Argus
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[Short Story] Paladin
🕑 Added 2019-01-24 19:07:55 +0000 UTCHere's something I've been wanting to write for a while. I think... I got it right. I don't know. I hope you enjoy it, though.
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The small bell over the door chimed, clean and bright, alerting the humans inside to a new visitor. A burst of hot air flooded through the short breach, carrying with it the scent of dust and animals, before it was cut short as the door closed behind the new entrant.
A pretty young woman walked out into the entrance hall. They hadn't been expecting guests today, but people were always welcome here. "Hello! Welcome to the..." The cheerful greeting cut off from her lips, accompanied by the clatter of glass on wood as she dropped the sculpted decoration that she had been cleaning. A second later, she screamed, shrill and harsh, stumbling backward and tripping over her own feet. Her arms came up in front of her face, as if to protect her from the horror at the door, as she collapsed back onto her backside; her scream dying off to panicked sobs.
Standing there in the door was a monster. Though it wasn't a particularly intimidating one.
At just over four feet tall, Si'Kia was fairly large for a kobold. With dusky bronze scales, dirty and worn from weeks of travel on foot, but still showing the signs of pride in her appearance, she wasn't the most imposing figure, but she had a sense of calm about her. Pointed ears swept back in the opposite direction as her long snout, one of them nicked from an old fight; an injury that had never healed right. No horns to get in the way of any helmet or hat she might have wanted to wear; though she went without today, content to feel the fire of the sun on her scales directly. Si'Kia bore no jewelry, tattoos, or marks of position; she may as well have been born yesterday, as empty and unadorned as she looked. She did wear dusty armor composed of layered metal plates on thick leather; false scales which kept the summer heat against her actual scales with pleasant warmth. A sturdy travel backpack was strapped across her back, containing both her survival gear, and the memory of the one who had gifted to her. And, casually resting against the floor and her side, a waraxe that looked preposterously sized in the hand of the small creature standing in the entryway.
She stood warily, not making a move to advance on the human girl now sprawled on the floor and weeping at the unexpected intrusion. Calm, but tense. It took about thirty seconds before someone came out to investigate.
"Cayle? What's going on... oh. Hello there." A tall man in a white cloak stood in one of the doorways to another room of the building. Not perfectly white; there was the telltale sign of living in a small town in the plains. Dirt smudges and a small thread loose at the shoulder. Si'Kia didn't begrudge him for it, though. It was hard enough keeping armor designed to take damage intact, she could only imagine that his mantle of office was less durable than hers.
The girl on the floor pulled herself to her hands and knees and lunged toward safety behind the man. "Marchus, there's a monster! Kill it, kill it!"
"Calm down, child." He said, settling a sun-bronzed hand on head, while letting the other one drop to rest on the hilt of a short blade tucked in his belt. Making eye contact with the reptilian intruder, he kept his hand on the knife but didn't begin to draw it. "Can I help...you..."
His voice was firm and commanding, the tone of someone about to order an unwanted pest out of their sanctuary. But his voice softened and trailed off as he looked at the face of the thing standing in his doorway. And saw first the blood trickling down her face, tracing a red line just above her right eye, and then saw the tears pooled in that teardrop eye.
"Oh." He said simply. "I see." And just like that, the tension vanished, and Si'Kia felt a kindness in the man's eyes and small smile that appeared there as if by magic. His hand left the knife, and he pulled the girl off the floor and to her feet next to him. "Cayle, be a wonder and fetch me the bandages from my office, would you? We'll be in the sitting room." He spoke as if he didn't have an armed monster standing in front of him.
"But... but..." The girl stammered out, wide and horrified eyes still locked on the scaled woman before her.
The man clicked his tongue at her twice in quick succession. "Now now. No 'but buts' from you, young lady. There's someone in our hall who requires help. Fetch." He spoke with a hint of that former sternness, but tempered with patience and kindness. But he also gave her a gentle nudge with his hand to get her moving. "Now, as for you. Would you join me? It seems you could use a small rest." He addressed his kobold guest. "You can leave your weapon in the stand there by the door, if you're comfortable without it." He said, gesturing to the brass cylinder that currently held two useless umbrellas and a walking stick. "I'd say we have a coat check for your armor as well, but it seems that it might be a little difficult to get Cayle to take it off you." He shook his head as he turned his back and walked through one of the side doors. "That girl has not a calm bone in her body." The muttered words seemed meant for no one in particular, but Si'Kia picked them up anyway.
She was confused by this man's calm demeanor, his lack of fear or hate for her. But something in her felt pulled by him; and so, she left her axe - and after a moment of consideration, so as not to be rude, kicked her talon covers as well - and followed.
The room she was led to was the closest thing to beautiful she'd ever seen. It wasn't extravagant, or impressive, or displaying any particular wealth. It was simply... safe. It had a happy feeling. Bright hot sunlight poured through the clear windows; so much glass in one place, it felt like magic. It may very well have been magic, too, to keep it safe from the sandstorms that sometimes kicked through this area. There were a half dozen chairs, none of them matching. Thick plush leather armchairs, their skins worn and well used, but still looking inviting with their padding. Five of them were arranged in a semi-circle around the sixth, which sat with its back to a fireplace that looked like it hadn't been used. Ever. Not that anyone would blame people who lived in constant sweltering heat for that; though someone might ask who had built the fireplace to begin with.
The man gestured her to a seat in one of the chairs in the circle. "Here, sit, please." Looking up behind her, he smiled. "Ah, Cayle, good. I'll take that from you. You can have the rest of the day off, if you need." He caught the other girl in the doorway, and relieved her of the package that she'd brought him before dismissing her. Coming back, he set the cloth satchel down on a small unpolished wooden table that he dragged over, and knelt down in front of the lizard girl. "You look like you've had a bit of a bad day. Here, let me help you with that."
She sat silently while the human, who had at some point taken off his cloak to reveal that he wore a simple shirt and well worn work pants, dabbed at the wound on her head with a cloth. The kobold bore the treatment without wincing as he mopped up her blood, and then applied a cool ointment that made the pain vanish. While it may not have hurt her badly enough that she showed it, that didn't make the injury enjoyable. Another ointment went on after that, this one smelling strongly enough to make her snout twitch, which got a genuine flash of a laughing smile from the man, before he hid it again. This ointment was stickier, and she realized why as he placed a clean strip of bandage over the wound on her skull.
"All is right. That should do it for you." The man stood, and then took a small step back to recline into his own chair at the center of the cluster of furniture. "You know, most of the people who come to see me tend to need a different sort of work done. You're lucky I'd just stocked up on medicine." He chuckled softly, and it suddenly became clear to Si'Kia that although this man wasn't threatened by her, or hostile to her, he was in no way letting his guard down. His eyes tracked her, calmly but firmly, just like the rest of his behavior. And as she was noticing this, he spoke again. "Well. Much as I'd like to know what brought you to my door with that nasty gash..."
He was clearly going to say more, but before he could, Si'Kia spoke first. "A child threw a rock at me." It was quiet, and her words had a lingering hiss to them. But even so, she talked with clean language, and it seemed to have surprised the man in front of her. Perhaps what surprised him most was that, despite the clear words, her voice couldn't hide the rasp of someone who had been crying. "I think I've lost my shield."
"Oh! You speak!" He leaned forward in his chair, pressing his fingers together in front of himself. "That's certainly interesting. I don't suppose you intend to leave as peacefully as you arrived, hm?" The question was asked without malice, but it still hurt to hear. And he saw it at once in the way her face fell. "Of course, of course." The man backtracked quickly. "Well. You were lucky to have stumbled into my little space here. Though I'm curious, why this building?"
Si'Kia looked up at him with sad eyes. "It looked the most like a church." She said by way of explanation. "And I wished to ask a question of a priest."
The man raised his eyebrows. His building certainly was unique in this small town. Perhaps a few more spires and twists of architecture to not stand out, especially to someone who was going to see what they were looking for. "A church? Well, perhaps not quite. Though I do deal with faith, in a way. Perhaps then I can help you find your answer; what is it you wished to ask?" He waited expectantly, but found no response forthcoming. "Well, if you'd like to think about it for a minute, maybe I can get us something to drink in the meantime." The man who was not a priest made to rise, but as he did so, his guest found the will to open her mouth.
"Do I have a soul?"
Her voice sounded so small as she croaked out the words, and Marchus felt a pain in his heart for the small monster sitting in his favorite chair. He sat back down, leaning back into the his chair as he answered smoothly. "I would assume so." He responded with a confident tone. "They say that every creature born has a soul of some kind, no matter what they are. It's one of the few things that the priests and thams agree upon, really." He quirked his mouth into a smile that fell away when he saw the reaction of his guest. Her snout was cast downward, eyes jammed shut to hold in tears as her shoulders jerked with silent sobs. "It would seem... that was not what you needed to hear." For the first time, the man's smooth tone staggered a bit. This was not a situation he was prepared for.
The little lizard bit back another sob, settling on a short breath instead as she bit back further tears. "No." She said simply. "Not surprising, yet it still hurts." Si'Kia commented, the hiss off her reptilian tongue coming through sharper now.
"Why?" He asked her, curious now.
She stared at the floor for a long time, and he worried that their conversation was truly over. But Marchus had experience in matters like this, and stilled his tongue in patience while his guest composed her thoughts. Finally, after a hundred heartbeats, she spoke again.
The words came out of a tight throat, heavy with an old shame. "I am... a made thing." Si'Kia said. "I was created. I will never have a soul. They..." Her voice broke slightly, small cracks in a hastily built wall. "They are right. To be afraid of me. I wasn't born, I am only a soulless monster."
Marchus almost flinched at the words. A created thing, she said. There weren't many entities on this world that would meet that criteria. A summoned familiar, perhaps. A golem, certainly. Or, more likely what she meant, one of the spawns from a wild hellzone. Things that were spontaneously generated from high-density mana regions, some of them so old as to be almost sentient, never had souls. They never even had personalities. Even most monsters in the wild were rational to a degree; they acted on hunger or anger or just plain old avarice. But hellzone creations were rampant beasts. On the rare case that they got loose from their spawning ground, they would kill, and kill, and kill, until they burned out or were put down.
But none of those, not even the last one, especially not the last one, described the person in front of him. And for all that she was a monster, she was certainly a person.
"A made thing?" He asked, instead of showing fear, putting curiosity into his words. "I admit, I've heard of creatures like that. You don't seem to match the description." Perhaps someone had simply lied to her. "Where do you come from?"
"Home." She said, simple and quiet. Marchus didn't know what to make of that, but he gave a small smile. But just as he was thinking that she was perhaps not as intelligent as he had thought, and that she didn't know her own origin, Si'Kia continued. "It is simply called Home. I do not know where it is from here; I am on pilgrimage." She said, as if that explained everything. He simply gave her a look, raised eyebrows over steepled fingers, and she got the implication. "Your people do not do that." She stated.
"No, we don't." He said, adjusting in his chair as they spoke more and more like equals as she calmed down. "Would you tell me about it?"
She nodded, and he had a flash of amusement at the exaggerated way that she bobbed her snout. It was adorable, in a way, to see the strangely human gesture coming from something that wasn't fully human shaped. Which brought him to wonder, who had taught her? He had never seen a kobold nod before. But then she spoke, and he didn't have time to dwell on it. "Every one of us at Home, on our fifth year, is sent into the world. To learn, to grow, to test our glyph-name, and to return home to share what we have seen. The Father called it 'like an apprenticeship, with no master', when he opened my portal for me."
Her words caused more questions than they resolved. But he didn't say anything, simply letting her speak. Marchus was wise beyond what his age showed, and he had learned that when the words started to roll from the tongue of someone in pain, they would find their own way to a truth before he could ever help them there.
"I want to go Home." She said, showing her teeth as she ground them together in pain and frustration. "I have failed my pilgrimage, it doesn't matter. I want to see my siblings again, I want to drink cocoa, I want to be safe in my bed." Her voice rose, angry now. "I don't want to learn how much you hate us, or how I've failed my glyph, or how awful, awful, this world really is! I don't want to be here anymore!" Si'Kia screamed the last words out. She broke off with a gasp, and he saw fresh tears pouring down her cheeks, droplets of water splattering onto his chair before fading in the summer heat. "I want to go back to where I was made..."
And though she was wearing armor, and had shown up armed to the fang, she seemed so young and alone right now. So he did the one thing he knew to do when it came to healing a crying, homesick child.
He knelt in front of her chair and gave her a hug.
She was shocked at first, and jerked backward as his sun touched arms wrapped around her. This was, for Si'Kia, the first time a human had made contact with her that wasn't to deliver a disdainful kick or a taunting slap. But as the warmth of this kind man seeped through her scales, she leaned into him, her own arms and claws coming up to hold his shoulders. As her sobs subsided, the little kobold gave one last sniff, and half-whispered. "When I was two years old, my nestmates and I chose our glyphs." Marchus leaned back to give her some space, but kept his arms around her back while she spoke, her voice gaining confidence as she went. "For two years, we had grown together. Learning how to be people. It was so difficult, sometimes, to understand Father's lessons. But then, I'd look at my sister trying to learn to dance, or my brothers chasing each other on the slopes. And it made sense. I knew. I *knew*." She pushed him back to make eye contact for those words, as if trying to convince him of a fundamental truth of the world. "And when it was time to choose our glyphs, from the four that Father had found, I knew then too. I took up..." And she spoke a word that *burned* his ears, that left him staggering backward coughing. But for all that it didn't match any language that Marchus had ever heard, he knew the meaning of it.
Protect.
A mission, a directive of the heart, a truth to a person. The heaviest word he'd ever heard, and said with such casual disregard by the kobold in front of him.
"What..." He started to ask, gasping. But the thing in front of him didn't notice or care, she just kept talking.
"I made it my glyph name. After the Father told us it was the hardest burden, the heaviest weight. I didn't care. I knew it was mine." She sniffed again, wiping damp eyes and scales with the back of her paws. "But now, after so much, I see the world, so full of humans and elves and reiko, and I can't understand why he told me that you were worth protecting as much as my own nest."
Ah, there it was. Catching his breath, and dusting his hands against well-worn pants, he sat back down, almost smiling as he understood. After all that, all those strange revelations and secret words, it all came down to one thing that he knew so very well.
A lost child, nothing more.
"Do you know what a soul is?" He asked, voice quiet and even, a small piece of stability for the lost one in front of him. She sniffed again, a wet noise against the dry and warm afternoon, and shook her snout. This time, he didn't have to work hard to keep the grin off his face at the human gesture. Leaning forward, hands clasped in front of him, he gazed at the kobold in his chair until she looked up and made eye contact. "Did you ever see your sister and brothers hurt?" She nodded, fresh tears still in her wide almond eyes. "Did you feel it? Did your skin crawl, and your heart burn? Did you want nothing more than to take their place, to pick up the pain onto yourself?" Another gasp of breath, and she sat straighter in her chair as she nodded back. "And when you see the world, you don't see just the people who hate you. You see the things that are amiss, the people who aren't monsters. You see their hunger and loss, and you feel that too. Even in the ones that hate you, you feel how broken they are, and you *know*." Another nod, a grudging one. Marchus tapped his fingers together lightly. "That's it. That's all it is. There's no magic to the soul, no deeper secrets you're missing. You have one, have the whole time."
Across from him, a young girl stared, then let out a cough halfway between a laugh and a sob. Then another, and another, until she was giggling and gasping uncontrollably. But her words after that almost caught him off guard, and if he hadn't heard them a dozen times before, he might have been taken aback. "I don't want it!" Si'Kia gasped out. "Take it away!"
"No." Was all the man said.
"You must!" She hissed back. "I cannot live like this!" Her reptile tongue betraying her as she half-stumbled through the words.
"But you will." He threw back, stern, but understanding. And for just a second, the kobold saw a flash of her Father in this strange person. Just enough to give her pause, to cut her cries short, and to make her listen. "You think you are the first to want to cast it aside? It doesn't work. And besides, would you wish to live without your nest?"
"No..." Came the meek reply.
"Because you would give them up with it. That's what having a soul means. It means you can love, as well as hate. Hurt, as well as harm. Being made doesn't seem to have deprived you of that one bit." He did smile now, letting the warmth of the sun pouring through the windows reach his face and his words. "Just hidden itself from you for a spell." Marchus stood up, and patted her shoulder pad with a calloused hand, before walking out of the room. Leaving Si'Kia to simply sit in reflection for a brief time, before he returned with a pair of mugs, one of them half empty. He offered her the full one, and took a sip of his own. "Here. Traumatic revelations of the self work up a thirst, I've learned." He said as he passed her the fruit juice.
She gasped out a barking laugh as she took it, mindful not to leave claw marks on the clay. The man across from her laughed himself lightly as she dug in a belt pouch and pulled out a long metal straw to drink with; a pilgrimage gift from an older brother who told her it was the best defense their kind had against cups.
The two of them sat in a now more comfortable silence for a while, enjoying the sharp citrus tang of the drink while watching dust play in the shafts of light from the windows. And for just a moment, she felt her muscles uncoil under her armor, and sagged down in the comfort of the chair. Home. This was someone's home, and this was what it felt like to have that shared. The drink was different. So was the furniture, and the floors, and the light and smell and even the dirt felt alien. But they had opened their home to her, and for now, she wasn't alone. At some point, Cayle came through and took their empty mugs away, and didn't scream, and that too felt strange. But not wrong.
After a while, when it was time to break the silence, she asked him the only question she had left. "What is this place?"
Marchus opened his mouth, but was interrupted as the front door slammed open down the hall. Si'Kia widened her eyes in curiosity as a pair of footsteps pounded down the hallway, accompanied by the sound of clattering metal something near the door was knocked to the floor. Outside, Cayle said something in her high voice that neither of the two in the sitting room caught, and a young man answered back. Before the older man could explain or the younger hatchling could ask, a vaguely familiar boy burst into the room, shouting.
"Mar! Mar!" He was panting, out of breath, red in the face and panicked but not slowing down in his words. "It took Bell! There's a..." A split second for his young mind to catch up to the scene in front of him that he'd interrupted, and then the word that had plagued the kobold's whole pilgrimage, "...monster!"
There was no hesitation from the man across from her. One second, Si'Kia was frozen as the kid looked like he was preparing to attack her, and in the next blink, Marchus was out of his chair, standing between them, and radiating the same sense of crushing disappointment that Father had when a nestmate did something they *really* knew they shouldn't have. Before he could speak, more footsteps resounded through the wood floors of the building, and a cluster of other humans pushed into the room behind him, clamoring. These ones were more Si'Kia's size, children all of them. But one by one, they fell silent as Marchus stood there, glowering. The kid who'd burst in first stepped back from the taller man, and stumbled a bit, falling onto his
"What" He stated in a firm voice that hinted at a hidden anger, "happened to your brother? Were you not taking care of him today?"
"A... a monster took him." The boy on the ground sniffed. "He's not my real brother, anyway..." He muttered afterward.
If he'd hoped that Marchus wouldn't hear that, he was sorely mistaken. The tall man knelt, and placed a tanned hand on the child's shoulder. "He trusted you to take care of him. That makes him your brother, Bessaphon." The kid winced, as if his name was only used as punishment, and Si'Kia suddenly felt an amount of kinship with this aggressive child. Father had done the same thing to her, when she misbehaved, after all. "Now, did a monster really take him, or did you simply lose him?" The collected group of children started shouting, then, about the monster that had snatched one of them away while they played down by the old riverbed. "Oh dear." Marchus stood up, grabbing his cloak off the chair, his body language radiating fresh tension. He turned back, finally, to the kobold in his sitting room. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut our conversation short. One of my fosterlings has need of me."
"Are there no hunters in this town?" Si'Kia asked in curiosity, and tried not to wince at the series of gasps and whispers from the kids that probably thought she was a mindless thing.
"Not that would spend resources on the orphanage." He told her, with a sad smile. And now, it was her turn to spot the spots of tears in his eyes, though far better covered up than her own. "If I'm quick, then maybe..." His hand gripped the hilt of his blade so tight that white spots showed on his knuckles.
Si'Kia stood, hopping down from the comfortably worn padding of the chair. She looked at Marchus, and then the children who were all now half-crying themselves. She took a deep breath, and really took in the smell of this home for the first time. Dust and dirt and sunlight and, yes, a nest of human children. Then she looked up, tilting her snout toward Marchus's face. "I will come with you." Was what she told him, before striding through the nest of kids in the doorway, and down the hall to where her talon covers lay and her axe had been left sprawled to the floor.
"Are you sure?" Marchus asked her as she clipped the bronze clawcovers to her feet.
"It's not for them." She told him, and he hissed a small breath but didn't say anything. "It's not for you, either. It is... you are correct. It hurts to see others hurt. Even when they have hurt you. This is the right thing to do." Her last words held conviction. "It is what I was made for, after all."
Marchus didn't miss her words. "Children!" He yelled down the hallway to where a host of small heads peeked around a doorframe at the two of them. "Out here, please!" The shuffled out, some slower than the others, many with eyes cast to the ground. "Apologize to the dame." He told them, simply. "And one of you, wherever you hid it, get her shield back."
Despite the stress of the day, the pain still in her head, and the feeling of dried tears on her scales, it was beyond Si'Kia's power to not laugh as a pair of humans smaller than her shuffled forward and told her they were sorry for hitting her with a rock. The small bark of laughter caught the kids off guard, and they flinched back, perhaps still terrified of the evil monster in their house, but then she found she couldn't stop, and by the time another kid presented her with her steel-banded kite shield, she was gasping away the last of a fit of giggles that was both unladylike, and also very much not something that Marchus would have expected from a lizardkin.
He stepped back into the room from where he'd vanished to while she waited for the kids to bring back her equipment. Though now, his casual work clothes were traded for a set of well worn leather pads with metal plates sewn into them. The short blade at his hip had a companion on the other side, as well, a longer sword that had no scabbard, and looked cared for, but well used. "Well, dame. Are you ready?" He asked her as she strapped the shield to her arm.
Si'Kia looked back at him with teardrop eyes. "You shouldn't call me that. I am no knight."
"Are you sure?" Marchus asked, raising an eyebrow. Despite the pressing nature of the situation, he still had his own role to play, as a guide, as a Father. "You may be the closest thing this town has ever seen to one. Now, tell me, are you sure you want to come with me? You have no obligation to us, no matter what you might think."
The kobold didn't have to think about it. She gave a short nod, and looked him directly in the eye. "Yes." She said. "I was born for this."
Comments
Argus
This may or may not be something I'll revisit later.
Dylan
Gah, now I want to know more. Good job. But also grumble.
