Bearers of the Black Staff

Sider nodded. “You don’t want to wake up the next morning knowing you made a bad one.”


“Something like that.” Deladion Inch took a long drink of his ale. It was bitter stuff, Sider found, but after a while it grew on you. “I like finding people and causes that need a strong hand to set things right. I like making my own judgments about who’s bad and who’s good. If I get paid, fine. If not, that’s fine, too. We’re all stuck in this world, and none of us made it the way it is. We don’t like much about it, and I think if you want to live in it with some sense of responsibility, you have to find ways to keep it this side of becoming too insane. It wasn’t like that for too many years. It’s still dangerous, but at least it’s understandable.”

He took another pull on the ale. “So isn’t that what you do? You sound like maybe it might not be. Do you think a different way about things than me?”

Sider shook his head. “I just don’t follow the same calling, Inch. Mine comes from a long way back in time and tracks a different path. It’s the staff’s legacy, really. You wanted to know more about it? Well, here’s something I can tell you. You don’t inherit this staff; you earn the right to carry it. It is bequeathed to you along with a set of rules about how it’s to be used. The primary obligation of its bearer is to protect those for whom it was created, way back when the Great Wars were just a possibility. When it was given to me, when I was chosen by my predecessor, it was with the understanding that I would carry on the work of all those men and women who bore the staff before me.”

“What sort of work? It’s not like mine?”

Sider shrugged. “I don’t know enough yet about the specifics of your work to be able to judge. But I’m not for hire, and I don’t get to choose my path. I am the protector of a group of people who escaped the Great Wars and haven’t come back out into the world again since. Except that now they might have to because the world is threatening to intrude on them. I’ve kept them safe and patrolled the perimeter of their safehold since it was given to me to do so, and I see it beginning to crumble. They always knew there would come a time when this would happen, when they would have to come back into your world, their old world. But knowing it and accepting it are two different things. Now that it’s happening, they won’t necessarily believe it or trust me to make the call for them.”

“So you work for free and you don’t get any respect from those you serve.” Inch arched one eyebrow. “I think I’d rather be doing what I’m doing. At least that makes sense.”

Sider smiled. “Well, I don’t know that what I’m doing makes much sense; I’ll give you that. People are strange creatures, and they don’t always have a clear eye toward how things stand.”

“No different out here, my friend.” Inch made a sweeping gesture toward the countryside. “That’s our history, if you think about it. Look at how we got to where we are. The Great Wars killed almost everyone, and those they didn’t kill they left homeless and disconnected. Everyone made new families. Everyone had to band together to survive. It wasn’t easy. Or so the stories that got passed down through the years tell us. It was pretty bad. Pretty terrible.”

He hunched forward. “Here’s what I know from the stories I’ve heard. The end of the Great Wars came in a series of huge explosions that tore up the land and poisoned everything in it for two hundred years. Almost no one survived. Those who did went north or south or hid out in places that escaped the worst of it. Some went underground. Some went deep into the mountains. Some stayed put and got lucky. Others turned into freaks and mutants and worse things than that. But there weren’t many of any kind who made it. Most never got through the first five years.”

He shrugged, looking off into the darkness. “It was a long time ago, Sider, and now it’s just old stories. We live in the here and now, not the past. But the present’s not so good, either. You wanted to know what things are like? All right, I’m going to tell you.”

He paused, as if gathering his thoughts or searching for a starting point. “Well, there’s no good place to begin. For about a hundred years after the end of the Great Wars, people lived like animals. Some still do, but almost everyone did then. They scrapped and clawed to stay alive. They killed each other if they felt threatened. They ate each other, too, I’m told. Food was hard to find, and starvation was an everyday occurrence. Men who hadn’t changed into something else and Men who had, they were all in the same situation. There was no longer anything resembling civilization, nothing of order or moral imperative or a sense of right and wrong. There must have been some who still held those values and tried to practice them, but most gave in to the demands of their environment and became what they needed to become to stay alive.”