Styrian Corridor, the Western Outpost
Two men of not so impressive body design, being somewhat toned in muscle but nothing particularly out of the ordinary with slightly tanned Caucasian and dark brown, hair that flows out from under a shiny grey steel helmet whose top curves into a spiky tip. Their dress and facial hair styles are nearly the exact same, but the two guards are not identical twins, for their height is different and one has brown eyes while the other has hazel. The shorter guard, named Izsar Ifac shows more sign of age than the taller guard named Csab Ifac.
The two guards stay strictly at their guard tower on the edges of the styrian corridor. Their outpost is simply known as the “Eastern Outpost”- a creative name is it not?
The out post is situated between two large slopes, both really large, hard to climb hills and the outpost itself is very much like a gate with stone brick walls and two guard towers on both ends of the out post. The guards keep a lazy watch, but never stop watching. Determined and dull in their ways, they stick to their posts lest they want their families to suffer by having their future children became peasants.
The two guards being talked of are on the northern guard tower that watches over a incomplete road which leads into the vast road network that connects the edges of the Styrian corridor to the Keletrian forests and the rather calm, slow flowing Lustaramian river that connects to the sea that is so calm in flowing traders from far away lands have come through the river to the far lying cities of the Thernopolesian empire in the name of commerce and the unparalleled metal crafting of the smith caste.
Guarding the gate itself are another two guards who wear armor and wield the finest steel of the Thernopolesian Empire, in all its bluish tinted, ornate hilted glory. The guards are golem-like in their stillness, despite the sweltering heat in the armor and having to stand hours on end only ever leaving to the side to go to the bathroom or eat a loaf of bread, a bit of lamb and drink a cup of water from the supply garrison. Their shifts still have three more hours.
Watching, Csab Ifac starts humming from boredom, making a hum that sounds somewhat like it came from the gut and atonal in its pace and pitch. The humming continues to get harder to ignore, irritating his fellow guard Izhar. Izhar starts getting irritated by Csab’s dissonant humming, and proceeds to rhetorically ask, “Do you intend to disturb the muses?”
Offend by the question; Izhar near-instantly ceases humming, and aggressively claims, “I intend to please them.”
“The only way I believe you could possibly please them is not to hum.” Csab tells Izhar with an annoyance that can only come from long periods of silence interrupted by dissonant humming. However, Izhar too proud of his humming to take this crap from someone nearly a decade younger than him in his own caste tells Csab, “I believe instead you have a poor sense of hearing.”
“Yet I am a guard.” Izhar tells Csab, seeing the caste he was chosen for as proof his hearing is good- a guard with bad hearing wouldn’t have been chosen to be a guard, would they have? “A guard must have good hearing.”
However, Izhar forgot an important part of the caste system that Csab remembered. Sighing a bit than laughing deeply Csab with his better knowledge of the system the empire uses points out the following, “Izhar, when you were chosen to be a guard like me, you were chosen because the choosers needed more guards, not because they thought you talented as a guard. You could be a great smith, but if they want guards, you must be a guard. It is not a perfect system, but it is what keeps the empire together.”
However, all this is lost of Izhar, who simply states “Your humming is still shit.”