Dunland, Lion Age 577

A Knight of The Seward Sword furiously shouts orders to his men from the center of the village. “Find him! I’ll have his head! Search every hovel if you must!” Blood trickles down from a head wound where the Knight had only half an hour before been knocked unconscious. Ignatius, a Friar in his mid-twenties, approaches a young Dunnick urchin no more than twelve. “Someone must have done something dangerous to get that Renett Knight so worked up, hmm?” he asks, letting the boy see a faint smirk of amusement on his face. “He’s going to be in an awful lot of trouble though. But maybe I can help him. Can you tell me where to find him?” He continues in the Dunnick tongue, adding a wink. “It will be our secret.”

The boy was hesitant, but found the Friar’s sincerity enough to trust, and directed him to a storm cellar beneath a stable. The Friar spent the next quarter hour getting the hastily retold story from the Dunnick man, who explained he’d knocked out the Knight when he tried to drag away his sister with intents too vulgar to recant. “Atonement for something like that I wouldn’t normally make so severe, but in doing so I believe we can save your life at the same time. Join me on the path of the Sanctae Viae, and we can walk out of town together. He wouldn’t dare accost you while under those vows, and thusly my protection.”

The pair strode openly across the streets of the town, the Dunn clad in Ignatius’s own worn white robe & ashen seal of Melandiel marking his brow. Making for the road east towards Ryker’s Gate, the pair were halted by a pair of soldiers and eventually confronted by the Seward Knight. Impassioned words of admonishment and very-due threats of repercussions from the Church were of little use against the rage and self-importance of the Knight, and Ignatius found himself clamped in irons and watching the Dunn man he’d promised safety to swaying from a rope. When released a few hours later with an escort to ensure he left the village promptly, Ignatius was granted only the few seconds needed to collect the muddied robe that had been stripped from the Dunn and cast aside before he was hung from the gallows.

“And in the depths of my soul, I felt the crush of Despair. For my Faith in God, Lurian, and Benalus was unshakable, yet I knew that it was not enough. The forces of the wicked were too numerous to bear,”
-Excerpt, The Word Of St. Istra, Gospel Of The Hospitalier