So I've had it in my head to make an ice mage character, so I did. Except I don't know too much about him since he hasn't made any appearances in my stories yet. I do know that his fingertips and ears are black like that because of frostbite- ice magic's tricky and can rebound on the caster. (Or else he has Raynaud's like me, idk. Maybe both, haha.) He might make it into a story I thought of while at work today, but I can't say, since I haven't started writing it yet. Also I wanted to add some mist effects around the ice, but I couldn't find a way of doing it that looked right, so I scrapped it for now. I might add it later. Also he's shirtless for a reason; I tend to sketch my characters more or less nude, and then add clothing, and this was the first time I drew a halfway decent back. It seemed a shame to cover it up, so I decided not to :>
Genre: Fantasy/Steampunk/Mystery
Summary: A rider's life is her saurisch and her duties. For Dima, both are about to be tested, in a whirl of politics and murder.
Warnings: Violence
Safety level: Work-safe.
(Please note that warnings and safety level only apply to individual chapters, not the whole story.)
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They rode in silence, the only sounds the wind and the pounding of their saurisches’ feet. Occasionally rocks tumbled down, and Dima prayed they were merely dislodged by natural causes or wild saurisches; she knew the Iguah herds passed through the canyon, and she’d seen flocks of Chaeyos launching themselves from the cliff tops and sides every so often. But Areesh remained unseen beyond his tracks, and so she had to assume that either the way ahead was clear, or he’d been captured or injured and unable to return. Her mind rebelled at the second notion, but she knew it was a possibility.
“Do you spend much time around humans?” the prince asked after several minutes of silent riding. Dima fought back irritation; she hated people who talked simply to fill the air with sound, who simply couldn’t let silence alone. It was possible the prince wasn’t one of those people, he simply wanted to make conversation, but his question seemed to mark him as the former.
“Not often,” she said. “I get along better with saurisches. Why?”
“The way you saw to your saurisches before me. Most people would help the other human before an animal like a saurisch.”
Dima fixed him with a glare, her jade eyes narrowed in disgust. “Riders are trained to see to our mounts before all else. Without them, we are nothing. Our mounts are everything; they are our defence, our transportation, our protection. It’s not that we don’t like humans, or don’t spend much time with them. It’s that our saurisches are important to us. And why should it matter, anyway? Is it just because you’re a prince, and you think that you’re the most important being in the room?”
The prince put up one hand. “Peace, Rider, peace!” he cried. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to offend you. I was just curious. I didn’t know saurisches were so important to riders; I wouldn’t be concerned with this Gallim before a person in need.”
“And therein lies the difference between a rider and an ordinary citizen,” Dima replied, still annoyed. They rode in silence for the next several minutes, the prince faintly embarrassed, Dima quietly fuming.
Finally she sighed. “I’m sorry, Your Excellency,” she said. “Had it been a different Rider, you likely would not have gotten such a vehement reaction.” She sighed again. “My mother gave birth to me while she was on patrol; I had a Yutahr for a midwife and a Rex for a godmother. Likewise, I’ve been present for each of their broods. Kita came from the last. You’re right, I do spend more time around saurisches than humans. Saurisches are simpler, less conniving, less concerned with what you think of them. They simply are what they are, no more and no less.”
The prince looked at her as if seeing her in a new light. “Hm. What is your name, Rider?”
“Dima. Dima la-Miyal. My Rex is Areesh, and my Yutahr is Kita.”
The prince managed to bow from the back of his Gallim. “I am Joyuji Khaat, and I ask that you please call me Joyuji. Riders are not bound by traditional codes of conduct, correct? Then please, oblige me in this.”
“As you wish. Tell me, Joyuji, what brought you through this canyon? What are you doing so far from the north?”
“There is a summit in Fa-Sajhul on the enslavement of the clockwork automatons. We have already abolished the practice in Tokhan; my intent was to bring abolition to Lucatia.”
Only then did Dima notice the pendant hanging from a fine silver chain around his neck, bouncing against his chest with his Gallim’s gait; it was a hand gripping a ring, a spiral encircling the wrist. It was the symbol of the abolitionist movement, a symbol that the wearer viewed the sentience of the clockwork automatons as genuine, and that that sentience meant that they could no longer be enslaved as they were. (The opposing side contended that sentience was irrelevant; the automatons were invented as machines and tools, and therefore should be used as machines and tools.)
“Tell me, Dima, what is your stance on the matter?” Joyuji asked, cocking his head.
Dima shrugged. “I don’t have one,” she said. “There are no servants in the lodges, or on the training ranches; we see to everything ourselves. I’ve never encountered an automaton, I’ve never seen them at work.”
“You should see one of the factories sometime,” Joyuji replied. A dark look came into his eye. “I daresay you would find a stance fairly quickly. It is surmised that because they are metal and clockwork, opposed to flesh and blood, they feel no pain, need no rest, have no needs beyond the occasional maintenance session. This is far from the truth. They—“
Dima held up a hand, her ears straining. Kita’s head was switching back and forth. He’d heard something, and Dima trusted his ears over hers. A faint rattling reached her, and she looked around. A large boulder at the cliff top was shifting back and forth rather alarmingly, as though it was about to tumble down.
“Run!” she shouted, digging her heels into Kita’s side. The Yutahr let out a short bark and sprinted forward, leaving the Gallim behind. Joyuji swore and did the same. The Gallim quickly caught up, and the two ran abreast.
The rock fall was not natural; Kita gave a bark that Dima knew meant he scented humans. She looked up at the cliff top, eyes narrowed, and spotted the top of a stick bobbing behind a boulder. She drew her pistol and fired at the stick, and the boulder stilled.
“The bandits are back,” she said grimly. “I suppose now they figure they’ll just search our bodies.”
“How long will it take to reach the mouth of the canyon?” Joyuji asked.
“It took me four days at a walking pace to reach that basin. I don’t know if the bandits will pursue us onto the salt flats. It’ll take three days to cross them.”
“Are there any other ways out of the canyon?”
“I don’t think so. There are crevices in which we might hide, but they'd likely trap us inside. If any of them lead out, I don’t know. I sent word to the nearest lodge, the one I came from, but like I said, it’ll take at least four days for help to reach us. There weren’t any Thokye riders when I left, although they had an eyrie.”
Joyuji looked pale. “So we cannot count on help.” Dima shook her head. “You’ll hate me for asking this, but how long and how hard can we push the saurisches?”
Dima considered. “I don’t know about your Gallim, but Kita can run for another several hours. He’ll need a rest, but not a very long one; just long enough to take water and a bit of food. Riders’ Yutahrs are bred for stamina.”
“Haya here can run for hours when she’s spooked,” Joyuji said, smiling slightly. “But she’d push herself too hard and too far and kill herself.”
Dima looked skyward, glancing at the cliff tops and the bandits pushing rocks down towards them.
“We’ll just have to hope,” she said.
The two wove around the falling rocks, sometimes moving single-file to avoid the rocks, Dima hoping to find Areesh waiting around the next bend. She fired her pistol whenever she spotted a bandit, be it his head or whatever he was using to lever the rocks loose, and this managed to buy them a few minutes between rock falls. Dima trusted the navigation to Kita; his reflexes were far sharper than hers, and he was able to react to falling rocks far more quickly than she could. She only held on to the reins. Eventually, the bandits seemed to run out of rocks to shove down, and the rock falls ceased. But they maintained their speed, for they’d no idea whether or not the bandits had any guns and wished to make themselves as difficult to hit as possible. As they rode at a breakneck pace, her sharp eyes continually scanned the surroundings. Finally, she saw that ahead of them, the canyon widened into a basin. Kita sniffing the air confirmed her suspicions.
“There’s a basin ahead that I passed yesterday,” she called to Joyuji. “There’s a dead Gallim in there.”
“One of ours?”
“You tell me when we see it.”
A vast shadow passed over them, and Dima looked up. Winging by overhead was a Thokye, its wingspan wider than the canyon. It let loose a loud cry, the sound echoing throughout the canyon, shaking loose several pebbles from the walls. A Chaeyo, a bright red and blue and gold streak in the air, winged down towards them, chirruping loudly, and landed on Kita’s head for a moment. Kita barked and shook his head, driving the Chaeyo into the air with an indignant squawk. It circled rather agitatedly for a moment before landing instead on Kita’s back, behind Dima. It hopped up and down on one leg, chirping. There was a bit of paper tied around its other leg.
Dima turned and removed the paper. Joyuji looked shocked that anyone could ride a sprinting Yutahr without holding the reins, but she paid him no heed as she unrolled the paper. It read, simply, ‘Get to the basin.’ Dima frowned.
“Did the bandits have any Thokye riders?” she asked. Joyuji shook his head.
“Not that I saw.”
“Hm.” Behind her, the Chaeyo chirped again, and took off. “Whoever it is wants us to get to the basin.”
“Can we trust them?”
“We can’t turn back, whether we can trust them or not.”
Joyuji nodded. They reached the basin with no mishap, and slowed their mounts. Joyuji looked over at the dead Gallim and sighed.
“That one belonged to one of my soldiers,” he said. “I wonder what happened to him.”
Dima opened her mouth to reply, but the Thokye came over again, angling down to land on the basin floor. It landed somewhat awkwardly, the basin being almost too small for its massive wings. It crowed loudly, almost triumphantly, as if it were proud of itself.
Dima smiled; she couldn’t deny the majesty of the giant flying saurisch. She had considered becoming one of the riders that specialised in the flying saurisches. To her, it was the ultimate expression of freedom, riding a beast that could cross continents with ease, unbound by roads or land. She was small enough; because Thokyes were so light, barely weighing more than two hundred pounds in spite of their size, their riders had to be small as well. The largest Thokye rider Dima had ever met was just four and a half feet tall, and weighed only eighty pounds.
But Dima’s first and last flight had been enough to quash those dreams; she’d gone up with a trainer, taken one look at the ground, some hundred feet below, and promptly passed out from terror. She had then met Kita, joined the Yutahr riders, and never looked back.
The rider slid off of the Thokye, and strode across the sand. Dima hopped off of Kita and went to meet her.
“Dima la-Miyal, rider of Kita,” she said, shaking the Thokye rider’s hand.
“Ari la-Fiddal, rider of Myko,” the rider said. She was built like all Thokye riders, extremely thin and very short, one of the few people that Dima could look down at. “I intercepted your beetle; I was flying back to the lodge when my Chaeyo came flying over with it clutched in his talons. So I wheeled around and came back here. Myko scared off the bandits dropping rocks on you, by the way; they saw him coming and panicked. Why did you take them on alone?”
Dima turned to Joyuji. Ari followed her gaze, and gasped. She bowed low.
“Please rise, Rider,” Joyuji said, looking embarrassed. “Rider Dima intervened on my account; had she not, I’d likely have fallen to the bandits, and Eternity knows what they would have done with me.”
“Your Excellency, were you not going to send a beetle to your men?” Dima asked.
“Ah, yes. Thank you.”
A short bark heralded Areesh’s return; the Rex trotted across the basin to them and butted his head against Dima’s side. She turned to him and scratched his eye-ridges.
“There. Message sent,” Joyuji said as he released the messenger beetle. It hummed up and away. “Hopefully the bandits won’t see it and shoot it down.”
“I’ll send Fikri to keep it safe,” Ari said. Joyuji nodded gratefully as Ari whistled to the Chaeyo. It chirped and flew away after the beetle. She turned to Joyuji and Dima again. “I’ll fly overhead and keep an eye out for you, keep the bandits from trying to crush you under rocks again.”
Dima bowed slightly to her. “Thank you, Ari.” She turned to Joyuji. “Let’s get going again, Your Excellency.” Joyuji nodded and mounted back up on Haya. Dima climbed up onto Kita, and Ari returned to Myko. The Thokye flapped its wings once, blowing dust about in miniature tornadoes, and launched itself upwards. The strong canyon winds lifted him out of the basin and he circled them for a moment before flying upwards again.
Dima and Joyuji started forward, Areesh in the lead, and made their way out of the basin and into the canyon again.
