"Mandrashard," Part 1
Nov. 2nd, 2003 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zesty_pintoWork of mine inspired from the D&D campaigns I used to do. Still a work in progress, but at least it's going.
His eyes could barely see through the vitriolic glare of the pale yellow sun staring him down from its promontory far off into the blanket of sea. It was one of the reasons why he hated working in the early mornings; even dusk promised a milder orange burn and the afternoon was when the sun was too high to bite anything but the top of his already baked brown cowlicks.
“Are you paid for standing?” the threat came behind him from the boss of the warehouse, a tall man with muscles that visibly refused to hide from the slightly frayed wool of his dun shirt. He felt the familiar feel of the man’s boot heel edge him forward; the man was in a good mood, for he didn’t feel it rammed between his legs this time “Get on with it!” This was his second reason. He took a deep breath of the dead fish air and remembered the third.
“Getting to it, boss…” his mouth rasped in a low grind as he ambled in a limping projection against the large man’s boot as though he was tossed softly from it; propelled like a fledgling forced to fly through falling. It was barely even morning with but a simple glamour of dour yellow sun, and already three ships came in with tired sailors lugging their payloads in wooden barrels and crates to the edge of the creaky wood port and the remnants of previous contents that escaped their containers from other ships from another day. His eyes, already half-clenched in a squint, only gave him a view deep in the fog of his view, reverting the malevolent sun to a muted orb, though at the risk of perceiving his world as a mass of bleary instruments cluttered together. He continued his work, using his sense of smell to describe for him his environment, and found the closest crate that needed movement: a dry musk smell entered his nose, informing him that it could only have been from furs from the North Reaches. Not a strong smell though, so probably too young to be worth anything beyond a few royals, he gave the box a careful muse as he reached down, pulling up the crate as it attempted to tug him down to the ground with him. This was hardly a heavy task for him, though; he soon began to continue his ambling with the two farthest corners of the wooden box held between the centers of his palm while the edge of the box rested against his chest. Putting the heavy pull of the crate to the heel of his shoes, he turned and marched back to the building where he was to return it.
Life was like as it always was at the warehouse. A quarter-penny for each crate and all the sort of things normally expected from dragging shipments around in a port like Saman when it was along the edge of an artisan’s community like Estran. As the sun began to escape the sea into the sky and as Tyren hefted what he knew was his twelfth crate(this time of the bitter stench of dried dye flowers), he reminded himself to be glad that the several days of exposure to this fish-stench pier had saved him from only reeling from the smell of the contents of the crates, as compared to before when the overpowering smell of fish had nearly blinded him with revolt the first time around. The passing time had at least thankfully saved him from the nuisance of an imposing sun’s glare to a mellow sand blue. He left the contents in the warehouse among the stack of other items and returned to his redundant duty.
The twenty-third crate that came under his care had the aromatic smell of foreign fruits and the uncomfortable rattle of what could only be fruit scarabs; they gathered around fruit since they liked to lay eggs in them, where a dozen worms would hatch and eat their way out in the most disgusting way possible. The thought reminded him of the time he had an infested melon with several of pale white spawn still wriggling for freedom as they attempted to jiggle free to his mouth, and the sensation soon left him spitting the corruption of the thought from his tainted mouth.
“Hey!” the stentorian eye of the pit boss fell down on him again. He was three inches from hitting the man’s boot by accident.
“Yeah, yeah…” he muttered back carelessly, the crate still giving unpromising clicking.
Crate twenty-nine had the clink of metal and a tinge of the rancid smell of oil; honing oil, most like. It took him one look at a well-shined edge jutting out from the crate to tell him that they were blades ready to be worked with a handle and finished. The iron, he could tell, was far from valuable.
The forty-seventh and final crate on the port held the worst smell of them all for him to be carrying: gamy meat, most likely was of some sort of large game animal. How it survived the trip through sea and how someone would still want it went beyond him, but he dropped it with much satisfaction and several wipes of his palms against the ground from an adhesive rot that came from the thought.
“Bah,” he clapped his hands, testing it for any more undue sensation of the final task, and then patted his clothes “Where’s my pay?” He shouted to the pit boss, who was still barking out at someone else who was still busy lugging a box.
“Wait your turn, brigand,” He did not look as he barked back at him; the man took the work of the crates as his liability as he watched the boxes get moved about.
“Bah,” he gave a smirk as he sat on one of the crates, watching out to sea “Estran, the land of prosperity,” His voice held back the annoyance that ran in him as he looked out to the ship near the dock, far enough from the great expanse of the warehouse to look the size of a house; a reasonable distance since it was a mercantile vessel that was driven by twenty-odd sailors in grease-speckled clothes. They had arrived earlier in the morning, and, as he recalled with distaste, were the ones that brought the bad fruit. His eyes turned to the high mast of the ship, the frames running to the sky in a wooden skeleton. The prow of the ship was fashioned with a long-nosed pole that most likely served its purpose for many lookouts or at least a flag, although he noted no signs of the rigs of rope to confirm the thought. Against the hull of the ship, he saw the name along the wooden frame embedded into the hull; “The High Sign.”
“They might as well have called it an inn,” he said as he spat.
“Hey!” He turned around and saw the worn leather soles of the boots that could have only been large enough to have been from the pit boss. He looked up and saw the man grimace down at him. He returned the gesture. The sky was beginning to tinge orange with the cooling shade of night.
“You want to get paid or should I get myself a new pair of shoes?”
“With what you pay, I would not be surprised if they just wrap your feet in cloth.”
“Hmph,” the man continued to glare down at him, “Unions have rules, scab.” His hand made a quick reach and dropped a worn sack by his legs. It did not have a chance to reach the floor.
After snatching the bag, he made a cursory glance inside. Forty-odd quartered discs of greening metal. He closed the bag and gave a snicker as he stood up, “A pleasure doing business with you.”
“Yeah, yeah…” The man smirked back at him “When are you leaving, anyway?”
“Soon… very soon, in fact.” His palm soon twirled the bag up slightly and gave it a light jostle as it tossed gently in his palm “Before I do, how about a drink?”
“A drink? With you?” The large man gave a large laugh “The last thing I’d expect from you is friendliness.”
Tyren’s eyes squinted as he returned the smirk back at him, lips balling to the other side of his mouth “You’re right, you should be expecting something when you hear that sort of thing.”
The large man gave him a grin; a knowing grin that seemed almost experienced “It’ll take more drinks than you can buy with your pay to get me drunk enough for you to filch my wallet. Besides, they don’t pay me as well as you think.”
“You’re right,” the small man stood himself up, shuffled his feet slightly, and then doubled back as his fist flashed to the large man’s face. The blow was strong enough to knock most people unconscious, but it was something the large man had already predicted, blocking with a hand. He man smiled back at Tyren, sneered, and then shuddered as his body crumpled to the ground.
As he planned, the first blow was predicted, allowing his second arm to perform a quick slam to the side of his head with a small beaded sack against his head. They were the last two in the warehouse as he had planned. His arm pulled the man up and dragged him against the floor into the warehouse, one arm holding the large man’s body with a slight drag as his free hand patted the man for any obstructions that could be felt. Hearing a light jingle as he felt a stream of metal, his finger pried open and felt inside the purse, as warm as the man’s body.
“Oh, you fool…” he mused “if they pay you this little, then you really should be doing something else with your life.” He removed his hand, and pulled the purse by the drawstring, closed. Placing the man’s corpulence on the dust of the warehouse floor, he immediately went for the doors and closed them with a slight ajar, blocking the view of the docks from the warehouse and filling it with shadows save a few scant bars of light from the holes in the walls. His arm quickly reached for the knife he always hid in the back of his pants in a clump of his shirt and the belt.
“Fruit, fruit…” He smelled the putrefying flesh, the musk… the crate of fruit rested below a crate full of clothes from the Northern Reaches, which his arm quickly shoved aside with the back of his arm to the ground with a loud thud. His eyes took to a tight squint at his own idiocy, “Impatience, impatience…” was his mantra as he placed his arms limp, he took a slow breath and then returned to the crate before him.
Undoing the crate was easy as he imagined as well: the nails that he saw were used were unusually cheap in make. An incessant buzz came out and something clutched onto his face before breaking free to chatter noisily into some other corner of the warehouse. He turned to spit again and then reluctantly edged his hand inside, feeling through wet rot, the crisped ends of what he could have guessed were shells, and squirming sensations.
“Pelor burn me…!” His hands squirmed through the wet mass in the attempt to clutch for something besides the cocoons, rot, and worms. Somewhere through the stickiness, his hand began to feel a slick, hard surface; definitely of a different grain from the crate. “Got you…!”
With a satisfied pull, his arm, slick with the juice of rotten fruit and with the fragments of dead insects, pulled out what he could only imagine to be a hard thin chest. Looking around, the arm then snuck towards the body of the pit boss and began to wipe his hands against the man’s shirt before returning to the box. As he walked out with the slick box in his hand, he snickered. The sky was starting to grow dark.
“I’m coming for you, Mandrashard…!”
His eyes could barely see through the vitriolic glare of the pale yellow sun staring him down from its promontory far off into the blanket of sea. It was one of the reasons why he hated working in the early mornings; even dusk promised a milder orange burn and the afternoon was when the sun was too high to bite anything but the top of his already baked brown cowlicks.
“Are you paid for standing?” the threat came behind him from the boss of the warehouse, a tall man with muscles that visibly refused to hide from the slightly frayed wool of his dun shirt. He felt the familiar feel of the man’s boot heel edge him forward; the man was in a good mood, for he didn’t feel it rammed between his legs this time “Get on with it!” This was his second reason. He took a deep breath of the dead fish air and remembered the third.
“Getting to it, boss…” his mouth rasped in a low grind as he ambled in a limping projection against the large man’s boot as though he was tossed softly from it; propelled like a fledgling forced to fly through falling. It was barely even morning with but a simple glamour of dour yellow sun, and already three ships came in with tired sailors lugging their payloads in wooden barrels and crates to the edge of the creaky wood port and the remnants of previous contents that escaped their containers from other ships from another day. His eyes, already half-clenched in a squint, only gave him a view deep in the fog of his view, reverting the malevolent sun to a muted orb, though at the risk of perceiving his world as a mass of bleary instruments cluttered together. He continued his work, using his sense of smell to describe for him his environment, and found the closest crate that needed movement: a dry musk smell entered his nose, informing him that it could only have been from furs from the North Reaches. Not a strong smell though, so probably too young to be worth anything beyond a few royals, he gave the box a careful muse as he reached down, pulling up the crate as it attempted to tug him down to the ground with him. This was hardly a heavy task for him, though; he soon began to continue his ambling with the two farthest corners of the wooden box held between the centers of his palm while the edge of the box rested against his chest. Putting the heavy pull of the crate to the heel of his shoes, he turned and marched back to the building where he was to return it.
Life was like as it always was at the warehouse. A quarter-penny for each crate and all the sort of things normally expected from dragging shipments around in a port like Saman when it was along the edge of an artisan’s community like Estran. As the sun began to escape the sea into the sky and as Tyren hefted what he knew was his twelfth crate(this time of the bitter stench of dried dye flowers), he reminded himself to be glad that the several days of exposure to this fish-stench pier had saved him from only reeling from the smell of the contents of the crates, as compared to before when the overpowering smell of fish had nearly blinded him with revolt the first time around. The passing time had at least thankfully saved him from the nuisance of an imposing sun’s glare to a mellow sand blue. He left the contents in the warehouse among the stack of other items and returned to his redundant duty.
The twenty-third crate that came under his care had the aromatic smell of foreign fruits and the uncomfortable rattle of what could only be fruit scarabs; they gathered around fruit since they liked to lay eggs in them, where a dozen worms would hatch and eat their way out in the most disgusting way possible. The thought reminded him of the time he had an infested melon with several of pale white spawn still wriggling for freedom as they attempted to jiggle free to his mouth, and the sensation soon left him spitting the corruption of the thought from his tainted mouth.
“Hey!” the stentorian eye of the pit boss fell down on him again. He was three inches from hitting the man’s boot by accident.
“Yeah, yeah…” he muttered back carelessly, the crate still giving unpromising clicking.
Crate twenty-nine had the clink of metal and a tinge of the rancid smell of oil; honing oil, most like. It took him one look at a well-shined edge jutting out from the crate to tell him that they were blades ready to be worked with a handle and finished. The iron, he could tell, was far from valuable.
The forty-seventh and final crate on the port held the worst smell of them all for him to be carrying: gamy meat, most likely was of some sort of large game animal. How it survived the trip through sea and how someone would still want it went beyond him, but he dropped it with much satisfaction and several wipes of his palms against the ground from an adhesive rot that came from the thought.
“Bah,” he clapped his hands, testing it for any more undue sensation of the final task, and then patted his clothes “Where’s my pay?” He shouted to the pit boss, who was still barking out at someone else who was still busy lugging a box.
“Wait your turn, brigand,” He did not look as he barked back at him; the man took the work of the crates as his liability as he watched the boxes get moved about.
“Bah,” he gave a smirk as he sat on one of the crates, watching out to sea “Estran, the land of prosperity,” His voice held back the annoyance that ran in him as he looked out to the ship near the dock, far enough from the great expanse of the warehouse to look the size of a house; a reasonable distance since it was a mercantile vessel that was driven by twenty-odd sailors in grease-speckled clothes. They had arrived earlier in the morning, and, as he recalled with distaste, were the ones that brought the bad fruit. His eyes turned to the high mast of the ship, the frames running to the sky in a wooden skeleton. The prow of the ship was fashioned with a long-nosed pole that most likely served its purpose for many lookouts or at least a flag, although he noted no signs of the rigs of rope to confirm the thought. Against the hull of the ship, he saw the name along the wooden frame embedded into the hull; “The High Sign.”
“They might as well have called it an inn,” he said as he spat.
“Hey!” He turned around and saw the worn leather soles of the boots that could have only been large enough to have been from the pit boss. He looked up and saw the man grimace down at him. He returned the gesture. The sky was beginning to tinge orange with the cooling shade of night.
“You want to get paid or should I get myself a new pair of shoes?”
“With what you pay, I would not be surprised if they just wrap your feet in cloth.”
“Hmph,” the man continued to glare down at him, “Unions have rules, scab.” His hand made a quick reach and dropped a worn sack by his legs. It did not have a chance to reach the floor.
After snatching the bag, he made a cursory glance inside. Forty-odd quartered discs of greening metal. He closed the bag and gave a snicker as he stood up, “A pleasure doing business with you.”
“Yeah, yeah…” The man smirked back at him “When are you leaving, anyway?”
“Soon… very soon, in fact.” His palm soon twirled the bag up slightly and gave it a light jostle as it tossed gently in his palm “Before I do, how about a drink?”
“A drink? With you?” The large man gave a large laugh “The last thing I’d expect from you is friendliness.”
Tyren’s eyes squinted as he returned the smirk back at him, lips balling to the other side of his mouth “You’re right, you should be expecting something when you hear that sort of thing.”
The large man gave him a grin; a knowing grin that seemed almost experienced “It’ll take more drinks than you can buy with your pay to get me drunk enough for you to filch my wallet. Besides, they don’t pay me as well as you think.”
“You’re right,” the small man stood himself up, shuffled his feet slightly, and then doubled back as his fist flashed to the large man’s face. The blow was strong enough to knock most people unconscious, but it was something the large man had already predicted, blocking with a hand. He man smiled back at Tyren, sneered, and then shuddered as his body crumpled to the ground.
As he planned, the first blow was predicted, allowing his second arm to perform a quick slam to the side of his head with a small beaded sack against his head. They were the last two in the warehouse as he had planned. His arm pulled the man up and dragged him against the floor into the warehouse, one arm holding the large man’s body with a slight drag as his free hand patted the man for any obstructions that could be felt. Hearing a light jingle as he felt a stream of metal, his finger pried open and felt inside the purse, as warm as the man’s body.
“Oh, you fool…” he mused “if they pay you this little, then you really should be doing something else with your life.” He removed his hand, and pulled the purse by the drawstring, closed. Placing the man’s corpulence on the dust of the warehouse floor, he immediately went for the doors and closed them with a slight ajar, blocking the view of the docks from the warehouse and filling it with shadows save a few scant bars of light from the holes in the walls. His arm quickly reached for the knife he always hid in the back of his pants in a clump of his shirt and the belt.
“Fruit, fruit…” He smelled the putrefying flesh, the musk… the crate of fruit rested below a crate full of clothes from the Northern Reaches, which his arm quickly shoved aside with the back of his arm to the ground with a loud thud. His eyes took to a tight squint at his own idiocy, “Impatience, impatience…” was his mantra as he placed his arms limp, he took a slow breath and then returned to the crate before him.
Undoing the crate was easy as he imagined as well: the nails that he saw were used were unusually cheap in make. An incessant buzz came out and something clutched onto his face before breaking free to chatter noisily into some other corner of the warehouse. He turned to spit again and then reluctantly edged his hand inside, feeling through wet rot, the crisped ends of what he could have guessed were shells, and squirming sensations.
“Pelor burn me…!” His hands squirmed through the wet mass in the attempt to clutch for something besides the cocoons, rot, and worms. Somewhere through the stickiness, his hand began to feel a slick, hard surface; definitely of a different grain from the crate. “Got you…!”
With a satisfied pull, his arm, slick with the juice of rotten fruit and with the fragments of dead insects, pulled out what he could only imagine to be a hard thin chest. Looking around, the arm then snuck towards the body of the pit boss and began to wipe his hands against the man’s shirt before returning to the box. As he walked out with the slick box in his hand, he snickered. The sky was starting to grow dark.
“I’m coming for you, Mandrashard…!”
