David - 14th of Megan '15 EoH - MorningDavid - 14th of Megan '15 EoH - Morning
Smoke is a great indicator of many things. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Where there’s lots of smoke, there’s lots of fire. But most especially of all, where there's lots of smoke, coming from a ton of different places within one small area, there’s a battle.
That was great news for me, a battle meant plenty of corpses. Which meant there would be plenty of things I could scavenge once the coast was clear. Add a little elbow grease to remove the chips and cracks, and just about anything is good as new.
It’s not like I had many other sources of income than scavenged weapons, armor, and coins. Apparently, people will buy weapons off of a Diamond Dog, but not trust him enough to give him a job. Even if he could easily handle any given job they might have. Racism, you know it best after experiencing it.
Though I suppose it’s less the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races, and more ‘I know for a fact you guys enslave and eat people like me.’ While that doesn't apply to this dog… I must admit that it certainly seems to apply to every other one I’ve met.
Even with the need to scavenge for a living, and the constant traveling to find people who would sell me the things I need, life had picked up a good deal in the last few years. The wandering renaissance man life isn’t so bad once you get used to it. Add in the few minor spells I’d picked up over the years and over all, I don’t think I’d do a damn thing differently, given the chance.
I whistled a merry tune as my boots crunched over the forest floor, and my handcart cracked along behind me. Sure, I was heading into a scene of carnage, but a battlefield isn’t really that traumatic after the fighting is over. Unless you’re squeamish that is. Especially if you have no attachment to either side of the fight, or the thing being fought over. For me, this was a payday resulting from two feudal lords squabbling.
The cedar trees began to thin as I approached what looked like a wheat field through the treeline. Squinting against the sun I raised a hand up to shield my eyes and get a better look. Sometimes soldiers are a bit bow happy after a battle. Better safe than a third need for self-surgery.
After a few moments I could make out a large hill or possibly a small mountain across the field. Tilting my head back and squinting I searched for any sign of a fort on the slope facing me. If the battle had been a siege, the winners would still be around, and they would have picked the field clean already. Seeing nothing and deciding that the trees were in the way, I moved up to the edge of the treeline for a closer look.
I saw it the moment I breached the treeline. There was no way for anyone to not see it. The whole western side of the hill was carved out into a massive archway, recessed back into the rock at least a hundred feet. Jutting out from the rock was a massive castle like building, as if some giant had carved a fresco into the hill.
The building soared up the side of the hill, it was easily thirty stories tall. The entire thing was built to fit the arch like a picture frame, and designed around a huge double door at the base that was framed side by side with two white marble obelisks. The entire building was decorated in a geometric style where each part of the building was also part of a simple, but awe inspiring structure.
Even more impressive was the electrum carved sun crest over the doors. It seemed to glow even though the real sun was behind the hill, and most certainly took a team of master masons to carve. I was looking at a proper mountain fortress, and charred corpses and smoke were spilling out of its entrance.
“Hahaha, nope!” I laughed to myself, tail and ears drooping as I slowly backed into the treeline. “Nope, nope, nope… nope.”
I did not have the firepower to fight anything that lived there, or could take that fortress. Even if the winning side was long gone, my common sense was telling me I would wind up underground fighting a Balrog deep within ancient catacombs if I headed on in there.
Right, that was a lost cause. It was back to the original plan of making my way to Applewood. A nice town by all accounts. I could probably buy a few things there. Only problem was I had been making for Applewood as the crow flies, so I would have to skirt around the Fortress of Certain Doom.
“Right Dave, let’s just skirt around, nice and quiet. No rush. Just keep behind the trees.” I muttered to myself. Muttering to one’s self is a great way to keep sane while traveling alone for days on end.
I slowly backed into the trees, turned right, and started to tiptoe my way around the edge of the field. The ground ahead was really hilly, and the trees were not very helpful in letting me move in a straight line. This made it hard to keep track of how far around the hill I was. Every single survival manual in the world will tell you how to find direction using the sun, but that’s not all there is to pathfinding, and it’s pretty useless when a thick tree canopy and mini-mountain obscures the sun.
Every few dozen yards I had to stop, creep up to the tree line, get a fix on the sun, and keep heading along my circle. There was no way in hell I was going to wind up walking past Applewood by five miles and never find it. I’d had enough of that shit with Moosville.
I stopped for the tenth time, let go of my cart, and started to walk for the treeline. I hadn’t been able to see the entrance on the last stop, but these kind of places always had back doors and hidden entrances in books, so I still pulled my cloak closed to try for at least some camouflage. Red and white collie patterned fur is not exactly stealthy, and my tunic was green, but not a leaf green.
I kept my head tilted up, eyes fixed on the sloping side of the hill. If any sentry had been posted they would likely be placed midway up the-
I stumbled forward as my paw hit something, a pathetic pained moan, so soft only a dog’s ears would have heard it accompanied the jolt running through my leg. I wheeled around, ears snapping to attention, lips pulling back to show my fangs, and almost throwing my Bowie knife trying to draw it as I readied myself to fight to the death with- A very much on the verge of death person of a species I had never seen before.
They looked a lot like a unicorn, only with a slender stinger-like horn, that was covered in a glossy black exoskeleton which had a cool sci-fi sort of look to it, a beetle-like shell of a pearly white on her back, and a pair of wasp-like wings. I was pretty sure the sleek, curving, and well, feminine looking, body meant that she was a she. She had a long silvery-gray mane which were braided into several thin stands which were pinned with a little silver clip to rest over the top of one larger central braid, and a tail which matched in color but was unstyled.
All of this somehow caught my attention before the pool of greenish-black liquid she was laying in. Or the ungodly large crossbow bolts lodged deep in her barrel, right up to the fetching. Or the other, smaller person of the same species, who was clearly a child and was totally transfixed by three equally large bolts.
“Ohh…” I hissed through clenched teeth.
I slipped my knife back into its sheath. “...fuck…” I cursed, grimacing.
I had seen a lot of death. It didn’t bother me to see soldiers lying dead. They knew what they had gotten into. These were not soldiers. The adult had a sword yeah, but it was held on her body in such an amateur fashion that even factoring in her probable telekinesis drawing it would be difficult, and no one who had ever fought before would ever put their blade under their pack.
She was a civilian, who likely had been taking the child to safety. This meant it was her home that was burning behind me. Her blade was in its scabbard, meaning she had been killed in cold blood, she had no time to defend herself, or even think to. Meaning the other side was playing by the Evil Bastard rules. They also killed a fucking child, overkilled from the looks of it, and left leaving the adult her bags and sword.
You don’t leave behind useful equipment unless you can’t take it with you at the moment. She had been shot at the beginning of the battle, meaning it was likely just wrapping up and once they remembered the bug-unicorn with the bag, they would come back in case she had been carrying the crown jewels to safety.
“I had better get going…” I groaned softly, staring at the pincushion of a fucking child’s corpse five feet from me.
“Urk…” the adult gurgled weekly, prompting me to look over at her.
Her left eye had opened a tiny bit. It was all white, and as I had guessed was a compound eye, but rather than creepy it looked good, like a huge diamond with a million facets. My stomach shifted uneasily. I had seen a lot of cruel shit in my travels, but I had never seen a mother and daughter left to die while their home’s halls ran with blood.
“Fuck…” I rubbed my forehead with two fingers while I tried to work out what I should do.
If they were mother and daughter, as I suspected, it might be kinder to let her die so she wouldn’t have to mourn her child. However, she could easily not be the mother, because after all bug-unicorn, meaning they might reproduce like ants, and she didn’t look very queenly.
I could try to treat her wounds, I had some skill as a surgeon, but this would most certainly be the worst injury I had ever treated. Yet, it would not be the first arrow wound. I knew how to fix this in theory.
Words I had said a long time ago popped into my head. Part of an oath I had happily sworn. My task is to provide to the utmost limits of my capability the best possible care to those in need of my aid and assistance...
“Right. Let’s patch you up.” I sighed, hoping Evil McCrossbow wasn’t already on his way back.
I took off my cloak, folded it, and headed to my cart for my tools. I decided to talk to her in case she was lucid at the moment. Bedside manner is after all, important. “You’re lucky I ran into you. I’m sure that surgeons around here have better techniques, but none of them will have proper anesthetic on hand.”
I rummaged around my cart for the small wooden box I kept my medical supplies in, picked it out of the general crap, and headed over to the child’s corpse to see how the bolt’s tips were made. Fortunately for whatever her name was, the bolt’s tips were basically bodkin points. No barbs, just big ass armor piercing needles. Seeing as she was a bug, armor piercing ammo made sense. Chitin and what not.
“I’m not just saying that because most people around here don’t have hands ether. Do you have any idea how hard it is to convince someone that the blue mold on that rotting fruit should be liquefied and spread on a wound, or ingested?” I laughed sadly, remembering the first few weeks I had been here.
She didn’t stir, which was a bad sign. Assuming her species needed a similar amount of blood to a unicorn, she definitely could use a transfusion. Unfortunately, that was beyond my ability to do. I set my kit down away from the pool of blood, lay down on my belly, and inspected her wounds.
“It’s pretty damn hard I can tell you that. But let me tell you something, that shit works wonders. Tell you what, how about once you’re back to walking about you put in a good word with alchemists for me? I would love a steady job somewhere.” I asked as I noted that the chitin around the bolts was shattered.
I was no entomologist, but hard bug exoskeleton wasn’t going to stretch and be sewable like skin. I also didn’t have the spare cloth to do a bandage wrapping around her chest. At the same time, since it was well, an exoskeleton, the ‘bandage’ would need to be hard to stop guts from coming out and to let muscles reconnect.
Assuming she lived through the extraction, I would have to improvise some kind of patch. But there was worse problems to work out for the moment. The flesh inside her exo looked like normal muscle tissue, which hopefully meant I could cauterize it to stop the bleeding.
As I looked I noticed a small, whitish fleshy orb pulsing within the cavity. “Hey! They missed your heart. I think. If so that’s good! You got a better chance of pulling through. One nick to the heart and well, that’s the last of you. Either way, things are moving, and unless that’s actually an egg or something you’re alive. You’re a tough girl to survive a hit like this. I’m sure you can make it.”
I took a small metal rod from my kit and placed it in my mouth like a cigar to hold while I worked. I would need it in a second, and since I didn’t have a campfire, I would need a hand free for arcane gestures. That left one to work with.
“Okay, let’s get these out.” I said as I gently gripped one of the bolts as close to her flesh as I could manage.
Contrary to popular myth, you don’t want to push an arrow through someone unless the tip’s come out the other side. If you did and the tip was inside them guess what, you just made the wound worse. I took a deep breath and slowly started to pull the bolt out.
She made the single most pained, feeble, terrified sound I had ever heard in my life. It sounded like a newborn kitten’s mew only in pain and almost undetectably quiet. I felt myself wince, I had expected some horrible bug sound, not a tear welling cry of distress.
The sound continued every few seconds until I had pulled the bolt out of her. As it left a few twitches shook her lower body. That wasn’t good. With the other bolt still inside her movement would be cutting her guts up.
“Whoa, easy there, stay still. Almost done.” I soothed as I gripped the second bolt.
I grit my teeth in preparation for the wounded kitten sound and extracted the other bolt. The moment it was out, I pulled the rod out of my mouth, being extra careful to not get any of her blood in my mouth. Ingesting bug-unicorn juice seemed like a great way to catch super-AIDS, or something similar.
Focusing all of my attention on the rod, I tuned out everything around me except for that small bit of steel. Turning inwards I searched for that place inside me where the joy of music lived, traced the appropriate rune in the air with my free hand, and whispered, “Akafi stal.”
Nothing happened.
“Shit.” I cursed. I was still learning how the whole magic thing worked. What I wouldn’t give to have a unicorn’s natural grasp of sorcery.
“Akafi stal!” I tried again, putting a little urgency in my voice this time.
The tip of the rod shimmered, then slowly began to glow red, then orange, and then nearly yellow. I could feel my energy draining as the rod heated. Not some vague metaphysical energy ether, the ‘oh god I’m sleepy’ energy.
With no time to mess around, I patted her carapace with my free hand. “To quote a favorite comedian of mine, in a moment you’re going to feel a little bit of pressure.” I informed, then I pinched her flesh closed and slowly drew the rod along the seam to burn it shut.
Instant mistake!
The wound closed, the bleeding stopped, but the smell, oh god the smell! A million burning plague infested sewer rats covered in thioacetone was a bouquet of roses compared to this! I felt my stomach hit its eject button, and turned my head just in time to avoid covering the poor girl in a sea of vomit.
I must have heaved ten times. It could have been more, I lost count. When the heaving had finally stopped, I noticed I had dropped the rod. Fortunately the spell had worn off. Or been broken when my concentration had been completely obliterated.
“Sorry about that.” I groaned, spitting to clear my mouth of sick. “Having a canine’s nose can really suck sometimes. No offense intended. You don’t control how your species burnt flesh smells.”
The smell had decreased to a tolerable level while I had been administering treatment to that impromptu chemical weapon. Even so I took a deep breath of fresh air before leaning in to inspect my a handywork. Only to instantly yelp as tiny emerald flames started to flicker across the wound!
“Oh shit! I lit you on fire! Er, um…” I turned and dug through my medical kit, looking for any liquid to douse the flames in. “Why is everything in this flammable?” I demanded of the universe.
I turned back to see how the fire had spread to see if I should just slap it out or look in my wagon for water. The burn mark from the cauterizing was smaller. “What?” I asked no one in particular.
Leaning in closer, I saw the little flames were sort of reverse burning the burn I had made, but not reopening the wound. “Well, I’ll be damned. You regenerate! Lucky bastard… Looks like all you needed was someone to pull those bolts out.”
Then the flames stopped. Leaving the huge, hand sized, gap in her chitin and a pretty good chunk of burn completely untouched. “... Or your regeneration only works on bad burns… Right. Back to healing.”
I shook my head and tried to think of a way I could patch that hole while I took a bottle of liquid penicillin from my kit along with a rag and began to gently dab the surface of her wound to clean and sterilize it. “Sorry that your magic didn’t fix you up more than that. I guess I suck at it so bad myself that I screw up everyone around me. That’s a joke but please don’t laugh at it…”
The answer hit me a moment later. “Right! That plate I picked up in Moosville!”
I jumped up, ran to my cart and quickly rummaged around my bags and boxes. “Ah ha!” I exclaimed after a moment, holding up a thin iron decorative plate in the shape of a heart, with a good luck charm etched into one side in arcane runes.
The smith’s apprentice had given it to me as an apology for how her master had screwed me out of over 30 gold on our trade. Now I could use it for something worth far more than 10 ounces of gold, saving a life. Possibly. Hopefully.
Some more digging produced two old leather belts and a small bottle of a carpenter’s resin. I’d used that stuff to fix my cart last year, and that glue was still holding the axle together after all these miles and time. It would certainly stick a plate to a bug girl. The belts would help clamp it on till it was dry.
Taking the plate back over to my patient, I held it up, and let out a relieved sigh as it was larger than the hole. A few seconds of work and I had bent the thin iron plate to conform to her body’s curvature. Thankfully her barrel was one solid piece of chitin so the patch wasn’t going to limit her movement.
It was but the work of a few moments to wash the plate with some alcohol to sterilize it, get glue applied to the patch’s edges, push it in place, and tightly strap it on with the belt’s in a cross to clamp it on. The glue would dry in an hour, and since her exoskeleton felt very metallic, it should stick nicely.
I took a step back and looked at my handiwork. It looked a bit cute actually, like she had pinned a button to a shirt at a jaunty angle. The only real question was would that do the trick?
A pair of voices reached my ears, which perked and swiveled towards the sounds of speech in the distance. Frowning I focused on the voices, maybe some friends of hers were coming this way. Maybe, but not likely.
“I still say we can just say it’s dead. The Captain will never know.” one said.
Oop! It looked like it was all aboard the Nope Train to Not-here-sville again. Realizing I couldn’t leave the bug-unicorn girl here, I carefully picked her up and carried her to my cart, careful to not jostle her while I moved and placed her atop a softer section of my cargo.
As I packed up my gear I realized that I would have to leave a trap to slow them so we wouldn’t be chased and caught. I had suitable supplies in my cart for the job. As I set the trap I got to hear more of their delightful conversation.
“Discord’s beard! What are you, deaf? This is the fifth time Chip, the fifth time I have had to explain this. If she ain’t dead, she will eventually turn into a Queen. The treaty says she owns the mine if she’s alive. All of them need to be dead or it’s not legally ours, and if word gets to Equestria about our illegal owning of a mine, there goes our grain and iron supply! Get it? The bug needs to be deader than breakfast!” a second voice shouted in the tone of well justified anger.
“Yeah, but Grey put two bolts into the big one. No way it survived that. We’re talking ten pounds of steel through the chest. You don’t get more dead than that.” the first voice protested irritably.
I shook my head grimly and set a small wooden box down where the bug-girl had been lying, and carefully unspooled the roll of twine which went into a small hole in it’s side. Keeping hold of the twine I walked back to my cart and began to slowly pull it behind a rocky outcrop. The trap was set.
“Yeah, maybe. But she had bags, and Captn couldn’t find the Queen’s spellbook in the hive. Gray remembered this one had some bags on it, so we have to check those anyways. But making sure it’s dead is more important, featherbrain.” the second growled.
As I peaked out from the rocks, two griffons walked into view. “Tartarus! It’s gone!” The first shouted. “I told you! I bucking told you it wouldn’t be dead!”
The second sent a glare of death at his partner, who by now was clearly ‘that guy’. You know the one. The one who always has to be right about everything and will try to retcon reality to be right. I hate that guy with the burning intensity of a thousand suns.
“It looks like she dropped something…” The second muttered, walking over and picking it up with a talon.
“Let me see.” The first demanded moving over to get a closer look.
Prefect! Much obliged featherbags!
I whistled loudly from behind the rocks. The griffons wheeled to face me. I yanked the string as hard I could. The box clicked. “Enjoy the fireworks!” I shouted.
The box exploded into a flash of white flames, splinters flew everywhere, the concussive boom of a lovely black powder, magnesium, thermite blend followed a second later. I let my ears stop ringing, then peaked out from behind the rocks at the two Griffon’s spread eagle and still forms, and nodded grimly.
I stood up, walked over to my cart, picked it up by the handles and started to pull it along behind me again. “Right. So, they are either dead or unconscious. Let’s not find out! Ever been to Applewood?”