Legend of Ransera

The line of Dhruv’s spine relaxed when Aoren laughed and shrewd eyes moved between the powerful men when they briefly switched to Kathenor. It was a language Dhruv recognized but did not know. When the red dragon stepped out from temple’s archway and was swallowed by shadow, his eyes widened.

“Does he travel that way often?” It was a question gently applied in response to the faint unease he sensed from Talon. For a long minute, he stood at the Lightbringer’s side, staring down the darkness.

At length, he nodded and made an eloquent gesture with for Talon to lead the way. An absent tug was given his shirtsleeves even as he fell into unthinking step to Talon’s left and a glance behind.

“I’ll have to borrow,” he confessed what he suspected Talon already knew to be true, a wry twist taking his mouth. “I haven’t got anything else.”

Maybe that touch of madness in Dhruv went deeper than was necessarily safe. He seemed perfectly comfortable with the fact that he was walking with Arcas himself through the divine’s own temple, unintimidated though not unimpressed by the sheer presence of his companions so far.

The reaving rune emblazoned on his back itched, almost eager, and Dhruv was more than ready to feel the wind in his teeth. A good fight might empty him and allow for a full and restful sleep as that he’d been denied since unceremoniously shoved into a sewer. It was how he thought of his arrival in this time, when he thought of it all. It was easier to focus on the present than it was to think too hard about the past. It was all still elusive, jumped and disordered, but also a gaping wound, too painful to touch. He knew he must hold it, hold all of it, so sharpened his focus and compartmentalized all of those jagged edges so he didn’t have to think his way through them.

At Talon’s mention of an older brother, the time-tossed Hytori slowly squinted one eye. Shadows all but stumbled to spill out of him with the abrupt sidestep of his thoughts, but the tilt of his head was thoughtful and the horde of questions was caught by the backs of his teeth. Maybe he recalled the Aoren’s caution, or maybe the sudden near-scent of aether as he followed the avialae into the armaments room silenced him. The smooth swath of stone wall that formed behind them was eyed for moment and he waited for something a whole lot like nausea to stop trying to humiliate him.

“What a wish,” he murmured, the corners of his mouth flickering up before he turned to take in the room’s contents. “Really?” He hesitated, clearly astonished by the generous offer. It was one thing to offer a sword and shield and another thing entirely to give Time's own thief free rein over a weapons horde maintained by the legendary Order. “Thank you.” The paladins on guard were given a polite nod of acknowledgment before, following another long hesitation, Dhruv slipped between suits of armor to consider the options.

There were far more than he’d anticipated. Of course, he hadn’t actually considered that he would find himself in this position. Not, at least, at anyone’s invitation. A final glance was given Talon around the wicked curve of a mounted helm, watching as he set a glyph to paper. Gold-chased eyes wanted to trace it, learn it, but he dared not delay and so shook off the last of his uncertainty and curved about on a worn heel that left a scattering of sand along the floor.

With the same matter-of-fact absorption with which he had thoroughly scoured the libraries, Dhruv set to ransacking the arms room. Numerous weapons were examined and many lifted. A dagger deftly flipped before placed back on its hooks. A rifle raised with the hard clap of palm to ebon wood. An iron chest plate with an old runework drew a ghost’s chuckle out of him before set back down. He idled a while before several displays of swords, mouth hooked in a funny smile, but ultimately moved on with a regretful but determined nod. This provisioning was not intended for his benefit, but for the defense of the people of Light's Reach. He ended up crouched in a corner, huffing a tangle of hair out of his face while peering into a rough hewn wooden box at the dulled gleam of an arm cuff and eventually nodded to himself. It along with his other, carefully chosen items ended up in a pile on a bench closer to where they’d entered so Dhruv could re-sort himself while Talon completed the scroll.

Cloak and shirt were divested while Dhruv took the opportunity to perform a silent self-assessment. Long, lean muscle. Sun bronzed skin. More than his fair share of scars. Weaker than his bones wanted. Weary with centuries despite the long-legged youth gifted his people. Ill to his soul. Magic the sigh of a forgotten wind where once had howled a hurricane.A whole heap of thoroughly depressing adjectives that his broken memories refused to let lie. Nevertheless, with a discipline unsung, he mentally packed them into a lockless iron box and stored them deep within the carefully curated corridors of his waking mind. The ring he sought – and all his leftover hopes along with it – was not forgotten so much as was depriotitized. The choices he made were, at a glance, less than impressive. Perhaps he had not understood the assignment. Selected armor consisted of a pair of dark leather greaves that would buckle over the tops of battered boots and crawled up over the knees in protective black scales. They rested on the bench as he lifted a right-shoulder pauldron that could strap diagonally over his chest and to which clever, calloused fingers were busily attaching a healthy supply of caster shells. Once finished, the pauldron was dropped to join the greaves so he could catch first one vambrace then the other with a light flip and yank at the buckles until the straps were braided and could be positioned once on to his very specific tastes. They were all dark, black and duller shades of metal, so as to go unremarked in the night. None of it was heavy, and none of it was like to make so much as a squeak to draw attention. This was a man who favored speed and agility over the greater protection of more robust armor. He turned to scoop up on a simple black shirt and heavier vest and pull it over his head and in doing so revealed the beauty and ruin emblazoned on his back.

An ancient longsword stabbed down the length of his spine, molten gold dripping and crawling through the shattered face of a stylized clock. It sharpened to murderous edges that grew lost in in the very shreds of shadow it destroyed. The clockhands could have been been pistols, smoke rising from fires that were shed from the wings of a phoenix rising over the hilt, beak turned to the noon point of the rising sun that spread behind, beside, and above it all. It was a massive entanglement of cardinal runes, layered masterfully over and in and around each other, to form the only remaining story of a hot head son of Sol’Valen who’d once imagined he could withstand Fate itself. It was the sigil of a great sorceror on the body of wayfinding beggar. And it disappeared beneath the heavy warmth of his borrowed shirt as he tucked it in. He finished strapping a double gun rig low about narrow hips and was tucking a matched set of well made but plain sniping pistols into the holsters when he turned back.

With a quizzical raise of his eyebrows, Dhruv automatically accepted the scroll Talon held out. The edge of his thumb rasped against the papers end, thoughtful, and he tapped it once to his palm before tucking it safely into an interior pocket of a vambrace. He propped a boot on the bench to tie off the ends of the gun rig and strap on the greaves. His body knew the way around weapons and armor even if his mind wasn’t quite able to always think its way to them.

After a few moments, he caught Talon’s eye with a swift smirk. “Don’t lose me.”

Part command. Part bargain. Part prayer.

“Almost ready,” he added. The vambraces were fixed fast, in ways more familiar to him than his own hands, the longest yawning memory. It was the left vambrace half under which he fixed the banded bracelet he’d discovered in a quiet corner shelf, half hidden behind items of far more obvious worth. Glyphs chased across it like sparks to conflagration, hinting at the elemental magics forged to its curve.

The smirk faded from Dhruv’s face, taken off guard by the vehemence with which Talon responded. His eyes narrowed not so much with suspicion as bewilderment, sensing the lumbering beasts of time and memory stirring even as his heart tightened. He might have grasped for it, or he might have recoiled depending on the courage of the hour. There were dangerous lures knotted to the endlessly reforged details of his destiny, ones that face down in a sewer seemed a mercy of forgetting, of undoing. An ending, even, rather than this endlessly ending symphony of skeletons his life had become. The vulnerability made him uncomfortable and opened his mouth to ask a question when the demigod turned to rip open a path to Aoren’s side.

So, instead, Dhruv released something between a nod and a shrug to Talon’s back in response to whether he knew how to handle the magic bracelet because the answer, of course, was that he didn't know yet if he did or did not. Nothing known to him was capable of being relied upon, he feared. Not yet, and the devils may care attitude he projected with it was at least half defense. Not that it was about to matter.

Instead he exhaled a thin breath through his nostrils to calm the nausea traversing continued to threaten him with, rearing like a phantom of unprocessed trauma, and unraveled to his toes while aether whispered itself awake around him. He bounced there while Talon shot like a comet through slipspace to Aoren’s defense, revving himself up even as the familiar song of battle came in a high pitched crash of ice. Unable to help it, Dhruv grinned in a flash of white teeth at the sight of the battle, and the idea of fighting with such great warriors.

He watched. He was not hesitating – no, never at this – but instead balancing on the threshold between while a longsword of such great age as to be primeval materialized in his right hand. His left hand rose, calloused fingers outstretched, to channel aether up through the unusually reversed curve of the sword’s quillions – their ends rounded up towards the blade rather than crossing, as this allowed for the swift rolls of his wrist that enabled the protective gyre of his particular swordfighing style. He squinted one eye at the ghastly ice beasts then refocused on his sword as Talon and Aoren came together.

“Géant bâtard rouge,” Dhruv swore on a sigh. The old rebel’s retort to Aoren’s remark – not that he had the faintest idea what he was being called, but that wasn’t at all the point – held all the companionable vehemence the moment called for. The beauty of ancient Vallenor almost made insulting the immensely dangerous dragon by naming him a giant red bastard seem less stupid – “I see you’re in need of reinforcements.” Well, almost.

Dhruv dropped his left hand with near visible relief. He’d not been certain how his magic might answer him. It had writhed and in turn caused him to writhe since his arrival in this strange time, unwilling or unable to ascend anywhere close to what it once was. Or, perhaps, he was simply delusional. He’d entertained that dark thought a few times too. Nonetheless, it answered him well enough tonight. He’d held his hope cautiously and sought only to use the power of morphosis in a clever manner. The wickedly sharp blade was now molded into a razor curve at the end, fashioned from longsword to hook sword with a hiss at it’s completion that left a glittering trail of sand on both snow and armament room floor. Dhruv crouched down, eyes up, to silently lay the pact weapon in the snow even as Talon was diving out of the way of the ice beast’s blow. One breath, two, and he bulleted out from the threshold for the creature in what should have been sheer suicide.

In the last moments he dropped, frost spraying from the downcut of his heels, to wheel a pistol out of its holster and fire up in an echoing clap of discharged caster shell for the beast’s core. Firelight caught on gold and shadow as Dhruv shoved the pistol into his belt, momentum still carrying him as he rolled out of the way of the stomp of huge frost foot and pushed back to his feet. One hand was thrown out and his pact weapon answered – later he would deny his sheer relief – by thrusting itself off the ground where he’d left it to whirl toward him. He caught the sword in his off-hand, swung it around so that the sword’s now-hooked end caught like a grappling on the beast’s knee, and doublehanded shoved himself backwards with all his strength.

He didn’t have wings, after all, so he meant to level the field.

When the frost beast gathered a deadly ice storm in its throat, moments away from erupting over Dhruv in what could only be certain death, the hytori tightened his grip on the sword hooked to the elemental’s ankle and swung up both feet to stomp his boots into the jagged knee joint. Ultimately, he shoved himself right into Talon as the availae came to his rescue and hastily released the hilt of his sword as magic once again folded space like an accordion and nothing less than a demigod hauled him right through it.

It was on the other side, there in the ring of fire summoned to thwart the blizzard winds, that Dhruv tightened his hand on Talon’s arm and clenched his teeth against the queasiness conjured by traversion. Someone unaccustomed to battle, to the swift shifts and rapid oscillations between push and shove, life and death, would not have been capable of acting so quickly; but Dhruv was. It took him only a few seconds to reorient himself in the protective blanket of Talon’s wings and by the time they swept out like expanding moons in a gust of billowing fire, Dhruv was flipping both pistols back into his hands. Gold eyes met grey with a cant of his chin to acquiesce and the pistols spun as he spun, a clockwise turn toward dark of noon while a triad of flames illuminated the night and the monstrous elemental at their convergence.

One eye squinted as Talon assaulted the creature’s armor and the ice surrounding the beast’s crystal began to melt beneath the heat. Dhruv silently marked the seconds and held steady, deadly in his patience. He failed to flinch at the scratching howls of the frost elemental, or at how the ground shuddered when it writhed. This man’s blood itself may as well have been ice for the manner in which he deliberately murdered a minute while steadily gathering aether and waiting for his chance.

As the last layer of ice began to slough off the elemental’s torso, Dhruv fired. First one pistol exploded, then the second, and in the echoing clap of discharge he brushed his aether across the magic armband fastened over the pulse of his left wrist and willed lightning itself to walk. Power activated by the borrowed bracelet shot out in the comet tail of the second caster shell with a banshee like whistle to hit the beast’s crystal heart in an explosion of light.