Chapter 8 -- Of Vulgarity and Murder
"It was once asked of god and dragon alike whether it is better to serve on one's knees or wield the power of the infinite and unknowable, and while they both provided different answers, they seemed to agree on a fundamental concept-- power and service can be one and the same. Wielded properly, power is a quill that can stir emotions, condemn the guilty and praise the righteous with nary a thought to what consequences may befall it.
Truth is simple.
If only the humanoid races of this world would learn from that simplicity, instead of insisting that their version of it was somehow more relevant than the objective truth staring them in the face. It's made worse when they turn their 'visions' and 'ambitions' upon each other as if they somehow mattered. Wars are waged in the names of benevolent gods, lives lost by the thousand and they carry on without thought to what their actions do to those who breathed life into them in the first place.
No, if it is one thing I will never understand, it is the self-destructive urges these creatures engage in. . . .but then I run a casino that takes full advantage of their competitive spirit and through it have amassed a great deal of my own power while still in service to the Holy Elisandra, so perhaps my words are meant to be taken with a grain of salt.
Or perhaps in your eyes, the words of a Sphinx are worth some value; I care not.
They are a truth. Like any other."
-Nyx
"Tales from the Unknown Bard Volume 3"
~Felicia~
Felicia wanted to sit down for a while, to wipe the dirt and pond scum for her face and pretend that her full body shivering would go away before she would have fallen to a fitful, empty sleep where dreams didn't exist. In this fantasy world, she'd be forgiven by Lostariel for doing so and for one night she'd not have to worry about pleasuring the insatiable killer for her share of dinner that she caught in the first place.
She chuffed a laugh. She liked to pretend a lot of things. . .
It hadn't been since she got lost on the plains that she'd become so familiar with the bottom of a body of water, but during the day's training, Lostariel had been trying to impart on her the value of patience by having her stay submerged at the bottom of a lake sipping air through a long straw from high noon to sunset. She'd come up several times, of course, more out of fear that Lostariel had left her there than a lack of discipline, though someone somewhere would probably claim them to be similar issues.
Every time she'd surfaced she was pelted with mud balls flung with startling accuracy, one of which had jostled her breathing tube into her throat sending her into a fit of sputters and coughs which earned her no sympathy from her teacher who continued to hammer her with mud until she went back down.
So when she came across one of her snares missing its bait, she allowed herself a curse, just one, before recovering it. On the plains such things happened quite often as the prey was often magically influenced and intelligent, but out here? It felt like she was being a sloppy hunter; it was an actual failure. An insult to her family name and her tribe as a whole.
She groaned involuntarily, suddenly very aware of the weight of the kukri on her belt-- a relic of an elder warrior's life she had no business handling. She was a hunter, a girl at that; nobody but warriors and sages were meant to handle sunless steel and men under twenty summers had no business touching the metal at all. It was a dishonor of the highest order that she would fail as a hunter while carrying such a weapon.
Profane. That was the word the religious used to speak of such things; profanity. An affront; Felicia was
profane
. If she was doing as she was supposed to, she would have been heading towards the southern plains to bury the weapon and sing the song of thunder so that it would be stricken from the world and reabsorbed into it.
But there were lives at stake, her only chance at stopping this killer was to be with her; to serve when necessary and learn everything she was going to teach. The elder had shown he understood, he'd allowed her that forbearance to carry on until such a time that the proper rites could be observed. She was doing the
right
thing, she could get better at this she promised herself. Yes, she just needed to have some patience and eventually it would pan out.
She'd stop Lostariel from killing Sarah and when that particular demon was laid to rest, she'd return to her homeland and go searching for her family. They needed to know of her mother's passing and she. . . She deserved better than that man who called himself her father. It was a solid plan as any, she decided. She just needed the patience to enact it.
Almost as if the gods were testing this new resolution, she found almost all her traps empty. In her increasing despondence her mind turned to thoughts of abandoning this ridiculous burden she'd taken upon herself in favor of going back to the plains, or even to Sorash. She had friends there that could probably be counted on if she was in need. And it wasn't like she didn't have enough coin to get her through the rest of her life.
Strangely absent were thoughts of her father or what might happen when the mortgage wasn't paid off. It occurred to her much later than it should have, but as far as she was concerned, he had ceased being a man the moment he let alcohol and his own desires for physical comfort take him away from their family bonds. He was a stranger that had used her, a pathetic empty shell of a person who she and her mother had once loved and known. But her mother wasn't alive any longer, and neither was he.
She was alone. With nothing more than her name and a history of a people she embodied; she had grown up on the great plains, she had learned their ways and she was for all intents and purposes a Mawik girl born and raised-- even if half of her parentage had been from the east. It was this pride that kept her going, it was that pride that drove her mad with her failure.
It was also that pride that reminded her she'd left a snare unchecked. She wasn't about to face the consequences of failure before Lostariel or herself before she had made damn sure she'd indeed failed. Begrudgingly, painfully, she climbed the crest of the hill that ran alongside the valley bed she'd been scouring, navigating by the pattern of trees she'd mentally marked out in the morning when she set the traps to begin with.
Something was scrabbling, thrashing violently and crying out with an eerily human 'creeeeee' now and then. She snuck through the underbrush carefully, prowling to her hands and knees to avoid making herself a target for anything with two feet and a weapon-- an affectation of Lostariel's training-- and made her way towards the sound, carefully drawing the elder's kukri when she got to the bush between her and the sound. She emerged from the shadows like a wolf, but somehow even in her heightened state of awareness, she hadn't been ready for what hung from her snare.
It was small, four legged. Felicia took a glance around to make sure there were no predators nearby drawn by its crying and snatched it by the neck firmly and held it for a moment. The curious animal thrashed and jerked trying to free itself but it wasn't crying any longer, giving her time to inspect it in closer detail. What a strange little animal it was; four legged and long eared with a fluffy dollop of hair on its rear end the color of snow.
"Easy," Felicia cooed as she brought the creature to the ground and undid the snare from its leg, careful not to get bitten in the process. "Easssyyyy. Relax." Once her trap was recovered she bundled the animal into the crook of her arm and held it to her body as she made her way back to camp. It thrashed and pissed on her along the way despite her soothing murmurings and by the time she got back to the camp she'd picked up a few scratches along her forearm for her troubles.
She wasn't bitter, though. Lostariel was more familiar with the northern way of life and the woods and its animals and this cute little animal had made Felicia curious-- there was also the possibility that it was poisonous, something she wasn't about to kill it and skin it without knowing what she was getting into.
The fire was a smoldering glow that threw weak shadows over her saddle bags and the horse they were supposed to be on, the same horse that had somehow managed to move from the heavy cover of the tree Felicia had tied it to to a smaller one several dozen feet from the warmth of the poorly maintained fire. All this and no Lostariel to be seen. . .
Felicia sighed. Another gods damned thing she was expected to do--
