4th of Ash, 4621
Night had fallen over Valtoria; Arkash's favorite time. It was a curious thing, considering he hadn't the natural warmth to sustain himself when it became colder outside, but he often felt empowered, stronger in the cover of darkness. Though he'd been branded a slave, that same sense of strength and indistinct prowess came over him while he laid wide awake in his cot.
He listened to the heartbeats in the slave pen among him; he listened for the gradual slow that indicated they were asleep, then he listened for the deepest part of their sleep. They were out cold. There were no guards beyond the door that trapped them inside, either. A simple lock was good enough to keep the slaves where they were at night, the Masters must have believed. They were wrong.
Without so much as a sound, Arkash slid from his crude bedding and slipped silently to the locked door. A press of his ear against the boarded wooden barrier revealed no sounds beyond. He grinned a little, then exhaled through his nose. Again, he focused his keen hearing on the heartbeats in the room and found that his fellow slaves were all sound asleep. That was critical, as Arkash needed to break his skin in order to escape, and he couldn't do so with fingernails and dull teeth.
He shrank a little as the structure of his bones changed dramatically. His skull extended outward at the face and his jaws curled into something unrecognizable. Additional columns were added to his spine as a tail grew outward from his lower back, and draped over the lip of his baggy, burlap pants. His bare feet met no resistance from any sort of footwear as his claws unfurled, and the same lack of gloves aided his fingers in their transformation too. Like a wave, his skin flipped in tiny panels of scales at about the same time that the points of his teeth split and narrowed, forming a set of sixty serrated chompers. A dark pigment overtook his scales, like ink mixing in water, and his eyes burned away their murky brown to a shade of misty yellow.
He had assumed his true form; an anthropomorphic Komodo Dragon. The venom that accompanied his nerves built silently in his mouth while he pressed his thumb claw to his wrist, and carefully pierced his skin. Such a feeling was so normal to him a year after he was initiated that he didn't even flinch. The sting came as naturally as the burn of his callouses after a day's mining did. With his scales running a rich red, he wove the blood between his claws to form blight, using minimal to no ether. He continued to siphon the energy from what he bled, then spent that blight creating both a lockpick and a lever for the tumbler.
For a moment, he lost his train of thought. His eyes focused on the rich red that oozed from his wrist, and he thoughtlessly wrapped the wound with his maw. He lashed at the punctured hole with his tongue and sighed through his nose. It was definitely time to feed, but he had to find someone outside of the fortress. If one of his fellow slaves was to end up a messy red stain in their bedding with no corpse to show for it, he'd surely be blamed as such an occurrence happened on the night he was added to the slave pens. So, he resolved to break out for a night, find some commoner to eat, then return.
When at last he shakily willed himself to stop tasting his own blood, he steadied his breathing, then put the lockpick to the tumbler and held the lever for pressure. One by one he bound the pins on the upper part of the mechanism, and with a quiet click, he turned the barrel of the lock and the mechanism released its hold. Oh-so-quietly, the rathor slipped out and into the hall that proceeded his pen. Once he was out, he carefully re-locked the door behind him with the same set of tools, then moved quickly to the nearest exit.
His footfalls were silent despite the sprint-like pace at which he rushed down the hall. His hearing, though polluted with his own heartbeat, stood as a sort of sentry between himself and any unwelcomed surprises. Alas, in his haste to sate his bloodlust, he'd moved far too quick to catch the beating heart around the bend. He moved with far too much momentum to stop himself, he just had to pray that they would somehow not see him.
With one foot, he leapt off the stone wall and kicked hard to throw himself into the air as he came around the turn. His eyes locked with the mortal that had wandered too close, and her eyes locked with his in turn. He'd hoped that perchance of fate, she might have been facing another direction when he crossed her path, but that wasn't the case. He had to somehow silence her while she gawked at him, wide-eyed.
A twist of his body threw his arm to grip the nearest sconce on his leap, and he used the leverage to redirect and pull his feet to his chest. All in one fluid movement, he kicked off the wall opposite her, and like a bullet, threw his entire redirected momentum at her in an explosive show of force. She had just enough time to reach for her blade and clench her teeth as the shaded blur that was the dranoch swept in and aimed his lockpick for the softest part of her face - The eye.
All at once, Arkash's momentum was transferred to the woman, and he carried through the strike. His hand was warm, wet where his scales met her face. Her whole form was tense, twitching and convulsing as Arkash brought her armored body to the ground with a thud. As he stuck the landing, his head snapped up and his hearing focused intently on everything around him. The hall was silent, but no doubt the sound of a dropping body had alerted someone, right?
What did he do? What could he do? Was this his next meal? Or was it some sort of unfortunate accident in the fortress to be discovered in the morning? Her gauntlet-wrapped hand met his wrist while he thought, and Arkash's gaze snapped to her in a split second. She still lived, the damage to her brain wasn't severe enough to kill her instantly. At once, he leeched from her wound and drank the blood from her brain to form a dirk in his free hand, lifted it overhead, then drove it toward her forehead in an effort to break her skull open. With his natural and unnatural strength, he split her skull on impact and pierced her brain with the makeshift spike he'd forged. She jolted and tensed up further; her teeth broke from the weight of her bite, and she continued to shake as her one good eye twitched and skipped before falling still. Arkash sighed as some more post-mortem twitches followed through her limbs, and her grip on his wrist tightened before he let it down gently.
Well now it certainly wasn't an accident; he had to dispose of her, which he was sure he could do given how hungry he was. But her armor? What did he do with that? A snarl took his reptilian features as he looked about his surroundings. He didn't know the building well enough to figure out where the best place to eat her would be... And then he saw the window. With a curl to his lips, he let go of the lockpick and the dirk both and slid to the window to peek over the sil. they were on the third floor, it looked like. Below the window? It was too sharp a drop to see. Still, he couldn't just hang around in the hall forever. He had to move. However far down it was or whatever laid at the bottom, he was skilled enough to land safely, he was sure. So, he opened the window, then collected her body, which dripped the entire way to the opening, then carefully pushed her over until gravity took the rest. A thud below gave Arkash a good idea of how far down the drop was. He turned then to the trail of blood and cast leech, converting the mess into invisible vapor, which he used to craft blood-shaped coating for his claws.
In a rush, he hopped over the sil, then clung to the ledge of the window before he pulled the pane shut. Finally, he extended his legs, and allowed himself to drop atop her body with a thud. His legs acted as a buffer against the force of the impact, but it wasn't enough to fully absorb his weight. The height combined with the uneven landing surface led his ankle to twist painfully as he hit the armored body. The pain didn't slow him down, if anything, it spurred him on. His meal was waiting, and her vitality would go toward replenishing his own.
It was messy and he didn't know what to do with her belongings when he was done, but he'd found his first meal in Valtoria. Under the cover of the night and the brush alike, he dug into her flesh and temporarily sated his unending hunger.
