image [https://i.imgur.com/9JnFmXw.jpg]
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Darrowfig wallowed absolutely still in a sunken ditch, half buried in the dark mire of the swampy jungle floor as rain poured around her. Her hand rested on the hilt of her cutlass. Her hunters were close.
She was soaked through. A swiftly growing pool of water filled the ditch in which she hunkered.
A summer storm raged overhead. Lightning branched across the sky, spawning thunder that shook the ground and made the surface of each puddle dance and quiver. The dense canopy provided little protection from the deluge. Rivulets of cool rainfall drizzled from each frond tip of the giant fern she hid beneath. Gusts of wind made the trees groan and sway.
Her worn riding coat, once a noble blue, was saturated with muddy water that turned everything a dark peaty brown. The thick mixture matted in her short dark hair, roughly trimmed with her knife before the expedition. She felt crawling things from the jungle floor climbing over her to try and escape the rising water, yet she dared not flinch or shift her weight.
A stone’s throw from her hiding place, the five strong Ragon'ta hunting party stalked through the underbrush.
Even creeping on all fours, the Ragon'ta stood as high as her shoulder. When they reared up on two legs to fight, they towered over Mardin like her. Their hide of ridged scales could turn aside a clumsy sword strike and each of them sported powerful jaws that could rip limbs from a person's body, given the chance.
The hunting party bristled with spears and bows, strapped to bandoliers of vine woven rope. Their spear-tips and arrowheads were smoky blades of expertly flaked and shaped sunglass. In her childhood lessons, Fig's tutors from the Radiant Magisterium had called the tools of the Ragon'ta people primitive. As an adult, she knew better, she'd seen what they could do.
Those edges were sharper than any razor; Fig knew an old pirate who's crew had the misfortune to shipwreck on this stretch of coast. 23 sailors managed to swim to shore, but only four ever made it back to the outpost town of Brandish, some of them missing extremities that were severed with unerringly clean cuts.
Out here alone against a five strong hunting party, Fig didn’t like her chances.
It had been many hours since the lizards picked up her trail near the ruins of Xish, a city of the lost southern kingdom, long since reclaimed by the jungle and, as she'd discovered, by the Ragon'ta who defended their territory jealously.
Fig had been forced to abandon her pack and provisions as she fled westward along the coast, running straight for the approaching storm with the Ragon'ta in hot pursuit. She left hastily assembled rope traps, and set false trails whenever she gained a minute's breathing room, just a few of the skills shed been forced to pick up these past five years in the Radiant Dyanasty's rough and unchecked outer-lands. If not for her attempts to hinder and deter her pursuers, the Ragon’ta would have surrounded and devoured her several miles back.
As it was, losing them in the storm had been her only chance of truly evading capture. As the weather broke overhead and rain began to fall in lashing sheets, she'd drawn upon her last reserves of endurance to gain enough distance to break her trail. She doused herself in a nearby stream, covered her tracks and hid in this ditch beneath heavy vegetation, rolling in the muck to blend in.
Now she sent a silent begging prayer to Illfish, the Face of Trickery, that the hunting party would lose her in the downpour.
The lizards circled the place where her trail ended. She'd splashed downstream a short way to try and and confuse their tracking, but they scoured the riverbank up and down on both sides, methodical in the manner of hungry reptiles. They chattered to each other as they searched, a deep and throaty reptilian clucking that reverberated through her chest from many meters away. Forked tongues as long as her arm darted and quivered, tasting the air for any trace of her passing, but the heavy rain and wind saved her by washing away any scent she'd left in the region.
In the overcast half light, the rain slick scales of the Ragon'ta glimmered verdant green. Up close, the ridges had a chrome sheen that flashed into purple each time lightning lit the jungle. Fig's hand sought the comfort of her blade more from habit than out of any notion that she could defend herself if she was caught in this moment. No matter her skill, against five Ragon’ta in the jungle, the sword would be next to useless.
Fig's old sword tutor, Draad Grimblade, always told her to forget notions of taking on multiple opponents, one of the many lessons he'd insisted on driving into her head in return for continuing her secret combat training.
She remembered a wintery morning in the forest outside Vostrel, when Vandrin’s first rising bloomed in the sky and the two of them stood panting in the frigid air, clothes steaming with exertion from their morning sparring practice. She’d asked a question about facing down a group of warriors, and he’d answered with gruff exasperation,
“Kid… if you stand your ground against a group, only one thing's gonna happen. You’ll get surrounded and stuck through like a pin cushion. Trust me.”
He lifted his jerkin to show a mess of knots and lines deeply scarred across the olive skin of his lower back, "Let my experience be a warning; If you’re outnumbered, run.”
“But, in an alley, or a small room... If i'm trapped? What about when there's no way to avoid the fight?"
He watched her with serious green eyes and said, “Then you’d better hit them so fucking ferociously, and so fast, that you even the odds in the first two seconds, or frighten them into backing off. Your only goal is to make an opening. Then, what do you do?”
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She sighed and nodded, "I run.”
“Thats right," He stretched and rolled his burly shoulders, groaning as he tried to release his aching back, "I love it when you actually listen."
Wish I had, Grim. Fig thought. Everything could be so different.
The searching lizards grew more frantic and intoned angrily to each other, arguing about her likely whereabouts as they sensed the trail growing cold. One Ragon'ta wore an extravagant mantle of bones around its neck that clattered rhythmically as it walked. It seemed to be directing the others. Their leader I'm guessing?
The bone wearer leapt atop the trunk of a fallen tree and reared up on its powerful hind-legs, glaring into the underbrush. Its eyes were bright yellow, disturbingly large; the colour reminded her of ripe lemons picked from her family's old orchards in Salissra.
As a child she'd wandered through those lemon trees in the noonday heat, drinking in Vandrin's brightest sunshine, with the scent of citrus so heavy in the air it made her head swim until her mother called her back to the shade. She could almost taste the lemon oil on her tongue. What a memory to find in this forsaken place.
The lizard's gaze scanned across the ditch where she hid, her blood surged with fear, then turned to ice as lightning flashed…
Festrel you fucking bitch.
The jungle lit up, just for an instant, but long enough to be a death sentence. Fig's heart hammered in her chest. Was there even a chance the Ragon'ta had overlooked her presence? It was glaring right at the bush that covered her.
The flash subsided and was replaced by the heavy roar of thunder.
Fig was tense as a coiled spring, ready to draw her sword and make whatever stand she could muster. But the Ragon'ta leader showed no sign it had seen her. A moment later its eyes had passed over her hiding place and continued to sweep across the jungle, looking with increasing ire as its attempts to locate her proved fruitless.
It seemed her desperate attempt to hide had actually worked. Her dark and mud streaked face was so shaded by the rain and windswept vegetation, nestled deep in a pool of muck, that even in the glow of the lightning she'd avoided the reptile's gaze.
Festrel, I sincerely apologise and thank the many Faces of Orot for their blessings, of which I know I'm hardly worthy.
The Ragon'ta grew restless. With a series of reptilian cackles, their leader formed up the pack and they pushed westward, steeply uphill towards the next ridge. They moved swiftly, perhaps assuming they'd fallen behind. Their tails lashed through the overgrown thicket, and shortly the rustling sound of their passage was drowned out by the drum of the rain.
Fig closed her eyes and let her hand slip from her sword as she slumped exhausted against the bank of the ditch. She wanted so badly to take shelter, to find somewhere to get warm and dry, but she remained in the mire, still and silent.
The lizards could double back, and if she had learnt anything from her mistakes it was patience.
So many fucking mistakes.
Fig was surprised to find herself strangely removed from her surroundings. The sound of rainfall was hypnotic, and perhaps it was the bone deep fatigue crashing over her after hours of running through the jungle, but whatever the cause, she had the sense of hovering slightly above herself, reflecting; what was her first mistake?
What brought her into this ridiculous predicament, lying in a pool of increasingly cold mud, hiding from a pack of hungry Ragon'ta in the pouring rain, a thousand miles or more from anything she considered a home?
Getting into debt with Mirabelle the Black, the most dangerous pirate captain in Saltcrust, certainly hadn’t helped; especially when it meant being forced to repay by taking a job hunting a gelatinous conman through the most lizard infested jungle of the southern outer-lands. But it went further back than that. What about the night she stole a sword from her father's armoury, and got caught by Draad swinging it at trees in the forest behind the estate? What about talking him into training her? What about the duelling tournament she entered even though he’d told her not to?
What about your sister?
Old feelings of shame bloomed once again. She moved through the landscape of her most painful recollections, like overgrown trails in her head, trodden many times but always lined by harsh brambles that caught and cut her just a little more each time she let the memories take root.
Enough.
She blinked and winced. There was mud on her eyelashes. She rolled onto her back and let the rain wash it off. How much time had passed, twenty minutes? She sighed and stood up, muck dripping from every inch of her frame.
Travelling alone, scouring the outer-lands for sell-sword work; in five years she’d lost every ounce of refinement, every treasured possession, every token of her noble heritage, every scrap of what little wealth she'd left with after being disowned. She'd even pawned the silver coat buttons engraved with her family crest, got ripped off by the pawnbroker too. Then there was her debt, money she'd never had in the first place, somehow she lost that as well, go figure.
The only things she had left were her coat, now crudely buttoned with tent toggles, although after the sheer amount of mud it had absorbed it was probably ruined at this point anyway, and an admittedly rusty blade. Perhaps there was still the slim chance that she might clear her debt if she could complete this job for Mirabelle. She’d thought about running, stealing a horse and heading to Garrel where no-one knew her. Running was something she knew a lot about after all, but it was a futile dream. The debt wasn't the real problem; running from it still left her in the gutter swirl of a five year downward spiral that she could only imagine ending one way; with her lying in some other ditch, alley, gutter, whatever; the specifics didn't matter; what all those possible futures had in common was that she'd be dead and rotting.
We can't keep doing this.
"I know," she said.
This ridiculous job was the last chance she had to turn things around.
Settle her debt, leave Saltcrust, maybe head home, face her family, see if they'd take her back.
They wont.
Faces and Fragments, truth telling got morbid fast…
She shook her head and pulled an oil treated map from her breast pocket. The thing was battered, almost illegible at this point, but she cleaned it as much as possible and could just make out the route she'd been told to take.
One silver lining to her unfortunate run in with the Ragon'ta was that she'd at least been running in the right direction throughout most of the chase. According to the map, and the number of waterways she remembered crossing, she was close to her destination.
She had treasure to recover, and maybe even someone to kill.
Lucky you! What more could a girl want?
She let out a weak chuckle and trudged upstream.
[End of Chapter 1]