Free Fiction Tuesday! A Fine Line: Part 5
Posted by alisonsky on March 30, 2010
As any fan of Joss Whedon will know, when there is a couple in love, someone’s gotta die. Guess who I’m a fan of? Oh wait, was that a spoiler alert rule I broke? Can the author actually break the spoiler rule?
So here we are, over a month into Free Fiction Tuesdays and now that you know all the main players, it’s time for the action to start. There’s a good chance that the people you thought you knew may not be as good or bad as you thought they were. And as I said before, someone’s gotta die.
Enjoy!
A Fine Line
By Alison Sky
Part 5
From the shadows of the woods just behind the Open Trough Inn, two sets of eyes watched the interaction of the human lovers in the kitchen. Price had actually enjoyed the choreography of the exchange; watching as the man tried to best the woman, and yet it was the woman who truly held the power in this relationship.
Zantos snorted, not amused. “Humans are confusing, don’t you agree?”
“I’m not confused,” Price replied. “Women are very powerful in their race. Every heroic man has had a stronger woman behind them as their support. Men just have the assumption that they are the weaker race so they have a reason to protect them.”
“I guess being part human yourself, you can understand them better than I ever could.” Zantos laughed and then started to move around the side of the inn. “But we must not let this distract us from our business here.”
Price followed closely in Zantos’ wake as they walked to the front of the inn. There was a group of ten other elven men in dark cloaks waiting in the shadows. Their hoods hid their faces, but each of them stood taller than the average man, and around each of their necks were various designs of a blood red pendant.
“What exactly is our business here?” Price asked.
“The same as always: hunting out those who were the murderers of our elders – of your parents. The man in here, Cairan, was a young soldier who has their blood on his hands. He may have forgotten, but we have not.”
“The Order’s memory lives forever,” one of the cloaked figures spoke softly at Price’s side. “And we avenge those who have fallen due to the hatred of others.”
“This man spilt the blood of ours,” Zantos spoke to the group, summing up his strength and feeding it to the others in his words. “Now we will take his blood, and those who stand in our way, to pay for his crimes against the Order.”
“Innocent souls do not need to die,” Price stated. “This is only a debt that Cairan owes.”
Zantos turned and scowled at the young half-breed. “Did the soldiers care about the innocents when they killed your parents? Did they not kill every man, woman and child in the village that was not hiding safely in the town beyond?” He glared at Price until the young man looked away, and Zantos smirked before pulling his hood up.
“And after all, they are only human.”
Vesa has humming to herself while working in the kitchen, thinking about Herrick who was now outside chopping firewood. After they had finished kissing – something neither of them were too quick to end – they had talked quietly about how to break the news to her father. Vesa was pretty sure Cairan already knew about the attraction between them as her father tended to have the annoying habit of knowing everything, but she did want to make sure that he wouldn’t try to beat Herrick up on some fatherly principle.
The joyful noises from the other side of the kitchen door went suddenly silent, which made Vesa stop and wait a moment to see if her father walked in after seeing the last guest out. When he didn’t enter, curiosity got the better of her and she walked to the kitchen door and opened it a crack to look in.
The main room held about a dozen figures in dark cloaks. All but one hid their faces in their hoods, hands wrapped around glowing red pendants. The guests who had been sitting with her father barely moved – almost as if they were all frozen in place; everyone except her father who was being confronted by the large elf that had his hood down.
“How dare you barge in here like this?” Cairan asked as he looked at his friends and guests in shock. “Who are you? What have you done to them?”
“Are you Cairan the Torch; hero of the Human-Elvin war in the westward kingdom?”
“That was a long time ago.” Cairan paled at the words from. “I was a different person then.”
Vesa jumped as she felt a body press up against hers from behind, and turned her head to see Herrick there, looking into the room as well. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Lower your voice,” she hissed, then turned back to watch the men in the main room. “And I don’t know, but they want my father.”
“You still go by that name; therefore you shall answer to the crimes of that name.” From his robe the elf drew a long silver dagger and held it up for the larger human to see it. Cairan started to retreat back, but the other elves had moved behind him to block his way.
“Leave my father alone!” Vesa ran through the door, unable to watch any longer. Herrick made a grab for her, but she was too fast and across the room in the matter of moments. She was almost to her father’s side when she stopped suddenly, frozen in place.
Zantos turned to look at Vesa, his lips turning up into a smirk. “This is your daughter? Very beautiful specimen. Perhaps I should allow her to witness the death of her father the way many of us did.”
“Please, no…” Cairan’s voice begged. “She has no part of this…”
“Now, she will.”
“Let her be.” Herrick came out from the kitchen holding a short sword in his hands. His eyes looked at each of the elves in the room before locking on Zantos. The numbers were even now in each elf that was holding a human frozen. It gave him an advantage he was hoping he could use.
“Ah, the lover; finally the picture is complete.” Leaving Cairan and Vesa behind, he moved towards Herrick with his arms outstretched. “You want to fight with me for your woman, human? Then come at me.”
Herrick raised his sword to attack, but as he took his first step forward, he felt a wire wrap tightly around his neck. He was still able to breathe, but the wire cut into his skin as he tried to move away from it. “Drop your sword,” a voice stated firmly from behind him.
Doing as he was told, Herrick dropped the weapon and then fell to his knees in front of the elf they were kicked out from behind. Zantos smirked and stood in front of Herrick, looking down as if his eyes were judging the soul in front of him. He then held up the dagger in front of Herrick’s face so that the human could see the engraving on the weapon.
“I want you to remember this night, human. It is your memories that will make you into the man that you want to become.”
With that, Zantos spun on his heel and tossed the dagger across the room. It landed deep in Cairan’s chest, and the larger man stumbled back into the wall. His hands went up to the dagger to stop the blood that was starting to flow from the injury – he was a warrior and knew better than to remove it – but he slowly slid to the ground from shock.
“Cairan!”
“Father!”
With the deed done, Zantos motioned for the other elves to leave. They started for the door, walking backwards with their hands still on their pendants. Zantos ignored Vesa as he walked by until she spat on the back of his neck. “You monster! You can’t even fight your own battles except to pick on poor, defenseless old heroes and their friends.”
Wiping the spit from his neck, he turned and looked her in the eye, then smiled. “You have a very sharp tongue, woman. Don’t force me to remove it.”
“I’d like to see you try.”
He laughed at that. “You might just provide me with some amusement, human.” He turned to the one elf that still remained in the room, holding his pendant and facing Vesa. “She’s coming with us. See to her.”
The elf nodded and approached Vesa. She wasn’t able to move away as he whispered a few words and touched the pendant to her forehead. She gave a small cry and then her eyes rolled back into her head as she collapsed into the elf’s waiting arms.
“Leave her be! You don’t need her!” Herrick resisted the urge to struggle against the wire around his neck, but he did manage to turn his head a bit to look at the man behind him holding it. He was surprised to see the face of a man that was half human, and not the graceful traits of a full blood elf. What was more surprising, though, was that the same look of shock at the turn of events was in the half-breed’s eyes as he watched the elf take Vesa out the door.
Zantos turned his gaze to Herrick, then the man behind him. “This time, I expect you to fulfill your task,” he stated before turning to walk past the still frozen humans in the room and out the door.
The half-elf looked down at Herrick and for a moment they just looked into each other’s eyes. Gritting his teeth, the half-breed took one hand off the wire as he grabbed a mug from the table. Herrick felt the wire loosen and tried to move to attack him, but the mug landed soundly across the back of his head and pitched him forward to the floor. Questions filled his mind as the blackness fell over him, the largest wondering just why he was still alive.
