lisaroquin (lisaroquin) wrote in sticksnstrings, @ 2009-02-14 16:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | author: etakyma, fandom: btvs |
Wings of Fire by etakyma
Title: Wings of Fire
Author: etakyma@yahoo.com (and on LiveJournal http://etakyma.livejournal.com/)
January/February 2009 Written for sticksnstrings challenge
Word count: approximately 2200 plus or minus
Prompt: Bang the Drum Slowly, Emmylou Harris
Author's Notes: This was not easy to write. In fact I got about 900 words into it three four times, from three four different angles, and in three four different points along the timeline before this was the one that felt the most "right." The tone of the prompt given to me was quite melancholy. And sad, slow-ish, and sweet.
~*~
I meant to ask you how you lived what you believed
With nothing but your heart up your sleeve
~*~
Xander Harris settled the pack more firmly and took a deep breath before beginning the trek. He needed a break. He'd done the whole search the continents for slayers thing for over a year, and now he needed a break. Not climb-a-mountain-to-find-a-book kind of a break either. More the kind with sunny beaches and no responsibilities. Not the world-is-gonna-end-without-this-tome kind. Damn it.
He's been sent up the mountain to seek the Keeper of Knowledge, the Elder of the Mountain, or the Mistress of Prophecy. Depending on who he asked in the village below. But the one thing they all had in common was they lived on the top of the mountain, and there was only one path to the top. He'd also been warned that the witch who lived on the mountain would fry him and eat him for supper. He wasn't sure who he should believe, but if G-man needed this thing that could be found at the top of this mountain, up he'd go and take his chances. So he trudged up and up and up. The hillside was steep enough to keep anyone away who was not climbing for a reason off the mountain. It wasn't the hardest or most technical climb Xander had ever undertaken, but he was breathing hard and sweating profusely by the time he reached the top.
It took nearly half a day of following faint traces of a trail. The only clue he'd had was "stay to the path" - and having heard better cautionary tales than Red Riding Hood (more with the ooze of demon slime than the teeth of a big bad wolf - but demon evil kind of trumped fuzzy forest critter for scary) he kept at it. Surprisingly, there was a sturdy hut built into the side of a rise of cliff at the top. And the brick chimney had faint smoke trailing from it, so that answered the question of occupied or not. Sitting in front of the hut on a hewn wood bench was a woman, and one look told him she was not a woman. Well, she wasn't just a woman. He might have not known what else she was, but he didn't grow up on the hellmouth just to not develop a bit of an oogy-boogy detector along the way. She was neither young, nor old, with long, braided mousy brown hair and blue-grey eyes, and it looked as if she had been waiting for him. Too bad he spent the first few moments of their acquaintance huffing and puffing, trying to get his breath back from the last long climb.
~*~
Ravija first laid eyes on Xander Harris after he'd spent half a day climbing her mountain to speak with her. The people in the village far below had likely warned him against climbing the mountain. She was to be avoided as some sort of immortal witch. They told tales about her, and no one could remember a time when she hadn't lived there, which made the people of the village afraid. But he'd climbed anyway in his quest.
She'd seen his type before. Warn and scarred, with old eyes in young faces. Warriors in a never-ending battle. The wars changed, the players changed, but the battles continued unending. When he told her what he wanted she laughed out loud for the first time in months. He was under a false impression he was looking for an artifact, or a book, or perhaps, an item of power.
He was not specifically looking for a mythological beast. He was not looking for a person who is sometimes a dragon. He was not expecting her. And she was not expecting to be charmed in spite of herself. So she went with him and saved the world. It was the most interesting thing she had done in over five hundred years, and she told him so. (She did not tell him that the last "most interesting" thing she had done was to lay waste to an entire invading army because their invasion would have taken them directly through the small village at the foot of her mountain. She'd claimed that village, and all who dwelt there, and she WOULD NOT have it wiped away by a thoughtless general planning an ill-fated invasion. The army disappeared off the face of the earth leaving nothing but scorch marks, and a few random horses. There was a reason ancient maps were marked "here there be dragons" to warn the unwary.)
Xander had come to her mountain because of a prophecy. There had been a troublesome demon making a bid for power. And it was prophesized a millennium before that the item that could smite the demon and avoid hell on earth could be found at the top of her mountain. When told what kind of demon it was, she knew just what he was looking for. The demon's only weakness was dragon flame, as being a magical creature, her inner fire also had magical properties. After it was all over, and the world was safe again, young Andrew Wells told her she was totally the demon's kryptonite. (It took over a year of living in the modern world for that remark to make any sense whatsoever, and when it finally did, she laughed about it in the privacy of her own rooms.)
Afterwards, Ravija did not really want to return to the mountaintop and her lonely life. Sure, she had her hoard, she had her lair, but her treasure was ephemeral enough that she could settle in just about anywhere with enough hunting for a dragon of her size. Dragons are not terribly sociable creatures, but she found she liked being useful. And the Council library was in terrible shape. Which she told Mr. Giles when he asked what was bothering her.
He hired her on the spot. By nature, dragons are solitary, and immovable creatures. Although they spent much of their lives in human form, their draconian nature asserted itself in times of stress or upset, and while they were not compelled to change forms, it became uncomfortable if they spent too long as a human. By looking at them, it was difficult to distinguish a dragon from a non-dragon, except for the very faint tracery of scales, in silver, gold, copper, or bronze. And since most dragons, like many of the other kinds of peoples like her, had left Earth for hidden pocket dimensions centuries ago, there were precious few who knew the facts behind the myth. The dragons left for somewhere they could live in peace without being stalked and hunted down by adventuring knights, and they had passed from reality to fantasy. Except for very few holdouts, like Ravija. She had not seen another of her kind in decades, although occasionally she'd get a tug on her senses when one passed within sensing distance.
Dragons as a whole got a bad reputation. In ancient times, they tended to hoard what they could find. Pebbles. Rocks. Shiny, man-made things. It fueled centuries of tale-telling about them. Dragons ended up with lairs full of gold and jewels, most of it picked up because it caught the eye of a passing dragon, abandoned somehow. And eventually a human had stumbled across a dragon's lair and coveted what likely took the dragon centuries to collect. So the legends rose up about the fearsome dragon a warrior could challenge for his treasure.
The problem lay in that every dragon had a different treasure. Something different to hoard that spoke to the sensibilities of that particular dragon. And not only that, but dragons were notoriously difficult to kill. Ravija read of one adventurer who "bested" a dragon only to find that his treasure had been made up entirely of seashells. It was couched as a cautionary tale, so fellow adventure seekers made sure to find out the dragon was "worth" killing.
It made her so upset, that one of her people had been slaughtered so callously, she burned the book to cinders right in her hands. Her treasure was knowledge, and she carried it with her wherever she went. The books she hoarded were the physical representation of her treasure, but they were not the treasure itself. Ravija became the head researcher and Librarian for the New Council. Her new lair was the slayer's school library in Cleveland, and was fortified by both Wiccan and her own magics. And her treasure was what it had always been, but now it was easier to add to it than it had been before. And she had a budget with which to do so.
Xander became a regular visitor to her domain when he was at the school. As Mr. Giles's right hand man, he went where needed. But his home base remained Cleveland, as was the main research branch of the New Council, and the slayer's school was there as well. So while she sometimes wished for the uncomplicated silence of her mountain home, most of the time the youth and vitality of the slayers in residence made her glad to have come with Xander to this new world.
She helped, sometimes, with the slaying, especially if there was a large pocket of vampires or demons. Her flame worked equally well, whether she was in human form or dragon, and vampires are fairly stupid and don't expect "dinner" to be able to flambŽ them. Her life had settled into a routine. She had tried to catch up on all of the technology she'd missed, because she had only come down off her mountain for weeks or months every few years before leaving it behind. But even with the technology at her disposal, she still preferred to arrange the library according to her own system. After all, magical texts and the Dewey Decimal System did not mix well. Some of her books had to be kept in iron boxes, and some had to be kept in a sterile room, and still others could not be anywhere near anything magical. Some she commissioned a pocket dimension for, these were the most dangerous ones, or the rarest. She had become indispensable to the Council for not only knowing the entire library inside and out (after all dragons had perfect recall, eidetic and photographic memory), but also for being multilingual in many lost and dead languages, not all of them human languages.
Ravija was not just the Librarian, allowing the Slayers use of her hoard, she taught as well. She had a small group of students made up of both slayers and magic users. She taught languages, both human and non-human, some that had been nearly lost to time. (She classified the languages human and non-human because one of the languages the old council had classified as demonic was Draconic, and while her people were not Human, they weren't demons, either, thank you very much!)
She had translated a small book of poetry from the draconic for the sole reason it was there, and it pleased her to do so. It had been a very long time since she'd seen her own people's language written down. It was full of metaphor about fire, flying and finding the perfect treasure. Rather pedestrian things to write poetry about, but they were all things that were important to a dragon.
Ravija was halfway through translating an ancient scroll in her office when she became aware of another person in the library proper. It was after hours, and all the girls would be out playing, or out patrolling. It wasn't any of the girls, she knew that without looking. All the Slayers tugged at her senses. As did all the magic users, but in a different way. Magic users were greenish in her mind, smelling of forest growth. Slayers were brown and red, trailing the tang of blood. This was human and male.
Xander Harris was slouched in one of the leather couches that dotted the sitting area. He came and went quietly, and she generally let him alone. But this time there was something weighing him down more than usual. This time, it was the loss of a Slayer that had Xander seeking the sanctuary of her library. The Slayer was stationed in India, and she'd succumb to wounds she'd received dispatching a demon. The demon died before it won, so there was no way to avenge her death. Just time to mourn the loss. He sat for a long time before she approached him.
"Would you like some company?" She kept her voice low in deference to where they were. The Library was her domain, her Lair, but she was also quite strict about the rules. No speaking above a whisper unless the end of the world was imminent and happening right here was one that was ironclad. After all there were texts here that did not react... well to loud noises.
His lips quirked in what might have been a smile in better times. "I'd like that. Thanks."