Gideon Orlahnd
“But I don’t want to kill anyone,” Gideon said, “I want to be a bard and play music and travel the lands.”
The seer continued to hold out the length of knife to the boy. His copper had bought him the reading. Her vision made her give him so much more. “Yours will be the path of steel, child. Take it to ease your suffering.”
But Gideon left empty-handed and losing his dog to a filthy pack of rats on the walk home did not change his mind.
The scraggy nag stomped a hoof as the lad finished the tune on his hand carved flute. “A fine refrain, boy,” the soothsayer said from her perch, “Though the truth of your hands wields the blade.” She offered a short length of sword to Gideon from the side of her cart.
“I think his music is inspired,” the girl clinging to his arm said.
The old woman turned her gaze upon the maiden. “Yours be the path of breeding and brutality.”
And so Gideon walked away once more and losing his love to the savagery of highwaymen did not alter his course.
The crone drew up her wagon alongside the burning ruin, sanguine kisses dancing on the breeze. Gideon rose from the rubble, the charred neck of a lute crumbling in his hands. Walking around the fresh graves, his ashen features were marked with smeared tear tracks. “Where were you?”
“Would you have listened?” she asked. One gnarled hand pulled back a flap of leather along the wagon, revealing a longsword hanging beneath.
Gideon snatched the flap and ripped it free. He grabbed a battle axe with both hands and tested the weight of it. “I choose my own path.”
Thus Gideon turned onto the path of steel and blood, and the crone followed him no more.