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31_days2005-11-05 10:10 pm
swollenfoot.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2005-11-05 10:10 pm
[November 5][Original] That Night
Title: That Night
Day / Theme: November 5 / A series of unlikely but significant events
Series: Original
Characters: Ebony, Sean
Rating: G
9:40 103105
It started one night, a full moon night that breathed in razor sharp and exhaled jarringly like breaking slivers of ice. A homecoming at the dead of night...it was a passing that might as well have occurred in the mythic hall of Savara’s Keep, where Sean Savara’s ultimate forefather had kept court under a battleaxe hanging by a single hairstrand millennia ago.
Sean, the gleam of the Valley’s Heart (another useless medal that announced his supposed valor) hidden by his robes, was disgraced. The royal runt he was supposed to protect had nabbed the job from his very nose. The weakest of the four Drynwyn royals, the child he remembered to have grown from a body so sickened it was barely corporeal, had saved him from a fate worse than death, from a high-caliber assassin of the undead, a sentient corpse. That she overdid it was of no moment. The air still reeked of burning flesh and the sticky sensation of human fat aerosolized in the atmosphere was upon everyone’s lips. All that was dwarfed by grim triumph.
(Yes, it was good news. She wasn’t a runt, after all, was as powerful as any of her three siblings. The city-state of Kentrona was vouchsafed by the demise of this common village. A whole world celebrated; these tears must be paid in ransom.)
She had incinerated the village with the enemy. Collateral damage, they told her. She nodded. Imagine? That stubborn, ornery, epitome of the unstable adolescent was nodding calmly like that.
He wasn’t angry, even though her carelessness would have cost him his head, had something gone wrong. A formal reprimand was impossible—she outranked him and, yes, it rankled still. But the usual gibe would have had unpredictable consequences. Would she turn her newfound power on him? Kill him on the spot, as she had always threatened to do? Was he afraid of this extremely powerful creature?
Sean Savara, afraid of Ebony Drynwyn, Adrian’s little sister. That the day had even come...
Impossible! He would jeer at her, as he always had done. He would save his face.
Bewildered, he found himself patting her head instead. An awkward thing to do to a girl almost his height. (She had grown that much in three years? What the hell did they feed her in the human world?)
Ebony was crying.
One of her dark eyes was white with the moon, while the other blazed red with the dwindling embers. Sean was chagrined. How long had he tried to make her cry? Years of his childhood. Precious years. (Didn’t he have a bet with Adrian on this? Ah, he’s forgotten the details, so there’s no exhorting money from the prince this time.) Trust her to steal victory from him so underhandedly. Crying in this place, in this empty frigid place, with common eyes ogling her and the wailing of the bereaved rending the skies.
...But since he had to be protected and she was forced to act herself, wasn’t it his fault? That all these people died? Since she was crying for these dead... by corollary, she was crying because of him.
Strange. Her defeat on his hand, then, at this unexpected moment, while others celebrated her victory over an ancient enemy of the realm of Lethe. Truly, it was a momentous night.
He neither laughed nor gloated at her as she silently wept all the way home. Call him an egomaniac, but that had to be the most significant thing of all.
~10:01
Day / Theme: November 5 / A series of unlikely but significant events
Series: Original
Characters: Ebony, Sean
Rating: G
9:40 103105
It started one night, a full moon night that breathed in razor sharp and exhaled jarringly like breaking slivers of ice. A homecoming at the dead of night...it was a passing that might as well have occurred in the mythic hall of Savara’s Keep, where Sean Savara’s ultimate forefather had kept court under a battleaxe hanging by a single hairstrand millennia ago.
Sean, the gleam of the Valley’s Heart (another useless medal that announced his supposed valor) hidden by his robes, was disgraced. The royal runt he was supposed to protect had nabbed the job from his very nose. The weakest of the four Drynwyn royals, the child he remembered to have grown from a body so sickened it was barely corporeal, had saved him from a fate worse than death, from a high-caliber assassin of the undead, a sentient corpse. That she overdid it was of no moment. The air still reeked of burning flesh and the sticky sensation of human fat aerosolized in the atmosphere was upon everyone’s lips. All that was dwarfed by grim triumph.
(Yes, it was good news. She wasn’t a runt, after all, was as powerful as any of her three siblings. The city-state of Kentrona was vouchsafed by the demise of this common village. A whole world celebrated; these tears must be paid in ransom.)
She had incinerated the village with the enemy. Collateral damage, they told her. She nodded. Imagine? That stubborn, ornery, epitome of the unstable adolescent was nodding calmly like that.
He wasn’t angry, even though her carelessness would have cost him his head, had something gone wrong. A formal reprimand was impossible—she outranked him and, yes, it rankled still. But the usual gibe would have had unpredictable consequences. Would she turn her newfound power on him? Kill him on the spot, as she had always threatened to do? Was he afraid of this extremely powerful creature?
Sean Savara, afraid of Ebony Drynwyn, Adrian’s little sister. That the day had even come...
Impossible! He would jeer at her, as he always had done. He would save his face.
Bewildered, he found himself patting her head instead. An awkward thing to do to a girl almost his height. (She had grown that much in three years? What the hell did they feed her in the human world?)
Ebony was crying.
One of her dark eyes was white with the moon, while the other blazed red with the dwindling embers. Sean was chagrined. How long had he tried to make her cry? Years of his childhood. Precious years. (Didn’t he have a bet with Adrian on this? Ah, he’s forgotten the details, so there’s no exhorting money from the prince this time.) Trust her to steal victory from him so underhandedly. Crying in this place, in this empty frigid place, with common eyes ogling her and the wailing of the bereaved rending the skies.
...But since he had to be protected and she was forced to act herself, wasn’t it his fault? That all these people died? Since she was crying for these dead... by corollary, she was crying because of him.
Strange. Her defeat on his hand, then, at this unexpected moment, while others celebrated her victory over an ancient enemy of the realm of Lethe. Truly, it was a momentous night.
He neither laughed nor gloated at her as she silently wept all the way home. Call him an egomaniac, but that had to be the most significant thing of all.
~10:01