Raindrop14
Soldier for Christ!
Welp, I'm all caught up. :3 Can't wait for more! 
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General Art A Dragir's Tale
- Thread starter *M i d n a*
- Start date
*M i d n a*
Æsir Scribe
Heya, you all, haven't been on much lately, but thanks for the support. 
Honors and Honorable Mentions
Chapter 8
Artemys ran on for as long as his lungs allowed him to. He had crossed the Cregen river and had continued east, the Dragir feeling too hurt within to even ponder about the possibility of stopping and returning to the monastery to those that he had left behind.
With nothing but the sword and the dark leather boots and the clothing that he had on, Artemys carried on and came to an area dense with dead trees and a mostly exposed barren ground littered with old branches and assorted rocks of different sizes. The Dragir had come to a small forest that signaled the end of part of the eastern border of Pancracia. Beyond it stood the high mountains that divided Pancracia from two deadly realms: The Bog and Dragiria. It was in that direction that Artemys was headed, for several times his mother Eve had assured him that his real homeland laid to the east beyond that mountain range. He knew that crossing over to those mountains would require stealth and care from his part, for there were several garrisons scattered about and filled with soldiers who had the duty of watching over the border.
After he had crossed halfway through those woods without any trouble, Artemys finally decided to stop and have a rest. The Dragir had been trotting the last few minutes and his legs had felt tired, his shins a little sore, which was what had made him stop, otherwise Artemys would have continued running on. His breathing came in hard gasps but as the seconds wore on he began to calm himself. He stared about the forest, noticing that the place felt lonely yet very peaceful, with few animals hanging about the area, keeping themselves out of eye reach from the newest visitor. Clusters of rotting trees stood all around him, some of those already lying on the ground. This had to be the old forest that his mother had told him about earlier, Artemys believed.
As he stood there catching his breath, Artemys was thinking about what had happened nearly an hour ago at the monastery, but suddenly, he was alerted of the presence of people nearby when in the distance he heard several voices speaking.
“Come on, Pandora, we don’t have all day!” Artemys had heard the voice of a female speaking. So much for the forest being abandoned, he thought then. With his heart beginning to beat fast, for he feared that he might be discovered out here and get himself killed or something, Artemys was quick to rush behind the fat trunk of a nearby tree, the only cover he could find at that moment. Unnerved and thinking that having come to these woods had been a terrible mistake the Dragir waited behind the cover of the tree and listened on, hoping that it didn’t come to much more than that. A reply from another young, crispy voice was heard then, this one belonging to another female.
“I don’t see any more twigs out here, Persia. Maybe we should go deeper and look for more, eh?”
“You’ve just been recruited into the service a month ago and you’re the expert now?” came the quirky reply. After a pause, there came a hearty laugh, followed by the same voice. “I’m just teasing you, Pandora, so don’t give me that serious look.”
“Then stop joking, Persia,” replied the so-called Pandora in a serious tone. “Or else you will find an arrow sticking out from your big head. You’re also a recruit much like me, so don’t start feeling all high-ranked on me just because you’ve been serving out here for three months.”
There was another pause.
“You know I was joking,” the voice belonging to Persia was heard again, this time with a hearty laugh. “Now come on, we don’t want the captain to be pissed at us for not taking care of our job.”
“Exactly,” Pandora’s crispy voice echoed. “We hardly have a load to take back, so stop your joking and show me where we can find more twigs.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on. Follow me.”
Artemys heard their footsteps in the distance as the soldiers–for they were indeed soldiers belonging to the nearest garrison–had started to walk. Artemys knew they were approaching and would probably be passing very near to him, so he sucked in a deep breath and held it, all the while keeping himself steady and ready to act in case he happened to be discovered. His right hand fell to the hilt of his blade, that sword that he had rarely used. The Dragir slowly withdrew it from its resting place and kept it ready.
The two female soldiers did come to the area where Artemys hid behind the largest tree visible, but Artemys did well to move around behind the cover of the tree, avoiding having the pair of soldiers come to know that he was there. As they moved ever closer, the Dragir shifted his position as he walked around the tree.
The soldiers, whose attention was on the branches that lay on the forest ground, never even imagined that a strange creature was lurking just fifteen feet away. Had they turned and stared with great care at the largest tree in the vicinity they probably would have seen a smallish shadow accompanying that of the tree's and would have taken that as being odd, but they had not truly paid attention and Artemys had been very lucky. The Dragir, though, had braved it out and had somewhat peeked from one side of the trunk, and he was able to lay eyes on the two figures.
A young-looking short-heighted Asakian girl was quick to secure one of the branches that lay on the ground and offered it to her companion, who tossed it into a large light-brown sack that she was carrying. The Asakian girl’s skin was light tan, her hair was dark and long and kept in a ponytail, and Artemys noted that she carried a well-crafted bow and a quiver of arrows at her back. That really unnerved the Dragir, for if he was discovered he was in for a rough time; archers could be deadly! The Asakian’s companion wasn’t that tall either, but she was the more robust of the two. Unlike her Yamatoan companion who wore dark colored light clothing suitable for an archer and other fast-moving warriors, Persia wore steel armor like that of a knight, but only on her torso, her legs were merely covered with black pants and similar colored boots. Persia had very light skin, dark-colored, messy seaweed-like hair with red-tinted ends, and a friendly face despite her two eyes being of different color: purple and red, which at times had made the girl soldier seem as if she was angry. An angry scar that ran horizontally near her left eye helped a lot in making the girl look angry at times. From his spot Artemys noted those eyes and the scar, and he was surprised of them, for he had never seen anything like that before on a person. He relaxed a bit when he noticed that at least that soldier was not carrying a bow, but she did carry a small sword at her hip and even a black staff with a ruby on the tip. Artemys remembered what his mother had told him about human wizards and other magicians who did not have the luxury that he had in summoning magic at will. They had to use tomes and at times magical rods and staffs like the one the soldier was carrying. Artemys became stiff and pulled his head back behind the trunk; he’d seen enough of the pair and knew that if discovered he would surely be in for a rough time.
“There’s this question that I’ve been wanting to ask you ever since I met you, Persia,” Pandora mentioned as she continued picking up branches from the ground.
“Oh yeah?” asked Persia, curious of Pandora. “What is it, young one?”
“Your eyes,” Pandora stared at her as she offered her two more branches that could qualify as twigs, for those weren’t that big. “Why are they of different color?”
Artemys listened on to their conversation, for there was nothing else that he could do except wait and listen to what they said.
“Hm,” Persia squint her eyes and her face suddenly appeared angry before Pandora, who often had seen the girl in that state. “It’s a long story that I cannot tell.”
“Ah come on,” Pandora cried. “Tell me about it.”
“No.”
“Aw, why not?” Pandora threw her arms aside, the Yamatoan girl looking disappointed.
“Personal reasons,” Persia said. “Let us keep gathering firewood, that’s why we were sent here, was it not?”
Pandora said nothing in reply to that, but she did nod at the soldier. And as to Artemys, who waited behind the tree, he was hoping that the soldiers would leave soon. The Dragir slowly let the air escape from his lungs, and he took in another fresh breath.
“If you don’t tell me I will bother you about it later in time,” Pandora told her partner. “I’ll even bring it up in front of people...Don’t forget I told you that.”
“You don’t want to be doing that,” Persia warned. When Pandora gave her a serious stare, Persia added, “Trust me.”
Pandora smiled and guessed, “Would I lament it because of your magical knowledge?”
“Yeah, perhaps,” Persia told her, the soldier not really interested about talking of her past. Pandora stared at the staff and asked, “Alright, so why not tell me how you got your hands on that beautiful staff? Were you perhaps a court sage back in your homeland of New Kembria?”
“No chance,” Persia told her companion. “That’s personal information too. Come on, just follow me,” she began walking away to the southeast. “I want to show you something over here.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, just something I discovered the other day,” replied Persia, turning over her shoulder to glance at the Asakian. Pandora put her hands on her hips and just remained staring at her.
Persia did not hear her companion walking, so she stopped and turned to regard her small colleague. “Oh alright," she told her with a sigh. "It’s just some old ruins if you must know.”
Pandora raised her eyebrows very surprised. “Ruins, you say? Out here?”
“Small, abandoned, and ruined, yet worth seeing,” promised the soldier.
"Perhaps with some treasure to be had as well?" Pandora hoped.
"Naw," laughed Persia. "If there was any treasure to be had it long ago was taken. But it's worth a visit, trust me. And besides, there's also plenty of good firewood to be had there."
"Ah," Pandora glanced about the place. "What the hell...there's nothing but dead trees here to see. Let's go, take me there, I want to see these ruins."
Persia nodded, smiled, and turned around as she spoke, "Come on, you will be marveled at what these Pancracians' forefathers built."
“Alright,” the Yamatoan followed her on, for she knew that Persia was taking her to an area where there would also be plenty of fallen branches and twigs that they could pick up and take back to the garrison to be used for cooking and for the soldiers to keep warm at night. Pandora, being a new recruit, had only wanted to please her captain.
Behind the tree trunk, Artemys sighed in relief when he saw them disappearing behind a cluster of leafless trees.
When the soldiers were out of view, their voices barely audible to him, Artemys relaxed and took the deepest breath of air that he had taken in a long time. He had been so close to being discovered and that would have probably gotten him killed if it had happened. Artemys felt grateful that it had not come to that, and he raised his eyes to the heavens and thanked the god that his mother Eve had inculcated to him: Adonis.
The Dragir put the sword back in its scabbard and proceeded to advance through the rest portion of the woods with more care and stealth. Artemys went on highly on the alert for any other human soldiers that he could encounter. He’d had to use his stealth skills that he had often used in the hide and seek games that he had played with his brothers and sisters back in the monastery.
About ten minutes later, Artemys came to find out that close to the woods, just over the flat ground of a nearby hill, was a garrison with a round tower made of stone set in the middle. Beyond the compound he could clearly see a few green-coated hills and beyond those the large forms that were without a doubt the Spinal Mountains, as the Pancracians called them. Behind those mountains waited his homeland: Dragiria.
As he scanned the entire area looking for the best possible route, Artemys noticed that there also was a long, wooden bridge that extended out to the other side of the border just about thirty yards south of the garrison. Because there was a wide gorge running north and south with a five hundred foot drop in the area that divided Pancracia from the eastern realms, several bridges had been created along it long ago. This was just one of them.
Artemys knew that the bridge would lead him on to his homeland, so he would need to cross it if he was to get there. But the bridge was guarded on the human side, and whether it was guarded on the other side he wasn't sure.
The Dragir counted two souls moving about in front of it, with a small fire burning nearby. Artemys turned his attention to the compound. There he counted about twenty soldiers, four of those keeping watch atop the tower, while the rest seemed to be walking about taking care of chores around the garrison or just standing and talking to each other. A few were cooking something, even the smell reached his nose, but barely, and Artemys noticed that several were shaving their faces near the south side. Four of those twenty soldiers were seated and playing cards right in the middle of the compound.
Artemys realized that he would probably have to sit tight and wait till nightfall came if he was to attempt to cross that bridge; he could not afford to be seen. The shadows of the night would definitely be his ally, but he knew that he still had to be very careful with the soldiers guarding it. He was so close to making it out of the human lands, he surely did not want to do anything stupid to blow the opportunity.
With that plan in mind, the Dragir licked his lips and retreated back into the woods and took care to avoid the two soldiers that he had seen earlier. Knowing about them he realized that the total count of soldiers was around the twenty four mark so far, and he hoped that there were no others inside that tower.
About twenty minutes later he saw the two soldiers as these made their way back to the garrison. Artemys followed their advancement from afar. Then they exited the forest completely and he felt relieved, for he didn't have to worry about them being about so close to him.
Artemys waited for nightfall in that withered forest, the Dragir keeping a good vigilance all around him and on the soldiers at the garrison. As he waited there those three hours he’d felt hungry, but he wasn't carrying anything that he could eat, nor was there anything edible close by. Well there was, but Artemys was not going to venture into the encampment and get something from the soldiers, so the Dragir endured the hunger knowing that the time would come for him to find something to eat once he made it safely across. The Dragir also felt the chilly wind that blew that night, a sign to him that winter was knocking on the door.
An hour later, just as he was about to initiate his plan, his human family appeared in his mind again. They had been on his mind all those minutes that he had waited for the night time to show up, but despite loving them too much, he knew that he would not be canceling his plans; he was going to attempt to return to his homeland this night, or he would die trying.
*End of Chapter 8*
Honors and Honorable Mentions
Honored ZDers: Atsuma, Siniru, TreeHuggerPanda
Honorable Mentions: February Eve
Honorable Mentions: February Eve
Chapter 8
Chapter 8: Running Away
Eastern Pancracia, August 23rd, Year 381
Eastern Pancracia, August 23rd, Year 381
Artemys ran on for as long as his lungs allowed him to. He had crossed the Cregen river and had continued east, the Dragir feeling too hurt within to even ponder about the possibility of stopping and returning to the monastery to those that he had left behind.
With nothing but the sword and the dark leather boots and the clothing that he had on, Artemys carried on and came to an area dense with dead trees and a mostly exposed barren ground littered with old branches and assorted rocks of different sizes. The Dragir had come to a small forest that signaled the end of part of the eastern border of Pancracia. Beyond it stood the high mountains that divided Pancracia from two deadly realms: The Bog and Dragiria. It was in that direction that Artemys was headed, for several times his mother Eve had assured him that his real homeland laid to the east beyond that mountain range. He knew that crossing over to those mountains would require stealth and care from his part, for there were several garrisons scattered about and filled with soldiers who had the duty of watching over the border.
After he had crossed halfway through those woods without any trouble, Artemys finally decided to stop and have a rest. The Dragir had been trotting the last few minutes and his legs had felt tired, his shins a little sore, which was what had made him stop, otherwise Artemys would have continued running on. His breathing came in hard gasps but as the seconds wore on he began to calm himself. He stared about the forest, noticing that the place felt lonely yet very peaceful, with few animals hanging about the area, keeping themselves out of eye reach from the newest visitor. Clusters of rotting trees stood all around him, some of those already lying on the ground. This had to be the old forest that his mother had told him about earlier, Artemys believed.
As he stood there catching his breath, Artemys was thinking about what had happened nearly an hour ago at the monastery, but suddenly, he was alerted of the presence of people nearby when in the distance he heard several voices speaking.
“Come on, Pandora, we don’t have all day!” Artemys had heard the voice of a female speaking. So much for the forest being abandoned, he thought then. With his heart beginning to beat fast, for he feared that he might be discovered out here and get himself killed or something, Artemys was quick to rush behind the fat trunk of a nearby tree, the only cover he could find at that moment. Unnerved and thinking that having come to these woods had been a terrible mistake the Dragir waited behind the cover of the tree and listened on, hoping that it didn’t come to much more than that. A reply from another young, crispy voice was heard then, this one belonging to another female.
“I don’t see any more twigs out here, Persia. Maybe we should go deeper and look for more, eh?”
“You’ve just been recruited into the service a month ago and you’re the expert now?” came the quirky reply. After a pause, there came a hearty laugh, followed by the same voice. “I’m just teasing you, Pandora, so don’t give me that serious look.”
“Then stop joking, Persia,” replied the so-called Pandora in a serious tone. “Or else you will find an arrow sticking out from your big head. You’re also a recruit much like me, so don’t start feeling all high-ranked on me just because you’ve been serving out here for three months.”
There was another pause.
“You know I was joking,” the voice belonging to Persia was heard again, this time with a hearty laugh. “Now come on, we don’t want the captain to be pissed at us for not taking care of our job.”
“Exactly,” Pandora’s crispy voice echoed. “We hardly have a load to take back, so stop your joking and show me where we can find more twigs.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on. Follow me.”
Artemys heard their footsteps in the distance as the soldiers–for they were indeed soldiers belonging to the nearest garrison–had started to walk. Artemys knew they were approaching and would probably be passing very near to him, so he sucked in a deep breath and held it, all the while keeping himself steady and ready to act in case he happened to be discovered. His right hand fell to the hilt of his blade, that sword that he had rarely used. The Dragir slowly withdrew it from its resting place and kept it ready.
The two female soldiers did come to the area where Artemys hid behind the largest tree visible, but Artemys did well to move around behind the cover of the tree, avoiding having the pair of soldiers come to know that he was there. As they moved ever closer, the Dragir shifted his position as he walked around the tree.
The soldiers, whose attention was on the branches that lay on the forest ground, never even imagined that a strange creature was lurking just fifteen feet away. Had they turned and stared with great care at the largest tree in the vicinity they probably would have seen a smallish shadow accompanying that of the tree's and would have taken that as being odd, but they had not truly paid attention and Artemys had been very lucky. The Dragir, though, had braved it out and had somewhat peeked from one side of the trunk, and he was able to lay eyes on the two figures.
A young-looking short-heighted Asakian girl was quick to secure one of the branches that lay on the ground and offered it to her companion, who tossed it into a large light-brown sack that she was carrying. The Asakian girl’s skin was light tan, her hair was dark and long and kept in a ponytail, and Artemys noted that she carried a well-crafted bow and a quiver of arrows at her back. That really unnerved the Dragir, for if he was discovered he was in for a rough time; archers could be deadly! The Asakian’s companion wasn’t that tall either, but she was the more robust of the two. Unlike her Yamatoan companion who wore dark colored light clothing suitable for an archer and other fast-moving warriors, Persia wore steel armor like that of a knight, but only on her torso, her legs were merely covered with black pants and similar colored boots. Persia had very light skin, dark-colored, messy seaweed-like hair with red-tinted ends, and a friendly face despite her two eyes being of different color: purple and red, which at times had made the girl soldier seem as if she was angry. An angry scar that ran horizontally near her left eye helped a lot in making the girl look angry at times. From his spot Artemys noted those eyes and the scar, and he was surprised of them, for he had never seen anything like that before on a person. He relaxed a bit when he noticed that at least that soldier was not carrying a bow, but she did carry a small sword at her hip and even a black staff with a ruby on the tip. Artemys remembered what his mother had told him about human wizards and other magicians who did not have the luxury that he had in summoning magic at will. They had to use tomes and at times magical rods and staffs like the one the soldier was carrying. Artemys became stiff and pulled his head back behind the trunk; he’d seen enough of the pair and knew that if discovered he would surely be in for a rough time.
“There’s this question that I’ve been wanting to ask you ever since I met you, Persia,” Pandora mentioned as she continued picking up branches from the ground.
“Oh yeah?” asked Persia, curious of Pandora. “What is it, young one?”
“Your eyes,” Pandora stared at her as she offered her two more branches that could qualify as twigs, for those weren’t that big. “Why are they of different color?”
Artemys listened on to their conversation, for there was nothing else that he could do except wait and listen to what they said.
“Hm,” Persia squint her eyes and her face suddenly appeared angry before Pandora, who often had seen the girl in that state. “It’s a long story that I cannot tell.”
“Ah come on,” Pandora cried. “Tell me about it.”
“No.”
“Aw, why not?” Pandora threw her arms aside, the Yamatoan girl looking disappointed.
“Personal reasons,” Persia said. “Let us keep gathering firewood, that’s why we were sent here, was it not?”
Pandora said nothing in reply to that, but she did nod at the soldier. And as to Artemys, who waited behind the tree, he was hoping that the soldiers would leave soon. The Dragir slowly let the air escape from his lungs, and he took in another fresh breath.
“If you don’t tell me I will bother you about it later in time,” Pandora told her partner. “I’ll even bring it up in front of people...Don’t forget I told you that.”
“You don’t want to be doing that,” Persia warned. When Pandora gave her a serious stare, Persia added, “Trust me.”
Pandora smiled and guessed, “Would I lament it because of your magical knowledge?”
“Yeah, perhaps,” Persia told her, the soldier not really interested about talking of her past. Pandora stared at the staff and asked, “Alright, so why not tell me how you got your hands on that beautiful staff? Were you perhaps a court sage back in your homeland of New Kembria?”
“No chance,” Persia told her companion. “That’s personal information too. Come on, just follow me,” she began walking away to the southeast. “I want to show you something over here.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, just something I discovered the other day,” replied Persia, turning over her shoulder to glance at the Asakian. Pandora put her hands on her hips and just remained staring at her.
Persia did not hear her companion walking, so she stopped and turned to regard her small colleague. “Oh alright," she told her with a sigh. "It’s just some old ruins if you must know.”
Pandora raised her eyebrows very surprised. “Ruins, you say? Out here?”
“Small, abandoned, and ruined, yet worth seeing,” promised the soldier.
"Perhaps with some treasure to be had as well?" Pandora hoped.
"Naw," laughed Persia. "If there was any treasure to be had it long ago was taken. But it's worth a visit, trust me. And besides, there's also plenty of good firewood to be had there."
"Ah," Pandora glanced about the place. "What the hell...there's nothing but dead trees here to see. Let's go, take me there, I want to see these ruins."
Persia nodded, smiled, and turned around as she spoke, "Come on, you will be marveled at what these Pancracians' forefathers built."
“Alright,” the Yamatoan followed her on, for she knew that Persia was taking her to an area where there would also be plenty of fallen branches and twigs that they could pick up and take back to the garrison to be used for cooking and for the soldiers to keep warm at night. Pandora, being a new recruit, had only wanted to please her captain.
Behind the tree trunk, Artemys sighed in relief when he saw them disappearing behind a cluster of leafless trees.
When the soldiers were out of view, their voices barely audible to him, Artemys relaxed and took the deepest breath of air that he had taken in a long time. He had been so close to being discovered and that would have probably gotten him killed if it had happened. Artemys felt grateful that it had not come to that, and he raised his eyes to the heavens and thanked the god that his mother Eve had inculcated to him: Adonis.
The Dragir put the sword back in its scabbard and proceeded to advance through the rest portion of the woods with more care and stealth. Artemys went on highly on the alert for any other human soldiers that he could encounter. He’d had to use his stealth skills that he had often used in the hide and seek games that he had played with his brothers and sisters back in the monastery.
About ten minutes later, Artemys came to find out that close to the woods, just over the flat ground of a nearby hill, was a garrison with a round tower made of stone set in the middle. Beyond the compound he could clearly see a few green-coated hills and beyond those the large forms that were without a doubt the Spinal Mountains, as the Pancracians called them. Behind those mountains waited his homeland: Dragiria.
As he scanned the entire area looking for the best possible route, Artemys noticed that there also was a long, wooden bridge that extended out to the other side of the border just about thirty yards south of the garrison. Because there was a wide gorge running north and south with a five hundred foot drop in the area that divided Pancracia from the eastern realms, several bridges had been created along it long ago. This was just one of them.
Artemys knew that the bridge would lead him on to his homeland, so he would need to cross it if he was to get there. But the bridge was guarded on the human side, and whether it was guarded on the other side he wasn't sure.
The Dragir counted two souls moving about in front of it, with a small fire burning nearby. Artemys turned his attention to the compound. There he counted about twenty soldiers, four of those keeping watch atop the tower, while the rest seemed to be walking about taking care of chores around the garrison or just standing and talking to each other. A few were cooking something, even the smell reached his nose, but barely, and Artemys noticed that several were shaving their faces near the south side. Four of those twenty soldiers were seated and playing cards right in the middle of the compound.
Artemys realized that he would probably have to sit tight and wait till nightfall came if he was to attempt to cross that bridge; he could not afford to be seen. The shadows of the night would definitely be his ally, but he knew that he still had to be very careful with the soldiers guarding it. He was so close to making it out of the human lands, he surely did not want to do anything stupid to blow the opportunity.
With that plan in mind, the Dragir licked his lips and retreated back into the woods and took care to avoid the two soldiers that he had seen earlier. Knowing about them he realized that the total count of soldiers was around the twenty four mark so far, and he hoped that there were no others inside that tower.
About twenty minutes later he saw the two soldiers as these made their way back to the garrison. Artemys followed their advancement from afar. Then they exited the forest completely and he felt relieved, for he didn't have to worry about them being about so close to him.
Artemys waited for nightfall in that withered forest, the Dragir keeping a good vigilance all around him and on the soldiers at the garrison. As he waited there those three hours he’d felt hungry, but he wasn't carrying anything that he could eat, nor was there anything edible close by. Well there was, but Artemys was not going to venture into the encampment and get something from the soldiers, so the Dragir endured the hunger knowing that the time would come for him to find something to eat once he made it safely across. The Dragir also felt the chilly wind that blew that night, a sign to him that winter was knocking on the door.
An hour later, just as he was about to initiate his plan, his human family appeared in his mind again. They had been on his mind all those minutes that he had waited for the night time to show up, but despite loving them too much, he knew that he would not be canceling his plans; he was going to attempt to return to his homeland this night, or he would die trying.
*End of Chapter 8*
*M i d n a*
Æsir Scribe
Honors and Honorable Mentions
The weight of the guilt that he’d felt within had made Damera leave the monastery as well. Without thinking too clearly, Damera had mounted the horse he had been brushing and rode off, ignoring the calls from the other orphans who saw him mount and leave.
Matron Eve had been quick to turn her attention behind her when she heard the horse galloping away and the shouts from the girls.
"Damera!" she had shouted, and she even had forced herself to run after him. "Damera, come back!"
But Damera was long gone, riding that galloping horse to the northwest and with no real destination in mind.
The matron found herself crying, trembling wildly, and unable to withstand what was going on. First Artemys had run away and now Damera. This was all so unbearable for her, who had a deep love for both. All she had wanted to do was fix the trouble between them and she had utterly failed big time. All of a sudden, the matron mother felt a sudden excruciating painful sensation within her chest. She moaned loudly due to the pain, and she pressed her hands on her bosom, for she felt truly pained. Then it all went dark for Eve, and her body went limp and collapsed on the ground like a heavy sack of potatoes. When she hit the ground, Eve hit the back of her head hard against the surface of a partially exposed and buried stone.
Tyson and the girls saw her fainting and were quick to head her way.
"Mother!" Ashie cried in fear believing that something awful had happened to her. Tyson, who had quickly knelt in front of his fallen mother, was quick to check her. He found a pulse on her, but he did not wholly understand what had happened to her. He explained that to the girls, who had urged him to tell them if she was alright.
"I don’t know what happened to her, she fainted or something, and then hit her head hard against this damn rock.”
“Is she bleeding?” Ashie asked.
“No, but we have to take her inside; we can't leave her out here like this."
"What about Damera and Artemys?" asked Alecia, her voice truly broken and worried. "We can't just let them go..."
"We can't worry about them now," Tyson forced himself to say that, his face a bit pale. He was feeling a bit confused, for he too had wanted to stop Artemys and Damera from going any further, but the way he saw things, it was their mother Eve who now needed of their full attention. "We have to tend our mother. Alecia, you and Abigale take her by the legs."
The two girls nodded and motioned to action.
"I want to help too," said Annabeth with tears falling from her cute face, driving Tyson's stare her way. Tyson regarded Alecia and Abigale. The redhead girl nodded right away and Alecia said, “Let her, Brother.”
Despite Annabeth being weaker than the rest of them, or so he thought she was, Tyson allowed the little girl to help out. “Fine, but because I don’t want you to get hurt, Annie, I won’t allow you to help us carry her in; we can handle it. You, however, can open the door for us and go clear any stuff from mother’s bed. Can you do that, little sis?”
“Yes,” Annabeth replied, and she didn’t wait for any more orders, the little girl wiped her tears away and hurried away to do as Tyson had asked.
“Ash, go help her,” Tyson told Ashie, who had just been kneeling close to Eve’s torso and crying, her hands on her mother’s belly in a praying position. The white haired beauty nodded and quickly stood up. She left, and Tyson regarded Alecia and Abigale once again.
"Alright," he said as he slid his hands underneath the matron's shoulders and grabbed her from the back just underneath her armpits. "We have to be very careful, we don't want to drop her or hurt her. She’s heavy. Are you two ready?"
Abigale and Alecia nodded at him, already positioned to lift their mother by her long legs, one at each side.
At Tyson's call they all lifted her up carefully and proceeded to take her inside the house and to her very own bed, where the girls covered her up with blankets and placed a wet cloth over her forehead thinking that it would help her.
The orphans waited around the bed for many minutes for their mother to react, to come back to life. But after half an hour had passed and the matron still did not show signs of awakening, Abigale took off to the kitchen, saying that she would prepare a hot brew for everyone, especially their mother who would surely need it when she came back to her own self.
“I’ll help you with it,” a pale-looking Alecia said, and she went after Abigale to the kitchen, leaving Tyson, Annabeth, and Ashie with their mother.
What the orphans did not know was that their mother had suffered a psychological shock attack, and afterwards, the hit that she had taken on the back of her head when she’d hit the ground had put her out for good; that wicked hit had thrown the matron mother into a coma.
Tyson and the girls drank hot tea about ten minutes later, and the beverage did relax him and the girls a bit. But still their mother had not reacted. That worried everyone, but Tyson knew something was surely wrong.
“I don’t like this one bit,” he mentioned to the girls, driving their eyes to him. He put his cup on the tray on a nearby table and went on to speak as he laid eyes on Eve. “She breathes slightly but has not come back to reality...”
“Is it bad?” asked Annabeth, the Lycan girl not liking Tyson’s nervous and worried tone.
“I cannot say, Annie,” he told her, the lad keeping his voice a bit sweet so as not to worry her too much. “But I think it is for the best that I head into Sinaí and fetch Stephanie the healer.”
His words made everyone regard him.
“I’ll go with you,” Abigale was quick to volunteer, not that Tyson was looking for his sisters to offer. “I will not let you ride alone. Soon it will be dark, and you know just how dangerous these parts have become.”
Tyson cast a stare at the redhead girl. “I know, but you must stay here, Abby. You’re the oldest amongst us. No, I will do this alone.”
“You’re not going alone out there,” Abigale walked up to him and stood in front of him, not in a challenging way, more like in a worried way. “I’m not letting you, Tyce. As you said, I am the oldest here, so my word is law.”
Tyson regarded her for a while, but then he nodded at her, knowing that she was correct. Their mother had raised them well, had always taught them to respect their elders, and so Tyson did. The other three girls surrounded them, concerned at what was going on.
“What do you suggest we do, then?” Tyson asked in a desperate way. “We can’t continue to just stare at her and wait for her to open her eyes. She could be in serious danger, you know? When I saw her fall I thought she had only fainted and would come back to us soon. But she hasn’t, and that’s what has me worried.”
Abigale covered her mouth with her hands. Tyson’s final words worried her, and she cast a glance at her mother.
“Rig...ht,” Abigale timidly said after a while. “Well, I think just this once you may be right. If you want to go get Steph, then I will allow you to go. Mother surely deserves every chance that we can give her, but you’ll take Ashie or Alecia along because I am not letting you go by yourself.”
Before Tyson could say anything to that, Alecia raised her hand in a volunteering gesture, but Ashie beat her with words, “I’ll go with him,” she said with a nod. “I can’t take this any longer. I can’t stand to watch mother like that. I need fresh air, and a good ride will do me well.”
“Then lets get going,” Tyson told the white haired girl as he quickly approached her. “We’ve no time to waste. Grab a coat, a blanket, and a bow or something and meet me outside. I’ll go prepare the horse.”
Ashie nodded, and she did head to the large room that they all shared as sleeping quarters. Meanwhile, Tyson walked toward the room's entrance.
“Tyson!” Abigale called. He looked back at her. “What?”
“Be careful out there,” Abigale said in a serious tone, her sisters agreeing with nods as well. “I will send a coat and a sword for you along with Ashie.”
Tyson nodded at her and at his other two sisters.
“Thanks,” he said, hiding a smile. “I hope I don’t come to need that sword, but I surely will use it if I have to.”
“Go!” Abigale nodded at him. “You can still make it to Sinaí before nightfall.”
Tyson nodded twice at that and then exited the monastery and headed outside toward the stable, where he would prepare the horse for the trip.
*End of Chapter 9*
Honored ZDers: Raindrop14, Lukémon, Xinnamin, WaffleNinja, Zelda_8, Hero of Time, February Eve
Honorable Mentions: Atsuma, Zelda's Child
Honorable Mentions: Atsuma, Zelda's Child
Chapter 9: Eve’s Downfall
Eastern Pancracia, August 23rd, Year 381
Eastern Pancracia, August 23rd, Year 381
The weight of the guilt that he’d felt within had made Damera leave the monastery as well. Without thinking too clearly, Damera had mounted the horse he had been brushing and rode off, ignoring the calls from the other orphans who saw him mount and leave.
Matron Eve had been quick to turn her attention behind her when she heard the horse galloping away and the shouts from the girls.
"Damera!" she had shouted, and she even had forced herself to run after him. "Damera, come back!"
But Damera was long gone, riding that galloping horse to the northwest and with no real destination in mind.
The matron found herself crying, trembling wildly, and unable to withstand what was going on. First Artemys had run away and now Damera. This was all so unbearable for her, who had a deep love for both. All she had wanted to do was fix the trouble between them and she had utterly failed big time. All of a sudden, the matron mother felt a sudden excruciating painful sensation within her chest. She moaned loudly due to the pain, and she pressed her hands on her bosom, for she felt truly pained. Then it all went dark for Eve, and her body went limp and collapsed on the ground like a heavy sack of potatoes. When she hit the ground, Eve hit the back of her head hard against the surface of a partially exposed and buried stone.
Tyson and the girls saw her fainting and were quick to head her way.
"Mother!" Ashie cried in fear believing that something awful had happened to her. Tyson, who had quickly knelt in front of his fallen mother, was quick to check her. He found a pulse on her, but he did not wholly understand what had happened to her. He explained that to the girls, who had urged him to tell them if she was alright.
"I don’t know what happened to her, she fainted or something, and then hit her head hard against this damn rock.”
“Is she bleeding?” Ashie asked.
“No, but we have to take her inside; we can't leave her out here like this."
"What about Damera and Artemys?" asked Alecia, her voice truly broken and worried. "We can't just let them go..."
"We can't worry about them now," Tyson forced himself to say that, his face a bit pale. He was feeling a bit confused, for he too had wanted to stop Artemys and Damera from going any further, but the way he saw things, it was their mother Eve who now needed of their full attention. "We have to tend our mother. Alecia, you and Abigale take her by the legs."
The two girls nodded and motioned to action.
"I want to help too," said Annabeth with tears falling from her cute face, driving Tyson's stare her way. Tyson regarded Alecia and Abigale. The redhead girl nodded right away and Alecia said, “Let her, Brother.”
Despite Annabeth being weaker than the rest of them, or so he thought she was, Tyson allowed the little girl to help out. “Fine, but because I don’t want you to get hurt, Annie, I won’t allow you to help us carry her in; we can handle it. You, however, can open the door for us and go clear any stuff from mother’s bed. Can you do that, little sis?”
“Yes,” Annabeth replied, and she didn’t wait for any more orders, the little girl wiped her tears away and hurried away to do as Tyson had asked.
“Ash, go help her,” Tyson told Ashie, who had just been kneeling close to Eve’s torso and crying, her hands on her mother’s belly in a praying position. The white haired beauty nodded and quickly stood up. She left, and Tyson regarded Alecia and Abigale once again.
"Alright," he said as he slid his hands underneath the matron's shoulders and grabbed her from the back just underneath her armpits. "We have to be very careful, we don't want to drop her or hurt her. She’s heavy. Are you two ready?"
Abigale and Alecia nodded at him, already positioned to lift their mother by her long legs, one at each side.
At Tyson's call they all lifted her up carefully and proceeded to take her inside the house and to her very own bed, where the girls covered her up with blankets and placed a wet cloth over her forehead thinking that it would help her.
The orphans waited around the bed for many minutes for their mother to react, to come back to life. But after half an hour had passed and the matron still did not show signs of awakening, Abigale took off to the kitchen, saying that she would prepare a hot brew for everyone, especially their mother who would surely need it when she came back to her own self.
“I’ll help you with it,” a pale-looking Alecia said, and she went after Abigale to the kitchen, leaving Tyson, Annabeth, and Ashie with their mother.
What the orphans did not know was that their mother had suffered a psychological shock attack, and afterwards, the hit that she had taken on the back of her head when she’d hit the ground had put her out for good; that wicked hit had thrown the matron mother into a coma.
Tyson and the girls drank hot tea about ten minutes later, and the beverage did relax him and the girls a bit. But still their mother had not reacted. That worried everyone, but Tyson knew something was surely wrong.
“I don’t like this one bit,” he mentioned to the girls, driving their eyes to him. He put his cup on the tray on a nearby table and went on to speak as he laid eyes on Eve. “She breathes slightly but has not come back to reality...”
“Is it bad?” asked Annabeth, the Lycan girl not liking Tyson’s nervous and worried tone.
“I cannot say, Annie,” he told her, the lad keeping his voice a bit sweet so as not to worry her too much. “But I think it is for the best that I head into Sinaí and fetch Stephanie the healer.”
His words made everyone regard him.
“I’ll go with you,” Abigale was quick to volunteer, not that Tyson was looking for his sisters to offer. “I will not let you ride alone. Soon it will be dark, and you know just how dangerous these parts have become.”
Tyson cast a stare at the redhead girl. “I know, but you must stay here, Abby. You’re the oldest amongst us. No, I will do this alone.”
“You’re not going alone out there,” Abigale walked up to him and stood in front of him, not in a challenging way, more like in a worried way. “I’m not letting you, Tyce. As you said, I am the oldest here, so my word is law.”
Tyson regarded her for a while, but then he nodded at her, knowing that she was correct. Their mother had raised them well, had always taught them to respect their elders, and so Tyson did. The other three girls surrounded them, concerned at what was going on.
“What do you suggest we do, then?” Tyson asked in a desperate way. “We can’t continue to just stare at her and wait for her to open her eyes. She could be in serious danger, you know? When I saw her fall I thought she had only fainted and would come back to us soon. But she hasn’t, and that’s what has me worried.”
Abigale covered her mouth with her hands. Tyson’s final words worried her, and she cast a glance at her mother.
“Rig...ht,” Abigale timidly said after a while. “Well, I think just this once you may be right. If you want to go get Steph, then I will allow you to go. Mother surely deserves every chance that we can give her, but you’ll take Ashie or Alecia along because I am not letting you go by yourself.”
Before Tyson could say anything to that, Alecia raised her hand in a volunteering gesture, but Ashie beat her with words, “I’ll go with him,” she said with a nod. “I can’t take this any longer. I can’t stand to watch mother like that. I need fresh air, and a good ride will do me well.”
“Then lets get going,” Tyson told the white haired girl as he quickly approached her. “We’ve no time to waste. Grab a coat, a blanket, and a bow or something and meet me outside. I’ll go prepare the horse.”
Ashie nodded, and she did head to the large room that they all shared as sleeping quarters. Meanwhile, Tyson walked toward the room's entrance.
“Tyson!” Abigale called. He looked back at her. “What?”
“Be careful out there,” Abigale said in a serious tone, her sisters agreeing with nods as well. “I will send a coat and a sword for you along with Ashie.”
Tyson nodded at her and at his other two sisters.
“Thanks,” he said, hiding a smile. “I hope I don’t come to need that sword, but I surely will use it if I have to.”
“Go!” Abigale nodded at him. “You can still make it to Sinaí before nightfall.”
Tyson nodded twice at that and then exited the monastery and headed outside toward the stable, where he would prepare the horse for the trip.
*End of Chapter 9*
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Siniru
Zoldyck family assassin
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2011
Thank you for using my character Atsu! I really appreciate it!
Raindrop14
Soldier for Christ!
Hey hey hey, great chapter ol' chap! Can't wait for more. :>
*M i d n a*
Æsir Scribe
Heh, it was no problem, Siniru. Thanx for participating in this project.
Thanks, Rainy. Here's chapter 10 for you and everyone else.
This is the final Chapter of this first book, but as always I will include an epilogue as a closer of the tale and also as opener for the next one.
Quite a few new ZDers are introduced here and in the Epilogue as well. I hope you all feel satisfied at how many of you I managed to include in this first tale. And I know I owe you readers a Special Look Back, but I will include that with the Epilogue. Honors and Honorable Mentions
Honored ZDers: Dan, Wielder of Aegis, Atsuma, TreeHuggerPanda, Siniru, Rishian, Triforce Hunter
Honorable Mentions: February Eve, BlueLakeKylie
Honorable Mentions: February Eve, BlueLakeKylie
Part 1/4 of Chapter 10
Chapter 10: Returning Home
Eastern Pancracia, August 24th, Year 381
*Past Midnight*
Eastern Pancracia, August 24th, Year 381
*Past Midnight*
“I’m going to go take a nice little nap,” the smallish soldier said and walked away. He had been keeping guard at the end of the bridge but had been feeling miserably sleepy. And why not? It was an hour after midnight.
“What?” the soldier’s colleague said from his guarding spot near the bridge, eyeing him as he headed toward the fire where close by laid their bedrolls on the ground. “Are you crazy, Kevin? I bet the guards at the tower are staring in our direction this very moment. You are going to get us in trouble, fool.”
“Those idiots are probably already sleeping,” replied Kevin without stopping. “Nothing’s happened in this area for a long time, Fredrick, we waste precious sleep time guarding s*** out here.”
“I don’t care what you think. Get your a** over here now! We have a damn job to take care of,” Fredrick Conners III reminded his soldier friend, feeling a bit hot.
“Just chill,” Kevin cried, sitting on his bedroll. He took his soldier helmet off before finally laying completely on that soft bedroll and pulling over a blanket to cover himself with. “Come join me, it’ll be alright.”
Fredrick made a funny face and shook his head several times his way; he was incorrigible. The soldier then turned north to stare toward the garrison. Torches flickered with life there as well, but he could not see or hear any sign of movement, not even from the top of the tower where he often saw movement. Fredrick shook his head again and rolled his eyes, believing that perhaps Kevin was right; the guards stationed on top of the tower had probably dozed off as well. Fredrick had always been serious about his service to the crown, so he turned around and headed back to his position near the bridge, willing to keep an eye out for any trouble. He was paid good enough for the job that he did, so he did not have in mind losing it just because his partner told him to do something else. Unlike his soldier friend, he had a wife and a child to look after, and so he needed the money to sustain them.
Fredrick held a spear in one hand and carried a long sword in a scabbard at his left hip. He also carried a bow with him, but the bow was resting near his bedroll. The sixteen year old stood around five-feet-eight-inches, was built and had light colored skin. His hair was brownish and short, and his ears a little big that he was known as “mouse”. Fredrick also wore an earring on his right ear that he believed was his good luck charm. It had once belonged to his wife, but she had given it to him days before he left the capital city of Leiads to come to the eastern front.
Two torches that had been set on buried poles that served as torch-holders burned close to the end of the bridge that the two human soldiers guarded, lighting the area well. Fredrick had never gone walking beyond the torches, for the precipice had always unnerved him. As a kid he had once fallen twenty feet from a rooftop and since then had hated heights, particularly if those led to a gruesome death. Fredrick came to stand in between the two poles, set the spear’s bottom end on the ground, and looked beyond the bridge. Everything was darkness over on the other side, and silence, except for the creepy growls and cries of beasts and animals that often reached his ears. Fredrick knew, just as any other Pancracian did, that another race lived on the other side, the so called Horned Devils, as the creatures had been called since centuries back. Not only them, but there was also rumors of a fierce monster, a lady who was half serpent and half woman, who resided there as well. This so called Serpent Lady was believed to have the power to turn beings into stone with a mere glance. Reminded of that, the soldier shivered and was quick to lower his stare, for he imagined that monster being about on the other side. Medusa, they called her, he knew, and the mere thought of the name made him shiver again.
Fredrick had always been fascinated about all the Medusa tales since he had been but a child. Growing up in the capital city he had learned of the rumors and tales that spoke about the race and the monster. That is why when a captain serving the royal castle of Pancracia had gathered the best soldiers available, Fredrick had been quick to raise his hand when he had learned that a relief team was going to be formed and sent to the eastern border as relief to the current border watchers. That had happened three months ago, and now here he was, standing at the end of the bridge and staring to the lands on the other side of it. He had often stared in that direction during the daylight hours as well from the garrison, his eyes wanting to see something that could assure him that the rumors were right, that there indeed were other creatures living on the other side. Fredrick had even pondered about crossing the bridge and heading into the other side a few times, but he had not done it merely because he also knew about the negatives of the many tales and rumors. Those who set foot there were never seen again. No, Fredrick would never attempt something as foolish as that, not when he had a family to look after.
Fredrick kept himself fully awake and watchful, not even disrupted from his duty by hearing his friend’s loud snoring over by the fire. He moved about near the torches when he got tired of just standing in one place, but his eyes were fully on guard, his senses as sharp as the tip of his spear. He was a soldier of Pancracia, he would always act like one.
***
Part 2/4 of Chapter 10
Artemys had waited too long behind the shadows afforded by the darkness and the cover of the brush on the hillside. He’d laid low behind a thorny, thick shrub, just staring at the soldiers near the bridge and at the garrison that stood close by to the north. When he had noted that one of the soldiers had apparently tired and had gone to sleep near the campfire, he knew that his golden opportunity had come. His waiting had paid off well, for he now only needed to get past one soldier instead of two if he was to make it across that bridge. He liked his chances, so he went for it.
From out of nowhere he came running full speed into the camp, his goal on his mind reminding him just how close he was from leaving the human lands for good.
Fredrick Conners was alerted right away when he heard the loud footsteps coming from behind him. He turned too late, though, and when he did, he almost had the shadowy figure right in front of him. The light afforded by the torches allowed him to see the figure fully, and Fredrick’s face deformed in more than just surprise and fear, he also felt his heart on his throat when he became aware that it was no human but a horned being coming towards him at full speed. Prevailing to take action against the sudden raw fear that he felt, he tried to bring the spear in front of him, but the creature jumped up at the last second and deflected it away with a kick, however, Fredrick held on to it, though he was sent stumbling to the side along with it.
“What the f***?!” Fredrick cried in shock.
Artemys had never had in mind hurting the soldier, the Dragir had just wanted to throw him to the ground and head toward the bridge. When he landed from his jump kick he went rushing towards him before he could recuperate himself. Fredrick recovered, but not wholly. Again, he wasn’t able to bring his spear for a striking position, for the creature was extremely quick. Fredrick had the creature in front of him once again, this time the creature collided against him, drawing a grunt from the soldier. Artemys used his left hand in an attempt to swap the long spear from his grasp as they fell, however, Fredrick never let go of it, he grasped to it tightly knowing that his life depended on it.
The two humanoids hit the ground hard, with Fredrick taking most of the impact on his back and Artemys landing on top of him and working furiously to disarm him. Somehow, in all his bemusement and fear, the soldier managed to strike at the horned creature with his free left hand. Artemys absorbed the punch on his right cheek, and he rolled off away to the side, but not before his left hand grasped the hilt of the soldier’s sword. He unsheathed it easily and found himself standing a few feet away from the soldier, who also rose back up, his shocked eyes on the creature. Fredrick noticed that the creature held two swords, his own and its own, which was really a sight to behold; never had Fredrick seen such a beautiful sword as the one that the horned being held in its right hand.
For a long moment the two just remained staring at each other, with Fredrick being the most bemused of the two. Artemys just remained staring at him with swords at the ready.
“W-what manner...of creature are you?” Fredrick asked, seeming too shocked with the creature, for the soldier wondered whether it was one of the so called creatures that lived on the other side of the border. Behind Artemys, the other soldier continued to sleep and snore, the brief disturbance hadn’t even bothered him.
Artemys would have responded to his question, but all of a sudden there came shouting from the north and the sound of running feet over the ground. Artemys turned to stare in that direction, but suddenly he felt a sharp, hot pain on his left arm.
“Auighh!” he cried in pain, knowing that he had just been struck with an arrow. Because of the stinging pain the dragir dropped the soldier’s sword and scrambled off to the side.
Seeing the creature stumble aside, Fredrick snapped out of his shock, and the soldier was quick to turn to the north, where his dark brown eyes noticed a group of soldiers heading their way. They held torches and a small female archer was right in front of them, already fitting another arrow to her bow. Fredrick knew Pandora quite well, and he knew that she rarely missed her target, even if this one was moving or running away from her.
Artemys knew this was it. He had wasted too much time staring at the bemused soldier.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he cried at the soldier before taking off running toward the bridge, grasping a torch from one of the poles as he went past them. His words left Fredrick in his place, unmoving.
Artemys stepped on the bridge and started crossing it, his heart racing along with inner thoughts, but suddenly, another arrow whistled in and punctured the back of his left thigh.
“Aarrrgghh!” Artemys cried in much pain again and nearly stumbled to the ground on one knee. Despite the terrible pain he forced himself to stand and ran on, limping badly and ignoring the arrow and the waves of pain it brought to his entire leg.
Another arrow came seeking him, but it missed his head by just eight inches. Artemys cringed as he heard it zipping by, but he kept going on, knowing that his goal was not far from becoming true. Over where she had fired the last arrow, Pandora was not too happy with herself.
“Fredrick!” There came a sharp voice from one of the soldiers. “What the hell do you think you are doing, boy? After him!”
Fredrick barely nodded as his friend near the fire jumped out of his place, surely startled by all the shouting.
Fredrick would have gone after the creature, except that a crispy young voice stopped him from doing that.
“No, don’t get in my way! I will bring him down.”
It was Pandora Koeki, the newest soldier in the garrison. Frozen in his place, Fredrick watched as she ran past him to stand near the end of the bridge, her mighty bow ready to let go an arrow again. Pandora, one eye closed and another one opened, saw her target and then let go of the arrow. And she smiled in satisfaction at her shot and skill when she witnessed how the shadowy figure fell on the bridge, losing the torch as he did, which proceeded to fall off the bridge.
Artemys had felt a nasty sting on his right lower back, and the arrow had forced him to trip and stumble forward, the Dragir losing the torch and coming so close to falling off the bridge himself. More than half his torso came off the edge of the bridge, but the Dragir managed to secure a line of roping with his hand, and he was quick to get himself back on the bridge. With tears of pure pain he stood back up immediately and turned briefly to stare at the other end where the soldiers stood at. He grasped at the arrow shaft sticking at his back and pulled it slowly, the Dragir coming to know real pain then. He growled in pain and went on to pull the arrow completely out, feeling the crippling pain at his back. Artemys endured it, though, with tears and anger. Feeling the mighty pain on his arm, leg, and lower back, the Dragir dropped the arrow on the bridge and issued forth a loud roar of defiance and anger. “Aggrrhhh!”
His roar echoed in the gorge below and all over the place for at least ten seconds. The roar even made Pandora take a few steps back in fear, and as to the other soldiers who heard it, they too, became confused and trembled in fear.
“Shoot him!” ordered the captain, who had been amongst the soldiers that had come down from the garrison to the bridge.
Pandora obeyed, lifting up her bow and letting another arrow fly, though she barely could make out the target in the darkness, for the torch that the creature had held at one time no longer gave her a clear shot at it. So close did the human archer come to ending the Dragir’s life with that shot, the arrow hit and bounced off Artemys’s right horn.
The Dragir, hurting badly, ignored the arrow that hit his horn and turned and limped away. He knew that he was an easy target for the archer just standing there. The Dragir managed to get off the bridge and to the other side. He ran into a crowd of mighty trees and bushes and disappeared from view. Though he was in true pain, the thought alone that he had managed to cross the bridge made him smile with much satisfaction. He groaned, but he knew that he had done it! He had made it to his homeland!
***
From out of nowhere he came running full speed into the camp, his goal on his mind reminding him just how close he was from leaving the human lands for good.
Fredrick Conners was alerted right away when he heard the loud footsteps coming from behind him. He turned too late, though, and when he did, he almost had the shadowy figure right in front of him. The light afforded by the torches allowed him to see the figure fully, and Fredrick’s face deformed in more than just surprise and fear, he also felt his heart on his throat when he became aware that it was no human but a horned being coming towards him at full speed. Prevailing to take action against the sudden raw fear that he felt, he tried to bring the spear in front of him, but the creature jumped up at the last second and deflected it away with a kick, however, Fredrick held on to it, though he was sent stumbling to the side along with it.
“What the f***?!” Fredrick cried in shock.
Artemys had never had in mind hurting the soldier, the Dragir had just wanted to throw him to the ground and head toward the bridge. When he landed from his jump kick he went rushing towards him before he could recuperate himself. Fredrick recovered, but not wholly. Again, he wasn’t able to bring his spear for a striking position, for the creature was extremely quick. Fredrick had the creature in front of him once again, this time the creature collided against him, drawing a grunt from the soldier. Artemys used his left hand in an attempt to swap the long spear from his grasp as they fell, however, Fredrick never let go of it, he grasped to it tightly knowing that his life depended on it.
The two humanoids hit the ground hard, with Fredrick taking most of the impact on his back and Artemys landing on top of him and working furiously to disarm him. Somehow, in all his bemusement and fear, the soldier managed to strike at the horned creature with his free left hand. Artemys absorbed the punch on his right cheek, and he rolled off away to the side, but not before his left hand grasped the hilt of the soldier’s sword. He unsheathed it easily and found himself standing a few feet away from the soldier, who also rose back up, his shocked eyes on the creature. Fredrick noticed that the creature held two swords, his own and its own, which was really a sight to behold; never had Fredrick seen such a beautiful sword as the one that the horned being held in its right hand.
For a long moment the two just remained staring at each other, with Fredrick being the most bemused of the two. Artemys just remained staring at him with swords at the ready.
“W-what manner...of creature are you?” Fredrick asked, seeming too shocked with the creature, for the soldier wondered whether it was one of the so called creatures that lived on the other side of the border. Behind Artemys, the other soldier continued to sleep and snore, the brief disturbance hadn’t even bothered him.
Artemys would have responded to his question, but all of a sudden there came shouting from the north and the sound of running feet over the ground. Artemys turned to stare in that direction, but suddenly he felt a sharp, hot pain on his left arm.
“Auighh!” he cried in pain, knowing that he had just been struck with an arrow. Because of the stinging pain the dragir dropped the soldier’s sword and scrambled off to the side.
Seeing the creature stumble aside, Fredrick snapped out of his shock, and the soldier was quick to turn to the north, where his dark brown eyes noticed a group of soldiers heading their way. They held torches and a small female archer was right in front of them, already fitting another arrow to her bow. Fredrick knew Pandora quite well, and he knew that she rarely missed her target, even if this one was moving or running away from her.
Artemys knew this was it. He had wasted too much time staring at the bemused soldier.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he cried at the soldier before taking off running toward the bridge, grasping a torch from one of the poles as he went past them. His words left Fredrick in his place, unmoving.
Artemys stepped on the bridge and started crossing it, his heart racing along with inner thoughts, but suddenly, another arrow whistled in and punctured the back of his left thigh.
“Aarrrgghh!” Artemys cried in much pain again and nearly stumbled to the ground on one knee. Despite the terrible pain he forced himself to stand and ran on, limping badly and ignoring the arrow and the waves of pain it brought to his entire leg.
Another arrow came seeking him, but it missed his head by just eight inches. Artemys cringed as he heard it zipping by, but he kept going on, knowing that his goal was not far from becoming true. Over where she had fired the last arrow, Pandora was not too happy with herself.
“Fredrick!” There came a sharp voice from one of the soldiers. “What the hell do you think you are doing, boy? After him!”
Fredrick barely nodded as his friend near the fire jumped out of his place, surely startled by all the shouting.
Fredrick would have gone after the creature, except that a crispy young voice stopped him from doing that.
“No, don’t get in my way! I will bring him down.”
It was Pandora Koeki, the newest soldier in the garrison. Frozen in his place, Fredrick watched as she ran past him to stand near the end of the bridge, her mighty bow ready to let go an arrow again. Pandora, one eye closed and another one opened, saw her target and then let go of the arrow. And she smiled in satisfaction at her shot and skill when she witnessed how the shadowy figure fell on the bridge, losing the torch as he did, which proceeded to fall off the bridge.
Artemys had felt a nasty sting on his right lower back, and the arrow had forced him to trip and stumble forward, the Dragir losing the torch and coming so close to falling off the bridge himself. More than half his torso came off the edge of the bridge, but the Dragir managed to secure a line of roping with his hand, and he was quick to get himself back on the bridge. With tears of pure pain he stood back up immediately and turned briefly to stare at the other end where the soldiers stood at. He grasped at the arrow shaft sticking at his back and pulled it slowly, the Dragir coming to know real pain then. He growled in pain and went on to pull the arrow completely out, feeling the crippling pain at his back. Artemys endured it, though, with tears and anger. Feeling the mighty pain on his arm, leg, and lower back, the Dragir dropped the arrow on the bridge and issued forth a loud roar of defiance and anger. “Aggrrhhh!”
His roar echoed in the gorge below and all over the place for at least ten seconds. The roar even made Pandora take a few steps back in fear, and as to the other soldiers who heard it, they too, became confused and trembled in fear.
“Shoot him!” ordered the captain, who had been amongst the soldiers that had come down from the garrison to the bridge.
Pandora obeyed, lifting up her bow and letting another arrow fly, though she barely could make out the target in the darkness, for the torch that the creature had held at one time no longer gave her a clear shot at it. So close did the human archer come to ending the Dragir’s life with that shot, the arrow hit and bounced off Artemys’s right horn.
The Dragir, hurting badly, ignored the arrow that hit his horn and turned and limped away. He knew that he was an easy target for the archer just standing there. The Dragir managed to get off the bridge and to the other side. He ran into a crowd of mighty trees and bushes and disappeared from view. Though he was in true pain, the thought alone that he had managed to cross the bridge made him smile with much satisfaction. He groaned, but he knew that he had done it! He had made it to his homeland!
***
Part 3/4 of Chapter 10
“Captain Danny, shall we go after him?” It was Kevin Santau who asked from the side with a trembling voice. The captain cocked his head and gave him a brief, mean look.
“He’s gone, you fool,” he said as he regarded the other end of the bridge. “He managed to make it to the other side. There is nothing we can do.”
“Yes, Sir,” Pandora claimed as she walked toward the group. “He got away, but not before I put three arrows on him at least. I say he’s dead meat.”
“Haha,” laughed Persia, who had also come along with the group. “You sure got that son of a b**** good, Pandora. I’d heard of your deadly accuracy with the bow, but damn!”
Pandora winked at her with a proud smile. “My people are the best when it comes to using the bow,” the small soldier bragged. “I was trained well.”
The captain turned around to face Fredrick, who’d had a brief scuffle with the trouble maker.
“What happened, Fredrick?” Captain Danny Thorpe asked. “What did you see? Tell me everything!”
The captain stood six feet even and was thin, with a dark goatee and a clean shaven head, not to mention having a face with at least four scars. He was young at twenty one but surely had seen lots of action on the battle field already; his soldiers respected him for that.
But Fredrick still could not believe what had just transpired. He was pale and trembling mildly, but despite all that, he looked upon his captain, who had been the very same one who had brought him to the region three months ago.
“H-he came out of nowhere, Sir,” Fredrick had trouble explaining due to feeling nervous. “I was shocked after I lay eyes on him. He didn’t appear to be human…and yet…”
“What?” Captain Danny said. “Not human? What are you babbling about?”
“I swear, Sir,” Fredrick gulped under the glare of the captain. “He wasn’t human at all. He appeared to be one, but he had dark horns, and his arms were riddled with dark scales or something.”
The soldier’s story made everyone look at each other.
“Bull****,” the captain cried and then walked past his soldiers and towards the edge of the bridge. He took a hold of the remaining torch and spoke. “It can’t be. The horned devils have not been seen for a long while…centuries even. I don’t even believe in them myself.”
“Are you saying that whatever attacked you, Fredrick, could have been a horned devil?” Pandora cried, shocked and feeling her heart in her throat. She’d heard stories about the horned devils of the east, but just like every other human being, she had not seen one up until that point.
“I don’t know,” Fredrick blurted. “But I know what I saw.”
The captain turned around and went back to the group.
“What are we going to do, Captain?” asked a bewildered Kevin. "Will we be reporting this matter to the Capital? We should, this could be serious. If that was indeed a horned devil, they could be up to something...”
The captain gave the slacker a hard glance. The captain knew that Kevin had been dozing off when the trouble took place, and he had it coming, but now was not the time. Besides, Kevin was right, he knew, the horned devils could be up to something.
“All of you stay here guarding this bridge,” Captain Danny ordered. As he turned to regard Kevin, he went on to say, “Don’t think for one moment that you are out of this just yet, Kevin. We still have to talk about your pitiful duty. But right now I have bigger fish to fry, so I will spare you my wrath momentarily.”
Fredrick gave Kevin a pitiful—yet—serene stare.
“Yes, Sir,” Kevin gulped and lowered his head in shame, also moving aside as the captain made his way past him.
“Rishian, you come with me,” the captain told another soldier. This lad was of medium height, had short, dark hair, and wore glasses over a handsome face.
Rishian nodded and said. “Aye, Cap’n Thorpe.”
“Persia,” the captain turned to regard the other soldier who had come down to the area with him, Pandora, and Rishian.
“Yes, Captain?” Persia asked as she straightened and saluted before the captain.
“You’re in charge while we are away.”
“Yes, Sir,” Persia hid a smile and nodded. “May I inquire as to where you and Rish are headed, Sir?”
“To the capital,” Captain Danny responded. “What happened here tonight merits a report to the high council and to Princess Marine. For all we know, there soon could be trouble coming to our realm from these…horned devils. If Fredrick is right in his account that could have been a spy right there…Perhaps they seek to attack us or something.”
Every soldier trembled in nervousness then, coming to understand the possibility about that.
“Like I said, guard this bridge as best you can, shoot to kill if anyone tries to come from the other side.”
The soldiers nodded, some said that they would guard the bridge with their very own life.
The Captain and Rishian left a few moments later. And the four soldiers who had remained behind near the bridge spent the rest of the night guarding the place well but with a little fear.
***
“He’s gone, you fool,” he said as he regarded the other end of the bridge. “He managed to make it to the other side. There is nothing we can do.”
“Yes, Sir,” Pandora claimed as she walked toward the group. “He got away, but not before I put three arrows on him at least. I say he’s dead meat.”
“Haha,” laughed Persia, who had also come along with the group. “You sure got that son of a b**** good, Pandora. I’d heard of your deadly accuracy with the bow, but damn!”
Pandora winked at her with a proud smile. “My people are the best when it comes to using the bow,” the small soldier bragged. “I was trained well.”
The captain turned around to face Fredrick, who’d had a brief scuffle with the trouble maker.
“What happened, Fredrick?” Captain Danny Thorpe asked. “What did you see? Tell me everything!”
The captain stood six feet even and was thin, with a dark goatee and a clean shaven head, not to mention having a face with at least four scars. He was young at twenty one but surely had seen lots of action on the battle field already; his soldiers respected him for that.
But Fredrick still could not believe what had just transpired. He was pale and trembling mildly, but despite all that, he looked upon his captain, who had been the very same one who had brought him to the region three months ago.
“H-he came out of nowhere, Sir,” Fredrick had trouble explaining due to feeling nervous. “I was shocked after I lay eyes on him. He didn’t appear to be human…and yet…”
“What?” Captain Danny said. “Not human? What are you babbling about?”
“I swear, Sir,” Fredrick gulped under the glare of the captain. “He wasn’t human at all. He appeared to be one, but he had dark horns, and his arms were riddled with dark scales or something.”
The soldier’s story made everyone look at each other.
“Bull****,” the captain cried and then walked past his soldiers and towards the edge of the bridge. He took a hold of the remaining torch and spoke. “It can’t be. The horned devils have not been seen for a long while…centuries even. I don’t even believe in them myself.”
“Are you saying that whatever attacked you, Fredrick, could have been a horned devil?” Pandora cried, shocked and feeling her heart in her throat. She’d heard stories about the horned devils of the east, but just like every other human being, she had not seen one up until that point.
“I don’t know,” Fredrick blurted. “But I know what I saw.”
The captain turned around and went back to the group.
“What are we going to do, Captain?” asked a bewildered Kevin. "Will we be reporting this matter to the Capital? We should, this could be serious. If that was indeed a horned devil, they could be up to something...”
The captain gave the slacker a hard glance. The captain knew that Kevin had been dozing off when the trouble took place, and he had it coming, but now was not the time. Besides, Kevin was right, he knew, the horned devils could be up to something.
“All of you stay here guarding this bridge,” Captain Danny ordered. As he turned to regard Kevin, he went on to say, “Don’t think for one moment that you are out of this just yet, Kevin. We still have to talk about your pitiful duty. But right now I have bigger fish to fry, so I will spare you my wrath momentarily.”
Fredrick gave Kevin a pitiful—yet—serene stare.
“Yes, Sir,” Kevin gulped and lowered his head in shame, also moving aside as the captain made his way past him.
“Rishian, you come with me,” the captain told another soldier. This lad was of medium height, had short, dark hair, and wore glasses over a handsome face.
Rishian nodded and said. “Aye, Cap’n Thorpe.”
“Persia,” the captain turned to regard the other soldier who had come down to the area with him, Pandora, and Rishian.
“Yes, Captain?” Persia asked as she straightened and saluted before the captain.
“You’re in charge while we are away.”
“Yes, Sir,” Persia hid a smile and nodded. “May I inquire as to where you and Rish are headed, Sir?”
“To the capital,” Captain Danny responded. “What happened here tonight merits a report to the high council and to Princess Marine. For all we know, there soon could be trouble coming to our realm from these…horned devils. If Fredrick is right in his account that could have been a spy right there…Perhaps they seek to attack us or something.”
Every soldier trembled in nervousness then, coming to understand the possibility about that.
“Like I said, guard this bridge as best you can, shoot to kill if anyone tries to come from the other side.”
The soldiers nodded, some said that they would guard the bridge with their very own life.
The Captain and Rishian left a few moments later. And the four soldiers who had remained behind near the bridge spent the rest of the night guarding the place well but with a little fear.
***
Part 4/4 of Chapter 10
Artemys had continued running, covering as much ground away from the bridge as he could and believing that the soldiers were coming after him.
He crossed trough those hills as fast as his wounds allowed him to. Nearly half an hour later, Artemys found himself reclined against a jutting stone surrounded by thick brush. He was badly wounded and needed to get himself some medical attention or he feared that he would die. He’d felt like removing the arrows on his arm and leg, but decided not to, believing that it would be for the worst. So he stood up once again and went on like that, the Dragir with hopes of running into one of his kind, if they indeed existed in this place. The Dragir did not doubt their existence, but the thought of running into one was something he thought impossible.
Artemys never ran into one throughout his passage that night. The weakness, the pain, and the fatigue that he felt drove Artemys to sit near the trunk of a large tree. Feeling exhausted and very hurt, he still was well aware of his surroundings, and he wasn’t scared of the noises pertaining to the place that he had come to, never had been scared of places. Not too far he heard the unmistakable sound of streaming water, perhaps of a river, or was it a waterfall? He did not know it but it was actually both: a river with a small waterfall from which water fell and converted into a lake and then back to a thin river at the other end. That noise brought back memories of his years at the orphanage, of those times that he had spent with the humans at the river.
Artemys also heard the sounds of crickets and a few birds chirping above on the trees, and far to the north he barely picked up what could have been other noises that he had never heard before. Artemys did not care where he was, he just chose to remain there staring up at the bright moon and the many stars that covered the sky. He swallowed hard and thought back on all that had happened so far. The Dragir remained there, his thoughts truly a mess. Artemys thought about his mother and the many relatives he had left behind. Had he lost all of that by running away and getting himself killed in his crazy attempt to make it to his homeland? Would he die here tonight? Thoughts like that assaulted him, but Artemys felt proud with himself; he’d come far, he had come. He had made it to his homeland, although hurt, but that was alright with him and made his heart and mind feel proud. If he did come to die that night, he would embrace death happily, for at least he would die back in his homeland and not on a place that he had not belonged in. He would proudly pass from this world after having taken care of his goal, which had been to reach his homeland. He had done just that, and so that was good enough for him. His troubled breathing came in short, slow gasps. No more troubles would he have to go through if he did die, no more hiding, no more of being seen as a freak as a monster. Before he passed away, he realized that he would not be doing that before asking for some form of forgiveness.
“Mothers, please forgive me,” he said then, in a weak voice and referring to both of his mothers: Eve and his true mother, whom he had never known. “And you as well, brothers and sisters.” Those were the orphans he’d shared fourteen years of his life with. “I was probably too weak in the end and may have gotten myself killed. But if I do die, I go happy and proud. I love you all. May...you all live in peace for a long time to come.”
He remained there sobbing and crying and staring up at the sky, at those beautiful shiny stars. In his mind he tried to picture his Dragir mother, but he could not come up with a satisfying image, for he had never seen what her face had looked like, what her hair had looked like, her body size, nor the color of her eyes. Then he shed tears when he remembered how his mother had come to pass. Eve had told him all that she knew, had related to him how she had found his mother laying on the ground with dire wounds and arrow shafts.
“Oh, mother,” Artemys lamented in total sadness that it hurt more than the wounds he had on him. “Perhaps this was destined to happen to me...perhaps the gods wanted for me to die like you did. Maybe I escaped my fate once...but it finally caught up to me...”
Artemys did not know when he finally came to lose consciousness a few minutes later.
He crossed trough those hills as fast as his wounds allowed him to. Nearly half an hour later, Artemys found himself reclined against a jutting stone surrounded by thick brush. He was badly wounded and needed to get himself some medical attention or he feared that he would die. He’d felt like removing the arrows on his arm and leg, but decided not to, believing that it would be for the worst. So he stood up once again and went on like that, the Dragir with hopes of running into one of his kind, if they indeed existed in this place. The Dragir did not doubt their existence, but the thought of running into one was something he thought impossible.
Artemys never ran into one throughout his passage that night. The weakness, the pain, and the fatigue that he felt drove Artemys to sit near the trunk of a large tree. Feeling exhausted and very hurt, he still was well aware of his surroundings, and he wasn’t scared of the noises pertaining to the place that he had come to, never had been scared of places. Not too far he heard the unmistakable sound of streaming water, perhaps of a river, or was it a waterfall? He did not know it but it was actually both: a river with a small waterfall from which water fell and converted into a lake and then back to a thin river at the other end. That noise brought back memories of his years at the orphanage, of those times that he had spent with the humans at the river.
Artemys also heard the sounds of crickets and a few birds chirping above on the trees, and far to the north he barely picked up what could have been other noises that he had never heard before. Artemys did not care where he was, he just chose to remain there staring up at the bright moon and the many stars that covered the sky. He swallowed hard and thought back on all that had happened so far. The Dragir remained there, his thoughts truly a mess. Artemys thought about his mother and the many relatives he had left behind. Had he lost all of that by running away and getting himself killed in his crazy attempt to make it to his homeland? Would he die here tonight? Thoughts like that assaulted him, but Artemys felt proud with himself; he’d come far, he had come. He had made it to his homeland, although hurt, but that was alright with him and made his heart and mind feel proud. If he did come to die that night, he would embrace death happily, for at least he would die back in his homeland and not on a place that he had not belonged in. He would proudly pass from this world after having taken care of his goal, which had been to reach his homeland. He had done just that, and so that was good enough for him. His troubled breathing came in short, slow gasps. No more troubles would he have to go through if he did die, no more hiding, no more of being seen as a freak as a monster. Before he passed away, he realized that he would not be doing that before asking for some form of forgiveness.
“Mothers, please forgive me,” he said then, in a weak voice and referring to both of his mothers: Eve and his true mother, whom he had never known. “And you as well, brothers and sisters.” Those were the orphans he’d shared fourteen years of his life with. “I was probably too weak in the end and may have gotten myself killed. But if I do die, I go happy and proud. I love you all. May...you all live in peace for a long time to come.”
He remained there sobbing and crying and staring up at the sky, at those beautiful shiny stars. In his mind he tried to picture his Dragir mother, but he could not come up with a satisfying image, for he had never seen what her face had looked like, what her hair had looked like, her body size, nor the color of her eyes. Then he shed tears when he remembered how his mother had come to pass. Eve had told him all that she knew, had related to him how she had found his mother laying on the ground with dire wounds and arrow shafts.
“Oh, mother,” Artemys lamented in total sadness that it hurt more than the wounds he had on him. “Perhaps this was destined to happen to me...perhaps the gods wanted for me to die like you did. Maybe I escaped my fate once...but it finally caught up to me...”
Artemys did not know when he finally came to lose consciousness a few minutes later.
*THE END*
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Siniru
Zoldyck family assassin
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2011
Awwwwww! That was brilliant Atsu! Please tell me when you publish the first book, for I am definitely ordering it!
*M i d n a*
Æsir Scribe
Thanks, Siniru.
You probably don't know this but I am not publishing this story, or the other two that will follow this one. Why? Because I chose instead to post it here. :yes: I could if I wanted to, but really, I will not be doing that. I did order this story once, and I showed part of it here with pics and stuff, but that book was for personal use, like to correct typos and to show the result of my hard work to family and friends. I am, however, publishing another series which I am working on as well. That one is called The God Wars Series, and though my created race "Dragir" appear there as well, what you read here has nothing to do with that other story, perhaps a bit, but really, it's a whole new story that I think you'd enjoy. Like I said, I will be offering that as a book, but first I must finish the entire tale, which is also three books, I hope. I am halfway done with it as well, and I intend to even make a site for it, and there you can order the book(s), and any other books that I may write, if you really want to buy them. Until then, I will continue writing this Dragir Tale here, so as to have something to keep me coming here. :nod:Anyway, here's the Epilogue as promised. With this update this first story has really come to an end. More characters are introduced and a lot of info is given as to what has been going on in Dragiria during the time that Artemys spent at the monastery. I hope you all enjoy it and are looking forward to the second story. I probably will be posting that story in a new thread, so look for it, or just look in my siggy for the link, which I will have up ASAP. Btw, do ignore any mistakes you may find, I know that I usually don't make them, but at times I tend to do, and I really would appreciate if you point out any typos.
And thank you all for your kind support.Honors and Honorable Mentions
Honored ZDers: Atsuma, Violet, Shan-Tastic, Pocket Asian, Master Kokiri 9
Honorable Mentions: ElvinKnight, EnemyTracker
Honorable Mentions: ElvinKnight, EnemyTracker
Part 1/3 of Epilogue
Epilogue: The Jyy Princess
Northwest Dragiria, August 24th, Year 381
*Early in the Morning*
Northwest Dragiria, August 24th, Year 381
*Early in the Morning*
The young Jyy princess had come out on this beautiful morning to collect plant and flowers for her sister’s experiments. Yukiko Mizaki was her name. She was a Jyy, an archenemy to the Dragir, but still belonging to that race. She was four inches shy of standing six feet, and her figure was slim—yet she was strong for her size. The Jyy princess had bobbed, white colored hair similar to the color of snow, with many of those hair strands ending in a light blue tone. Her skin was light tan and smooth, for the young Jyy princess had not exposed herself to the harsh environment that much as most of her kin did on a daily basis. Though she was very pretty for a Jyy, her beauty was not her striking feature, those would be her eyes, which were of different color: the left one was bluish and the right one was as white as the snow. She had been born like that, it was not a magical trick or anything, and though many of House Mizaki had often told her that her different eye color actually made her look beautiful, Yukiko had never believed it. Every time that she had looked at her reflection in a mirror she'd felt weird, like if she was a monster and did not belong in the House along with the rest of the Jyy that inhabited it.
Despite her weird eyes, Yukiko was a princess of House Mizaki. As such, Yukiko was dressed in a two-piece dark blue dress of the best material found in Dragiria. The dress had several beautiful symbols near the waistline, and also a hood attached to it, therefore two-pieced. She also wore dark, leather boots and carried a few satchels around her waist belt, which actually sort of covered up the dress symbols. Yukiko also carried a short sword and several throwing daggers on her right and left hip, but those weapons were just for show, for she was no warrior, rather a mage and an excellent archer, though that morning she was not carrying her bow and arrows with her.
With her had come two tough-looking bodyguards dressed in spiky, light-weight armor and holding nasty-looking spears that folded and became swords. The Jyy matriarch of House Mizaki would have it no other way; if her sons or daughters left the House they always had to take company with them. What with the war against the Dragir being at its most hostile point. Houses were warring every day, Houses and their families—both Jyy and Dragir alike—were destroyed almost with every passing day. Death was a part of Dragiria, always had been since the two factions had begun to war with each other. In these dire times it was the Jyy who were winning that war, though, but only because of recent events that had taken the Dragir by surprise. A very powerful Jyy leader had found allies in a hostile race of demons that had lived mostly in secret and seclusion in the southeast mountains on Jyy territory. Fearing the wrath of the violent Jyy, the demons had lived in seclusion within those twin mountains, their numbers growing with each passing year. But their existence was discovered one day by Jyy spies, and the might of the greatest Jyy House came upon them. The demon lord in charge of his race had had no other choice but to surrender, what with the Jyy numbers surpassing his own by thrice as much. The Jyy leader made a pact with the demon lord. He offered them the right to continue living in those mountains without interference from his Jyy people, but they had to come to his aid and fight for him when he called. The demon lord agreed, else he and all his kin would have died that day. That’s how both races had become allies, and with those demon allies helping the cause for this Jyy leader, whose main purpose was to eliminate every Dragir House, powerful Dragirian Houses had been erased forever, including the mighty Crystal City, where many Dragir Houses had once stood. Ever since that assault upon the city, the war had not stopped. The Jyy continued to battle the Dragir and had taken the northern territories from them, forcing them to flee to the south, where they sought help from other Dragir Houses of great power. But few powerful Dragirian Houses remained standing in the southwest of Dragiria, most of them forced to unite with each other in order to survive the oncoming wave. It was well known that it was just a matter of time before this Jyy leader had everything under control, everything in Dragiria under his rule. Even at this very moment a plot was being designed to finally wipe the Dragir forever, with only the Jyy standing tall and firm.
“You two stay put,” Yukiko told the guards as she removed her boots, for she would actually have to cross a stream in order to make it to the other side of the river where she would look for flowers and plants. “I cannot have you come with me. I’ll collect those flower samples on my own.”
“Suit yourself, Princess,” said a pale-skinned Jyy who had long black hair kept in two pigtails, and dark, mean-looking eyes. “Just make sure to call for us if you happen to need us, we’ll be around.”
“I will, Koroko,” the princess rose from her bent position. She saw the two guards turning around ready to leave, so she turned around as well, eager to head into the river in order to cross it so that she could start retrieving plants and flowers for her older sister.
Yukiko did not consider herself a warrior, she saw herself as being a helper rather than a Jyy princess, Jyy warrior, or Jyy battle mage. Humans would have called her an aider to an alchemist, but the Dragir and Jyy did not use that term, so she considered herself a mere helper. Battle had never interested Yukiko, but her love for the research that she had learned by being by her sister’s side had grown through out the years. Her mother, of course, hated the fact that she had turned out to be a little too soft, but she had let her do as she wanted, for she was the youngest member of House Mizaki, and the matriarch of the House believed that one day Yukiko’s time would come for her to show her real worth. Though not a lover of battle and violence, Yukiko helped a lot through whatever potions she came up with. She had learned much from her sister and her specialty was creating poisonous concoctions that could kill a being in a snap of fingers. Through her help, several Gurga and Jyy Houses had been eliminated quite easily, for no other House had the poisons available that Yukiko created. To this day, powerful Jyy Houses dealt with House Mizaki instead of dealing with other Houses, for most Houses sought Yukiko’s finely brewed deadly potions.
The Jyy princess walked slowly into the river, carrying nothing but a large sack in her right hand. She would use that sack to put the plants and flowers in it.
She walked all the way to the other side, which had been some thirty feet away from the southern riverbank where she originally had stood. The northern riverbank was thick with brush, wild flowers, large rocks, and large trees. She immediately headed to where she saw a thorny, greenish plant. Yukiko was quick to cut off what she needed from it. She cut down another similar plant and then moved along to the west, bending low to cut another of the thorny plants. A few red flowers, also thorny on the stem, she put into the bag, followed by large, greenish plants known as “elephant ears”, for their big rough leafs resembled just that: Elephant ears.
Everything was going alright for the princess that morning; she wasn’t having trouble finding what she and her sister needed. The mosquitoes and other flying insects that flew about the place were neither bother nor of interest to her, but a small, purple flower with long petals known as Guerwilons that she still needed to collect was, for without it there would be no poisoned potions this time around, and the House sorely needed them, for they were in the midst of a war against a tough Dragirian House that was giving pain and death as it was taking it. Yukiko did not see any Guerwilons lying around as she stared about, and she grimaced, but she proceeded to head a little deeper into the foliage, knowing that she’d actually find a few. These flowers were rare, few grew every month.
Yukiko came walking near the edge of the lake with a huge tree in front of her. She stared up at its branches but went past it. But then, suddenly her eyes widened in shock when she saw a figure reclined against the trunk of the tree.
“Aghh!” Yukiko gasped and even took a step back, believing that she was doomed. The little Jyy princess also dropped the sack and the palm of her right hand lit up with a fire ball.
But she never threw that fireball at the figure, for this one just remained there, unmoving, and with its eyes closed.
Almost as soon as she had seen the body, Yukiko had recognized it as being of her own kin, but she covered her mouth when she noticed a shaft protruding from the figure’s left shoulder.
“Gah, Help!” she shouted. “Koroko! Alex!”
The two Jyy soldiers had been talking to each other at the other side of the lake, but when they heard the princess’s wild shouts, they were quick to head to her rescue, preparing their silver-made weapons as they went.
“Princess Yukiko!” Koroko cried, the Jyy protector quite in anguish, for if anything bad happened to her, he and his partner would be in for a beating, possibly an execution, for Jyy nobles were not quick to forgive mistakes.
“What is going on?” shouted Alex, the other Jyy. “Where are you?”
“Over here!” Yukiko even came out from the foliage so that they could see her, and she invited them with a signal from her hand.
The two Jyy saw her and headed there immediately, crossing the river without taking their boots off. Their pants became wet all the way to their thighs, but they did not care.
“What happened?” Koroko asked the princess when the two Jyy guards came to stand close to her.
Yukiko merely pointed into the foliage and said, “There, look.”
Koroko and Alex stared at each other, but then it was Koroko who went into the foliage, followed by Alex. The two were able to see the fellow Dragirian who sat unmoving. Instantly as he had seen the figure, Koroko guessed that it was a Gurga and not a Jyy like them. The bodyguard’s face deformed in anger briefly, but then his eyes noticed the beautiful hilt of the sword on his hip. Koroko was quick to lower himself and grabbed the hilt, bringing the sword out and standing up once again. The Jyy had actually feared that the figure would react and attack him, but he felt at ease when he stood back to normality and the figure remained in its sitting position.
“I think it’s a damned Gurga,” Koroko told then, giving the sword to Alex, who took it and ran his eyes all over it. The Jyy came to know that it was just a sword, possibly Dragirian in design and not Jyy, so it was not too much of a valuable piece despite its minor weight and beauty, for in Dragiria the quality weapons were made out of silver, gold, and other raw materials that were extracted from the depths of mountains and mines. Not knowing that the sword was magical and more powerful than the pitiful weapons that he and his partner wielded, Alex dropped the sword on the ground and kicked it several feet away while crying, "Ugly piece of trash."
“A Gurga?” Yukiko’s timid voice was heard from behind, and she approached cautiously behind her guards.
“That’s what I am guessing he is,” said Koroko.
Part 2/3 of Epilogue
The Jyy then lifted the Dragir’s arm up and checked his wrist for a pulse, and he wasn’t that gentle, Yukiko noticed. “Oh...Looks like he’s still alive but wounded, Princess Yukiko. He’s got a pulse on him...”
That shocked the young princess more than she had been when she had seen the body.
“Then we do well to finish him off,” Alex proposed behind Koroko, his dark eyes staring hatefully at the creature. “For all we know he could be a Gurgan spy or something else.”
“No, wait,” Yukiko was frightened to hear that. She abhorred violence; she had never been involved in any kind of battle to witness someone getting killed. “We can’t kill him.”
“But he’s a Gurga, Princess,” Alex turned around and stared at her in bewilderment.
“How can you be sure he’s Gurga and not Jyy?” shot Yukiko.
“He’s got to be,” gasped Alex, the Jyy wanting to put his sword to use. “And as such, he is enemy to us, we must ensure your safety and–”
“Shh, quiet, I know that,” Yukiko was already standing behind them and looking at the Dragir. “In that state I doubt he would be much of a match for us. And we don’t even know if he’s a Gurga, for all we know he could be from a fellow Jyy House.”
Alex just stared at her with incredulous, bulging eyes. “He’s not, Princess. He’s got the stinky smell of a Gurga written all over him.”
“But we don’t know for sure,” Yukiko cried.
“Well whatever the case may be, this poor fool has lost lots of blood,” the princess heard Koroko’s report. “Doubt he’ll be living much longer. Too weak to go on, he must have spent the whole night here, Princess.”
A pool of thick blood visible underneath the seated Dragir was probably proof to that.
Yukiko noticed that Koroko was moving the Dragir about, checking his wounds and not really doing that with the most care in the world. The Jyy bodyguard even grabbed the Dragir by his horns and moved him forward to check his back before tossing him back roughly in place.
“I say he’s a Gurga belonging to some destroyed House,” Alex believed. “He ran off trying to save his a**; lemme finish him off, Princess.”
“No,” Yukiko shouted, shoving Alex aside and coming to stand right behind Koroko. Yukiko had not really liked the way her bodyguard had handled the wounded creature. “I want to see his wounds, so move.”
Koroko turned over his shoulder and regarded her, thinking her crazy. When he didn’t move, Yukiko kicked him lightly on the rump and told him to make way for her. Koroko stood up and moved away, telling the princess that he was sorry, for Yukiko’s words had sounded hot.
Princess Yukiko took a quick look at the Dragir and noticed how young he seemed to be compared to her and her bodyguards. Koroko and Alex were already living past the two century mark, Yukiko was eighty five years old, but she seemed as young as the Dragir himself, still pretty much in her teen years, but she could still tell that the Dragir was way younger than her. Compared to her and the two Jyy guards, the Dragir who sat in front of them was just a young one, a teenager.
“Help me lay him down with care, with his back facing up,” she requested. The two Jyy guards exchanged curious glances at the princess’s request.
“What do you intend to do, Princess?” Koroko didn’t think that was a good idea. “Are you sure you want to be touching this piece of trash with your royal hands?”
I wish she’d touch me instead, thought Alex with a wide grin. Oblivious to the Jyy’s wild and erotic thoughts, Yukiko noticed the grin, though, and she didn’t like that stare one bit.
“Do you want me to hold you two in contempt and have you put in chains when we get back merely for disobeying my orders?” Yukiko stared at Koroko harshly from below. She could have been a violence-loather, perhaps, but Yukiko could definitely become enraged and show her tough side too, at least when it needed to be shown. “You know that my sister, my brothers, and especially my mother, are not as generous as I am.”
“But my liege, he’s just a dirty Gurga,” protested Alex, who was not really looking forward to touching the enemy. Alex was a Jyy to the core, a hater of the righteous Dragir. Many of those damned Dragir had died at his hands, and he had enjoyed killing every one of them, so had the princess not been there with them that morning, he surely wouldn’t have hesitated to finish off the wounded fellow.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Yukiko replied as she swat at a huge mosquito that had dared to fly near her nose.
But Alex was a stubborn fool as much as he was a Dragir hater.
“I am a hundred percent sure that he’s one of those pigs and–”
“Damn it! Do as I say or you’ll suffer the consequences!” Yukiko stood up and challenged the Jyy face to face, her right hand fingers curled and showed a nasty flame there, which began to grow into a small ball. Yukiko had just summoned a fireball to her hand. “I am the one who gives the orders out here, not you!”
“Don’t anger our beautiful princess, you fool,” Koroko acted quickly and shoved Alex aside. The two immediately moved to obey, before the princess took her actions any further.
“Be careful about it too,” Yukiko warned, letting the fire die in her hand. “Or I will have you thrown into the dungeon for a whole year with a meal every other day.”
She was a princess; she could do that and much more if she so wanted to, even kill them on the spot for disobeying her. But Yukiko was not about to kill them, she hated violence, although she hated it more when she was disobeyed.
The Dragir finally lay on the position that the princess had requested. The Jyy rose up and stared curiously at her, Alex wanting to strangle her but knowing better.
“There, all done, Princess,” Koroko informed, sounding not too pleased after what he had done.
“Good, now step aside,” Yukiko bade them, willing to have a look at the wounds on the Dragir, for something odd had caught her eye then, though she did not reveal this fact to the two protectors. As a mage that she also was, she knew magic that could help stop the bleeding: healing magic. She got close and knelt beside the Dragir, her hands carefully examining the wounded arm. She noticed that the Jyy had taken her order for granted and had not moved.
“Didn’t you two hear me?” she looked up at them with a menacing stare.
The two Jyy obeyed her command, giving her enough room, but Yukiko had run out of patience with the two fools and added, “You know what, just leave me alone with him. I need to be able to concentrate here. Go back to the House and inform someone of my family about what’s happened. Tell them to send help, and make sure that a stretcher makes its way here, you understand?”
“A stretcher?” Alex cried in disgust. “What for, Princess?”
“Now you are just asking for it,” Yukiko shouted, and she made a move to stand up, but she didn’t because Koroko stepped in front of her.
“Don’t mind this fool, Princess,” Koroko was quick to say. “We’ll do what you’ve requested.”
“Then go now before I lose my patience with you two!”
“As you wish,” Koroko said without hesitating. Looking over at Alex with angry eyes, he barked, “Come on, you fool, we have our orders.” He even dragged his colleague along with him, the two crossing the lake in a hurry, splashing water wildly as they went.
Yukiko was left alone with the wounded Dragir, the Jyy princess unafraid and very willing to help save his life, for she understood that this Dragir, if he wasn’t a fellow Jyy, could come handy to her House. This sort of action was not entirely new, it was well known that other Jyy had saved enemies in the past only to have them become prisoners, have them join their cause, or have them executed later in time for the viewing pleasure of many Jyy nobles and non-nobles.
Yukiko moved the shirt up and exposed the Dragir’s skin, the Jyy princess feeling a bit ill when she noticed the wound and blood and pus still oozing from it. The good thing was that the Dragir still drew breath; the arrow had missed vital parts. Yes, Yukiko knew, he was alive but surely just barely. Without wasting time, she summoned a magical spell that would cauterize the wound on his lower back, stopping the bleeding. It took a few minutes, but she managed to do it to perfection, just as her mother had taught her how many years ago.
There were still two more wounds to heal, but first Yukiko had to remove the arrows. Those arrows had been what had struck her as being odd. These were not bolt shafts as the ones that both Dragir and Jyy used for their crossbows and bows; she noted that these were smaller and different. Was this a different type of bolt, perhaps a much smaller and faster-traveling one? If so, had this creature–whether he was Jyy or Gurga–been used as a test subject for it? Or had he escaped from a House on House battle? She did not know, but the weird bolts would surely serve a purpose as well.
The princess brought her attention back to the matter at hand, which was to cure the Dragir’s wounds. She could have panicked and waited for help to arrive, for Yukiko had never pulled arrows out from a wounded body, but she noticed that blood flowed freely from those wounds as well–slowly but surely. It could mean a sure end for the Dragir creature if the wounds were not treated, and Yukiko did not want to witness his death with her own eyes.
The princess closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and grabbed the arrow shaft that stuck from the Dragir’s shoulder.
“Come on, Yuki,” she cheered herself on. “You can do it.”
That shocked the young princess more than she had been when she had seen the body.
“Then we do well to finish him off,” Alex proposed behind Koroko, his dark eyes staring hatefully at the creature. “For all we know he could be a Gurgan spy or something else.”
“No, wait,” Yukiko was frightened to hear that. She abhorred violence; she had never been involved in any kind of battle to witness someone getting killed. “We can’t kill him.”
“But he’s a Gurga, Princess,” Alex turned around and stared at her in bewilderment.
“How can you be sure he’s Gurga and not Jyy?” shot Yukiko.
“He’s got to be,” gasped Alex, the Jyy wanting to put his sword to use. “And as such, he is enemy to us, we must ensure your safety and–”
“Shh, quiet, I know that,” Yukiko was already standing behind them and looking at the Dragir. “In that state I doubt he would be much of a match for us. And we don’t even know if he’s a Gurga, for all we know he could be from a fellow Jyy House.”
Alex just stared at her with incredulous, bulging eyes. “He’s not, Princess. He’s got the stinky smell of a Gurga written all over him.”
“But we don’t know for sure,” Yukiko cried.
“Well whatever the case may be, this poor fool has lost lots of blood,” the princess heard Koroko’s report. “Doubt he’ll be living much longer. Too weak to go on, he must have spent the whole night here, Princess.”
A pool of thick blood visible underneath the seated Dragir was probably proof to that.
Yukiko noticed that Koroko was moving the Dragir about, checking his wounds and not really doing that with the most care in the world. The Jyy bodyguard even grabbed the Dragir by his horns and moved him forward to check his back before tossing him back roughly in place.
“I say he’s a Gurga belonging to some destroyed House,” Alex believed. “He ran off trying to save his a**; lemme finish him off, Princess.”
“No,” Yukiko shouted, shoving Alex aside and coming to stand right behind Koroko. Yukiko had not really liked the way her bodyguard had handled the wounded creature. “I want to see his wounds, so move.”
Koroko turned over his shoulder and regarded her, thinking her crazy. When he didn’t move, Yukiko kicked him lightly on the rump and told him to make way for her. Koroko stood up and moved away, telling the princess that he was sorry, for Yukiko’s words had sounded hot.
Princess Yukiko took a quick look at the Dragir and noticed how young he seemed to be compared to her and her bodyguards. Koroko and Alex were already living past the two century mark, Yukiko was eighty five years old, but she seemed as young as the Dragir himself, still pretty much in her teen years, but she could still tell that the Dragir was way younger than her. Compared to her and the two Jyy guards, the Dragir who sat in front of them was just a young one, a teenager.
“Help me lay him down with care, with his back facing up,” she requested. The two Jyy guards exchanged curious glances at the princess’s request.
“What do you intend to do, Princess?” Koroko didn’t think that was a good idea. “Are you sure you want to be touching this piece of trash with your royal hands?”
I wish she’d touch me instead, thought Alex with a wide grin. Oblivious to the Jyy’s wild and erotic thoughts, Yukiko noticed the grin, though, and she didn’t like that stare one bit.
“Do you want me to hold you two in contempt and have you put in chains when we get back merely for disobeying my orders?” Yukiko stared at Koroko harshly from below. She could have been a violence-loather, perhaps, but Yukiko could definitely become enraged and show her tough side too, at least when it needed to be shown. “You know that my sister, my brothers, and especially my mother, are not as generous as I am.”
“But my liege, he’s just a dirty Gurga,” protested Alex, who was not really looking forward to touching the enemy. Alex was a Jyy to the core, a hater of the righteous Dragir. Many of those damned Dragir had died at his hands, and he had enjoyed killing every one of them, so had the princess not been there with them that morning, he surely wouldn’t have hesitated to finish off the wounded fellow.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Yukiko replied as she swat at a huge mosquito that had dared to fly near her nose.
But Alex was a stubborn fool as much as he was a Dragir hater.
“I am a hundred percent sure that he’s one of those pigs and–”
“Damn it! Do as I say or you’ll suffer the consequences!” Yukiko stood up and challenged the Jyy face to face, her right hand fingers curled and showed a nasty flame there, which began to grow into a small ball. Yukiko had just summoned a fireball to her hand. “I am the one who gives the orders out here, not you!”
“Don’t anger our beautiful princess, you fool,” Koroko acted quickly and shoved Alex aside. The two immediately moved to obey, before the princess took her actions any further.
“Be careful about it too,” Yukiko warned, letting the fire die in her hand. “Or I will have you thrown into the dungeon for a whole year with a meal every other day.”
She was a princess; she could do that and much more if she so wanted to, even kill them on the spot for disobeying her. But Yukiko was not about to kill them, she hated violence, although she hated it more when she was disobeyed.
The Dragir finally lay on the position that the princess had requested. The Jyy rose up and stared curiously at her, Alex wanting to strangle her but knowing better.
“There, all done, Princess,” Koroko informed, sounding not too pleased after what he had done.
“Good, now step aside,” Yukiko bade them, willing to have a look at the wounds on the Dragir, for something odd had caught her eye then, though she did not reveal this fact to the two protectors. As a mage that she also was, she knew magic that could help stop the bleeding: healing magic. She got close and knelt beside the Dragir, her hands carefully examining the wounded arm. She noticed that the Jyy had taken her order for granted and had not moved.
“Didn’t you two hear me?” she looked up at them with a menacing stare.
The two Jyy obeyed her command, giving her enough room, but Yukiko had run out of patience with the two fools and added, “You know what, just leave me alone with him. I need to be able to concentrate here. Go back to the House and inform someone of my family about what’s happened. Tell them to send help, and make sure that a stretcher makes its way here, you understand?”
“A stretcher?” Alex cried in disgust. “What for, Princess?”
“Now you are just asking for it,” Yukiko shouted, and she made a move to stand up, but she didn’t because Koroko stepped in front of her.
“Don’t mind this fool, Princess,” Koroko was quick to say. “We’ll do what you’ve requested.”
“Then go now before I lose my patience with you two!”
“As you wish,” Koroko said without hesitating. Looking over at Alex with angry eyes, he barked, “Come on, you fool, we have our orders.” He even dragged his colleague along with him, the two crossing the lake in a hurry, splashing water wildly as they went.
Yukiko was left alone with the wounded Dragir, the Jyy princess unafraid and very willing to help save his life, for she understood that this Dragir, if he wasn’t a fellow Jyy, could come handy to her House. This sort of action was not entirely new, it was well known that other Jyy had saved enemies in the past only to have them become prisoners, have them join their cause, or have them executed later in time for the viewing pleasure of many Jyy nobles and non-nobles.
Yukiko moved the shirt up and exposed the Dragir’s skin, the Jyy princess feeling a bit ill when she noticed the wound and blood and pus still oozing from it. The good thing was that the Dragir still drew breath; the arrow had missed vital parts. Yes, Yukiko knew, he was alive but surely just barely. Without wasting time, she summoned a magical spell that would cauterize the wound on his lower back, stopping the bleeding. It took a few minutes, but she managed to do it to perfection, just as her mother had taught her how many years ago.
There were still two more wounds to heal, but first Yukiko had to remove the arrows. Those arrows had been what had struck her as being odd. These were not bolt shafts as the ones that both Dragir and Jyy used for their crossbows and bows; she noted that these were smaller and different. Was this a different type of bolt, perhaps a much smaller and faster-traveling one? If so, had this creature–whether he was Jyy or Gurga–been used as a test subject for it? Or had he escaped from a House on House battle? She did not know, but the weird bolts would surely serve a purpose as well.
The princess brought her attention back to the matter at hand, which was to cure the Dragir’s wounds. She could have panicked and waited for help to arrive, for Yukiko had never pulled arrows out from a wounded body, but she noticed that blood flowed freely from those wounds as well–slowly but surely. It could mean a sure end for the Dragir creature if the wounds were not treated, and Yukiko did not want to witness his death with her own eyes.
The princess closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and grabbed the arrow shaft that stuck from the Dragir’s shoulder.
“Come on, Yuki,” she cheered herself on. “You can do it.”
Part 3/3 of Epilogue
She could not be able to witness the blood pouring out as she pulled on the shaft, that is why she had closed her eyes, but she drew the arrow out slowly and carefully. When it had come out in its totality, she didn't take a look at it; she just placed it at the side. And again she went on to cauterize the wound, working her magic to perfection. The wound in the Dragir's leg followed, with Yukiko removing the arrow and proceeding to seal the wound.
When she was done, she stood up and looked down upon the Dragir, feeling impressed with her work, for no more blood came out from the wounds, rather the skin that had been punctured now appeared as if it never had been.
“Ah, the power of healing magic,” Yukiko smiled proudly, but she nearly fainted from weakness, for in curing the Dragir she had given away part of her strength, part of her energy. She sat down right beside him, careful not to touch him, for she did not want to hurt him. As she sat there, Yukiko began to wonder how he might have ended there and so badly wounded. Then her eyes landed on the blade that Alex had kicked away. She crawled to it and grabbed it, inspecting it as she went back to her sitting position near the wounded Dragir. She agreed with herself that the sword was a beauty, and once again she regarded the Dragir.
“What happened to you?” she whispered.
Yukiko waited for help to arrive, and that took about an hour, for her House had been at least two miles away from her current position. Getting there on foot took about half an hour, and mostly because of the rough, sierra-like terrain.
While she waited, she took the time to look thoroughly at the Dragir. He was handsome, she believed, and well built. Yukiko chuckled embarrassingly at herself for believing that, but then a scowl appeared on her face when she remembered that he could be a Gurga. Despite her amazement with herself, for few times had she deemed a male Dragir worthy of her compliments, she picked up the smallish arrows and the sword and crossed the lake, where she waited for help to arrive while observing the arrows.
Around fifteen minutes later she noticed a group of six Jyy approaching in the distance, with a well dressed figure leading them, making the group be seven total. Yukiko knew that front figure well. She smiled when she laid eyes on her mother.
Her own mother had come out, truly worried after what the two bodyguards had related to her back at the House.
“Are you alright, Yukiko?” she arrived and was quick to place a hand on her shoulder and another one at her cheek. She was taller than Yukiko at six feet even, had short, dark hair, pale skin, and a pair of beautiful green eyes that could have resembled valuable gems. She was beautiful, even with that face of hers which seemed to hold a snarl all the time.
The matriarch, whose name was Shan, was dressed in a fine outfit suitable for a queen. She wore light-weight armor over a dark blouse and a long white skirt with bluish symbols all over the fabric. The skirt fell to her knees, and her feet were covered with dark, long boots that reached up to her kneecaps. A black belt that she wore around her waist was host to several satchels and a silver scabbard that housed a beautiful silver sword with the hilt holding a diamond in place.
“I’m perfectly well, Mother,” Yukiko said. “I was never in any danger.”
“But Koroko said that you could be…”
“Koroko has always been too over protective,” Yukiko interrupted. “He’d kill a fly if this one landed on my arm.”
Her mother chuckled at that observation, for it was sort of true.
Yukiko noticed that Koroko and Alex were not in the group that had come, but she believed that perhaps her mother had told them to stay at the House after the trouble they had gone just to inform her of the news.
“I am fine,” Yukiko added. “And the Dragir is fine, too. I took care of cauterizing the wounds, but you might have to take a look at him yourself, Mother, you’re better than me when it comes to healing matters. And…perhaps you may know him.”
“Well where is he?” Matriarch Shan looked about the place.
“Over behind that tree,” informed Yukiko as she pointed toward the spot with her hand as well. Her mother nodded at the pair of Jyy who held the stretcher.
“Bring him to me.”
The Jyy went to do just that, crossing the river without pausing to remove their gear.
"Get my sack while you're at it," Yukiko yelled, to what one of the Jyy turned over his shoulder and nodded at her.
Moments later, they lowered the loaded stretcher to the ground, and matriarch Shan walked toward it, willing to lay eyes on the wounded Dragir. Yukiko walked up to the stretcher as well, and one of the Jyy handed over the sack to her. The four elite guards of Matriarch Shan kept a good watch all around the place, but as soon as she had approached the wounded Dragir, one of them, a female soldier, came to stand close to the Dragir’s head, her long spear pointing down at the creature's neck in a protective gesture for his queen.
Matriarch Shan wasn’t too concerned with the creature, for she knew that in his state he was harmless. "Easy there," the matriarch told the guard, who indeed did relax at her voice.
Shan looked at the Dragir for a while, wondering whether he was Jyy or Gurga. Then Yukiko asked her whether she knew him or not.
“Do you know if he’s from some Jyy House close to ours?” was what the young princess had asked.
“He’s a young one,” Matriarch Shan told. “And no, I have never seen him before. From the looks of it, he appears to be a warrior, though.”
“He was carrying this sword,” Yukiko handed it over.
Matriarch Shan stared at the fine piece of blade as it rested in her hands.
“Oh,” Shan was perplexed at how light-weight the sword seemed to be. “Weird...I never have wielded such a light-weight sword before.”
“So now what happens?” Yukiko asked, surely concerned at what was going to happen with the Dragir. Her mother was not known to have pity on Gurga prisoners. “Oh yes, look at these, too.” She lifted her hand and showed the arrows to her mother, who grabbed one and lifted it up, close enough to give it a good inspection as she had done to the sword.
“These are not Dragir or Jyy made,” she was quick to announce, her eyes scanning the length of the arrow. “I’ve never seen one, not even in the black market. Could it be that the Dragir have started building them smaller?”
“That is what I thought,” Yukiko told her. “But I couldn’t be sure. Less weight means more speed, right?”
Her mother offered her the arrow but not the sword, and then she stared down at the wounded creature, her hand maneuvering the sword in a series of cuts to the air.
“Mother?” Yukiko called for her attention, believing that she was about to deliver a final merciful blow upon the creature. “You’re not planning on killing him after I went through all the trouble of healing him?”
“What do you expect me to do with this creature?” Matriarch Shan asked, still maneuvering the sword about, the Jyy leader liking how the light-weight sword felt in her hand. “You do know that he could be a Gurga, right? He could be an escapee to a destroyed House. A few days ago House Benefatos was destroyed by House Ingrenam, and where that happened is not so far off...”
“Just seven miles to the south of here,” assisted one of her bodyguards. Matriarch Shan and Yukiko stared at him, but he only nodded at them with a smile, assuring them that he only meant to help by pinpointing the exact location of where the battle had happened.
“I know that,” Yukiko replied at her mother, coolly and respectfully, but she felt like getting away, for she believed that her mother was upset at her for having to come to fix the creature up. “You know that I would have never refused to help him,” Yukiko added. “I thought that perhaps you could use him to your advantage.”
“To my advantage?” The Matriarch asked with wild eyes.
“I meant to say to our advantage, Mother. We could like trade him off for something in return if he happens to be a damned Gurga. I don’t know, perhaps you could use him to have my very own brother and some Jyy prisoners returned to us. The Gurga are always willing to trade so long as they get their own people back, right?”
Her mother chuckled lightly as she headed walking towards her daughter, for she clearly had read the hope behind her words. She handed the fabulous looking sword to her and said, “Perhaps you may not share our beliefs or enjoy battling at all, but you still help the House in many ways. You did well, Yukiko,” a gleam showed in her pretty emerald eyes as she stared at her daughter. “Be proud of yourself this day. This Jyy or Gurga, whatever the heck he is, will surely be of good use to us. As you have suggested, perhaps we can get Kotetsu back via a trade with House Stargleam. I’d hate to learn that my son was killed at the hands of those damned Gurga.”
“So that means we will be taking the Dragir into custody?” Yukiko surely sounded hopeful, and within she scolded herself for letting it show, but her heart really lit up in happiness at the mere possibility that the Dragir could play a crucial role in bringing her own brother back to them.
Her mother did not reply right away, rather she turned to regard the Dragir once again, who still laid on the ground, with the two Jyy assistants seeming eager to seize the stretcher and proceed to return to the House with him; a prisoner nowadays was coveted like gold. She glanced at the Jyy and nodded lightly at them, letting them know that they could proceed to do just that. The Jyy moved to obey right away, picking up the stretcher from both ends and rushing past the matriarch and her daughter.
“Custody?” the matriarch cried, putting her right arm around her daughter’s neck and starting to head back home with her youngest daughter alongside. “He’s done nothing to us, why should we hold him in custody? No, dear, we’ll be taking him, alright, but you will be in charge of watching over him. He’ll be a guest.”
“What?” Yukiko was shocked to hear that. She moved away from her mother and stood in front of her, hands on her hips. “How do you suppose I will be doing that?”
“He’ll be imprisoned, but treated as a guest, although it will be you who will be taking him his meals, interrogating him, finding the truth about him and whatnot. You know how our servants are when it comes to handling Gurga.”
“They just wish to pound the living crap out of them,” Yukiko seemed upset.
“Surely none would be willing to treat one with care, like you would.” Matriarch Shan pointed out.
Yukiko knew that was the plain truth. “And what if he is a Jyy? What if he is one of us?”
“That’s what we are going to find out as soon as he is well,” smiled her mother. “Thus we cannot make assumptions at this moment and treat him like a Gurga, but a guest.”
“Yes, I understand that, but why should I look after him at all? I just saved him, that’s all. You are better off appointing one of your servants to this matter.”
Her mother appeared upset then, and Yukiko did not like to see that face, for most of the time she usually ended grounded or chastised badly.
“You’ll be doing that or I will order my bodyguards to stop and end with his miserable life right here and right now! No, not that, I have a better idea: perhaps I’ll give him to your sister Zolanda, you know how evil she can be...”
Her words even made the elite guards tremble in their places, who knew how far Zolanda like to go with filthy Gurga. Yukiko shivered wildly too, knowing that. She did not know what to say, she just looked at her mother in disbelief before cowering and lowering her stare.
“If we are to use this Dragir as a bartering tool, we must treat him well,” said her mother. “I loathe the Gurga, but it is for the best that we do just that with him. You found him, you saved him, and so you have to watch over him, regardless if he is a Jyy or Gurga. Nobody else will want to, so what will it be, Yukiko?”
Yukiko remained quiet for a while and staring low. A few seconds later she turned her attention to the east, where the two Jyy assistants still could be seen as they transported the injured Dragir. Was he worth the trouble?
She probably had just saved his life, and to see him dead merely because she would refuse to look after him did not sit too well with her. He was just a young one, a teenage Dragir or Jyy. In a way she had asked for this by saving him, so she nodded to herself and then stared at her mother and said, “Alright, Mother. You win. I will look after him and do whatever you want me to do when it comes to extracting information out of him by peaceful means. But be warned now: I won’t be using violence against him if he refuses to talk. You hear me? You and I understand just how proud and tough Gurga really are, so if he turns out to be one, I won’t be a part of any violence if it comes to that with him. Do you understand me?”
The matriarch thought on that for a while, but she proceeded to nod and chuckle, mostly because of the way her daughter looked to her at the moment: she had a mild, angry expression on her face and appeared to be fully anxious, but that only made her look so pretty, made her look more like a Jyy.
“You’re really as tough as a dragon,” said Matriarch Shan. “You should see the deadly gleam behind your eyes right now, Yuki.”
“I just want what is just,” said Yukiko. “Nothing more.”
“Then I will hold you true to your word, Yuki.” Matriarch Shan’s voice was serious.
“And I to yours,” Yukiko was quick to reply with a serious tone as well, her stare on her mother’s beautiful face.
Matriarch Shan chuckled and nodded at her and said nothing more.
The group returned back to the House about an hour later. The wounded Dragir was not even sent down below to the dungeon, Matriarch Shan ordered that a clean room be prepared on the second level close to Yukiko’s own quarters. The matriarch ordered that the room be barred like a prisoner’s cell in the dungeons below, so as to keep the Dragir behind bars and from escaping, not to mention her daughter safe. The windows were barred as was the door.
Unbeknownst to Artemys, he had done it, he had achieved his goal. He had suffered through it all, his wounds had nearly claimed his life, but he would make it; he would survive. He was alive and back in Dragiria, his true homeland, albeit in enemy hands.
***To Be Continued***
When she was done, she stood up and looked down upon the Dragir, feeling impressed with her work, for no more blood came out from the wounds, rather the skin that had been punctured now appeared as if it never had been.
“Ah, the power of healing magic,” Yukiko smiled proudly, but she nearly fainted from weakness, for in curing the Dragir she had given away part of her strength, part of her energy. She sat down right beside him, careful not to touch him, for she did not want to hurt him. As she sat there, Yukiko began to wonder how he might have ended there and so badly wounded. Then her eyes landed on the blade that Alex had kicked away. She crawled to it and grabbed it, inspecting it as she went back to her sitting position near the wounded Dragir. She agreed with herself that the sword was a beauty, and once again she regarded the Dragir.
“What happened to you?” she whispered.
Yukiko waited for help to arrive, and that took about an hour, for her House had been at least two miles away from her current position. Getting there on foot took about half an hour, and mostly because of the rough, sierra-like terrain.
While she waited, she took the time to look thoroughly at the Dragir. He was handsome, she believed, and well built. Yukiko chuckled embarrassingly at herself for believing that, but then a scowl appeared on her face when she remembered that he could be a Gurga. Despite her amazement with herself, for few times had she deemed a male Dragir worthy of her compliments, she picked up the smallish arrows and the sword and crossed the lake, where she waited for help to arrive while observing the arrows.
Around fifteen minutes later she noticed a group of six Jyy approaching in the distance, with a well dressed figure leading them, making the group be seven total. Yukiko knew that front figure well. She smiled when she laid eyes on her mother.
Her own mother had come out, truly worried after what the two bodyguards had related to her back at the House.
“Are you alright, Yukiko?” she arrived and was quick to place a hand on her shoulder and another one at her cheek. She was taller than Yukiko at six feet even, had short, dark hair, pale skin, and a pair of beautiful green eyes that could have resembled valuable gems. She was beautiful, even with that face of hers which seemed to hold a snarl all the time.
The matriarch, whose name was Shan, was dressed in a fine outfit suitable for a queen. She wore light-weight armor over a dark blouse and a long white skirt with bluish symbols all over the fabric. The skirt fell to her knees, and her feet were covered with dark, long boots that reached up to her kneecaps. A black belt that she wore around her waist was host to several satchels and a silver scabbard that housed a beautiful silver sword with the hilt holding a diamond in place.
“I’m perfectly well, Mother,” Yukiko said. “I was never in any danger.”
“But Koroko said that you could be…”
“Koroko has always been too over protective,” Yukiko interrupted. “He’d kill a fly if this one landed on my arm.”
Her mother chuckled at that observation, for it was sort of true.
Yukiko noticed that Koroko and Alex were not in the group that had come, but she believed that perhaps her mother had told them to stay at the House after the trouble they had gone just to inform her of the news.
“I am fine,” Yukiko added. “And the Dragir is fine, too. I took care of cauterizing the wounds, but you might have to take a look at him yourself, Mother, you’re better than me when it comes to healing matters. And…perhaps you may know him.”
“Well where is he?” Matriarch Shan looked about the place.
“Over behind that tree,” informed Yukiko as she pointed toward the spot with her hand as well. Her mother nodded at the pair of Jyy who held the stretcher.
“Bring him to me.”
The Jyy went to do just that, crossing the river without pausing to remove their gear.
"Get my sack while you're at it," Yukiko yelled, to what one of the Jyy turned over his shoulder and nodded at her.
Moments later, they lowered the loaded stretcher to the ground, and matriarch Shan walked toward it, willing to lay eyes on the wounded Dragir. Yukiko walked up to the stretcher as well, and one of the Jyy handed over the sack to her. The four elite guards of Matriarch Shan kept a good watch all around the place, but as soon as she had approached the wounded Dragir, one of them, a female soldier, came to stand close to the Dragir’s head, her long spear pointing down at the creature's neck in a protective gesture for his queen.
Matriarch Shan wasn’t too concerned with the creature, for she knew that in his state he was harmless. "Easy there," the matriarch told the guard, who indeed did relax at her voice.
Shan looked at the Dragir for a while, wondering whether he was Jyy or Gurga. Then Yukiko asked her whether she knew him or not.
“Do you know if he’s from some Jyy House close to ours?” was what the young princess had asked.
“He’s a young one,” Matriarch Shan told. “And no, I have never seen him before. From the looks of it, he appears to be a warrior, though.”
“He was carrying this sword,” Yukiko handed it over.
Matriarch Shan stared at the fine piece of blade as it rested in her hands.
“Oh,” Shan was perplexed at how light-weight the sword seemed to be. “Weird...I never have wielded such a light-weight sword before.”
“So now what happens?” Yukiko asked, surely concerned at what was going to happen with the Dragir. Her mother was not known to have pity on Gurga prisoners. “Oh yes, look at these, too.” She lifted her hand and showed the arrows to her mother, who grabbed one and lifted it up, close enough to give it a good inspection as she had done to the sword.
“These are not Dragir or Jyy made,” she was quick to announce, her eyes scanning the length of the arrow. “I’ve never seen one, not even in the black market. Could it be that the Dragir have started building them smaller?”
“That is what I thought,” Yukiko told her. “But I couldn’t be sure. Less weight means more speed, right?”
Her mother offered her the arrow but not the sword, and then she stared down at the wounded creature, her hand maneuvering the sword in a series of cuts to the air.
“Mother?” Yukiko called for her attention, believing that she was about to deliver a final merciful blow upon the creature. “You’re not planning on killing him after I went through all the trouble of healing him?”
“What do you expect me to do with this creature?” Matriarch Shan asked, still maneuvering the sword about, the Jyy leader liking how the light-weight sword felt in her hand. “You do know that he could be a Gurga, right? He could be an escapee to a destroyed House. A few days ago House Benefatos was destroyed by House Ingrenam, and where that happened is not so far off...”
“Just seven miles to the south of here,” assisted one of her bodyguards. Matriarch Shan and Yukiko stared at him, but he only nodded at them with a smile, assuring them that he only meant to help by pinpointing the exact location of where the battle had happened.
“I know that,” Yukiko replied at her mother, coolly and respectfully, but she felt like getting away, for she believed that her mother was upset at her for having to come to fix the creature up. “You know that I would have never refused to help him,” Yukiko added. “I thought that perhaps you could use him to your advantage.”
“To my advantage?” The Matriarch asked with wild eyes.
“I meant to say to our advantage, Mother. We could like trade him off for something in return if he happens to be a damned Gurga. I don’t know, perhaps you could use him to have my very own brother and some Jyy prisoners returned to us. The Gurga are always willing to trade so long as they get their own people back, right?”
Her mother chuckled lightly as she headed walking towards her daughter, for she clearly had read the hope behind her words. She handed the fabulous looking sword to her and said, “Perhaps you may not share our beliefs or enjoy battling at all, but you still help the House in many ways. You did well, Yukiko,” a gleam showed in her pretty emerald eyes as she stared at her daughter. “Be proud of yourself this day. This Jyy or Gurga, whatever the heck he is, will surely be of good use to us. As you have suggested, perhaps we can get Kotetsu back via a trade with House Stargleam. I’d hate to learn that my son was killed at the hands of those damned Gurga.”
“So that means we will be taking the Dragir into custody?” Yukiko surely sounded hopeful, and within she scolded herself for letting it show, but her heart really lit up in happiness at the mere possibility that the Dragir could play a crucial role in bringing her own brother back to them.
Her mother did not reply right away, rather she turned to regard the Dragir once again, who still laid on the ground, with the two Jyy assistants seeming eager to seize the stretcher and proceed to return to the House with him; a prisoner nowadays was coveted like gold. She glanced at the Jyy and nodded lightly at them, letting them know that they could proceed to do just that. The Jyy moved to obey right away, picking up the stretcher from both ends and rushing past the matriarch and her daughter.
“Custody?” the matriarch cried, putting her right arm around her daughter’s neck and starting to head back home with her youngest daughter alongside. “He’s done nothing to us, why should we hold him in custody? No, dear, we’ll be taking him, alright, but you will be in charge of watching over him. He’ll be a guest.”
“What?” Yukiko was shocked to hear that. She moved away from her mother and stood in front of her, hands on her hips. “How do you suppose I will be doing that?”
“He’ll be imprisoned, but treated as a guest, although it will be you who will be taking him his meals, interrogating him, finding the truth about him and whatnot. You know how our servants are when it comes to handling Gurga.”
“They just wish to pound the living crap out of them,” Yukiko seemed upset.
“Surely none would be willing to treat one with care, like you would.” Matriarch Shan pointed out.
Yukiko knew that was the plain truth. “And what if he is a Jyy? What if he is one of us?”
“That’s what we are going to find out as soon as he is well,” smiled her mother. “Thus we cannot make assumptions at this moment and treat him like a Gurga, but a guest.”
“Yes, I understand that, but why should I look after him at all? I just saved him, that’s all. You are better off appointing one of your servants to this matter.”
Her mother appeared upset then, and Yukiko did not like to see that face, for most of the time she usually ended grounded or chastised badly.
“You’ll be doing that or I will order my bodyguards to stop and end with his miserable life right here and right now! No, not that, I have a better idea: perhaps I’ll give him to your sister Zolanda, you know how evil she can be...”
Her words even made the elite guards tremble in their places, who knew how far Zolanda like to go with filthy Gurga. Yukiko shivered wildly too, knowing that. She did not know what to say, she just looked at her mother in disbelief before cowering and lowering her stare.
“If we are to use this Dragir as a bartering tool, we must treat him well,” said her mother. “I loathe the Gurga, but it is for the best that we do just that with him. You found him, you saved him, and so you have to watch over him, regardless if he is a Jyy or Gurga. Nobody else will want to, so what will it be, Yukiko?”
Yukiko remained quiet for a while and staring low. A few seconds later she turned her attention to the east, where the two Jyy assistants still could be seen as they transported the injured Dragir. Was he worth the trouble?
She probably had just saved his life, and to see him dead merely because she would refuse to look after him did not sit too well with her. He was just a young one, a teenage Dragir or Jyy. In a way she had asked for this by saving him, so she nodded to herself and then stared at her mother and said, “Alright, Mother. You win. I will look after him and do whatever you want me to do when it comes to extracting information out of him by peaceful means. But be warned now: I won’t be using violence against him if he refuses to talk. You hear me? You and I understand just how proud and tough Gurga really are, so if he turns out to be one, I won’t be a part of any violence if it comes to that with him. Do you understand me?”
The matriarch thought on that for a while, but she proceeded to nod and chuckle, mostly because of the way her daughter looked to her at the moment: she had a mild, angry expression on her face and appeared to be fully anxious, but that only made her look so pretty, made her look more like a Jyy.
“You’re really as tough as a dragon,” said Matriarch Shan. “You should see the deadly gleam behind your eyes right now, Yuki.”
“I just want what is just,” said Yukiko. “Nothing more.”
“Then I will hold you true to your word, Yuki.” Matriarch Shan’s voice was serious.
“And I to yours,” Yukiko was quick to reply with a serious tone as well, her stare on her mother’s beautiful face.
Matriarch Shan chuckled and nodded at her and said nothing more.
The group returned back to the House about an hour later. The wounded Dragir was not even sent down below to the dungeon, Matriarch Shan ordered that a clean room be prepared on the second level close to Yukiko’s own quarters. The matriarch ordered that the room be barred like a prisoner’s cell in the dungeons below, so as to keep the Dragir behind bars and from escaping, not to mention her daughter safe. The windows were barred as was the door.
Unbeknownst to Artemys, he had done it, he had achieved his goal. He had suffered through it all, his wounds had nearly claimed his life, but he would make it; he would survive. He was alive and back in Dragiria, his true homeland, albeit in enemy hands.
***To Be Continued***
Special Look Back
1. Artemys grew up in the monastery surrounded by humans. There he was taught love, respect, and battle skills, and he soon became a fine, unknown warrior.
2. Because he was having trouble with one of his brothers, Artemys had been wanting to run away back to his homeland. The sheer love that he felt for his human family had detained him from doing that, but after he raises his sword in defense against his brother Damera, Artemys decides to leave for good. He goes to an old, dead forest and waits for nightfall to fall.
3. Damera, feeling guilty for his acts, also took off, and because of that, matron Eve suffered a shock attack and fainted; a hit that she took on the back of her head when she fell causes her to fall in a coma, yet the other orphans do not know this to be the case.
4. That same night, Artemys attempts to cross a bridge that leads back to his homeland, but before he does that, he has a brief scuffle with a soldier and then gets wounded badly by an archer. Somehow he manages to cross the bridge and makes it to his homeland.
5. Read the Epilogue if you want to find out what happened then.
2. Because he was having trouble with one of his brothers, Artemys had been wanting to run away back to his homeland. The sheer love that he felt for his human family had detained him from doing that, but after he raises his sword in defense against his brother Damera, Artemys decides to leave for good. He goes to an old, dead forest and waits for nightfall to fall.
3. Damera, feeling guilty for his acts, also took off, and because of that, matron Eve suffered a shock attack and fainted; a hit that she took on the back of her head when she fell causes her to fall in a coma, yet the other orphans do not know this to be the case.
4. That same night, Artemys attempts to cross a bridge that leads back to his homeland, but before he does that, he has a brief scuffle with a soldier and then gets wounded badly by an archer. Somehow he manages to cross the bridge and makes it to his homeland.
5. Read the Epilogue if you want to find out what happened then.
Note: I will post my usual story quiz later tonight or tomorrow. So if you read the story and want to try your luck at answering the questions I come up with, then check this thread later, or visit my Group, as I will also post the quiz there. ~Atsie
Quiz
Alright, here's the quiz. I normally have asked you to take it without looking at the story, but you may if you want. The one who gets the highest score will receive a GIFT from me from the Gift shop, possibly a kitty. XD
A Dragir's Tale Quiz:
What is the actual name of the Disobedient Child?
a) Diablo
b) Atturi
c) Sagas
d) Ulrion
Who created the Dragir?
a) The All-Father
b) Diablo
c) Megakas
d) The Disobedient Child
What was Ella Rose turned into?
a) A half spider-half woman monster known as the Spider Queen
b) A half serpent-half goddess monster known by the humans as Medusa
c) Into a four-headed Chimera
d) The Sphinx
True or False: Ella Rose was the All-Father’s Armed Arm from the beginning of time.
What is Artemys’s actual Dragir name? *I actually messed up in that 1st chapter and named him Artemys (lol) when I had intended for him to be named Valen, so you get this free one. XD
a) Ao
b) Valen
c) Neki
d) Jurgen
True or False: Veeka found the Dragir at the riverbank cuddled in his mother’s arms.
Who was the oldest orphan at the orphanage?
a) Abigale
b) Aisling
c) Minono
d) Tyson
e) Damera
True or False: Annabeth is actually from the Lycan race
Who were the two orphans that had a problem with Artemys?
a) Abigale and Ashie
b) Tyson and Annabeth
c) Damera and Alecia
d) Aisling and Minono
The orphans had a dog, what kind was it?
a) German Sheppard
b) Bulldog
c) Husky
d) Doberman
When last Ella Rose checked the seal, how many years must pass before her brother is allowed to return to the world?
a) 90
b) 44
c) 35
d) 40
True or False: Matron Eve had a friend in Sinaí Settlement.
Which of these two went to study magic?
a) Aisling
b) Minono
How old is Artemys when he runs away?
a) 12
b) 17
c) 14 close to 15
d) 18
Does Ella Rose has more brothers and sisters other than Atturi?
a) Yes
b) No
What is the name of the Sword that was given to Ella Rose?
a) Serpinia
b) Arektäris
c) Ayäris
d) Flamburg
At the end of Tale 1, how many years must pass before Atturi is freed from his underground prison?
a) 10 more
b) 6 more years
c) 13
d) 15
How many ZDers have been honored and mentioned so far? *Including Zelda’s Child, who replaced Shan-tastic in chapter 9 as the healer due to me introducing Shan’s character in the Epilogue instead.
a) 12-16 I say
b) 30+
c) 10 total
d) Damn you, Atsie, I believe it’s been more than 20
How many arrows did Pandora shoot at Artemys before the Dragir escaped?
a) 5
b) 4
c) 3
d) 1
What was the name of the ruling Queen when Eve was serving Pancracia as a knight?
a) Clarice III
b) Hena Sapphire
c) Elena Sapphire
d) Patricia IV
What color was the dragon that Artemys saw?
a) Black as the night
b) Silver
c) White
d) Reddish with a black tail
Who was the orphan who lost a doll at the river?
a) Aisling
b) Ashie
c) Abigale
d) Damera
What was the name of Artemys’s mother?
a) Atalanta
b) Evelina
c) Mirrom Saki
d) Persia
A Dragir's Tale Quiz:
What is the actual name of the Disobedient Child?
a) Diablo
b) Atturi
c) Sagas
d) Ulrion
Who created the Dragir?
a) The All-Father
b) Diablo
c) Megakas
d) The Disobedient Child
What was Ella Rose turned into?
a) A half spider-half woman monster known as the Spider Queen
b) A half serpent-half goddess monster known by the humans as Medusa
c) Into a four-headed Chimera
d) The Sphinx
True or False: Ella Rose was the All-Father’s Armed Arm from the beginning of time.
What is Artemys’s actual Dragir name? *I actually messed up in that 1st chapter and named him Artemys (lol) when I had intended for him to be named Valen, so you get this free one. XD
a) Ao
b) Valen
c) Neki
d) Jurgen
True or False: Veeka found the Dragir at the riverbank cuddled in his mother’s arms.
Who was the oldest orphan at the orphanage?
a) Abigale
b) Aisling
c) Minono
d) Tyson
e) Damera
True or False: Annabeth is actually from the Lycan race
Who were the two orphans that had a problem with Artemys?
a) Abigale and Ashie
b) Tyson and Annabeth
c) Damera and Alecia
d) Aisling and Minono
The orphans had a dog, what kind was it?
a) German Sheppard
b) Bulldog
c) Husky
d) Doberman
When last Ella Rose checked the seal, how many years must pass before her brother is allowed to return to the world?
a) 90
b) 44
c) 35
d) 40
True or False: Matron Eve had a friend in Sinaí Settlement.
Which of these two went to study magic?
a) Aisling
b) Minono
How old is Artemys when he runs away?
a) 12
b) 17
c) 14 close to 15
d) 18
Does Ella Rose has more brothers and sisters other than Atturi?
a) Yes
b) No
What is the name of the Sword that was given to Ella Rose?
a) Serpinia
b) Arektäris
c) Ayäris
d) Flamburg
At the end of Tale 1, how many years must pass before Atturi is freed from his underground prison?
a) 10 more
b) 6 more years
c) 13
d) 15
How many ZDers have been honored and mentioned so far? *Including Zelda’s Child, who replaced Shan-tastic in chapter 9 as the healer due to me introducing Shan’s character in the Epilogue instead.
a) 12-16 I say
b) 30+
c) 10 total
d) Damn you, Atsie, I believe it’s been more than 20
How many arrows did Pandora shoot at Artemys before the Dragir escaped?
a) 5
b) 4
c) 3
d) 1
What was the name of the ruling Queen when Eve was serving Pancracia as a knight?
a) Clarice III
b) Hena Sapphire
c) Elena Sapphire
d) Patricia IV
What color was the dragon that Artemys saw?
a) Black as the night
b) Silver
c) White
d) Reddish with a black tail
Who was the orphan who lost a doll at the river?
a) Aisling
b) Ashie
c) Abigale
d) Damera
What was the name of Artemys’s mother?
a) Atalanta
b) Evelina
c) Mirrom Saki
d) Persia
Violet Link
takumi was a mistake and so are the S supports
I love it. I'm catching up and I've finished reading it. Do you know what, Atsie? The story line really flows well and it's descriptive. All well done, really. I can't wait to read more.
*M i d n a*
Æsir Scribe
Why thank you, Violet. I agree with your words, but I think I could add more description at times, and I am working hard on that in my other story.
I will post the next book probably tomorrow. Thank you for your kind support. :nod:
Siniru
Zoldyck family assassin
- Joined
- Aug 22, 2011
That is really good! You are a brilliant author