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31_days2009-09-21 01:19 am
intradependency.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2009-09-21 01:19 am
[September 20] [Death Gate Cycle] The Winged Beast
Title: The Winged Beast
Day/Theme: Sept 20, appealing to emotions I simply do not have
Series: Weis and Hickman's Death Gate Cycle
Character/Pairing: Hugh the Hand/Elf Lieutenant
Rating: NC-17
.
When the slavers first dragged Hugh into the airship’s heart, he struggled.
Captured months ago, Hugh knew this ritual, though he had never been at the heart of it before. The elves – particularly, their low-deck lieutenant - were picky about who they’d take this deep. Only the strongest of their slaves, the largest. Only elves and corpses ever came back from the airship’s heart. The elves would be laughing, the corpses broken.
Slavery had always been an arbitrary concept for Hugh. He knew a hundred other names to call it by, captivity, a prisoner of war, even a forced apprenticeship. For the first time that day, he felt his slavery as what it was, an evil thing, no dignity here, no choice of his own. Not even the choice of how he was going to take this. Each of his forward steps came forced, grudging, and no less desperate for all his refusal to panic. This was a battle whose inevitability he knew.
Hugh could kill them. Elves were touchy, even the male ones, always stroking each other; they never guarded against an invasion of personal space the way a human would. Wrestling with him like this, they’d let him get close enough to kill them without even realizing he was close enough to do so. But then what? He would die for certain instead of out in the unknown. The elves on deck were better armed, better trained than the bored ones tasked to watch the ‘beasts’. Hugh found no honour in the concept that he would go to his death in the company of his fellow dead; he found no honour in the concept of his own death. The slaves wouldn’t help, if Hugh moved. They were well fed on this ship, fattened if filthy, their needs met and their wants simplified for them, stripped to the essentials. Hugh was not the man to inspire another with conversations on the nature of true freedom. He cared nothing for slaves, for their lives; he was no slave. One man’s cage was another’s safe haven; for the humans on this ship, slavery had been a better end to the struggle of daily existence than death. Hugh did not scorn them, but they were stranger to him than the elves who dragged him now to his uncertain death.
Hugh was the only one who tended the corpses left after the elves entertained themselves. The bodies, broken arms, broken legs, broken backs, were savaged, and striped neck to knee with burns that looked like they had come from a rope.
.
The heart of the airship proved to be a tiny room with a window to the fore, with walls, deck and ceiling cut through with many angled slots. Each gap was lined around the edges with leather-wrapped, padded metal. Reinforcement, Hugh realized, because each slot had a rope that ran through it, all the way to another slot opposite. Each rope was in singing, whirring motion, whining with strain.
The air was full of rope fibre and dust. Hugh caught his breath, coughing, striving for equilibrium. The elves moved with certainty through the morass, a familiar ease. Some wore gloves with plate metal across the palms, while others had long metal rods with hooks on the end. The ones with the rods caught at a point on each rope as it sawed past. An eyelet, magically charmed to hold two halves of the rope together – to hold two halves of the dragonship together. The ones with gloves assisted with drawing the rope to a motionless tension, feet braced against the deck, the walls, two to a side. Once stilled, the low-decks lieutenant spoke a single word to make that eyelet’s charm unlock.
Selbarillel. Literally, a command to release, a word two scant syllables from freedom, selbirallel. Seven ropes, seven times the word was repeated. Even half-obscured by the ceaseless creaking and sawing of rope, Hugh heard the word often enough to memorise it. He disliked the elven tongue, it made him feel awkward, his vowels too static, but he’d learned it. These elves had no idea how fast he could learn.
This was the airship’s heart, a term Hugh learned only by listening to the elves – but Hugh had misinterpreted the latter word. This wasn’t the airship’s heart, surely the slaves’ deck was that, wingmen all and solid grunt to power the peripherals. Nor was this the dragonship's brain, where one man wore a harness and steered the ship, the captain by his side to speak the word of where to go. This room -- was a nerve center. The elves had brought him to a control centre, a repair outlet, a node through which all the ropes ran to govern the flight of the ship.
The dragonship was currently in motion, the return flight up from the Maelstrom expected to be boring, uneventful, pirate attack notwithstanding. The seven ropes the elves had unhooked must be non-essential ones to the airship's flight, or they wouldn't have risked this.
Hugh realized, sudden, sharp, gleeful, that the elves were going to teach him to fly. They didn’t even know it.
His elation came so hard that he missed seeing the blow coming in its wake, the plated fist swung to catch his skull from the side. A boot planted onto his braid, jerked his scalp tight and his chin to the floor. Cold metal slid under his collar. A sword, sharp along his spine; Hugh made no sudden moves. The seam of his shirt parted under pressure, his trousers to follow.
Only one elf was free to move. The others held the waiting ropes, as taut with tension as their tasking. Hugh recognized the low-deck lieutenant by his smirk; the elf had no command presence above deck. Down here, his word was as good as a god’s.
The elf unbuckled his sword belt, slid it to one side, set his hands to the trefoil buttons at his uniform’s collar. ‘You know what I want, beast?’
The elf’s tongue made of the human language a distortion that should have been laughable. Yoo naow hwhut Ai hwaint, bhist? The boot still pinned Hugh by his hair; he made no move to rise. They would humiliate him before they let their ship tear him apart. They would make him grovel, make him beg. They would burn him in parts and rip him into pieces, make him howl, set his tongue to one of the still-moving ropes. He would lick their knuckles clean of his own shed blood.
He gave his assent. He knewwhat the elf wanted.
No knowledge was free. Hugh counted scarce four years freedom from the walls of the monastery, almost one of which had been on this ship. He was young enough to be ignorant, old enough to know his own ignorance, but he knew this already: freedom could never be quantified by another man’s measure of barls. They would teach him to fly, these elves, for as long as he could take this; they wouldn’t know it, but they would teach him to fly.
‘Master,’ Hugh said. Hugh would have said whatever they wanted him to say. What were words when he could have wings?
The lieutenant smiled, bent over, and patted him on the cheek.
.
It took so long to get to this.
At some point during the previous, the ship had listed sharply to the right, enough that one of the waiting elves cursed and had to duck below the thickest rope in the room as it sawed, up, down, back. The lieutenant’s sword had skittered to the side, the only metallic sound amidst the airship’s song and human mortality. That rope had then shrieked for a moment against another. Through the substance that gummed his eyes, Hugh noted exactly how that thick rope moved.
The lieutenant was never fully naked through it all. Authority belonged to the clad. His orders were always short, sharp, to the point. Hugh could not help the surge of his own satisfaction when at last the order went to the lieutenant’s subordinates, be ready. The air was twisted with their tension. Hugh sucked in fibrous air as the lieutenant hauled him into position. The first rope went around his waist, one around his right wrist, three around his left bicep, the last two to wrench his left leg up, away. The asymmetry threw him, he hadn’t been expecting it. He hadn’t prepared for it. He hurt, and the elves hadn’t even released the ropes yet. They were taking most of the strain.
Twelve of them. One of him. Hugh was strong, but elves were stronger; but he only needed to hold for a moment. He was staggering already, one-legged, unbalanced, as strained as if the ropes paid their full loads into his flesh already. He was waiting for this:
Laughing, the lieutenant ordered his men to stand down.
The instant of release, Hugh threw himself to one side with as much force as he could muster. He could not allow his body to take this strain, he would sunder, he would fly and fly apart. His lunge took him to the left, and up, where the down-sweep of the wings worked with where the vast quantity of his bonds wanted him to go; the airship met his shoulder with a crack, with pain; another rib broken, he thought, and spat blood across the ceiling with a shout not entirely of pain. The one rope to his right pulled only on the upswing of the wings, he had two seconds before the wings turned against him. He gathered his free leg, set his heel against the wall, and fought against the pull of six left-sided ropes, hollering with the strain. Just for a second, please, please, a second was all he needed, a second before the elves could react, before the dragonship he could have loved could kill him—
At the bottom of each wingsweep, there was a pause which read as brief dip in the tension of all ropes. Hugh surrendered when it happened, and in surrendering, controlled where he fell.
Onto the other side of the thickest rope in the room. The key to it all.
Wracked, Hugh struggled to stand. The lieutenant tied his knots with skill. Hugh had not enough rope to rise when his balance was this compromised, but enough to kneel. Just. He braced the tangle of six ropes against that giant one and with the upswing of the wings, he had –
--freedom.
.
Six ropes uncoiled across the room, lethal lashes that threatened to foul the entire ship’s workings. The elves were shouting at each other, shrieking, but they were as much slaves to this airship’s needs as Hugh and the human beasts were. The elves were prepared, even half-clad, rods and gloves always at hand. Hugh breathed, simply. They couldn’t get to him where he lay. They were desperate to grab the ropes.
One rope to the right, around his wrist. Hugh had forgotten. The upswing continued and he slid across the deck, helpless. His forearm cracked against the wall, unnaturally angled, a wretched pain that would have had him scream had he not been wrung dry. The adrenaline of his bid left him empty, near delusional, the furor around him meaningless when he had wanted – to find order. To find a reason. Master of his own fate. It seemed so laughable as an ambition right now. He laughed. He was going to lose his arm if he was lucky, his life if he was not.
The lieutenant approached. Hugh couldn’t rise. The lieutenant knelt. Some light – gleamed in his eyes. Human enough, for an elf; Hugh could understand that look.
‘Impressed,’ said the elf, halting. Behind him, six lost ropes were reclaimed. The elves were swearing. Laughing. Relieved.
‘Impressive,’ Hugh corrected. It seemed the time for the correction of many an assumption. He was grinning, or grimacing, he had no idea why. Blood hung thick from his lips, slick through his beard.
‘Strong.’
‘When I need to be, elf.’
‘What you want? Why you live? Your fool-king is waiting?’
‘He’s not,’ Hugh had to laugh. The king had no need for another bastard Blackthorne. Seven bounties on Hugh's head, certainly no ransom if the elf thought to collect, but he might collect something. ‘I’m alive because it means I’m still winning.’
‘Bark slower, beast –‘
But Hugh could do better than that. ‘Kelhorihielanhala,’ he said, shuddering. His arm would come off if the ship went through another wing cycle; his shoulder was screaming, his elbow – barely looked human any more. ‘Krenka-anris del-ogrith nelhorihielanala-el-neshtris.’
Death waits for me, Hugh said. Elf humour on board a ship was entirely hierarchical, devoutly misogynistic, and layered with inference. Hugh knew how to read a crowd. I like to keep the Lady in-waiting.
The lieutenant’s lips quirked. He shifted slightly, just enough to set his boot on the rope that held Hugh’s arm. The tension eased, the cessation so – unexpected, Hugh choked, wept. His wrist leaked blood like a sprung barrel. Gods couldn’t have meant more to him then than that shining black elf-boot.
The lieutenant bent, set his lips to Hugh’s ear, and whispered, ‘What you want?’
‘Don’t kill me,’ Hugh said. He was banking on the elf’s curiosity overriding the usual habit now, on his own strength, on the novelty of his defiance. No master was truly a master without a battle under his belt to prove it; and the lieutenant was trapped here, below decks, not by merit or its lack, but by his birth. Hugh knew enough of elf hierarchy, and of human aristocracy, to understand that frustration. ‘What fun in that? Bring me back in here. Two ropes at a time. I can – behave. Two ropes at a time.’
‘Why? What you want, beast?’
‘Selbarillel.’
The elf’s sticky fingers walked a path down Hugh’s scarred chest, settled on one particular bruise, thick and purple over a rib he had broken before. He pushed. Hugh sucked in his breath, choked on rope fibre, and bore it, sweating. Drenched with it.
‘Fuck me, lads,’ the elf said, liquid laughter, eyes like the Maelstrom itself. ‘The beast’s just volunteered himself to our indefinite personal service.’
‘Throw him over, ‘Rell. You saw what he did--'
‘--nearly lost the fucking ship!’
‘–and how did he know, he’s too strong--’
‘You like to play it risky, ‘Rell, this beast’s not a dumb one, he’s going to learn--’
The elf’s gaze still focused on Hugh’s. He ignored his chorus; the curiosity burned now, tempered by something else. He did not relent with the pressure on that bruise, even as Hugh gasped, faster, faster, pain overwhelming what numbness adrenaline could give.
‘Risky,’ the elf said. He licked his lips. ‘But look at him take it. Isn’t he magnificent?’
The pressure abated, sudden and shocking, to leave Hugh groaning again. The remnant rope about his leg, while severed from the ship, was yet tight enough to have him crippled, one arm still trapped, dependent on the lieutenant’s bootheel. The elf’s touch – wandered, where Hugh had not thought the elf would want to touch except to hurt. But he wasn’t – and after so much pain it was –
‘Selbarillel,’ the lieutenant said.
--shit. But Hugh had meant, selbirallel. The elf wasn’t moving, just holding him tight enough that it became another kind of ache; the elf whispered again, that fluid, magicked order that shot through Hugh’s skin like a whiplash itself--
One man’s freedom is another’s cage. The elf was going to teach Hugh to fly, and he knew what he was doing. All because the poor bastard hated being trapped on this ship with every fibre of his being. It was the best of elfish humour as Hugh understood it. By the look in the lieutenant’s eyes, his quirked lip as he -- held, the disgusted retreat of his men, he seemed to think so too.
‘Release, beast. Release for me. A command. Selbarillel. You get your wings. I get what I want.’
.
Day/Theme: Sept 20, appealing to emotions I simply do not have
Series: Weis and Hickman's Death Gate Cycle
Character/Pairing: Hugh the Hand/Elf Lieutenant
Rating: NC-17
.
When the slavers first dragged Hugh into the airship’s heart, he struggled.
Captured months ago, Hugh knew this ritual, though he had never been at the heart of it before. The elves – particularly, their low-deck lieutenant - were picky about who they’d take this deep. Only the strongest of their slaves, the largest. Only elves and corpses ever came back from the airship’s heart. The elves would be laughing, the corpses broken.
Slavery had always been an arbitrary concept for Hugh. He knew a hundred other names to call it by, captivity, a prisoner of war, even a forced apprenticeship. For the first time that day, he felt his slavery as what it was, an evil thing, no dignity here, no choice of his own. Not even the choice of how he was going to take this. Each of his forward steps came forced, grudging, and no less desperate for all his refusal to panic. This was a battle whose inevitability he knew.
Hugh could kill them. Elves were touchy, even the male ones, always stroking each other; they never guarded against an invasion of personal space the way a human would. Wrestling with him like this, they’d let him get close enough to kill them without even realizing he was close enough to do so. But then what? He would die for certain instead of out in the unknown. The elves on deck were better armed, better trained than the bored ones tasked to watch the ‘beasts’. Hugh found no honour in the concept that he would go to his death in the company of his fellow dead; he found no honour in the concept of his own death. The slaves wouldn’t help, if Hugh moved. They were well fed on this ship, fattened if filthy, their needs met and their wants simplified for them, stripped to the essentials. Hugh was not the man to inspire another with conversations on the nature of true freedom. He cared nothing for slaves, for their lives; he was no slave. One man’s cage was another’s safe haven; for the humans on this ship, slavery had been a better end to the struggle of daily existence than death. Hugh did not scorn them, but they were stranger to him than the elves who dragged him now to his uncertain death.
Hugh was the only one who tended the corpses left after the elves entertained themselves. The bodies, broken arms, broken legs, broken backs, were savaged, and striped neck to knee with burns that looked like they had come from a rope.
.
The heart of the airship proved to be a tiny room with a window to the fore, with walls, deck and ceiling cut through with many angled slots. Each gap was lined around the edges with leather-wrapped, padded metal. Reinforcement, Hugh realized, because each slot had a rope that ran through it, all the way to another slot opposite. Each rope was in singing, whirring motion, whining with strain.
The air was full of rope fibre and dust. Hugh caught his breath, coughing, striving for equilibrium. The elves moved with certainty through the morass, a familiar ease. Some wore gloves with plate metal across the palms, while others had long metal rods with hooks on the end. The ones with the rods caught at a point on each rope as it sawed past. An eyelet, magically charmed to hold two halves of the rope together – to hold two halves of the dragonship together. The ones with gloves assisted with drawing the rope to a motionless tension, feet braced against the deck, the walls, two to a side. Once stilled, the low-decks lieutenant spoke a single word to make that eyelet’s charm unlock.
Selbarillel. Literally, a command to release, a word two scant syllables from freedom, selbirallel. Seven ropes, seven times the word was repeated. Even half-obscured by the ceaseless creaking and sawing of rope, Hugh heard the word often enough to memorise it. He disliked the elven tongue, it made him feel awkward, his vowels too static, but he’d learned it. These elves had no idea how fast he could learn.
This was the airship’s heart, a term Hugh learned only by listening to the elves – but Hugh had misinterpreted the latter word. This wasn’t the airship’s heart, surely the slaves’ deck was that, wingmen all and solid grunt to power the peripherals. Nor was this the dragonship's brain, where one man wore a harness and steered the ship, the captain by his side to speak the word of where to go. This room -- was a nerve center. The elves had brought him to a control centre, a repair outlet, a node through which all the ropes ran to govern the flight of the ship.
The dragonship was currently in motion, the return flight up from the Maelstrom expected to be boring, uneventful, pirate attack notwithstanding. The seven ropes the elves had unhooked must be non-essential ones to the airship's flight, or they wouldn't have risked this.
Hugh realized, sudden, sharp, gleeful, that the elves were going to teach him to fly. They didn’t even know it.
His elation came so hard that he missed seeing the blow coming in its wake, the plated fist swung to catch his skull from the side. A boot planted onto his braid, jerked his scalp tight and his chin to the floor. Cold metal slid under his collar. A sword, sharp along his spine; Hugh made no sudden moves. The seam of his shirt parted under pressure, his trousers to follow.
Only one elf was free to move. The others held the waiting ropes, as taut with tension as their tasking. Hugh recognized the low-deck lieutenant by his smirk; the elf had no command presence above deck. Down here, his word was as good as a god’s.
The elf unbuckled his sword belt, slid it to one side, set his hands to the trefoil buttons at his uniform’s collar. ‘You know what I want, beast?’
The elf’s tongue made of the human language a distortion that should have been laughable. Yoo naow hwhut Ai hwaint, bhist? The boot still pinned Hugh by his hair; he made no move to rise. They would humiliate him before they let their ship tear him apart. They would make him grovel, make him beg. They would burn him in parts and rip him into pieces, make him howl, set his tongue to one of the still-moving ropes. He would lick their knuckles clean of his own shed blood.
He gave his assent. He knewwhat the elf wanted.
No knowledge was free. Hugh counted scarce four years freedom from the walls of the monastery, almost one of which had been on this ship. He was young enough to be ignorant, old enough to know his own ignorance, but he knew this already: freedom could never be quantified by another man’s measure of barls. They would teach him to fly, these elves, for as long as he could take this; they wouldn’t know it, but they would teach him to fly.
‘Master,’ Hugh said. Hugh would have said whatever they wanted him to say. What were words when he could have wings?
The lieutenant smiled, bent over, and patted him on the cheek.
.
It took so long to get to this.
At some point during the previous, the ship had listed sharply to the right, enough that one of the waiting elves cursed and had to duck below the thickest rope in the room as it sawed, up, down, back. The lieutenant’s sword had skittered to the side, the only metallic sound amidst the airship’s song and human mortality. That rope had then shrieked for a moment against another. Through the substance that gummed his eyes, Hugh noted exactly how that thick rope moved.
The lieutenant was never fully naked through it all. Authority belonged to the clad. His orders were always short, sharp, to the point. Hugh could not help the surge of his own satisfaction when at last the order went to the lieutenant’s subordinates, be ready. The air was twisted with their tension. Hugh sucked in fibrous air as the lieutenant hauled him into position. The first rope went around his waist, one around his right wrist, three around his left bicep, the last two to wrench his left leg up, away. The asymmetry threw him, he hadn’t been expecting it. He hadn’t prepared for it. He hurt, and the elves hadn’t even released the ropes yet. They were taking most of the strain.
Twelve of them. One of him. Hugh was strong, but elves were stronger; but he only needed to hold for a moment. He was staggering already, one-legged, unbalanced, as strained as if the ropes paid their full loads into his flesh already. He was waiting for this:
Laughing, the lieutenant ordered his men to stand down.
The instant of release, Hugh threw himself to one side with as much force as he could muster. He could not allow his body to take this strain, he would sunder, he would fly and fly apart. His lunge took him to the left, and up, where the down-sweep of the wings worked with where the vast quantity of his bonds wanted him to go; the airship met his shoulder with a crack, with pain; another rib broken, he thought, and spat blood across the ceiling with a shout not entirely of pain. The one rope to his right pulled only on the upswing of the wings, he had two seconds before the wings turned against him. He gathered his free leg, set his heel against the wall, and fought against the pull of six left-sided ropes, hollering with the strain. Just for a second, please, please, a second was all he needed, a second before the elves could react, before the dragonship he could have loved could kill him—
At the bottom of each wingsweep, there was a pause which read as brief dip in the tension of all ropes. Hugh surrendered when it happened, and in surrendering, controlled where he fell.
Onto the other side of the thickest rope in the room. The key to it all.
Wracked, Hugh struggled to stand. The lieutenant tied his knots with skill. Hugh had not enough rope to rise when his balance was this compromised, but enough to kneel. Just. He braced the tangle of six ropes against that giant one and with the upswing of the wings, he had –
--freedom.
.
Six ropes uncoiled across the room, lethal lashes that threatened to foul the entire ship’s workings. The elves were shouting at each other, shrieking, but they were as much slaves to this airship’s needs as Hugh and the human beasts were. The elves were prepared, even half-clad, rods and gloves always at hand. Hugh breathed, simply. They couldn’t get to him where he lay. They were desperate to grab the ropes.
One rope to the right, around his wrist. Hugh had forgotten. The upswing continued and he slid across the deck, helpless. His forearm cracked against the wall, unnaturally angled, a wretched pain that would have had him scream had he not been wrung dry. The adrenaline of his bid left him empty, near delusional, the furor around him meaningless when he had wanted – to find order. To find a reason. Master of his own fate. It seemed so laughable as an ambition right now. He laughed. He was going to lose his arm if he was lucky, his life if he was not.
The lieutenant approached. Hugh couldn’t rise. The lieutenant knelt. Some light – gleamed in his eyes. Human enough, for an elf; Hugh could understand that look.
‘Impressed,’ said the elf, halting. Behind him, six lost ropes were reclaimed. The elves were swearing. Laughing. Relieved.
‘Impressive,’ Hugh corrected. It seemed the time for the correction of many an assumption. He was grinning, or grimacing, he had no idea why. Blood hung thick from his lips, slick through his beard.
‘Strong.’
‘When I need to be, elf.’
‘What you want? Why you live? Your fool-king is waiting?’
‘He’s not,’ Hugh had to laugh. The king had no need for another bastard Blackthorne. Seven bounties on Hugh's head, certainly no ransom if the elf thought to collect, but he might collect something. ‘I’m alive because it means I’m still winning.’
‘Bark slower, beast –‘
But Hugh could do better than that. ‘Kelhorihielanhala,’ he said, shuddering. His arm would come off if the ship went through another wing cycle; his shoulder was screaming, his elbow – barely looked human any more. ‘Krenka-anris del-ogrith nelhorihielanala-el-neshtris.’
Death waits for me, Hugh said. Elf humour on board a ship was entirely hierarchical, devoutly misogynistic, and layered with inference. Hugh knew how to read a crowd. I like to keep the Lady in-waiting.
The lieutenant’s lips quirked. He shifted slightly, just enough to set his boot on the rope that held Hugh’s arm. The tension eased, the cessation so – unexpected, Hugh choked, wept. His wrist leaked blood like a sprung barrel. Gods couldn’t have meant more to him then than that shining black elf-boot.
The lieutenant bent, set his lips to Hugh’s ear, and whispered, ‘What you want?’
‘Don’t kill me,’ Hugh said. He was banking on the elf’s curiosity overriding the usual habit now, on his own strength, on the novelty of his defiance. No master was truly a master without a battle under his belt to prove it; and the lieutenant was trapped here, below decks, not by merit or its lack, but by his birth. Hugh knew enough of elf hierarchy, and of human aristocracy, to understand that frustration. ‘What fun in that? Bring me back in here. Two ropes at a time. I can – behave. Two ropes at a time.’
‘Why? What you want, beast?’
‘Selbarillel.’
The elf’s sticky fingers walked a path down Hugh’s scarred chest, settled on one particular bruise, thick and purple over a rib he had broken before. He pushed. Hugh sucked in his breath, choked on rope fibre, and bore it, sweating. Drenched with it.
‘Fuck me, lads,’ the elf said, liquid laughter, eyes like the Maelstrom itself. ‘The beast’s just volunteered himself to our indefinite personal service.’
‘Throw him over, ‘Rell. You saw what he did--'
‘--nearly lost the fucking ship!’
‘–and how did he know, he’s too strong--’
‘You like to play it risky, ‘Rell, this beast’s not a dumb one, he’s going to learn--’
The elf’s gaze still focused on Hugh’s. He ignored his chorus; the curiosity burned now, tempered by something else. He did not relent with the pressure on that bruise, even as Hugh gasped, faster, faster, pain overwhelming what numbness adrenaline could give.
‘Risky,’ the elf said. He licked his lips. ‘But look at him take it. Isn’t he magnificent?’
The pressure abated, sudden and shocking, to leave Hugh groaning again. The remnant rope about his leg, while severed from the ship, was yet tight enough to have him crippled, one arm still trapped, dependent on the lieutenant’s bootheel. The elf’s touch – wandered, where Hugh had not thought the elf would want to touch except to hurt. But he wasn’t – and after so much pain it was –
‘Selbarillel,’ the lieutenant said.
--shit. But Hugh had meant, selbirallel. The elf wasn’t moving, just holding him tight enough that it became another kind of ache; the elf whispered again, that fluid, magicked order that shot through Hugh’s skin like a whiplash itself--
One man’s freedom is another’s cage. The elf was going to teach Hugh to fly, and he knew what he was doing. All because the poor bastard hated being trapped on this ship with every fibre of his being. It was the best of elfish humour as Hugh understood it. By the look in the lieutenant’s eyes, his quirked lip as he -- held, the disgusted retreat of his men, he seemed to think so too.
‘Release, beast. Release for me. A command. Selbarillel. You get your wings. I get what I want.’
.