Disheartened by Destiny (Solo)

[Allennia]

Disheartened by Destiny (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR28G204z5k)

http://th08.deviantart.net/fs70/PRE/f/2012/333/e/c/fantasy_forest_by_willroberts04-d5mjsgy.jpg

[Allennia]

Standing on the border between here and there Allennia Isould felt trepidation and longing. On the one hand, Corone had provided her with a wealth of knowledge beyond expectation. On the other, she had not found the answers she sought. She had not found her brother. She was still alone, lost, and languishing in self-doubt.

“Are you sure you’re ready to go back to the Valley?” Nayeli chirped.

The squire come horse oft asked appropriate questions. She did her duty as befitting of her station in the order of life. Allennia, of late, had abandoned her own responsibility to answer them civilly.

“Of course I am. Why would I be here otherwise?” Her blistering tone, stern and chiding danced like a devil through the clearing. Oaks creaked in fear of her brewing wrath. The birds in the branches abandoned their nests for loftier climes. The tree line north drew the duo’s attentions. Silence.

After several awkward minutes, Nayeli changed form. Her neck elongated. Her hands clicked, bone cracking and resetting. Pale skin turned swift into snow-white mane and leather bandoleer became saddle for a seditious passenger. A neigh brought Allennia out of her darkness. A nuzzle of the horse’s wet nose against the knight’s neck brought her firmly back to earth.

“I’m sorry…,” her Ladyship whispered. She stroked and patted her neck and mounted in one titanic heave ho. Her armour, thankfully lighter than it appeared, clattered and scraped as she adjusted herself in the saddle. “Let’s go home, sister.”

[Allennia]

Moss and mud formed the forest floor. Spider web and willow weave blocked their path. Sword snacking, and horse biting, the duo forced their way. It had only been a year since they departed the Valley, yet the land seemed to have waged millennia in their absence. Allennia could not help but feel remorseful.

“Destitution and ruin on that man’s head,” she said through grit teeth and a scowl. Her broadsword tore through a swathe of knotweed. “Even without Abhorrash at my side, the war we will wage will be absolute.”

“Jurran will not open the Library, yes.” Nayeli’s dismissive comment made Allennia realise she had been ranting for many miles. Her skin torrid with sweat, her armour thick with grime, she looked every bit the ironic monster.

“You still don't believe I can do it, do you?” She stopped and turned. The tip of her blade dropped with a thud to the ground, dead leaves and dirty dreams welcoming its cold release. “Why can a sword not speak our people’s objections?”

“Because magic is his way and only magic can undo his treachery.” The horse reached gingerly for some reeds, and began to masticate and ruminate on her increasingly empty stomach. Her nosebag was empty of straw, and their date loaf was long spoiled. “You will have to learn its secrets.”

“I will not fight fire with fire,” Allennia snapped. She turned. Her sword raised and fell. A rotten trunk, no worthy adversary for her might erupted into shards.

[Allennia]

“Look around you.” Bright eyes bore into the back of Allennia’s neck. Nayeli was unpaved by the outburst but mottled with bark and woodchip. She whipped her tail and mane to free herself of the rubble.

“At what?” The knight whirled about.

When she looked Allennia swift came to realise. They were at the heart of a forest. Not just any forest. Here, in the border between the Valley and Corone, things unspeakable and ancient dwelt in shadow and solitude. So busy usurping the order of things she forgot her roots. She forgot that above herself, her house, and her enemies, this land was king. She frowned.

“If you fail, the Valley will disappear from the world. Its people will die. Its house names forgotten. No more will the piety of Isould or the sovereignty of Alar hold our homestead high in antiquity.” Nayeli’s lofty tone took Allennia quite by surprise.

“You speak as though you were born here…”

Nayeli neighed with humorous trill.

“Forget how I was as a girl, sister. Youth clouds the mind. I wanted nothing more than to leave, and now I have I want nothing more than to go home.” She approached Allennia. Her hooves made light work of the uneasy ground, though she took care all the same. She set the course and continued pushing her way through the increasingly dense tree line.

“Who will teach me magic, then?”

Traipsing after Nayeli Allennia focussed thoughts, between hot flashes and aches on the task ahead.

[Allennia]

“When we return to the Valley we will find somebody worthy of…”

“…of?” Allennia pressured her sister to finish her statement with the conviction she clearly possessed. “Speak your mind. You usually do.”

They traipsed five hundred feet over rotten bough and encroaching waste before the horse spoke again.

“Your stubborn nature. Admit it. You were never a willing pupil.”

True enough, Allennia found herself reflecting on her past. In her youth, alongside the tutelage of her father’s Knight Commander, she had learned all the regal skills she would one day require to rule House Isould in his stead. That favouritism has spawned the sibling rivalry that kept them thick as thieves to this day. Their life was an eternal exchange of witty sarcasm and loving praise.

“Father was never a willing teacher.”

Nayeli chuckled. By the time Allennia turned to enquire, the horse was a woman once more. Still knee deep in mud, the straw-haired youth set about unravelling her knotted locks and picking out the leaves from her woollen cloak. Knight to Squire, Allennia made to help her.

“He was the best he could be given the expectation he had for you.”

“Which was?”

Resting her gauntlets on her hips, Allennia watched Nayeli preen herself into a presentable state. Approaching her elder sibling the squire-come-horse held out her hand, as though to walk arm in arm through the easier terrain between forest wilds and the approaching wetlands.

“One day you will sit in his throne: Lady Isould proper.”

[Allennia]

It was a grand ideal. Striving for that legacy, that power, kept Allennia focussed. Had she not had the weight of her family pressing down on her, she was certain Abhorrash’s disappearance would have been her breaking point. The thought of where she would be, and how she would act sans the Isould idolatry was unbearable.

“Then one day that duty will fall to you, Lady Nayeli Isould.”

“Pffft, me?” Nayeli scoffed. Destiny, by force of habit, sunk her to the knees in the sluice water black and ichor-like. She scoffed again, for dramatic effect. “I am not…ladyship material.”

Allennia circled the sinkhole and reached out a hand to her sibling. She helped her free of her trap, and although muddied in the process she found her spirits lifted.

“Mud can be cleaned away just as a keenness to get dirty and rebel.” Looking her sister once over, Allennia arrived at the inevitable, singular conclusion. “Perhaps it will just take a little longer to bring out your regal qualities.”

Nayeli stomped her feet and tried to rinse away the stagnant water. Realising it was useless; she took off her boots and tossed them into the swamp’s deeper recesses. Wisps of white mist roiled, spiralled, and drifted away. Hooked branches like ghastly fingers held aloft skeletal birds and haunted rodents. They were in the heart of darkness here, the way lit only by their conflicted rhetoric.

“Let’s start with magic lessons and a cure for this.” She began transforming.

“Good idea.”

[Allennia]

Horse once more, Nayeli took the lead. Side by side, forging their own way towards uncertainty, the Isould inheritors considered their options. Cycling between trivialities and trepidation as ever, Allennia saw herself only in conflict and fire. Nayeli, ever the optimist, saw herself only in a well-kept stable mane deep in straw and feed.

“I’m sorry it had to come to this.”

Considering what her sister meant, Nayeli assumed she was referring to her anamorphic state. The chain of events leading to her affliction had been entirely her doing. Just as the dangling stink, vines knotted in tendrils and hung down from overhead branches, so too hate fate and destiny threaded into the inevitable.

“No you’re not.” The rebuke was sincere, and not bitter. Nayeli understood more of the world than Allennia. People made difficult choices. “It was either this, or the suffering of many.” She rose over a crest, out of the wetlands at last.

“That does not make it any more moral or justified.” Allennia pushed down on her knees to support her own ascent. Nayeli’s stamina was one small blessing amongst myriad misfortunes.

Atop the ridge, Nayeli turned and looked back on the road travelled. The tree line was growing darker behind them, and lighter ahead. By her estimations, they were less than a league from Northolt: the cliffs that edged the eastern end of the Valley. Below them, when they came home proper, beauty in a scar on the surface of the world. Her excitement grew.

[Allennia]

“It means reflection is paramount if we are to advance. If we are to learn, we must learn in hindsight.”

Finally out the swamp, Allennia was not sure if she stomached the tear of wisdom from Nayeli only because it come from the horse’s mouth. She panted, even her physical prowess gnarled and drained by their three-day march.

“You have clearly been thinking about this lots.”

Leaving the rhetoric to do its work, the knight stood upright and statuesque. She tensed her shoulders, and began to rotate them left then right to restore flexibility. Satisfied she had not pulled anything, she pulled her black strands back into a ponytail. Damp and fetid from exposure to the rotting, festooned bog, it did little to improve her appearance or mood.

“Not being able to talk in public leaves my mind to wander,” Nayeli chuckled. She flicked her tail. “Astarelle’s confidence rubbed off on me too I guess.”

Allennia smirked. The Fallieni had left quite the impression on the both of them. Far behind them now, a distant, but jubilant memory, she was pleased Nayeli had found a role model of sorts. She produced a pinch of karuku root from her pouch, swallowed it, and clapped her hands as a way to urge herself on.

“If you want to talk now is as good a time as any.” She pointed north. “We are nearly home, and in the court of Our Father there will be no time to fall silent or mince words.”

[Allennia]

“What is your plan of action for when we return?”

Nayeli’s question stung. Though the treeline became a thing of beauty, ugliness reared its head in Allennia’s mind. Her soul fought a private war. Her brow furrowed, worn to strain by the ignorance of her failure. She had faired entirely in her purpose.

“Tell father Abhorrash is dead.”

This did not stump Nayeli as it might. They had scoured all Corone for signs of the red cowed mage to no avail. The last sighting of him had been days before he returned to question Jurran of his intentions. Shortly after, the Library building at the heart of the Valley exploded. Flames burnt bright as the autumnal leaves in the canopy overhead.

“I wondered how long it would be until I heard your thoughts uttered.” The horse would have had a glum expression, given the face to do so.

“We are a stone’s throw from home I cannot continue to hide my head in the sand,” the knight sighed. She pushed aside a low branch. As though veiled by nature there ahead was the Valley. The land gave way and a low horizon stole Allennia’s breath.

“Do not be frightened of telling him. You had no control over brother’s decision to leave. He made his choice.”

“Jurran his,” Allennia added. She would never allow herself to forgo guilt, but there was at least now someone else to blame.

Nayeli trotted to the cliff’s edge. “He will pay for it in time.”

[Allennia]

“I guess you are right,” Allennia conceded.

To the east, heading south along the western coast of Corone the Valley was rugged and prairie like. To their west, the forests sprang from saplings into salient oaks and swathes of autumnal foliage trapped in permanent decay. Magic tingled in the air, felt even by Allennia’s untoned senses.

“When am I not?” Nayeli laughed as best a horse could.

Ahead, beneath the crystalline horizon stood a plateau. At the heart of the Valley, the Library seeped into the rocky edifice. Atop the gardened walls, a palace. There, the Council of the Seven held power. There, the future of the Valley and the peace between houses feebly kept.

“I will refine my magical intuition only if your ego is kept in check,” Allennia chuckled in kind. She liked her sister’s confidence, but that would not serve her as well in their homeland as it had on the open seas and the raucous nights in Radasanth.

“Look at us,” Nayeli made towards the solitary and spidery path down the cliff. “We are ‘getting on’.” The mirth and disbelief in her tone was contagious.

Allennia chuckled again, lightened by levity and disheartened by destiny no longer. Running ahead of Nayeli, vigour renewed, she took inhaled deep of the warm, fragrant air. With honeysuckle from below and piety from on high, the Isould sisters began their final descent.

“If our father could see us now,” she mused. “Bedraggled, belittled, and yet wholesomely unbeaten by the world.”

[Tobias Stalt]

Story: 9. The story at the heart of the thread drives every interaction. From the first post to the last, everything that is said, felt, or seen takes the character's closer to their goal.

Setting: 9. The writer establishes immediately that they're in Corone and where they are headed, then continues to bring the reader along with them on the journey through the forest. You even get their view as they exit the forest on the horizon and the scent of honeysuckle. Beautifully done.

Pacing: 8. Each post moves them into a new "scene". Everything moves at a very measured pace, and the conversations they strike up are dynamic and move the story. (See communication for more.)

Action: 6. The action suffered in this thread because it was very slow paced. It did nothing to accentuate the other fine qualities of the thread. It was not bad- the actions fit the sequences- but it was staggering.

Communication: 10. This thread thrived on the communication more than any other area. The siblings are talking about their journey home and expressing thoughts, fears, and feelings. You can see the character of both of them through how they talk to one another, and it helps you ease into their reasoning and mindsets.

Persona: 9. Compounded with the communication in this thread, the writer truly brings you into the character's and interfaces your reading with their dilemma. It's a feeling everyone gets: going home again. They've been away. Things have happened. Things they're going to have to answer for, in some instances. What are they going to do? Where are they going from here? He answers all of them, and it's compellingly done.*

Mechanics: 7.

Clarity: 8.

Technique: 7.

Wildcard: 6 I don't have much to add, other than it was a pretty good read for a shorter thread. I'd have liked to see more action (I'm a glutton for violence), but it wouldn't have fit. Therefore, I can't fault you for it. Anyway, it was emotionally driven and we'll written, so keep up the good work.

Final Score : 79/100

Allennia gains:
1,000 Exp and
200 Gold (Extra 50 for good writing, matey.)

Congratulations!!

PM me if you need explanations for the commentary lacking areas.

[Lye]

EXP & GP Added!