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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StalkingBlue" data-source="post: 1231830" data-attributes="member: 645">Here's a flashback scene I wrote for Cho last week.  Simon suggested that I post it.  It's set about a year and a half after Hawk's Palace's fall, a little over a year before Cho joined the game.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> Tea-With-Bread… the warm ice … the hot slippery ice … … the bell jingles as the lamb hobbles away, three-legged … that she must catch or die … … here is that barrel of a man, scale mail scissoring, tearing and mangling her flesh as he smothers her … only now his face is that of the Lady Ochi, scorning her to get up and perform the Form of Ice that she ought to have practiced, maggots worming out the hole where her thumb gouged the man’s eye … laughing, foul-teethed mouth laughing as he presses down upon her … No!  Her head hits a soft obstacle and is bounced back down;  her legs have twisted under her and brought her upright before she is aware enough to know where upright is, madly kicking free of some cloth entangling her.  A splintery pole holds her more than she holds on to it;  as her vision clears, the vague image of fangs snapping, fur bristling melts down into a wolfhound, which settles back down with a nervous groan at a word from the man who sits cross-legged at the tiny dung fire.  No attack.  A tent.  Its walls flap violently in the night wind and rain.  Not the same man.  Lady be thanked. She killed that one, barely.  This one sits quietly watching her with eyes that show neither fear nor greed.  There is a weathered knife on the ground beside his left knee, blade whittled down into a frail moon shape.  Left-handed?  She steadies herself against the tent pole, fighting to control her breathing, stop her legs from shaking so.  The bell from her nightmare maddeningly keeps tinkling.  There is the lamb, too, curled on the man’s lap, bell on a collar around its neck, broken foreleg tightly wrapped in scraps of leather;  it is sucking on the thumb of the man’s right hand.  He has had three of his fingers cruelly twisted, and lost the nails of two.  Yes, he would fight left-handed.  She remembers diving at the lamb:  too dense with loss of blood and cold and hunger to think properly;  too slow to catch it.  It is the last thing she remembers.  Something about that fire is not quite right.  “Devil’s moss,”  the man with the lamb says suddenly.  “There was not spider web enough for all of … that.”  His glance alone points, his hands rest on the lamb.  She glances down herself.  There is not an inch of her she can see that is not mottled, mangled, criss-crossed with cuts with blackening and swollen edges.  All the wounds are covered in thick grease;  black spiky things straggle from the ragged slash that curves down the outside of her thigh, and from one of the deeper cuts running down her right breast and stomach.  Scimitar;  and scale mail.  So close –  Distraction.  Where?  She shakes her head free of memory, looks back towards the fire.  There it is.  One of the supports for the spit from which the kettle dangles is a forked branch;  the other a dull metal thing.  Taken as it is with rust, with soot and gristle from many cooking fires, she knows its shape.  Its bit of leading blade is rammed into the soil, the curved prongs rest on the ground on either side;  the spit runs through the angle formed by hilt and wrist guard.  This is a sai:  a Guardian’s weapon.  This is the object he did not want her to notice.  Devil’s moss indeed.  He reaches forward and twists the sai out of the ground, holding the spit up with his good left hand.  For a heartbeat the sai hovers, then he chucks it, hilt first.  The sai slithers to a stop at her feet.  The wolfhound flinches.  “I killed no one for that,”  the man says.  A red rim runs across his forehead where a straw hat would sit.  His shirt and trousers are simple and patched many times.  There is no armour evident in the tent, nor other weapons.  Next to the cloak under which she has been lying is the tidy stack he has made of her things:  the bracers, the amulet made of hawk’s feathers, on top of the wreckage of her footcloths and sandal soles.  It takes focus to go down on one knee and bend, and not black out.  She makes sure to place a foot across the sai to control it, but picks the bracers up first.  They are heavy with rainwater and icy on the skin.  Every fibre in her screams against going back out into that cold;  her fingers fumble with the thongs.  There is a furry taste on her tongue.  The man watches her from the corner of his eye while he stacks stones from the ring of fire to build a support for his kettle spit, then scoops boiling water into two wooden bowls, breaks bits off a brick of tea and crumbles them into the bowls.  The bitter scent of Plains tea rises.  One bracer on;  the second.  The man breaks a loaf of hard spiced bread across his knee and stands two pieces in the bowls to soak.  The amulet, hawk’s feathers sodden and half frozen.  Shield me, Lady.  He starts to reach for the knife just as she picks up the sai.  His hand flinches, withdraws.  Slowly he lifts the lamb from his lap and puts it down on the far side of him, with the quietness of one putting himself between a danger and a child.  The sai is beautifully balanced, and blissfully warm from having been so close to the fire.  There is the wingspread stamp at the end of the hilt:  Palace-forged.  The rust is thick, but then this weapon does not need a cutting edge.  It is a weapon to disarm or batter with.  “I killed no one for that,”  the man says again.  Oh?  “It was a gift.”  Of course.  She has seen peasants take ‘gifts’ like this one.  “A gift, is that so?  She happened to be dying?”  “She died.”  Perhaps he does not understand sarcasm.  “Did you trouble to learn her name first?”  “I can show you the place where I gave her ashes to the wind.”  He will not be stared down.  She straightens.  “My shirt.”  “Yes.”  It is no more than acknowledgement of her ownership in the clothes hanging beyond the fire to dry.  By the time she ties the drawstring of her clammy trousers he has found a string of dried meat in a sack;  he cuts two strips to place on the side of each bowl, then puts the knife back down.  By now she is calm enough to look down on him coldly;  to coldly remember that other man she killed three days ago.  Her shirt is shrivelling to threads.  Curse that scale mail:  scale mail with about a ton of man in it, struggling to crush her to death.  He would have succeeded in that, and in other things too, if he had not been so distracted by his rage at losing an eye to her thumb, and his urge to rape her even as they were killing each other.  So close.  The man with the lamb leans and gingerly sets a small jar beside the bowl of tea-with-bread he has placed on her side of the fire.  “Milk of poppy.  It will take the edge off your pain.”  And dull my senses.  Isn’t that the furry taste of it on her tongue already?  “Perhaps you should feed that to your lamb,”  she says, to keep him occupied while she ponders the double obstacle of tent flap, tightly laced with intricate knots, and wolfhound, crouching tersely inside of it.  His crippled hand strokes the lump of hooves and lamb pelt.  “Not mine.  If you had killed her today, I would be in trouble come midsummer day.”  He has seen her then, bumbling at catching a lamb on three legs and blacking out in the process.  Fine hawk, that.  “Please do not tear the strings,”  he says suddenly.  “I will open the flap for you.”  And at that, finally, her legs fold quietly and she sits.  Two bowls of tea-with-bread and dried meat, leaning to keep hot by the fire:  taken together they would make a satisfying meal for one.  Over the past year many bowls have been set out for her by villagers at firesides or on benches;  but always she has had to eat alone.  Few dare offer guest right to a Palace-trained stranger these days.  Oh Lady.  What have we become.  He takes me to shelter and cleans my wounds.  And I would have killed his dog if I could;  and him, too, if he would have dared stand in my way.  And only because I have forgotten how to trust?   She leans forward and sticks the sai back into the ground next to the stack of stones that he has made, avoiding his eyes.  “You were putting this to a useful purpose.”  She has no way to judge the amount of tension running out of him other than by the relieved grunt from his wolfhound, which flattens and promptly begins to yawn.  She draws her feet under her and sits on her heels, in the straight formal posture.  “You fed me milk of poppy,”  she says.  “Some of it may have gone down,”  he admits.  She reaches for the bowl of tea-with-bread, careful to neither touch nor overturn his precious milk of poppy.  Almost the bitter soggy scent of the dish overwhelms her, but she controls herself;  halts politely for the correct interval, then speaks the correct words:  “I shall eat now.”  Silence while he waits for her to take the first sip, then he lifts his own bowl with the ancient formal reply.  “You honour my hearth.”  There.  He has bound himself.  Their eyes meet through the two columns of steam.  If he betrays her now while she is under his roof, three lifetimes’ guilt upon his soul.  Trust?  Asking much, that.  At least tonight she may sleep almost without fear.</blockquote>

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