Private Tales Trouble on the Drawa

[Valgir]

Far to the east, across the Spine, are the Blightlands of Molthal, a forsaken plateau. Travel south, past the Drawa, and the lands become humid, muggy, and full of enormous reptiles and insects.

It was here that the Lady Nath'iarra and her sole surviving warrior, Valgir, fled. Behind them lay nothing but desolation and a field of the dead. Defeat tasted bitter in Valgir's mouth, but in the Lady's service he was well used to such a wretched taste.

They'd managed to cross the Drawa. Fortunate enough to bathe in it. But it no longer mattered. The air here was so humid that Valgir's clothing stuck to him, drenched in his own sweat. He rubbed the back of his hand against his forehead, blonde locks plastered to his face.

"Curse this land," he muttered.

He was of the Tundra. Of the ice. He did not belong in this land where the air itself sought to drown him. They were fortunate enough to find a road headed west, though it was mostly overgrown, it once might have been the highway of some vast empire. Valgir didn't know and he did not give two shits. He just wanted to be out of this heat. At least when they crossed the Spine he'd get some mountain air again.

The jungle loomed in around them on all sides, a nightmare of green in a hundred shades. Half of them poisonous.

Valgir stepped away from an anthill that towered nearly to his knee and trudged on, glancing at the Lady Nath'iarra. He wondered if the heat of this miserable jungle afflicted her as well.

Nath'iarra

 

[Nath'iarra]

It did.

Not the most serene of countenances in the best of times, the Lady Nath'iarra looked perturbed. That was a nice word, a fancy word, a word that -- if uttered in her presence and in this context to describe her -- might earn only a hand being removed and not the head. She was not of the tundra, Nath'iarra, but rather of the gloom. She liked it dark and cool. The exile's flesh, usually a subtle purple, was flushed, to the point that her aristocratic cheekbones and nose looked freshly abraded, and her platinum hair stuck to her forehead and cheek and neck as if emerging from a night of enthusiastic passion.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

"It is already cursed," Nath'iarra muttered irritably. She had to unclench her jaw to say it, which in the unclenching made her realize just how hard it had been clenched. She might have chewed through a nearby tree. "Would that we had traveled west by the river," said Nath'iarra, not for the first time. Not because it mattered -- manifestly it did not -- and not because she was confident that she was right -- she was not -- but because it was something to say that didn't involve her dropping to her knees and screaming her rage into the sunblighted sky.

At least the river could be cool. At least it could be drunk. At least she could have thrown herself into it and let the tide take her to the great hereafter and away from the treacheries of this life. Perhaps that was why her thrall had advised against it. She could have compelled his obedience -- otherwise what was the point of having a thrall? -- but he knew this world, this cursed geography on the surface of the earth better than she. It made sense to trust his judgment.

"How long?" she demanded, a question posed by her aching feet and aching back more than anything else.

Valgir