Hi folks,
Posted my turn 15. Here it is. Thanks for the delay to allow me to get caught up
C'tis Turn 15
The sun slowly bled to death in the lake.
Ash'embe had never seen so much water. Rivers he knew, though rivers in lizard lands were seasonal things, dry all but a few weeks a year, then torrents of raging flood waters that no civilized lizard would go near.
This water was very placid. Perhaps it had been lulled into complacency by the knowledge that it would never run out, never dry into nothingness. Ash'embe eyed it suspiciously, watching the last sliver of sun cling desperately to life before being subsumed in the blue. It was time to go. Darkness fell quickly in the mountains, and he had to hurry back to the fireside before he stiffened from coldshock.
A loud squawk came from the cliffside, not three hundred centimeters away from him. It was too dark to see what kind of bird it might be, but that didn't matter. He knew it was a white gull. It was always the same damned white gull.
Too many damned scale-leavers here, he thought. Between that and the huge expanse of water, it was no wonder his troops were jumpy and on edge. He rummaged on the ground for a large, smooth rock, picked it up carefully, and turned to face the gull. It eyed him curiously, no hint of fear in its eyes. He hefted the rock, calculating trajectories and impact parameters; at this distance there was no way he could miss.
The bird calmly sidestepped the rock, straightened itself up again, stared at Ash'embe as if nothing had happened. It squawked again.
Damn bird, said Ash'embe, scampering back to camp before he froze to death. He always missed.
"Hey, Ash'embe," came a voice, and he winced. Not again. "I've been reviewing your plans for the morning, and I was wondering if I could make a few slight suggestions..."
He glanced longingly at the sheltered cliffside, where a score of lizards nestled together, dreaming warm dreams of fame and glory. Then he sighed, and turned to face the voice, steeling himself for another sleepless night.
- - -
Ruli slinked into town at midnight on a new moon. For good measure, he made sure it was cloudy, too. It didn't help.
"RUUUUULIIIIII!" He felt his tail being ignobly grabbed by somebody's teeth, who for good measure also cuffed him in playful hatchling style. Somebody acting entirely unbefitting of the solemn dignity of the purple robes she...
"Hi Laph," he said, trying not to sound sheepish. He also tried to break free.
"Oh, no no no, little egg brother," she said. "'Hi Laph?' Is that the best you can do? You've been gone for
three seasons. You could have sent a messenger... or, you know, come back yourself five times over." She was smiling at him, clearly overjoyed to see him alive and whole-tailed. Just as clearly she was not going to let him escape until she'd pried every last detail from him.
"You missed all the Trials, the Enyarnment itself... for Aetonyx's sake, last time I saw you you were slipping out of my
Egg ceremony," she went on. Her face was implacable.
"So spill."
He gave placating a shot anyhow, just for kicks. "Oh, you know how battles go, so hard to get away or spare a runner," he tried. No luck. "Have you heard about this cool trick I figured out, took me such a long time to get it working, see, you take some bones and..."
"Ruli," she said. "I told that story to the kiddies yesterday. I've been telling it for months. That was ages ago."
"Plus," she continued, before he could speak again, "the rest of the army's been back for ages, gotten reinforcements, gone out to fight more campaigns, and should be back again any day now. So WHERE have you BEEN?"
He sighed. It was all quite hopeless.
Better tell her now and get some rest tonight... Somehow, that seemed implausible.
"Well, I stayed behind to scout out the land. Cole said there were some fascinating sites that he remembered from his youth, and I found this place where the rocks howled in pain from an ancient battle..." she was shooting him a look he knew all too well "... and you want me to get to the point now, before you're forced to rap me on the skull with your ceremonial staff, don't you?"
She nodded, a slight smile escaping briefly before being swallowed by a very determined expression.
"Ah, well, you see, the howling rocks weren't all I found. There was also a huge pile of bones, warmling or lizard, it was hard to say which, and there were all still armed, of course, so I thought I could try..."
Laph sighed, as if she had been expecting this. "How many were there, Ruli?"
"Um... thirty-seven?" He had counted them all as he laid them out in neat formations, before he set to work. Afterwards, he couldn't get an accurate count, owing to the fleeing. "But some of them weren't very stable, I'm sure I saw at least three of them fall apart before..."
"Thirty-seven," repeated Laph. "Armed with what?"
"Er, mostly broad swords," said Ruli. "But some of them just had sharp pointy claws..."
"Broad swords," repeated Laph. It sounded almost like she was making a mental checklist. Things to Bear in Mind Lest We Be Ignominiously Crushed for Want of Proper Preparation, she probably thought of it as. She seemed to be taking it rather calmly, given how close the army of deadls had been...
"You knew." It wasn't a question.
"Yeah, Cole flew that way on his morning exercises," said Laph, but grinning this time. Ruli was so funny when he looked all guilty and furtive. "For an egg-mate of mine, you sure suck at spinning good lies, Ruli," she laughed. "You really think we wouldn't find out and would think it was just some random bad luck that a horde of dead things was menacing out outer provinces, oh Arruli Bone-master? Or should I say, Bone-semi-masterer?"
He still looked a little mortified. "Oh, c'mon, relax, we're not going to banish you," she said. "C'mon up to the royal caverns, we have a special cavern all prepared for you, as befits a lizard of your stature." She turned and strode off toward the High Rock, the majestic flow of her robes offset slightly by the undignified snickering sounds she kept making.
Ruli had no choice but to follow.
- - -
When Ash'embe returned, flush from victory against rather well-armed peasants (who had naively thought that meant they could deprive C'tis of some fine farmland), he advocated leaving immediately before "the damned winter egg only made it worse." It was all Laph could do to make him settle down and come up with a plan first.
"They're not peasants with pitchforks who'll run screaming at the sight of a walking, talking lizard carrying a sharp pointy stick," she said. "They're battle veterans. Oh, and did I mention they're
dead? You won't be able to scare them with your little walking skeletons trick, either," she said, cutting off an attempt by Ruli to speak.
He spoke anyways. "There's a counterspell I've been working on, it'll make their bones fall apart..."
"Got it working yet?"
Ruli was silent. He'd never seen Laph like this before. She had always been bold: once, she had talked Cole into letting her ride on his back, and made out like flying came perfectly naturally to her, although Ruli knew she had gotten very sick from all the swooping. But this aura of command and authority – that was new.
"No," he admitted.
"Then you'll just have to stay with Great-Grandfather Lugal and work on it," she said. She turned to Ash'embe. "We have a squadron of new hatchlings from the guild of empoisonners, strong tails on all of them, excellent aim I'm told."
"Won't do much good against undead," the young commander said.
"Well, there's always the new recruits," said Laph. "With them we should have more than enough."
"What you really need is some way to keep them from fleeing," said Ash'embe. He spoke more easily now that the conversation had moved to familiar territory. "A lizard is just as strong hand to hand as any skeleton, if he can only be persuaded to stand his ground..." It was a mystery to Ash'embe why anyone would choose to run from a glorious death in battle, but he had learned to accept the limitations of the lesser lizards in his command.
Then he said the words he would regret forever.
He would even regret them after the longdead warriors had crumbled and fallen, while not a one of his own lizards had turned tail and fled. He would regret them in spite of the admittedly motivational yarn that was spun about the Curse of the Longdead Ghouls, who were fated to die again at the hands of green recruits, which the young swamp lizards eminently were.
He said the words anyways, even though before he spoke them he somehow knew that they would be followed by days upon days of many, many more words, words beginning with "Now have we thought this through fully?" or "Let's be sure we're not missing anything here." He said the words, he sometimes thought later, to test his resolve never to bite a fellow lizard, only warmlings. Ash'embe was no biter. But he would wish he were sometime real soon now.
What he said was, "Laph, you should come with us."
Re: PBEM Game: Yarnspinners 2
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