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The city guard was annoyed, but not aggressive. They had seen it three times now — outriders upon montane calves.

Mongrels and devils upon the oxen who shared the mountains with them. Some bore taut shortbows, and others armfuls of spears. One or two counted patinaed old snaphances — hunters no doubt.

"What do we do?" The Captain of the Guard grabhanded for a bow. "We let them know they are not welcome."

He let fly an arrow, ever low and barely short, so that it thukk'd soundly into the dark earth: A universal, translingual warning. Even the yak seemed to comprehend, rearing backward anxiously into a cloven trot.

The darkness rustled as rank formed to answer the arrow — and then a band.

The grizzled captain looked uncharacteristically surprised — the hunters trotted brazenly into the torchlight and raised their masked faces to answer the arrow.

"...Muster the nightwatchmen." A small flurry of silent activity began to take the battlements until the troop of oxen circled back into themselves and trotted back into the dark.

But the old guards were not so easily dissuaded. A rank of infantry banded at the portcullis and a suitable hailstorm of crossbowmen amassed like a crown above them.

Thoom-...!

A resonant blow shook the rampart and scattered its stacked masonry like sugar cubes. In a mere feint's time the defensive perimeter had been breached.

Stray — the great misshapen beast itself — plucked timbers from its bloodied fur.

The crossbowmen turned and racked their gear to shoulder that they might address the maw closest to them only to catch a volley of wood and bone. The hunters had been hunters indeed, drawn to the panic of a routed prey — The tandem plumes of a flashpan exploded into a flaming lance, and the Chief of the Guard, with his russet beard and his leather face fell dying.

"Stem the flow. Stem the flow-..." But he spoke not of himself, pointing a metal finger to the punctured walls, and to Stray, whose many siblings poured into melee.

Bellmite did not hurry. Her task was deliberate. In her charred hands, she cradled great flames — nursed them into arson with the profane toll of her bell — and loosed them like an echo across the hamlet's woodworks.

"Hold! Hold!" A wall of pikes and voulges drew crimson arcs across Stray's twinned faces and spiced the air with the autumnal rust of spilled blood.

Humanity was resourceful — it collapsed its battlements further crushing the seigebeast under the weight of its own success.

The city burned — but at what cost? "Mother!" When Bellmite whirled from her blaze, she found the plea had not been addressed to her.

Knights, hungry for glory, were already engaged in the arduous task of flensing Stray's trapped bulk.

"Mother!" Came the howl oncemore, to the sky. To the All-Mother in her molten palace. It was too great a treasure. Too symbolic a victory.

She struck her cursing bell, and agonies bled the questing youths and would-be victors. Set them to curling and dying like ants upon the corpse of a greater being — but corpse it was.

Stray's bloodied musculature steamed into the mud where the great beast had fallen. Tears and wrath gathered in Bellmite's heart.

She could feel the heat — abyssal and hungry — pulse through her blackened arms. It hurt. The curse-blessing of her sacred flame.

She seized what still clung of the great beasts pelt and wrenched, tearing it raw and slippery into her arms. Gathering into her arms like a bleeding, matted carpet.

They would not have it. She would not let them.

Pandra had been in exile. A de-facto and self-imposed exile interrupted by distant hollow wail. A baleful, mournful song that splintered into many smaller songs like a dropped plate.

The whole of the offensive had not been permitted to accompany the fell saint, but Aaravi — with her clattering skirt of skulls still new and pink — and Alke — with her blind erratic flight — joined her, bearing the scabbing leather that once nursed Pandra upon her bestial teat.

It was a funerary procession.

Pandra covered her pointless teeth in shame before Bellmite, who stood in terse apprehension — nevertheless her presence here was not an accident. It was a solicitation.

"Dull-Tooth Pandra," she addressed, pregnant now with sorrow.

"Grandmother." "Witness, now, the folly that begot you." The procession unfurled the pelt, and its misshapen face stared eyelessly upward locked in a mute cry for vengence. "Oh — Oh — Stray. Oh, Mother—" "You see, now, do you not?"

Bellmite sat upon her haunches, as Pandra wept bitterly into the sooty fur. "I plead with you, child. Open your blessed eye. See. Witness truth. See that you are surrounded by enemies. That we are your kin. Your avenging arm."

Bellmite inhaled, as if to begin one of her many impassioned speeches, and swallowed it, letting out a pained gasp instead. "Hold us. Wield us in hate. Eschew your dull teeth, won't you? To embrace your sharp mind."

From the half-blood, there came no reply. Her eyes panned into the trio of empty sockets in her arms until she at last stood, and draped the lifeless pelt upon herself.

"Child?" "Begone, Grandmother." Aaravi looked expectantly toward the Saint. "There is no fire in this one, Bellmite. You knew there would be no spark."

"And should there be?" The headhunter did not expect the exile's reply. "Where has your warmongering left you? Are you not the same bloodied outcasts you were when my great mother walked astride you?"

"Your 'great mother' fell!" hissed the Bloodkite. "They climbed her, and flayed her, and all we could do to keep dignity was scatter them like flies with flame!"

"Silence, Aaravi." The skull-collector had no more time for mournsong — they were, and had always been, a creature of violence.

"You deserve eachother — Gutless and hollow as she is now!"

"Aaravi." Bellmite reprimanded.

"You did not fight by her side, Pandra. You deserve her only now."

And so the truce had failed. Pandra remained unmoved. "When you are all dead," she said. "I will likewise wear you."

Now it was Bellmite who scoffed. "We opened our arms to you, and you again deny us. Wish for our downfall."

"Predict your downfall," she corrected. "And when time has made your wars idle and your flames cold who will remember you, rather than squabble over the marrow of your bones and your sacred charge?"

A grave silence fell. Perhaps, in her truth-gazing eye, Bellmite saw then her fate.

"Pandra" the halfblood answered her own question.

"Dull-Tooth Pandra will be all that remembers you."

#Pandra #Bellmite #Aaravi #Stray #Fiction #writeblr #Story

A procession had taken to the countryside and snaked through the dark, messy and burning like a lava flow, toward the harbors where it might cool into unyielding stone for the purpose of discussion

The coy soliloquy poetries of the harpies, and the clatter of dice were drowned by the doleful tumult of flute and drum.

The seducing perfumes of the kitchens and camphor dens were overwhelmed by smoke and bestial must.

The parades and festivals with their whooping attendants had been routed, replaced with a snarling scrabble of limbs and misshapen faces.

For a moment, the harbor had ceased to be — unmade and replaced.

Bellmite, reclining and pregnant, wore a wreath — Burdock, Thistle, Thistle, Pine — borne to the steps of the festival plaza where Dinze sat, bemused amongst her court of hedonists.

"I am Bellmite — Redmuzzle Oracle. Toppler of Walls. The Flame Consuming. She-Sire of Storied Greats."

Her procession roared and the timbers of the harbor rattled with their unity, bearing up their scarred limbs and trophied skulls.

"I am Dinze — a butcher's daughter." She offered her smile. The painted, wry smile of a criminal. "Why have you come from the mountains where you dwell, bearing this—" The boar-faced woman could scarcely contain herself. "This crown of weeds?"

"We have long suffered as wretches," the gravid imp's third eye gazed through Dinze, trembling in it socket with divine indignation. "The slain of heroisms, the exiled of cities, ill-omened and ill-fated for our shape."

"And what would you have me do of it?"

The sword! The torch! The drum! Bellmite's eyes narrowed as she weighed the Harbor Madame's feigned ignorance.

"We ask that you take arms with us — that you act true to the tenets of wild freedom and loved self — and crush the cities that have so long troubled our lives."

Dinze rolled the mouthpiece of her pipe idly with her tongue. "You have sought me in error, then."

It was understood that Dinze carried immense sway. A harbor. A jealously-guarded economy. A criminal underbelly. But no army.

"I have no swords to lend to your cause. No ranks to my name. I am merely..." She smiled oncemore. "The daughter of a butcher."

"Then you will not stand with us?" "I cannot stand with you."

The monstrous saint was borne back into the sky aboard her clattering palanquin, couched in the hands of Ogres and beasts. "So be it. Careful that, in besting humanity at its own games, you do not grow to their shape."

"And you, Bellmite, that you do not burn yourself as you continue to play with fire."

The procession left atop its elephantine ploddings and yowling maws as easily as it had arrived.

Burdock, Thistle, Thistle, Pine.

#Writing #Dinze #Bellmite #writeblr

Airport Doodles

"I am on the plane home; it is like, ninety degrees in here and touching the window is actually hot enough to burn my hand. I almost wonder if it is because my seat is next to the turbine?

On the other hand, maybe it is just the complete lack of clouds.

Either way, I nearly cried when the stewardess brought me a glass of water. I was so thirsty, I even ate the ice."

#Prai #Bellmite #Doodle #OC #Furry #Scribble #Sketch #Art #Diary #journal