79th of Ash, 120
Step by step, the half-frozen rathari descended the mountain. Blasts of air and gusts of wind threatened to knock him off balance and send him tumbling to whatever icy doom awaited him below.. Of course, the chill eased as he came toward the foot of the mountain, but it made no difference. His body retained very little warmth, especially when one considered that he hadn't fully recovered from his blood loss. His bones ached and his fingers were numb, but his senses remained.
His only saving grace was perhaps the fur-trimmed leathers he used to wrap his scales. The hides did well to trap what little heat he retained, but it wasn't much in the face of the whistling winds. Even when he arrived at the forest below, where the woods sheltered him from the cold, his bones were still wrought with frost. It was no longer a matter of preserving warmth, for his body heat had fallen too far. He needed fresh heat from an external source.
Every footfall weighed as much as lead and drove him into a deeper state of lethargy. The effort it took just to lift his arm to support himself against the coarse bark of a tree left him exhausted, but still, he trudged on. The snow was up to his knees, even with the canopy to shelter the ground. He hissed at every piercing, numb sting to litter his chilled scales, and finally gave way to exhaustion.
Arkash fell to his hand claws and knees in an effort to rest his tense body, but no such relief came. Every breath he drew only further iced his lungs and blew the heat from his core into the open wind. His heart began to slow, and the flow of oxygen to his brain lessened.
He could no longer feel the cold; his mind was elsewhere. Conscious thought receded, and his vision filled with images of bundling up beside the fire. Four rickety wooden walls surrounded him, and a cheaply-planked wooden roof kept the heat in while he remained bundled beneath the furs of some big animal. That had been his life not too long ago; sleeping on the floor, huddling for warmth, relying on dead trees and animals for his preservation. Despite everything that changed that season, his greatest adversary was still the chill of Frost.
His breathing slowed, and his vision darkened as his eyelids became heavy. His hearing was too muffled to perceive the crunch of footprints beside him. Finally, he shut his eyes and succumbed to the call of hibernation.
There was a long silence between the whistle of the wind and the crackle of the fire beside him, but that was what Arkash came to wake to. His eyes partly opened to the warm amber glow of an open flame, and his chest deflated while he oriented himself with his body again. His claws were numb, radiating with stinging pain. He drew a deep, shaky breath, then turned over where he laid, to find the burning red eyes of no other than Fayeth, looming over him.
He startled, and scrambled away from her a foot or so before quickly lifting his frostbitten claws from the rough stone with a hiss. The elf’s scowl didn’t let up as Arkash cradled his claws, but his attention was divided between her, the pain in his digits, and the scene. They appeared to be in some tunnel; an abandoned, man-made, stone pipe of sorts. He soon recognized it as one of the sewer’s exits, which the rusted iron grating had been broken off of sometime before. How he got there, he could only imagine. Fayeth was there, watching him with a scowl. Her nose was undoubtedly good enough to find the lizard amidst a blizzard, but why hadn’t she left him to die after his abandonment?
“F-Fayeth,” he hissed, baring his teeth as he inched his body closer to the burning fire.
“Arkash,” she returned with obvious scorn in her tone.
After a moment’s pause, he stammered an “it’s good t' see 'ew age'n!” Only to earn the ired glare of a royally peeved elf.
“Where have you been, Ark?” She cut to the point, then approached the floored rathari while she stood. The glint of the blade at her hip was visible in the dim, amber glow of the fire. “Don’t even think about lying; you know how little I think of liars.”
She already knew where he’d been, didn’t she? There was no way Asmodei wouldn’t have sold him out by now, not after he betrayed the Velsign’s trust in turn. Lying to her was a lost cause, it seemed. Arkash was no professional deceiver.
With a sigh, he brought his raw, numb claws to the fire, and turned his attention from the elf. The Sil’Norai curled her nose. “Don’t ignore me, Ark,” she warned.
“I’m no’,” he clarified with something of a frown. “‘Ew alredy kno’, enywey. Why’d I ‘ave’t’ seh i’?” his gaze lifted from the open flames and returned to her gaze, where he found a deep, almost hateful scowl. His heart sank.
“So it’s true then, you’ve been off playing assassin for this terrorist, Malafor?”
Asmodei had sold him out, Arkash’s intuition was right. “...Yeah,” Arkash affirmed.
“Killing nameless for spare farthings?” She snapped with budding irritation in her tone. Arkash could tell that the conversation was only going to escalate in volume and aggression, but he wasn’t in a position to change the flow.
“Yeah…”
“Just killing people? For no reason?”
“Yeah…”
“...And you’re FINE WITH THAT?!” She snapped at last, and Arkash winced. The echo of the tunnel amplified her voice, and he already had a headache from the prior bloodloss.
“I didn’ seh tha’…” He was fine with it, despite his implication. They were just humans, why would he care about a human’s death? They’d never offered him as much consideration.
Fayeth snarled. Her whole form was tense with rage. “List your victims,” she ordered. “ALL OF THEM!” She snapped after just a moment of silence.
Arkash startled, the flow of venom in his jaws sprung to life and he began to drool. Fayeth could see it but offered no relent in her aggression. “T-two farma’s,” he spoke to start his list, but couldn't get to the rest of his murders before she interrupted him.
“Farmers? You killed farmers?”
“Yeah… Fay, they’s jus’ ‘umans…” he started to reason.
“Just humans?”
“Yeah!” he spoke quickly the moment she slowed her aggression, which was his mistake. In a flash, she was on him. Her hand was around his throat and his back was pressed into the stone floor. His claws came to wrap around the dranoch’s wrist while he stared at her with wide eyes. Being strangled was nothing new to him, especially by Fayeth, and she’d never killed him while grabbing his throat before. What cause did he have to worry?
As she brought her blade to his right eye, she called "and you're just a rathor! What's the difference, Ark?!" He shut his eye at the glare of the point, but didn't actively fight back against her unreasonably strong grasp. He could still breathe, that was all that mattered. There were lots of differences between rathor and humans, but Fayeth wouldn't listen. He knew she didn't blame the evils of the world on a people, but on the structure.
"...Lots, Fay-!" He spoke, only to choke as she squeezed his skinny neck. "Please!" He called through his raspy, half-shut windpipe. His legs pulled to bend halfway while she held him down and his claws pulled hard at her iron grip, to no avail.
"Your differences are skin deep, Ark. You're mortal, just like them." That statement was only half true; their differences were down to the bone, even on a psychological level, humans were different to him. He wasn't hateful or afraid of what he didn't understand like they were. He wasn't pointlessly cruel, entitled or hypocritical… was he?
Humanity had scorned him, oppressed him with crippling poverty and illness his whole life, all because of the rien people's xenophobia. They suppressed and trampled all that wasn't their own, just as Arkash had. But it wasn't the same. "We's not'ta saem!" He called when she relaxed her grip. "I gotta reason! 'Ey dun'!" There was a reason for Arkash's behavior, and it was because he had no alternative. Humankind had pushed him too far.
Fayeth stared him down, then looked over his new eye, his new claws. He'd woken in the season without them, a cripple. None could deny that Arkash had suffered and lost so much to humanity, but… "You're just as bad as them, then," Fayeth sighed and shook her head. The blade came down from Arkash's eye, and she relented her grip on his neck. Arkash sat up and felt over the scales there with his burning fingers. Again, she hadn't killed him. "You're lost, Ark. You thought you were before, but you've never been this far gone."
Arkash furrowed his brow while he sat there, staring with pleading eyes at the elf. "Fayeth… 'Ew dun' understan'..." He began to explain, but the dranoch merely shook her head.
"It's you who doesn't understand, Arkash. You might have two eyes now, but you're more blind than you've ever been," spoke the pale elf as she took a step toward the Rathari, then lowered to her knee before him. As she stared the rath in his yellow, hesitant eyes, she parted her lips to speak "Let me tell you a story."
Image source.
