Red Sky At Dawn

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Not found on any map, Endrykas is a large migrating tent city wherein the horseclans of Cyphrus gather to trade and exchange information. [Lore]

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Red Sky At Dawn

Postby Rufio on January 28th, 2016, 1:15 am

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33rd WINTER 515AV

    
         The firelight had been warm and crackling, the meal in their bellies flavourful and satisfying, the laughter that ebbed and flowed with the wine and the familial teasing a soul-filling comfort. The family had camped by the coast, by the beach. For the first time in three generations, the Wildmane Ankal had made a decree. “The Wildmanes will learn to hunt and fish. We will follow the craft of our Clan, our ancestors, and return honour, luck and fortune to this family, once again!”

The Wildmane’s felt renewed, as Tal’c, son of Roan, took the Wildmane curse into his and cast it into exile, into the grasslands, where his father, Rufio’s father, and their father before had succumbed to a wandering madness. The little family cheered and laughed with each other as they rose from the depression of their past misfortune and looked optimistically towards the future.

The ‘wandering Wildmane’ curse was going to break with their Ankal, Tal'c. Rufio was certain. They all were.

As the night had worn in, poor Louka had been the butt of the family jokes and taunts again, and the trapper-tracker sat quiet and withdrawn as his hands etched carvings into the shaft of his beloved half-spear. Rufio’s shoulder leant against the lanky, awkward, clumsy trapper-tracker. Beside him she sat happily tipsy.

As the Wildmanes peeled off to their sleeping furs, the fire burned low and these two were left sitting up late into Leth’s shining. As always.
“Remember what I said to you, nights and nights ago, Louka?”Rufio’s ochre gaze was staring into the red embers, reflecting the fire.
The hunter stirred from his own musings and gestured. Remind “You say so much when you've had wine....” He teased her, getting his own back on the only Wildmane he felt brave enough to retort with.
Rufio felt a grin saunter across her cheeks, half-numb with wine. Too tipsy to conjure a witty reply, she simply shoved at him.

The Wildmanes slumped, together, in a heap on the beach sands. There they giggled a while until their gazes took to the stars and their mutual silence unified them in a contemplative mood. The quiet seemed to stretch between them, and yet, it was full of meaning, of feeling, of unspoken words. These cousins, so close of heart, they needed not speak to understand one another.

Rufio listened to the ocean. Its voice grated on the sands and pebbles, roaring and crashing into a quiet hiss. Zulrav’s fingertips brushed across her cheeks, and danced with the waves. Rufio wondered if there was a sea god, and if there was, what His name was. The stars twinkled above, firelight in the vast inky expanse. So far away.

  The stars always reminded her of her father.

      The wanderer. The traveller.

          They reminded her of herself.

                  After a bell of quiet, listening to the waves grate and hiss on the sands, and feleing Zulrav’s gentle brush against their cheeks, Rufio and Louka lay down their wine-muddled heads and slept together by the fire, Rufio's meaning to revisit a conversation they had had before forgotten in the sleepy stupor of drink...
  
Last edited by Rufio on April 23rd, 2016, 5:32 pm, edited 8 times in total.
Rufio
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Posts: 392
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Red Sky At Dawn

Postby Rufio on July 28th, 2017, 11:30 am

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       Waves crashed, wind howled, a storm raged.

Icy, salty spray drenched her hide pants and the Wildmane tugged her fur parka tighter about her. Zulrav’s breath whipped scathingly across her sodden skin, raising gooseflesh and burning her lips and cheeks. The salt stung her eyes as she looked around fervently, the rock under her bare feet was sharp and unforgiving. Rufio gasped as another wave crested, and roared as it split around her.

              She stood on a shard of rock, in the middle of the sea. Trapped by the angry, broiling waves, and the sea-storm.

Frantically, Rufio was searching, searching. Her heart pounded at her ribs, her breath hitched and searing stitches in her side. She turned this way and that, looking, looking.
“Mother!” Her Shiber too gentle, torn from her chapped lips. “Father!” Her Pavi a better baritone in the tumult, yet even it not strong enough to match Zulrav’s thunderous growl.

Tears pricked at her eyes and threatened to spill over her freckled cheeks. Rufio shoved her fingers into her short black hair, matted and dripping down her neck. “Hai, hai!” She cried out, like a child lost. She was alone. Her heart sank, thud-thud, thud-thud.

        She was alone.

“Rufio!” A voice! Someone’s voice. She whipped around, turning in circles, the rocks beneath her feet cutting into the delicate flesh and staining the black shards with red. She whimpered with the pain and stopped.

“Rufio!” Called the voice, and she recognized it this time.
“Louka?” She cried out, relief and apprehension and panic in her voice. “Louka?! Louka, where are you? I can’t see!” Her gaze was alight with hope as she strained to peer through the salt spray and the inky swirl of the night. There came no reply, and fear seized her heart. “…Louka?!

No reply. Her tears spilled now. Warm against her cheeks. She looked down at her feet and the cuts and scrapes that bled profusely there. They stung, as if someone shoved a hot poker against the raw, exposed flesh. She looked up into the darkness. “…Louka I’m coming.” She murmured.

“Louka, I’m coming! Stay where you are, I’ll find you!” Her throat scratched as her voice grew hoarse. A wave crashed and sprayed her with its icy touch as she began to make her way down the steep incline. As she watched for her steps, she noticed suddenly that the rocks were covered with hard, crusted shells, like the ones on the rocks at the beach. Limpets.

With trembling lips, she moaned against the pain. Feeling that if she took some of the weight off of her feet she might be cut less, the Wildmane sat onto her bum, and shuffled her way down the rock formation, using her hands to bear her weight and her feet to brace the incline. When a wave threatened to crash and tug her from the stony island, she paused her descent and clung to the jagged limpets.

Her arms grew sore and weak, so they shook. Her tears, refreshed, spilled anew and blurred her vision. Rufio looked down into the cove below and saw little lights flickering. “Louka! Louka! I’m coming!” Her heart leapt. The lanterns bobbed, like a child Rufio made them mean that he heard her, that he waited for her. Once she reached his silly awkward arms, she would be safe.

“Rufio.” Came his voice, softer this time, and oddly close to her shoulder. Rufio hesitated and turned to the shadows and salt-spray, those were the only things beside her. Brow furrowed, heart skittering, she lifted a hand to reach out into the night’s ink.

“Lou..ka?” She whispered, sensing a warmth beside her, as if he sat there on the rock beside her. She heard his heavy breathing, felt a static, as if they sat in Syna’s Summer light and the warmth rolled off him. When the sensations shifted, Rufio sensed he moved. He stood. Rufio looked up, gazing where she knew his face would be, and even felt he lifted his arm to tousle his mass of curls, as he often did.

“Louka?” She queried again.
Oddly frightened and comforted at once.

        Then he was gone.
  
Rufio
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Red Sky At Dawn

Postby Rufio on July 29th, 2017, 11:49 pm

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6 bells later

    
The heavy tears of Makutsi plinked against leather and metal armour. Blades caught the red glow of the fires that blazed, many pavilions were set alight. A chaos of screaming and yelling were drowned out in the clang of steel as it rang, as blades met blades. Sparks flew with the fighting, hissing as they died in the rain. Drykas were fighting invaders that had swept up onto the shore in a ship, wreathed in the deep night shadows. The walahks came, greed-possessed, cutting down men, women and babes in their barbaric path.

Rufio was panting heavily, sweat mingling with the icy droplets drenching her skin. She had been awoken by the cold fire-pit by Louka’s panicked voice. He had dragged her up the beach, were they had climbed the sand dunes, huffing and grunting as their hands clawed at the sharp, dry grasses and their feet sunk into the soft sands. They had ran for their pavilion, to warn and protect their family. To bring Drykas down to the shore, to protect the city.

Too late. The walahks came in the night, when families slept sound and unprepared. It had been so long since they had faced death brought upon them that was not of nature’s wreaking. Drought, famine, sickness, storms, wildfires. The Drykas danced with Caiyha and Zulrav, and moved with these setbacks, they grew through them with a resilience wrought in them like iron. Killing by the blade was an altogether more lethal blow. It was certain, and swift.

Tears ran unchecked down the Wildmane’s freckled cheeks, pain and fury and loss etched in her face as she turned towards the grasslands and faced the fiery glow of another burning pavilion. Tal’c, her Ankal, was howling behind her. He crouched over his wife, a bloody baby in his arms. His pain wrenched so deeply that Rufio felt his voice would split the heavens and beseech Zulrav to strike the raiders down. He did not move from his dark grey throne above.

It was Makutsi who seemed to feel the Drykas’ pain tonight, she wept heavily for their loss. “Rufio.” The male voice sounded distant, muffled, as if the cousin that spoke it did so through water. She knelt in the muck, one hand clutching at the handle of a falx, her other resting on the chest of her favourite spirit in all the world. Louka lay dead and bloody beside her.

Rufio! Alar’ck called, a rough hand gripping at her shoulder and tugging her from her distracted numbness and into the horrid reality. Rufio, we must fight, get up!

She turned her ochre orbs to Al’s fervent face, noting the rage that tinged his cheekbones with shadows, and his deep brown eyes felt as if they would swallow her as weakened as she sat. There are others, get up!”

“It is too late...” Rufio muttered, and sucked in a sharp breath of surprise at her voice. It was hoarse and broken. Tears anew spilled from her eyes and she moaned like a cow in labor. Louka was dead. She had witnessed it, helpless to prevent it.

▵ ▿ ▹

3 bells ago


        Louka had charged on without her when she could not keep up wth him. Her timid, awkward cowardly Louka, fearless.

He had plunged into camp, crying out like a warrior, kicking and slamming into those who invaded their pavilion. He had wrenched his half-spear from the rack it sat by the doorway, and had swiped it furiously at the foreigners, fierce as a lion raking its claw at the hyena.

At his feet Yama lay, her head split open by a club. Tal’c was in nothing but shirt and hide pants, brawling with the man who had struck down his wife. His bare knuckles split and ruined as he smashed in the man’s skull. There had been too many of them, the confusion overwhelming. Rufio could not get out of her head the screaming of Mar’ck, the baby, kicking and writhing in the dirt by his mother's lifeless arms.

Could never un-see the way the striders were shrieking and panicked, their hooves bricks of sheer power, stomping this way and that. She had known what was coming, the gruesome knowing tore up her throat in a strangled cry. Her gut wrenched, she screamed for Tal’c, unable to get past a walahk as Alar’ck fought him blade to blade.

The strider brayed and reared, his great hooves flaying the rain, and when he stumbled back, in the chaos… There was a sudden, deafening silence. The dim split all their focus. Little Mar’ck had been trampled dead. Alar’ck roared and Rufio took the tick to yank a falx from a scabbard strapped to the foreigner who faced him. With a rage like none she had ever felt in her life, they slew the walahk together.

Rufio swung the falx up above her head, the weight of it hanging in the strain of her shoulders for a chime, before her shoulder blades rippled with all the power she could muster and she sliced the blade down the man’s back. The edge bit deep and tore through the leather he wore, slicing into the flesh beneath. He screamed, and Alar’ck plunged a kopis blade into the man’s chest, then he choked on the blood and bile that erupted up his throat.

Louka crawled to the mother and baby, bloodied by a gaping wound in his side. His face twisted in agony, corporeal and emotional alike. He had fallen defending the younger girls, Laiha and Farha. Laiha helped with her axe but little Farha had been cut down as her elder sister was thrown aside. Louka charged a man three times his size and was cut open by the man’s dying thrust. He struggled, groaning, as Tal’c crawled towards them.

Alar’ck gathered grandmother Raen, who was clinging to Laiha, they wailed together. Rufio trudged to the little pile of bodies and sunk down by Louka’s side. He was coughing and spluttering, his wound pouring blood. She had pressed her hands against the wound and felt the sickening wriggle of flesh and bone under her palms. “Louka…louka…” She said his name, over and over and over, as he peered up into her face. Desperate pain and fear in his; he knew what was coming.

        Rufio felt deep, wrenching sobs rake her, as he slipped into Dira’s grasp.

▵ ▿ ▹


          “Rufio, we have to go!” Alar’ck’s hands tugged on her, pleading her to move with him.

She resisted a tick, and then let him whisk her over to Grandmother Raen and Laiha, who had shaken themselves from their trauma enough to gather the horses. They stood, now, clinging to their manes, begging them to whisk them away. Tal’c would not be moved, Rufio thought, as Al tried to stir the Ankal from his grief. “Come on Tal’c, we must leave them! They are dead and gone…we have to fight.” Survive, protect.

Tal’c wailed more keenly. Rufio felt her heart break somewhere between her ribs and sobbed uncontrollably. Even so, she tread over the dead to get to her Ankal. She dropped to her knees in front of him, Yama lay between them. Her hands clutched at the slick mud, as if seeking to draw strength from Semele. “Tal’c…” She sobbed loudly, begging, sharing pain “Tal’c, please, we need you.” Her voice was not her own, full of sorrow and pain as it broke.

The Ankal looked up through his tears, his handsome face twisted into a grimace, wreathed by his dark, sodden braids, to meet his cousin’s ochre orbs. Rufio took his trembling hands in hers, and they shared a moment, sobbing and shaking and moaning together. Sharing the burden. When finally Alar’ck wrapped his trembling hands around his brother’s shoulders and hauled the man to his feet. With his ascent, Rufio felt herself rise as well.

The Wildmanes clung together for a chime, arms wrapped around each other and violent sobs trembling through their bones as they took strength from each other. Moaning and occasionally crying out as if the reality of their dead struck them anew every few chimes, the Wildmane lot mounted their striders and set off at a canter for the city. Rufio rocked against Loha, her strider, feeling tangibly his weight under her, his beating hooves, the flex and pull of his muscles.

          He was here. She was here.
                They were alive.

A pain that ebbed and rose like a beating drum ached in her, and she leaned forward to wrap her arms around Loha’s thick, curved neck. His mane whipped past her cheek in the icy wind, and she clung to him. As if he was a rock, and she a tiny limpet, clinging to life amid the stormy, cold sea.

  
Rufio
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Posts: 392
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Red Sky At Dawn

Postby J'Ak on August 7th, 2017, 9:50 am

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G R A D E



xp

Socialization +1
Philosophy +1
Observation +1
Climbing +1
Running +1
Weapon, Falx +1
Medicine +1
Persuasion +1
Riding, Horse +1


lores

The Wildmane curse will break with Tal’c
Pirates attack the drykas
Louka: Killed in the pirate raid
Farha: Killed in the pirate raid
Masuli: Killed in the pirate raid
Yama & Mar'ck: Killed in the pirate raid
Louka: Fearlessly fights the pirates
Medicine: Pressing to staunch bleeding
Persuasion: Reminding a leader that he is needed & valued


rewards

+ Falx



Self-Graded thread - grading policy Summer 517AV
  
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J'Ak
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