Paladins: Still in Gnoll Space

The biggest trouble with waiting for an attack is that I feel bad about drinking. Everybody on duty's not allowed to. And even if I know I'm fine, people start worrying I'll forget spells or something if I start drinking. Like I've never cast hung over before.

So instead I can't sleep for shit, sitting in bed wishing I had a drink and thinking about other battles.

Here's the trick: they're all stupid. All of them. Not most, not many, bloody all.

I've known that since I was eleven, living as a runaway at the Pelor monastery. Just old enough to be in charge of taking care of some of the younger kids, but not old enough yet to have taken up a trade.

There weren't that many options for what I might do. Pelor had obviously brought me there, and one way or another I was devoting my life to him. It was a question of how: would I stay a monk right where I was, and take care of children the way they had me? Would I become a priest and go about healing folks? Or would I become a paladin, put on the shiny armor and go fight evil?

At the time I thought I might like to be a paladin, and when those soldiers came through and stayed the night with us, it only helped me think it was a bloody great idea. The armor! The swords! The shields! It was all so bloody shiny, and better than looking at a naked lady for a boy that age.

I don't even remember what battle they were headed for. Probably some idiotic war that got started over the daughter of some tanner running off and eloping or something. Hardly matters. The soldiers would damn sure they would win, that they would hardly have to fight. Just show up and the other guys will run away.

It did not quite work out that way. Two days later they were back at the monastery. Their healer was dead. The armor was broken, scattered about. And all that shiny bloody armor was caked in blood and dirt, and the men looked worse. The confident bastards who'd gone to war were gone, half of them for good. The other half we healed, though we didn't have the money to try to resurrect any of their dead friends.

The joking, the laughter, the confidence, all bloody gone. Replaced by some haunted motherfuckers who never wanted to see another fight as long as they lived.

Three months later, I was on my way to be a healer, glad that I'd managed to avoid ever being near a bloody battlefield again.

Shows what I know, I suppose.

I should try to sleep, I suppose. I'll have work to do in the morning.