V M [Q] Rathian Rising

Ellie

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“Shimmer. Dude. You’re gross. You’re fucking gross,” Ellie fumed, scrubbing her backpack. “This is the grossest shit you’ve ever done.”

Shimmer, a chestnut mare with a splotch of white splashed down her nose, gazed balefully at Ellie. A horse’s big eyes, so full of depth and expression, always had a sad look in her opinion but it seemed like Shimmer’s were extra sad, and good, fucking good. Kneeling over the bank of the river, her backpack’s contents emptied onto the ground beside her, covered in dirt, muck, and horseshit, the bent-backed entirety of her scrubbed the waxed canvas of her bag with a shoulder-aching amount of muscle.

“You shit on my backpack,” she said, brow knotted, sweat trickling down her face. “Everything I own, I keep in here, and you shit on it. Do you know what that feels like?”

Shimmer gave a whickering snort.

“Yeah,” agreed Ellie. “Pretty fucking bad. How would you like it if I just shat on everything you loved? Probably wouldn’t like that now would you? If I just shat in your feed bag or something.”

Obviously she wouldn’t do that, but, pissed off as she was, it helped to vent about it. Since Shimmer was her only traveling companion, she’d have to bear the brunt of her fury, which consisted largely of veiled threats and intricate revenge plots that she’d never exact on her own horse, because backpack covered in shit or not she loved her horse and her horse loved her, that was true, nobody could deny it. She didn’t have anybody else, either, for better or for worse so it was the two of them do or die and sometimes it had been a little closer to the latter than the former. If she didn’t have Shimmer, it might have just been ‘die’ in those scenarios, so even in moments like this, Ellie was glad to have her, because she preferred ‘do’. Yeah, when they arrows got to flying, it was sometimes a little of column A and a little of column B, but with a faithful horse beneath her there were a lot more options in a pinch like that.

Canvas scoured adequately, Ellie hung her rucksack by its handle on a tree branch’s offshoot to dry. They wouldn’t make any more progress today, she knew not until the canvas had dried enough for her to put all of her belongings back into, so it was time to rub Shimmer down, feed her the evening’s grain (shit-free, though be damned if she didn’t want to…no, better not), water the beast of burden, and then set about to making camp. Dinner that night? A can of beans, she figured, and for a treat maybe she’d cook up the last two rashers of bacon to spice that bitch up, because one could only eat so many cans of beans before things got a little dull.

She produced a spark onto the gathered tinder, rewarded with a thin coil of smoke for her efforts, then worked a tiny blossom of flame into an actual fire that bloomed up in the darkening air with a natural grandiosity that she’d never stop admiring.

“...not bad,” Ellie mumbled aloud, and Shimmer agreed with a gentle whinney. “Not bad, Ellie. Faster than usual.”

And it had been, which was good, because even though she had almost nothing better to do there was something about the tedium of doing the same tasks every night, night after night, that started to wear away at the fringes of the mind. Some folks found the opposite: that a steady routine of the same fucking task night in and night out provided peace of mind. She’d met a couple of wanna-be cowboys and gun-slinging badasses that fancied themselves something special because they were men of the world who found a simple joy in the down-home act of making a fire. That wasn’t her, though, man. It just wasn’t her.

Ellie was a different kind of gun-toting badass who endured the bullshit for the big payoff at the end, the adrenaline rush of a big score, or the satisfaction of skating through danger by the skin of her teeth. That was the tits, the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, and she set herself to laughing when she imagined flip-flopping those two phrases for the bee’s pajamas or the cat’s knees.

“The cat’s knees!” she told Shimmer, snickering like an idiot. Ellie shook her head. “The bee’s fucking pajamas.”

She cooked the last rashers of bacon first, snagging the little portable cast-iron she usually kept in her pack that had been relegated to sitting on a smattering of rocks that kept it off of the true filth of the ground. Once a suitable layer of bacon grease had been teased out of the meat she dumped the can of beans right in there without draining the pan because that’s how she rolled. Fuck counting calories, especially when you lived hard and rough the way she did. Every drop of bacon fat might be the difference between an extra surge of energy that could pull you up a cliff ledge or the flagging lack of strength that could spell a girl’s death at the end of a long day. She ate slowly, savoring the beans, while Shimmer ate her shit-free grain.

While she was finishing her last few spoonfuls, something strange happened.

A pigeon, an Arbiter-be-fucked pigeon, actually lowered itself flapping through the canopy of leaves and branches overhead to land on her backpack. Ellie blinked stupidly, actually rubbed her eyes to make sure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, then walked over to inspect the bird. Slate grey, a little different from the pigeons you’d found in the settlements, it was a little bit sleeker and prettier. It lacked the dull plump one usually found in that kind of bird, and instead looked adequately bodied from travel.

And on one of it’s legs there was a piece of paper, rolled tight, then tied in place by twine at the top and bottom.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Ellie remarked to nobody in particular. “What have you got for me, little guy?”

She worked the twine loose with calloused fingers, and the bird let her. It seemed used to this kind of treatment, which Ellie found downright fascinating because she’d never seen a trained bird before, and in fact had only seen a very small smattering of domesticated birds altogether. They were not a sight often seen amongst the lower rungs of Kraw society. When she’d worked the note loose the pigeon tilted its head expectantly at her, and bobbed its beak up and down. It…wanted something?

Uncertain about what to do, she plucked a stray bacon bit from her cast-iron and offered it to the bird. To her surprise, the bird took it, and ate it quickly. Note in hand she watched it light from her pack with a couple of pumps from its wings, then disappear back up into the canopy and then it was like the bird had never been there except for the piece of paper she clutched in stunned silence.

“...did you see that shit?” asked Ellie, smiling at Shimmer. “That’s crazy. …let’s get a look at who…”

She unfurled the note, and found it scrawled in a tight spidery web of ink, so fine in its calligraphy that she had to actually lean in and squint at the paper and put an effort forth to decipher it.

“Fucking snobs and their lame-ass handwriting,” Ellie remarked aloud, as she was want to do for a lack of other voices to fill the lapse of silence. “Let’s see who you are, then.”

And she set about to reading the note proper.

Rathian Rising
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Ellie

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The gentle squish, squish, squish of Shimmer’s hooves picking their way through the sodden jungle floor played a constant beat, while Ellie filled the silence with a nonstop stream of chatter.

“So, she said to me,” Ellie prattled on, eyes lost somewhere far away in her memory. “And mind you she seemed like she was telling me some kind of secret. She leaned over and put her hand over her mouth and said to me, ‘I’m going to dominate’ your little hobbity friend, which made me spit out my drink because Gary was small, but he wasn’t a hobbit in the literal sense. …just a small guy who liked to eat, and liked to party. So she mixed a drink, and I swear that I saw her put something in there. Even if she didn’t, she was being crazy fucking suspicious about the way she was being with it.”

Ellie shook her head, remembering, and clucked her tongue.

“So she calls Gary in there, says something like, ‘hey, Gary, honey, I’ve made you a drink!’ which I knew was like a dinner bell to Gary. You can hear everybody all abuzz through the house, which isn’t that big of a house, and they’re all chatting and partying. You know, the way you do in a house party. I don’t even know how old everybody was, but who cares, you know? Nobody cares about shit like that in that kind of place. But I’m getting away from it.

“So she calls Gary in, and he comes a-running, and she hands him this drink. He was ready to drink it, too, when he saw the look on my face from over her shoulder, and I’m making this fucking ‘hey don’t do it’ motion with my hand, like, shaking my head and slashing across my neck as quietly as I can so she doesn’t hear me from behind her.

“Katie turns around to look at me, because she must’ve seen something in Gary’s eyes that clued her off, but I stopped as fast as anything and gave her my schmooziest smile, which seems to be enough for her. Gary thanks her for the drink and takes it back out into the party, which leaves me alone with Katie in the kitchen. And she starts telling me about what she’s going to do to Gary, and the whole time I had known Gary, I had never known him to show even the remotest sexual inclination, you know? I’ve never seen him look at anybody with any kind of romantic interest. He was just some little guy who liked to party.

“So he goes out into the party and he gets wasted, but he doesn’t pass out, which makes me think he tossed out whatever drink Katie had made him, because I’m fucking positive something in it. Party goes well into the night, and Katie’s friend, this tall red-headed girl named Celeste, is drinking folks under the table left and right. I’ve never seen a woman put back as much booze as this one.

When people start passing out or going home or whatever, I go looking for Gary and find him out on the back porch smoking something with these guys from Mesa Roja. I don’t know what they were doing there, and damned if Gary didn’t forget everything he’d learned about them by the next day, but they were just as thick as thieves that night. Fucking drinking and palling around and whatever - but I can tell that Gary’s timer is ticking, and that he’s only a drink or two away from the edge, and over that edge? I can see Katie waiting to scoop him up and take him back to her sex dungeon or whatever she has waiting, which is just…not good. Not good for Gary, and not good for anybody involved, I imagine. So I wrangle up Gary, I say, ‘hey, Gary, I’m heading out, do you mind escorting me?’ and I give him some cock and bull story about a couple of big guys eyeing me in a way I didn’t like, but really it was me that’d be escorting Gary.

“So I manage to pry him away from the two dudes from Mesa Roja, I have no idea how because you’d think I was trying to steal their dog the way they were carrying on about how Gary couldn’t leave, and Gary needed to stay for another drink, and Gary was going to play darts, and blah blah fucking blah...

“I get Gary outside, you know, and he’s stumbling because once he’s out of the party it’s like it all hit him at once. He puts up a finger and runs over to this bush, and somewhere beside the bush he finds this plastic bag, damned if I know where it came from. He opens it up and throws up inside the damn bag. Now I’ve got Gary, and he’s got this bag full of vomit, and we’re out in Katie’s yard, so we’re not out of the lion’s den yet.

“I look at Gary, he looks at me, and then he fucking throws the bag right up into the tree in Katie’s yard!”

Ellie started laughing, then got to really laughing to the point where her shoulders were shaking and tears sprouted from the corners of her eyes. She let them fall. But it felt so good to laugh like that! And wasn’t it funny that she made herself laugh in a way that nobody else did? It was like she got her own sense of humor and it was a private thing that belonged to just her.

As her laughter tapered off, Ellie noticed that the density of trees was diminishing with each stride of Shimmer’s powerful legs, which meant that they were getting close. Her mousy face grew solemn and shrewd, her green eyes grew careful; what came next was not something she enjoyed but to the well seasoned hunter it was a necessary pilgrimage on any journey, the first leg of the journey to New Abraxas and the most important stop on the road in Ellie’s own humble opinion.

Shimmer carried Ellie through a particularly dense outcropping of trees whose lush green branches arced in a way reminiscent of a gate, which they passed under and through.

They emerged into a very large clearing. Here the muddy ground gave way into something more well kept, where an enormous greenhouse punctuated the open ground. It was visibly fogged from the outside and Ellie found herself, not for the first time, impressed by the sheer tenacity of the human spirit that went into creating and then operating something of that size in the jungles of Kraw. It was something impossibly rare on a world whose most impressive structures were derelict and crumbling at best and unrecognizably ruined at worst.

Near the greenhouse, dwarfed by it in size, was a meager wooden cabin with a wispy trail of smoke creeping from its chimney to wind up into the sky.

This cabin was known to many who made frequent outings into outer wilds from New Abraxas and then back again: it belonged to Lady Godiva.

Ellie reined up outside of the cabin and tied Shimmer to a hitching post, then plumbed her saddlebags for Shimmer’s feeding bag, which she affixed to her horse’s face after filling it with grain.

She gave two heavy thuds of the enormous knocker on the door. Shortly thereafter, it swung open, and an enormous man gestured her inside.

He was large by any standard, but next to Ellie he was practically a giant. He stood easily a head and shoulders over Ellie, and was nearly twice as wide with a great big stomach; despite this, his arms were wound tight with cords of muscle, and his bulk belied the enormous strength Ellie knew him to possess. He had a shaved head, and dark eyes. Once she’d stepped through the door she saw his companion, a man who for all intents and purposes seemed to Ellie to be identical to the first. She was unable to tell them apart even if she had known their names. They lacked tongues, she knew, so they would be unable to tell her their names even if they had wanted to.

They gestured her towards a hanging bead curtain which festooned the doorway into the next room. As she entered she could hear them approach either side of her, flanking her, to escort her to the crone: Lady Godiva.

Lady Godiva’s room was a dimly lit affair, an exercise in excess characterized by the hippy movement intermingled with some traditionalist decorum. Like many other sections of the house its doorway was a bead curtain, its scent was a cloying incense aroma, and it bore shelves and shelves loaded with all manner of pseudo-religious trinketry.

The Lady Godiva herself sat in an ornate rocking chair of carved maple, which itself sat on a raised platform so as to present the illusion of a throne.

Ellie removed her backpack and her shoes, which she set by the doorway, then prostrated herself, hands flat on the floor.

“Lady Godiva,” stated Ellie ceremonially. “We are all but children at your feet.”

Those were the words. She’d said them many times.

“And I am the Granny of all you children,” answered Lady Godiva.

That was the prompt that it was okay to slide back into a seat on the mat on the floor. Ellie did so, folding her legs over one another with knees akimbo. She rested her hands on either knee and looked up at the old crone.

Lady Godiva wore her hair, which was bone white and thinning, in an ornate pile of woven braids held together by a butterfly clip. In garment she was simple: she wore a purple robe bound at the waist by a tie; the sleeves flared bombastically at the cuffs. Her face was a topographical map of deep creases and wrinkles. But her eyes! Her eyes, Ellie noticed, were blue and bright, hyper-aware and studious. They were the eyes of someone who had lost much in the way of mobility with age but had never dulled in mental faculty. That is what made her revered by the travelers who passed by.

Her status afforded her many visitors who she took in for visits either short or long. Lady Godiva traded not in goods or services but in stories. She took stories offered, and she offered a story in return. The stories she was interested in varied: they could be tales of one’s past, observations from one’s travels, or even myths and legends. The Lady did insist, however, that the tales she be given must be something she hadn’t heard before.

In exchange she would offer useful information: what the upcoming weather might be, or if there was danger on the road ahead. She might inform the traveler of beasts’ migratory patterns and what paths to avoid, or on the movements of bandits and highwaymen. Ellie had wondered many times if the Lady Godiva was, in fact, a fortune teller, or simply a talented merchant in the information trade.

After a suitable amount of time, Lady Godiva cleared her throat.

“Alright,” her quavering old voice intoned, not unkindly. “Let us hear your story, then, Ellie.”

Ellie bowed her head respectfully. In many circles she was crass, crude, and uncouth. In this old crone’s house, however, she knew her place and understood the value of the ritual. Each step was important, and a misstep might cost her the ability to seek an audience with the old woman.

She pushed a lock of red hair aside and raised her own green eyes to the crone’s luminous blue ones.

“So, I have a friend named Gary…” Ellie began.

Rathian Rising
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Ellie

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“Gary was a friend of mine from way back. I mean way, way back. All the way back, as far as I can remember.”

Ellie’s face worked its way through the stages of concentration while her preponderance of freckles shrank in towards her small nose, because of the way she crinkled her cheeks when she was deep in thought.

“Yeah. I guess I can’t remember the first time we met, but I remember him being with me when I was snatching the apples off of carts, or running rooks with me out in the square. Those were New Abraxas days, and good fuckin’ riddance to them. Gary made things a little easier, though. He was the kind of guy that you’d find an easy laugh with, and there weren’t many easy laughs to come by. He was also the kind of guy that was so good at everything he tried that you’d start to get a little pissed off at him. I mean, who’s good at everything? Nobody should be good at every-fucking-thing, but he was. I swear he was.

“He was a Hell of a hunter, too. We started young. I don’t think we were the youngest, but we were close. When the bullets start flying you get this kind of squirrely panic in your stomach, but then when you’d look over at Gary’s face he was just an ocean of calm. Then you’d start to feel calm because he was, and the next thing you’d know you’re galloping away from the fight with a bag of loot and laughing, and the whole damn thing feels like a wild dream.”

Ellie paused and looked at the Lady. Lady Godiva was still as a statue. If not for the steady rise and fall of her breath, Ellie would’ve thought she was dead. This had been the way Ellie had known her to attend all stories; when telling previous tales she would get swept up in her own remembrance, catch herself getting lost in the tide, startle, then look up, and the old woman would be there at rapt attention.

She took a breath, then opened her mouth to ask for a glass of water, but this was something that was expected, and one of Lady Godiva’s tongueless attendants was ready at the rip. He handed her a glass. Ellie took a long sip, savored the feeling of cool liquid running down her throat, then gathered herself.

“Right, um…yeah. So, that’s just the way that Gary was, I guess. I don’t get to talking to many folks anymore, but the ones I do, they all seem to have a Gary. Or if they don’t, they did once. I think we all kind of look for a friend like that, someone who seems like an island of peace in this big, whacky world. You can go out there and get eaten by a fucking dinosaur in the Jungle, but when you ride out there with a Gary it feels like that just wouldn’t happen to you. Not while he was there.

“Gary was a guy, though, who liked to work hard and play harder. I was never much for a party, myself, but Gary fucking loved to party, and I loved to hang out with Gary, so I ended up at my fair share of them. Gary would get plastered, and I mean, this guy was drunk off his fucking ass.”

Her smile, remembering, was wistful. There were funny times, sure, but there were other times…worse ones. Times when she’d cleaned up Gary’s vomit off the floor and had to watch to make sure he didn’t choke on it in his sleep. Dark times. The funny times started to grow old in the shadow of the dark times. That wasn’t how it’d been in the beginning, but it was how it grew to be.

She found herself thinking about Gary an awful lot, lately, and why was that? It had been awhile since it had happened.

Who’s to say?

“...which, that was the craziest thing to me, because out in the field he was like…the most observant, focused dude. And at a party he would be a riot, too, until he went a little too far and then he wasn’t really Gary anymore. The time that I’m talking about, we’d all been in this basement playing pool. We went there a lot, Gary loved it, because as much as he liked to party he also liked to be doing something. He needed games and stuff to keep him occupied, which was fine by me, because I couldn’t drink myself senseless the way he could so I needed something to do as well.

“We’d end up playing doubles at pool. Gary was a shark at that game, man. Like a real fucking shark. Folks knew that, so most of the games were for fun because nobody wanted to bet against a guy like that. Even when he’d lose himself in the bottle he was still a better shot than I’d ever seen, which was nuts. How do you even shoot like that when you’re seeing double?

“We’d played a couple of games that night when a cocky little fucker with that blowback black hair and the tanned out face of a scavver - sorry, a scavenger, that is - comes rolling up to the table and challenges us to a game. He’s got his buddy with him, a big guy who doesn’t say much, and then there’s Gary and I.

“And the guy wants to make it interesting. I kind of warn him, because we’re not hustlers, at least not playing pool in a place we hang out all the time. He insists, though, and he pulls out what he wants to bet.”

Ellie could remember it, still. A hand, almost mummified, frozen eternally in a writhing grasp. It had been severed at the wrist; the thing itself was withered and dark, with a hole drilled through the very base of the hand from which a loop of simple rope was affixed. The man had worn it as a necklace, drawn it out from his sweatshirt in fact, which Ellie found horrifying.

“It was a hand of glory, I swear it on my mother’s grave,” stated Ellie, grimacing at the memory. “Ugly fucking thing. In more ways than one, too. It’s ugly because of the way it looks, but it’s even uglier because of what it is. I didn’t know what it was until the guy explained it. You probably already know what it is. You probably know what just about everything is.”

Ellie could’ve sworn she’d seen the ghost of a smile flicker across the old woman’s face, but maybe it was a trick of the light.

“Anyway, what it is, is the hand of a hanged man. I guess after he’s hung, whoever is fucking disgusting enough to do the deed has to go creep out to the crave, dig up the body, and cut the hand off.

“But there’s more. The hand can be used on its own, sure, but what makes it really powerful is the candle. The same sick fuck who takes the hand has to get some of the fat, and they take this fat, and they render it down into wax. They use that wax to make a candle. If you light that candle and you stick it in the hand, and show it to a room, everyone in the room is frozen in place. Can you believe that? Frozen in place. I, myself, I didn’t believe it, because that’s some really gross shit.

“And I told Gary as much, and I told him I didn’t want to play, but Gary had that look in his eye. I knew it, I recognized it. It was that look he got when he was ready to get obsessed with something, and I knew there was no use in trying to talk him out of it.

“So we ended up playing the games. Gary had gotten a little drunk at that point, so his game had started to suffer, but Gary when his game was suffering was still three times the player a hobbyist was, and that was good enough. We won the first game, and we won the hand.

“The second game was for the candle. Gary had gotten even drunker at this point, because a pool game isn’t necessarily the quickest thing, but Gary’s drinking is about one of the quickest things I’ve ever seen, so he was at least half in the bag by the time we’d wrapped up the second game. We won, but by the skin of our teeth. That’s the game that won us the candle.

“Those two, they handed it over, and I caught this look on their faces…I thought it looked like relief. Maybe I was imagining it. I don’t know if anybody really likes to carry around something like that, because that’s just kind of…it’s dark magic, you know? Really dark, so when you carry it around it kind of feels like a curse. You have power, but you never know when the other shoe is going to drop. I didn’t want anything to do with the fucking thing, so Gary collected his winnings, and he draped it around his neck, then he stowed the candle in his backpack.

“He got royally drunk that night. In the middle of the night he’d woken up from a blackout, stood up in his chair, turned around, unzipped his pants, and pissed right in it. It all happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to stop him - even drunker than a skunk, Gary was quick as Hell. When he woke up the next day, he barely remembered winning the hand at all. If it hadn’t been hanging from his neck, I don’t think he would’ve remembered at all.

“But it was. It was hanging from his neck, and I remember thinking that there was a kind of black humor in that. Hanged man’s hand, and it hung from Gary’s neck, so in a way it was like he was sort of hanging too. I wondered if the rope on the hand was the rope they’d used to hang the poor fucker whose hand Gary had won.”

Ellie trailed off, remembering, and the room fell silent.

“That’s your story, then?” the old crone asked, after sufficient time had passed. Time enough that she was able to ascertain that the story was over.

“I guess it is,” Ellie admitted. “Sorry. Didn’t exactly stick the landing.”

Her face flushed red, a deep red, like her hair. The old crone laughed at that, it was a high, lilting laugh. It was a surprisingly pretty sound, Ellie found, and she wondered about how beautiful the old crone may have been in her youth. …very beautiful, she guessed.

“Very well, then,” Lady Godiva said. “I will tell you of the trails to New Abraxas. There are highwaymen to the East, so the road you’ll want to take is…”

Rathian Rising
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Ellie

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After long enough in the saddle, Ellie’s legs got to feeling like prosthetics. It was the stiff, unwieldy wooden feeling that was even a step further than the pins and needles you’d feel after a long ride. Ellie knew long rides. There were long rides, then there were long rides. She’d set out for a long ride and man, had she accomplished it.

The cooling heat was the first warning she’d noticed, warm and good. An average day on Kraw teetered between uncomfortable and unbearable, so when things wound down to the category of warm it was a sign that the day was getting long in the tooth. The sun would sink after that, she knew, and by that time a body wanted to be well on its way to making a fire if not actually in front of a fire by that time.

Usually she’d adhere to that, too. But not today.

Today she’d set out with a goal to push the limits. When she’d left the crone’s joint she’d been filled with a quiet excitement. That quiet excitement was a fuse in her that only a couple of things could light: a good hunt, a good fight, or a good score. This was going to be one of those, she just wasn’t sure which yet. And she had to capitalize on that hype didn’t she? A normal ride was mundane, textbook, ordinary. But those rides when she’d caught the bug, those were the rides that could go on forever and she fucking wanted them to. Where she could think, and was excited to do so, and every thought was novel and full of a buzz that kept her up at that level.

It would still be there tomorrow, she knew. It would be there until the job was done. The job in the letter, the job she’d go into New Abraxas to take. But today was today, and she wanted to savor it.

Sooner or later common sense needed to win out over wonderment, though, and her luck was dwindling rapidly; its expiry would match that of the sunset. Ellie knew that. It was time.

She swung out of the saddle, sore in her loins from a hard day’s ride. The ground was hard here which was good because that would mean a camp was feasible. What would she have done if it wasn’t? If the ride had ended on swamp land or something? That would’ve been a fucking disaster.

But it didn’t and she guessed she knew it wouldn’t. Some part of her subconscious mind locked away for the menial task of navigation had probably kept adequate tabs, that same part that allowed her to preserve her survival through raw instinct alone.

It was also the same part of her mind that kept her maps; maps with hand drawn shortcuts here, there, and everywhere. Those shortcuts along with Lady Godiva’s instruction had turned one day’s ride into a day and a half’s progress which she felt proud of. A satisfaction comes with a hard day’s work, and in Ellie’s job profession, this was a good day’s work. A step, one of many, towards the end of the job.

Wasn’t she getting ahead of herself though? As she set up camp she wondered if she hadn’t been assuming a little too much. That letter, the one from Lysandra, had promised her the job, but…

Hunters hedged bets. She knew that. Every hunter did it, it was just standard operating procedure. Hell, it would be downright irresponsible not to. So Lysandra had probably sent out a dozen of the same letter, and who’s to say that even with the time she’d made on a good day’s ride that some lucky bastard less than a day from New Abraxas hadn’t hauled ass into the capital and seized on the opportunity?

And there were the others.

She’d picked up on them a mile or two back, trying to keep themselves hidden. She could tell, though. They weren’t better than her. The same, or worse? Maybe. But they sure as Hell weren’t better. She wondered if they were highwaymen at first, or regular rabble bandits, but that didn’t quite jive.

Lady Godiva had never given her a bum tip before. If there were folks following her, it wasn’t a coincidence, They hadn’t strayed across her…it had been deliberate.

That only left a couple of options, and of those options the most likely seemed that Leliana’s flunkies were hot on her tail again. How many times did she have to shake those fuckers? How many did she have to send back to Leliana in a bodybag before enough was enough? Was it that they knew what she had, and couldn’t rest as long as she had it? She’d gone to great lengths to keep it under wraps, but…Leliana had her ways. Everyone knew it.

She had that feeling, still, which was good. Sleep would elude her that night, she knew, because it would not be appropriate to slumber when a pack of assassins was nipping at her heels. She’d put in some distance, maybe enough to set up for the evening, but not enough to rest.

So she put in the work. Regular work for her, intricate, with attention to detail. Tripwires were a specialty of hers, and makeshift alarms as well.

Filling her sleeper with enough rocks to resemble a body was a hasty job, though. If she’d had more time she could’ve done more, but there wasn’t time. The clock was ticking, and her heart thumped in her ears to tell her that time was almost up.

When they came, she was ready. One of them crossed the wire and was rewarded for his effort with a dirt sandwich when the tripper snagged his ankle and sent him sprawling. Ellie didn’t drop down, then, it was too soon.

Homicidal anger swallowed Ellie’s mind, a black cloud that grew, uncontrollable. Anger pounded over her in a wave that left her grinding her teeth. How fucking dare they? Did they have any idea who they were dealing with? Any motherfucking idea!? Her wrath grew into a bear, uncontrollable, raging in her system. The combat adrenaline flooded her and left her acutely aware of her hyperfocus, the hammering of her heart against her ribcage, and how pissed she was.

Another of the assassins garbed in black emerged from the trees, stepping over his companion. An arrow sprouted from his neck, punching through with a confetti of bloody mist that bloomed into a cloud. The man made a strangled noise, his hands went to his throat, then he fell over, dead.

Before the first man could scramble to his feet another arrow pierced his back and pinned him to the ground. He began to scream.

One, two, three. They came from the darkness one after another. One of them bolted for Ellie’s sleeping bag and stabbed down into the spot where her head might’ve been if she’d been a damned fool. He was rewarded with an arrow to the temple for his efforts.

By then the other two had caught on.

One of them began spraying bullets into the canopy of trees, but the darkness rendered his aim subpar. An arrow soared from the branches and punched a hole into his chest, sinking past the breastbone and into his vital organs. He grasped the shaft of the arrow with both hands, clawing desperately, trying to remove the subcutaneous invader from his body. When he succeeded in yanking the arrow free with a horrifying ‘schlop’ noise, the ensuing spray of ink black blood that shot across her sleeping bag made Ellie even angrier.

The last of them, excluding the man wailing in agony who was pinned to the forest floor, looked right at her in terror. He brought up his pistol with shaky hands, but he didn’t fire. He couldn’t see her, so he didn’t know if he could hit her, and a missed shot would mean his death. He knew that.

“Come out!” he shouted desperately, and she could hear the fear in his voice.

She smirked.

“Hey, shit-heel!”

His eyes widened, then one last arrow slotted itself between his eyes. Brain matter and skull shrapnel burst from the back of his skull, then he fell backwards onto the mess, eyes rolled up.

Ellie dropped down from her branch perch, landing quietly. Noiseless, she padded across the ground in a crouch-walk to where the last survivor’s helpless wails were dying off into a strangulated moan; his voice was failing him, she knew. She’d seen this before.

“We’re going to have some fun, tonight,” Ellie whispered into his ear. “You and I. You been on any dates lately? Because it’s going to be a hot one tonight, buddy!”

She pulled out her switchblade. Snikt.

The man’s desperate cries filled the night while she worked, and Ellie plied her trade, probing for information about her pursuers. It was gruesome stuff, but necessary. A hunter could not survive without information.

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Ellie

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When the mushroom cloud of Ellie’s rage had finally dissipated she was left to drink in the fallout it left behind: a strange combination of exhaustion, shame, and satisfaction.

The man she’d worked over was spectacularly ugly. He’d been ugly before, to be fair, but what she’d done to his face hadn’t made any improvements. The way his head hung there, hangdog and drooping, was testament to what he’d endured. Whenever she moved, however, he raised it back up with all the strength he could muster to watch her with bugging eyes that threatened to pop right out of the community of his facial features; everything she did made him wary. He was like a dog she had beaten, and she felt ugly about that.

Sitting in the guttering light of her dying campfire while the sun of the morning bloomed up over the treeline cast Ellie’s features in sharp effect. The rings around her eyes told the tale of her exhaustion, the adrenaline had left her, and her face waned pale in the new light of the sunrise. She chewed a strip of jerky contemplatively, her bloody knife at her side, and watched the assassin.

He was hogtied, the knots were simple but vicious in their efficacy, any movement from him would serve only to tighten them behind his back and he’d discovered that quickly. His lank blonde hair, once smothered in mask, lay in grimy, sweaty curtains on the ground. Blood spattered the bare earth around him like a Jackson Pollock painting. He moved only when she moved, and even then only in jaunty flinching spasms.

Chewing the jerky, Ellie grew morose and pensive. Her knife hand trembled badly.

“You know, the first time I ever watched Gary work a man over, I was horrified,” she began.

“It was the first time I’d seen him use the Hand. I think I only ever saw him use the Hand a couple of times…two, maybe three altogether. The first time really stood out, though, because we’d been in a really tight spot. The fucker had cornered us in an alley, you know, and I hadn’t even seen him coming. I hadn’t heard his footsteps or his friend’s, so I felt like a real rube. It wasn’t often I’d been caught flat-footed like that.

“Ol’ Gary was as drunk as a Lord, but somehow he’d seen it coming before I did. The alley was a shortcut, a really simple one, but I was ass-over-end about my little shortcuts even back then, so I’d insisted. We took it.

“And they came from either end. By the time I’d noticed them Gary was already reaching into his backpack for the candle and his zippo, he had the whole pack on the ground and was moving faster than I could even process the situation. By the time they’d gotten to us he’d already lit the candle and stuck the thing in between the hand’s middle and index finger. They got close enough to see the flame sputter into life when he lit it. So did I.

“It froze us dead in our tracks, you know. I’d never felt anything like it. It was like I’d been thrown into an icy lake and every single one of my muscles had seized up, I could barely even breathe, the breath could only slip in through my nose and my half-open mouth. I couldn’t move an inch.

“Neither could they, as long as Gary had the Hand and the candle. He held it only long enough to get behind the first guy and jerk his arm up into a chicken wing. He had ol’ Glory in his offhand, but he blew it out after that and forced the guy kicking and screaming to the ground. The other guy took off and I let him because even though I had my handgun holstered at my hip you just don’t want to go popping off like that in the middle of New Abraxas, you know?”

The man on the ground groaned in response, a gutteral sound that came out thick and wet. Ellie imagined his mouth was working against him, and felt a surge of empathy but not sympathy. He’d known the risks. He took the job. There was no sympathy afforded to those who took a calculated risk in this line of business, even when they fell short of the mark.

“Yeah, you probably know,” she continued, finding that the memory was steadying her hand. “Anyway, I was horrified at what he did to that guy, because he didn’t really need to do it, you know? I begged him to stop. But he was fucking mad, and drunk, and I guessed he felt like it was the only way to get it out of his system. I guess this was similar, because I was also pretty fucking mad. I mean, you guys would’ve snuck right up on me in my own camp and stabbed me to death, or worse, right?

“But the big difference between what Gary did and what I did was that he didn’t need to do it. You know? If I hadn’t done it, you wouldn’t have told me anything, and then I wouldn’t have known about the others. I did it because I had to. You have to know that, right?”

The man rolled his face over, and Ellie noted with black humor that he looked a bit like a gremlin: big ears that poked through his blonde hair, swollen eyes that jutted from deep pits, and a busted lip that leaked blood out onto the ground.

“Y-y-you…k-keep…telling…yourself…”

She didn’t need him to finish. Ellie drew out her pistol, a well polished Beretta 92FS Inox with wooden grips, and thumbed back the hammer. The noise was enough to shut the man up.

“Now, listen,” she whispered quietly.

She got up and walked over to him, then pressed the business end of the pistol against his temple. He whimpered.

“I would like you to return to the others with a message. I would like that,” she emphasized. “But I don’t need that. If you say another word, you make that decision for me, alright?”

A mewling noise like a kitten. He was crying. Even assassins had a breaking point, she reminded herself, before re-holstering her pistol.

“I’m going to cut your legs loose, then I’m going to blindfold you. I’m going to send you straight west, and I want you to keep going for a while. I’m going to bust up camp, and I’m going to dispose of any sign that I was here. I’ll move carefully, and I won’t leave any tracks for you to follow. Do you understand? …yeah, you understand. If I catch a whiff of you and yours at my heels after this, I’m going to do more than I need to before I put you on the ground. I’m going to do like Gary did to the man in the alley, and I won’t enjoy it, but I will make it long and excruciating and before I am done you will beg for death.

“Now, go.”

In the fallout of her rage she felt cold, deft clarity, but she did not feel enjoyment. Sometimes you had to do things you did enjoy in order to survive, though. And she’d done a lot of them.

Rathian Rising
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