Untold Tales RPG

From the moment of his return to life some months ago, errand rider Hirgon had been kept trotting, both while growing used to his new mare and riding messages with her, and on his feet as well, as his services had been required. It had simply been another day of work after the other the moment he had walked back into the rider barracks nearly four years to the day he had left Minas Tirith for his last ride in Denethor’s service. He’d been informed of all events then of course, the sea of strange new faces, his berth given away, his prized mattress nowhere to be seen, though he now knew the rider who’d done that . He’d been informed, demanded work an hour after his arrival there and been sent with a quick message across the city that same afternoon.

Since then, the days had gone on much the same as before the war and Hirgon was grateful for that. Easier to fall back into with the time, enough moments to live in peace to rid him of the worst of the nightmares of orcs who bore down upon him, of his death with Minas Tirith in plain view, the knowledge that the single moment he might have gone faster… Those still came to him of course, the long scar he’d watched his blood seep out of ached when he woke in the night, but overall those things had gotten better.

His face seemed younger now, a little, to the few remaining riders who’d have known him then, or so they told him. But on the rare moments that Hirgon looked into a glass, he did not see so much was different about him. He smiled and laughed now, or had learned to smile and laugh again in the absence of such hard times as those had been.

The new life had suited him, he’d thought, until so very recently when news of illness striking had sent the world into an organized panic again. Hirgon was never one for panic, he was one for work instead to cope with it, so work was what he did. If he smiled a little less as he rode messages bearing the news of death, if he’d forgotten how to laugh again most times, he still went grimly onward, reminding himself he had born worse things before. An arrow painted black with a red tip, a symbol of the world’s end, a mark of certain death, they all had thought it, and Gondor had passed through that, harmed but ever proud, unfelled by evil and emerged, her banners waving as bright, her spires shining silver as they ever had before.

It was for this that Hirgon rode on when all but one other might have stopped it long before, in memory of the time when other tides had turned, and in the hope they turned again. It was for this that he now wove a scarf about his face whenever he rode to the boundaries of where messages could be sent and checked for signs of those within the city who had fallen ill, even while trying to prevent the thing for himself. If keeping busy was a way to fend off an urge at giving in to nightmares, then Hirgon chased his shadows down with all that he was worth. It was the only thing he knew, the only thing he wished, and in the times like now, the only thing that mattered.