When first Micheal had been sentenced to exile, he had thought that he was cursed to wander the wilderness, he could not imagine a life away from court. Of course he had been young then, now he was older and better suited to his fate. Though he still cursed his traitorous father out of habit, Micheal had come accept that for him, the court would always be a thing of the past. It was a thing of half dreams for him now anyway, something he had not seen for a decade. He wouldn't be allowed at court now anyway, all of their lands and titles had become forfeit the moment that his father had been sentenced to death.
Exile was not as bad as it had sounded when Micheal had first heard it, a shaking boy, dragged before the king. He had taken the remains of their fortune, what he had been able to grab before having to leave his lands forever, and simply gone into the neighboring kingdom. It wasn't a capital like the one that he had grown up in, but it was still a reasonably sized town that he lived in, not the wilderness that he had imagined when he was fourteen. While he could no longer live as a noble he didn't have to work thanks to the money he had brought, and he spent his life in idleness, walking where he could and dreaming of how things had been in the past.
It was not the sport that Micheal missed, he had been a poor hunter and wrestler, in fact he was in better shape now that he went on his walks than he had ever been when a child. Instead he missed the texts that had been passed around the court in manuscript form and read aloud. Micheal knew that those were lost to him forever, the only way he would ever see a book again was to become a man of the church but he suspected it was sacrilege to join the cloth only to be able to read. Having been raised to be religious Micheal felt that one should only join the clergy if it was for a selfless desire to serve God.
Everything Micheal thought of to do with his time was dismissed in this fashion. He thought about opening a shop and starting a family, but it seemed like admitting that he was no longer a noble and even with all titles gone he could not bring himself to do so. He thought about joining a guild, but fraternizing with people of such lower upbringing seemed unlikely to give him pleasure. Micheal gained a reputation around the town for being aloof and mysterious, silent and withdrawn. He did nothing to change this opinion, enjoying his time alone with his thoughts.
Sometimes Micheal pictured in his mind the plans of his father, the maps with the pictures of what he would do in battle, battles that never happened, with troops that never came. Micheal had never taken a constructive role in these plots, he had been too young, a fact that had in the end saved his life. Other times Micheal daydreamed of an old servant of his father coming to serve him, or some noble of this country finding him and taking him in. No one came though and Micheal had, despite his dreams, decided that he would die in obscurity with no one to even befriend.
Micheal was twenty-four when the war between the kingdoms erupted. It was not just between his new home and his old, had this been the case he would have simply left for a new one, he had no attachment to his adopted state. Instead however war was like a fire that covered every country Micheal had ever heard of and it was everyone against everyone else. The lord who controlled the land of the town sent soldiers to drag men from their homes to fight but every time they came from Micheal he gave them some money and they left him alone. The people of the town just thought him to be one of the lucky ones who had been spared because they needed hands to work.
To be continued...
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