City of IF

[dinranwen]

With no posts...I went straight to a poll. Please vote.

[Player of Fates]

I voted take the offer and kill the girl and the person she gave the sword too.

[dinranwen]

Oh dear, the only option I didn't want anybody to vote for....

Anybody else voting. *begs* Please?

[dinranwen]

As much as I am going to hate this...poll's closed. New chapter will up in a few days.

[Chinaren]

Sorry Dinny, missed the vote, though it wouldn't have made any difference.

[solus.serpen]

Uhhh. Missed the poll again. :(

Oh well - at least the option I would have chosen won.

Hopefully I'll be quicker next time. ;)

~Solus

[dinranwen]

Chapter 7: Rightful Airs, Part 1: Second Thoughts

((Sorry, Rath…and vicariously Rai…Please don’t kill me for this…))

Rath stretched her talons forward and with a quick motion slid the coins in the ever-growing gold pile that made her bed. Some fool had once said that sleeping on gold made dragons young and gave them magic, Rath snorted at this thought. The truth was that when you were a being with the size and reputation of a dragon, sleeping on your gold was about the only way to keep it safe.

“Alright,” Rath said her voice showing no seen of the hesitation and suspicion her cunning mind had displayed moments before. “Consider the task done. But I will need a more vivid description of the girl if you don’t wish me to make a mistake.”

“Oh, trust me, dragoness assassin, you won’t miss this girl. After all a common witch, whore, and peasant giving an eroki a sword isn’t exactly a sight you see every day.”

Rath mused her muzzle displaying her fangs in what have been mistaken for a smile on another’s face, “Perhaps.”

“We will give you the other half of your pay as soon as we know the task is done. And leave the bodies in a place they can be found, examples cannot be examples unless their seen.”

Rath felt her eyes widen. These men planned on paying her double what they already had? Already the pair had paid her enough to kill a powerful Lord and hang his body on the wall for public display, which as one can imagine involved a very high risk for the assassin who completed such a task.

Once again the nagging suspicion that there wasn’t something quite right with these two plagued her mind, but the sight of the gold and the prospect of fresh blood blinded the dragoness to all else. Already her world was turning red.

“Alright,” Rath roared, “I have agreed to your commission, now get out of my cave.”

Rath emphasized the last remark with a breath of fire that barely missed the exiting visitors behinds. Inside her cave, Rath began to pace while she tried to calm herself by counting to One Billion in draconic, common tongue, and elvish all at once.

~ ~ ~

What had become of her? Rath wondered as she lumbered around on the ground outside the city gates making her slow way towards the Dragons Field where the ceremony would take place.

What would Path think of me now I wonder? Taking commission to kill a common girl…[i] The lighter side of her soul, the soul that seemed to hold her withered blighted emotions, her morals, and her sense of pride.

[i]Path’s not here. Path’s dead. The darker side of Rath’s side growled at the lighter soul causing her morals to shrink and flee under the cool iciness of unthinking, unfeeling assassin. Being unthinking, unemotional, and as moral as a ice block prevented one from thinking too much about one’s past, and in Rath’s mind, it was much better then the madness.

Oh yes, the Madness, the cold, bloodthirsty, searing anger that blinded her and made her no better then a rabid dog. Path had been able to break her out of it, but Path was no longer here. He was gone, slain by demons, orcs, and other foul ilk. Rath remembered going mad then, remembered vaguely hunting down every demon, orc, goblin, giant, and foul beast she could fine until she awoke again one night in a dark forest covered in blood vaguely blinking in the light.

Ever since that day, Rath could not go long with the taste of blood in her teeth, without the feel of the warm, sticky sensation running through her talons and over her forelegs. She had tried once to bury herself in a cave to prevent herself from killing. She had failed and had only gone mad once more when the thirst, the desire for blood became too much, and this time when Rath awoke out of her madness she found the body of bloody child in her talons and not some evil orc or demon who had done her wrong. Rath had decided then and there to become an assassin. What better trade was there for a dragon who had a taste for blood?

But how she ended up in those moment, morals gone, more then willing to take every contract she was offered no matter how petty, Rath had no clue.

Yes what would Path think of her now. Probably not much. It is a good thing he’s dead then, muttered the coldness of the darker side of her soul but the lighter half a small fragment of the once happy content Rath wailed with tears in the small corner of the mind it had been pushed into by the cold assassin that now controlled Rath’s movements.

It did not take her long to arrive to the Dragon’s Fields and soon she found herself amidst a crowd of people, eroki, and dragons.

Normally Rath found it hard to move around these cities whose occupants welcomed but were still suspicious of the dragons with whom they held an uneasy alliance, but here at this time, Rath was just another elder dragon of high esteem who had come to witness the ceremony of bonding between man and dragon.

Rath smiled, these humans trusted to many people too often. It was a good thing they did not that Rath was not one of their own dragons. Rath was a Skye dragon and so much unlike, and her mind superior to these worms that more often then not chained themselves to weaker races such as mankind. Indeed, not only was she not a typical dragon of Cree, she was not even from Cree, but Lodryss, but that was another thought for another time. Rath was sure when she had first started coming to this ceremony for the commissions it would bring people would notice the difference between her dragon-form and the other dragons, but no one did. Not even the other dragons noticed the subtle rounder curves of Rath’s body, the delicateness of her figure, the hollowness of her bones, the highness of her checks with her muzzle, the tuffs that projected above delicately curving horns that served as ears for a sky dragon, nor did they notice that her wings far too delicately webbed to be able to realistically carry a dragon of Rath’s size flew much faster and steered much smoother then the Creeian dragons massive ones. The blindness that seemed to lay hold of this world served Rath all to well, especially on this day when she had killing on her mind.

As soon as Rath arrived she began to look around with her sharp black eyes watching carefully for a human maid and an eroki male, and the sword-giving that was to be her signal.

~ ~ ~

Juri paced up and down the small room he had procured for his sister’s sake so that she could wash the crude of the sea, and although he knew well that neither he nor his sister like the closed room with a roof far to confining for those of gypsy blood, he also knew that the streets of Mendar were not place for a young girl of sixteen to make her bed at night.

“Juri, sit still! For pete’s sake if you keep this up much longer your going to wear a whole in the floor,” came the soft delicate voice of a girl who was still very much a child in Juri’s mind.

Juri turned and looked at his sister, Nari who was sitting on the edge of the bed with her legs bouncing up and down like a little girl, and he just had to laugh at the sight. “You’re one to talk,” Juri laughed at his sister pointing at her moving legs. Blushing guilty Nari tried in vain to tuck her legs underneath to stifle their endless restlessness only to find herself bouncing up and down on the bed instead within a few moments of stillness. Juri couldn’t help but laugh and Nari laughed at herself too.

Juri was nervous, they both were. Juri was half tempted not to believe the wild tale Nari had spun about the sword falling from the sky, the strange nightmares Nari had been having recently, but when Nari told him about the men she had unwilling killed and pulled out the blade once more, Juri had been forced to believe her.

He was glad it would all be over soon, this thing with his younger sister and the blasted sword that had caused them so much trouble already. It would all be over for him to, this seamlessly endless waiting after years of training and field experience with men far more experienced then he.

It had come down all to this, a ceremony were Juri would find out if he had what it took to be a dragon rider.

The ceremony would take place soon and soon the Dragon Trainer whom Juri and the other selected youths had trained with would come to fetch them. The Dragon Trainer had been the first person Juri had spoke to after her sister told her strange tale, and he had been he that had suggested a room where Juri could protect his younger sister and have some privacy before the ceremony. The Trainer had even been willing to send one of the Dragon Boys, children of the Dragon riders far too young or too fragile to be trained as a dragon-rider with their fathers, to fetch Juri, but then again the Trainer had made secret of the fact that Juri had been his favorite and that Trainer had high hopes for Juri in the ceremony.

Resuming his pacing, Juri folded his arms behind his back and was now glancing at his sister who had given up on sitting and was now standing in front of a beaten brass mirror playing with her hair as she tried to decide which way she would wear it for the dragon ceremony.

Much had changed with Nari over the last 5 years when Juri had first found his sister bloody and crying in the forest after the dreadful ceremony that guaranteed that neither of them would find a comfortable home among the gypsy’s again not even with their father who dared not anger the wagon master by disobeying his wishes. Nari had been 10 then, Juri thought, and he had only been a very impressionable thirteen. He hadn’t been exactly certain where they were going or what they would do in the big wide world with a girl of 10 at his side, but they were gypsy children and they had found their way soon enough.

Juri remembered as he paced the length of the small room how he once had a notion to become a sailor. Gypsy’s could not stay still long, not even there children, something in their blood called them to move, to never stay still, but to move endlessly on to discover new places and new people. A sailor’s life, Juri had thought, would provide the movement both he and his sister needed and surely some ship would need a cabin boy and maybe a small girl to perform some tasks aboard the ship. Juri, now a much older and wiser man if still very young, could have laughed at his younger self for his foolish thoughts. They had found a boat alright who were more then willing take the children aboard as helpers, but neither he nor his sister had counted on joining a crew of pirates, nor had they counted on Matt the ex-knight who pushed Juri towards the dragon riders, and neither had they counted on Maggs the captain of the Red Wheel who had taken then raised Nari as her own child.

A knock at the door finished this musings however, and Juri found himself gulping nervously.

Opening the door he saw the trainers eldest son a lad about seven standing at the door. Swallowing his adam apple with a gulp, Juri found his voice creaking with nervousness, “Yes?”

“Father say’s its time,” the boy said sticking his sandy head in the door to smile at Nari like he had never seen a girl play with her hair before.

“We’ll be right down.” Juri said pressing a small bronze penny in the lads hand and closing the door to turn towards Nari. “It’s time sister.”

Nari sighed and let her hair fall from her hands to cascade once more over her supple brown shoulders. “I know.” Walking over to the bed, Nari picked up the sword that was still laying upon the colorful wrap on which it had been laid after being showed to her brother. Hesitating a moment, Nari picked up the sword with reverent hands and stuck the sword unsheathed in the red sash that wrapped around her waist and then took the wrap and with a few twist and tugs made a rough headband to hold back the length of her hair from her beautiful face and her strangely colored eyes. Taking another look at the beaten brass mirror, Nari nodded as if satisfied with her meager preparations, “I’m ready.”

“Let’s go,” Juri said and with that brother and sister headed downstairs to see what destiny had in store for them.

((Sorry, this chapter is HUGE! So I'm breaking it in half. Please free to comment whilst I work on the second half however. Second Half should be up in a few days, as it needs serious spellchecking and tweakign. The Second will be MUCH, MUCH, MUCH Longer than this so be thankful that I broke in two. The DP will be in the second half.)))