RP:The Last Ride Home

Somewhere in the forests near Venturil

Pain is what wakes her, a thousand drilling agonies burrowing into her flesh. She sits up with a bewildered, frightened scream; bones creak, muscles sizzle, head swims. The cloud of wasps which had settled on her continues to sting. The blind druid lunges to her feet, naked and already stippled with half a hundred angry red welts. She pelts northward, the swarm hot on her trail. The river is there, and its embrace is cool, thundering bliss. She plunges into its depths, then settles herself behind a rock, gripping with arms and thighs to keep the current from exerting its relentless pull upon her weakened flesh. Even that short run has all but exhausted her, so her counter-stroke against the swarm is less than artful. Rikailin's senses spread out from her watery refuge, finding and then focusing upon every sun-heated rock she can find. She concentrates her willpower and begins to amplify the natural warmth of the rocks until she has made them nearly red-hot. Then, with a burst of terramancy more force than skill, the battle-druid sends the rocks into the air in a whirling tempest, crushing the enormous bloated wasps to pulp. Each is a tiny beacon of frantic life, quickly snuffed. Grull, her dire bear, is somewhere out there, and it would not do to have him stung to death. She drives off almost the entire cloud of insects before the rest grow wise enough to flee. This done, the vampiric elf breaks the water's surface and swims slowly for shore. Her body still tingles with pain, but the cold of the water has helped to alleviate the worst of her misery. When she reaches land, she puts fingers to lips and issues an ear-splitting whistle. Soon enough, crumping footsteps herald the arrival of her last friend in this fallen world.

Even as the echoes of that piercing whistle die, Rikailin is beginning to move, back toward the clearing where she has rested in her self-imposed exile for so long. When she reaches it, she finds her dire bear, Grull, hunched patiently beneath the trees. He was not young when she found and tamed him, all those years ago, but he is old now...old beyond his years, in fact. His fur is a uniform silver-grey now, and heavily matted. He moves with a pronounced limp, and a huge patch of hair is simply gone from one of his rear legs. Rikailin, having grown used to using her friend as a food source, thinks nothing of leaping upon the dire bear's haunch and battening on him with her teeth; she has, after all, been doing this for sustenance for years, in the absence of other prey. This all ends today, though, for two things have changed. The first is the taste of the bear's blood, which reminds her of spoiled meat and causes her to recoil in disgust. The second is a far greater danger: Grull himself, who roars and attempts to kick the druid loose. He tosses her aside like a ragdoll, and for a moment, Rikailin is simply too surprised to react. She sprawls on the beaten ground as the bear shuffles a step away; reaching out to touch his mind, she feels...wrongness. Weakness. Anger. He is sick, perhaps dying. Rikailin stands warily, bows to the bear, then speaks, her voice a rusty, broken caw. "Cry pardon, Grull. I did not know." He has grown to understand most of her peculiar speech, and he grunts his forebearance, though there is still a hint of wariness in his muddy brown eyes. The druid reaches up, the better to toss her soaked black hair out of her face, then freezes. That simple gesture usually brings with it a brief tingle of pain from the symbol made upon her forehead, the signatory of a magical contract made when she was exiled from her homeland. There is no such pain. The druid touches her forehead. It is smooth, a bare expanse of blameless skin. Her blind blue eyes widen in shock. Could it be? "Grull!" she shouts, and in her stark surprise she gives the word far more force than she would have. "You must take me. Take me home!" In truth, Rikailin has stayed in these environs for so long that getting back home on foot would be a tiring process; Grull, by comparison, has two working eyes and a bear's nearly endless stamina. He is long used to doing his mistress's bidding, and stoops to pick her up in his huge claws without so much as a second thought. He tosses her skyward, drops to all fours and catches her on his back - a trick he is partial to - and Rikailin settles into the coarse fur upon his shoulders as the bear breaks into a run. Despite her excitement, despite the rising hope that things may be different now, the druid is soon lulled by the rocking motion of the great bear's body, and she falls into a dreamless half-sleep as her familiar gives his last homeward ride.

Kelay Way

It is the cessation of motion that wakes Rikailin. She opens her eyes, shakes her head and spreads out her senses like a sentient umbrella. She has reached Kelay, it would seem, but something is wrong. Grull is not moving - has not been moving for some time, it would seem - and he does not respond to the touch of her mind on his. "Grull?" Her voice is a hoarse croak. "Are you all--" The bear gives a long, moaning cry and shudders down the length of its body. He is lying belly-down on the dirt of Kelay Way, and his paroxysm causes great puffs of dust to whirl up from the thoroughfare. With nimbleness she can scarcely credit, the vampire leaps from the dire bear's back and begins walking in a circle around him. Her flared nostrils smell more than just bear-musk now; the creature is in its last extremity, dying a slow death from age, sickness and hard, pitiless use. "No," she whispers, and her voice is that of a disbelieving child. "No. You can't be dying. You can't be. Can't be." She reaches out to pat the bear's foreleg; Grull cannot summon the will to stir. Her mind paws through old recollections, trying to figure out how this could possibly have happened. Grull is not old enough to be this near to death, so there must be-- Her thoughts break off cleanly, and tears begin to fill her blue eyes. "I'm sorry, Grull. So sorry. So sorry." She has bidden him stay by her, as guard, as companion, as constant food source. Lacking the company of others, lacking even a rudimentary cause to live for, the druid has partially reverted to old beast habit, sleeping when she wants, eating what she pleases, turning off her awareness of the outside world in favour of the numbness to be found within. Here, now, standing on the sunlit Kelay street, those old patterns and defenses crumble away. She has taken this bear's strength bit by bit to feed herself, and has given him little to no respite for his trouble. It is no wonder that when he finally, inevitably fell ill, he was unable to fight it off. Rikailin delves the creature, but one quick touch is enough to let her know that saving his life is well beyond her skill, and likely beyond that of even the most skilled healer. "I can do this much," she says, and comes around to the bear's head. She turns toward him, blue eyes seeking vainly to see his wrinkled muzzle. Grull blinks sleepily, twitches one back paw, and grunts way down low in his throat. He knows what is coming.

It is a simple matter for the druid to locate the bear's huge, weakly-beating heart. With the same deft magic touch she has used countless times to give life to flora and fauna both, she settles her focus upon her dying familiar. Instead of trying to grant life, though, she reverses the spell, yanking its ley-line taut with almost vicious force. The massive heart gives one faltering beat, then stops. Grull's head slumps down onto his forepaws. A fly lands in his left eye, washing its legs in the wetness there; the bear is well past caring now. It is done. The druid falls to her knees then, pounding the earth with both fists. She hammers the dirt over and over, splitting her knuckles on rocks and not caring a bit. She shakes with uncontrollable sobs, wretched blasts of grief and anger and self-loathing which tear through her, then out of her, in wild, gasping shrieks. Grull was, as far as she knows, the last living friend she had, and now she has, in all likelihood, been the author of his death. Eventually she gives up, slumping forward onto her belly before the great dead bear. His animal reek fills her nose, and she does not notice. The sun begins to burn her naked back. She does not care. She is home, but home is of no importance if there is nothing and no one there to give it meaning. She thinks - insofar as she is able, in this state of blossoming apathy - that Tiphareth and the drow have won after all. They have taken everything from her. Everything.