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Rhonyn already missed his partner. Granted, Myles was too much of a naive young chatterbox for Rhonyn to stand as they walked the streets, but another patroller -- any other patroller -- would be a lot more welcome than some Collegium mage. He didn't know what aims the Collegium of Magic hoped to reach by assigning a few of their spell-crafters to the City Patrol, but Rhonyn could care less. Having a mage walk the beat alongside him was only going to stir up more trouble, especially in the parts of Glassgate City that Rhonyn worked.

Raynessi was a small country in the Western Quarter, known for resisting the Golden Empire through sheer determination and a touch of magical prowess. That hardly meant warriors of a heroic level and mages with the power to move mountains lounged on every street corner. It just meant that the king and his council had a devil of a time playing their political games and all but kowtowing to avoid another invasion like that of seventy years ago.

Rhonyn's grandfather had fought in that one, and these days he sat legless by the fire, puffing away on his pipe and grumbling darkly about how this peace was ready to shatter at any moment. (He had been saying the same thing for decades, but lately Rhonyn was actually starting to believe him.) Of course, these days he had been telling fewer soldiering tales than criticizing Rhonyn for his less-than-successful profession (anything besides being in the King's Royal Military was less than successful) and how Rhonyn better get looking if he hoped to settle down before Grandfather was in his grave.

Rhonyn pushed his grandfather's sharp words from his mind and instead focused on the sharper idea of a mage following him around all evening. The patrol's commander had been the one to reassign Rhonyn's partner and inform him -- personally -- of his new 'friend.' Rhonyn had worked as a patroller for a good sixteen years now and he could count the times the commander had talked to him on one hand, which basically, in a nutshell, meant that Rhonyn had better take care of this new crossbreed of magic and city law enforcement, or else it was all on his head.

In theory, the patrollers were supposed to rotate routes, giving everyone a chance to work both the rougher and nicer neighborhoods. In practice, Rhonyn was such a presence in the gang-infested roughs that he had gotten to patrol the clean part of Glassgate exactly three times, each for a three-month period, before they quietly shunted him back to the city roughs.

At the least he could have been promoted by now, but you need to have either wealthy blood or exceptional connections to manage that in the Patrol, and Rhonyn had neither. He had come to terms with his lot years ago, though, considering he lived at the very edge of the roughs anyway and at least this saved him the trouble of walking any farther than the five-mile route he worked nearly every day.

The evening patrols started as the sun went down, though now that it was summer Rhonyn could count on about an hour and a half of sunlight during his shift. He leaned against the old, crumbly wall that surrounded the City Patrol West District Station, a tall, broad-shouldered man whose mere, watchful visage often stopped petty crimes before they were even committed. His brown hair was already beginning to gray, much to no one's surprise, and even though Patrol regulations stated their patrollers must be clean-shaven, a thin, dark line stretched from Rhonyn's sideburns to his chin.

Patrollers  wore a uniform of severe gray and blue, and all carried a lead-cored baton at their hip. Rhonyn wasn't the only one who augmented this with leather gloves, or even with thin metal strips sewn across the backs of the glove's hand and fingers. In the roughs, gentleness wasn't worth it.