Logs:Thread Has the Last Laugh
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| RL Date: 26 June, 2008 |
| Who: N'thei |
| Involves: High Reaches Weyr |
| Type: Vignette |
| When: Day 28, Month 11, Turn 16 (Interval 10) |
| « We need help! » Sheyith. Then Avalanche. Then Equinox. Wyaeth and Teonath in unison, concord reached in seconds between dust-and-grit bronze and winter-perfect gold: « Help will come. » The bowl was ordered chaos. N'thei and Wyaeth were three seconds *between* and a fast dive to a landing, and already dragons poured in. Teonath-- Rielsath-- no time for the swell of admiration watching two queenriders maintain order among dragons and riders ranging between sudden panic and fierce determination. Kaylith-- Shanlee! A thousand hard words remembered in an instant, eyes met. As ever, N'thei would defer to her in this. "Thread is gone, your usefulness is limited." He knew she would remember those words, and he acknowledged in a look what could never be said out loud, apologized with a nod while Wyaeth reinforced Kaylith's commands to a hastily organized partial-Wing. Around them, the four mobilized Wings went through the same motions, words of riders drowned beneath the rapid crunch of dragon-jaws smashing chunks of firestone. Shock of cold air. N'thei's fingers flew to finish buttoning his coat, one of a hundred things he felt must have been forgotten in the hurry to meet this rogue 'fall. He had an instant, a second, half-a-breath for realization to set in while they hovered just above the rim of the bowl. Supposed to be gone forever. « No such thing as forever. » Black. Blacker. Blackest. Reports fired at Wyaeth when the bronze arrived. Hailstorm had already lost three, leaving nine patchy dragons on the upper tier, but Snowstrike would take the lead there. Melata had a near-miss, but she and Verenth still flew in one piece. Instinct replaced rationale, and N'thei and Wyaeth opened to one another in a way they seldom allowed. Every strain the bronze felt, every moment of worry the rider knew went between them unchecked, unguarded. They encouraged each other, bravado dissolved if only for a few hours. Grazed-- Wyaeth grunted in clipped pain when a ribbon traced his forelimb, when they skipped into *between* to crumble it away, leaving only a skin-deep sear that the dragon put out of mind. All right? went the question. « Don't use my talons for this anyways,» came the dust-amused answer. Twenty-minutes in, they lost Juinth. A flurry between Wyaeth and Kaylith-- he would cover the gap, she reminded him that he had a position to hold, he tried to buck her assumed authority, N'thei ground his teeth and yielded to the light of reason. Shanlee was simply better at this than he was, and it had long ago stopped stinging his pride to admit it and move on. Wyaeth would grumble later, would test his will against his rider's when they were both caught in the moment, but the facts remained unchanged in that regard. An hour after Juinth. Almost to the mark. Tangled, tumbled, thread reached toward Ashmyth over the emptiness where Juinth had been. Defiance set Wyaeth to action immediately. He broke formation, skimmed along the edge of the Wing, guttered a stream that crisped those tendrils before they reached the green, before they touched Viviana. But bronze and rider turned a blind eye to their left. The words that left N'thei were lost in wind and dragon-wings, a guttural scream. For a second, he wasn't sure which of them felt this pain. He saw, through sweat and tears, Wyaeth's belly lashed with scores, but the bronze had taken worse than that and fought through it. Then he felt it, not a stab of pain but a coil of it, a writhing tangle that left him tasting blood and bile. One of them had the presence of mind to skip into *between*, neither of them ever knew which had realized they were in trouble. A second of blackness, the aching cold cutting paired minds, the agony lessened when thread disintegrated in the icy darkness. And a rush of new pain when they returned to the fight and felt heat and blood and wind in open wounds. Had Kaylith told them to leave? Had Wyaeth, for an instant, thought they would battle through this pain? N'thei felt his eyelids flutter, felt his teeth grind, felt his gloved hand trying to press against his ribs to cover the pain, but his mind fought to distance itself from his body, to separate itself from hurt. Home. On the ground, N'thei lost consciousness. Wyaeth tried to blot out the thoughts coming from dragons that still fought, to keep them from reaching the man being stretchered off to the infirmary. N'thei didn't need to know right now, no more than they needed to know that he bled, that they hurt. Eyes opened when they cut his coat off of him, protests babbled, threats unheeded. He managed to punch someone, or thought he did, all sort of blurry. Fragments slipped through, and he could hear the healers talking about putting stitches in his face, his arm, his side, his hip. "Wyaeth?" They tried to answer him with fellis, and he knocked the cup out of a steady hand, sent it sailing across the room, landing with a splash. « Just a scratch. Ain't bad. Wings're coming home. Be still. » The idea of what was happening in the infirmary, spun through Wyaeth's mind, made N'thei relax with checked laughter, fall into the desert-hot certainty of his dragon's unfailing arrogance. For the bronze, it took ten near-giants to restrain N'thei, a far cry from the two needly healers whose calm certainty wavered with knowing that their patient was undosed and prone to violence. They wanted him to drink fellis. He was one day shy of six months sober. He drank nothing. |
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