Fable - Ask The Testing of a Spear

[Aeyliea]

She staggered along the rutted road, and even at a distance it was easy to tell that she was in a bad way. Far off, she looked like she was some drunkard that had become lost in her cups, the ragged clothing appearing stained and tattered even at a distance. Closer to...

<<"...'ll never...defeat us,">> she said in her native tongue, a cadenced thing that was far from the common spoken widely across this part of the world. Even being unable to discern what it was she was saying, it was easy to hear the slur in her speech. <<"The...wolf...">> Silence, another step forward. The grass was so tall on this road, her mind remarked to her despite the fact that the road - while overgrown and in poor maintenance - was not that far gone. Ghosts swirled through her vision, their voices clawing at her mind. Her feverish eyes saw very little of the world around her, of course; though she was naturally copper skinned, she was as deathly pale as the ghosts chanting to her in their foreign tongue, and the scent of corruption surrounded her. Closer up, it was easy to see the source; a bandage-wrapped wound on her forearm dripped yellow-green pus, and the foul scent of that infection was like a miasma around her that almost overpowered the smell of the sewers she had quite literally swam through to make her escape. Abscess wept from a hole in the tattered shirt she wore, oozing from the sister wound in her left breast - both of which had been the prize for deflecting a sword thrust with her arm that would otherwise have left her dead. The heat of the fever burning through her radiated powerfully from her weakening, shaking frame.

How long ago had that been? A day? A week? The concepts seemed laughable at absolute best. Time had ceased to have any meaning to her. Only misery and pain, a fiery pain that seemed to spread through every part of her body until every single inch seemed to be on fire. Pain? What about the voice in her head? The ones that whispered promises of vengeance and death, offered her power beyond comprehension? She gibbered a bit as she stumbled, laughing manically at things only she could see and hear, mumbling nonsense as she staggered along...

...until she didn't, and she tripped over a rock in the road, or her own feet. The cause did not matter, only the result: falling, tumbling like a boneless sack of meat down a steep slope, bouncing off a tree before finally, mercifully, coming to a rest in the middle of the forgotten trader's track. She but trembled where she lay for a moment, gasping out a few syllables of her native tongue through the long, white hair that shrouded her nearly prone figure, before collapsing and drifting off into a troubled, nightmarish fever dream.

There was only one outcome, of course: death. She had run as far as she could, but while she could escape the slavers or the law, she could not outrun mortality itself.

 

[Tielan Kiertan]

Tieland blinked slowly over the lip of his cup of tea as the figure came tumbling and rolling down the side of the hill, bouncing off a tree and coming to a stop in the middle of the old track he was sitting beside. Wisps of steam rose up from the cup in front of his face.

"Ah, hello?" He raised his eyebrows for several long moments as he assessed the situation. In that time, the details sank in-- from the stink of a wound gone sour and one who certainly must have swam through a sewer. His nose wrinkled, but he let out a long breath and sat the teacup back on the flat stone.

He pulled himself up to his feet and stepped over and bent down to inspect the wounds. Two that he could find- one in the arm and the other in the chest. Both had gone bad. He shook his head in disappointment and pulled out some lengths of fresh cloth, which he dipped in the hot water and let soak in there.

His own hands he dipped into his tea, still steaming to cleanse them, before he stepped close to Aeyliea in readiness to begin the operation. He would need to clean the wounds first, then bandage them to stop any further bleeding.

 

[Aeyliea]

The grass rolled in tan waves from horizon to horizon, the dry and hot scent of the plains clear on every breath. Nothing moved except for the great, lumbering beasts that fed on the grass and darkened the fields wherever they gather in number; horns curled back behind their great heads and ears more than capable battering rams that were only outshone in brutality by the hooves on their feet.

She stood in grass that came up to her thighs, staring at the moon rising far afield. The sun had not yet set, and cast long, long shadows across the wildlands that had been painted in liquid golds. The charms woven into her hair clicked in the wind as she stood tall and proud, awaiting the arrival of the Wolf. The Wolf - the smaller of Arethil's two moons and known more properly as Pneria. The Wolf was the Hunter, in the lore and legends of the No'Rei, the Father that gave its seed to the Wild and thus gave birth to her people in the time before the great beasts roamed.

This is all a lie, something whispered to her. Not her, but something near her...within her, perhaps? It was scales and claws and the hideous breath of chaos at her neck, reeking of dissolution and madness. The elders speak untruthfully to you all...

Her eyes snapped open suddenly, in the middle of the elf's ministrations on her body, but there was no recognition in them that he was there. <<"Snake...in the...">> she croaked, and then relaxed under his hands, out cold.

 

[Tielan Kiertan]

Tielan paused and raised an eyebrow at the words. It was a language he had not heard in a very long time, and she was unconscious again before he was able to pin meaning to them. "Snakes in the? I presume you're thinking of snakes in the grass, no?"

He spoke softly as he went about the business of cleaning the wounds of infection and applying an ointment to help with healing followed by linen bandages steeped in hot water infused with healing herbs. It was a long, meticulous process, but in time it was finished.

The monk was reluctant to move the injured human, given the severity of the injuries and the possibilities of further injuries from the tumble. So, instead, he made her comfortable and erected a simple tent to keep the sun off her while she was unconscious and help keep some more warmth in during the nights.

When she had recovered enough to awake, there would be tea and well-cooked stew ready, a bit on the thin side to account for the possibility of not eating for a long time.

Aeyliea

 

[Aeyliea]

"You must go back."

She lay on her back under a starless sky, her breath smoking in the air. Never had there been so clear a night sky in all her life, where every star was visible in their millions. The heavens were strewn with diamond dust, patches of color smeared across the great arch of the void. Oddly, no moon stood in the heavens.

She lifted her head, and stared at the source of the voice. The withered, ancient woman stared back at her as calmly as ever, eyes consumed by shadows gleaming with the starlight. That heavily wrinkled face wrinkled further in a grin that was not necessarily friendly. gray hair, thin and fluttering in an unfelt wind, crossed the cold pinpricks of light in her eyes.

Aeyliea tried to speak, and found she had no voice. Tried to move, and found she had no strength.

"The time is not right, young one," the elder croaked at her, and raised a wizened arm. The length of wood in that ancient hand seemed as weathered and sun-bleached as the crone herself, and Aeyliea felt a thrill of ancestral dread at its sight. "Go, now. There are other worlds than these..."

A wave of ancient wood, the taste of burning tin....

The No'rei gave a strangled start, eyes snapping open suddenly. She felt he weight of days spent unconscious, could feel the stickiness of an unwashed body and all the sweat that had dried on her skin when her fever had finally broken. Tired, hungry....but alive. But how? Memory of the past days was absent, of course...but she could remember stumbling away from Gale, going their own separate ways after escaping from that prison, or whatever it had been they were held in.

She had known a festering wound for what it was, and was now confused by how she had not perished once the fever had taken hold.

"...urk..," she said, failing form any word worthy of the name. Her throat was dry, and she felt too weak to try to rise just then. Reassessing, she saw she was under cover, and confusion increased. Had they found her? or had someone else? Where was she.

"...?"

 

[Tielan Kiertan]

Tielan raised his eyebrows slowly as the wounded traveler slowly came to and tried to puzzle out the situation. He waited for just a few moments to see if she would remain conscious before nodding and coming over, kneeling on the ground next to her, with a bowl of thin soup and jug of water. On the campfire not far away, a pot of tea slowly simmered.

"Rest easy, young one," he said gently, offering the water first. "You've taken some nasty wounds lately and while they're in the process of healing, your body still has much strength to regain. Can you hold the water yourself, do you think?"

"My name is Tielan Kiertan, and I'm a monk from deep in the vales of the Spine. Fortunately for you, you landed right next to my camp when you tumbled down to this path." Aeyliea

 

[Aeyliea]

She stirred at the words, spoken in common. She had a passable grasp with common, although she had an extremely difficult time communicating in that language herself. She had always felt it was base, somehow less than her native tongue. Not surprising, since she considered anyone who was not No'rei to be less than her own native people.

She found movement was not welcomed by her body, not yet; stirring simply caused dizziness and her stomach - empty as it was - to threaten revolt. She stared at the water being offered like a poisonous snake, and made no effort to accept it. Not, as the case might be, that she could have.

She could not understand all of his words, unsurprisingly. She did not know what a monk was, and the idea of the Spine as he spoke of it was meaningless to her. She was a of the Savannah, and aside from raids into Vel Aniri held lands (and Elbion, and any other so-called civilized place), she had never been beyond them. Where she lived, the mountains that split the continent west of Alliria were not even visible.

"Aeyliea," she said thickly in response to his torrent of quick words. She did not see any reason to withhold it and, if it came to it, to distrust anything he was offering her. If he wanted her dead, all he had to do was cut her throat and leave her for the vultures. If there were such things here in the hills to the west of Vel Anir. "Slavers, they used sharp weapons on me," she said haltingly with an accent so thick it was difficult to discern the words. It was clearly not her first language, this trader's tongue the rest of the world called common. "Days in the past. Blood was fever?" she asked.

 

[Tielan Kiertan]

Aeyliea

Tieland paused and let the words settle through his mind as he sifted through the bulk of the woman's accent before slowly nodding. "Of course." He searched through his mind back to his initial pilgrimage around Arethil in which he had dwelt with many cultures and learned many languages. Seeing she couldn't seem to move enough for the water, he raised it to her. "You will need water," he said slowly in her own language, stumbling slowly over the different words until it started to come back to him.

"Slavers, you say?" He shook his head sadly. "The world is in a sorry state when such things are tolerated. But, yes, you had a fever and your wounds were fevered. I was able to squeeze some drops of tea into your mouth to help bring down the fever while you slept, but your body will still be very weak and need to regain strength and perhaps relearn how to move the damaged muscles."

He rocked back on his heels, still holding the water still as his eyes peered across the horizon.

 

[Aeyliea]

Her breath caught, which was as much as gasping and staring wide-eyed would have been from any of the city-borne. The words were not quite right, not perfect No'rei as she had spoken it all of her life...but it could have been as her ancestors had spoken it. The language was not something anything like common among the people beyond the plains.

She was too tired to wonder much about it now, though. The weight of her illness and her injuries, healed or not, pulled at her flesh nearly as heavily as the weight upon her soul. That was for an entirely unrelated problem, and one that the old man likely did not even know existed.

It galled her to be forced to accept the water in this way, but she did not even have the strength to stir. Her lips cracked and bled at the simplest movement.

"Vel...Anir," she said thickly in her own tongue. "They have been raiding our land....for many seasons." Though her voice was thready and weak, it still held that musical cadence. No'rei had a certain savage flow to it, and would likely have been appreciated if the people it belonged to were not so rough and prone to violence towards outsiders. "Push is into the heart of the Wild," she added haltingly. "Kill or capture those that refuse."

A pause.

"Captured me. Escaped, later," she said. Was there a hint of anger there, buried beneath world-ending exhaustion?

 

[Tielan Kiertan]

Aeyliea

“Ahh,” Tielan said with a nod, still speaking her language. The words were coming somewhat more fluidly now that those memories were coming back. “Anirian aggression has become a pox on this world for a great while now, I fear.”

Thoughts about this popped up in his mind, but he let them and their unsettling implications fade. Someone would have to do something about them. Perhaps Arvalion could muster a coalition. They at least had no desires for empire building, and could perhaps keep the more ambitious in check.

“Well done on your escape, my friend,” Tielan said, waiting until the cup of water was emptied and then leaned back on his heels. “Now we will wait and see how your body handles that before we try anything with more substance.”

His lips pursed as he considered the situation. “Though I fear it will be quite a long while before you return to your former strength.”

 

[Aeyliea]

"Cannot stay here," she said in response to his assertion that she would be long in recovering from her injuries. She did not doubt him in the slightest; truth told, she should have died. That he had managed to bring her back from the edge of the abyss...well, that was a problem to deal with later. He owed her his life, and that was a debt that carried with it the requirement of redress.

"They will come for me," she said again. She tried to move, but it was difficult to even shift her body a little bit. It was enraging to be so...so helpless. She did not like relying on anyone else, and certainly did not like being in the power of another. "We killed a few of them escaping. They threw me in that place because I killed more of them on the plains, and so I believe they will want the skin off my back very much."

She regarded the old elf with eyes the color of a stormy sky, blue-grey and cold.

 

[Tielan Kiertan]

Aeyliea

"Hmm," Tieland said as she spoke. He rubbed his chin with one hand as he considered. "Perhaps, perhaps not. If they saw how injured you were, they may think you died somewhere out on the plains. There is a great deal of territory to cover, after all."

But it was a danger. And while he was a proper swordsmaster, even the finest swordsmaster could only do so much against an army or even a moderately sized patrol. Not that he tried lately to see how many he could face, but protecting an injured person added even more difficulty.

In this, the hardest lesson of mastery was faced: knowing and accepting the limits of what could not be fought and avoiding fighting, even if it looked like running away.

"And either way, you're still too weak to move."

 

[Aeyliea]

"The hell I am," she said in a thready voice, and proceeded to prove herself wrong. She could barely move her limbs and head, and trying to lift her body was a waste of time. And it hurt, hurt beyond anything she could remember in recent memory. Despite her best effort, a mewl of pain escaped.

"...or maybe..." That was not the sound of resignation, and she had no intent to lay around for days or weeks while the slavers came for her. Slavery was not likely her punishment, though; a quick death was the best she could hope for, but given the rage in the eyes of the Dreadlord that they had evaded, she could imagine a much worse fate.

She did not know what else she could do. She had no skill with healing, and healing was an art that was ineffective at best when used on oneself. Her usually sharp eyes were decidedly dull, now, and they fixed upon the swordsman. "Why?"

A moment longer. "Why did you....help me? To take me to the markets in...their place?"

 

[Tielan Kiertan]

Aeyliea

Spoiler

Sorry. Totally thought I'd responded to this one already.

Tieland just raised two eyebrows to the woman as she tried to push herself up. "I would advise such actions for some time until you are more recovered. Your body has already suffered dramatically and pushing it further may cause even more."

Her next question raised his eyebrows even further. "Why? Because I have the skill to do so and the opportunity presented itself. As such, it is my responsibility to do such a deed. And to take you to their market?"

The old Elf's voice rose for a moment in indignation before softening it. "I would never take anyone to such a place nor allow anyone to be taken there. I am a monk of the Four-Fold Flower and such actions engaged in by these Vel Anirians and their Dreadlords are an abomination that stain the very world itself. I help you because it is the right thing to do, no more nor any less."