Wolves of Maldeen
As the baron threw up a hand to cover his eyes, the stranger said, “M’ lord, you’ ll excuse this intrusion, I hope. I’ve come to collect this poor soul and see to him properly.” “Who are you?” Cardoza asked, his voice’s pitch higher than normal. “Get out of my manor. Now!” His screech had accompaniment—the grating scrape of Justiciar Drent’s longsword tearing free from its scabbard. “You heard his lordship. Be gone, or I’ ll bleed you like—” “Like you bled this boy, your honor?” The gray stranger’s voice became as cold as the wind blowing into the room. The man’s own blade came free of its sheath. “That boy is a criminal. He stole a loaf of fresh-baked bread. But tell me, sirs, is that a greater crime than allowing a boy to go hungry in the dead of winter while you sip wine from a goblet whose jewels alone could feed fifty families for a month?” “I’ ll kill you, slave.” Drent strove for a fierce tone, but failed. “You might. But death is far preferable to living alongside men like you.” And with that the gray man stalked toward Drent like a wolf, and the cold wind carried certain death along with him.
History of the Wolf As a beardless officer, Maldeen volunteered to join the Gray Wolves, a ragtag militia assembled overnight near the end of an orc invasion and ordered to Red Rock Pass to stem the tide of these orcs. Hundreds of battles, some of the bloodiest seen in this age, took place in Red Rock Pass, and the battle of the Gray Wolves put them all to shame. It was pure slaughter. Within 2 hours, three hundred Gray Wolves had died on the valley floor, and among the dead were all eight of Maldeen’s superior officers. The young lieutenant took command of the tattered remnants of the Gray Wolves. He was fourteen at the time. The tales of how Maldeen broke the orc horde like a wave against the rocks vary tremendously. In some, he shows a dramatic aptitude for tactics and outwits the orc chieftains. In others, he single-handedly cuts a path through the orc hordes and leads his Gray Wolves to victory. However
he did it, the cold fact of the matter remains: A boy cast the savage tribes back to Black Shard Peaks. On his return from the front, the baron of Maldeen’s lands heralded the young warrior as a hero. When this boy was raised high on a dais next to the baron to address the people, he did not regale them with tales of bravery and battle. Instead he launched into a scathing indictment of the baron’s decision to hurl the militia into the jaws of death, while surrounding his keep with a thousand pikes and archers to await the enemy after they had chewed through the Gray
ending up starving and nearly exhausted to death at the front door of simple log cabin in the deep solitude of the forest. A leathery old man, crippled from a life of bonecrushing battle, answered the door. The refugees’ only hope against a ravening tribe of pursuing ogres was an eighty-four-year-old veteran with one crushed leg. Maldeen had seen worse. He died that day, his aged chest crushed by an ogre’s club, but not before he culled more than half their number and scattered the ogres into the forest. The refugees he saved spread
The tales of how Maldeen broke the orc horde vary tremendously. However he did it, the cold fact remains: A boy cast the savage tribes back to Black Shard Peaks. Wolves. Maldeen assailed the baron with the names of every single carpenter, brewer, farmer, and artisan of the Gray Wolves butchered by orc axe and spear. The baron had Maldeen arrested, and the boy wallowed in the dungeons while a strike force of Gray Wolf veterans laid siege to the keep. It took three years, but they broke the army’s resolve, and, in the end, the baron’s own general impaled him on a golden sword he later laid at Maldeen’s feet. The fighting forces of the area demanded that Maldeen assume leadership of the barony, but he refused, instead restoring the baron’s son and acting as his closest advisor to ensure the boy grew up virtuous and far stronger than his cowardly father. For forty more years Maldeen commanded the baron’s armies against countless foes, and then he retired from service and disappeared. Maldeen’s story might have ended there were it not for the massacre at Delkarem’s Vale. A group of refugees fled the Vale when a band of ogres descended on their town and slaughtered everything in sight. Those who escaped ran headlong into Starfall Forest and scampered through the thick woods for days,
tales of the old man’s heroism far and wide, and when it came to light he was the same Maldeen who led the Gray Wolves to victory at Red Rock Pass over seventy years before, memorials sprouted up across the land, and wayside shrines honoring Maldeen as a true guardian of the common folk and scourge of corruption and evil became common sights along the road. These shrines soon attracted drifters—young men and women whose communities had been torn asunder by strife. They’d seen their families trampled by evil and witnessed atrocities and injustices heaped upon those unable to defend themselves. These refugees, vagabonds, and wanderers were inspired by Maldeen’s courage and virtue, so they took up arms in his name and swore never to allow rampage and iniquity to visit the meek again. They called themselves the Gray Wolves, and their pack has now grown hundreds strong.
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