TIME August 14th, night (continuing) LOCATION The ziggurat, then the jungle beyond
BACKGROUND:
A second, larger wave of orcs was already breaking from the treeline before the smoke from the first had cleared – four ranks deep, and considerably angrier.
WHAT HAPPENED
Dimitri’s own entangle spell caught the second wave at the base of the steps, weeds and vines seizing most of the charge in place for the archers above to work through at leisure.
The orcs who did break free found Raven, Krusha and Ash waiting in the doorway.
The last of them – a huge brute with a two-handed falchion – made it as far as the threshold before Ash’s dagger and Raven’s blade finished him there.
Dimitri, examining Raven’s recovered sword with something like genuine respect, recognised the name etched into it.
Kort Sanum, orc-bane
Searching the dead leader turned up a grim piece of craftsmanship along with his poisoned arrows – a quiver fashioned from a severed humanoid arm, the hand still cupped to form its base.
Five of the elven hostages survived the siege.
The wounded orcs were finished, the sleeping ones bound, and the elven dead buried before the group settled onto the ziggurat steps to share what provisions were left, looking out over the endless jungle canopy below.
Figures broke from the treeline not long after, and one of the elves answered them with a loud, birdlike whistle before anyone else reacted.
A call answered a few heartbeats later in kind, the whole party dropping into a wary crouch until the reply confirmed it.
A full elven honour guard burst from the undergrowth surrounding an enormous cat-like beast, and on its back, strapped into a high chair for support rather than restraint, an elf so old he could no longer move or speak on his own.
Their leader recognised Dimitri at once – relief plain on his face for just a moment before duty reasserted itself, ordering the area secured and the wounded tended.
Weapons stayed drawn and a tense exchange in Elven followed, the newcomers circling the group until Dimitri vouched for them himself – they’d held the objective, and held it bravely.
Only then did the elves relax, sheathe their blades, and scatter to their assigned tasks.
Grigori, Dimitri’s father and the party’s captain, introduced the ancient passenger as the Sarry Oatsiet – the King’s Father – roused from decades of silence by the falling meteors and demanding, against everyone’s better judgement, to be brought here.
Grigori asked, too, who had fought best in the defence of the steps – Raven claimed it without hesitation, and Krusha backed her up rather than argue the point.
Among the captives the returning elves herded in from the woods was a bound man with slicked-back hair and a gold-capped tooth.
Left bound for his own protection as much as anyone else’s, Grigori noted.
In Chuza, you break the law, but in the Indegee, the law breaks you!
And an orc kept alive, by the elves’ own account, for combat training or as a meal for the great cat that had carried the King’s Father.
The Sarry Oatsiet’s own story came out sideways, over the course of the evening.
Unable to move or speak for a couple of hundred years, imprisoned in his own body by whatever had happened to him, and forbidden by law and his own god from a mercy his condition might otherwise have earned.
His peers long dead, his wife long gone and his son grown and busy being King.
He could still see and hear, though.
The night of the meteors he had lain out in the rain all evening, watching them fall, until his eyes rolled back and he began to drool and his servants finally let him be; Grigori himself had been the one dispatched to escort him here afterward.
“You have prisons, da? Locked up, but still able to speak, to walk,”
Grigori said, quietly, of the King’s Father.
“That is a far worse fate.”
Dimitri, watching his own father say it, offered something that sounded less like comfort than a private understanding between them: if the same ever happened to him, he had Grigori’s blessing to end it rather than let him linger.
Grigori’s only answer was a low growl and his son’s name, and neither man pushed the subject further.
Krusha’s improvised DikDik-finder – a compass Asquith had built for exactly this purpose – pointed straight at the bound man the moment Krusha walked the room.
Pressed and questioned, the captive worked a rat familiar loose to gnaw through his own bindings, straightened to his full height once free, and produced a staff seemingly from nowhere – his slicked-back hair and beady eyes gone, replaced by dark, ebony skin and a pair of eyes that had turned, unmistakably, red.
The watching elves needed no translation for the string of curses that followed; whatever he was, it plainly wasn’t human.
“When Akatha come a-calling,”
he said, and the accent and the posture both changed completely.
Hector Andreas Vasilev – DikDik – wasn’t hiding any more, and wasn’t in a hurry to help either.
“Tell me why should I assist?”
he asked, and kept asking, until Krusha stopped explaining and started naming names instead.
“You helped before. Asquith – Akatha asks for your help. The country needs your help.”
Even then, what came out wasn’t agreement so much as old, unresolved grievance – something about the last time Chuza had called on the Order for help, and a name, Andros, that clearly still stung.
He agreed to help anyway – for reasons of his own rather than Chuza’s, by his own account – but insisted on eating first.
It was over that meal that the elves performed a coming-of-age rite on Raven without much warning – a ritual phrase spoken, elves closing in on either side to hold her arms as a spider the size of a dinner plate was lifted toward her shoulder.
Dimitri offered what reassurance he could as it struck:
“let the Spiga bite – it will help with the process. It is a great honour, but it can be quite unnerving.”
Raven fought the panic of suffocation as the silk sprayed thicker and hardened around her, the weave slowly darkening from raw white into a subtle camouflage of brown, green and black stripes.
She came out of the cocoon minutes later wearing something that fit like a second skin – light, strong, and every bit the equal of mithral armour, without weighing anything like it.
DikDik asked to see Asquith’s own snuff box before agreeing to anything further, and pressed a drop of his own blood into it.
Asquith’s tiny mites and DikDik’s own bright red ones swarming to opposite sides of the box like two carpets meeting, then together, red visibly getting the better of the exchange before both masses stilled.
“Haha, we both grow old,” he said, “but I still have the edge, brother.”
DikDik, satisfied and considerably more cheerful, crushed the tracking device Asquith had built into his snuff box underfoot –
“can’t have that lying about”
And vanished on the spot, teleporting ahead to Chuza.
He reappeared moments later laughing at the look on everyone’s faces.
It was, he pointed out, going to be a very long walk back otherwise.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- DikDik has agreed to help, but resents Asquith over something involving a missing third Brother, Andros.
- The ancient Sarry Oatsiet, King’s Father of the Indegee elves, has some connection to whatever woke inside the temple.