Lost Bird
@yknow-fromtv
This cycle had started out so promising. It was fairly similar to the history of the world they came from, with castles and knights and royalty- though all went by different titles, and the architecture in this world is spiny and black. The language was easy enough to parse, within just a couple days of listening in with the satellite, Lucretia had put together the core of the language, and they used the bond engine to download the language into their subconscious, as they have so many times before.
Lup had run off with Barry as soon as they landed, while Davenport and Magnus elected to stay on the ship to keep orbiting and hopefully see where the light fell. Merle and Lucretia decided to take the year to do a walkabout and grow closer spiritually. Which left Taako.
He could have stayed on the ship, but spending however long in close proximity with those two chuckledicks didn’t sound promising, so he’d set out alone. He hoped to find a city, maybe learn a new trade, figure out what the food was like here and maybe reinvent the wheel for these potato-eating fucks. But that hadn’t gone as planned when passing through a stately and uniformly planted forest, he was descended upon by a pack of wolf-like creatures, bigger than him by half and so black they looked more like dog-shaped voids of light and color.
He fought like an animal, but they overwhelmed him, transforming back into people that resemble humans at first, but he notices they have small black spiraled horns on their foreheads, black scleras and sharp teeth. They clapped some kind of collar on him that cut him off from arcana, draining him of his magicks and a great deal of his energy, and they easily carried his limp, exhausted body through the straight rows of identical trees. At some point he must have passed out, because when he awoke, he was being carried over the drawbridge into one of those spiny black castles. Up this close, he can recognize that the architecture resembles the shape and color of the horns on the skulls of the people who live here.
He realizes he passed out for a second time when he awoke being shoved to his knees. It takes him a few disoriented seconds to pick up the tail end of the conversation going on over his head, while he fights with his blurring, spinning vision.
“-caught it roaming the royal woods. Should we kill it?”
“-not even sure what it is. Has no horns.”
“-and send it to the Porter. He’ll know what to do.”
Lifted up once more, the next hour of Taako’s life is humiliating. He’s stripped down nude and roughly bathed in cold water, they try to force-feed him some kind of bread but he manages to nearly bite a finger off, which only earns him a hard slap that’ll probably bruise. He’s dressed in an itchy long-sleeved gown and cuffed and brought, hair still dripping, into some kind of royal chamber. He has just enough wherewithall to lift his head from his humiliating vantage point of being dragged along under the arms, and sees standing before him, decked out in shimmering black clothes that resemble an oil slick, the blessedly human Magnus.
