Koe Tidraq (discant) wrote in adusta, @ 2010-03-18 09:31:00 |
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Entry tags: | koe tidraq, oaths, vedette uthral |
through this pass lies death (vedette)
A journey out of a village had never been so strange. Koe could feel it even as he secured his saddlebags, before they left the stable. Mirram and Horon were involved in a hushed conversation on the far side of these wooden stalls, with carefully laid straw and carefully arranged troughs. Red pushed his head against Koe's shoulder as the dragon worked - but Koe's hand was absent as it stroked the dray horse's face. Whatever they had been discussing was for their ears alone. Eavesdropping was not a gentleman's sort of business. He was a storyteller, not a gentleman, but even with that distinction clear in his mind Koe still could not hear what they were saying. A trick of the wind, perhaps, which was rushing through the stable from one set of open double doors to the other. Or perhaps it was something else and he chose not to think so. Thinking that they were hiding something would have cast a pall over this entire affair. Well. That was nonsense. If he believed it he was lying to himself. Horon was hiding something. The question was simply whether or not that unknown element was going to cause trouble for them. Two dragons and a knight of Bahamut had nothing to fear.
Nothing at all.
As dawn's sweet light kissed the mountain hills more than one village emerged from their home. Some were half-dressed, ready to begin the day but wanting to see this strange party of warriors off. Others were solemn, in the tunics that they would favor on a visit to a temple. He remembered the color of their eyes. Resolute but still somehow blue, a great many of them, kin to the see for all he could read of their depths. What did they hope when they watched their aged protector depart with a pair of traveling minstrels?
A brighter future, some glorious and distant reward that would not be coming to them. For his part Koe simply hoped he could do the right thing. And perhaps find a song in it. Horon had a strange sense of honor, chasing away guests, but at least he understood the man's reasons for doing so. Before it had seemed nothing except secretive hillfolk wanting to keep their secret. Now it had the character of a trial, of a struggle, and those who visisted this place cast as the innocents who must be protected. Koe did not really think of himself that way. Perhaps that was how he'd come to be here. And what would happen if something had to die? Would he be the one to do it?
Such thinking could drive a man - or a dragon, he added ruefully - mad. Far better to think about what sort of magic involved sacrificing a child. Blood answered blood, and darkness, but that was the territory of Amasa. She was not evil in the way that evil was classically understood - with blackened blades forged in the hellish pits of some sinister peak, yellow cat's eyes, and fangs that drank blood as wine. There might have been something evil in the end, but only because it was not what the heart longed for, and not something the soul could easily accept. So it was an evil of endings, of conclusions, of time gone before the heart and soul could part with it.
Rather a melancholy sort of evil, Koe thought, but nevertheless it was based entirely on human experience and not on the truth of the thing. He did this not because Bahamut was always right and Amasa was always wrong, but because he gave himself to the winged king of the sky and never looked back. For him hope was essential to the way he lived his life. And it was not something he would surrender merely because he could see the other point of view. Of course, if you flew into a gorge with the wind at your back, sooner or later you would be dashed against the cliffs.
Light purged the ground of fog on its daily and most aggressive campaign. Enough so that he could see the hard-packed dirt which formed their road. Wet, perhaps, with the fog's touch still lingering. A look to the sky, and the taste of the air, told him that no rain was coming today. Only frivolous blue skies, light and marked with white, shapeless clouds that could not contain the glee of the dawn whcih grew inside them. He could not have explained why it always made him feel like a child. If asked, he would have answered that feeling like a child was preferable to the alternative, in which each of his years sat heavy on his brow. Horon would understand the sentiment, Koe thought, even if he did not agree with it.
How did someone so old come to be the sole protector of this place? Was it simply that he could not stomach the evil? Or was it about the creature they were hunting, more than the lives of innocents? A knight with a strange sense of honor could do things for a reason that no sane person could fathom and still refer to themselves as good, as just. Horon's instrument, then, was a guitar. Clinging melancholy and aggressive combat in the same wooden neck, the same six strings, a soul as complex and mirrored as the knight's own.
And when did he begin to compnose a ballad about the fellow? Perhaps Ilyien would be glad to hear it. Koe thought the phoenix lived for the day Koe would find someone else to compose knightly songs of.
Of course, Koe had ordered an archivist and his five apprentices to make one hundred legible copies of "The Swordsman of the North". The direction might have been wrong, but the tune was quite catchy.
It made him smile.
"Thinking of something, Master Bard?" Horon asked politely.
"A song that I wrote. Perhaps you've heard of it. 'Swordsman of the North'?"
"You wrote that," Horon exclaimed. "Of course I know it, Koe! It's the first song we played in my hall. Everyone looked up to that fellow. Was he real?"
Koe considered his answer carefully. "Real enough, Horon. I took dramatic license, of course. The fellow I wrote of is rather more stoic than the hero in the song. He commonly grunts, or makes no sound at all."
"Poor simpleton," Horon murmured sympathetically.
Koe laughed.
Iluq seemed more at home, now, on the deserted road with the chill in the air and the wind at their backs. Perhaps this was closer to home for her. Koe knew the feeling all too well. He'd spent most of his life living in the mountains, or at least calling the mountains home, even if his heart always took him elsewhere. Clhen had been in the mountains. A fine place to raise a child, where beauty was only as far away as a window or a door, and the squalor of city life was far behind. Oh, he enjoyed the cities at least as much as he enjoyed the mountains, but for different reasons. And the city could never occupy so warm a place in his heart as the mountains did.
"And you?" Koe asked her, with a bright smile. "Have you heard my masterpiece?"