Tidings Beneath the Bough

[excited 10833]

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

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In a familiar land with inauspicious timing, our unsightly leads find themselves immersed in things beyond their understanding. Two boys, raven-haired, and recently on the road after the death of their mother. Bastard born, quick-witted, malicious and glum. They find themselves in the woods before an ominous sight.

 

Entangled within its roots was a limp skeleton, a rotting carcass with shreds of skin hanging off of its face, and maggots crawling across its body. This place had long since become a place of sanctuary for them, so to find such a thing there was shocking to the both of them. 

 

Yet, the thing - the skeleton - beneath the tree made them a promise. So the boys set out from the sanctuary of the Tree Demon to locate what was required. The ashes of their dead mother, once held as sacrosanct, was procured from their vestigial home in a town far from there. Entombed within an urn forevermore, the boys received the war hero George Galbraith’s ashes too from the Duke of Adria’s butler, before they began their search for the tree’s other requests. One boy found a goat and slew it during a hunt, whilst the other tried to deduce what the Tree Demon had intended to be his enemy. Within the land of Talar’nor, the second boy had at last found his quest.

 

 

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An elven prince had wronged his brother. So the second boy had challenged him to a duel. At the mere age of eighteen, the second boy had endured many trials, and was as wily and chaotic as he was malevolent. The elf lord was the type of warrior who was foretold in stories and fables. Long and blowing auburn hair, a slim nose, and a tranquil gaze that was broken only by his expressions of somber contemplation.

 

The elf was close to six-foot-five and bore the regalia of a warrior. His pristine armor was unmarred by conflict, as new and pristine as the day he had received it on the evening of his wedding years earlier. The boy, however, hungered for something more. He hungered for bloodshed and could not contain his own violent impulses. As a wolf besets cattle in the nighttime when the farmers are asleep, the second boy besets his foe for the insult the elf had dealt his brother. The two exchanged insults before drawing their blades, and there was a clashing of swords between the two. Flourish, parry, pirouette. 

 

 

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Before long a ruckus began in the background. As the fight had started, the second boy had flung his brother into a mage who was casting her resonance. The second boy slashed the elven lord across the face, pivoting and then going to jab his sword into the warrior’s armpit with a sudden gush of blood washing out of his wound, the ruptured flesh pierced by his steel. In retaliation, the elf lord reached up and gouged out the boy’s eye, and then the boy screamed in pain before kicking him down the steps and fleeing. The boys' mission had been a success, but one conquered at a steep price.

☬

[alien_mc 521]

Spoiler

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