rampant, dark joy held in that gaze. Around that first arresting pair others began to bloom in the darkness on the edges of the village's defenses, to that first pair's left, right, above, below, before they reached a number innumerable, legion.

My breath, arrested and captured after the first sighting of those eyes, suddenly erupted into the twilight in a half enraged, half terrified scream as my hand reached for the weapon sheathed at my waist, "SCOURGE!"

End of Chapter 1.