Private Tales Playing Nice

[Zathria At'Arel]

Vyx'aria told Zathria that she had to start playing well with others, and she didn't like that. She was downright terrible at it! She gave commands and people followed them or they lost their head. Life was so simple when it was like that.

But now they had nowhere near the resources they had had in Zar'ahal and they couldn't afford to be wasting people. She was having to make due with subpar soldiers and those loyal warriors who had followed her to the surface were already stretched thin.

So with the sun having set, she had risen from her new tiny house in Hallowmere and made her way out to find J'rell. The male had proven useful in getting this place to capitulate to begin with so she decided she needed to get to know him.

Besides, if he had designs on murdering or betraying their Queen, then Zathria needed to know so that she could distribute some Drow diplomacy.

She rapped her knuckles against the door of his home. He knew to be expecting her as they were supposed to get food before going out on a scouting mission together.

 

[J'rell]

Spoiler: Music

The door yielded before her lightest touch. Scarcely more than a board on hinges, it creaked open, revealing a messy room sliver by sliver. Broken wicker baskets lay strewn about like tumbleweeds abandoned by the wind and piles of clothes lay in a ragged pile, clogging the middle of the room. The orcish sword stuck out from this pile of rags, discarded just as frivolously.

It would take stepping into room to see J'rell's bald head poking up behind that pile, his back resting against a tall bedframe; sat before the bed instead of in it, cross-legged, hands clasped before him in his lap. Still wearing his white loincloth, though at least he had bedecked his shoulders in a similarly white shawl. It nearly covered his torso, but not his trunk-like arms.

This seated giant didn't so much as stir upon her entry. Placid as a statue, breath barely audible, chin sunk down to his collarbone, one might think him asleep. Or at least unconscious.

Zathria At'Arel

 

[Zathria At'Arel]

Zathria was surprised when the door just gave way in front of her, swinging open on its hinges and she let her eyes traced along the doorframe looking for some sort of trap but finding none. Had it been ransacked? Had he gotten in an altercation or been murdered in his sleep?

She took a careful step inside, her hand resting on her knife in such tight quarters but no one jumped out to attack her. In fact, who would want to come steal from this place? It was not exactly the pinnacle of living circumstances.

She rounded the corner to find him not in his bed but next to it, only half clothed with rippling muscles just everywhere. She could just imagine what... nope, knock that off, Zathria. She was here on business.

"Are you dead?" she asked, her statement carrying all the subtlety of a basilisk with it but she didn't care.

J'rell

 

[J'rell]

Spoiler: Music

His brow twitched and knitted together in a frown. Nostrils flared. A new tension entered his body, but it didn't release him from his trance.

Not immediately.

For J'rell's soul was somewhere else entirely. It was still battling through the night before; a vagabond to time and reality.

The enemy? Blurred; shadowed; shrouded; nothing but red eyes and naked steel. The village: wreathed in infernal flames, aglow like one grand pyre dedicated to daemons. It could have been a hundred different villages, a thousand different battlefields — the same counted for the enemy; they could have been drow, or they could have been Githian infantry, Kivren raiders, orcs and goblins, undead hordes of wraiths or simply marauding humans. Past upon past blended together into one vast inferno, and J'rell cleaved through them all, crushed skulls underfoot, snarled and gnashed his teeth like a beast, unable to tell where his spilled blood began and where theirs ended.

He was at once within himself — feeling every cut, scrape and flaring cinder of revenge — and without, disembodied and watching his own visage like it belonged to a stranger. Both experiencing and seeing what he had become. A monster. A creature of battle.

Spoiler: Image Reference

"Are you dead?"

Words brought the first fracture. The fracture spiderwebbed through his consciousness, breaking the crystal world. It broke him and his visions. It crashed through his sea of illusions and anchored him.

Awareness of the room, the night and the drow snuck back into him like a burglar, and by the time it had infiltrated his mind and stolen his attention, it was too late to return to his dream. To his other reality. Whatever it had been.

His eyes fluttered, before slowly opening. He looked across the room. Red eyes. Echoes of the visions flickered over his sight. His eyes narrowed and fell, but it saw no drawn blade. But he remembered.

"I have been. But for now, I live."

With these words, he unfurled from his seated position, head nearly touching the ceiling. A faint wobble went through him, as if getting used to inhabitating this skin again. Where had he been, in that realm of his mind? Why had he sat down there before the bed? He couldn't remember.

As if to defy the weakness of his memory, he pulled the sword free from the pile of rags. The drow; she had told him she would come. What was her name? Zathria. Zathria was her name. He remembered.

"It is time to leave — I take it?"

Zathria At'Arel

 

[Zathria At'Arel]

She saw his chest rise and fall and she saw that his face seemed to twitch ever-so-slightly as if he was caught in some unpleasant dream but he began to stir. It reminded her almost of those she had seen in fitful "sleep" after experiments gone wrong in the Underrealm where someone had become possessed by their own failed experiment.

"That's either some big talk or there's a story there. If it's the latter, it sounds interesting," she said, commenting on how he had been dead before. It sounded like empty boasting, right? Surely that was all it was.

"It is," she confirmed. "Checking defenses of one of the smaller villages a few miles away. Shouldn't be too difficult but you know how these things go," she said. She did not, in fact, know if he knew how these things went. Did he have actual military experience? Was he just big and strong so everyone assumed he knew how to fight? She didn't know, but hopefully she'd find out soon. She was still left with more questions than answers about this J'rell character. She didn't like unknowns.

 

[J'rell]

J'rell answered her with silence. Neither commenting on her scepticism nor on her briefing. A long and stretched pause; enough to turn awkward, though he near wielded it, perhaps as a shield or weapon, looking at her intently, towering above her. Finally, at last, came a tiny nod, the barest bob of the chin.

It was difficult to tell whether that silence and gesture had been an easy acknowledgement; or complete, utter incomprehension towards their scouting task, masquerading as understanding.

Either way, he walked out. And he followed her into the dark jungle, towards their first target.

Zathria At'Arel

 

[Zathria At'Arel]

Zathria received no real acknowledgement for what she had said and she just looked at him for a moment. She would have normally wondered if he was mute or an idiot, but she already knew neither of those were true. Perhaps he just held overwhelming disdain for her or one of a thousand other reasons.

"Good talk," she said, rolling her eyes at him but deciding that there was no point in fighting about it. It was going to make for a very long patrol if they didn't speak at all, but then, she supposed, she could just be alone with her thoughts and the plans for the future.

Vyx'aria always had a new scheme in the works and Zathria was happy to follow her into it, but her mind churned with all the possibilities if even a fraction of the plans panned out. She knew that together they were unstoppable, but she knew just how hard things had been.

They made their way through the forests until they came to a small stream that - according to the maps - would lead them along their way to the next village down. The quiet flow of the water was relaxing and she thought back to the hours she had spent in the Underrealm by the underground river, letting her mind wander free from responsibilities.

But this wasn't one of those nights. She had work to do and dangerous work at that. She couldn't afford to be lulled into a sense of complacency now, especially not with a partner she didn't know she could rely on.

J'rell

 

[J'rell]

J'rell moved through the jungle with the easy simplicity of someone who had learned how to walk within its dense foliage. Sounds of hundreds of different animals competed for attention; tropical birds, buzzing insects, branch-snapping monkeys, hissing reptiles . . . it was only in the Ixchel Wilds that life could flourish with such abandon, overcrowding every root and vine.

Moonlight fell upon his white shawl and loincloth, reflective in the night, the rest of him merging with the darkness. Ebony eyes took in the stream like seeing an accustomed neighbor, gradually growing out of his immobility and strange distortion with the world, slipping back into natural motion and honed instincts.

At last, as his senses sharpened and he felt less like a drunkard just awoken from a fretful rest, even J'rell began to find the silence tedious. He knew not to show weakness with the drow. So he had been careful with saying anything, until he felt absolutely sure to be in control of himself.

Following the stream, J'rell broke that silence, his voice deep and soft, like a heavy cloth rustling and folding over a fence.

"I see you follow your leader with loyalty. I thought such rare among drow." Another ponderous pause, as he attempted to dress into words the naked feelings he had once felt for his own regent. "I once followed someone, too. Someone . . . who was perhaps alike her. In certain ways."

Zathria At'Arel

 

[Zathria At'Arel]

Zathria had just adjusted to the silence of traveling alongside the quiet stream when his voice broke the silence and jerked her back to the present. It was probably irresponsible that she had let herself become so distracted on their travels.

"She is a leader worth following," she said, her voice quiet as her mind slipped into everything they had been through. They had fought dragons, conquered domains, and lost everything. Now they were on the road together again. The future was draped in a fog of uncertainty and layered with dangers, but Zathria knew that Vyx'aria would see them through. She always had.

"Loyalty is earned, and I have seen the lengths she will go to those loyal to her," she said.

"You left this person you were loyal to?" she asked, curiosity creeping into her voice. She didn't want to admit it, naturally attempting to remain neutral and detached, but she was quite curious. Inquiring minds and all that.

J'rell

 

[J'rell]

J'rell's chin dipped as they traversed. He wished to say no. He wished to explain how long he had served. How long he had suffered. But the simple truth wanted out.

"I did." Regret pierced his voice like a spear. Melancholy lowered it, barely audible against the insistent song of the jungle. It hurt all the more to profess this to someone of his own make: a devoted servant. "I served her long and well. But by the end . . ."

He remembered the cold maw of the tomb, its sepulchral breath. The sickly embrace of hard, unfeeling stone. The wide smile of victory, twisting her paltry and withered features, as she willingly lowered herself into her sarcophagus. Certain that she would rise again. He too had been certain, at first. But over time, time, and more time . . . her hubristic ambitions exposed themselves for what they were. Madness.

A shuddered breath, distancing himself from the past. Always the past.

"She had become someone else entirely. I did not recognise her any longer. I did not even recognise myself. I . . . had changed, as well." He almost stopped there, but decided finally to air his last thought. "Time. Time will eventually change anything, given enough of it." With a side-eye to his surroundings, he then muttered: "Few things are impervious to it."

Zathria At'Arel