This Isn't How I Remember Swan Lake...(Closed)

[Duffy]

This Isn't How I Remember Swan Lake...

dragon-love-white-heart-31000.jpg

Closed.

Part One of the Light & Darkness Saga, in which the half-dragon MetalDrago finds the light within.

I sit here in disgust,
For the block strikes nigh again,
I've spent my day whittling my nib,
Fighting my restrain.

I want to write just one last verse,
A line to end all lines,
I want to smell the roses wrought
In the woodland realm of pines.

I talk myself a merry talk,
Soothe soul with caustic lies,
For every time I flick to paper,
The poet in me dies.

I seem to have hit an end stop,
A stop to all dictation,
Of dragons, dreams and dust I dream,
Of tripling and sedation.

I long to write like I’ve never written,
Make marks in a mystic land,
But here I am, settling for nothing,
Fighting with time's hand.

By Cydney Oliver.

[Duffy]

“He’s coming Duffy, I can feel the darkness.”

Ruby’s soft tone drew razor sharp talons down the bard’s spine with its sincerity. Beneath the weight of her presence, he could not help but shudder. That tone meant only one thing, and when Ruby Winchester wanted something, it could destroy the hearts of lesser men.

“I can’t ignore it any longer; I can’t hear anything but his voice, the beat of his wing, the swipe of his claws for our necks.” There was a certain poetic disposition about her, which only served to make Duffy more nervous. When Ruby Winchester wanted something and turned to dramatically heavy turns of phrase, she could tear through greater men too.

He set his book down onto the edge of the kitchen table, slightly disgruntled at the interruption, but wise enough not to show it. He had been enjoying the vivid descriptions of the various wild beasts that purportedly dwelt in the Valenwood. The vast forest covered most of the Western coast line of the island, and come the arrival of summer, the troupe were considering an excursion there – one well deserved after all their hardships through the theatrical season of High Spring. He had read various choice passages aloud whilst Ruby cleared up after their baking session.

It was a happy respite in the long road to the preparation of High Tea. He adjusted his crossed legs so that the stiffness in them eased off before he looked up at the red headed mistress dutifully. He had played the long game thousands of times before over the centuries, so his turn came naturally and he rolled the rhetorical dice.

“You will forgive my expression of vague confusion Ruby,” he tried hard to look none the wiser, “but what are you talking about?”

He knew exactly what she was referring to, but he did not want to admit that now was the time to address it. If he let Ruby know that she was right at the start of a long conversation, she would be unbearable by the end of it. Ruby set down the soapy plate and let the dishcloth in her fingertips drip dry for a moment before she rang it free of suds. She let out a long, languishing sigh. The sun that streamed through the small window overlooking the herb garden to the rear of the playhouse cast a fiery halo around the spell singer’s head.

“Come now Duffy, you know who I mean.” Even though she had her back turned to her companion, he could see the corners of her lips curling. It put a picture of a sour smile in the bard’s mind. He rolled his eyes, and reminded himself to not think so highly of his dichotomy when dealing with a woman who lived to talk her way through the world. Her voice, after all, was a power unto itself.

[Duffy]

“The one we’ve been expecting, the one in the dreams we have,” his voice was heavy, as if spoken under duress or after a marathon.

The dreams they had both had frequently over the last few months were less dreams, and more like nightmares. They were dark, frightful, horrifyingly real, and made all the worse for Duffy because of the harbinger in their illusions. The creature that hunted them in the night was a half-dragon, more man than its bestial counterpart but creatural and fell all the same.

Duffy Bracken did not like dragons one bit. Even as they spoke, at the zenith of midday, he felt a chill in his joints at the prospect of having to eventually succumb to the need to sleep when darkness fell.

“How can he be coming? He’s a figment of our conscious mind, an entity in our dreams.” Duffy would need more than hearsay from his dearest friend to believe otherwise. He was a very pragmatic man, and a firm believer in reality as an explanation. It was all he had left to remain sane in an insane corner of the world.

“I just know that he is, and soon.”

Duffy gritted his teeth, “but how?”

The smell of freshly cooked bread washed over the growing tension in the playhouse’s poky but well stocked kitchen. It brought Ruby from her statuesque vigil at the sink to the front of the aga, which radiated warmth and pepper scented luxury.

“It’s as if it’s been written in the fabric of the skeins of history, to coin a line you used to explain various misfortunes that happened to my finest bone china, my best skillet,” she wagged a finger over her shoulder, keenly pointing at her target despite not looking “and let us not forget my ball gown, which ‘went missing’ just before the Spring Dance!”

She slipped a tea towel from the polished silver rail which ran along the front edge and buried her still wet hands into the checked pattern. Whilst she dried away the detritus of her washing up spree, she audibly muttered her thoughts into order.

“Well, okay, yes, I guess there’s that on your side…” He blinked with the sort of flummoxed look you pulled when you might have just seen a ghost. Duffy watched her shoulders tense, then relax, then tense again as she ran through the likely outcome of the forthcoming exchange. He let the tension in his jaw slip away under another torrent of smells from the range.

His stomach rumbled.

“We’ve known it would happen for a long time, I just feel it’s now,” she bent at the knee and took a firm hold of the larger oven’s door. With a clunk, she turned the black veneer and stepped away as she opened the chamber. The smell intensified, as did the rumbling from Duffy’s stomach.

If Duffy had not known any better, he might have thought Ruby had planned to disarm him with bread all along. There was a saying, after all, one the troupe used often to console the orphans they cared for and their siblings when the winter months struck and gave them all snivelling colds.

“Everything is better with bread,” he mumbled.

[Duffy]

“What was that?” Ruby said, her voice muffled and echoed as it bounced around in the oven.

“Here was me thinking you invited me for afternoon tea to be nice,” he clucked, and slid his book away so that he could work with the chopping board. The sarcasm parry worked perfectly.

Duffy had been eyeing the array of salad components set to the right of the large chopping board since he had arrived back from his errands in the merchant district an hour or so ago. The chopping board itself was serving as an altar to a particularly hefty steel chef’s knife. The chopping board itself was pine, polished and waxed a thousand times and as thick as a man’s arm. It had not been moved since it had been brought from Ruby’s manor ten years ago, as it was monstrously heavy.

“If I’d known all I was going to get was a cauliflower ear and a metaphysical lecture on the meaning of dreams, I’d have gone to see Leopold,” he picked up the knife, felt its weight, then scooped up a large and very ripe beef tomato and started to slice. His lips curled into a satisfactory smile, knowing full well that the remark would cost him, but knowing full well it was worth it.

“Oh,” Ruby sucked in a large intake of air, the sort that one used to bite one’s tongue. “Don’t worry Duffy; you’re going to taste the nicest ploughman’s sandwich ever conceived in a kitchen on Scara Brae’s scattered shores. It will be a trencher worthy of kings!” She delved into the oven and grabbed a hold of the tray with tea towel wrapped fingers.

The knife cutting through fruit and clipping against the wood filled the momentary silence with holistic and atmospheric sounds.

With an acrobatic whirl, she set the hot, heavy tray onto the far edge of the preparation table and flapped her fingers in a comical manner. She sucked them cool, the wet noise breaking her cool repose with slurps and sudden vacations of the air from her rosy cheeks. “Blast and damming curses!” she plopped the tea towel next to the tray and turned to push the oven door too. It shut with a satisfying thud, followed by the clink of the latch falling into place.

Duffy remained on tender hooks as she stopped and started, half smiling still at Ruby’s impeccable ability to never use curse words, even when in pain.

“I can’t ignore the signs anymore,” she turned on a heel and rested her hands on the table edge, tapping them in a matriarchal fashion that often accompanied the thoughts just before she barked orders at her waiting kitchen hands.

Today that was entirely Duffy’s burden to bear. He chopped quicker beneath her gaze.

[Duffy]

“What sort of signs are we talking about?” Duffy treated omens and divination with just as much suspicion as he did magic users, sober thieves and people who liked the early works of Tolstoy of Salvar, the self-proclaimed master of the ironic soliloquy.

He was starting to think that not even Madame Croup’s Chutney, resting on the table just a few feet away in a little jar wrapped in red check grease paper could take the bad taste in his mouth away now…

“I dreamt about him again. I awoke screaming, which Leopold was not best impressed with to say the least.” She furrowed her brow. That slip of form by itself told Duffy all he needed to know. This would be a serious business to discuss, and one that would do its best to dampen his enjoyment of Lady Rosetta’s Homemade Gherkin Pickle; no pickle, no chutney…this was a grave event indeed.

“The same dream as last time I assume?”

He did not look up at her to gauge her reaction, but he remained attentive to audible indicators. She was an expert at clucking, sighing, coughing, spewing and puking her thoughts without ever having to actually spell it out to anyone.

“Or something different altogether?” he added, just to make sure she was clear with him. He was already sensing a long evening ahead.

Whilst she hummed and ached, he slid the sliced tomato over the chopping board. The movement left juice and pips in its wake, like a glacier of late afternoon sustenance. He let them fall off the edge into one of the many small ingredient bowls Ruby had thoughtfully left out alongside the miniature mountain of chopping. He moved on to the fresh bunch of celery, bright verdant leafs still clinging to their progenitor in fear of excommunication and the inevitable smothering with excessive amounts of vinaigrette.

“Not really, it was a similar dream, but not quite the same. This time there one was key difference.” She bit her lip, and whilst she thought about how best to explain she tapped the top of her perfectly browned poppy trencher with the back of her knuckles.

It let out a little hollow whelp of culinary joy.

“Flawless,” she said with a chirp, the delight of another perfect batch acting as a temporary distraction from the heavy weight of destiny and danger.

Little wisps of steam, moisture clouds sodden with poppy and yeast overtones spiralled up from the well-structured cracks on the crust of the bread. There were little valleys and crosses on the top where Ruby had scoured the dour before putting in the oven to rise.

Each matriarch in the city had her own insignia, and Ruby’s was a triple ridged scratch accompanied by a cross at each end. Many people in the lower echelons of Scara Brae’s noble circle would pay good money to know how to bake bread quite like she did.

[Duffy]

“Do you remember the night that we both had the exact same rendition of the dream?” she did not wait for a reply. She tapped the bread again and went about carefully sliding it and its two almost identical twins onto the wire cooling rack waiting for them to her left. Her cooking and her conversation were almost seamless. “Well, it was like that, except that when the ‘half-dragon’ descended he did not roar and wake me up as he had done every other time.”

The ‘half-dragon’ was how the bard and the Spellsinger referred to their night-time assailant. The dream had always caused them to wake with a start, sweaty and stale at that moment. For countless nights it had been the vision they had awoken to, and the scar on their memories and sanity was widening with every recital. The roar was more like a scream in Duffy’s head, but just as terrifying, just as deafening and thundering in the shadows.

“What did he do instead, then?” Duffy diced the celery sticks with a rattle of chops, slid them into a second bowel and picked up a cucumber before Ruby had time to finish setting out the loaves to cool. Despite the growing intrigue sloshing in the pit of his famished stomach, he kept a relatively flat tone in his line of questioning.

She waited for the noise to die down before she continued. Duffy caught her flinching at every haphazard descent of the hefty steel blade onto the wooden block. He cut through the last wide length of celery quickly.

“I saw his face as he swooped into the light of our campfire.”

In the dream, the troupe in its entirety was camped out under the stars on the shores of Valeena Lake. The crystalline waters had consoled the group through a long, drunken afternoon of paddling, boating and at one point, trout tickling, much to Arden’s dismay at trying to teach his friends his secrets. When the night descended with the sun, which perished in a death throe of splendid gold and vibrant crimson so too did the half-dragon.

It was how it had been every night, and both bard and buxom housewife witnessed the exact same unfolding of events.

“I know exactly who he is now Duffy,” she said sternly.

Her words echoed in the last chop of the knife, dragged out in poignancy as he scraped the celery chunks into another porcelain bowl.

“If I’m not mistaken, and my memory does not deceive me, so do you…”

In a medley of sickness, remembrance and reaching for a duo of kiwis, Duffy started to recollect a knife fight from a long, long time ago – quite literally in another lifetime.

“I believe Arden and Lillith have crossed paths with his tyrannical blade in more recent months.” The ponytail into which Ruby’s long crimson hair was tied flicked as she adjusted it. Whilst she waited for Duffy’s momentary amnesia to subside, she set about undoing the tie of her pinafore at the neck and then at the small of her back. Flour covered fingers and dusty cotton dropped onto the table, finally able to rest.

Duffy pieced together the small clues in her statement.

“Does that ring a bell?” She added helpfully, though smothered in sarcasm and belittling overtones.

His chopping slowed with audible decreases. There was a name on the tip of the bard’s tongue, woefully brought to the tip of his conscious but denied the air.

“You don’t mean…no, it can’t be that obvious?”

The second paladin of N’Jal Duffy had encountered in his long lifetime. The first was known by Lorenor, and the second had been named MetalDrago.

[Duffy]

The implications of the contents of the dream suddenly became serious. They became the sort of implications two idle thespians could no longer ignore. Whilst Duffy continued to chop, jaw slack, fingers careless, kiwi increasingly cut into uneven slices and still in their furry skins, Ruby picked up the now cool tray and tossed into noisily into the foamy sink.

Domestic dystopia returned to the kitchen of the Prima Vista, and with it, a strange yet comforting status quo between absurdity and disaster.

“He’s coming here and he’s coming to see us Duffy. Do you what the devil for?” She stepped up to the sink as if she had just been chained to it, and dug through the soaking dishes to fish out the dish cloth she had left soaking in the cooling depths.

Duffy shrugged. He was still recovering from realising how small the world was.

He gave up on the butt of the kiwi and scooped it into a third bowl. He tossed the ends into the bin behind him expertly, and clicked his spine straight and his neck to life. He looked at the remaining pile, and from the four or five vegetables and fruits in he moved on to his favourite; a large, juicy bunch of grapes, picked that morning from the Echo Fall estate. It was one of the small perks the Winchesters could claim rom their business associates, or rather, a perk Leopold could work hard to afford, and Ruby could squander as she deemed fit.

“I think we can take a guess, don’t you?” He popped several into his mouth whilst Ruby’s guard was down, and beamed a distracting smile at the eruption of sweet tastes that hit his dry tongue. He absent minded wished it was in its more better known form, Echo Falls Chardonnay, but he had that luxury to look forward to later in the evening when the sun set and the last dying warmth caught the balcony overlooking the stage house’s grand sun dome.

“I think we both know exactly why, now we’ve realised who it is.”

Duffy had always known, but he wasn’t quite sure how.

“It’d be nice not to know…” he mumbled.

It was better to let Ruby keep playing her shadowy games with the moment than trip up on his words. He leant back in the chair, taking a break, and cocked his head as if to incite academic ritual. He delved into his wide pool of useless rhetoric, knowledge and wisdom to pick out the pieces he needed to make sense of it all.

Avatars, children and disciples of the Thayne of Althanas had always had two callings. The first was naturally a calling to the Thayne, or indeed pantheon of Thayne that they served. It was a strong, deafening choir of command and hope, which could be heard even in the darkest depths of the world, or atop the windiest peaks. The second on the other hand was lesser known and heard more rarely. Only the truly pious followers of the world’s gods could hear it, and only those who were deemed worthy of fate’s attention would ever get the chance to witness it in action.

The second calling of a Thayne’s puppet was to each other. The children of Tantalus were not being tormented by dreams, malefic incantations or misconceived memories. The harder Duffy thought about it over his salad preparation, the clearer it was becoming. The children of Tantalus were hearing the lost and hallowed calling of N’Jal’s Paladin.

They were being drawn to one another, even if they did not yet know why.

[Duffy]

“I can’t think why N’Jal would pay any attention to us, out of all the heroes, villains and vagabonds in the world. That’s the greatest mystery in all of this,” Ruby broke Duffy’s concentration with a well-placed switch in focus. He nodded, though more to reassure his own doubts than hers.

She continued to wash the dishes, as if domesticity and disaster were one and the same.

“What makes you think that N’Jal has any part to play in MetalDrago’ actions?” he raised an eyebrow.

All the efforts of the troupe until now had been focussed solely on saving others. They had torn holes in the fabric of reality to right their own wrongs, and gave their lives many a time to bring peace and harmony to the many lands of Althanas. Be it in the company of one another, strangers or the brotherhood of the Ixian Knights, the Tantalum had become a verdant force springing life roots up through the war torn surface of the world.

The more Duffy thought about it, the more apparent it became that perhaps, just perhaps, they might have attracted some unwanted attention along the way.

“Do you think he’ll be able to find us?” Ruby’s sincerity broke through the mask, and her face puckered into a frown. She did not like the thought of conflict, not after peace had finally returned to their lives.

“If N’Jal is willing him, then he will break down any walls we build. Normally this would worry me, but in the dream, it felt like Drago wants to find us. Not the spider goddess.”

“If he’s coming on his own volition, then we should remain just as wary of his motives.”

Ruby set the clean earthenware plate onto the draining board and returned her hands to the water. She fished about in the depths for a few moments, taking in Duffy’s consideration like a fine wine. With the sun on her face, she felt slovenly and sullen and, as she turned on a heel to spray Duffy’s cheeky grin with soap suds, quite mischievous.

“You think he’d seek out to harm us?”

Duffy blinked, soap suds slowly dripping down his cheek, nose and chin.

The bard and the spell singer stared at one another, eyes, nostrils and auras flaring with the sort of aggression that could and indeed had started many a war throughout the skeins of history. Duffy continued to rifle through the pile of salad components, trying not to look away in case it sparked a reaction that he would feel for several weeks.

Ruby’s lips curled first.

“Yes,” she chuckled.

They both burst into raucous laughter, the sort that split sides and brought enemies into communion once more as friends.

[Duffy]

“You didn’t answer my question,” Duffy didn’t let Ruby’s ‘jest’ to distract him from trying to retrieve the last piece of information she was clearly not telling him. From her awkward smile and her rigid shoulders, she was withholding something crucial; perhaps that she was scared to admit. He glared over invisible glasses.

“Nothing gets past you does it?” she returned to the table and slipped regally onto the tall stool opposite the bard. She adjusted herself in the seat so that her dress wasn’t tight over the top and her knees were slightly to one side, almost side saddle. “N’Jal is not willing him to come to us, because when he enters the clearing he lands.”

She picked up a large mixing bowl, one with a thick glaze on the exterior and a white, hairline fracture laden interior and dusted it with the hem of her sleeve. She used the movement and the picking up of the salad component bowls to avoid having to look Duffy in the eye. The tomatoes, celery and kiwi slices flopped unceremoniously into the dish. The sound of empty bowels returning with force to the table by her side hallowed the kitchen with awkward echoes.

“He lands in your dream?” Duffy tried not to look scared. His chopping slowed, so much so that he might as well have just tapped the cucumber he was chipping away at to death. “It’s never gotten that far for me.”

“That’s because you’re scared of dragons, they’re part of your primal fears. For me, they mystify my senses, by all means, but I’m not afraid.” She leant forwards, stretching over the table to grab at the small rabbit leaf lettuce Duffy had yet to slice, and set it onto her own smaller chopping board next to the half full bowl. Her tone was matriarchal, with a hint of big sister.

“So what did he do then?” he resumed his labours.

“He stepped into the clearing, amidst screams, granted, but then he did something most unexpected.” She slid the hastily chopped lettuce leaves from the chopping board, scooping them expertly into her cupped hands and dropped them into the bowl. She tossed the contents lightly with a wooden spoon she produced from the neatly arrayed instruments to the right of the chopping board before leaning forwards once more to snatch at a bunch of fresh radishes, picked that morning from the Prima Vista’s modest garden.

Her words seemed to slow time.

“He sang his name to me.”

Duffy blinked.

For a few awkward moments of silence, the bard tried very hard to remove the image of the large, scary, heavily armoured half-dragon he had encountered in the Citadel singing from his mind. The dark, polished, almost glowing scales of its hide and the enigmatic way it spoke did not compel him to imagine a high, well-polished and melodic singing voice. The chorus was rumpus, and the voice harsh on his ears, even when it was imaginary.

“He sang to you?” he asked, half whispered, half full of surprise, like a small child asking if the gods were real or if that large pile of sweets really were all for him.

Ruby nodded, continuing to chop without looking up from her duties.

“You’re telling me that the half-dragon MetalDrago, paladin of N’Jal, the spider goddess, the forbidden one, sang his name to you?”

“He sang of light and dark and duality first, I should point out.”

“He sang in riddles?” Duffy’s voice lost its composure and its sense of wonderment, replaced swiftly with a rising flare for the dramatic.

[Duffy]

“This,” Ruby slapped the carrots onto their opposite side so that she could slide her knife along their opposite edge to remove the rest of the dirty skin with quick and anatomical movements, “is why I had to make sure I was certain before I told you.”

“Certain of what, Ruby, that you’re losing your marbles?”

“No, no, no. I had to make certain that when Drago spouted a second pair of wings, one white and one black, that the words he sang and the way in which he split into two fully formed dragons was a metaphor I understood.”

“A metaphor you…wait, he did what?”

They continued chopping, almost in unison. Neither of the pair looked up at the other. Their lips were pursed, eyes flaring with concentration, neither willing to give away their confusion and growing frustration to their counterpart. There was something about their conversation that leant itself well to the rugged, hostile momentum of salad preparation. Their words were interlaced with dying vegetation and the grinding sound of black peppercorns in a pestle and mortar, which Ruby attacked with bony elbows and far too much satisfaction.

“I needed a few days to do some research, to check my sources, and console my doubts. What I found was proof of sorts that MetalDrago does not wish to harm us, per say. Proof you might say that he is compelled to seek us out through a need to be helped.” Satisfied that the three carrots were clean and edible, relinquished of the playhouse garden’s soil she lined them up, points to the right, stalks and bushy green foliage to the left and set her knife on the tips.

“What do we have to offer something like him?” Duffy sounded horribly uncharitable.

“We have a duty to fulfil to the Ixian Knights, even though it’s been many a moon since we visited the castle, or indeed, since another of the captains came to us with an assignment. Do you remember what that duty is?” Her matriarchal and thus condescending tone returned, a clear sign that her slip of control over the situation was only slight, and that she was commandeering the proceedings once more. Duffy fell very quickly in line.

He felt empathy for the carrots in his groin, as she whisked through them with a slice and dice flurry that made short work of their flesh.

“We are supposed to help those lost in their lives and bring them into the light – into the ‘charity’ of the Ixian Knights.” This was a certain twisting of many truths, but it was the gist of it. They were part of the reclamation front, converting potential enemies into allies, to save on needless bloodshed and violence. “What do you expect us to do, talk him out of his rage?” He raised an eyebrow once more, but quickly lost his sarcastic tone when Ruby rose from her chair suddenly.

“No, Duffy, I expect you to draw on theatrical providence to be mature about this.” She strolled around the table with a clip clop of stilettos on stone, before she stopped at the door leading into the dusty living room beyond. “Finish off the herbs and stir the salad, I’ll be back shortly – I have something you need to see.” She disappeared into the bowels of the playhouse far too quickly for Duffy to object to enquire further. He shrugged, a shrug of resignation and scooped up the three small bunches of fresh parsley, thyme and cat mint that were the sole contents of the ‘to chop’ pile after their hard work.

He set them onto the chopping board, said a few silent last words and then obliterated them in a whirl of steel and a dance of jade and olive fragments.