Dryad Eyes, part 37.
2,540.
I thought I wasn't going to finish this today. Then, once I got started, I thought that I would be lucky to go over 1,000 words with it. Shows what I know!
A single, burning candle was the only source of light in the room. It sat upon a heavy, wooden dresser, and shared that platform with a mirror that reflected its light back at it and across the room. There, upon a disheveled bed, lay two figures. Treyp, every bit as nude as she had been in the dream that had so embarrassed her but short while ago, lay covered only by a coarse blanket and the arm of her lover. That limb belonged to Matthew, of course, who had also been the object of her desires in that same dream. It was nice, she decided, these moments when the two of them had no reason to clash. This peaceful moment was not to last, however. She knew that as she laid there, on her side, her bare skin still glistening with well-earned sweat as she gazed off into a darker corner of the room.
'Don't take too long,' the swordsman's words came back to her then, and she snorted an unlovely retort. "Fuck off, Kurik."
"Httmh?" From behind her came the drowsy response, his warm breath softly brushing the back of her neck with each spoken syllable. "What was that?"
"Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud." With a low, suffering sigh of trepidation, she rose up and began disentangling herself from his limbs and the bedclothes. Neither of these seemed quite ready to let her go. "Listen, I'm sorry. This... I... I didn't mean for this to happen."
"You could have fooled me." He muttered. Rolling onto his back, he watched her body from beneath raised eyebrows as she began casting about for her discarded clothing.
"No, seriously." Feeling his eyes on her, she was not entirely certain that she could drive home the severity of what she had to say. This would have been so much simpler had she not approached him so brazenly, and allowed herself to be swept away in the real world form of the same fantasy that had driven her so wild in the first place. "I didn't come here for that... Sorry. It... I need your help with something. Something big."
"What is it?"
This was not going to come across very well, was it? If only she had kept her clothes on, she continued to lament. "There is this thing loose in the City, and in the Keep. It is... I don't know. I think it is some kind of demon, or a demon-y thing, and I need your help to stop it."
Matthew stared at her for a long, quiet moment. His bemused expression would have better belonged to a man that was waiting for the funny punch line to a joke that had been cut off somewhere shortly before its climax. Finally, realizing that she was actually waiting for him to respond
"Sorry, afterglow. I thought you said you wanted me to fight a demon."
"I did."
"You came here to ask me that."
"Yes."
"What was this, then?" He asked, his tone flat, as he rose up into a seated position. "Bribery?"
Caught not with her pants down, but with them on their way up, Treyp froze in place for a moment, stung. That cruel little question, whether it was warranted or not, cut her to the quick. It was not the first time that Matthew had said something so callous to her, and she doubted that it would be the last. Certainly, it would not be, she told herself, if she did not grow a brain and find the strength to distance herself from him. Slowly, deliberately, she drew her pants up to her hips. Shaking fingers fumbled at the buckle on her belt, and she only sniffled but once. She was quite proud of herself.
"No," came Treyp's very soft reply. Finished with her belt, she stooped down to grab at the crumpled form of her shirt. "It was... I just needed... it doesn't matter. It was a mistake. I'm sorry, Matthew."
"But you are the very best at what you do. You are one of the most dangerous men in this city, and that is saying quite a lot, actually." Her body fully covered, she gathered the shredded remains of her dignity about herself and rounded on the young man who remained seated in the center of the large bed they had shared. "There isn't anyone else. I don't know who else I can trust, who else I can find before that thing finds me again. You're it. All I've got. The ace up my sleeve. So will you help me or not?"
Matthew was staring at her again, but this time his expression was not bemused. It was intent. "Tell me about your demon."
His gaze did little to set her at ease. Scratch that; it did nothing to set her at ease. Quite the opposite, in fact, Treyp found herself becoming increasingly nervous beneath his scrutiny. When she answered him, she clasped her hands tightly together in front of herself in order to prevent herself from fidgeting. "There isn't much to tell. It's hard to kill, we know that. Kurik stabbed it, and it disappeared, but I think it was more startled than hurt. It seems to be able to bend people to its will. It... it already got Charis. I think it almost had Kurik, but Lithia interfered. It recognized me..."
"It knows you?"
"It was the same man, Matthew." So much for not fidgeting, she thought, as she began working her hands against each other. At least the wetness in her eyes was not leaking out. She took some small comfort in that. "The blonde man who led the men that attacked me."
"Erek? No, he's dead. I--"
"I know." Treyp quickly interrupted. She understood why Matthew had taken the man's life, and why Geran, Kurik, Arimus or any of their friends would have done the same had they laid hands on him first. That understanding, however, did not mean that she wanted to hear the gory details. Something inside of her shied away from that. "But he is back, and somehow, between the last time you saw him and now, he became something more than he was. Something straight out of a nightmare."
Shaking his head, the assassin again tried to deny it. The idea of Erek being alive, it seemed, was as abhorrent to him as anything he had ever heard. "Maybe something appropriated his body..."
"No. Trust me. He knew me, and he spoke... it was the very same vile bastard as before."
"Gods damn it." Matthew growled. Rolling his nude form out of the bed, and dumping the coarse blanket unceremoniously upon the floor, he began gathering his own clothing, as well as his weapons. "Gods damn it all!"
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"Oh, Gods..."
Treyp, feeling either empty or numb or some other emotion that she was too stunned to recognize, sank to her knees amid the ashes that filled the room in which she had left Kurik and Lithia a short while ago. The table and the chair in which she had fallen asleep were both gone entirely, incinerated. Before her, where there should have been a bed with young redheaded woman asleep upon it, there was not but the blackened, skeletal remains of the bed frame. On the floor was a soot-covered sword, the twin to the one that the swordsman had left buried in the demon's back when it had attacked them in a distant hallway. Beside this was a still smoldering scrap of what might have been all that remained of the same man's tough leather vest that he usually wore.
Matthew stalked about the room slowly, deliberately, his face a mask of calm that did nothing, absolutely nothing, to disguise the fury behind it. That made sense, she thought. If he had any true friend at the Keep, it had been Kurik. There were few others that the young assassin truly socialized with.
"It looks like the fire began at the door," he was saying. "It moved inward, spreading swiftly, and burned itself out at the walls. There wasn't enough air, much less enough fuel, to sustain it for long."
Treyp did not answer. How swiftly things change, she thought. They had been here, Lithia asleep and Kurik his usual, snarky self. Now they were not, unless one was to count the ashes that had once made up their bodies. And it was her fault. 'Don't take too long,' Kurik had told her, and she had assured him that what he had thought would happen was not even on her mind. If she had kept her word, perhaps she and Matthew would have returned in time to prevent this terrible tragedy from happening. Failing that, at least, they could have rightfully died beside their friends. That would have been fair, would it not?
"Treyp."
It was the demon. It had to be. Erek, that vicious, hateful bastard, seemed to be good at nothing beside taking lives, or ruining them. Why had he struck at them and not her? She and Matthew had been nothing if not vulnerable. Perhaps it had been a strike at her, like a predator playing with his food, hurting it, before finally moving in for the kill. If only, she thought, and paused. That was a dangerous road. Geran always said so. However, if only she had died in that horrible man's first assault, none of this, including her uncle being 'outed' as the son of a Dryad, would have happened.
If only...
"Treyp!"
Falling to his knees on the floor between her and ruins of the bed, Matthew laid one strong hand on her shoulder. He placed the other on her chin, and pulled her face upwards. Tears glistened on her cheeks, flowing freely from her red and swollen eyes. The terrible, all consuming pain in her eyes was reflected clearly within his own, but he was made from sterner stuff than was she. He could cope; he could react and plan to strike back against the filthy, mystical creature that had done this. After all that had happened over the past couple of weeks, she was at her breaking point and he could see it written all over her face. Treyp had nearly died, had fought her way back from her deathbed only to have yet another narrow escape, then another, and then discovered that the man who had committed those crimes against her was more powerful yet again. He had struck at her friends. She felt responsible. She felt guilt. She was losing hope.
Without another word, Matthew drew her close and wrapped his arms around her. What else was there to do? He felt her chest begin to heave, and she leaned into him without reservation.
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When he awoke, Kurik became aware almost immediately of the fact that he was not alone. That fact struck him, like a slap to the face, before he was even able to properly open his eyes. Then he realized that, in fact, he had just been slapped across the face. What a way to greet the day! Tilting his head up, at an awkward angle thanks to his arms being bound backwards over what felt like a stout plank that held him aloft, he glared at the woman before him. Then he had to blink, several times, and wondered if he was going mad, or perhaps had been struck over the head even harder than he had previously thought. What his eyes were telling him was impossible.
"L-Leeann?" He stuttered, too dumbfounded to even be embarrassed.
"Not quite." The woman said. It was then, beginning with the voice, that the Swordsman understood that this woman, no matter how much she resembled the late Queen of Camelot, was far too old to be the same person that he had only briefly met so long ago. The resemblance was uncanny. If, on the day he had met her, Leeann had introduced this woman to him as her mother, he would never have questioned that statement.
"Oh, don't worry yourself over the petty little details of my heritage, or who I look like." The woman seemed amused, VERY amused, but Kurik was certain that he did not in any way understand the joke. "My name is Mistress Alga, and, for the time being, you are my guest."
The captive swordsman coughed, then spat a bit of blood upon the bloodstained carpet beneath him, and frowned. That did not look good. Ah, he remembered, head wounds. They bleed.
The little makeshift dungeon that he was presently hanging in was clearly somebody's living quarters. There were still deep indentions in the carpet where several pieces of furniture normally sat. Directly across the room from where he was hanging, just visible over this Alga woman's shoulder, he could see Lithia was in a similar predicament. An unusually tall blond woman was tending her, wiping at the girl's brow with a wet cloth that was drawn from a bucket at her feet.
Turning his eyes back to the face of the older woman that stood before him, Kurik tried his best to shrug. "So, you've caught us. Whoever you are, that name doesn't ring any bells for me. Why don't you skip the introductions and start with telling me what you want?"
"Of course!" Mistress Alga grinned, not taken aback in the least by his casual manner. Damn, he thought, a waste of good bravado. Patting him on his bare chest, the woman continued. "Recently, you stuck a sword in one of my children. A very unique sword that people know belong to you. What I want is for you-- you well known associate of Geran's, you!-- to hang in here, out of the way, while I pick somebody important to kill with that sword so that people will blame you."
"Wha--?!"
"Then, since you will have served your purpose, I will probably cut your throat and have Beatrice dump your body in this-or-that alley in one Keeper's Gateway's rougher neighborhoods." Sliding her hand slowly up from his chest to his strong shoulders, to his stout neck, to his face, she finally reached up and tousled his hair as if her were but an unruly child. "Does that sound agreeable to you!"
"That will never work!" He spat. "Geran knows me--!"
"To hell with Geran," Alga twirled her long fingernail in the air as she turned away, walking toward a tall, black door that he had not previously seen because it had been on the other side of her. "He can believe what he will. And the people of Keeper's Gateway will believe what they will. Come on, Bea. Let our guests get settled in for the night."
Their hosts left, and then Kurik was left alone again with Lithia, who remained less that conversational. What a fine mess this is, he thought. Trying to focus, he tensed his muscles and tried to power his way free of his bonds. They did not budge, and he was rewarded with a wave of nausea that preceded the vomit by mere moments.
"Great," he groaned, wishing that he could wipe at his mouth. "I'll at least ruin your carpet. Bitch."
I thought I wasn't going to finish this today. Then, once I got started, I thought that I would be lucky to go over 1,000 words with it. Shows what I know!
A single, burning candle was the only source of light in the room. It sat upon a heavy, wooden dresser, and shared that platform with a mirror that reflected its light back at it and across the room. There, upon a disheveled bed, lay two figures. Treyp, every bit as nude as she had been in the dream that had so embarrassed her but short while ago, lay covered only by a coarse blanket and the arm of her lover. That limb belonged to Matthew, of course, who had also been the object of her desires in that same dream. It was nice, she decided, these moments when the two of them had no reason to clash. This peaceful moment was not to last, however. She knew that as she laid there, on her side, her bare skin still glistening with well-earned sweat as she gazed off into a darker corner of the room.
'Don't take too long,' the swordsman's words came back to her then, and she snorted an unlovely retort. "Fuck off, Kurik."
"Httmh?" From behind her came the drowsy response, his warm breath softly brushing the back of her neck with each spoken syllable. "What was that?"
"Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud." With a low, suffering sigh of trepidation, she rose up and began disentangling herself from his limbs and the bedclothes. Neither of these seemed quite ready to let her go. "Listen, I'm sorry. This... I... I didn't mean for this to happen."
"You could have fooled me." He muttered. Rolling onto his back, he watched her body from beneath raised eyebrows as she began casting about for her discarded clothing.
"No, seriously." Feeling his eyes on her, she was not entirely certain that she could drive home the severity of what she had to say. This would have been so much simpler had she not approached him so brazenly, and allowed herself to be swept away in the real world form of the same fantasy that had driven her so wild in the first place. "I didn't come here for that... Sorry. It... I need your help with something. Something big."
"What is it?"
This was not going to come across very well, was it? If only she had kept her clothes on, she continued to lament. "There is this thing loose in the City, and in the Keep. It is... I don't know. I think it is some kind of demon, or a demon-y thing, and I need your help to stop it."
Matthew stared at her for a long, quiet moment. His bemused expression would have better belonged to a man that was waiting for the funny punch line to a joke that had been cut off somewhere shortly before its climax. Finally, realizing that she was actually waiting for him to respond
"Sorry, afterglow. I thought you said you wanted me to fight a demon."
"I did."
"You came here to ask me that."
"Yes."
"What was this, then?" He asked, his tone flat, as he rose up into a seated position. "Bribery?"
Caught not with her pants down, but with them on their way up, Treyp froze in place for a moment, stung. That cruel little question, whether it was warranted or not, cut her to the quick. It was not the first time that Matthew had said something so callous to her, and she doubted that it would be the last. Certainly, it would not be, she told herself, if she did not grow a brain and find the strength to distance herself from him. Slowly, deliberately, she drew her pants up to her hips. Shaking fingers fumbled at the buckle on her belt, and she only sniffled but once. She was quite proud of herself.
"No," came Treyp's very soft reply. Finished with her belt, she stooped down to grab at the crumpled form of her shirt. "It was... I just needed... it doesn't matter. It was a mistake. I'm sorry, Matthew."
"But you are the very best at what you do. You are one of the most dangerous men in this city, and that is saying quite a lot, actually." Her body fully covered, she gathered the shredded remains of her dignity about herself and rounded on the young man who remained seated in the center of the large bed they had shared. "There isn't anyone else. I don't know who else I can trust, who else I can find before that thing finds me again. You're it. All I've got. The ace up my sleeve. So will you help me or not?"
Matthew was staring at her again, but this time his expression was not bemused. It was intent. "Tell me about your demon."
His gaze did little to set her at ease. Scratch that; it did nothing to set her at ease. Quite the opposite, in fact, Treyp found herself becoming increasingly nervous beneath his scrutiny. When she answered him, she clasped her hands tightly together in front of herself in order to prevent herself from fidgeting. "There isn't much to tell. It's hard to kill, we know that. Kurik stabbed it, and it disappeared, but I think it was more startled than hurt. It seems to be able to bend people to its will. It... it already got Charis. I think it almost had Kurik, but Lithia interfered. It recognized me..."
"It knows you?"
"It was the same man, Matthew." So much for not fidgeting, she thought, as she began working her hands against each other. At least the wetness in her eyes was not leaking out. She took some small comfort in that. "The blonde man who led the men that attacked me."
"Erek? No, he's dead. I--"
"I know." Treyp quickly interrupted. She understood why Matthew had taken the man's life, and why Geran, Kurik, Arimus or any of their friends would have done the same had they laid hands on him first. That understanding, however, did not mean that she wanted to hear the gory details. Something inside of her shied away from that. "But he is back, and somehow, between the last time you saw him and now, he became something more than he was. Something straight out of a nightmare."
Shaking his head, the assassin again tried to deny it. The idea of Erek being alive, it seemed, was as abhorrent to him as anything he had ever heard. "Maybe something appropriated his body..."
"No. Trust me. He knew me, and he spoke... it was the very same vile bastard as before."
"Gods damn it." Matthew growled. Rolling his nude form out of the bed, and dumping the coarse blanket unceremoniously upon the floor, he began gathering his own clothing, as well as his weapons. "Gods damn it all!"
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"Oh, Gods..."
Treyp, feeling either empty or numb or some other emotion that she was too stunned to recognize, sank to her knees amid the ashes that filled the room in which she had left Kurik and Lithia a short while ago. The table and the chair in which she had fallen asleep were both gone entirely, incinerated. Before her, where there should have been a bed with young redheaded woman asleep upon it, there was not but the blackened, skeletal remains of the bed frame. On the floor was a soot-covered sword, the twin to the one that the swordsman had left buried in the demon's back when it had attacked them in a distant hallway. Beside this was a still smoldering scrap of what might have been all that remained of the same man's tough leather vest that he usually wore.
Matthew stalked about the room slowly, deliberately, his face a mask of calm that did nothing, absolutely nothing, to disguise the fury behind it. That made sense, she thought. If he had any true friend at the Keep, it had been Kurik. There were few others that the young assassin truly socialized with.
"It looks like the fire began at the door," he was saying. "It moved inward, spreading swiftly, and burned itself out at the walls. There wasn't enough air, much less enough fuel, to sustain it for long."
Treyp did not answer. How swiftly things change, she thought. They had been here, Lithia asleep and Kurik his usual, snarky self. Now they were not, unless one was to count the ashes that had once made up their bodies. And it was her fault. 'Don't take too long,' Kurik had told her, and she had assured him that what he had thought would happen was not even on her mind. If she had kept her word, perhaps she and Matthew would have returned in time to prevent this terrible tragedy from happening. Failing that, at least, they could have rightfully died beside their friends. That would have been fair, would it not?
"Treyp."
It was the demon. It had to be. Erek, that vicious, hateful bastard, seemed to be good at nothing beside taking lives, or ruining them. Why had he struck at them and not her? She and Matthew had been nothing if not vulnerable. Perhaps it had been a strike at her, like a predator playing with his food, hurting it, before finally moving in for the kill. If only, she thought, and paused. That was a dangerous road. Geran always said so. However, if only she had died in that horrible man's first assault, none of this, including her uncle being 'outed' as the son of a Dryad, would have happened.
If only...
"Treyp!"
Falling to his knees on the floor between her and ruins of the bed, Matthew laid one strong hand on her shoulder. He placed the other on her chin, and pulled her face upwards. Tears glistened on her cheeks, flowing freely from her red and swollen eyes. The terrible, all consuming pain in her eyes was reflected clearly within his own, but he was made from sterner stuff than was she. He could cope; he could react and plan to strike back against the filthy, mystical creature that had done this. After all that had happened over the past couple of weeks, she was at her breaking point and he could see it written all over her face. Treyp had nearly died, had fought her way back from her deathbed only to have yet another narrow escape, then another, and then discovered that the man who had committed those crimes against her was more powerful yet again. He had struck at her friends. She felt responsible. She felt guilt. She was losing hope.
Without another word, Matthew drew her close and wrapped his arms around her. What else was there to do? He felt her chest begin to heave, and she leaned into him without reservation.
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When he awoke, Kurik became aware almost immediately of the fact that he was not alone. That fact struck him, like a slap to the face, before he was even able to properly open his eyes. Then he realized that, in fact, he had just been slapped across the face. What a way to greet the day! Tilting his head up, at an awkward angle thanks to his arms being bound backwards over what felt like a stout plank that held him aloft, he glared at the woman before him. Then he had to blink, several times, and wondered if he was going mad, or perhaps had been struck over the head even harder than he had previously thought. What his eyes were telling him was impossible.
"L-Leeann?" He stuttered, too dumbfounded to even be embarrassed.
"Not quite." The woman said. It was then, beginning with the voice, that the Swordsman understood that this woman, no matter how much she resembled the late Queen of Camelot, was far too old to be the same person that he had only briefly met so long ago. The resemblance was uncanny. If, on the day he had met her, Leeann had introduced this woman to him as her mother, he would never have questioned that statement.
"Oh, don't worry yourself over the petty little details of my heritage, or who I look like." The woman seemed amused, VERY amused, but Kurik was certain that he did not in any way understand the joke. "My name is Mistress Alga, and, for the time being, you are my guest."
The captive swordsman coughed, then spat a bit of blood upon the bloodstained carpet beneath him, and frowned. That did not look good. Ah, he remembered, head wounds. They bleed.
The little makeshift dungeon that he was presently hanging in was clearly somebody's living quarters. There were still deep indentions in the carpet where several pieces of furniture normally sat. Directly across the room from where he was hanging, just visible over this Alga woman's shoulder, he could see Lithia was in a similar predicament. An unusually tall blond woman was tending her, wiping at the girl's brow with a wet cloth that was drawn from a bucket at her feet.
Turning his eyes back to the face of the older woman that stood before him, Kurik tried his best to shrug. "So, you've caught us. Whoever you are, that name doesn't ring any bells for me. Why don't you skip the introductions and start with telling me what you want?"
"Of course!" Mistress Alga grinned, not taken aback in the least by his casual manner. Damn, he thought, a waste of good bravado. Patting him on his bare chest, the woman continued. "Recently, you stuck a sword in one of my children. A very unique sword that people know belong to you. What I want is for you-- you well known associate of Geran's, you!-- to hang in here, out of the way, while I pick somebody important to kill with that sword so that people will blame you."
"Wha--?!"
"Then, since you will have served your purpose, I will probably cut your throat and have Beatrice dump your body in this-or-that alley in one Keeper's Gateway's rougher neighborhoods." Sliding her hand slowly up from his chest to his strong shoulders, to his stout neck, to his face, she finally reached up and tousled his hair as if her were but an unruly child. "Does that sound agreeable to you!"
"That will never work!" He spat. "Geran knows me--!"
"To hell with Geran," Alga twirled her long fingernail in the air as she turned away, walking toward a tall, black door that he had not previously seen because it had been on the other side of her. "He can believe what he will. And the people of Keeper's Gateway will believe what they will. Come on, Bea. Let our guests get settled in for the night."
Their hosts left, and then Kurik was left alone again with Lithia, who remained less that conversational. What a fine mess this is, he thought. Trying to focus, he tensed his muscles and tried to power his way free of his bonds. They did not budge, and he was rewarded with a wave of nausea that preceded the vomit by mere moments.
"Great," he groaned, wishing that he could wipe at his mouth. "I'll at least ruin your carpet. Bitch."