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rainbowfic2014-07-01 07:47 pm
kay_brooke) wrote in rainbowfic2014-07-01 07:47 pm
Amaranth #10, Crane White #12
Name: kay_brooke
Story: The Myrrosta
Colors: Amaranth #10 (mermaid's flesh), Crane White #12 (the rivers roll down to a soundless sea)
Styles/Supplies: Frame, Seed Beads, Miniature Collection
Word Count: 788
Rating/Warnings: PG-13; no standard warnings apply
Summary: Gheir looks for answers.
Note: Constructive criticism is welcome, either through comments or PM.
He went to the Catan temple in Ttarren first, begged audience with one of the Nikolean priestesses he knew were hidden behind its hallowed walls. They had powerful group magic, he had heard, and they could help him with his problem.
“There are no such people here,” the Catans told him, but he insisted. The rumors were too persistent to have no truth behind them.
“There are no such people here,” they repeated.
#
Next he tried the salkiys, but he had barely stepped foot into their forested land before he was captured and sent back. “Please,” he said. “Let me go to Lenthyn. Let me speak to the Araithus.” The most powerful salkiy in all the world must have some idea how to help him, and Gheir could think of no place more magical than the temple at Lenthyn, arranged on the holiest of spots where three rivers merged.
But the war had made the salkiys even more suspicious of humans than usual, and they told him no.
#
There were sorcerers among the Arkijti, he had heard, some powerful enough to control life and death. So he paid handsomely for mules and a guide through the desert, all the way to the sparkling coast and the wondrous, colorful city of Sarachnia.
But he had no contacts, and his queries got him nowhere. “Northern foreigner,” they spat at him, and refused to take his money, though it was good gold coin. And when he asked about the sorcerers, they only laughed.
#
“Go to Rona,” some sympathetic friends said to him. “It is said they have their own magic, though nothing of its power.”
It was a long and expensive trip, across the eastern sea, and there was only one port the ships left from. It pained Gheir to part with the gold, because if he was going to live he would need it, but if he didn’t he wouldn’t live. So to the port he went.
“If you have no business in Rona, you cannot go,” they told him at the docks, and barred his way.
#
He considered crossing the other ocean, and making his way to Maston. So much of that other land was unknown; perhaps he would find what he needed there.
But all the stories about the Mastonians spoke of their strange languages and governments, their coldness compared to other peoples. Nothing of their mystical arts. It was possible they had none at all, or their ruthlessly efficient legislators had stamped them all out long ago.
And the voyage took three months. Gheir wasn’t sure he had that long.
#
He tried Seena last, based on a half-remembered tale he had once heard about a healing magician who roamed the steppes, moving village to village to cure ills in exchange for a night’s sleep or a warm meal.
“There was once such a man,” said the innkeeper in a particularly freezing little cluster of buildings called Five Stone, “but no one’s seen him since I was a boy. Dead, most like. Even magicians will fall to the cold.”
#
That left him with a lot to think about, that even those with great mystical power eventually slipped from their physical bodies into whatever awaited them after death, and he decided then there was nothing to do but go home. His true home, Rednor, not the Calweri village he had spent most of his life in. Accept there was no magic nor power to cure him, and face his death with dignity.
Still, it was a bitter herb to swallow.
#
He didn’t know if Rednor would take him back; he had left as little more than a traitor. But the elders granted his desire for peace in his last days, and even put him up in a little room inside the eldershall, where he would not want for food or drink until his life was done.
He took their offer and went to his bed, and tried to stop thinking that there was something more he could try, some other people who could rid him of his disease, not merely watch over him until it took him.
#
He spent as much time outside as possible, because the day was coming when he would take to his bed for the last time. Once he came across a man with a familiar pale, hollow pallor. A fellow sufferer. And foreign, too, he realized when the man spoke.
“Why are you here?” Gheir asked, because it was still odd to see strangers in Rednor, despite how much things had changed.
“I’m looking for a cure,” the man replied. “They say the Wyrtessian elders have great magic. Is it true? Is that also why you’re here?”
Gheir only laughed.
kay_brookeStory: The Myrrosta
Colors: Amaranth #10 (mermaid's flesh), Crane White #12 (the rivers roll down to a soundless sea)
Styles/Supplies: Frame, Seed Beads, Miniature Collection
Word Count: 788
Rating/Warnings: PG-13; no standard warnings apply
Summary: Gheir looks for answers.
Note: Constructive criticism is welcome, either through comments or PM.
He went to the Catan temple in Ttarren first, begged audience with one of the Nikolean priestesses he knew were hidden behind its hallowed walls. They had powerful group magic, he had heard, and they could help him with his problem.
“There are no such people here,” the Catans told him, but he insisted. The rumors were too persistent to have no truth behind them.
“There are no such people here,” they repeated.
#
Next he tried the salkiys, but he had barely stepped foot into their forested land before he was captured and sent back. “Please,” he said. “Let me go to Lenthyn. Let me speak to the Araithus.” The most powerful salkiy in all the world must have some idea how to help him, and Gheir could think of no place more magical than the temple at Lenthyn, arranged on the holiest of spots where three rivers merged.
But the war had made the salkiys even more suspicious of humans than usual, and they told him no.
#
There were sorcerers among the Arkijti, he had heard, some powerful enough to control life and death. So he paid handsomely for mules and a guide through the desert, all the way to the sparkling coast and the wondrous, colorful city of Sarachnia.
But he had no contacts, and his queries got him nowhere. “Northern foreigner,” they spat at him, and refused to take his money, though it was good gold coin. And when he asked about the sorcerers, they only laughed.
#
“Go to Rona,” some sympathetic friends said to him. “It is said they have their own magic, though nothing of its power.”
It was a long and expensive trip, across the eastern sea, and there was only one port the ships left from. It pained Gheir to part with the gold, because if he was going to live he would need it, but if he didn’t he wouldn’t live. So to the port he went.
“If you have no business in Rona, you cannot go,” they told him at the docks, and barred his way.
#
He considered crossing the other ocean, and making his way to Maston. So much of that other land was unknown; perhaps he would find what he needed there.
But all the stories about the Mastonians spoke of their strange languages and governments, their coldness compared to other peoples. Nothing of their mystical arts. It was possible they had none at all, or their ruthlessly efficient legislators had stamped them all out long ago.
And the voyage took three months. Gheir wasn’t sure he had that long.
#
He tried Seena last, based on a half-remembered tale he had once heard about a healing magician who roamed the steppes, moving village to village to cure ills in exchange for a night’s sleep or a warm meal.
“There was once such a man,” said the innkeeper in a particularly freezing little cluster of buildings called Five Stone, “but no one’s seen him since I was a boy. Dead, most like. Even magicians will fall to the cold.”
#
That left him with a lot to think about, that even those with great mystical power eventually slipped from their physical bodies into whatever awaited them after death, and he decided then there was nothing to do but go home. His true home, Rednor, not the Calweri village he had spent most of his life in. Accept there was no magic nor power to cure him, and face his death with dignity.
Still, it was a bitter herb to swallow.
#
He didn’t know if Rednor would take him back; he had left as little more than a traitor. But the elders granted his desire for peace in his last days, and even put him up in a little room inside the eldershall, where he would not want for food or drink until his life was done.
He took their offer and went to his bed, and tried to stop thinking that there was something more he could try, some other people who could rid him of his disease, not merely watch over him until it took him.
#
He spent as much time outside as possible, because the day was coming when he would take to his bed for the last time. Once he came across a man with a familiar pale, hollow pallor. A fellow sufferer. And foreign, too, he realized when the man spoke.
“Why are you here?” Gheir asked, because it was still odd to see strangers in Rednor, despite how much things had changed.
“I’m looking for a cure,” the man replied. “They say the Wyrtessian elders have great magic. Is it true? Is that also why you’re here?”
Gheir only laughed.
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Thanks for reading!