Post by Eurydice on Apr 27, 2008 13:10:06 GMT -5
((Cross-posted to the Erphamir board. Set x years in Nyrea's past.))
Calloused fingers held fast even as hard granite nipped and bit into them, until the fingers, trembling as they pressed the rocky cliff face, extended into strong, battle-scarred hands, leanly muscled arms, and sun-tanned shoulders. At the top of the neck connected to the sun-tanned shoulders was a young, angular face, tan and outlined with a brush of dark brown hair, tied back in a long, careful braid, which was, at the moment, soaked through. Beads of perspiration and sea water sprawled on her skin like lazy sunbathers, spread over her steep nose, quizzical brow, and shortly angled half-elven ears. The remainder of the body, long and athletic, propelled itself over the cliff face and scrambled into an upright position as a second figure rose and pulled itself to solid purchase. Both were arrayed in sparse, simple swimwear, and to a human observer, both would look to be eighteen or nineteen years of age.
The half-elven girl who had risen over the cliff face first peered over the edge, surveying the upward climb that they had pursued as sea spray dried on her skin. Sharp eyes, the color of brandy and carrying the same punch, swept up from the path of their rocky ascent to look over the dive point to the wine-dark sea below. Arching her back, she cracked her knuckles above her head.
The girl was no great beauty; her sharp face lacked any subtlety or sweetness. Her body was all of long, muscular limbs, smooth and sure while in motion, awkward and waiting in stillness. With a greatsword in hand, though, she had the grace of a professional dancer.
Her companion was full-elven, his damp hair matted, clinging to his forehead like a black skullcap. The rich, bronze skin of his bare chest fairly shone wherever the sun, riding its path down the western sky, touched it. He was sprawled out on the rocky flat, hands folded behind his head, and like the half-elf, he was a soldier, born and bred. Eyes closed, he soaked up the sun with a thin, content smile, stretched out like a great cat.
The half-elf turned back slightly, wind battering her sea-soaked hair. Shaking the sparks of moisture from her head, she paced over to the lone, battered tree that decorated their ledge; a shared haversack of their belongings sat in the shade.
Tan limbs and reclining torso twisted towards her as the elf opened a lazy eye. “Where you going, Ny? You hear some call to arms that I missed?”
She smirked. “It’s getting late. We should head back to town.”
“Horseshit. We should stay out here in this gorgeous weather and maybe dive a couple more times, that’s what we should do. When do you think’s the next time we’re gonna have downtime some place where there’s decent cliff diving?”
“It’s a long walk back.” She squinted across the irregular slope and expanse to the southeast. The small but pleasant little town of Imdi, where they were staying, lay somewhere in the far-away foothills, invisible to the present view. The roving path back was far from clear and somewhat less than easy. “Come on, Kero; up.” She kicked him.
He rolled away from her foot, back flat against the rock again. “That an order, Lieutenant?” he asked with a winning glare.
“Absolutely,” she deadpanned.
The tan elf held out his hands, wrist to wrist. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to arrest me for insubordination, Amalsë, ‘cause that’s the only way I’m leaving before sunset.” He wore a grin of smug, self-satisfied mutiny, and she laughed, in spite of herself.
In build and coloring, the two friends could have easily passed for siblings, but in everything else, Nyrea Black and Kerolev Triades were as clearly differentiated as sun and moon. Nyrea was with the Blood Guard by the grace of her father, the lauded Colonel Aaron Black. As of yet, she lacked his easy grasp of large-scale, long-term strategy, but she had been handling a sword since she’d been old enough to lift it. Most of the guard found her a bit cold, antisocial, but they rallied around her readily enough on the battlefield. With time and patience, she’d be what her father was.
Kero’s composition of background and behavior was a study in contrasts. At first glance, he was called “relaxed” by some, “lazy” by others. Nevertheless, anyone having more than a passing familiarity with him knew the keen wit behind the laid-back demeanor. He filled out the warrior-poet archetype with ease, having learned wordplay from his scholarly father and swordplay from his warlike mother. Kero took special pride in his unfailing command of the Elvish language, regardless of his lazy-tongued common, ever the right quip or turn of phrase for the right moment. Amalsë was his tongue-in-cheek nickname for Nyrea, who had never figured out quite what it meant; her knowledge of Elvish was limited to what little her resentful Elven mother had taught her, mainly consisting of “yes,” “no,” a few basic commands, and a smattering of profanities.
On top of this, Kero was a wily strategist; even when his somewhat less-refined fighting was not sufficient to make his intentions manifest, the thought process behind them was rarely wrong. Fighting alongside Nyrea combined the best of their parts; they made a formidable team, and friendship had spontaneously made itself manifest, somewhere along the way.
Nyrea shook her head in exasperation and strode back to the edge of the cliff to sit, her legs, long and completely unfeminine, dangled over the edge. Waves danced far below, catching the sun and throwing it dazzlingly into her eyes. She had her mother’s eyes and her father’s legs.
“Oh, come on,” Kerolev groaned. “You don’t want to be here?”
“Of course I do, ass. But we’re leaving before sunset; I don’t fancy trying to get back to town by moonlight.”
Kero rolled his eyes and stretched. “We can continue this argument at sunset.” He closed his eyes again, breathing deeply, taking in the salty air and ignoring the sand and grit that she swatted towards him. After the brief onslaught, he opened one eye to look at her again. “So. Did you ask him?”
There was only one “him” that she could have been asking; being Colonel Black’s daughter had occasional perks, but it mostly consisted of friends—or friends of friends—or vague, unfamiliar acquaintances—bothering her to confirm or deny the latest rumors of what might be happening, higher up in command or even with the crown itself. “Ask him what?” she said slowly, although she was fairly certain what he was talking about.
“Come on.” Kero rolled onto his stomach, hands propped under his chin. “The compound. The big government thing. He must have some idea what it is.”
Nyrea didn’t reply, her lips pressed into a thin, pale line. She had hoped that Kero would be too distracted by the sun and sea to remember having talked about it. The compound to which he referred was a large, gray, flat affair with small windows near the ceiling. It was out of the way, nondescript, and, to a trained eye, completely conspicuous in how fervently it wanted to be inconspicuous. They had passed the compound on the ride into town, and none of the officers, looking at it smugly, had spoken a word as they rode past, as if some unspeakable taboo prevented it.
She turned away as she saw Kerolev start to get up, fixing her eyes on a tiny white isle a little ways south. Kero’s voice prodded her, a light, teasing baritone. “Did Daddy make you promise not to tell, little girl?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Well, what is it, then? He has to know.”
She looked further away, awkwardly wringing out her hair. “Probably. I didn’t ask.”
Turned away, she could still feel his disbelieving eyes boring into her skull. They both glowered in silence. Down and over several meters, a family of scruffy, speckled sea birds fussed and nattered in a mismatched nest which rested perilously, almost comically close to the drop of the sheer cliff face. It didn’t seem to bother them.
Kerolev found his voice, finally, slow and exasperated. “Why not?”
“I meant what I said when you first asked,” she said, rotating back to turn her cold stare, etched indelibly on her sharp features, to his irritated, bewildered eyes. “It’s not any of our business. If we needed to know, command would have told us. And I’m fine with that.”
It was one of many such moments that the two friends shared, in which the sheer distance between them created by a slight difference of opinion sat heavy, palpable and strange. It was all well and good to say that opposites attracted, made for good friends and the like, but there were times when they might as well have been speaking different tongues. Kero seemed to consider his next words carefully. “Ny… a little healthy curiosity isn’t against regs.” He smiled hesitantly, eyes seeking out any compassion or allowance in her glacial gaze, finding none. “It’s not the first building like that that we’ve seen. Don’t you want to know, even a little?”
“Sure. And maybe when I’m promoted far enough, I’ll ask. Or maybe I won’t have to, and I’ll be told when I need to know. But I can wait. The information will get to me when it’s time for it to do so, sooner or later; I’m not going to bother my dad about it.”
Kero sighed and let his head thud against her shoulder. Nyrea considered elbowing him away but refrained. “You are something else, Amalsë.”
“Am I now?” she murmured wryly.
“You could be so much more…”
Nyrea shrugged him away; this line of conversation was as old as their friendship, and it always made her ineffably uncomfortable. “I don’t want to start into this again. I like what I do—”
“—your breeding, your duty, I know, I know.” He studied her curiously, shaking his head. “But you’ve got such possibility in you, Ny, so much possibility…”
Exasperated, Nyrea stood and ambled away from the sheer drop, hands locked behind her head in a knot of frustration. It would sound silly, to most, to call work in the Talkan Empire’s armed forces “safe,” but that was what it was. Her existence was a simple world of definites, a black and white progression that would be the rest of her life: service, promotion, repeat until death. There was order, structure, design. There weren’t “possibilities”; there were events that would happen when they happened. That was how it worked. “‘Possibility,’ gods, possibility for what? Be so much more what?”
Kero smiled noncommittally. “You know, I’m not a hundred percent sure myself. More of a person, I guess.”
“I’m not a ‘person,’ I’m a soldier. I’m an object, a piece on the game board, and a future corpse. It’s pretty much my job not to be a person.”
“But the potential—”
Nyrea barked a laugh and rounded on him, “Kero, that’s like saying I have the ‘potential’ to be a really great lute player when I’ve never bloody well seen a lute in my life.”
Silence hung between them again. It was too large of a debate to be settled by any mere exchange of words; this exchange had happened a dozen times in the two years that they’d worked together. Kero didn’t know why he felt so insistent about it anymore than Nyrea knew why it unsettled her so profoundly. Nyrea had faith in the system; Kero had faith in the world. She would try to win him over to the Empire’s standard lines about power, duty, the future of Talkan, and he would try to win her over with taffeta phrases and three-piled hyperbole, with stories and songs. He’d even tried to persuade her to let him read her fortune in the lines of her hand, one time, which had been the height of his strangeness.
Inevitably, though, when these awkward moments between them came to an impasse, one of them would surrender, delay the inevitable header between them a little longer, and today was Kerolev’s turn to do so. He stood, came to her even as she turned away again, and touched her sun-tanned shoulder. “Alright. Truce, for now, so we can get something out of the rest of the day.”
Nyrea nodded stiffly. “One more dive?” she asked, turning to him, her face and voice equally neutral.
“For a start,” Kero snorted.
“We’re heading back to town before sundown!”
“You make me!” He took a running start and swept into the air, into an arc, plummeting like a falling star.
Calloused fingers held fast even as hard granite nipped and bit into them, until the fingers, trembling as they pressed the rocky cliff face, extended into strong, battle-scarred hands, leanly muscled arms, and sun-tanned shoulders. At the top of the neck connected to the sun-tanned shoulders was a young, angular face, tan and outlined with a brush of dark brown hair, tied back in a long, careful braid, which was, at the moment, soaked through. Beads of perspiration and sea water sprawled on her skin like lazy sunbathers, spread over her steep nose, quizzical brow, and shortly angled half-elven ears. The remainder of the body, long and athletic, propelled itself over the cliff face and scrambled into an upright position as a second figure rose and pulled itself to solid purchase. Both were arrayed in sparse, simple swimwear, and to a human observer, both would look to be eighteen or nineteen years of age.
The half-elven girl who had risen over the cliff face first peered over the edge, surveying the upward climb that they had pursued as sea spray dried on her skin. Sharp eyes, the color of brandy and carrying the same punch, swept up from the path of their rocky ascent to look over the dive point to the wine-dark sea below. Arching her back, she cracked her knuckles above her head.
The girl was no great beauty; her sharp face lacked any subtlety or sweetness. Her body was all of long, muscular limbs, smooth and sure while in motion, awkward and waiting in stillness. With a greatsword in hand, though, she had the grace of a professional dancer.
Her companion was full-elven, his damp hair matted, clinging to his forehead like a black skullcap. The rich, bronze skin of his bare chest fairly shone wherever the sun, riding its path down the western sky, touched it. He was sprawled out on the rocky flat, hands folded behind his head, and like the half-elf, he was a soldier, born and bred. Eyes closed, he soaked up the sun with a thin, content smile, stretched out like a great cat.
The half-elf turned back slightly, wind battering her sea-soaked hair. Shaking the sparks of moisture from her head, she paced over to the lone, battered tree that decorated their ledge; a shared haversack of their belongings sat in the shade.
Tan limbs and reclining torso twisted towards her as the elf opened a lazy eye. “Where you going, Ny? You hear some call to arms that I missed?”
She smirked. “It’s getting late. We should head back to town.”
“Horseshit. We should stay out here in this gorgeous weather and maybe dive a couple more times, that’s what we should do. When do you think’s the next time we’re gonna have downtime some place where there’s decent cliff diving?”
“It’s a long walk back.” She squinted across the irregular slope and expanse to the southeast. The small but pleasant little town of Imdi, where they were staying, lay somewhere in the far-away foothills, invisible to the present view. The roving path back was far from clear and somewhat less than easy. “Come on, Kero; up.” She kicked him.
He rolled away from her foot, back flat against the rock again. “That an order, Lieutenant?” he asked with a winning glare.
“Absolutely,” she deadpanned.
The tan elf held out his hands, wrist to wrist. “Then I suppose you’ll just have to arrest me for insubordination, Amalsë, ‘cause that’s the only way I’m leaving before sunset.” He wore a grin of smug, self-satisfied mutiny, and she laughed, in spite of herself.
In build and coloring, the two friends could have easily passed for siblings, but in everything else, Nyrea Black and Kerolev Triades were as clearly differentiated as sun and moon. Nyrea was with the Blood Guard by the grace of her father, the lauded Colonel Aaron Black. As of yet, she lacked his easy grasp of large-scale, long-term strategy, but she had been handling a sword since she’d been old enough to lift it. Most of the guard found her a bit cold, antisocial, but they rallied around her readily enough on the battlefield. With time and patience, she’d be what her father was.
Kero’s composition of background and behavior was a study in contrasts. At first glance, he was called “relaxed” by some, “lazy” by others. Nevertheless, anyone having more than a passing familiarity with him knew the keen wit behind the laid-back demeanor. He filled out the warrior-poet archetype with ease, having learned wordplay from his scholarly father and swordplay from his warlike mother. Kero took special pride in his unfailing command of the Elvish language, regardless of his lazy-tongued common, ever the right quip or turn of phrase for the right moment. Amalsë was his tongue-in-cheek nickname for Nyrea, who had never figured out quite what it meant; her knowledge of Elvish was limited to what little her resentful Elven mother had taught her, mainly consisting of “yes,” “no,” a few basic commands, and a smattering of profanities.
On top of this, Kero was a wily strategist; even when his somewhat less-refined fighting was not sufficient to make his intentions manifest, the thought process behind them was rarely wrong. Fighting alongside Nyrea combined the best of their parts; they made a formidable team, and friendship had spontaneously made itself manifest, somewhere along the way.
Nyrea shook her head in exasperation and strode back to the edge of the cliff to sit, her legs, long and completely unfeminine, dangled over the edge. Waves danced far below, catching the sun and throwing it dazzlingly into her eyes. She had her mother’s eyes and her father’s legs.
“Oh, come on,” Kerolev groaned. “You don’t want to be here?”
“Of course I do, ass. But we’re leaving before sunset; I don’t fancy trying to get back to town by moonlight.”
Kero rolled his eyes and stretched. “We can continue this argument at sunset.” He closed his eyes again, breathing deeply, taking in the salty air and ignoring the sand and grit that she swatted towards him. After the brief onslaught, he opened one eye to look at her again. “So. Did you ask him?”
There was only one “him” that she could have been asking; being Colonel Black’s daughter had occasional perks, but it mostly consisted of friends—or friends of friends—or vague, unfamiliar acquaintances—bothering her to confirm or deny the latest rumors of what might be happening, higher up in command or even with the crown itself. “Ask him what?” she said slowly, although she was fairly certain what he was talking about.
“Come on.” Kero rolled onto his stomach, hands propped under his chin. “The compound. The big government thing. He must have some idea what it is.”
Nyrea didn’t reply, her lips pressed into a thin, pale line. She had hoped that Kero would be too distracted by the sun and sea to remember having talked about it. The compound to which he referred was a large, gray, flat affair with small windows near the ceiling. It was out of the way, nondescript, and, to a trained eye, completely conspicuous in how fervently it wanted to be inconspicuous. They had passed the compound on the ride into town, and none of the officers, looking at it smugly, had spoken a word as they rode past, as if some unspeakable taboo prevented it.
She turned away as she saw Kerolev start to get up, fixing her eyes on a tiny white isle a little ways south. Kero’s voice prodded her, a light, teasing baritone. “Did Daddy make you promise not to tell, little girl?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Well, what is it, then? He has to know.”
She looked further away, awkwardly wringing out her hair. “Probably. I didn’t ask.”
Turned away, she could still feel his disbelieving eyes boring into her skull. They both glowered in silence. Down and over several meters, a family of scruffy, speckled sea birds fussed and nattered in a mismatched nest which rested perilously, almost comically close to the drop of the sheer cliff face. It didn’t seem to bother them.
Kerolev found his voice, finally, slow and exasperated. “Why not?”
“I meant what I said when you first asked,” she said, rotating back to turn her cold stare, etched indelibly on her sharp features, to his irritated, bewildered eyes. “It’s not any of our business. If we needed to know, command would have told us. And I’m fine with that.”
It was one of many such moments that the two friends shared, in which the sheer distance between them created by a slight difference of opinion sat heavy, palpable and strange. It was all well and good to say that opposites attracted, made for good friends and the like, but there were times when they might as well have been speaking different tongues. Kero seemed to consider his next words carefully. “Ny… a little healthy curiosity isn’t against regs.” He smiled hesitantly, eyes seeking out any compassion or allowance in her glacial gaze, finding none. “It’s not the first building like that that we’ve seen. Don’t you want to know, even a little?”
“Sure. And maybe when I’m promoted far enough, I’ll ask. Or maybe I won’t have to, and I’ll be told when I need to know. But I can wait. The information will get to me when it’s time for it to do so, sooner or later; I’m not going to bother my dad about it.”
Kero sighed and let his head thud against her shoulder. Nyrea considered elbowing him away but refrained. “You are something else, Amalsë.”
“Am I now?” she murmured wryly.
“You could be so much more…”
Nyrea shrugged him away; this line of conversation was as old as their friendship, and it always made her ineffably uncomfortable. “I don’t want to start into this again. I like what I do—”
“—your breeding, your duty, I know, I know.” He studied her curiously, shaking his head. “But you’ve got such possibility in you, Ny, so much possibility…”
Exasperated, Nyrea stood and ambled away from the sheer drop, hands locked behind her head in a knot of frustration. It would sound silly, to most, to call work in the Talkan Empire’s armed forces “safe,” but that was what it was. Her existence was a simple world of definites, a black and white progression that would be the rest of her life: service, promotion, repeat until death. There was order, structure, design. There weren’t “possibilities”; there were events that would happen when they happened. That was how it worked. “‘Possibility,’ gods, possibility for what? Be so much more what?”
Kero smiled noncommittally. “You know, I’m not a hundred percent sure myself. More of a person, I guess.”
“I’m not a ‘person,’ I’m a soldier. I’m an object, a piece on the game board, and a future corpse. It’s pretty much my job not to be a person.”
“But the potential—”
Nyrea barked a laugh and rounded on him, “Kero, that’s like saying I have the ‘potential’ to be a really great lute player when I’ve never bloody well seen a lute in my life.”
Silence hung between them again. It was too large of a debate to be settled by any mere exchange of words; this exchange had happened a dozen times in the two years that they’d worked together. Kero didn’t know why he felt so insistent about it anymore than Nyrea knew why it unsettled her so profoundly. Nyrea had faith in the system; Kero had faith in the world. She would try to win him over to the Empire’s standard lines about power, duty, the future of Talkan, and he would try to win her over with taffeta phrases and three-piled hyperbole, with stories and songs. He’d even tried to persuade her to let him read her fortune in the lines of her hand, one time, which had been the height of his strangeness.
Inevitably, though, when these awkward moments between them came to an impasse, one of them would surrender, delay the inevitable header between them a little longer, and today was Kerolev’s turn to do so. He stood, came to her even as she turned away again, and touched her sun-tanned shoulder. “Alright. Truce, for now, so we can get something out of the rest of the day.”
Nyrea nodded stiffly. “One more dive?” she asked, turning to him, her face and voice equally neutral.
“For a start,” Kero snorted.
“We’re heading back to town before sundown!”
“You make me!” He took a running start and swept into the air, into an arc, plummeting like a falling star.