Snippet #1876998

Caelin sighed to himself, folding his hands behind his head. Presently, he strode along an ill-used deer path without any particular sense of urgency. Maferath mumbled something about humans and a poor sense of direction in the back of his mind, but if the old dragon had really cared for a response, he would have been louder, impossible to ignore.

It wasn’t as though he’d become lost in the forest by accident, after all. One of the best things a person could do was get himself lost in a place as beautiful as this, and Caelin had entered the wood with this precise goal in mind. He loved cities, too, but in truth there was something unanswerable to be said for the wild grace of such places as this one, where water droplets fell from the canopy high above, sounding almost musical in their patter against the earth. The sunlight filtered down through those same verdant shades, dappling the ground beneath his feet in strange and fantastical patterns. Someone of his mindset could do nothing more than contemplate them for days, without difficulty or boredom.

He was aware that these forests belonged to the elvenkin, but… he remembered vaguely something about that, as though his purpose here would protect him. Almost as though he’d been before, only-

The dragon rumbled in his head, the mental noise effectively drowning out any thoughts, and Caelin flinched. Apparently, he’d gone treading too close to things he wasn’t supposed to know again. Sometimes, it frustrated him to no end that his mind was not entirely his own, but for some reason, he also knew that Maferath and the memories he could not recall were linked in some way, and the best way to recover those recollections was to convince the dragon to relinquish them.

Shaking his head, he allowed his thoughts to fade outward, embracing the sensations of the forest. The sounds of waking creatures filled his ears, under it all the faint cadence of his own heartbeat. His steps punctuated the song, until he altered them so he was moving with the natural rhythm of the forest, rather than against it. Rain and green life were the scents most predominant in the air that moved languidly over his skin, still damp and heavy in the early morning. He found that it wasn’t too hard to get a sense for where the trees were, even with his eyes closed, so he left them so for a while, walking through the trees as though he were a blind man.

Opening them again after an indeterminate amount of time had passed, he spotted what he was looking for; a magnificent old tree, standing alone and yet perfectly integrated with the rest of the forest. Grinning broadly, Caelin padded up to it and ran a hand long the roughened bark, feeling the pulse of life-energy in the trunk. Slow, steady, and deep, as aged plants tended to be. So different from the bright flares in things like rabbits, or the overflowing rush that was a healthy person.

Settling himself at the base of the tree, upon a raised root, the monk assumed lotus position, allowing his hands to drape loosely over his knees. His staff, he removed from its fastenings at his back, and placed on the ground beside him. He doubted he’d need it, but it never hurt to have such things close at hand, now did it?

---

Damn that Fox and his bloody oath-breaking, piss-drinking lackeys, too. Luna’s teeth ground against one another with her frustration. If she’d had her ship, this trip to Delta would have been nothing. What’s more, she probably wouldn’t have needed to make it in the first place!

As it was, however, mutiny was not kind to one’s transportation options, even if one was a notorious mercenary captain. She snorted derisively and shook her head, disheveling her unusual striped locks. Captain Nightswift, a name on many a portsman’s tongue. If you needed a job done right and done cleanly, she was your go-to resource… assuming you had the coin to make it worth her while. Now, all of it was gone, just because her first mate had decided he’d like to try his hand at river-pirating. Bastard.

Without her conscious notice, the Archblade’s hands had gone to her swords, and she forced them away calmly. She hadn’t wanted to kill any of them. It was with that crew that she earned her way up the mercenary ladder, and with them that she thought she would end her days on some enemy blade, the sort of thing bards would sing about for generations.

She should have skewered them all when she had the chance.

Instead, she’d jumped overboard and swum the river until she hit shore. Rumor had it that some new gang of pirates was terrorizing the river up and down, but made their base in Delta. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. Nobody who had the audacity to use her name to steal from the populace was going to live if she had a say about it. Biting back the rising anger that threatened to make her violent to the next poor fool she saw, Luna slowed her furious tread. Delta would be over the horizon soon enough. Working herself up like this wasn’t going to achieve anything, and she was a practical woman if nothing else.

Which was why, when she came upon the traveler huddled behind the stone, apparently in great misery, her first instinct was to keep on walking. The woman could have some kind of disease for all she knew, and though Luna had through conscientious habit been able to avoid scurvy for all her years on-board a ship, she’d never been any kind of healer, and really didn’t want to risk it.

There was just something so… sad about it, though, and Luna was pretty sure she was feeling something akin to sympathy, which was most odd to her. This woman (for she was fairly certain it was a woman, despite the hunched figure covered by a cloak), looked about as out of place here on the road as she felt on land instead of the decks of her precious ship.

Her indifference to other people warred with this unfamiliar sympathy, and in the end, the new feeling won out by just a hair. Approaching the hunched figure, she noted the dark grey skin and reached the conclusion that the woman was drow. Unusual, out here. Most of the drow she’d ever heard of either stuck to their pine forest and caves or else the more urban areas, where they could still be indoors as often as possible. Glancing up, she took note of the cloudless sky and put two and two together fairly quickly.

“Didn’t think it’d be quite so bright, did you?” she asked. Her tone, though gruff, was not necessarily unkind. Crouching in front of the drow, elbows on her knees, Luna took note of the traveler’s strange clothing choices beneath the cloak and allowed one eyebrow to ascend her forehead. She’d seen prostitutes with more in the way of coverage, but then maybe it was some cultural thing she didn’t know about. Whatever.

---

It was an uncanny feeling, to know you were being watched. The funny thing was, every time she turned to see what was so interesting, the people watching suddenly averted their eyes, leaving Claenereth quite puzzled. Well, a few didn’t, cracking slow smiles at her, and she tried to smile back, though something in their eyes often gave her pause and made her feel uneasy.

She tried to remind herself that she was staring just as much. She’d never been outside of her forest before, and never so much as seen a human until she began this journey (well, one half-human, but to her he was so elven that it didn’t really count). It most certainly wasn’t just the humans though- kinderlings, drow, she’d even spotted a dwarf! It all had her staring around in wide-eyed wonder.

She seemed to have hit a marketplace of some kind, from all the brightly-colored cloth and the smell of exotic spice. People yelled to be heard over one another, and it was starting to give her a headache. She felt a touch of warmth on her clavicle, though, and knew that Misara sent her comfort. Still, Clae wondered why she’d been chosen for all this. Surely, there were better people for a holy mission from the goddess; she was simply a huntress, one among a number of devoted providers for Elfingrove and the surrounding areas. She’d always said her prayers and lifted her voice in song to the heavens when asked, and certainly, always found comfort in knowing that her goddess was there, but she was no priestess, no cleric, and no attendant at the hallowed temple. What was more, she knew little of the languages spoken here, and less of the culture. What if she did something horribly wrong, and this mage did not want to help her?

She swallowed heavily, realizing not for the first time that she had absolutely no idea what to do.

Apparently, she looked that way, too, for she was seized by the hand and dragged towards a market stall. She tried to protest, but she didn’t want to hurt anyone- maybe this was a normal thing? The merchant who’d grasped her was speaking too fast for her to understand, and showing her pretty trinkets. She shook her head emphatically; she had no time, nor currency. This only seemed to increase his insistence, though, and she found that she didn’t quite know what to do. “Please… I have none…” she’d forgotten what humans called their coins, but he seemed to understand, letting go so abruptly that she quite nearly staggered backwards, saved only by reflex.

Hurrying away, she continued to wind her way deeper into the city, guided only by a faint instinct that wasn’t quite hers. It was the same feeling that had gotten her here, though, so she knew it must be Misara’s doing, somehow. Clae had only these feelings and a single name to go with her directive, but she trusted that this would be enough. It had to be.

It seemed that she was guided towards the spire of a tower close to the center of the city, and as she drew ever closer, her chest constricted uncomfortably, something between awe and fear holding her in its sway. She had never seen such a massive structure of stone. Chewing her lip nervously, she forced the fear down and straightened her spine. She was a huntress of her people, a proud citizen of Elfingrove, and she had faced more tangible dangers before. She would not allow herself to be afraid before there was anything to fear.

Not much later, she found herself at the door. Taking a deep breath, Claenereth knocked thrice, then stood back, hugging a nearby shadow out of instinct. It was what she’d been taught to do, to use the environment to its greatest advantage. There were no trees here, but it was not trees alone that cast shade.

The door swung back, and a soft voice spoke, easing some of the tension in her shoulders. It was not haughtily demanding that she show herself, though for some reason she had expected the person that she needed to see would be alone. She wasn’t really certain how to answer the question, because she had no idea who the young man’s master was. Gathering her fortitude, she stepped out of her cloaking shadow, trying to smile. It mostly worked, she thought.

“Please pardon me,” she began, lilting accent rolling her r’s and drawing her vowels into musical trills. “I do not know if he is master, but I come for… Lord Kitherine Damacus…?” she struggled slightly with the sentence, but gave Kitherine the title she thought probably applied. Were all people of sufficient status ‘Lord’ to humans as they were to elves? She was unsure.