Private Tales The Last Resort

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

She laughed lightly. "No worries, I normally travel alone. Choosing a campsite is easy enough," she said. It actually did feel good to be in company more than the rare occasion it had cropped up over the last forever. She never really felt fear when she was alone in the woods or cities - for obvious reasons - but there were always other needs to be taken into consideration. The soul required more than feed and water; it required company to remain tethered to the world at large.

It was too easy to become cold and inhuman when separated from the various strains of humanity for too long. She had fallen victim to that before, and it had not been a good experience in the long run.

"And that would be delightful," she said. Even though we have been walking all day. A touch of curiosity, then, that he would wish to speak to her by herself. She could think of a few reasons that were not, strictly speaking, rational and had a great deal more to do with certain other aspects of their relationship...but she did not think that was so, here. "The air is always more crisp after the sun has dipped low," she added.

They did not have to go far. she had turned to follow the stream on its far bank, and that eventually led them to an old bow in the creek, The channel had shifted course, and left a sandy patch under an undercut bank held together by roots. There were stones to build a fire within, and the sandy ground was enough to provide a soft place to sleep.

"If you can get the kindly, I can set a blaze," she said as they slowed, and she removed the tack from the horse.

 

[Draedamyr]

"Kindling? That's the little twigs and stuff to get a fire going?" Draedamyr asked.

He was entirely serious.

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

She stared at him expressionless for a long moment, saying nothing. In the background, red was clearly trying not to laugh out loud and (mostly) succeeding with it.

And then she laughed, clear and true and hard, until tears streamed down her face. She leaned into his chest and buried that tear-streaked face therein, helpless with laughter. "You darn city folks," she managed to say with a great deal of difficulty, giving the words a decidedly country twang. She was immensely amused by her own joke, and broke down in another peal of helpless giggles.

"I'll set up camp if you want to go help our friendly city elf out," Red offered, already suiting his own words and busying himself about the site, moving rocks into a ring and unpacking the gear they had brought with them.

Once she had mastered herself enough to trust her speaking, she nodded. "That would be great," she replied, aftershocks of laughter still bubbling through occasionally.

And to Draedamyr, in a lower voice, "You wished to go for a walk anyway? What an opportunity, this, then."

 

[Draedamyr]

Draedamyr placed his hands on his hips, looking as if he was ready to challenge the whole world to a fight. Eventually his expression broke down into a more muted laugh too.

"It is almost as if we all decided that scrabbling around in the mid was not the best way to live," he mused with a roll of his eyes. There was no venom in his tone at all.

He asked to borrow Red's hand axe, having nothing suitable for the task. Reverie was too find an heirloom to be turned to cutting pieces of wood. The blacksmith had a sword of his own to defend himself with.

"And yes, an opportunity," he said as they were out of earshot. "I have had so much of your time recently it feels strange just to share it for the journey," he admitted. "Do you think Red knows of us?"

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

"I haven't scrabbled around in any mud recently," she said primly. She walked as regally as a queen as they left the camp, and Red, to their devices.

As soon as they were away, though, she leaned in to the elf. The closeness fo another was something she often forgot about. This man did not need to do things to her to keep her desire alive; that desire was as much for closeness as it was any...other...thing. She touched the axe that Draedamyr now carried, seemingly amused by it. Whatever her thoughts were about it, though, she kept to herself.

"Define what you mean by 'knows of us', and I shall attempt to answer that question," she replied. She was not really looking for wood as they walked, apparent by the fact they walked past several pieces of suitable kindling. "There is...something about him I cannot quite put my finger on. It is probably nothing, though, and certainly not malign whatever it is."

 

[Draedamyr]

"Ah, now that question feels like a trap," Draedamyr laughed. He veered around a potentially lewd joke around scrabbling in the mud. He was also ignoring the trees and the dried wood on the ground around them.

"Now I have to define what I mean by us. By which I of course mean: do you think he is aware that we are deeply in love?"

Humans could be rather strange about other species and anything they decided was not normal. They had normality drilled into them from a young age. Discipline and order rather than creativity and freedom were welcomed in human lands.

"And do you think it could just be...still letting what happened sink in?"

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

"And what if he is?" The words were, if anything, more prim than before. "I certainly have no care for what anyone else thinks of us," she added archly. There was a touch of possessiveness there, too, buried not-quite deep enough to hide.

"Even if he did object, he could find his own path apart from ours. I certainly do not care what a bunch of children think of my personal tastes are," she said finally, and then paused a moment as she realized that he could interpret that into her calling him a child. It did not matter that it was probably more true than she would like to admit. She hoped he did not take offense to it, but could not help adding, "Besides, robbing the cradle is fun sometimes."

She did not speak for a time, instead leaning into Draedamyr as was her particular way. Not for the first time, she wished she had her wings back. "I do not know. Some things take a while to come to grips with," she said. She was thinking of the pony she had been forced to put down by her own hand. Not quite the same, but the emotional impact might have been about right. "I am pretty sure both of us understand that."

 

[Draedamyr]

Draedamyr snorted. Robbing the cradle. He didn't know where the expression came from, but it wasn't one he had heard before. The smile slowly faded, but he expected the phrase was going to pop into his head again later and make him laugh at nothing at all like a mad man.

He brought them to a halt, gently turning her to face himself.

He did not care what Red may or may not think. Not really. He did care that he couldn't have her again tonight, with them trapped between the moonlight and the firelight.

"I think we both understand. Maybe not exactly how this will unfold, but we know where we are now. And that makes me a very happy man."

For Draedamyr it was a particularly earnest admission. Not a touch of sarcasm. He drew a long strand of moon-silver hair through his fingers.

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

She was forced to crane her neck to look up into his eyes, green like the grass or the leaves of the forest around them. She did not mind...too much, which was just as well. All of her former lovers, buried in graves crafted of years rather than stone and dirt, had been other than her own kindred. Too few for so long, after all.

"Too few understand the blessing of companionship," she said softly, her own luminous eyes reflecting his face back at him. "It takes a great deal of time to understand what true solitude means, and even longer to appreciate good company." She laughed low in her throat, something smoky and suggestive without need for words.

She leaned into his chest, if only to feel the steady beating of his heart, the warmth of his flesh beneath. His own desires were mirrored in her own heart. Unlike him, though, she would be content just to lay beneath the blankets and enjoy the close contact with another. There were, after all, many varieties of intimacy, and each and every one of them equally important.

"Love is such a strange thing, though," she murmured into his chest. She did not stir from where she leaned into him; walking or standing or sleeping, every moment of contact was a blessing to her, with clothes or without. "The bonds that unite us are as strong as forged steel, for all that we've only but met in the grand scheme of things." Simple fact, whispered into the fabric of her lover's chest.

 

[Draedamyr]

Draedamyr kissed the crown of her head and sighed softly. He did not know if he understood companship properly himself. It was a question that a man of his years should have known the answer too.

He was silent for a long time. They had left into the woods to simply share some of that. He was content to spend it in silence, simply holding her against his chest.

"You might be the best thing that happened to me in centuries," he finally said. "And you don't need to go and outdo that with millenia."

"We were supposed to be gathering...I believe."

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

There was no need to say anything for a time, and so she didn't. She could happily bask in the warmth of his body pressed against hers, the thump of his heart audible in her ears. That was it beyond the soft sound of the woods.

Eventually, though, she pulled away with a sound in her throat. "We were," she said a touch huffily. "The trouble with company and prying eyes." The last was rather enigmatic, and she turned away. All around, sticks quivered where they lay, slowly shifting off the ground, They drifted along as though suspended by strings, which was more or less what was going on. Such casual displays of her mastery of sorcery were just that - casual and completely unthinking.

"Perhaps you can use those fine muscles and get us a log of some thickness," she offered.

 

[Draedamyr]

"Seeing as you've handled the kindling..." Draedamyr replied.

There was a heavy branch that had half fallen from its tree, likely in a storm. It meant the wood was nice and dry for the fire. It still took some time the break it into pieces to carry.

It was two trips to get it all back to the camp, but they soon had a fire going. Just to show that he wasn't entirely magically inept, he set the kindling aflame with an old elven spell.

"How dangerous do you think these woods would be? Do we need to have watches?" he asked. "I don't suppose you can set watches if you normally travel alone..."

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

"Not dangerous at all," the blacksmith replied before Seska even had a chance to open her mouth. She merely nodded in agreement to the statement. "Most wild things do not like people very much, and fire even less. They will avoid us, and the ones that do not are not likely to bother us much beyond curiosity."

"Not to mention," the sorceress added in a confident voice, "that the camp will be warded in such a manner that we either wake us or startle any skulking predator away." She had spent a very great deal of her life among the wilderness and was entirely comfortable in its wide open spaces. Here, the trees created a close canopy, but not so close as to obscure patches of star-filled sky. The sun was fading away rather rapidly, and before long - so far from any city, or even a village- the sky would come alive with tens of millions of twinkling lights, a ribbon of white fire across the heavens.

How often had she looked to those points of light so terribly far away that they could not be made out individually? Beyond the few larger points of light that bore names, there were so many far beyond them that it beggared comprehension. Maybe the people of this world had never looked beyond their own celestial sphere before, but hers had.

"Besides," she said in a lower voice, "if you stay close to me nothing will bother you."

 

[Draedamyr]

"Well if you insist, I suppose," Draedamyr replied.

At the end of the day, what Red thought wasn't so important. He set their bed rolls out close together, not too far from the fire. It was slowly creepy up the logs and would be roaring before long.

"You know I never learned any of elven names for the stars," he said, noticing Seska's gaze. "Or maybe I did and I've forgotten them, but I only know the constellations they teach in Allira."

He perched on a log, poking the fire. It felt like the right thing to do. They had fires inside too.

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

"They change over time, you know," she said as he sent embers spiraling into the dark sky. She sat beside him, looking at the same distant lights. "Some constellations vanish, only to return again...much later."

The quiet out here was nearly complete. Wild things moved in the darkness, but they were neither a threat nor even interested in the three travelers huddled around their pool of light and heat. Nothing that moved this night paid them any heed.

"You know," she started, and for a change she sounded a touch uncertain. "I...have always thought the stars overhead were the same as...as the ones over my birthplace." The same points of light, the same constellations...but on an entirely different world. She had many theories about that, of course, but most scholars of this age would have scoffed at the majority of them. Never mind that she was their senior by more time than they could possible conceive of. "The sky over the island of Mo'pri was more or less the same."

 

[Draedamyr]

"It is the sky," he replied. "Why would you think it would be different anywhere else?"

Looking up, he mentally drew The Anchor. It hung from the thickest band of stars across the sky. The star in the centre of the constellation always had a slight red tinge to it.

"When do constellations change?" he asked. "There are the wandering stars but I've never heard of them just...vanishing."

Draedamyr asked softly, no accusation in his tone. Without thought, he settle an arm around her waist, the other to the bark so he could lean back and look upwards.

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

"You said you did not want to bring millennia into this," she whispered to him, amusement in her voice. "They change....over great periods of time," she said. "I have not checked if they do here, on Arethil...but, well, why wouldn't they? Star charts kept on Mo'pri were not accurate after a few thousand years." There were few who would know - or care - about such a thing, truth to tell. There had only been so many that were obsessed with the skies overhead to begin with, and far, far fewer with the lifespan to record such a thing.

"Sometimes I wonder...if out there, among those points of light, the wreckage of my home world can still be found..." She trailed off and sat in silence for a long moment, then sighed softly. "Doesn't matter. I am here, now." She laid a hand atop his arm as lightly as a breeze. "Little lights in the sky, numerous beyond counting. I have long wondered what they were, and if we could go to them some day..."

 

[Draedamyr]

Red didn't seem to regard the stars with quite the same fascination. He struck Draedamyr who spent most of his life looking at, and thinking about, whatever was directly in front of him.

Blacksmithing might have held an artistry of sorts, but Draedamyr thought he would have found it a very mundane career.

He laid a hand over hers, listening to every word as he traced patterns in the sky.

"Why would your home be in the sky?" he asked, entirely innocently.

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

"I don't know," she said absently, still looking up. "Why wouldn't it be? I used to walk between worlds as a matter of course, but even I did not stop to think very much of what it was I was doing or where I was going to." She paused, and laughed bitterly. "Until I could no longer do it. Then, I had all the time in the world to think about it."

She turned her eyes to watch the blacksmith work about the camp. All of his motions were oddly well practiced and efficient. It was clear that this sort of thing was not uncommon to him, which seemed odd on the surface. He was, after all, a blacksmith and not a wanderer; one did not carry an anvil and a forge with them when traveling the world.

"In any case," she said at last, "my home isn't there any longer. Even could I reach it, it is more dead than the wastes of the desert, devoid of life. The end of the world was not a metaphor, but a reality..."

 

[Draedamyr]

"But then how could another world be...Up. "

Draedamyr was thinking out loud on subjects he had never given much thought to before. It was close to making his head hurt.

"But then where would another world be? These worlds must have had stars too?"

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

She rolled her eyes and gave an exasperated sigh. "How should I know? I am a sorceress, and one from a people who don't consider casual spell casting to make one a mage! If you want to know how to level a mountain range or bore a hole into reality, I'm your woman. If I want to know how to deal with five armed men with nothing but a sword, I'd ask you. Questions like other worlds, well...the experts are so long gone even the dust has gone to dust."

Red chuckled to himself at the conversation, but did not include himself in it. Instead, he set up a tripod over the fire, and set to cutting up vegetables - withdrawn from his pack - into a small pot suspended over the flames.

"Maybe ask him," she said, and Red laughed at that too,

"Sure, I work iron lady. Gives me a great deal of time to think about the pretty lights overhead at night," he said as he tossed carrots into the water.

 

[Draedamyr]

Draedamyr grinned at her reply. The question had been asked in earnest, but he was amused by her reply. It was fortunate that despite his sarcastic nature, he was not fond of teasing. He was glad, in a way, of the end of the conversation. It was a topic that he could have easily lost himself to.

Red had brought cooking apparatus with him. Draedamyr found this particularly novel. Riding between towns with a caravan he usually packed enough dried meat and other foods that would last the trip. He would typically eat alone and sleep on the back of one of the wagons.

"Nothing but a sword, don't listen to her..." said Draedamyr, touch a hand to the pommel of his blade.

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

She looked o at the camp work without comment. She was quite accustomed to life on the road, spending the vast majority of her life, in truth, outside of cities and away from society at large. The blacksmith noted her attention to his work, and grinned. "Hungry?"

"Not in the slightest," she replied. She did not expect he would understand if she tried to explain the why of it. She never needed to eat; if anything, the biological function of it was just to aid with recovering from exertions that were not magical in nature. "It does look like it will be delightful, though." She laid her hand on top of Draedamyr's, feeling the cold steel beneath that where his fingers parted. Very definitely not her particular favorite kind of object.

"You are far from being just a sword-arm, fair Knight," she said with a grin on her face.

 

[Draedamyr]

"Oh and I have never claimed to be a Knight," he chuckled. "But I will attest to being very hungry. That smells very good."

For all the talk of honour from the Knights, he knew it was just another title for the wealthy. Humans and their titles. The rich sons got to wear armour and ride around the fringed of battle trampling peasants armed with sticks.

They would call him a bounty hunter at best and a sellsword at worst. There was simplicity in a contract and an exchange of coin. There was an honesty there not present in what most Knights got up to.

Draedamyr decided not to let his mind wander off into thoughts of other worlds as he ate. They kept the fire nice and hot and he settled down to sleep facing it, Seska just in front of him.

The outdoors greeted you early. Draedamyr was last to stir in the morning. Even then, the bright light and bird song woke him far earlier than he would have liked. At least they hadn't opened the wine yet.

 

[Seska the Dragonslayer]

It was easy to rest through the night, sharing the closeness of the one she loved. They shared their blankets, but only to enjoy the close proximity and for no other reason. She was just as happy to curl up pressed against his chest, and to let the dreams of yore flow through her as she drifted off.

With but a single discordant note, a chime that seemed to ripple through every fiber of her being. She was aware of it, but not aware of it at the same time.

And so morning came.

She woke with the first stirrings of the wind that came with dawn, carefully extricating herself from the bed without disturbing the city elf. She looked upon him with a soft expression, admiring those hard features softened in sleep. She did not waste much time with that indulgence before setting about camp duties for the morning, which necessitated tea.

She looked round for the kit, and was surprised to discover that the fire had gone out overnight, and that Red had vanished. His bedroll was missing, and the patch of ground where he had been lying was untouched, undisturbed. It was almost as though he had never been there to begin with.

Frowning, she carefully moved through the woods nearby, looking for any sign of the missing blacksmith. Her trailcraft was not as good as an actual ranger, but it was good enough. There were no signs of passage, overt or hidden. She was well and truly puzzled by this.

And so she went and knelt beside Draedamyr. The elf was already waking up of his own accord when she laid a hand upon his shoulder. "Red is gone," she said simply, settling back on her haunches.