No words were being uttered as the four members of the Zerulic Ducal Guard hurried down the street, pumping their legs as they ran at a pace chosen as a compromise between speed and endurance, to ensure that they reached their destination relatively quickly without being too winded to handle whatever situation they were urgently need at adequately. They moved much more easily in their padded leather armor than they would have in heavier equipment, and although their brown cloaks did little to keep them warm when they were blown back by the wind as they ran, it did lend them a somewhat theatrical flair that seemed to impress the civilians on their way boundlessly. Startled citizens cleared the way for them as they went, looking more and more unsettled the closer to their destination they got, and it was never an issue to squeeze through crowded streets, even with their halberds in hand. Any normal day without mysterious flashes of light and the like they would only have cleared a much narrower passage, and just ten years ago they would probably have been lucky to get through at all.
Much had changed in all of the chapters of the Ducal Guard in the years since the outbreak of the Withering, and since the death of Paul IV, the Last King of Rodoria. Before then the guards almost never saw actual combat and their duties were much safer than they were today, since whenever they expected a situation to turn violent or otherwise dangerous they would simply call the soldiers from the army to at least support them during the encounter. Back then all guardsmen were expected to do was to investigate crimes that had already been committed, catch the occasional thief and maybe break up a drunken brawl from time to time, and otherwise just act as keen observers to keep the peace. Until the Ducal Army's resources had been redirected to handle the civil war, guardsmen had never needed to hunt bandits or fight off monsters.
There was no denying that the guards were afraid; their jurisdiction was one of the most dangerous in Rodoria nowadays, after all. Some would argue that Nemhim was worse due to crime being as frequent there as it was and due to how few members of the guard there actually cared enough to do something about it, and the argument could also be made that Gilmah or Seclyr were places where assassinations and assaults, respectively, were much more common, but Zerulic guardsmen would pick any of those places over Zerul. They would much rather have to deal with extortionists, smugglers, assassins and muggers every day than face the occasional magical threat here, in the Rodorian center of magical study and research. How were they, ultimately ordinary men and women, expected to face people that could control the elements, raise the dead and conjure demons to do their bidding? They were not trained for that, and for most of the veterans it was not what they signed up for, either. Many had resigned, unable or unwilling to cope with how the world was changing; most had stayed, either because they were dependent on their salaries or because they felt a true sense of duty that would not allow them to turn away from danger only to let others face it in their stead. A lot had been killed. Far too many...
So it was to be expected for guardsmen heading to the scene of an evidently magical occurrence to be absolutely terrified. At least the Blue Duke was sympathetic to their plight, and despite the economy being as fragile as it was he still ensured that the families left behind by guardsmen who lost their lives received some kind of monetary compensation, as well as he had made sure to raise the pay to the remaining guards, albeit not much, but enough to let them know that he was aware of them and that they were suffering from the civil war too, even if they did not have to fight it. Marcus Zerul was a good man; had he been less eccentric about his study of magic and more involved in the day-to-day governing of his duchy, he could have been a great man. Instead they had to make do with the practical rulers being the nobles and merchants of the city, lead by that slick bunch of lard, Remdal. Such a selfish and ambitious prick; the Ducal Guard, especially, hated Dennis Remdal, and although none dared to say it out loud for fear that their words would reach his ears, many wished that he had managed to blow himself up [I]properly[/I] back then, or at least that his stepson, Gerald, had had the guts to murder the bastard before being exiled. They all agreed that his son, Thomas, would do a much better job as the duke's right hand man than his father.

Several months ago, at the twelve-year anniversary of the start of the civil war, the guard captain had held an assembly of the entire Zerulic Ducal Guard, as he did every year, although there were much fewer people to gather now than there had been twelve years ago. In his speech this year he had mentioned that more guardsmen of Zerul had been killed in the line of duty during these last twelve years than over the entire last century, but he had also said that fewer guardsmen had died over the last three years than over the first year of the civil war. It was all pretty confusing to them, since none of them aside from maybe a few of the lieutenants had gone to school and been taught any of that fancy math, but the captain had assured them that this meant that although theirs was a dangerous job now, they were getting tougher, stronger and better; that they were adapting well and rising to the challenge, and that their hardships had made them the strongest of the Rodorian guard companies. Said that while they should remember and mourn our lost comrades, those of them that were left had achieved a survivability that rivaled that of the army, if not even the deo'iel.
While Marcus fell just short, the captain was truly a great man. It was him that had convinced the general and the nobles to allow the recruitment of mages into the Ducal Guard, and even now he was trying to shove his way through the tangle of politics to get the duchies to do something about that scourge, the Crusader's Guild. The Ducal Guard was tougher now than it had been twelve years ago, but many of the crusaders were mercenaries; professional soldiers, people who fought and killed for a living. They could manage stopping small groups of them from time to time, or at least manage to dissuade them from causing undue trouble too close to the city, but ultimately the Guild was simply much more powerful than the Ducal Guard. The army needed to forget about the civil war for a while and take care of those ruffians! Why Etlon allowed the Guild free passage across their borders was a mystery, although chances were that they just did not want to provoke their enmity and end up having to fight them and lose resources they needed for the civil war.
In short, the civil war ruined everything, and none felt this more clearly than the Ducal Guard.

It was with dread of a magical confrontation in their hearts and the determination born from a dozen years' fighting to keep the people safe that the four guardsmen entered the alley, already in formation and prepared for the worst. Three men stood in the front, halberds lowered and ready, and a woman was positioned behind them, aiming down the length of a loaded crossbow and with a shortsword at her hip.
"What is going on here?" the middle guardsman thundered, his gaze being immediately drawn to the corpse of the blue-clad woman on the ground. "Nobody moves! You -"
He abruptly stopped himself as he noticed I'on, and he actually moved to a less battle-ready stance immediately, raising his halberd to a less threatening position and staring at the penin with surprise.
"I'on the Noble?" he exclaimed, looking around to see if the others gathered here were of a similar status within the duchy. In truth he really had no way to say whether they were or not, since they both wore masks, which was usually never a good sign. "What's going on?" He looked at the woman on the ground. "What happened?"