A failure of duty.

The captain of the town guard kicked his off his boots and sighed, planting his feet up on the tavern table. His eyes were hazy and far away, his face red and his body heavy with a drunken stupor hanging over his mind. His subordinate guardsmen caroused all about him, harassing the barmaids and slamming gauntlets down with mighty guffaws at the joking words of their neighbors. To the untrained eye, spirits were high, but these men were drowning. The captain's eyes were far away with more than just the drink. A younger looking guardsmen still clean of face silently wept in the corner, staring at his sword, caked with black sludge. Another man walked slowly with wide eyes down from the upper floors of the lavish tavern, having glanced out an upper story window a second too long, his eyes having lingered on the far off, midnight curtained treeline. He left his blade sheathed at his side, hurrying to the bar counter to shout and bluster at the harried barman, demanding a stiff drink while tears streak down his cheeks and into his beard. A simple looking man, lay on the floor at the captain's feet, a bruise on his cheek where he had been punched clear into unconsciousness. The captain cast his doberman like eyes down on him and scoffed, and quaffed his flagon remembering the simpleton's words. "What are you doing away from your posts at this hour? What of your sacred duty?" Imagine the blithering man, speaking to his betters like that. The captain shook his head and put his forehead down on the table, reveling in sedation. It was then, in that silence of lack of thought, that he could hear the slithering. All about the noisy tavern, slithering black tendrils invaded this place of light. Like snakes, they curled in from the shadows. Disturbing invaders they were, and legion they were. "The warriors of old were not so lack luster~ In their gleaming mail and bearing their shining weapons~ You disgust me, mere men you are, uncloaked by honor or sacrifice. You are just as you seem, and will die as you are. Unworthy." A hissing voice said all this without warning, as the first man died. Many men in the tavern rose, some fell out of their chairs, the women began to scream. A man had been grabbed at one end of the room and brutally dispatched by the strong tendrils of the feind. The captain rose from his chair slowly, stupidly, watching the second and the third man get yanked into the growing shadows. Erikson. Drevel. Conchor. They died drunken, sudden deaths in the unseen places of the world. In the same moment half the candles blew out, leaving the captain and several other men on islands of light in a sea of nightmares. Danger and excitement had a way of sobering a man up. The brew of the master elixir smiths, had nothing on a pure sudden dose of life-threatening circumstances. It did not matter how out of it the captain was when the tendril of darkness pierced his right spaulder and lanced into his flesh and bone, he was no longer in that quiet place. He was in the loud rush of battle once more, just like those days with his training instructors and the first day of real combat on the great kingdoms borders. He felt more alive than he ever had, once again. Black blood went spilling everywhere as the captain's sword flashed in the air by his side, slashing the meat of the tendril away from its bulk.