I hate to skip the weekly update to Dark Armor, but Firstborn appears to have given his head cold to myself and his mother alike, and my skull is now approximately 67% mucus by volume. It will therefore come as no surprise that also, I feel like I've been run over by a truck and I lack much of anything in the way of energy and concentration. So, instead, here are some things that might keep you entertained...
Videos:
Reading:
Lithos was navigating between the tables with a tray of drinks when the inn door opened. He didn't immediately turn to see who had come in; he'd learned better over the years. Instead, he slid the tray onto the surface of one of the long wooden tables, then hopped up onto an empty space on the bench beside it and looked around. The four merchants here -- three men and one woman -- were dwarves by birth as well as citizenship, and he glanced around at them in a quick count to make sure he was oriented.
When he was sure, he began distributing the drinks: "Dark ale, rice wine--" He paused, realizing that two of the men had switched places, and quickly readjusted. "--spiced wine, and al'cul."
"Very good, lad," said one of the men, "but you've gotten the two of us backwards."
"No, Sir," Lithos said cautiously. "The two of you switched places after you ordered."
The woman laughed, and the man who'd spoken looked sheepish. "Well done, then," he said. "You're one of the Foundingstones, then?"
"Yes, Sir. Adopted, obviously."
The man across from him laughed. "Adopted, obviously," he repeated. "Still a Foundingstone, though, it seems. Here, lad." He laid a silver on the table. "'Tis my will to buy this round, and the extra is for you, to make up for the mischief these two attempted."
"Thank you, Sir," said Lithos, and hopped back down to the floor before carefully pulling the tray from the table. He wouldn't put it past these four to balance a drink back atop it, or place one to be knocked from the table.
"A moment," said the man who'd accused him. "When you have a moment, would you fetch me a tumbler of port? We'll share the al'cul around."
"Of course," answered Lithos, and set back off across the common. The trouble with being a dwarf who'd been born a goblin was that he was essentially the same height as the tables. Navigating between them limited his visibility, and the dwarves who'd been born as dwarves had a tendency to bump into him before they noticed him -- most of them accidentally. He'd learned early on to be quick and nimble, and to anticipate their movements as best he could.
Aside from being tested by traveling merchants, it had been a fairly ordinary night; so when he reached the bar and found Mistress Richvent leaning against it and looking down at him, it came as something of a shock. On the far side of the bar his father looked up quietly and asked, "Failing GSL? How can you possibly be failing GSL?"
Lithos swallowed, but first things first: "The merchant asked for a tumbler of port after I delivered their drinks."
Marduk Foundingstone glanced up, found the table with his eyes. "He did, did he? Go on, I'll send your brother over with it. Now tell me, how can you possibly be failing your GSL class?"
Lithos felt a touch of anger rising up in him. Defiantly he looked at his father and then at Mistress Richvent. "Because it's a stupid language," he said, "and you only want me to learn it because I was born a goblin."
"That's not true," said his father, and Lithos raised an eyebrow. "Not entirely," his father amended.
"James doesn't have to learn it," he pointed out.
"Your brother," said Marduk Foundingstone, "does not have your talent for languages."
"Goblin," he said carefully in Elvish, "is a simple squirrel chattering in the imitation of speech."
Mistress Richvent sighed and answered in the same language: "You are a blank scroll filling itself with spilled ink to spurn the recording of knowledge."
Lithos blinked and swallowed, while his father simply waited.
Cautiously, in Goblin, he asked: "You say what?"
"I say you are stupid because you want to be smart," she answered, and then she switched back to the Dwarvish that he'd grown up with. "Goblin is a simple language, but only on the surface. Nuance in Goblin isn't a matter of finding exactly the right word, the way it is in Dwarvish or the Common tongue of humans. Yes, the words in Goblin are simple, a basic framework; but they are informed by context and more importantly by tone, and if you haven't figured that out yet then you haven't been paying attention."
Lithos scowled, because the truth was that he hadn't been paying attention. Goblin was a simple language, too simple to hold his attention. He knew the grammar and most of the vocabulary already; what else did he need? Tone, he thought. Tone and context, apparently. "I know the words," he said quietly, defensively.
"Yes," said Mistress Richvent. "You know the words." She paused, then added: "But you don't know how to say them, because you didn't think you should need to learn that."
I shouldn't need to learn that, he thought, but then shoved that thought down because apparently he did. "Tomorrow I listen," he said in Goblin, this time trying to remember how Mistress Richvent pitched her voice when she was telling them what to expect for the next day's lessons.
"Good," she said in Dwarvish. She studied him for a moment longer, then added: "I will see you tomorrow. We have a guest teacher, and I want you to pay careful attention to him and to his speech."
Lithos nodded, and Mistress Richvent nodded back; then she turned and made her way back out of the inn.
"You're actually failing Goblin as a Second Language?" asked James, materializing beside him.
"Shut up," Lithos answered automatically. "You can barely speak Halflingo."
"Yeah," said James, "but I'm not supposed to be the smart one here."
Lithos tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling, then walked past his father and into the kitchens. There was a servant's stair along the left wall; he went up. He knew he was leaving James with the majority of the work in the commons, but he also knew that he wasn't going to be any use down there until he sorted this out in his head. He was too distant, too distracted.
So instead of trying to work, he went to his room to think.
So, Beautiful Wife and her mother were watching Christmas cartoons on Christmas eve, including this one:
As a result, I've had the tune as an earworm for a solid three days... except, my brain has taken it elsewhere. Specifically, I've now got it crossed with the advertising jingle from Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which is this one:
So my brain has been playing, "Christmas comes but once a year, once a year, once a year; Christmas comes but once a year, Silver Shamrock!" on loop, for three days.
I'm doomed.
We're past the solstice and almost to the end of the year. Soon, the sun will be reborn. To celebrate, here's some holiday music:
"...Why are you still here?" asked Pallian. "If somebody cut me loose like that, I'd have been gone before anybody could so much as whisper my name."
The thing's face twisted through an unreadable change of expression. "Perhaps I was curious about the one who released me," it said.
Were you? It didn't seem like a safe question to ask; if the thing had wanted to explain its motivation, it would have. Instead, after a moment's consideration, Pallian admitted: "Well, I'm certainly curious about why you wouldn't want to leave."
A rippling motion passed down its arms, ended with its claws scraping against the floor of the carriage. The were tilting now as their conveyance changed directions, drawn through the air by its nightmarish steeds. "Do you not know this?" it asked. When Pallian didn't answer, it said: "While I remain here, I cannot be summoned again. Without the binding, I can do as I like on this plane. It is... less comfortable than my native land, but I find that trade acceptable."
Pallian nodded slowly. "That makes sense, at least." He hesitated. "What do you intend to do, now that you're here?"
That same rippling motion passed down its arms, an unnatural gesture that should have been impossible for flesh and bone. "I do not know," it told him. "Learn more of this place, perhaps. That is why I came back to you. I need a guide, and you neither banished me nor destroyed me."
Nighted Hells, Pallian thought, I've unleashed a summoned nightmare on an unsuspected population. He paused for a long moment, thinking, and then said: "All right. I released you. I suppose it's my responsibility to help you find a way to live here." He didn't mind helping the thing, at least in principle; there was something plaintive about it, an appeal in the inescapable fact that it wanted help.
"This is--" It stopped as if unable to finish the sentence. "How do we proceed?"
That, Pallian had an answer for. "When I wear this armor and step into this carriage, I am riding to battle. You understand that?"
"I know battle," it answered. "I know ages of battle."
Pallian nodded. "This is not your battle. You don't have to help, and it will be better if you stay back and avoid notice. My father and my brother will be there; so will the House of Edrias. Any one of them might take an interest in trying to bind you once again."
The thing seemed to consider. "I would not like that."
"So stay near the carriage, and keep yourself hidden. When the battle is done, we'll talk more about where you might go and what you might do. Can you look human?"
It blinked. "I do look human."
Pallian sighed. He should probably have seen that one coming. "Can you shorten your arms, flatten your claws, make your fingers and hands more like the proportions of my body?"
The thing considered that, then drew itself in. It was still otherworldly, too pale and too tall and too skinny, but at least now it might pass for an odd-looking human, or somebody who'd taken a few ill-advised initiations. "Better," Pallian told it. "Hold onto that look. I need to get ready for battle."
The nightmares were were worse than usual this time. He was... spread out, his body layered across a multi-level ruin, turned into a massive room with many doors. He reached out through those doors, crafted passages on the far side, made those passages into traps that brought people into him. And when they came, he ate their bones and left the rest of them to rot...
Chris shook himself awake, gasping. Across the fire, Antoinette raised an eyebrow in his direction. "It's okay," she said softly. "We're warded. We're safe."
Sherri, Adam, and Thorin were asleep around the fire, much like he had been. The night was quiet and pleasantly cool; even the fire had settled into a silent warmth. There were creatures moving in the darkness outside their camp, but nothing large or dangerous; nothing that might try to come through the wards. He nodded slowly, acknowledging what she'd said, and sat up slowly so as not to wake the others.
"Nightmare," he said, since there was no point in denying it.
"Chris..." Antoinette looked frustrated. "What happened to you? I've never seen someone so eager to get himself killed."
Chris looked at the fire for a long moment, then met his partner's eyes. "I'm not suicidal, you know," he said after a moment. "I know it looks that way, but I'm not."
"What is it, then?" she asked. "The risks you take..." She trailed off.
He sniffed, faintly amused. "I don't know how to say 'I appreciate the concern' without it sounding condescending, so I won't try." He paused, searching for words, and finally said: "I'm a wolf. I'm a lot harder to kill than most people -- even magi -- understand. I can recover from things that would cripple you if you didn't have magical healing. So I don't worry about getting injured the way you do."
Antoinette considered that. "Okay," she said at last, "I can see that. But it still seems like there's more to it than that. When that Master had me, you could have just snuck back out and set the place on fire on the way. Instead, you started shooting him."
"He had his fangs in your throat," Chris said quietly.
Antoinette swallowed. "So you couldn't stay safe because I was in danger?"
Chris frowned. "It's not--"
"It's not romantic," Antoinette said firmly. "I got that earlier. It's... loyalty?"
"...Somewhat," he admitted after a moment.
"So you went after the bone-taker because... it had already attacked you and you knew what it was capable of? And because it was attacking us?"
"And because it might have decided to kill Adam at any moment," Chris added. "Seemed less likely if something else had its attention. So I got its attention." He looked back at the fire. "But yeah, also because I was angry."
"Angry."
"Angry." Chris swallowed, but since he sharing confidences already he continued: "That thing had been sitting down there for... I don't know. Centuries, maybe. Luring people in through passages they couldn't escape, terrifying them, devouring them. It needed to die." He fell silent for a long moment, staring at the flames. "I would have let the magi handle it, I really would've. But then I fell down inside it and saw its heart, and... well... that was an opportunity that I wasn't going to miss." He grinned an unsettling grin, and his eyes sparkled as they caught the reflections of the fire. "And it was the perfect distraction."
Antoinette nodded slowly, then shivered. "Do you mind if I... Could I lie down next to you? Not for... you know... just... for warmth, and to have somebody next to me?"
Chris considered that for a long moment, then he stood. "Do you mind if I...?"
Antoinette shook her head. "Whatever you need to do."
He turned into a wolf, and curled up at a comfortable distance from the fire.
Antoinette approached slowly, then settled and and curled up beside him, putting her back to his back. If she was bothered by his being a wolf in truth, she didn't show any sign of it and her scent was, if anything, relieved. He stayed still as her breathing slowed and her body relaxed, keeping an eye on the fire and tracking the sounds and scents of the night. We're warded, he reminded himself. We're safe.
He didn't know if he still believed in the concept of safe anymore, but after a time he felt his body begin to relax and his attention begin to drift. He let himself go, and eventually he slept.
This time his dreams were undisturbed.
