Reluctantly Rogue

WARNING: This is a long story, but it is unfinished, and likely to remain in that state.

Also, it contains:

-Low levels of erotic content

-Slow Pacing

-Annoying characters

-Unsatisfying events

Consider yourself forewarned, dear reader!

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RELUCTANTLY ROGUE:

The Indecent Adventures of Atyr Bracken

PART TWO

The Tower on the Spire

***

CHAPTER ONE

Devil's Deal

Devil.

"Fiend" may have been a loosely defined term in Atyr's vocabulary, more of a description of someone's personality than a type of someone, but "devil" was a term with a very clear meaning. Devils featured in a great number of the tales from his childhood.

There were two kinds of stories about devils, and both involved deal-making. The first kind of story was the fun kind; a devil appears and attempts to bargain with the plucky, clever hero. The hero manages, through wit and subterfuge, to confound the devil's plans, getting everything they want, and usually leaving the evil creature imprisoned, humiliated, or otherwise defeated.

The second kind of story was of a darker sort. The would-be hero of the tale is too greedy, or too trusting of the devil, and doesn't notice all the details and implications of the deal to which they agree. The ends of those tales were generally gruesome, nasty, and otherwise unpleasant.

Atyr had certainly not even considered attempting to confound Helliot's plans with either wit or subterfuge, which meant he couldn't be in the plot of the first sort of story. Thus, unless tales about deals with devils were largely unrepresentative of reality, he had to assume he was in the second sort.

Judging from Pesky's reaction to the situation, that seemed to be a decent assumption.

Her arms were still draped about his neck, her wet, naked, star-made body leaning into his, her lips a hairsbreadth from his own. And she was not pleased.

"Right, Dummy. I'm taking charge for a bit." She let her head drop onto his sopping shoulder, slumping against him in the rain, very much not presenting herself as one taking charge. "I've been trying to give you a long lead, but it is not going well."

As she was speaking, she continued to dwindle, her feet leaving the ground as she hung from his shoulders, until she was her regular size again. "You have a room at the inn? With the sad old man?" She climbed slowly up onto his shoulder. "We're going there. Were talking where it's dry. Let's go."

"I do have a room already paid for, but I can't say whether we'll have it to ourselves. Maybe we should talk here?"

"We are not talking here."

"Or in the clearing where we were the other da--"

"We'll have the room to ourselves."

Atyr wasn't sure he liked the certainty with which she said that. "Uh... how do you know?"

"I will make sure."

"Pesky, is this-- how will you make sure?"

"I will. It's fine. Walk."

This commanding side of Pesky was not one he was prepared for. He began to walk. "Alright. But, you're not going to do anything too fae if we do have roommates, right?"

"Atyr, I watched Woodstead grow from wondrous woodlands that had never felt a human foot, to a narrow track, to a road, to a small cluster of huts, and in the last few moments, into the town it is today. I'm not a child, and I'm not a dummy." She smacked his dripping earlobe.

The moment of playfulness was reassuring in that it was familiar, but that puckish behavior was also what he was worried about.

"Look, I'm trusting you; I'm walking to Gant's. But please, will you promise me not to do anything that will call attention to us? Or harm anyone?"

"Atyr, I will promise you anything you want if it gets us inside a dry, private room where I can explain to you, in detail, what an enormous, colossal, gigantic, immense--"

"You're going to say 'dummy'."

"-- dummy you are!"

"Alright. I get it. Look, I already agree this was probably a mistake. I'm going. You're in charge." They were on the muddy main road now, turning toward Gant's. "I'm sorry."

Atyr preempted whatever Pesky's plan was to ensure a private room by offering Gant an additional two kips, claiming exhaustion and a great need for undisturbed sleep.

In the room, he wedged his dripping pack against the door as on the previous night. He pulled the contents out and spread them to dry. Everything was damp, including his spare set of clothes from the Teggums, so he just peeled off what he was wearing and hung it, dripping, on the footboard.

He sat down cross-legged on the bed, naked. Fae take modesty. He was over it. Pesky dropped out of the air onto the pillows and sat facing him.

Atyr spoke first. "Let's just agree that I messed up, and that I am in fact a dummy, and move past that to the part were you explain to me just how badly I messed up."

The sprite nodded. "Agreed, except that I get to call you a dummy one more time first." Atyr almost smiled, and nodded as well. She grinned. "Thank you. You're a dummy."

"Alright," he said. "I know all sorts of stories about devils and their deal-making. I know I'm probably in way over my head. But I need to know how far over."

Pesky smoothed her hands down her thighs, sitting up very straight. "Fine. And I need to know exactly what you agreed to."

Atyr spent several minutes detailing how he had met Helliot, the borrowed time, the questions, the story, the second agreement, and the terms.

"Some money and a dog?" Pesky was incredulous. You sold out the women who healed you for a dog?"

"I did not sell them out!" he hissed. "I promised to help Helliot by asking Bird to pass her stake in the agreement on to Kella."

The sprite stood up. She walked up to him and stood on his bare knee, staring up into his face. "And what happens if Bird says no? If Kella says no?"

Atyr wasn't sure. "Um, we didn't really spell that out, I just said I would help him."

She was shaking her tiny head slowly, eyes shut tight. "What. Exactly. Did you agree to?"

"I agreed that I would help him get Bird to pass the agreement to Kella, I've told you at least three times now."

"Exactly. The exact words Helliot used."

He thought back, carefully. The words, he realized, came easily to him, almost as though they were written somewhere in his mind, indelible. And from you, I will receive your aid in securing a resolution to my outstanding agreement with Abarabirdadellet.

Atyr repeated it word for word to her. He chewed his lip. "I'm certain that's right."

Tiny wings flicked in annoyance. "First. 'Will receive'. there's no out there. You will do it."

"...Right. I mean that's how deals work."

"Not always. He could have said, 'If possible I will receive,' or something. But that's the least of it. 'Aid in securing,' is the tricky part. It's murky. Ambiguous. Coming from Helliot, that's intentional. He doesn't slip up."

Atyr was beginning to see where this was going. Pesky continued. "How much aid? When? What counts? My guess is you're going to find out it's quite a lot of aid, and that you can't skip out until you have secured, and this is the big one, 'a resolution.'"

Atyr closed his eyes, feeling suddenly the weight of his mistake. "Right. A resolution. Not necessarily passing the agreement on to Kella. Just any resolution. And I have to help him or break the agreement."

"No Atyr. That's not how this works." Her white eyes pierced his own like shards of ice. "This isn't a deal between mortals. You have made an agreement about how this world will be. There's no breaking it. There's no future where you go home to your little clearing by the pool and build your cabin and get sucked off by the kelpie, and every now and then you get a strongly worded letter from one Belzekeziol Helliot, urging you to come back and fulfill your obligation. It's going to happen. You are going to help him 'secure a resolution'."

He was breathing hard now, comprehension punching him in the core like kickback from a bad-felled tree. Swallowing, he picked up where she left off. "Right. What if I flee? I run away, far away, too far to ever be reached?"

Pesky rolled her eyes at him. "It will happen, dummy. I don't know how, but it will. Imagine you run away. A few days from town, you meet an elderly couple. The man has a fever and a bad cough. You tell them to visit the Healing House, you sing Bird and Kella's praises. They take your advice. Bird catches the cough, and a week later, she's dead. You have secured a resolution."

"...I didn't know. I had no idea."

"Of course you didn't, dummy. If you had had an idea, we wouldn't be here. You would have ignored the fiend, and you certainly wouldn't have promised to either kill a nice old lady, or to convince your beautiful beloved to tie herself to the service of that princeling of the Inferno."

"Look, if you had taken the time to actually speak to me before now, to explain all of this fae-cursed, luckless shit to me like you're finally doing, we also wouldn't be here." He breathed in, trying to keep his voice low. "I would have had an idea, and we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be here."

Cold, white eyes cut into him. She held him with her gaze for a long moment, but then she broke and looked down, and her wings and shoulders slumped.

A long moment passed. Another. The room itself seemed to settle and relax. Atyr looked at the tiny figure, seated on his bare thigh. He really knew so little about her. A week ago, he had been certain she was an easily distractable, sexually-irresponsible, clingy, annoying, well, dummy, if he had to pick a word. Over the past few days he'd had a peek at something else, and this evening his understanding of her had come flying apart into dust under the wings of an immense angel of starlight.

"Pesky."

She looked up at him.

"What if, and I'm not saying I'm planning this, I just want to know, but what if I was really gone. What if I was--"

"DON'T!" Her voice came loud, like the breaking of a bell, and it came with a weirding to it, but a weirding unlike any she had used before. It was a voice that let him feel true hurt, true fear, true loss, as though everything important to him in his short, little life had been destroyed right here, right now, on this dark, rainy night, in this small, dark room in Gant's Inn. "Don't," she repeated quietly. "I don't want to talk about it."

He breathed a moment, shallow, shuddering, tears hovering, not quite spilling over to run down his face. He closed his eyes. "Pesky, please. I need to know. What would happen?"

Silence. Long Silence. No sound aside from the fading rain, and the drops of water running off the roof outside the window.

He opened his eyes again. She was gone.

***

The sky outside the small window of Atyr's rented room was beginning to lighten, turning from the blue-black of true night, to the muted violet of the before dawn hours. Over the trees and hills, far away on the horizon, a faint, pink haze marked the point at which the sun would, in its ponderous journey, first grace the day with its radiance.

The young man slept on his side on top of the covers, naked. His brows were pulled down, eyes squeezed tightly. In his sleep, he worried at his lower lip with his teeth, an unconscious habit, with him since childhood.

On the pillow beside his head, a tiny, white figure stood motionless, glowing faintly with stardust. She stayed a long time there, looking at his face, watching him breath. From time to time her transparent wings would flutter.

Finally, as the first golden light glinted at the dark edge of the world, she moved. She stepped forward and reached towards the man's face, then hesitated and drew back. After a moment, she reached again, grabbed a single nose hair and yanked. Hard.

Atyr shot upright, hand flying to his nose. "Fae take you Pesky, you ill-fated little blight! Why?!" He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, then let himself drop back, face down in the pillows. His voice came muffled. "Why must you plague me?"

It was quiet. No response came from the little sprite. Atyr began to hope she had left again, and would leave him to sleep a little longer, but then her voice came soft beside him..

"I'm sorry Atyr. I am"

He lifted his head and opened a single eye to look at her. "You should be. That luckless hurts, you know."

"No. I mean I'm sorry. For the rest of it."

Atyr sighed, deep and slow, and rolled over on his back. He nodded and shrugged, looking away from her, out the window.

"If you..." Her voice was a whisper. "Mmm. If you. Died. If you died. I don't know what would happen. Maybe the agreement would die with you. No, that's not right, I know it would. But your... Death. Your death might also cause a resolution to occur, if it was possible. I don't know.

"Fae are the way we are. We don't grow, really. For lifetimes of mortals, we continue as we have been. We don't change. Not quickly."

He was looking at her closely now, unsure of where she was going.

"But I'll try," she said. She spread her wings wide, clenched her fists and stamped a tiny foot. "I'll try!"

Atyr couldn't help smiling. Such a theatrical display of determination could be only humorous in someone barely taller than his hand. Half a moment later, he recalled her form as an avenging angel the night before, and the smile faded slightly.

Pesky tilted her head. "I want to help you. I do. I promise to try to explain things to you. I have learned something important." Her habitual grin returned. "I have learned that you are definitely, certainly, very much, a dummy."

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CHAPTER TWO

Broken Glass and Confusion

Atyr stood up suddenly from the bed. He slipped into the clothes from the Teggums, as his clothing from last night was still damp. He grabbed his pack and turned. "Come on. I need you with me today. All day."

The sprite, still standing on the bed, cocked her head at him. "Where are we going?"

"I came to a decision last night. There are three ways to resolve Helliot's situation. If it's going to happen one way or another, then I have to make it happen the way I want it to. First, I'm not letting anything happen to Bird. That's obvious. And the second option, well, I'm not letting Kella bind herself to a devil, whatever that might entail. So that leaves the impossible option, the one that can't be done." He pointed at Pesky. "You and me, are going to find a way to allow Bird to see Helliot, and refuse his offers. That'll send him home to the Inferno, as I understand it."

"Listen, dummy--"

"Still with the 'dummy'?"

"Always with the 'dummy'." She smirked. "Answer me this. Bird has to be able to talk to Helliot to make this work. She can't hear him. She can't see him. She can't interact with him at all unless she can re-invite him. She can't re-invite him unless she can summon him from the Inferno, and he can't get to the Inferno unless she can complete the agreement, for which she needs to be able to see and hear him. Correct?"

Atyr grinned fiercely at her. "Wrong. She can't hear him or see him. But they can interact."

"Alright... enlighten me?"

"They can write. We can put them together in a room, and they can have a written conversation. Bird writes to him what she initially summoned him for, he makes an offer, she rejects it, he goes home. Done."

Pesky was shaking her head. "It just doesn't work like that."

"Why not?"

"He won't do it that way."

"He can't, or he won't?"

"He won't but... but it's the same thing, for us."

"Oh, it's 'us' now? I thought he wasn't fae, that he was a fiend."

"We're both not mortal. We're similar in certain ways. We don't change, and we are as we are. Helliot won't do it."

"He will. I'm going to make him do it."

"Atyr, he won't."

"Well... no harm in trying?"

The sprite stared at him. He got the sense she was experiencing a bit of the annoyance he usually felt towards her. "Fine." She said. "But I'm letting you know now that it's pointless. You think he's really never considered using pen and ink over the three score summers he's been trapped here?"

"I have no idea what he's considered. But I wasn't here before, and fae take me if I don't try all my options."

"Fine. Fine. Let's go see Helliot. But let my opposition be noted."

They found Helliot sitting on a bench against the back wall of the Birdhouse, reclining with his head resting on crossed arms behind his head. He greeted Pesky somewhat apprehensively, but then turned his focus to Atyr, listening attentively and graciously to the young man's idea.

"My dear Mr. Bracken. Hardly has a single night passed and yet, with the coming of the dawn I find you already hard at work on your obligations. I have said this to you before, but truly, I commend you on your promptness. It fills me with great confidence that, as you develop your subsequent plans of action, they will lead us to a swift and satisfying resolution to our dilemma."

Atyr sucked his lip and stared at the dark-clad man, feeling somewhat emboldened after last night by the presence of Pesky, even in her diminutive form. "Subsequent plans? So you won't try this one?"

"I will not, Mr. Bracken. My apologies. If it were within my power to do it, be assured that I would jump to it with eagerness and with verve. In fact, were it so, it is possible I might have taken the opportunity at some point over the past three score and seven years."

"So, a written contract doesn't work? It needs to be spoken aloud?"

"Mr. Bracken, a written contract would be quite satisfactory. At many points in my life I should have preferred it. It is not the writing per se that presents the obstacle. The obstacle lies with the inability for Abarabirdadellet and myself to communicate directly with one another before creating such a contract."

"But you could write messages back and forth, and communicate that way."

"I could not." Helliot sat up now, and spread his hands apologetically. "I know this must seem an odd and ornery bit of pedantry on my part, for which you have my profuse and sincere contrition."

"You could not? Or you won't"

Helliot was quiet, then he stood, and walked over to the window that looked into the Ending Room, as yet with a pane missing. He pointed a velvet finger at the ground, still damp with morning dew.

"Mr. Bracken. If I may impose upon you. Would you be so kind as to secure this sliver of glass for me? The long, thin one there."

Atyr frowned, but obliged. It was hard not to trust the man, not to assume good will from him.

"Excellent Mr. Bracken. If you will oblige me further: yet another practical demonstration, as with our metaphorical examples of the apple and of the lens." He clasped his hands and smiled warmly. "Mr. Bracken, if you would be so good as to insert that sliver of glass into your left eye. At your leisure."

Atyr took a step back now, holding the glass at arms length. He looked nervously around, but Pesky seemed unconcerned. She was hovering several strides away, apparently unsurprised by Helliot's sadistic request.

"I note, Mr. Bracken, that your eye remains free of any glass. Are you physically unable? Perhaps I may assist you?" He took a small step forward, gracefully extending a hand to accept the broken shard.

Atyr dropped it on the ground, and backed away towards Pesky. "Pesky told me what you are. I'm not afraid of you, and I won't kill Bird for you, or let you steal Kella's soul." He spat. "Devil!"

Helliot continued smiling, as he bent and carefully retrieved the small, clear sliver. "Mr. Bracken, I have made no attempt to disguise my origins. It is in the surname, after all." He chuckled slightly. "Rest assured, I have no desire to harm you. More than that, it would actively pain me should harm befall you. In our brief dealings, Mr. Bracken, I have developed a fair level of respect for your integrity, your simplicity, and perhaps most of all, your promptness. I do so value promptness, Mr. Bracken.