A Knight's Tale, part the first (OPEN)

[The Mongrel]

The half-orc agreed to come right away, for reasons both noble and selfish. I had expected as much, and honestly, if there was any single person of the three I'd have picked, it was him. Blame bias, but out of the men whose path I'd crossed, he seemed the most grounded. The big guy was probably stronger and sturdier, but he was twitchy. And between my experiences with Mutt and Erirag, I felt safer with an orc at my back.

I lifted my hand to motion him forward when the little fox spoke words that froze me in mid stride and sent uncomfortable prickles racing up my limbs and spine. They were callbacks to the single action that would forever define me in the eyes of anyone who heard my name throughout history. Whatever else I'd done, whatever else I would do, all of it paled in the light of this one title: Pode-slayer. It was also the last title I wanted to claim at that moment.

Very slowly, almost woodenly, I turned around. My green glare lanced through the redheaded boy. My skin tingled, and I was sure my usually grayish-tan skin had mottled into darker and lighter variants. "Do you ask every blond elf if he is Findelfin ap Fingolfin? No? Do you ask every Alerian male if he is Izvilvin Kazzizrym? Or every brown-bearded human bastard if he is Letho Ravenheart? Do you? No."

The muscles in my chest tightened, making my breath come harder and shallower. "Then why in Haide would you ask the first random elven hybrid you met if she is Illara Alfheim? Let me tell you something, little fox. And make sure you listen well, because if I have to clean your ears, I will do it with an arrow. People like me are very, very rare. That's because if Raiaeran and Alerian elves produce a baby, nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand those children are war crimes, just in their existence. If we make it alive out of the womb, the lucky ones don't see our second breath. No matter which side of the border we were born on."

I stalked forward, crunching dead leaves and green grass beneath my boots. "Only a handful of us survive long enough to get out, and when we do, we find that the world isn't any kinder to us than our homelands. Surviving is hard, forget thriving. If we're lucky, we eek out a meager existence on the margins, slinking in the shadows, keeping our heads down, trying to not draw attention to ourselves so that we can survive one more day. The gods do not guard or guide us, Raiaerans and Alerians despise us, and humans take advantage of us because they know we have so few options."

I stopped a stride away from the fox. "If Illara Alfheim is smart, she is in Raiaera, soaking up every last drop of adulation and goodwill her actions have brought her. But she has ruined the lives of everyone like me, because all of a sudden we're noticed. We're scrutinized. And if it was hard to make a living before that, it's damn near impossible now. So do not insult me by confusing me with her."

I closed my eyes, feeling the contacts - purely there to show the green and hide the tell-tale silver - itch against the lids. I let myself take a couple of breaths, releasing the rage. "The only name I claim is Mongrel. I don't care if you call me Dog or Kon," I nodded to Casimir; if he spoke orcish, that was the word for dog. "If you fall behind, turn around, because I am not waiting for you. If you're coming, then come."

Blood still boiling, I turned sharply back to the west and started walking into the dense woods. With a newly acquired party, fifteen miles would be a long distance to cover, indeed.

[SerCasimir]

Casimir cocked an eyebrow at the surprisingly sensitive giant who took a light jest as mocking, but said no more about it. He had given his word to accompany the elfmaid, who was presently tearing deep into the small human who had called her "Pode-slayer". The name meant something to the men, and clearly to the woman, but she did not seem to find it complimentary. He heard her words and felt so many feelings he knew well mesh with hers. He had been extremely fortunate, as half-orcs go, but even he saw the faces as he passed, heard the whispered words when humans forgot how well half-orcs could hear. His father and mother had been in love, but he knew that love was no small part of why that pogrom took them when he was young, why the other children at Ser Bryndis' estate would not play with him. He shook the memories off when she finished her rant, and he followed behind her. She gave her name as Mongrel, but said she would answer to dog, or Kon, which was Orcish for dog. It was strange to hear her speak that word, he had never met a mixed elf, and certainly no elf that would "dirty their lips with orcish speech", as he had often heard it referred.

Cas followed her, along with the half-giant, and they marched quietly for a while. He decided to chance speaking with her, as he found her fascinating mix of new discoveries. He decided to speak to her in orcish. He had learned it as a child from his mother and rarely used it since, and so his accent was a touch provincial.
<Do you speak orcish truly? Or do you know but a few words? I am not offended if such is the case>

[Vendredi]

“Right,” he strained faintly, forced back by the furor in the words that she flunged at him. His hands shot up as a shield and peace-offering both, and in that moment, the rabbit bounded away.

He wanted to rebut something, but the look on her face stilled his words. The look said speak no more if you treasure your tongue. His mind said you still look like the woman on those pictures. His face said I’ll mind my own goddamned business now. And so he did. Or tried to.

Right. He gulped thickly and stared at her departing back. Mongrel. Synonymous with terrifying.

Suddenly, the giant looked much more interesting. Sometime in the last minute or five, the giant’s armor had rescinded, revealing a -- to Fii’s surprise -- mostly human face.

Grassed crunched beneath his feet as he padded over to the giant’s side, and he purposely chose the side that was further away from the Mongrel. The half-orc had her attention for now, and Fii hoped that’s where her attention would stay. Until she cooled down a little, at least. Instead, Fii eyed the giant's shield, and poked it with a finger.

“Say, we’ve got a halfbreed elf and a half-orc here. Are you a half-giant?”

[redford]

John walked with relative ease through the forest. Though it was dense, the moon and stars offered just enough light to help him see the Pode-slayer climb her way through the forest, nimble as a squirrel hopping between branches.

John's method was a little different. leaves and sticks crunched under his massive boots, and any offending branches in his way were simply pushed off his path, sometimes snapping in the process. He glanced, and the boy was following behind in the path he forged.

Despite his recent hesitation, the human that walked in the sprinkling rain had a disarming quality about him. Perhaps it was his nature to protect the boy, perhaps the giant had just taken a liking to him.

Then again, perhaps the boy was the only one who hadn't directly annoyed him this eve. His scowl lightened a bit and he swung the eight foot by four foot dehlar shield over his head, the armor on his back extending spikes to connect the two metals. He turned his head down as they walked further from the fire, his deeply timbred voice carrying a little in the rain.

"Perhaps. They say that the Cromwell line has giant blood in it; we certainly have the strength."

[The Mongrel]

I was honestly surprised that all three of them followed. At the very least, I'd expected one of them to protest that it was nearly dark, that the way was treacherous, that it was so far away. Then again, it wasn't in the orcish nature to shy away from anything or to complain about the weaknesses of the body. The giant human - Cromwell, he said, in his Salvaran accent - probably just didn't give a fuck. He was big and armored enough that almost anything would have a hard time getting at him. And of course the little fox had proven again and again that he didn't have the sense the Thayne gave a turnip. Maybe I should have expected that they all just fell into line, even though they wouldn't be able to see their hands in front of their faces after less than an hour.

The forest spread out ahead of us, friend and foe, merciless in its whims but mostly benevolent in its nature. Gentle rain pattered down on the leaves and branches around us, and the ground smelled of musky moss as it opened up to accept the life-giving (though slightly chilly) water. So long as nothing suddenly turned red and vicious around me, I wasn't bothered. If it did turn red and vicious, I was going to kill that Pode bitch again, because I don't appreciate her aesthetic.

Little specks of starlight reflected off of leaves and trees, creating a silver pathway. In the Lindequalme, Erirag hadn't noticed it and my brother's troops had sniggered behind my back when I tried to point it out, so my assumption was that no one else could see it. It seemed to point out the least treacherous way, but I was more interested in finding the path most passable and least time consuming. The sooner we got to the bandit camp, the sooner we could leave, after all.

It took a while before anyone dared approach me; after that outburst, I couldn't blame them. I wasn't surprised that it was the half-orc. He had to have experienced the same discrimination as I had. We were two hybrids that the world had never wanted, incredibly similar despite our differences. Mutt had seen that even before I had. I wondered if Casimir saw it, too.

I glanced at him when he spoke to me, but it took me a moment to piece his words together. His manner of using the words was clumsy, as though they were almost forgotten to him, and he went soft on the gutterals that tore my poor throat to shreds when I tried to speak the orcish. Whoever taught him thought of how humans would hear it. Or he's so unused to speaking it that he speaks it like a human.

<"The love of my life was a half-orc,"> I explained. <"He was raised by his human mother. When he decided he wanted to learn more about being an orc, we learned the language together. He used to pick on me because I couldn't get the tusk-sounds or deep-throated growls right.">

I smiled with bittersweet remembrance. <"I got him back by teaching him elven tongue twisters. He always tripped up on the vowels. But he never got mad about that, either.">

[SerCasimir]

A surprised expression crossed his tusked face, though he was unsure whether she would be able to see it in this dark. It was hard to believe that any beautiful elfmaid would fall in love with an half-orc. Every elf he had ever met before look at him like he was repugnant, same for half-elves, and most humans. He had never met a dwarf woman before, but he imagined it would be no different.

She really was a surprising sort.

He smiled knowingly when she mentioned the elven tongue twisters, he had tried his hand at a bit of elvish once upon a time, and had fared no better than her old lover.

<You say was, has he died? If so I am sorry. Love is a hard thing to come by for those like us. I learned from my mother, but she died many years ago, and I haven't had much chance to use it since.>

Having a companion made traveling much more pleasant. He had walked who knows how many miles before, and would walk all these to the camp, then likely all of them back before resting. Alone it would have been harsh, but around Kon he felt a bit invigorated by conversation and a proper goal.

<What was your love's name?>

[Vendredi]

[OOC: Will interrupt Cas/Illara's conversation later. :')]

In minutes, the sparse drops of rain turned into a quick drizzle. Droplets bounced off his skin and sank into his clothing, and soon enough, Fii was more damp than dry. He wiped his face three separate times before giving up, and resigned himself to becoming drenched before the night was out.

The evening was a foolish time for traveling, but none of his companions seemed to care. Soon enough, all signs of the road and the giant’s fire dimmed to a spark, and then were gone. Trees and darkness became their world, along with the harrowing whispers of the evening winds. However, between the mountain-sized man -- half-giant indeed -- trampling half a step in front of him, and the elf -- Mongrel, indeed -- expertly leading the path ahead, Fii felt strangely assured that he could not possibly come to any harm. Youthful recklessness often came with a belief in one’s own invincibility.

Harm from creatures other than them, anyways.

After all, he had seen her skills first-hand. And there was something about the giant man that had been pricking at the edges of his attention for some time now. It would be minutes before Fii fully grasped it. The metal armor -- or he had thought it was armor earlier -- was moving entirely too fluidly.

“What,” he asked, pointing to the giant’s arms where a band of metal was clear, “exactly is that?” The itch to know had overridden his tongue,

[redford]

Wind flowed through the trees gently like a river flowing around rocks, chilling John's exposed skin. Amidst the crunching of his own feet on the leaves below, he heard the mumbling grunts of he orcish language. It was a guttural mix of short syllables, spoken easily by the half-orc, but the girl had trouble with the more guttural and phlegm heavy sounds. But still, she spoke it well for a petite woman. As it was, John could only pick out little words here and there; 'love', 'mother' and a few pronouns were all he could understand with his limited knowledge of orcish.

The boy spoke again, and Cromwell glanced over just in time to see his darkened figure point at his armor.

"What is that?"

John looked down at him again, and furrowed his brow, his mouth returning to the hard line it was before. A voice in the back of his head told him the boy didn't, couldn't know; but another told him he was again just for the looking at, for the ogling. He pulled his armor up behind his sleeve.

"It's a curse."

He picked up his pace a little.

[The Mongrel]

Stars, it was weird to walk through a dusky, drizzly forest with a half-orc who was interested in my past. It felt like coming to a path I thought was destroyed, finding something eerily similar there, and walking it anyway. And damn if it wasn't doing things to my head.

<"To know why he called himself what he did, you should know how he viewed the world. Like me, he rejected the name he was given at birth. He told me what it was once, the day we decided that we were together for better or worse, and there would be nothing hidden between us. But he said...">

I took a deep breath. I'd learned so many things from him, and while I freely handed out his wisdom to Unfoundlings who would never know him or even to strangers I needed to keep alive, speaking his words now opened up the pain I'd felt the day I lost him and threatened to close my throat.

<"He said that it's not what you're made of that matters, it's what you make of yourself. That it's not how you're built, it's how you build. That when you fight, fight twice as hard as you can, and when you love, love twice as hard as you can. And, most important, he said that you must own what makes you weak, or it will own you. So he called himself Mutt.">

Mutt and Mongrel. Outcasts among all but the group who took us in, but we found all we ever needed in each other. <"I lost him before you were born, to battle wounds. But he was beautiful. The face of an orc, yes, but the heart of a warrior, and the soul of a poet.">

If I'm honest, it took me almost a year of being Mutt's lover to find his face attractive. I always felt safe and secure in his arms, but orcish faces don't mesh well with elven aesthetics. I don't think I'd ever describe him with stunning good looks, or even reasonably good looks. But as his face came to represent comfort, safety, and love, it became the face that I called home. It's still a face I miss.

I closed my eyes for a second to compose myself, then ran my right hand over my cheek. The sutured wound that ran across from my nose to my hairline throbbed painfully in response, but it helped bring me back to the present. I didn't want to dig into my past anymore; at that moment, it made my heart ache for things that could never be again. <"What of your life, Casimir? You said your mother taught you orcish, which seems to mean that she was an orc, but you have a human name. That's very unusual.">

"Watch your feet," I called in Tradespeak for the entire party to hear, before he could respond. Hopefully the brief interruption would be forgivable; the night-blind among the group needed the warning. "We're coming into a nasty tangle, and you don't want to trip."

[SerCasimir]

<His words were wise. I am very sorry for your loss, my people tend not to live over long even naturally, so to lose him to battle must have been especially difficult.>

Casimir carefully avoided the the tangle of growth on the ground, continuing to walk beside her. The story of her lover Mutt moved him, made him feel for the first time in his life that maybe someday someone might love him.

Maybe.

When she asked about his life, he was surprised. No one ever cared about his history, and he rarely thought about his parents anymore. At that thought he frowned to himself. They deserved better than that.

<The circumstances of my birth were unusual for those like me. I was fortunate in that sense, I suppose. My father was a landed mage-knight of some small renown, Ser Garrison Taryndor. My mother was Lokra Dragon's-Eye, of similar renown. They fell in love on their quest against the Sanguine King. I was born of that union>

He paused a moment, drinking from his waterskin.
<Naturally such a union was not to the taste of anyone but them. When i was ten and the troubles in Corone were just beginning to brew, they sent me away to an old friend of my father, Ser Bryndis Adelbert. When things begin to sour as they did in Corone in those days, I am sure you know obvious non-conformists tend to be first against the wall, and my parents were slain in a pogrom. I am told at least they died fighting, and breathed their last in each others arms. I squired for Ser Bryndis, until he knighted me when I was twenty, and I have been alone since.>

His expression darkened, though he doubted she'd be able to tell.
<The life of a hedge-knight is not one that encourages close bonds or roots. During the restructuring toward the end of the troubles, my family lands were taken, our keep of Knight's Rest, and my father's runebrand Requiem were lost. A Taryndor knight had carried that blade for a thousand years. I was told it was forged by dwarves in dragon's fire and enchanted by elves with magics of elder days, greater by far than the craft any possess now.>

He chuckled a bit, mostly to himself as he remembered the stories of his youth.
<Likely an embroidered truth, if there is any truth to it at all. Still a mighty blade. I suppose it's only right that I shall never get to wield it. The Taryndor line had a half-elf or two in it, and there are tales of a silver dragon in woman's form, but I am the only half-orc, and I am the first Taryndor heir to have no gift for the arcane. I am not a fit heir to such a legacy.>

He hadn't intended to tell as much as he did, but it was strangely pleasant to have someone actually ask to hear about him.
<Forgive me my lady. I am certain such tales must be dull to anyone but me.>