Fae Conundrum

[Yvonne]

Yvonne smiled too and looked to her friend with admiration. The half-dwarf reached out and gave Felicity a few soft pats upon her arm. With that simple gesture of approval she turned away stepped toward the animal-skin archway. No longer did she focus on her but the words she spoke benefited the teenager alone.

“I couldn’t have said it better myself. Yer going ta make a wonderful mother some day--” she acknowledged, sweeping the skin aside and passing through. The pelt fell back into place with a swoosh and she continued, distant, “--and make a little tike happy ta have a mama like ye,” finishing her sentence on the other side.

Shaseth embraced his wife in the main room while Yvonne explored a brief corridor that forked both left and right. Off to the left appeared to be the sleeping quarters of husband and wife. Prying from the hallway she could make out the wide double bed within, no doubt cushioned with little more than straw bedding and linen blankets. She noticed a fur covering strewn across one corner however its origin couldn’t be discerned. A wooden chest rested parallel to the foot of the bed, secured tightly.

There didn’t seem to be anything out of place. With the master bedroom relatively undamaged Yvonne spun on her heel and gazed into the room of two drakari cubs. Child-like decorations hung upon the walls, claw-paintings and scribbles. The drow-dwarf had a hunch that the quieter child expressed herself through art, and they wouldn’t hear much from her any other way.

Stepping into the children’s room the black dwarf realized why this family felt so rattled.

She had never in her entire life set goggled eyes on anything like the far-wall window.

The glass had been shattered from the outside-inward, but fractured pieces did not lay scattered across the floor in a dangerous hazard underfoot. Instead they remained, as if trapped in the moment the window broke, caught in a supporting crystallization of dripping ice. Held, floating above the ground until the ice melted away and released its frigid clutch on its jagged, glass prisoners.

No wonder the drakari husband had desperately sought them out. Of course his wife felt suspicious of strangers in her home. It seemed the safety of their children had been threatened.

Yvonne subconsciously took a step away from the window and reversed into Shaseth’s hulking form. He blocked the doorway. She turned and glanced up at him, her brows conveying how troubled she felt with the discovery. Her silver eyes searched his for any answers she could find, but with none forthcoming she struggled to look at the ice-pierced window again. She couldn’t do it.

“What do you make of it, tiny matriarch?” Shaseth inquired apprehensively.

“I-- I don’t know Shaseth,” she admitted, fearful. “It scares me. Please, let me go.”

“You said you would help us. Please, help us,” he pleaded.

“I will but ye need ta let me out of this room,” Yvonne stressed, her voice heightening.

Reluctance waged war with acceptance. Eventually acceptance won and he shifted sideways to allow the little one an escape route, breathing a frustrated sigh of dragon steam. His slit-eyes remained fixed on the frozen ice-pulse which had solidified the broken window of his daughters. Even now it dripped onto the wooden flooring beneath, pooling into a thin puddle of water.