Arokthis
02-01-2008, 22:36
I posted this story here some time ago, though it was only the middle section at the time. In my head I kind of see this more as a description of a film than as (the begining of) a story. Trying to see it as a story means I don't really like the first section as it is because it rambles quite a bit. (Not much of a surprise; I ramble a bit when I talk.) Any suggestions on how to fix it would be greatly appreciated.
The name of the main character is a play on words combining my online self and my real-life name. Those who ask for more information will be beaten to death with an anchovy pizza.
Arokthis and the Griffoness
Sitting alone at a large oak table in Vindor's Bar in the city of Telgemin, Arokthis Knoll, with an ale mug in front of him and his battle-axe against the right side of his chair, was thinking about the many battles he had fought, both won and lost. By human standards, he appeared only slightly shorter than average; being from the race of dwarves, he was actually quite tall. Standing at just over five feet tall, he virtually towered over the rest of his kind. At only seventy-five, he could still be easily mistaken for a young human, since he kept his sideburns carefully shaved and his blonde beard and mustache short, unlike most other dwarves who usually had bushels upon bushels of hair, often braided into mats that took forever to wash, and even longer to dry.
Collected into a ponytail at the back and tucked into his shirt, his waist-length blonde hair revealed his part human lineage with black streaks, a "gift" from his paternal great-grandmother. When asked about the hair, he had the following story to tell:
Over one hundred and eighty years before Arokthis was born, a swarm of flesh-eating demons descended on a village/fort and killed nearly every living thing. A middle-aged warrior/trader named Bodoro K'aleh, having celebrated his two hundredth birthday, needing to get away from the nagging of his clan over his still being unmarried, had been heading there on a combination of business and relaxation. Upon his arrival, he found nothing left but bone, stone, and charred wood.
Apparently, a few in the nursery had hidden with a number of the children in the community grain silo. Made of mortared stone and designed to stop mice, rats, birds, and insects from getting in, it sealed itself tight with a number of lodestones in the door frame which gripped an iron strip around the edge of the reed framework door, which was covered with a layer of copper. Being only the size of sparrows and having brains to match, the demons had been unable to get the door open in the two days before they were forced to leave due to their ever-present hunger.
Combining the fact that this particular group of humans had come to this area to get away from a number of nasty dragons, the nearest human settlement was over twelve days away on horseback, and the physical beauty of P'aden R'osho (the young woman had gotten the bright idea in the first place) made up Bodoro's mind; he would take the children to his clan to be fostered and adopted by the various families. Three years later, P'aden and Bodoro were married, with seven children and over half a century of wedded bliss to follow.
At the age of forty, a fight with a griffoness had given him a scar that began just above his left eyebrow, continuing across the eyelid, barely missing the eye, down his cheek and jaw, onto his collarbone and halfway down his ribs, where it terminated abruptly in a ragged patch of scar tissue. From that fight he had a preserved claw on a leather thong which he wore around his neck. His arms, covered with scars received in various battles with men, beasts, and elementals, were acting as supports for his tired head, while his strong, heavily callused, yet supple hands helped to partially muffle the loud and alcohol-sodden songs of the other patrons of the inn.
His wide, well muscled shoulders, usually held proudly back, drooped under the resin-coated leather armor as he stared at the claw which now lay on the table, his memories taking him out of the present and into the past.
(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)
The whole episode had begun when a young human had gotten hold of his father's magical arrows, which had been received from a sorcerer as payment for a favor. The arrows were spelled to give the user, no matter how unskilled, greater accuracy and distance when firing them. Unfortunately for the griffoness, her own natural countermagic had actually worked against her, such that the arrow hit her flank instead of a vital area. Very rapidly the wound began to fester and become gangrenous, which caused great pain for the griffoness. After several farmers had been attacked by the pain-crazed animal, Arokthis was asked to euthanize her.
He knew from the outset that the mission would not be easy, mostly because he had to kill her by either breaking her neck or choking her to death. The reason for this was that no-one in the area had any fast-acting poison, and a spell might backfire too easily. His first problem was in finding her nest, so he borrowed a pair of the local warlord's riding eagles to search from the air.
When he finally found it, he saw that there were three golden eggs, which showed their nearness to hatching by a slight translucency in spots. He knew that the mother had to be away from her young during the early minutes after hatching, so she would not attack and kill them in her crazed condition. He also knew that the fight would be all the more dangerous because she would be fighting for, at least in her mind, the life of her brood as well as herself.
Having found the nest, he decided to get the eggs to the local warlord before they hatched, so as to reduce the danger both to himself and to the hatchlings. This sounded much easier than it really was, due to the fact that each egg was bigger than his head, though he did manage to do it. After sending home one of the eagles with the eggs packed carefully in a set of saddlebags brought for the purpose, he commanded the other eagle to wait under a tree a mile upwind. Then came the really hard part: killing the sick griffoness. He decided to simply wait in the nest until she returned, and have the battle there; however, she must have come from downwind, for she seemed to know he was there.
She entered the nest with a loud cry, kicking, clawing, and biting the entire way. One great swipe with a back leg gave Arokthis the wound that later became his distinctive scar. At the end of the swipe, the claw somehow seemed to snag, and took out a fist-sized chunk of flesh before disconnecting from him. The pain this caused gave him a birst of berzerker strength and further fueled his determination. After nearly an hour of jumping, ducking, dodging, blocking, and swinging his morning star to no avail, he managed to get on her back and get his hands about her windpipe, which he squeezed until it collapsed. Arokthis then retreated until she finally died of suffocation. At this point, he drew from his pocket the whistle to summon the second riding eagle. He blew a piercing note and promptly passed out. Upon arriving, the eagle saw Arokthis' condition, grabbed him and the griffon in its talons, and immediately headed for the warlord's fort.
When they arrived, the warlord's personal chichurgeon immediately began to tend to Arokthis' wounds. When he came to a few days later, his first thoughts were of the eggs. When he inquired about them, he was told two had hatched, a male and a female, and the other was not long off in releasing its prisoner. Over the chichurgeon's vehement protests, he demanded to be taken to the stable where the hatchlings and the egg were being kept. He had barely stepped into the stable when he heard what sounded like leather tearing. It took but a moment for him to realize that it was the final egg hatching. He immediately took the haunch offered him, still dripping with blood, and walked to the stall in which the emerging griffon (another male) was so he could feed it. The reason for this was to imprint himself on the hatchling as its "mother." When the hatchling had devoured nearly its own weight in meat, it grew drowsy and eventually fell asleep.
Then a disconcerting thought came to him: Who had fed the other hatchlings and how? His worries were put to rest by the stablemistress; she had lowered meat down from a hole in the roof via a hook on the end of a chain. She had made sure that no-one had been seen by the griffons, and had even taken the liberty of putting some armor belonging to Arokthis in the stall with them so they would recognize him by his smell when he came to see them.
At that point, Arokthis inquired about the state of the mother's remains. The stablemistress, knowing something of griffons, told him that the female hatchling had eaten everything but the claws, tail, beak, and some of the feathers; even the major bones had been cracked (with some help from the humans) and the marrow ingested. This news Arokthis made glad, because griffon hatchlings given the meat of their own kind as the first meal grew up to be much smarter and larger, as well as having life spans nearly thrice those of other griffons.
(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)
Arokthis was shaken out of his reverie by a bloodcurdling scream from the direction of the stables, followed by some laughter and thudding of coins on tables in the bar around him. The level of the water clock on the wall told him it was about the right time for the stablehands' shift-change. With a smile, he could pretty accurately ascertain what had happened: an unknowing young stablehand had walked in on Modurka.
As she had matured, her plumage had changed from the normal tan and golden brown of most griffons to jet black and blood red. At night, her gold colored eyes would appear to glow the same as a cat's would if seen by a person holding a torch or candle. She had a bit of a sense of humor, and would have held her head in such a way that the poor boy would have thought he was seeing a demon's face in the stall.
If not stopped by his fellow stablehands, he would run to the city's wizard screaming about monsters and end up embarrassed beyond belief when, having woken up the wizard and trying to get the city guard ready for a battle with demons, he is told that it is merely someone's mount. Arokthis frequented Telgemin and was rewarded with a repetition of the event every few weeks. Getting scared out of a year's growth in the middle of the night by Modurka had turned into a sort of "initiation" for the hostel's stable. Since half the town knew him and Modurka by sight, and most of the rest knew him by reputation, every time he showed up guaranteed that there would be a number of wagers on whether or not there would be a scream tonight, as well as on how far the unlucky newcomer got before being stopped.
Arokthis usually went to Vindor's when he came to Telgemin. His reasons were numerous: the food was plentiful and cheap, the cooks knew what they were doing so they didn't need to burn incense, the ale was good, they never tried to take his battle-axe away from him, the beds were comfortable, the roof never leaked, the serving girls were pretty, the roof never leaked, and last, but most importantly, Vindor's was as far as you could get from the wizard's house while still being inside the innermost city wall. This gave the stablehands the most amount of time to catch up to the panicked runner and explain what was going on. In the last three years, only one person had managed to wake up the wizard after their "initiation," and only two others had made it all the way to the wizard's door before being stopped by the rest of the stablehands.
The name of the main character is a play on words combining my online self and my real-life name. Those who ask for more information will be beaten to death with an anchovy pizza.
Arokthis and the Griffoness
Sitting alone at a large oak table in Vindor's Bar in the city of Telgemin, Arokthis Knoll, with an ale mug in front of him and his battle-axe against the right side of his chair, was thinking about the many battles he had fought, both won and lost. By human standards, he appeared only slightly shorter than average; being from the race of dwarves, he was actually quite tall. Standing at just over five feet tall, he virtually towered over the rest of his kind. At only seventy-five, he could still be easily mistaken for a young human, since he kept his sideburns carefully shaved and his blonde beard and mustache short, unlike most other dwarves who usually had bushels upon bushels of hair, often braided into mats that took forever to wash, and even longer to dry.
Collected into a ponytail at the back and tucked into his shirt, his waist-length blonde hair revealed his part human lineage with black streaks, a "gift" from his paternal great-grandmother. When asked about the hair, he had the following story to tell:
Over one hundred and eighty years before Arokthis was born, a swarm of flesh-eating demons descended on a village/fort and killed nearly every living thing. A middle-aged warrior/trader named Bodoro K'aleh, having celebrated his two hundredth birthday, needing to get away from the nagging of his clan over his still being unmarried, had been heading there on a combination of business and relaxation. Upon his arrival, he found nothing left but bone, stone, and charred wood.
Apparently, a few in the nursery had hidden with a number of the children in the community grain silo. Made of mortared stone and designed to stop mice, rats, birds, and insects from getting in, it sealed itself tight with a number of lodestones in the door frame which gripped an iron strip around the edge of the reed framework door, which was covered with a layer of copper. Being only the size of sparrows and having brains to match, the demons had been unable to get the door open in the two days before they were forced to leave due to their ever-present hunger.
Combining the fact that this particular group of humans had come to this area to get away from a number of nasty dragons, the nearest human settlement was over twelve days away on horseback, and the physical beauty of P'aden R'osho (the young woman had gotten the bright idea in the first place) made up Bodoro's mind; he would take the children to his clan to be fostered and adopted by the various families. Three years later, P'aden and Bodoro were married, with seven children and over half a century of wedded bliss to follow.
At the age of forty, a fight with a griffoness had given him a scar that began just above his left eyebrow, continuing across the eyelid, barely missing the eye, down his cheek and jaw, onto his collarbone and halfway down his ribs, where it terminated abruptly in a ragged patch of scar tissue. From that fight he had a preserved claw on a leather thong which he wore around his neck. His arms, covered with scars received in various battles with men, beasts, and elementals, were acting as supports for his tired head, while his strong, heavily callused, yet supple hands helped to partially muffle the loud and alcohol-sodden songs of the other patrons of the inn.
His wide, well muscled shoulders, usually held proudly back, drooped under the resin-coated leather armor as he stared at the claw which now lay on the table, his memories taking him out of the present and into the past.
(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)
The whole episode had begun when a young human had gotten hold of his father's magical arrows, which had been received from a sorcerer as payment for a favor. The arrows were spelled to give the user, no matter how unskilled, greater accuracy and distance when firing them. Unfortunately for the griffoness, her own natural countermagic had actually worked against her, such that the arrow hit her flank instead of a vital area. Very rapidly the wound began to fester and become gangrenous, which caused great pain for the griffoness. After several farmers had been attacked by the pain-crazed animal, Arokthis was asked to euthanize her.
He knew from the outset that the mission would not be easy, mostly because he had to kill her by either breaking her neck or choking her to death. The reason for this was that no-one in the area had any fast-acting poison, and a spell might backfire too easily. His first problem was in finding her nest, so he borrowed a pair of the local warlord's riding eagles to search from the air.
When he finally found it, he saw that there were three golden eggs, which showed their nearness to hatching by a slight translucency in spots. He knew that the mother had to be away from her young during the early minutes after hatching, so she would not attack and kill them in her crazed condition. He also knew that the fight would be all the more dangerous because she would be fighting for, at least in her mind, the life of her brood as well as herself.
Having found the nest, he decided to get the eggs to the local warlord before they hatched, so as to reduce the danger both to himself and to the hatchlings. This sounded much easier than it really was, due to the fact that each egg was bigger than his head, though he did manage to do it. After sending home one of the eagles with the eggs packed carefully in a set of saddlebags brought for the purpose, he commanded the other eagle to wait under a tree a mile upwind. Then came the really hard part: killing the sick griffoness. He decided to simply wait in the nest until she returned, and have the battle there; however, she must have come from downwind, for she seemed to know he was there.
She entered the nest with a loud cry, kicking, clawing, and biting the entire way. One great swipe with a back leg gave Arokthis the wound that later became his distinctive scar. At the end of the swipe, the claw somehow seemed to snag, and took out a fist-sized chunk of flesh before disconnecting from him. The pain this caused gave him a birst of berzerker strength and further fueled his determination. After nearly an hour of jumping, ducking, dodging, blocking, and swinging his morning star to no avail, he managed to get on her back and get his hands about her windpipe, which he squeezed until it collapsed. Arokthis then retreated until she finally died of suffocation. At this point, he drew from his pocket the whistle to summon the second riding eagle. He blew a piercing note and promptly passed out. Upon arriving, the eagle saw Arokthis' condition, grabbed him and the griffon in its talons, and immediately headed for the warlord's fort.
When they arrived, the warlord's personal chichurgeon immediately began to tend to Arokthis' wounds. When he came to a few days later, his first thoughts were of the eggs. When he inquired about them, he was told two had hatched, a male and a female, and the other was not long off in releasing its prisoner. Over the chichurgeon's vehement protests, he demanded to be taken to the stable where the hatchlings and the egg were being kept. He had barely stepped into the stable when he heard what sounded like leather tearing. It took but a moment for him to realize that it was the final egg hatching. He immediately took the haunch offered him, still dripping with blood, and walked to the stall in which the emerging griffon (another male) was so he could feed it. The reason for this was to imprint himself on the hatchling as its "mother." When the hatchling had devoured nearly its own weight in meat, it grew drowsy and eventually fell asleep.
Then a disconcerting thought came to him: Who had fed the other hatchlings and how? His worries were put to rest by the stablemistress; she had lowered meat down from a hole in the roof via a hook on the end of a chain. She had made sure that no-one had been seen by the griffons, and had even taken the liberty of putting some armor belonging to Arokthis in the stall with them so they would recognize him by his smell when he came to see them.
At that point, Arokthis inquired about the state of the mother's remains. The stablemistress, knowing something of griffons, told him that the female hatchling had eaten everything but the claws, tail, beak, and some of the feathers; even the major bones had been cracked (with some help from the humans) and the marrow ingested. This news Arokthis made glad, because griffon hatchlings given the meat of their own kind as the first meal grew up to be much smarter and larger, as well as having life spans nearly thrice those of other griffons.
(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*)
Arokthis was shaken out of his reverie by a bloodcurdling scream from the direction of the stables, followed by some laughter and thudding of coins on tables in the bar around him. The level of the water clock on the wall told him it was about the right time for the stablehands' shift-change. With a smile, he could pretty accurately ascertain what had happened: an unknowing young stablehand had walked in on Modurka.
As she had matured, her plumage had changed from the normal tan and golden brown of most griffons to jet black and blood red. At night, her gold colored eyes would appear to glow the same as a cat's would if seen by a person holding a torch or candle. She had a bit of a sense of humor, and would have held her head in such a way that the poor boy would have thought he was seeing a demon's face in the stall.
If not stopped by his fellow stablehands, he would run to the city's wizard screaming about monsters and end up embarrassed beyond belief when, having woken up the wizard and trying to get the city guard ready for a battle with demons, he is told that it is merely someone's mount. Arokthis frequented Telgemin and was rewarded with a repetition of the event every few weeks. Getting scared out of a year's growth in the middle of the night by Modurka had turned into a sort of "initiation" for the hostel's stable. Since half the town knew him and Modurka by sight, and most of the rest knew him by reputation, every time he showed up guaranteed that there would be a number of wagers on whether or not there would be a scream tonight, as well as on how far the unlucky newcomer got before being stopped.
Arokthis usually went to Vindor's when he came to Telgemin. His reasons were numerous: the food was plentiful and cheap, the cooks knew what they were doing so they didn't need to burn incense, the ale was good, they never tried to take his battle-axe away from him, the beds were comfortable, the roof never leaked, the serving girls were pretty, the roof never leaked, and last, but most importantly, Vindor's was as far as you could get from the wizard's house while still being inside the innermost city wall. This gave the stablehands the most amount of time to catch up to the panicked runner and explain what was going on. In the last three years, only one person had managed to wake up the wizard after their "initiation," and only two others had made it all the way to the wizard's door before being stopped by the rest of the stablehands.