Post by Wilhelm Opens-the-Way on Aug 22, 2011 11:31:23 GMT -8
On a craggy hill, near the Arcadian Gateway long ago...
The craggy caverns beneath the dragon's perch were jagged and black, a dangerous ant-hill of obsidian switchbacks and tunnels. Wilhelm 's hands were bloody from climbing, making the ascent even more precarious.
The Dragon Fafnir, the Defiler of the Land, was wounded. The steel-crystal Fae blade Gram was lodged between its shoulder blades and would not be reached. The great beast had bellowed, howled and raged. It was a dragon-killer, this blade, and it had tasted Fafnir's blood. It refused to give up the meal. It simply continued to wound and scrape and burn while the dragon's resilient flesh attempted in vain to heal around it. So the wound festered with despicable purity, the spirit within the blade's sense of justice a steely bulwark against the defiler's fetid, scaly corruption.
Pooling in the cavernous perch were bones, eroded by the dragon's foul and tainted breath and the weapons and armor of a hundred knights and heroes. Wilhelm leapt across chasms of the lambent green gas, scrabbled over piles of discarded weapons.
Gram's bite was not the only wound on the old fire-breather. One of Fafnir's wings, the leftmost was crushed and half-severed. It had a wound above the breast on it's right side that made it's right claw useless, a deep cut that had barely missed the jugular along it's long throat and a cut above it's right eye that had all but blinded it in it's own acidic blood. That cut now was crusted over and swollen, leaking.
Fafnir needed to heal, to rest. Crawling up the labyrinthine cliffs to meet his master's killer, Wilhelm had other plans for it.
Well, that was a lie. He had planned to leave it the hell alone. It had caved in his old master's chest with a single bite and clawed his leg into ribbons of useless flesh after all - and that was before throwing him a considerable distance that had resulted in several other broken bones and punctured organs, each tainted with the foul beast's poisonous breath.
Peering out from one of the holes beneath the beast, Wilhelm could feel it's labored breath moving the azure air. From his vantage point in a gully he could see the gemmed hilt of the blade sticking from it's back, right between the shoulder blades. Fafnir's back was turned to him, a stroke of calculated luck. It's scaly tail twitched, closer to his hiding place than the young squire would have liked. It's back was slippery with ichor, blood and pus from the blade it couldn't expel. It would be a slippery ascent, up the dragon's spine to the hilt of the sword, where he would... well, hopefully finish what his master, the old Fae Knight had started. He planned his steps.
Wilhelm steeled himself, took a breath, vaulted out of the gully and ran. He was quick, lithe and afraid. Fear gave him speed. He kicked up the highest spine spike he could reach with his first leap, then pushed off of that to the next highest. Then the dragon noticed. He turned toward his broken wing to look at what was climbing him, as Wilhelm had hoped. Fafnir's long neck slid half around his own trunk and his jaws snapped at Wilhelm, but his own broken wing got in his way. He'd have had to have bitten his own wounded forewing to have gotten the cub and it was, by that time, too late. Wilhelm had his hands around the hilt of Gram, and locked one elbow around the blade, drove it deeper into him with his full weight.
Fafnir roared and thrashed. Wilhelm felt his shoulder dislocate and then jam back into place as he held his lock around the hilt of the sword. His moan of pain was swallowed up by the dragon's fearful bellow. The creature tucked his wounded side and rolled like an alligator with food in his jaws, and for a moment Wilhelm disappeared beneath the dragon's girth. Once again, luck seemed to have kept him from being completely crushed by the weight of the dragon, but he emerged even more bloodied. The hilt of the blade now pinned Wilhelm’s elbow to the dragon completely, so that like the sword itself, Wilhelm couldn't have extracted himself from the beast even if he'd wanted to. He was a bull-rider tied to the bull.
Terror left him. Wilhelm recognized the pain in his body as temporary. He wondered how long he would hang up here before he succumbed to the damage of being whipped around like a puppet on strings, or crushed completely by the rolling thing, or if, like so many old weapons jabbing broken from Fafnir's scaly body, he'd become yet another trophy scar for the beast.
That is when Wilhelm first heard the battle cry of the Deep Skies pack. The earth rumbled. Heat seemed to fill the chilled air. The scent of scalding magma was harsh in the breeze. Orion Wyldblood bellowed a challenge. Wilhelm's ears were so full of blood and pain he couldn't hear the words.
Fafnir roared and bellowed green fire at the sky, it's talons tearing up the jagged stone beneath it in a challenge of its own.
Something the size of an automobile struck Fafnir square in the jaw, stopping the dragon mid roar. It was a car, or at least the crushed into a ball remnant of one. Wilhelm managed a strange, spurious giggle from the spine of the creature.
For a second there was silence on the craggy battlefield.
"Hey!" said Abraxas One-Ton, "You heard the man," he shouted, "Why don't you pick on someone your own size?!"
The dragon growled, a low, deadly sound, not the defiant challenge of a predator, but of a cornered creature, suddenly unsure of it's dominance.
"Like my friends here, for example," said the Garou who would one day be Alex Trueheart. He rose up, floating in the icy air, suspended in the palm by the spirit of the North Wind, who blew frost on the unbroken wing of the creature, only to have a massive sun spirit superheat the same wing. It shattered like a high-school science experiment, leaving a bloody, cauterized stump, still crackling with frost.
Fafnir's head whipped around and it shot a jet of green poisoned fire at Alex, who floated out of the way of the majority of the blast by the skin of his teeth, yet still was singed somewhat.
In the ensuing fight, Orion had closed the distance to the large gash on the dragon's throat, and proceeded to dive into it, claws first, rending and tearing. His own blood coated his claws, and seemed to cause the wound to sizzle and burn. Fafnir clawed at him, dangling from his throat and his claws sparked off of a shirt of flint arrows that acted as armor around the Alpha. Still the Get was gouged and slashed, sending more of his blistering blood stinging into Fafnir's claws.
Wilhelm smiled weakly. They were so... valorous, he thought. They were beautiful. They were also all, Wilhelm was certain, going to die.
Out of the corner of his peripheral vision a flicker of movement, like an unseen ripple passed over him silently. There was a hand on his leg, and he felt for a moment as if someone was using his limp body to climb beyond him onto the dragon's neck.
As it turned out, that was exactly what was happening. Thalia Deed-Catcher, invisible vengeance that she was, clambered over the cauterized wing stub like it were a stair crafted for her boots, past him beneath the shroud of Phoebe's Veil and set her feet between the great dragon's shoulder blades. She raised her massive moon-axe Glabrys and with the warrior howl of the Black Furies, brought it down hard.
Fafnir's roars were choked off. Between Orion's claws and Thalia's swing, the neck of the defiler was severed, and fell twitching like a serpent to the blackened earth, before it's blood-gushing trunk slowly bowing forward, overcome by gravity.
Wilhelm was near to a loss of consciousness, but set his feet against the center of the dragon-corpse's spine and pushed. The blade slid out of the back of the dragon, and to spite the gout of black ichor that covered Wilhelm's body, Gram sung in the air. The weapon was taller than young Wilhelm by a head in Homid, and he reverted to his breed form to heal enough that he could slide down the dragon's body, using the weapon more or less as a crutch.
The Deep Skies pack surrounded him, many of them wounded, panting, but flush with victory.
Wilhelm could only smile weakly, leaning against the steel-crystal blade heavily.
"Got..." he gasped, "Got the sword," he said breathlessly, his voice squeaking embarassingly as he spoke. His right arm hung useless, broken in a dozen places. A spent chuckle passed around the pack, with the exception of Orion. He looked grievously wounded from the dragon's talons, but it didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. Orion tore one of the dragon's teeth out of its severed maw and compared it favorably to the others in the unfinished necklace around his neck.
"What did you learn cub?" asked the Get sternly.
Wilhelm's mind was blank.
"Um... Never count on the politeness of dragons?" he said. The others laughed. "Ragabash alright," said Thalia, rolling her eyes. She held out her hand to Abraxas, who sighed, fished into his pockets and handed Thalia an American five dollar bill. Would-be-Alex shook his head. He had acid burns all over the left side of his body and was clearly in pain, but on his feet.
“I could have told you that,” he said.
"No cub," Said Orion. "Today you learned that you are Garou. And also, what it is to fight with a pack."
Wilhelm was without a retort. Rather, he choked back tears that surprised him. To be part of a pack, even for a moment, he'd never dreamed...
Orion embraced him. It was, Wilhelm decided, a little like being hugged by a Spanish bull-run. Things popped in places that he thought weren't strictly supposed to.
"Now come!" he said, joyful with a suddenness that alarmed even his pack mates. "We will heal and cleanse this place, then celebrate with prayer and the hunt and feasting!"
He lead and the others followed. Thalia let Wilhelm lean against her while Orion continued to talk in his fearfully joyous manner over his shoulder.
"Since you are a Ragabash, I will honor you with a joke! You see once there were five brothers..."
A groan went out from the rest of the pack, but Wilhelm listened intently.
