A wave of startled murmurs swept through the audience at the opening declaration, and it took Spur a mont to silence everyone with a raised hand. Looking down at the angry dwarf, Spur replied.
“Perhaps a bit more detail would be helpful? Not just about Curash, but yourself as well? Currently we know nothing beyond the fact that you have so rather strong opinions on how this trial plays out.”
“I ran what you could generously call a tavern in our small village,” Vurnon explained, not taking his eyes off Curash as he spoke. “More of a place for people who didn’t want to sleep under the stars or those who wanted a drink to co and rest within. I’m not good at all that much, but I can brew up a drink hard enough to knock your socks off. Because of that, I spent most of my ti helping people drink to forget their worries. So of us Bands were trapped in that prison for years, so there was no shortage of people in need of drinks once we were free. However, due to the actions of this man before you, we received quite a new handful of worries to drink about.
“We spent months dealing with raids and attacks from the Red Dawn,” Vurnon spat, his eyes narrowing at Curash. For his part, Curash rely stood there with his eyes closed and a blank look on his face, his head tilted down in acceptance. “We did the best we could to fight them off, but with most of us having given up our combat classes to lead new lives, it wasn’t a fair fight. Every ti they showed, lives were lost and our village was whittled down further and further. We made the bastards pay for their actions with their own blood, but it would take five or ten of us to take down a single one of them. I saw people I’d co to call friend perish at their hands, and that man there is the one responsible for all of it.”
Vurnon paused, breathing heavily as his finger trembled. Not once did he lower his arm, as if hoping to suddenly manifest the power to shoot lightning from his fingertip and deal with Curash all on his own.
“Thank you for coming up here and speaking,” Spur said, and there was a rather loud sweeping of applause from the crowd, along with a number of Bands shouting out words of encouragent before Spur continued. “I am not disputing any of your words, but for the sake of our judgent, it is important for us to know. Did you or any of the other Bands personally witness Curash kill or harm anyone?”
“What?” Vurnon asked, his angry gaze switching from Curash over toward Spur. “What does that matter? He’s the leader of the Red Dawn, and they killed dozens of us!”
“Just answer the question,” Spur said, his voice growing stern. “And need I remind you we have no need to bring in a truth-gem with the Roar sitting here with us.”
Vurnon’s eyes flicked to Vin at Spur’s comnt, and Vin was at least pleased to see the clear anger within them switch to sothing that looked more like pained acceptance. With a sigh, the dwarf shook his head, his voice growing a bit quieter.
“No… As far as I know, none of us ever personally saw the bastard kill anyone.”
“Thank you,” Witherson said as she motioned for Vurnon to take a seat off to the side. “Now, as there is nobody here truly fit to speak on the behalf of Curash, we have decided to allow the defendant to speak for themselves. Curash, if you would—”
“Actually, I would like to speak on his behalf,” Golrim declared loudly, standing up from his seat in the front row of the audience and stepping forward to the confused murmurs of the crowd. A quick glance at the equally confused faces on the rest of the council was all Vin needed to see to confirm that this hadn’t been part of the plan, and Witherson paused. Clearing his throat, Spur took over once again, giving the Logistician a seething look.
“We have already heard from a representative of the Bands, Golrim, so you should take your seat. We would hear from Curash himself.”
“That doesn’t seem very fair,” Golrim said, flashing them his signature, sly smile that seed to be a near-permanent addition on his face for as long as Vin had known him. “After all, from the very beginning, Curash was only following my orders. I’m the one responsible for the Red Dawn.”
For one brief, solitary second, the courtroom was silent as the grave. Hundreds of wide, shocked eyes stared at Golrim in unison, unable to believe what they had just heard. Bands and Earthers alike stared at him as their minds whirled, taking in Golrim’s sudden declaration and processing just what it ant. Even Curash had finally raised his head, looking at Golrim in confusion, as if this had been the last thing he’d ever expected.
Then a wall of noise unlike anything Vin had ever heard before exploded across the courtroom as everyone began screaming all at once.
Earthers were shouting at one another in confusion, trying to figure out if anyone had known that Golrim was the actual mastermind behind the Red Dawn all this ti. Guards were scrambling, trying to maintain the peace and keep everyone in their seats. And the Bands were practically going rabid, screaming obscenities at Golrim and staring at the man with blood in their eyes as they learned after all these months that the man who had been their original, unofficial leader was also the one responsible for all the hardship they’d been forced to endure during their first few months on Edregon.
The small handful of guards quickly proved not to be a dangerous enough obstacle, as dozens upon dozens of Bands hurled themselves out of their seats, forcing their way toward the floor as they rushed to get their hands on Golrim.
Not waiting for anyone to make any sort of formal decision, Vin stood up and leapt down to the floor, landing between Golrim, Curash, and the oncoming crowd. Not wanting to actually hurt anyone but unsure how to protect them both from the oncoming swarm, Vin stood firm, crossing his arms and doing his best to look like what he hoped was a good impression of the Roar as he silently cast Vibrate and dumped as much mana into the spell as it could physically hold.
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The courthouse floor shook and the oncoming mob stumbled and lost their montum, everyone desperately grabbing onto a chair or another person to stop themselves from tumbling to the ground. The standard, tier-1 spell wasn’t designed for this level of spread-out vibration, and Vin’s mana pool was all but evaporating in response, but he didn’t let up. Instead, he went a step further, casting Whispering Wind to literally raise his voice so that it sounded as though it were coming from closer to the roof, high above everyone’s head.
“Stop!” he shouted, louder than he ever had before. For good asure, he followed his order with a brilliant flash of electric blue light from his crossed golem arm. He wasn’t sure if it was the quaking floor, the booming voice from on high, or the realization that they would need to fight their way through The Roar and his glowing arm in order to get to Golrim and tear him limb from limb, but his plan worked. As he finally let up on Vibrate and the swarm of angry Bands collected themselves, they took one look at Vin standing there as steady as a statue, before pausing in their assault. They didn’t go back to their seats, but at least they didn’t continue forward.
“We trusted him!” one of the Bands shouted out, a beastkin who was still vibrating, albeit with his own fury. “We thought he was one of us!”
“Forget Curash, he should be the one to die!” another Band shouted, this one an orc who was gripping one of the chairs hard enough to splinter the wood.
“The lawless, free-for-all ways of doing things are exactly what led to the Red Dawn being created in the first place,” Vin said, absentmindedly noting that the entire courthouse was watching him as he stood his ground before the angry mob. He didn’t have ti to care about any of that, however, he knew just how important Golrim was to Terra. The last thing he wanted was for Phil or Spur to unintentionally harm any of the Bands as they fought to defend him. The Bands had suffered enough, and the rest of the council who spent their days within Terra’s walls couldn’t be made to look bad. “This is a courtroom, right? A place for both sides to be heard and justice to co forth? Let’s let Golrim finish speaking, and then we can decide what to do with him.”
Vin stared down the angry mob for a few more tense seconds, and he half expected them to ignore his words and continue rushing forward. Thankfully, either his words or his image seed to reach these people, as they begrudgingly moved back to their seats, acting like nothing had happened as they waited for the trial to recomnce. Letting out a sigh of relief, Vin turned, giving a sheepishly grinning Golrim an annoyed look.
“Thanks for the save there, Vin,” Golrim chuckled quietly. “That level of reaction was a bit beyond my calculations.”
“I don’t know how many tis you have to have this lesson before you realize you can’t calculate emotions like you can the number of arrows in a barrel,” Vin drawled, shaking his head before returning to his own seat. Rather than go around and climb up the stairs leading to where the council sat in their elevated seats, Vin cloud stepped his way up with quick casts of Create Cloud, going over their stand before dropping back into his chair. As soon as he was seated, he looked around, noting how all the eyes in the entire courtroom were still locked onto him. Even the other council mbers were giving him a mixture of looks ranging from awe to approval.
“What? Everyone keeps talking about how we don’t have ti to waste, right?” Vin asked, doing his best to sweep the large room with his gaze. “Let’s get to it. Golrim. Start talking.”
“Of course, Roar. Happily,” Golrim said, flashing Vin his sly smile one more ti before turning to address the crowd. Vin frowned slightly at the small, nagging thought in the back of his mind that he’d yet again found himself dancing to Golrim’s tune without even realizing it, but he decided that would be crazy. Not even Golrim would willingly risk having himself torn apart by his own people with the hope that Vin would intervene fast enough to save him.
…Right?
“You all already know , so I’ll get straight to the point,” Golrim said, clearing his throat and taking on a serious expression for a change. “During my ti spent working as the advisor to the king of our old nation, I learned a number of lessons. So of them painful. Many of them shocking. But all of them useful. One of such lessons was the importance of a common foe to rally around.
“When we first broke out of that horrific prison, there was a lot of argunt as to what we should do. I doubt I need to remind you, but there were quite a number of people who didn’t want to have anything to do with starting over and making new lives for themselves. They wanted to take advantage of their newfound freedom to continue the mindless bloodshed and carnage that had gotten them thrown into that prison in the first place. Do you all rember those first few hours of freedom? Where it felt almost as though they were going to start with all of us to satisfy their urge for blood?”
The large crowd of Bands begrudgingly nodded, and many of them even shivered at the mory, rubbing their hands against their arms.
“There was only one way to unify our people and get rid of the worst of us all in one fell swoop,” Golrim continued. “Curash is not just so random man I t in prison. In fact, he was an agent of the crown as much as I am. He is soul-bound to .”
That got the appropriate sea of gasps from the watching crowd, and hundreds of eyes turned to Curash, who nodded and spoke for the first ti.
“It is true. Golrim gave the chance to work with him and give my family a better life when the king wanted executed. I was on a mission to gather intelligence from a man locked in that very prison when the kingdom was overthrown and Golrim got himself locked up as well. Sothing I was very unhappy to see, I will add.”
“I used my connection with Curash to give him a mission. To create the Red Dawn and to slowly whittle them down over ti,” Golrim explained. “The reason why none of you ever saw Curash kill anyone is because we went to great lengths to avoid doing just that. Did none of you ever find it strange how even when the Red Dawn ‘ambushed’ us, we always managed to spot them coming from far enough out that we were ready for them? Curash and I worked tirelessly to ensure the deadliest of escaped prisoners were contained within their own small group, and that they were taken care of one by one.
“Curash personally killed forty-three mbers of the Red Dawn by his own hands over the course of his mission, and orchestrated the deaths of all the others. He was just following my orders. I spoke up because the man has suffered enough by my hand. I stand by my belief that forming the Red Dawn was the right decision, as our village and people never would have survived if I hadn’t gone through with the plan, but Curash shouldn’t be on trial here today. If anything, he should be regaled as a hero. I am the one who should face judgent.” Turning to face the five mbers of the council, Golrim bowed his head low to the ground. “I apologize for keeping such a giant secret from the council. I can only hope that all my efforts these past few months to turn Terra into the wonderful town it is today might offset my past deeds. I do regret the lives that were lost because of my plan, and for that, to my fellow Bands, I apologize. Please take all this into account during your deliberations.”
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