Summer 1st, 512 AV - The Edge of the Mists
It was early morning, the pale light the sun only barely seeming to warm the cold air as it whipped across Zandelia’s face to ripple her hair in various directions – mainly across her eye, an annoyance in and of itself. It was the first day of Summer now, the days the Crimson Edge having spent in the Spires growing to a good score now. In that time there had been a small measure of scouting into the depths of the curling mists, but for the most part their research had been through their getting to know the denizens and the terrain. It was a slow pace of intelligence gathering, hampered by their isolationist ways and the fact that any real sojourns into the hunting grounds were cumbersome and slow to success. Still, she had called a few to meet her on the verge of danger this morning, their task to g hunting for their quarries.
I just bloody well hope that we are ready for it. It is a lucrative business but a hard one. I doubt we will catch more than a few if we are lucky, and if we are unlucky… she thought to herself, letting it trail off into nothingness without bothering to tell herself the inevitable ending.
“Where are they?” she muttered to herself, stamping her feet upon the solid ground t keep the blood flowing through them as she pulled her cloak tighter about her torso with numbing fingers.
Her gaze swept towards that which created the wall between a meager civilization and utter chaos, the mist. It was difficult to penetrate and conjured up darker parts of her memory of time spent within a similar mist. It was a strange creature she thought, almost alive in the way it moved and kept its shape despite the winds moving through it. She could not bring herself to believe that it was a natural occurrence, her instincts telling her that it held its own organic mysteries. It was to be respected, even feared, lest it swallowed you whole. No, it was no mere fog to her. It set her teeth on edge to look at, her sight seeming to convey to her two sides of its nature that were contradictory – as if it tried to fool her in its state.
Bloody thing! she cursed as she spat upon the ground, an omen for good luck to her family – now long gone admittedly.
The sun was climbing higher as she waited, wondering if her requests, nay her orders, had merely been countermanded or ignored. She hoped not for she sorely wished to bind herself to many of those she had chosen for three separate journeys into the mists. Her future, in some respects, depended upon their arrival this day. She was in danger of letting go of Sunberth completely, perhaps travelling back to Lhavit or Ravok in her search for influential powers. Her attempts to shift the balanced scales of power in her home city had proven foolishly easy to undo. It was that which sought her to take upon herself the role of amiable patron – a gatherer of the flotsam of life that sought to turn it into the steel of deadly artifice. Still, they had not yet arrived.
I sincerely hope they do, otherwise I am alone and keeping all the bloody money I get. If I survive she thought to herself with growing terseness.
