[OOC: Thread is currently getting underway, but if you have an interest in getting involved come over to the
Plotting Thread and say hello.]
'Traveler's Respite,' as the building's name and weather-beaten wooden sign out front implied, was a tavern which had obviously once been built with ambition and optimism. It was fairly large for the humble hamlet in which it resided, being three stories, and boasted both an eating establishment on the lower floor and plenty of rooms to accommodate guests.
Equally obvious was that time had not been kind to its builders' egos. The paint was well worn, the windows often did not look entirely impervious to the weather, and even its quaint wooden sign, hanging from a post and beam out front, was chipped and weathered. None the less it was the only one of its kind for some distance in any direction which gave it enough business from the passing traffic to keep its proprietors in business and the roof from leaking.
It was that very rural-yet-active atmosphere that had attracted its newest employee, a young man (by appearances at least) perhaps in his early twenties. As unremarkable looking as the Respite itself -yet stopping short of being called ugly- the young man had wandered in from the countryside one day carrying only the belongings he could fit into his humble pack and inquired of the establishment's owner so that he might work for his room and board. Unfortunately for young Liri, that happened to be a large and burly (not to mention surly) man who called himself 'Rich,' perhaps in reference to his obvious aspirations.
Unlike the Respite however, Liri was not at all what he appeared. For he was in fact a young woman of the same age who had in her childhood become the victim of her own wish to be someone, ANYONE, else. Not everyone gets to have their childhood wishes come true, but to Liri it had not been a blessing. Partially because it seemed suspiciously like magic -which was forbidden in her homeland of Connlaoth- but mostly because she was totally unable to figure out how to reverse the process and appear as herself once more.
Sometimes she pondered on the irony that she should spend her childhood wishing to be anyone and anywhere else only to spend the years since wishing she could for just one day be herself and return to the places she once called home.
On this particular winter's day, not two days after the tavern's surly owner reluctantly agreed to take her on, she stood by the bar and watched the room's limited stock of occupants. For as long as she could remember she had always had a habit of watching strangers and idly speculating on their lives and motives. She was eternally fascinated by a good story you see, and life had frequently taught her that she could invent more interesting stories for people than they had managed to make for themselves.
A few more private alcoves nestled up against the room's outer walls that just begged for secretive meetings and nefarious dealings, but those were all empty at the moment. Of the handful of plain wooden tables that occupied the center of the room only one was in use, taken up by a group of five rugged and travel-worn looking men prone to sudden bursts of raucous laughter while talking altogether too loudly to each other over some ale and cold soup.
Their kind were not usual for inns such as this one, and she paid them little mind. She was more focused on the room's other occupant, a scrawny-looking young man dressed in worn traveling leathers and a full-length forest-green cloak which looked like it long been in need of a good tailor but had been forced to do without.
The scrawny, dark-haired man looked to be no older than she was, yet haunted by demons that even a more experienced man should not have to bear. The dark circles under his eyes bespoke of too little sleep, and his eyes perpetually darted from one corner of the room to the next as if indeed expecting a demonic spirit to appear at any moment. When he turned his head a ragged red scarf could just be seen poking out from beneath the folds of his cloak. It clashed horribly with his attire and she had to wonder at its purpose.
Yet in spite of this the thought occurred to her that he was actually kind of handsome. His smooth features gave him a gentle, sculpted look that seemed to say 'this man should have been born a noble and walk proudly in fine clothing with servants about him.' -No, she reconsidered. This strange boy should be a handsome rogue, daring with his sword and leaping about slaying evildoers and pirates. Yes that was it, she decided. A roguish swashbuckler who chased after the princess far above his station whom he could never have...
"Ho, hey lad!" came a loud shout from the crowd at the table.
She turned to look at them, hoping the ox of a man who had gotten her attention would simply announce what it was he wanted. Instead she saw him beckoning her towards their table with a mischievous grin. Inwardly she groaned but made her way over to him.
When she arrived the men were all grinning at each other, and the smell of intoxication was pungent. "Don't look so glum lad," the ox spoke again, elbowing her in a conspiratorial way when she came within range. "I've got one that'll cheer you up. Made my friend here spill his drink all over 'imself. You want to hear it?"
This, she had learned, was probably the biggest drawback to being trapped in the appearance of a man: other men expected you to act like them. Her mind raced in an attempt to think of a polite way to run the other direction. Unfortunately she wasn't fast enough.
"So a man and his wife are arguing over which sex is better," the ox continued without waiting for her response. "The man drops his pants and says 'men are clearly superior, we're born with one of these."
"You know I really should be-" she began during the dramatic pause.
The ox -literally tearing up at his own joke- simply talked over her as if she hadn't spoken. "So the wife says, 'You think that's worth somethin' eh?' Then she drops her pants too and says 'well with just one of these I can get as many of those as I want!'" With that the whole table burst into laughter again as though they hadn't heard the joke already.
'Great,' she thought bitterly as the men continued, 'I'm working for my food and now I don't even have an appetite.' She turned to make her escape but the man grabbed her arm, leaning towards her in that conspiratorial way again.
"We're just joshin' ya lad, don't mind us. Say..." He glanced about for a moment as if to make sure his wife hadn't wandered in while he wasn't looking. "Where abouts in this little village of yours does a man go to see to his needs if you know what I'm askin' eh?" He even winked.
His breath assaulted her and for a moment she wanted to vomit. All five of them had turned to her in expectation of her answer. Her face began to turn beet red, although she wasn't sure if it was from embarrassment or frustration. "You know," she began, wandering if telling the men to go pleasure each other for all she cared would cost her the job she had only just gotten, then deciding it probably would. "... I really wouldn't know. I'm new here myself. -Excuse me I have to get back to work." With that she pulled her arm from the man's grasp and walked briskly away from the table and made for the door that led to the tavern's back rooms. She would go hide in the cellar until the men left, she decided.
She hadn't gotten there yet when another booming voice interrupted her.
"Boy!" called Rich from behind the bar. He never seemed to use her name, though she had given it to him a couple of times. She was only 'boy,' and probably always would be.
Bracing herself for her second enjoyable encounter of the day she made her way over to the bar. "Yes?"
"Look at that young man there by the door and tell me what's wrong about him eh?" he directed, nodding towards the nervous-looking young man she had been observing before.
For a moment she just looked at Rich, surprised the man shared her interest in astute observation. Perhaps he wasn't so bad after all... "You know I saw that too. Look how he keeps glancing around the room as if memorizing the exits, and you can tell he hasn't slept. Do you suppose he's on the run?"
Rich only looked at her for a few moments as if she were the least intelligent form of life he had ever had the misfortune of coming upon. Then he brought his right arm out from under the bar where it had apparently been holding an empty cup, and slammed it down upon the bar with such force she was sure she'd jumped a foot off the ground in shock. "Noooo... He's got no drink in his hands," he stated in the exaggerated way one might talk to an insufferable child. "I don't run a charity shelter here. Go sell him a drink or a room or tell him to move on." He walked away, shaking his head.
With hands that were shaking slightly as she gripped the cup, she moved to do as instructed. 'That finishes it,' she thought, 'I was better off hunting rabbits in the wild and fending for myself. I'm going to wait until he gives me my promised night of food and sleep and then I'm going to tell him I quit.'
The young man seemed to grow more nervous as she approached, until he had looked her over for a few moments and seemed to decide she was just the harmless server she appeared. Then he slumped in his chair again, not making eye contact.
"You want something to drink?" she asked sullenly.
The stranger seemed distracted. "Yeah," he said casually, waving a hand. "Whatever you got. -And some food too." Unlike his clearly unsettled manner his voice managed to project confidence. She wondered if it was real or practiced.
"Fine," she said, setting the cup down in front of him. For a moment their eyes met. His were dark, like his hair, and searching. For a moment she became preoccupied with staring into their depths.
"-Look I'm not paying for an empty cup," he barked. "Just go get whatever you got and be quick about it."
She glared back at him for a moment, disappointed that his personality clearly didn't match his looks, then swallowed her anger and moved to fetch his order. 'Leaving in the morning,' she repeated to herself like a mantra, 'leaving in the morning...'
The front door behind her creaked open and a cold winter draft announced the arrival of another potential customer. A middle-aged man with an athletic build and expensive-looking clothes stepped in. He had shoulder-length shiny blond hair which he kept tied back, and a hawkish face complete with a too-long, bent nose. His skin was smooth and dark. Without even bothering to look about him he strutted to one of the tables and sat down.
Two other men followed him, both were dressed in similar-looking dark coats and sharp black trousers. They seemed... professional... she decided. Business associates or bodyguards? Their boots made a slight tapping sound on the wooden floorboards. Solid soles and warm thick leather on the outside. Practical, yet a subtle display of wealth. They all smelled of expensive cologne. Was that one... rose?
'Stop getting distracted,' she chided herself, turning around again to face the lone stranger.
...Who was not there. She looked about but didn't see him anywhere in the room. 'How did he do that?' she wondered. Not even a scuffle to announce his movement.
Then something caught her eye. It was a small medallion, or looked like one.
She picked it up off the chair where the stranger had been sitting. It was just the right size to have fallen out of his pocket. Upon further inspection she decided it was no mere trinket. Whatever metal it was made out of reflected the light in a very strange way -refracting it into strange colors and patterns. It seemed to have strange little pictures all over it. Or perhaps text written in a language she had never seen.
"Boy!" came a familiar shout. She almost dropped the strange pendant as she jumped out of her skin for the second time that night. "Bring these fine gentlemen some of our best vintage!"
She turned slowly, a venomous look on her face, but Rich wasn't even looking in her direction. He was too busy fawning over his 'new favorite customers.' She had never seen the man so jovial and smiling. Too bad she knew it for the empty performance that it was.
"Finest vintage is it?" she asked softly, though she knew they were too far away to hear. "We only have one, and you probably brewed it from something out of the privy..." On a whim she turned in the direction opposite the bar and walked out the still-open front door, slamming it behind her. She hadn't known why or where she was going, but now that she was outside she decided she was going to go return the strangers pendant. Perhaps he would reward her with some money and she could leave this sorry little village behind.
There was only one problem. She had no idea where he had gone to.
"Well the town's not that big," she thought aloud as she set foot in the direction of most of the other buildings. He had to be here somewhere. It was then that she saw, or thought she saw, a shadow move against the town's smithy. No fires burned inside it this time of night nor was there an abundance of moonlight but she was certain she had seen something. Her pace quickened.
Then stopped abruptly as a blood-curdling scream erupted from behind the building. She had never heard a scream like that. It sounded like a man's voice but there was little humanity left in it. Only pain, agony of a kind that only a soul-wrenching scream like that could every truly convey.
Terror battled with curiosity and a desire to help inside of her. For a moment it was a stand-off, then much to her own surprise she found herself taking off at a run towards the sound of the scream. What she saw when she rounded the far corner of the smithy would be a sight she would never forget.
For a mere heartbeat, eternity though it seemed as time slowed to a crawl, she saw the flesh of a man turn to cinders before her very eyes. The man's outer shell was all that was left of him by the time she arrived- a fire seemed to be devouring him from the inside out- and even that was flesh but for the barest of moments. A moment in which she was sure she had recognized the face of a young man with gentle features and dark hair, covered in a worn dark-green cloak and a clashing red neck scarf.
Then the moment fled and any resemblance to a human had turned to dust – literally. All that was left of the man now was a large pile of still-smoldering ash. Not a fingernail or loose thread from his clothing had survived the immolation.
It had all happened so fast that the still-rational corner of her mind doubted her own memory, yet the image of his face was persistent, burned into her very retinas. The face of the swashbuckling rogue distorted and twisted by pain into something wholly inhuman – a portrait to hang on the walls of the darkest imaginings of hell. And the truly gut-wrenching part was that small speck of humanity that had somehow endured in the boy's eyes, grabbing her by her very soul with the last piece of his own. Pleading, begging. Then extinguished.
She backed up against the wall of the smithy, feeling weak. She had never before seen death. Not like that. Her heart did not want to seem to beat again, to acknowledge the return of time's normal passing. Distantly things around her began to register, but they seemed far away at first. Was someone talking to her? She turned to see someone across the road from her, coming towards her now.
"Are you alright young miss? What happened here?"
There was something wrong with what he had just said, she was sure of it, but her mind wasn't working right. Had he been talking to her?
Then all at once her mind seemed to jolt awake as if shocked. Sounds seemed louder. The feel of the cold night's wind cut into her once more. She shook her head to clear it, looking back at the man crossing the road.
He had stopped short all of a sudden, looking at her strangely as if she had not been standing there a moment before. Why was he looking at her like that? Before she could explore that thought further an overriding terror gripped her. She was standing, alone, before the ashen remains of what had been a human being. He had been murdered by... it must have been magic. How would she explain? How could she?
Without purposefully deciding what to do she found herself bolting around the far side of the building – seeking concealment, running for all she was worth.
Sometime into the night she had finally calmed enough to think sensibly again and, not knowing what else to do and not wanting to look suspicious by her disappearance, returned to the Respite. It seemed somewhat more populated than when she left, but she was too preoccupied to so much as glance at the new arrivals. She moved across the room towards the bar where she saw Rich idly wiping clean some glassware. Half way there however she was stopped by a hand on her arm.
"Excuse me there." It was the hawk-faced man with the expensive clothes. "But I was supposed to meet someone here who I'm afraid is running quite late. You wouldn't happen to have seem him would you? He would be young, about your age, wearing nondescript clothing... perhaps even a red bandanna or scarf of some kind?"
Instantly her limbs seized up and she found she couldn't move even though she was quite sure she wanted to run. She stared at the man, looking for some sign of accusation or knowledge, but he only stared back quite innocently. "I umm... No- no, I don't think so..." She winced at the sound of her voice. She was not normally such a horrible liar.
The man narrowed his eyes at her response, staring at her with such intensity she was sure he could see into her very soul. He frowned. Then, as if nothing had passed between them, he released her arm and said casually "Very well, don't let me keep you then."
She ordered her limbs to move once more and after a moment they obliged. Her heart still beat frantically. Did the man know something, had she been recognized at the scene of the murder?
Rich intercepted her next, his face a portrait of disgust and anger. "So, you think you can just wander back in here after what you pulled eh boy? If you think for a moment that you're getting anything in the way of food or a bed out of me well let me tell you that I've gotten a better day's work out of my lame horse! I don't know where you came from but you're just going to have to keep on walking and don't ever let me see you back in here-" He stopped short, a gold piece flying from behind her to bounce off his chest. In a surprising feat of reflexes he caught it before it could fall halfway to the ground. "What the-"
Hawk-face spoke up again from his seat at the table. "That might cover a few days of the young man's stay might it not?" He was talking to Rich but she turned around to see it was her he was looking at, and with a disconcerting intensity. "I think perhaps we'll talk again. Wouldn't want him to feel like he had to run off..." While it was said with a smile there was no kindness behind the expression.
Without saying a word in reply she moved away, just stopping herself from actually running up the stairs that led to the Respite's upper floors. Upon reaching her room she paid no attention to the bed however, instead grabbing her pack with its meager possessions and moving to the window.
It was all just too much. Someone was quite likely on the prowl who could incinerate a human being, the hawk-faced man seemed to know something, but the mysterious stranger had seemed afraid of him. A stranger who was now dead, murdered in front of her and she might even be connected to the crime. So it didn't seem wise to reveal that she had the man's only apparent possession -which now that she thought about it seemed like it just might be valuable enough to kill for. She had no idea how any of it was connected but she knew she wanted nothing to do with it. It was time to make a discreet and quick exit, ditch the medallion somewhere, and forget all about this cursed little village.
She threw open the shutters and looked down. It was too far to jump straight down, but by luck or good fortune her room was almost above the attached stables and she was able to direct her jump to the right and onto its poorly thatched roof.
To call her meeting with the roof a landing would turn out to be somewhat generous. She slipped as soon as she hit and rolled her way off the slanted roof, falling ungracefully to the ground in a pained heap. For a moment she could only lay there, listening to the nickering of the startled horses inside the stable. That didn't last long. Adrenaline was doing its work and she soon had got back on her feet. Her right ankle throbbed painfully but it still moved so she ignored that for now and took off at her best pace...
