Private Tales Feral Animals

[Sable]

Sable sucked in a ragged breath as the pressure on her throat eased. The moment her airway opened, she tore the chain from her neck with an impatient snarl, her jaw set so tight her teeth ached.

Her eyes dropped to the sobbing elf beneath her. Blood welling bright as wine around the blade still buried in her shoulder.

Pathetic.

Sable’s hand came down without hurry, splaying flat across Yavanna’s sternum and pinning her in place with effortless strength. The gesture wasn’t violent. It didn’t need to be. It was insulting in its ease.

“You think you can choke me out?” she exhaled, still catching her breath but steady now, anger sharpening every word. A humourless, husky laugh broke from her chest. “Elf, I’ve fought ogres the size of carriages and they didn't manage it either."

She leaned in, close enough that her breath brushed the elf’s cheek, warm and steady, utterly unbothered by the pain she'd 'inflicted.

“You are outmatched,” Sable murmured low in warning. “Outmuscled. And if you try that again, you won’t be conscious long enough to regret it.”

“Now,” Sable hissed. “We’re going to try this without the kicking. Without the grabbing. Without the fucking talking and without you pretending you’re capable of killing me.” Her lips curved in cruel amusement.

“Unless you’d prefer I put you to sleep and drag you the rest of the way. Or, if you're quite fond of pain, there are plenty of other ways in which I can hurt you without killing you.." she said, twisting the blade a fraction.

“Choose. Are you going to behave?"

 

[Yavanna]

Another shriek of pain pierced the air as the woman twisted the knife in Yavanna's shoulder. Tears fell, hot and streaming down her face.

"Fuck," she moaned, legs squirming on the ground. Her toes curled and she hunched with the pain, wanting to thrash about and scream again but she didn't. Wouldn't let two centuries of existence be torn away with a whimper and a slash. She could feel the blood pool under her back, warm and sticky, clinging to the fabric of her dress. Ruined. Just like her shoulder. Just like her life if the dreadlord had her way.

"You fucking stabbed me," she hissed through her teeth, ending with another whimper as pain lanced through her body.

What did all the magic in the world matter if she could not access it now? Rolling around in the muck in a dress, trying to outmuscle an armored dreadlord seemed so foolish. But she tried to buy time. She did not know if it worked.

"Fine, yes. Just, get this out of me," she gasped, amber eyes wide and shimmering with the agony and more standing tears.

Sable

 

[Sable]

The sobbing didn’t move her. Not the tears, not the trembling, not the soft collapse of pride cracking under pain.

If anything, Sable felt the faintest of satisfactions. A warning finally delivered. A lesson absorbed.

She let out a short, annoyed huff, then, without a word of comfort or any warning at all, she gripped the hilt and ripped the blade free. A wet sound followed it. The blood welled slowly, rather than spurting all over the place. Good. She’d aimed carefully enough. All the same pain but less... messy.

Sable rose in one fluid movement, leaving the squirming elf on the floor, not bothering to spare her a glance as she stepped over her and strode to look outside.

The forest stretched out below, lush and deceptively tranquil. Grey eyes swept the endless expanse of green for movement of friend or foe. For archers. For the shimmer of magic. For anything that meant more work. Nothing. For now.

“Rest,” she ordered dryly, not looking back. “You’ll need it for the walk.” There was no sympathy in the command. No gentleness. Just the practical truth of someone who had every intention of dragging her prisoner, bleeding or not, through miles of forest until the mission was done.

 

[Yavanna]

For once, Yavanna did as the dreadlord instructed. What else could she possibly do? She hoped that her people would find her. Fal'Addas would not just abandon her, would they? She did have enemies among the princes, to just let her be handed over? She closed her eyes and curled up where she lay, unwilling to even move back to the cot.

Not sure she had the strength to, or that her shoulder would support her weight if she tried to push herself up.

But the rotted wood felt so hard against her back that eventually she could bear it no more. Wincing, she pushed herself up with her good arm and nearly fell back over as a fresh wave of pain pummeled her.

Struggling forward, Yavanna toppled onto the cot, her dress a mess and blood crusting on her skin. She shut her eyes tight again and tried to pass out.

It proved easier than she thought and in moments she drifted away. At least in her dreams she was still free.

Sable

 

[Sable]

Silence.

It was a strange silence. A kind she’d never known in Vel Anir, where everything was always loud. Here, there was only the forest breathing. Leaves whispering against one another like soft conversation, and the chirps and calls of forest life. A soft breeze of fresh, clean air brushed across her face in gentle strokes.

Her jaw unclenched. Shoulders loosened beneath her armour. She was stranded, potentially hunted, and the elf nearby wouldn't hesitate to strangle her in her sleep, but... She had never felt more calm.

She flicked a glance toward the cot. The elf’s chest rose and fell shallowly, her face slack with exhaustion. A pretty thing, she noticed again, except for the ears. The ears were a shame. Her gaze moved to the wound in hers shoulder. Sable felt nothing about it. Not triumph. Not guilt. Just the simple assessment that her prisoner was no longer a threat, at least, not for now.

When at last she was certain the elf’s breathing had slipped into the deep, heavy cadence of true sleep, Sable rose. Her steps were soundless on the earthen floor, a habit long ingrained, and she came to kneel beside the cot. She inspected the wound, still bleeding slowly. She had no linen, but she cast a look over Yavanna's 'attire'. So much fabric meant only for beauty and decoration, trailing uselessly, delicate as spidersilk and just as impractical. Wasteful, but workable.

With careful fingers she cut a length of the excess, one that fluttered and draped without offering warmth or modesty. Sable wound the strip beneath the elf’s arm, across the angry wound at her shoulder, drawing it snug enough to support without waking her. The makeshift bandage tied off neatly, a knot small and secure against pale skin.

Sable sat back onto her heels, watching the rise and fall of Yavanna’s chest, a thin ribbon of moonlight tracing the line of her cheek. Then she turned away, letting the quiet reclaim the space between them.

She sat with her back against the cold stone just outside, her attention drifting upward. The sky bled slowly from blue to violet, to ink. A scattering of stars blinked awake one by one. Fireflies rose in slow spirals of light like tiny, flickering lanterns.

She watched them until her breathing fell into rhythm with the forest. Until the constant tension riding her spine eased. Until her eyes blinked slow and heavy. Her hand rested atop her blade. The door was bolted. The elf unconscious... And in the hush between one heartbeat and the next, Sable’s chin dipped and she drifted slowly to sleep.

 

[Yavanna]

Yavanna awoke to the smell of fire and smoke. She lurched to her feet, wincing as pain flared in her shoulder. The elf spared a glance to see the wound bandaged. Her brow furrow. Did the dreadlord...

Why.

Her lips pulled back in a snarl. No matter. The pox take that woman.

Yavanna hurried over to the battlement and peered over. All along the base of the tower, torches glimmered in the morning twilight.

Finally, her people had come to save her at last. She peered down, trying to see if she could make out any familiar features, but saw only hulking and hunched forms, furred and maned.

Her blood chilled.

"No," she whispered into the air, fear spiking through her.

How close were they to the savannah border? Her throat closed up and she tried to swallow down the rising panic.

Below them, crowding the base of the tower, were dozens of Beastmen from the Aberresai Savannah.

Sable

 

[Sable]

Sable was already in motion before the elf had fully found her voice. She evaluated like a soldier, quick and cold. Facing the savages head on was stupid when she couldn't make out how many there were. Either way, she was vastly outnumbered. Up here, she could at least funnel the attackers to a narrow point and break them one at a time and they might endure.

She drove her shoulder into an old cabinet, shoving it across the stone floor until it scraped hard against the door. Whatever else she could find was wedged beneath the latch to brace it. It wasn’t enough, not against what waited below, but it was something.

"Don't suppose they're friends of yours." she rasped, voice edged like broken glass. Sable crossed the short distance between them in two strides and reached to turn Yavanna's face toward her, it might have been tender if not for the firm grip on her jaw and the stern, icy gaze she levelled her with.

"If they breach this tower, you do not run. They will chase you. They will enjoy chasing you. And when they catch you, and they will, they will tear you apart for sport, or do far worse."

Her fingers loosened, though her stare did not.

"Right now, I am the only one who does not want you dead. So you will stay close, and you will do as I say. Are we understood?" she said over the sound of banging and crashing below as the door gave way, and the beasts started up the many stairs.

 

[Yavanna]

A moment of stunned silence at the woman's fingers on her face, searing against her skin with the indignity of it. And... some other emotion. A thrill.

"You can't be serious," Yavanna guffawed, "You think you can take them all by yourself?"

She would have crossed her arms but for the manacles around her wrists. Yavanna winced at the sound of the door splintering and giving way. These were beastman from the savannah. They preferred to overwhelm with numbers and savagery.

The dreadlord was right. Used to hunting prey across the great grasslands, they would catch them if they ran. But if the dreadlord thought she could fight them all, then she was a fool. They would either be eaten immediately or taken as captives and... Yavanna shuddered.

"You need my magic."

Snarling from below and the thudding of paws and hooves announces the warband's charge up the stairs of the small tower.

"Take this collar off me or we will both die here, human."

Sable

 

[Sable]

Sable barked out a low, humourless laugh. “And let you turn that magic on me the moment you get the chance?” Her grip on her blades tightened, metal glinting as she stepped between Yavanna and the stairs.

“You think I survived this long by being naïve?”

Boots pounded the stone below. The growl of beasts rose like a tide. She didn’t look at the elf, she didn’t need to. Her whole stance was an unyielding refusal.

“I don’t need your magic. I need you breathing. Just stay the fuck behind me." Her voice was as calm as frost, though the snarl of the warband drew ever closer.

She tilted her head just enough to catch Yavanna’s eye, even as she braced herself to meet the first body that breached the door. The door that was rattled again and again before it started to crack, then to smoulder, and smoke began filling the chamber.

 

[Yavanna]

“Cave dwelling imbecile,” Yavanna muttered under her breath. She retreated away from the groaning door, moving so that her back was to the edge of the tower wall. She looked over at the drop. A long way down.

Far enough to kill her?

Yavanna thought ending over two centuries of life by throwing herself off a tower seemed so terribly banal. What a whimpering end to her story.

A sudden thought crossed her mind. Awful. What if the fall only broke her legs? Then the monsters from the Savannah would drag her off and she would be even more helpless should they choose to peel her flesh from her bones.

The elf looked up and away. How would she survive this moment? Had the spirits of the Falwood forsaken her? The pain throbbing in her shoulder indicated they may very well have.

Then the door burst asunder and the first bodies of Beastmen came crashing through, all tooth and claw and bone-ax.

Yavanna let out a scream.

Sable

 

[Sable]

Sable did not flinch at the insult, nor at the scream that tore from Yavanna’s throat. She had no space in her mind for anything but the potential death rushing up the stairs in a pack of snarling bodies. Her world narrowed to the jagged frame of the doorway and the killing that needed doing.

She planted herself there like a barricade of iron and bone.

The first Beastman lunged through the splintered threshold, a towering boar-like creature, a bone axe raised high. Sable’s body moved before thought, one knife snapped from her fingers in a perfect arc, burying itself to the hilt in the creature’s eye. It dropped with a choking grunt, its weight slamming into the second Beastman behind it and slowing their surge.

Good. One at a time.

The next came barrelling through with a roar, slashing with claws like hooked sickles. Sable met it with a low, then thrust her hand forward. The air obeyed, and a concentrated blast hit the creature square in the chest sending it crashing back down the stairs into its own allies.

Another leapt over the fallen bodies, jaws snapping. Sable stepped into the attack, turning her hips, and drove a dagger into the underside of its jaw, wrenching upward until hot blood spilled down her arm. She shoved the corpse aside, boots braced against the rising rush of bodies below.

A thrown spear hurled from the crowd below whistled up toward her. She flicked her wrist, the air thickened around her, catching it. The spear hung suspended for a heartbeat before she sent it whipping back toward the one who'd thrown it, followed by a strangled yelp.

One Beastman, smaller and faster, managed to slip past her guard. It lunged toward Yavanna, claws outstretched.

Sable didn’t even look. Her fingers curled as though grasping an invisible throat and the creature staggered, choking on empty air. She pulled its breath from its lungs and it collapsed, convulsing silently, as Sable slit another Beastman’s throat without missing a beat.

Blood slicked the stones. Smoke thickened. The warband kept coming. The bodies kept piling up.

Sable stood, knives dripping, eyes sharp and cold with the efficient focus of someone who had lived too many battles to fear another.

 

[Yavanna]

The one who slipped past the dreadlord's guard fell dead, gasping for air that simply would not enter its lungs.

What a clever little trick this dreadlord had, but it seemed that might be her only spell. Yavanna had heard this about dreadlords. They only focused on a single ability in magic, or perhaps only gifted the one. It was not clear. They were exceptionally powerful with that ability, training it to be used in ways that would put most spellcasters to shame.

But they lacked versatility and subtlety. Just brutes swinging around magic like a hammer.

Yavanna's lips twisted with disgust, even though it seemed likely she was about to be eaten. What a waste of talent. What a waste of centuries.

She would not die this way.

The sorceress fell to her knees beside one of the corpses of the slaughtered beastmen stacking up around the dreadlord. Hurriedly, she grabbed hold of a dagger in the corpse's belt sash and drug it free. Hardly more than a shard of bone wrapped in leather, but better than her bare hands.

Her chest rose and fell as her breathing quickened with the growing tide of anxiety.

What could she do? What should she do?

Yavanna's fingers tightened around the hilt of the dagger. If she stabbed the dreadlord now, they would both die. That would be foolish. If she did nothing, they might die anyway. Yavanna was not about to try to rush in and stab one of the beastman. They were absurdly huge.

No.

If it looked like they were going to overwhelm the dark haired bitch, she would just slit her own throat and avoid whatever other fate they had planned.

Sable