A momentary pause

After riding hard for several hours the village of Membe and its castle was now in view of the three knights and their squires. It had been over eleven years since Amondo Malla had last viewed it and the rest had never done so. The village itself was split into two by the medium-sized stream that ran through it. On one side the castle, a shrine to the Goddess Synno and a mill, while on the other side was everything else.

A bridge did of course link the two sides, it appeared to be made of wood but it wasn't like any other wood anyone had ever seen outside of that which was also used to construct two dozen or so other bridges scattered all over Cundus.

No one has any kind of an idea as to what kind of tree it had come from, not even the elves of the great forest on the other side of the great mountain range, or so they claim.

As far as was known the bridge had been in existence since long before anyone had inhabited any of the areas of Cundus the bridges could be found in. Not even the finest axes wheeled by the strongest forester could even scratch it.

Where ever the bridges could be found those who live in the area plus many of those who visit them have at one time or another tried to do so. Everyone who lives in Membe and many of those who visit the area or that of the other bridges, always with the same predictable outcome.

Amondo had been thirteen and just home from serving as a page in the Duke's household for his sister Rheas first wedding when he had tried and even ended up managing to injure himself in the process, not to mention when his father caned him for having done so.

The Current castle was a relatively new construction which had replaced a previous castle which had been built some distance away. It had been slighted during a particularly bloody period in the history of the Bantis Empire, three centuries ago.

It was just after the end of this period that the Barony of Membe had been granted to the Malla family in the form of one Sir Alek Malla for services rendered during the closing years of the second Imperial Interregnum. From the period it was founded until then it had been ruled by the Membe family which had chosen the wrong side in the struggle for the imperial crown and paid the price for having done so.

Alek hadn't rebuilt the castle in the same place because he felt the site was unlucky and he wanted his castle in what he felt was a more easily defended location. It was at the time widely believed that his wife was the one responsible for the change, she was the daughter of a low-level elemental mage and was rumoured to be a minor prophetess.

Whatever the real reason was it proved fortuitous when a giant sinkhole opened up in the ruins of the old castle. The new castle had been built using the latest designs at the time, which turned out to only be a short-lived fad. It was situated on a slight rise near one of the bends in the stream and it had seen better times. There just wasn't any money left to pay for its upkeep and there hadn't been even before Amondos brother reign as Baron.

A year or so after their father's death and Amondos leave-taking Leonid had decided to build a manor house to replace the castle as the Baron's primary residence. The castle would have been kept at least for the time being as a garrison for the barony's soldiers and the administrative centre for the barony.

Leonid had been left a well enough run if not particularly prosperous Barony by his father. The treasury contained just over two thousand gold plus a further three thousand in silver. Then disaster had struck, the copper mine that had provided a large percentage of the revenue of the Barony began to run dry earlier than expected.

Leonid had by this time already spent a good portion of the treasury to begin construction of the manor house and borrowed more to pay for the rest. He had used the mines now greatly reduced future earning potential to attract the funding.

At this point, he should have reevaluated the situation and that is perhaps exactly what he would have done if he hadn't been approached by a mining engineer and one of the new geologist that had started to appear in recent years. They were looking to obtain his permission to perform a mineral survey of the Barony. He had readily agreed to their proposal and two months later they had come back with a report on what they had uncovered.

Their findings included the presence of two different minerals in sufficient quantities to make their mining worthwhile. The first was coal but that was mined elsewhere in the area and it was felt that the market for it was already sown up. The second was Galena, which contains lead and often smaller quantities of silver.

He was then approached by the Mining guild of Frandel, one of the city-states of the Urban Union with an offer to help finance the opening of a lead/silver mine on a half and half basis.

Leonid invested a considerable amount of the money he had raised to build his manor in this new mining venture expecting to recoup it in no time at all. As you no doubt have realised by now that wasn't what happened. When the miner he had hired to run the new mine turned up and started a test mine he discovered that there wasn't any Galena or anything else to be found. When he sent word about this to the Frandel mining guild he discovered they did not know of any kind of agreement with him or anyone else anywhere near his barony for that matter.

When the dust had cleared his finances were in ruins and even then he still moved ahead with the manor, abet on a much smaller scale. By the time he died, it was only half-finished and he had only managed to keep his debts to a manageable level for as long as he did by cutting his costs as much as he could, spending his wife's small dowry and raising some funds using methods that had rarely been used in the history of the Barony.

The unfinished manor house was located at the southeastern edge of the village. and work on it seemed to have stopped. It was within the wooden walls that not withstanding the stream nearly completely encircled both sides of the village.

Amondo and the rest of the advanced party paused for a moment to allow him to contemplate the situation and how in the short term at least he planned to deal with it. He didn't feel as if he wasn't up to the challenge he was now faced with or that others might be better suited to do so.

Instead, he was hyper-aware of the awesome responsibilities that he was about to take on and the consequences that failure or indeed success in the endeavour would bring. He just needed to take a moment to metaphorically draw a line in the sand and then cross over it, to embrace whatever the future had in store for him.

With that taken care of he spired his horse on and thus passed from one phase of his life another in the sure knowledge that there was no going back. Once the moment had passed they all continued on toward the village and whatever fate had in store for them.