Duffy
11-06-11, 04:35 PM
Burning Bush
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK9CJQ6WbvA)2564
Wager Match: (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22249-Challenges/page4) Closed to Slayer of the Rot.
Duffy really didn’t know what to say for himself. He was quite fond of bushes, but this one was burning. Its branches were scoured by flames of his own making, cindering and crackling in the heat of his fire.
“There’s innuendo here for sure,” he said smartly, his breath freezing into wisps of smoke that drifted up into the cold Raiera sky.
His journey through the aptly named red forest had taken him nearly three days, long tireless hours classily blurring into a poignant montage of personal struggle and achievement. Now that he was here, though, he was not sure the effort was worth it. There were no ceaseless virgins awaiting him here in this paradise…there was only a madman, pain, and the howling of wolves that hungered not only to devour the bard’s flesh and gnaw on his lanky bones, but to envelop his soul with their gangrenous maws.
“This is what you get for volunteering to do ‘the right thing’,” Ruby said with the sort of wry smile on her face that got people shot.
“Oh don’t you start with your omniscient claptrap. I’ve had enough of that all the damned way here.” He darted her several shot sniping glances before he let his gaze return to the crackling embers of his well-placed gout of flame. He adjusted the pipes of the Tinder Gear so they were comfortable, before he squatted onto the fallen, half rotten leg to warm up.
The red leaves of the sycamores, warped and decrepit that rose about them cast their shade onto the evening’s activity. At the heart of their camp, there was the new fire, which had quickly bedded down into the circle of rocks prepared by Ruby. Three tree trunks, forming a triangle around the flames had been carried in from the tree line to give the party something to sit on, and on the outskirts, to the north, Arden stood with his arms folded and his red tunic and hood pulled tight. If Duffy hadn’t known any better, he was looking at a sprucing, not a guardian.
“So tell me,” Ruby began to ask, unpacking her satchel. She produced the various cooking utensils she required to prepare the brace of hares Lillith had caught that morning in a ritualised manner that only she would understand. “What do we actually know about our assignment?”
“They call him the ‘Slayer of the Rot’,” he replied wistfully, bobbing up and down on his haunches as he rubbed his palms together a little too close to the flames. They glowed with amber light, as if his skin were luminescent.
“Horribly uninformative there Duffy. They call you a bard, yet that tells me nothing of your form, your drive, your talent and ambition.”
“What do you want to know?”
“For starters,” she jabbed a wooden spoon at him like an old wife nagging her husband to finally bring in the logs for the dying hearth, “tell me why a simple acquisition assignment from dear Sei required the four of us,” she pointed at Blank, herself, Duffy and then Lillith in turn.
Duffy watched the tall, Akashiman assassin slip through the trunks of two old oaks that stood constantly in the heart of the Red Forest. She moved so silently, without disturbing so much as the air about her advance the bard wrinkled his forehead trying to work out how Ruby had known she was there.
“I didn’t ask Sei why, he just said, in his usual manner, ‘take the whole brood with you’.” Granted, the leader of the Ixian Knights had instructed the captain with a strange, unassuming smirk on his face which Duffy had ignored up until now.
“Who is he?” Ruby tossed the spoon at Lillith, who rushed forward to catch it gracefully. “Stir the humus would you sister?” She looked back at Duffy before Lillith could object.
“His real name or so they say is Dan Lagh'ratham.” He did not know if it was destiny or truth that made the name sound ominous is it spewed forth from his lips, but it turned the tone over the camp fire sour. He watched Lillith as she sat on the log to his right to stir the contents of a large wicker bowl noisily. She did so with gusto and enthusiasm, in stark contrast to the blood on her right cheek and the reddened tanto resting on her lap.
“I know that name, I am afraid to say.” Ruby’s voice hushed, and her movements, once quick and domesticated slowed to clumsy, awkward preparation. “I had thought the man an ally of sorts, why would Sei turn us loose against him?” Duffy could see that Ruby’s mind was assailed by memories she would never share with the likes of him.
“The captains and members of the Ixian Knights are brought from all walks of life. Who can say, or indeed who can know what baggage people bring with them to the court of the great Sei Orlougne.” Only recently, Cassandra Remi had left their number, and many others had done the same – through dead, sacrifice or madness, the bastion of good and order on the island of Corone was losing its war.
Several minutes passed in awkward silence. Ruby continued to set out a carving block and utensils, on which she gingerly sacrificed the neck of their supper. Duffy watched the blood pour slowly like a waterfall over the well-worn block’s edge into a terracotta pot. Lillith prepared the humus, set out three plates which Ruby had insisted they brought with them on their caravan and shared amongst them chunks of a large, hardened loaf of soda bread.
“Look around you, the both of you.” Lillith broke the momentary pause in conversation. Her hazel hair and piercing eyes remained fixed on her duties, not once looking up at the stars and trees to lead by example.
Ruby and Duffy stared childishly at the trees, tree line, the shadow of Blank and the flickering flames that by now had turned into an inferno nestled about a blackened stump. There did not seem to be anything out of the ordinary, or indeed, worthy of note. The Red Forest, its leaves resplendent in ruby and gold and the landscape of the elven heartlands remained constant, eternal, uncaring for the people that walked amongst its wavering boughs.
“What are we looking for?” Duffy chuckled, “Ghosts?”
“This will be our grave, I thought I’d try and get you to appreciate it a little more.” The calmness Lillith uttered the words scared Duffy, who lost the façade of confident and cocksure lad about town almost instantly. Ruby was almost sure he whimpered.
“What aren’t you telling us sister?”
“I feel it, I fear it, and it is why Arden will not fight alongside us when the time comes.”
Duffy turned very slowly to pick out the silent swordsmen set against the tall spindly trees. He paused for thought, before placing several awkward pieces of a jigsaw together. It had been Lillith that insisted Blank come with them, and know he knew why.
“When he comes for us, and it shall be us who shall be the hunted, not the hunter, we will not survive the encounter if we use brawn.” Duffy couldn’t disagree with her point, so he leant forwards in his seat to listen closer. “Blank will take our blood vials and go north, returning in two days to either victory, or our corpses. We will have failed in our endeavour, but we will live.”
Ruby broke the awkward silence with a triple drop of her blade. She snapped the back legs of each hare open, and then skinned each with three carefully timed and skilled slices. As was tradition, she wrapped each in sheets of dock leaf and dipped them in water from a pale, which she had filled from the stream to the north that evening. They fizzled and hissed as they landed in the embers, and began cooking almost immediately.
“If we are so certainly going to do then sister, let it be on a full stomach.” Duffy didn’t look at Ruby as she rose, rinsing her fingers as she did so and made out of the camp fire’s radiance towards Blank.
Duffy waited until she was out of earshot before he sighed.
“You feel it too, don’t you?” Lillith smiled.
“I can’t say I’m altogether that enthusiastic about being here. As quick and strong as I am, from what I know of this creature, he can break my bones with a sneeze and rape my loved ones in front of me quicker than I can protest.”
“I guess you best enjoy this hare twice as much then.”
“You’ve been a good sister to Ruby, you know that don’t you?” His sudden swell of sincerity fazed even him. He stroked his shins, bare and cold even in the Basque of the fire to try and keep warm. He came across as an awkward, sniffy child waiting outside a prefect’s office for a lashing.
“Thank you Duffy. You have been almost a brother to us both.”
They stared at one another awkwardly.
The red leaves overhead continued to sway in the gentle breeze as the group went about their meal preparations. Duffy tended to the fire, layering more twigs over the hares so that they remained cooking with hisses of fat on all sides. Lillith continued to prepare the plates, so that the meat was well garnished, and Ruby extracted Blank’s plan from him with a lashing tongue and a fiery grimace of revenge and wrath if the swordsman did not tell her everything he had on his mind.
“It does smell good, at least we’re dining alfresco – start as you mean to go on I always say!” He tried to laugh, but a wolf howled in the distance before it’s cries cut short with a gargle. His eyes widened until they shone of their own volition, and he stared at Lillith for security.
“He is coming for you, Duffy. He will not be tamed so easily as the last mad men and thieves we brought back to the fold of the Ixian Knight’s glow. We must be ready for him; you must be ready for him.”
The bard nodded, and drew his trusted daggers from their places on his hips. They caught the red light of the fire as they spiralled into two discs of mercury light. Even though he was immortal, and the providence of a Thayne ran through his blood, he felt, for the first time in a long time very much afraid. With the dying of the light and the calming of the storm that had washed over the forest earlier that morning, the ambience of the red forest smelt damp, rotten and cursed.
Duffy was not sure if it was just the venerable state of their battleground, but he felt incredibly young, inexperienced and vulnerable in the vastness of the elven world.
He felt like a wounded deer being stalked by a lion…
“I am as ready as I ever will be…I am stronger now with my friends by my side,” he looked over his shoulder again as he heard Ruby’s footfall breaking branches and scuffing against the long crumbled ruins of elven tors. “Let us dine together one last time, just in case the entirety of our knowledge, persuasion and charisma cannot bring this lost, rapid dog back into the pack…” He didn’t wait for the two to sit, and leant forwards to jab at the hares to lance them out of the embers.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK9CJQ6WbvA)2564
Wager Match: (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22249-Challenges/page4) Closed to Slayer of the Rot.
Duffy really didn’t know what to say for himself. He was quite fond of bushes, but this one was burning. Its branches were scoured by flames of his own making, cindering and crackling in the heat of his fire.
“There’s innuendo here for sure,” he said smartly, his breath freezing into wisps of smoke that drifted up into the cold Raiera sky.
His journey through the aptly named red forest had taken him nearly three days, long tireless hours classily blurring into a poignant montage of personal struggle and achievement. Now that he was here, though, he was not sure the effort was worth it. There were no ceaseless virgins awaiting him here in this paradise…there was only a madman, pain, and the howling of wolves that hungered not only to devour the bard’s flesh and gnaw on his lanky bones, but to envelop his soul with their gangrenous maws.
“This is what you get for volunteering to do ‘the right thing’,” Ruby said with the sort of wry smile on her face that got people shot.
“Oh don’t you start with your omniscient claptrap. I’ve had enough of that all the damned way here.” He darted her several shot sniping glances before he let his gaze return to the crackling embers of his well-placed gout of flame. He adjusted the pipes of the Tinder Gear so they were comfortable, before he squatted onto the fallen, half rotten leg to warm up.
The red leaves of the sycamores, warped and decrepit that rose about them cast their shade onto the evening’s activity. At the heart of their camp, there was the new fire, which had quickly bedded down into the circle of rocks prepared by Ruby. Three tree trunks, forming a triangle around the flames had been carried in from the tree line to give the party something to sit on, and on the outskirts, to the north, Arden stood with his arms folded and his red tunic and hood pulled tight. If Duffy hadn’t known any better, he was looking at a sprucing, not a guardian.
“So tell me,” Ruby began to ask, unpacking her satchel. She produced the various cooking utensils she required to prepare the brace of hares Lillith had caught that morning in a ritualised manner that only she would understand. “What do we actually know about our assignment?”
“They call him the ‘Slayer of the Rot’,” he replied wistfully, bobbing up and down on his haunches as he rubbed his palms together a little too close to the flames. They glowed with amber light, as if his skin were luminescent.
“Horribly uninformative there Duffy. They call you a bard, yet that tells me nothing of your form, your drive, your talent and ambition.”
“What do you want to know?”
“For starters,” she jabbed a wooden spoon at him like an old wife nagging her husband to finally bring in the logs for the dying hearth, “tell me why a simple acquisition assignment from dear Sei required the four of us,” she pointed at Blank, herself, Duffy and then Lillith in turn.
Duffy watched the tall, Akashiman assassin slip through the trunks of two old oaks that stood constantly in the heart of the Red Forest. She moved so silently, without disturbing so much as the air about her advance the bard wrinkled his forehead trying to work out how Ruby had known she was there.
“I didn’t ask Sei why, he just said, in his usual manner, ‘take the whole brood with you’.” Granted, the leader of the Ixian Knights had instructed the captain with a strange, unassuming smirk on his face which Duffy had ignored up until now.
“Who is he?” Ruby tossed the spoon at Lillith, who rushed forward to catch it gracefully. “Stir the humus would you sister?” She looked back at Duffy before Lillith could object.
“His real name or so they say is Dan Lagh'ratham.” He did not know if it was destiny or truth that made the name sound ominous is it spewed forth from his lips, but it turned the tone over the camp fire sour. He watched Lillith as she sat on the log to his right to stir the contents of a large wicker bowl noisily. She did so with gusto and enthusiasm, in stark contrast to the blood on her right cheek and the reddened tanto resting on her lap.
“I know that name, I am afraid to say.” Ruby’s voice hushed, and her movements, once quick and domesticated slowed to clumsy, awkward preparation. “I had thought the man an ally of sorts, why would Sei turn us loose against him?” Duffy could see that Ruby’s mind was assailed by memories she would never share with the likes of him.
“The captains and members of the Ixian Knights are brought from all walks of life. Who can say, or indeed who can know what baggage people bring with them to the court of the great Sei Orlougne.” Only recently, Cassandra Remi had left their number, and many others had done the same – through dead, sacrifice or madness, the bastion of good and order on the island of Corone was losing its war.
Several minutes passed in awkward silence. Ruby continued to set out a carving block and utensils, on which she gingerly sacrificed the neck of their supper. Duffy watched the blood pour slowly like a waterfall over the well-worn block’s edge into a terracotta pot. Lillith prepared the humus, set out three plates which Ruby had insisted they brought with them on their caravan and shared amongst them chunks of a large, hardened loaf of soda bread.
“Look around you, the both of you.” Lillith broke the momentary pause in conversation. Her hazel hair and piercing eyes remained fixed on her duties, not once looking up at the stars and trees to lead by example.
Ruby and Duffy stared childishly at the trees, tree line, the shadow of Blank and the flickering flames that by now had turned into an inferno nestled about a blackened stump. There did not seem to be anything out of the ordinary, or indeed, worthy of note. The Red Forest, its leaves resplendent in ruby and gold and the landscape of the elven heartlands remained constant, eternal, uncaring for the people that walked amongst its wavering boughs.
“What are we looking for?” Duffy chuckled, “Ghosts?”
“This will be our grave, I thought I’d try and get you to appreciate it a little more.” The calmness Lillith uttered the words scared Duffy, who lost the façade of confident and cocksure lad about town almost instantly. Ruby was almost sure he whimpered.
“What aren’t you telling us sister?”
“I feel it, I fear it, and it is why Arden will not fight alongside us when the time comes.”
Duffy turned very slowly to pick out the silent swordsmen set against the tall spindly trees. He paused for thought, before placing several awkward pieces of a jigsaw together. It had been Lillith that insisted Blank come with them, and know he knew why.
“When he comes for us, and it shall be us who shall be the hunted, not the hunter, we will not survive the encounter if we use brawn.” Duffy couldn’t disagree with her point, so he leant forwards in his seat to listen closer. “Blank will take our blood vials and go north, returning in two days to either victory, or our corpses. We will have failed in our endeavour, but we will live.”
Ruby broke the awkward silence with a triple drop of her blade. She snapped the back legs of each hare open, and then skinned each with three carefully timed and skilled slices. As was tradition, she wrapped each in sheets of dock leaf and dipped them in water from a pale, which she had filled from the stream to the north that evening. They fizzled and hissed as they landed in the embers, and began cooking almost immediately.
“If we are so certainly going to do then sister, let it be on a full stomach.” Duffy didn’t look at Ruby as she rose, rinsing her fingers as she did so and made out of the camp fire’s radiance towards Blank.
Duffy waited until she was out of earshot before he sighed.
“You feel it too, don’t you?” Lillith smiled.
“I can’t say I’m altogether that enthusiastic about being here. As quick and strong as I am, from what I know of this creature, he can break my bones with a sneeze and rape my loved ones in front of me quicker than I can protest.”
“I guess you best enjoy this hare twice as much then.”
“You’ve been a good sister to Ruby, you know that don’t you?” His sudden swell of sincerity fazed even him. He stroked his shins, bare and cold even in the Basque of the fire to try and keep warm. He came across as an awkward, sniffy child waiting outside a prefect’s office for a lashing.
“Thank you Duffy. You have been almost a brother to us both.”
They stared at one another awkwardly.
The red leaves overhead continued to sway in the gentle breeze as the group went about their meal preparations. Duffy tended to the fire, layering more twigs over the hares so that they remained cooking with hisses of fat on all sides. Lillith continued to prepare the plates, so that the meat was well garnished, and Ruby extracted Blank’s plan from him with a lashing tongue and a fiery grimace of revenge and wrath if the swordsman did not tell her everything he had on his mind.
“It does smell good, at least we’re dining alfresco – start as you mean to go on I always say!” He tried to laugh, but a wolf howled in the distance before it’s cries cut short with a gargle. His eyes widened until they shone of their own volition, and he stared at Lillith for security.
“He is coming for you, Duffy. He will not be tamed so easily as the last mad men and thieves we brought back to the fold of the Ixian Knight’s glow. We must be ready for him; you must be ready for him.”
The bard nodded, and drew his trusted daggers from their places on his hips. They caught the red light of the fire as they spiralled into two discs of mercury light. Even though he was immortal, and the providence of a Thayne ran through his blood, he felt, for the first time in a long time very much afraid. With the dying of the light and the calming of the storm that had washed over the forest earlier that morning, the ambience of the red forest smelt damp, rotten and cursed.
Duffy was not sure if it was just the venerable state of their battleground, but he felt incredibly young, inexperienced and vulnerable in the vastness of the elven world.
He felt like a wounded deer being stalked by a lion…
“I am as ready as I ever will be…I am stronger now with my friends by my side,” he looked over his shoulder again as he heard Ruby’s footfall breaking branches and scuffing against the long crumbled ruins of elven tors. “Let us dine together one last time, just in case the entirety of our knowledge, persuasion and charisma cannot bring this lost, rapid dog back into the pack…” He didn’t wait for the two to sit, and leant forwards to jab at the hares to lance them out of the embers.