The Daughter of the Desert (Solo)

[Mordelain]

Desert_Ruins_by_SC4V3NG3R.jpg
The Daughter of the Desert

Part One of the Jya's Fall Trilogy

Sequel to The Heart of the Nomad and Vhadya & Velocity. It heavily references events from those threads.

Harpies
"They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned -- well, if that's so, the harpies have three millennia of scorn pent up in each of them."
-Esseker Nomad

Before the wrath of Vadhya swept over Fallien and remade it, it is said that a female prophet from beyond the seas came and drew maidens of the tribes away from their scriptures, forsaking both Suravani and Mitra for a fabricated god. Instead of allowing them to perish in the Vadhya, Mitra swept the women up and twisted their bodies to horrid feathered beasts, a cross between woman and foul carrion bird.

Harpies commonly kidnap Fallien children and carry them off, screaming to their lair-nests. There they "eat" them, sucking out their life and turning them to ash, thus absorbing their youth. Harpies are incredibly vain, and cannot stand being called ugly (one in every ten harpies is actually good looking). Mitra had originally intended on forcing them to live short lives of misery and pain (particularly the molting), but the harpies' queen was clever, and discovered ways to keep living to punish the others of Fallien.

On the harpies, the "Desert Sirens", from A Rough Guide To Fallien.

[Mordelain]

Prologue
Present Day, the Ruins of Kesta

“Why do you remain here, Mordelain?” asked the planes walker’s gruff mentor.

“I…” she began, before trailing off into silence. She contemplated her answer carefully.

Mordelain Saythrou had never truly felt at home on Althanas. For years, the Troubadour wandered the continents of the young world, struggling to find a place that welcomed her. After almost a century, she discovered somewhere that answered her cry. It was in Fallien’s swaggered embrace that the Troubadour now felt most comfortable. Though worlds had hurled their glories at her feet, only Fallien opened her eyes. Her heat and peoples had enticed her with tales, love affairs, and sorrows succour. Only in the beating flame of the desert’s heart did she feel at peace.

“Here in Fallien’s sway, I feel duty-bound,” she replied. Shackled was a word she had considered using many a time, until her own thoughts had freed her, and the pace of the Free Runner became her own. In duty, she found kinship, and in kinship, she found belonging.

“I am glad, because so you should,” her mentor said excitedly, his heavy girth shifting in the folds of his light, swaying brown robes. She threw him a dagger with her sincere eyes, before she settled back into a squatted position, and raised her partisan in both hands over her head.

“Can we continue now?” she sighed.

“Perfect, the Lathee style opens just like that,” he clapped, “stay like that as your enemy approaches. Show them no mercy, no malice, and no mindfulness.” The juxtaposition between the states she ought and ought not to take up caused the Troubadour to flinch again.

There was a lot to learn, and little time in which to learn it.

“I have been doing just as you asked you oath!” she clucked. She beckoned him to advance.

Suresh advanced brutishly over the sand like a charging wildebeest and brought his cane, a gnarled edifice of Liviol, down over the raised pole-arm. It caved, quite easily, beneath what he considered a gentle tap.

“No, no, no, Mordelain. That is no good. You will die every time to Radar’s downward strike,” the heavy man waved at the tall, lithe, and tanned servant away from the dust bowl they were using as a training ring. His flabby hands tinkled under the weight of many bangles and rings, emeralds, and sapphires catching in the midday glare. He would not let the swordsman set foot in the sand circle to test his pupil again until she showed some improvement.

Mordelain dropped her shoulders, her ego quite deflated. She pictured the meal she would partake in at the end of the day, and took a deep breath. The phantom aromas gave her just enough strength to redouble her efforts. With her usual defiant, stubborn, and feminine strength, she rose to the challenge of trying to satisfy her mercantile tutor.

“Okay, explain it again.” She dropped the blunt tip of her silver weapon to the sand. It thudded noisily and left yet another circular imprint on the desert floor.

[Mordelain]

“I am not going to repeat myself when there is no need,” he said flatly. After four hours of constant repetition, her wits ended. She did not want to waste any more time making foolish mistakes.

“You make it sound so damned easy,” she snarled, wiping her brow free of perspiration with the fur lining of her bracer.

“It is, Mordelain, it really is.” He replied wistfully.

“I would like to see you try and take the weight of his attack with my frame.” Her words lashed out like a cobra’s poison, hurled toxins with syllables of regret.

Suresh frowned, his beaten brow gaining several momentary furrows. He rested his hands on his hips with a patriarchal stance and shifted his gaze between pupil and instructor. If Mordelain had not known him better, she could have sworn she had bested him. In a game of words, she finally found an advantage, a small triumph, and a brief moment to relish in what victory would taste like when it finally came.

“Let me,” he gestured for his servant to hand the quarterstaff to him, and he took it proudly. It was a good five or six feet long, as was traditional for the usually ceremonial Lathee fighting technique.

“What are you going to do?” she raised an eyebrow, her words sarcastic, and her heart dropping.

“I will show you, and you will observe. You will take my lesson into your heart and you will learn it. Then, you will learn and learn it again.” He walked around the girl and spread his legs at the centre of the disturbed sand, from whence Radar had launched his pulled blows moments before.

“We are to continue as before, then?” Mordelain enquired as she stooped into her stance. She bent her knees just enough to give her leverage against Suresh’s heavy handed approach to sparring, more so than she had done before. With her mentor’s insistence, she was learning, but learning her own valuable lessons.

The bells on the tips of her headdress chimed softly with the gentle breeze that dropped down over the rocky outcrop to the south. It sheltered them from the harsher environment of the desert, and swept away the smell of body odour; the soft winds carried it away with the scent of dung and vulture carcass. In the wilderness of the east, with the mountains of the Zaileya rising up over the jagged edges of the natural pit, the scene was set for a long and gruelling day.

Suresh only nodded before he brought the quarterstaff crashing down into the shaft of the partisan. Though the tip still gleamed as brightly as the day he had brought it, its beauty had already begun to fade. She stumbled back and landed squarely on her buttocks with an undignified grunt. Crows, watching from the outcrop, broke into a cacophonous applause.

“That was not as before, damn you. You did that on purpose!” her childish protestations were smothered by Suresh and Radar’s joint laughter.

[Mordelain]

He had somehow seen through her body weight shift, and adapted his own strike to counterpoint her insolence. In Fallien, a fighting style was not to be adapted on a whim. When you fought with the strength of the desert, you fought with its history, its legacy, and its rules. To break them was to invite disaster.

The cackling bounced out of the bowl and echoed over the sand. It wavered in pitch and keenness as it flowed with the contours of the dunes. It echoed for many leagues more until it drowned in the immensity of the ruined landscape, broken long ago by jealous rage and fate.

“Do you think your next assailant will be so lenient Mordelain? Do you think bandits will pull their blows, swing their bardiche, and strike their blades lightly? Just so you can simply melt out of their advance?” Mordelain scrabbled with the dust as she pushed herself upright, almost certain the question posed to her was rhetorical.

“They can try,” she mumbled, too belligerent to remain silent.

“No, I did not think so. Lathee may be a ceremonial fighting technique used to settle scores amongst Bedouin warriors, but of all the arts in the military heritage of this island it is most suited to your needs. Now, take your stance again, and this time, do so as you are bloody well instructed!” Her mentor’s voice grew in intensity.

“Yes master,” she whipped. Mordelain had come to know the man who cared for her like a father enough over the years to know that his particular tone was very severe. It was to be revered; his commands followed to the letter.

“You are watching me, though. That will always be a sign of inexperience to a seasoned assassin.” He used the Tradespeak variant of the word, but Mordelain had seen Fallien’s deadly practitioners of silent murder enough times in her travels to know that what he actually meant. The assassin did not fight with his body; he fought with his blade. “You should be watching this,” he shook the quarter staff with a sturdy grip, “my weapon. Out here on the sands, or deep in the ruins of Kesta, it is your true enemy.”

He snapped it forwards and lashed Mordelain’s loosely held partisan with a swift rebuke of her ignorance. Unprepared for the blow, it slipped from her fingers and fell to her right, its tip illuminating the way home to her embarrassment and defeat. She had every mind to canter off and be on her way, to live out the rest of her life in the relative safety of Irrakam’s Outsider Quarter. She could take up her second calling and be a glass spinner’s wife, or a scullery house cleaner in one of the many hookah bars to be found in the cluttered, warren like streets.

If only he would let me, she mused in her gloom.

“Pick it up, come on!” he lashed at the back of her knees with a forward step that belied his heavy bulk.

[Mordelain]

Suresh’s heavy chin wobbled in unison with his stomach, perhaps too comically for Mordelain to realise she had even been struck. Warmth rose up her calf and she quickly retrieved her weapon, span about, and dropped instinctively into the stance Radar had shown her. A sudden vigour, a need to not lie down and die, quickly over took her body.

The bulky and silent servant clapped, quite happy to see progress at last. His applause dropped down into the pit from the top of the jagged outlay. The ferocity flaring in her eyes revealed to the world that finally, Mordelain Saythrou was ready to become a daughter of the desert.

“You have bested the perils of the desert without trouble before, Mordelain. Now you must learn to best an altogether more deadly foe – man,” he snapped forwards again, but this time Mordelain was ready for him.

Her partisan rose with its dry shaft horizontal, but firmly held between both her hands. It met with the downward strike with a silent cry that echoed in the Troubadour’s heart. Before the merchant could realise, she pushed up with a grunt and a flex of her muscular lower legs. The moment his weapon stopped being a threat and his guard broke she jumped back.

“Men are deadlier, by all means,” she whispered as her breath fought to return to her lungs.

Her weapon snapped down and clashed against Suresh’s over extended right leg. The padding he carried, both in the form of his heavy clothing and his second helping of figs easily absorbed the blow. He retreated, bowed, and smiled brightly with a chuckle in acknowledgement of her triumph.

“Deadlier, by all means…but?” he repeated, raising an eyebrow in anticipation of the assured witticism Mordelain had become quite skilled at delivering.

“They are deadlier, by all means, but they are certainly not always as terrifying.” Though a sharp pain that pierced her lungs, she managed to smile, even laugh as she leant forwards on her weapon. Its wooden shaft and metal framework carried her lithe form with ease. Suresh’s eye for a cheap purchase extended, apparently, to also buying the perfect item for the best price. It suited her in every way, as if it were an extension of her will, arms, and anger.

“Now my dear, let us continue your education with a dual approach to learning.” The merchant stepped back from the circle of dust, and bade Radar to return to his post. He handed the man his staff, and stepped up out of the rock formation. Mordelain watched him with a squint as he moved with the sun’s glare behind him. In the heat, the merchant almost instantly started to smell like baking alpaca dung. She wrinkled her nose.

“What do you mean?” she asked inquisitively. The warm kiss of the midday heat forced her head down and her gaze away from Suresh. She turned her attention instead to Radar. The man terrified her more than Suresh’s inevitable rebuke; he stood like one of the monoliths that lined the desert’s western wastelands where the harpies danced. He towered over her in every way imaginable.

[Mordelain]

“Radar will test the merits of your body, whilst I will test the merits of your mind.”

Almost as if the two men had rehearsed it for days, the tall Fallien born fighter stepped forwards. Without flinching, he trusted the tip of his staff into Mordelain’s midriff.

She lifted the partisan and spun it through several rotations to deflect its course away from its spine tingling conclusion; she moved just in time.

“Ugh,” she wheezed.

The clash of wood together echoed out over the sands. Her jaw snapped shut, her teeth clenched, and her veins exploding with adrenaline she never knew she possessed.

“Name the three leaders of the il’Jhain Houses?” Suresh’s question dropped down onto her shoulders and seeped into her ears like dead weight. She paused; just long enough for Radar to recover his weapon from overextending.

It swung into her chest with the force of a comet, knocking her off her feet, back into a bundle of flailing arms, and recklessly swung silver. Even Radar could not help but show a grimace, before he leant over her groaning, writhing, and dusted form to offer her a hand.

“I will repeat the question for the sake clarity.” The merchant repeated himself louder, prouder, and cruelly without recognition of his pupil’s discomfort. “Name the three leaders of the il’Jhain Houses?”

Mordelain squinted at Radar, unsure wherever or not to trust him after his rude awakening. When she made up her mind, she rose swiftly with a rush of air, and found her trust well placed as the Bedouin man retreated. He entered a neutral stance she recognised from her dancing forms and waited. Mordelain hovered, calf muscles tensed, and grip firm around her pole-arm.

“You are a <harpies’ bastard>, Suresh, I believe that is the saying they use in the Outlander’s Quarters.” She watched Radar’s grin reaction, and smiled herself, guessing she had learnt the correct curse phrase in her time well spent in the under belly of Ikkaram.

Her native tongue had no such word, though there were many that came close. Trade speak and Fallien were both brutally spoken, primal, and languages far from soft in intonation; so she had taken to using whatever curses she could to show her ever growing frustration with the men in her life. The Troubadours had never been a race to express their anger through conceited words.

“The leaders of the Houses,” she stepped forwards and kicked up the tip of her partisan into Radar’s waiting guard. He knocked it away and spiralled about, only to find the Troubadour retreated from the arc of his flat blow. “Of present, though I can recount all the leaders from the fall,” she dropped the partisan’s point to the sand and drew a circle, as was customary in her own art of dance, “are Îdhdaer, Faziah, and Azuban.”

“That is correct,” Suresh barked, only to clap and command Radar to continue. He mused over the many possible ways to test her knowledge of the desert and its people.

[Mordelain]

From what he had seen in the few short months, whilst they had worked and relaxed together endlessly, his knowledge might not be able to test her enough. She had a very keen mind for flora, fauna, and pathetic fallacy. Suresh curled his lips into a cruel smile. He wondered if it was keen enough.

“What next, master?” she said sarcastically. She kept her eyes firmly and assuredly on the warrior before her.

“What are the properties of Niphena?”

It took Mordelain only a split second to locate the small part of her mind slowly occupied by nothing but alchemical recipes and poisonous missives. She took a deep breath, and a sniff, and then smelt the properties of the plant; they were an acrid, leathery, and intoxicating flower that produced a potent by product from its roots. It grew primarily on the rocky banks of the Attireyi, just north of the Jya’s Keep.

“Niphena is a dry tubular plant which produces hypnotic trances in its investors.” Mordelain took the initiative, rising from her low stance to return his opening thrust with one of her own. Her weapon carried no more of a convincing argument at its tip than the flat end of a worn walking staff.

He knocked it aside with his bracer, swatting it away as if it were a fly. Radar snarled, finding her quick to anger, and quicker still to start to resent agreeing to this petty lesson. She in turn had gone beyond recognising that she was tired, gone much further beyond realising she was hungry, and had given up all hope of diving into an oasis to ease her woes. Suresh watched them both keenly. He silently picked out weaknesses in pupil and tutor with all the scrutiny of a desert drake descending to its prey.

“Who resides in the blue oasis?” his question danced in the winds, crashing onto the sand between the two dancers with heavy force. His tone could have awoken long slumbering gods.

“Karachi, spice merchant, and artisan of the device called a noria.” She dashed forwards, feigning one thrust into a harsher follow-up. Radar deflected the first, stumbled into thin air, and roared as the partisan pierced his abdomen. Red blood trickled along the intricate and ornate shaft binding, which turned quickly into black ichor and then oil like composite.

Mordelain almost seemed apologetic as she pulled her weapon from Radar’s body, but he soon quietened down. He touched his shaking fingers to the wound, smelt the blood on his fingertips like a dog enquiring as to the origins of a matted part of his fur, and then he shrugged.

Unfazed by the developments, or indeed the progress, Suresh continued to walk in a circle around the dust bowl in the ancient caldera. He scrutinised his employees for any signs of weakness.

“What does a noria do?” the merchant continued, seemingly oblivious to the unfolding look of concern on Mordelain’s face.

Mordelain darted a prudish look at the merchant, before she pointed at Radar with her free hand. “Can we not stop, he is injured!” she protested, but almost instantly felt as if something was amiss.

[Mordelain]

“Is he really?” he replied with a smile, his words seething with amusement through the curls of his greying beard. He shook his head and tucked his hands together in the small of his back as he walked. A scholarly visage covered his tired, sweaty form.

The sickly scent of alpaca dung and sand vanished, turning instead into the peaky smell of a man’s perspiration.

Mordelain looked back at Radar’s torso, which dripped with sweat and trails of blood from a renewed fold of skin. There was no sign of injury, except the stains of his fluids. She instantly realised why Suresh had insisted on the man joining them in the desert.

“What are you?” she mouthed almost silently. Wonderment sealed away her usual zest. “I have seen many things in my travels sir, but none so strange.” She wove a masterful lie into her words. She had known what he was all along, and that Suresh too was of the same kindred. She was playing a deadly game on the outskirts of Kesta with enemies as old as Fallien herself.

Radar tried to smile, as if he thought the gesture would appease her. He had tried and failed to explain what it was he was exactly so many times he had become afraid to do so again. He looked up to Suresh for guidance.

“Radar, my dear, is what the people of the desert call a Ghubar.”

Mordelain repeated the word repeatedly, feigning an attempt to get to grips with the pronunciation. She made a show of trying to place its significance in the long menagerie of strange memories and facts she kept fresh in her mind. She pretended to give in, and then curled her lip with a hint of confusion.

“We do not know anything of their origins, except that they are a rare and unusual people who dwell in the mountains. Occasionally,” he pointed at Radar, “they come to the cities. In this case, to Irrakam to seek work and to open trade routes so that they can resource materials they cannot acquire in their own lands.”

“I did not think anyone could live in those harsh landscapes, least not for long, or without divine guidance?” the question aimed at both, and indeed. All she had learnt since she had arrived on Althanas had taught her that the mountains of this world meant death. The Zaileya and the eastern fringe were out of bounds even to her talents.

Radar found his courage finally, “the Ghubar are a people born of the desert, literally.” He ran a dagger over his right breast; the motion formed a long, razor nail that dug into the flesh with a sickening tear. Mordelain looked away, but soon looked back, too unconstrained to fight the curiosity she felt swell in her stomach. She silently chuckled at the irony in the creature’s self-expression. The Ghubar were indeed born from the desert, but not just literally, as Radar believed.

Radar and his kin was the desert.

[Mordelain]

“Ghubar in Fallien and indeed in the tongue of Radars’ kind means ‘sandy’.” Suresh gave up his vigil and shuffled to the edge of the dust bowl. He stooped to perch on the rocky outcrop with his fat tree trunk thighs swinging over the edge.

With the illusion keeping Radar’s true form breaking, something unexpected trickled from the wound. Instead of blood, golden sand fell down his torso as if he had just split open a sack of grain. It trickled to the floor, lifeless and odourless, and from the lack of pain on the man’s face, without having any effect on him whatsoever. Mordelain pulled a mock expression of surprise, and made a show of trying to mouth a question through flabbergasted gasps for hot, sticky air.

“I see this is new to you,” Radar said meekly. He ran his claw over his wound and sealed the cut shut with whatever magic held his strange form together.

“Mordelain is no stranger to the wonders of many a world, if the rumours are too wild to be believed.”

The Troubadour glanced at Suresh, biting her tongue long enough to carefully consider her response to his accusation. She had wondered how long it would take before people talked, and how much longer Suresh of all people could keep his mouth shut. Shansi, the al-Thayne’s soul was rearing her ugly head in the words of her mentor. If Mordelain were to use the spirit’s own creations against her, to locate the Tower of the Ghubar, she would have to play this game very carefully indeed.

She had come close to losing it once already; she could not afford to make the same mistake twice.

“You make such lofty demands on my knowledge so openly, Suresh. I think one question in kind is more than appropriate.” She shifted her body to face the merchant, and let her partisan fall to the right, away from Radar and the sun. “What do you mean by that, exactly?” her hot breath warmed her lips, burning away the last remnants of moisture from her morning meal. She felt so weary and sweaty that she wondered if there was any water left in her bones at all.

“I have heard you are of the Tama, a people that once visited Fallien, and whose name is still whispered through the bazaars of Irrakam.”

She was not as surprised as she expected.

“Perhaps,” she said softly. The expression on her face remained tactile, expressionless, and unreadable.

Suresh cocked his head, unsure how to proceed. Since the Cataclysm, Mordelain had presumed the history and legacy of the Troubadours and the Kalithrism, the network of worlds tied in common brother hood would have faded from knowledge. The people of the nine planets scorned her kind, blamed her kind, and shunned her kind. Why would Althanas, even throughout its long excommunication be any different? Shansi, once again, was channelling her will through the Ghubar, testing Mordelain’s tenacity and patience.

“How…”

Suresh rolled his eyes, and gestured for both Radar and Mordelain to rest their aching limbs at his feet. He sat crossed legged now, like a strange deity, or wise man imparting pains of knowledge to innocent minds. “I know everything that happens in the walls of Irrakam, and much that does not,” neither Radar nor Mordelain felt entirely at ease with the way he winked at them after that. Mordelain could only wonder what strange notion of conduct Shansi believed in, but it seemed unnatural and childish to her.

[Mordelain]

“She is a Troubadour?” Radar questioned. They both sat cross-legged like Suresh.

The merchant nodded, his chin wobbling encouragingly.

“You know about my people too?” she mock cursed, in her own tongue this time.

“Less haste, Mordelain, the Ghubar has lived on this island for much longer than any other. Many of their kind remember the desert long before it was a desert.” His tone became patriarchal, overbearing, and sycophantic. He was becoming too accustomed to correcting everyone around him. Mordelain grit her teeth.

“I remember it much more clearly than you could imagine,” the sand man said longingly.

“Explain yourself, both of you!” her cries lost their usual sternness, but were cries all the same for the sake of her masque. She was by no means a politician, and she was playing a game of thrones with kings of a dying empire. She looked between them, trying to remain placid. Her breath became strained, tested, and heated.

“Long ago, the Troubadours came to Irrakam. They helped us, guided us, and readied us. Though little of their input remains today, there are traces, murals in fact of brightly clothed dancers and singers in the Outlander’s quarters, and in the ruins over the mountains where the Exile Coradan dwells. Those artistic relics depict the enormity of their deeds.”

Radar scooped up a handful of the sand they had spared on and swallowed it greedily, an action Mordelain assumed sustained the creature, or perhaps healed it when it became…empty.

“When you appeared in the city many months ago, I could not believe my eyes, and in that respect, I could not believe my luck!” the fat merchant slapped his thighs, before he produced something from the leather pack by his side. Mordelain smelt the aroma before he tossed it, and moved to intercept the bundle of food wrapped in red cloth with grace and finesse.

Mordelain suddenly doubted her gambit in the Freerunner’s Café had been prophesied by Shansi after all. She swallowed the lump in her throat and tried to remain calm. If the spirit of the desert had cajoled her into leaving Irrakam’s safety, then she was in more danger than she first believed.

She closed her eyes and took a moment to compile her thoughts. Instinctively, she undid the bundle of food, and set it out on her lap. She draped the cloth, which was a headscarf as much as a lunch pale, over her knees. She ran her fingers over the fabric, and traced out the stitching. The image of the horse galloping over the silk burnt into her dark mind with golden threads, until it galloped away and left her with a recollection from three days prior.

“All the threads are coming together,” she whispered, afraid she might be overheard.