by Rune Electra » Thu Mar 06, 2003 11:40 pm
It took a half a moon to return to the palace, the king mulling over the lines of prophecy. He had no living brothers, let alone ancient ones, so the prophecy was a mystery to him, though its syllables rang in his jewel-adorned ears. The moment he returned to the palace, he sent the prophecy to all his soothsayers and astrologers and sages, and mere days later he recieved a definite answer back, echoed in the stars and the wisdom of ages.
The Drow, their brethren of ages past, was to pose a threat to their beautiful kingdom. Immediately, the king was determined to do one thing; destroy them. He would not brook those ugly dark beasts threatening his rule.
The invasion of the Drow caverns began immediately. In one night, all the passages were closed off, sealed with the High Elves' soldiers.
The only thing to escape the dark passages of the Drow was a ragged-winged hoary bat, practically limping through the air. It had a long way to go.
The gray light of false dawn trickled reluctantly over the ice-rimed ground in one of the great Eastern cities, a hard-edged, gray-stone monstrosity built for defense. An inn harbored one of the few open spaces in the city, a gaunt little park with a scraggly leafless tree and plenty of dead grass. Rune's soft-booted feet crunched lightly over it as she left the inn, heading out. No dispatch had arrived when she had expected it to, and she was beginning to worry.
She wasn't sure whether to worry more or worry less when a dying hoary bat came careening in to a landing at her feet, blood and ice striping the poor thing and nearly hiding the little message roll. She gently removed it from the bat's corpse, and unrolled it. A hastily scrawled message... reading that the High Elf king had attacked the Drow, without apparent provocation. But the stone of the caves had heard his whispered talk with his advisors, and he spoke of a prophecy by the Oracle. Rune was the only one outside the caves with a chance.
She looked up in shock from the paper, crumpling the tough parhcment in numb fingers as she stared into space. Moving as if asleep, she made her way towards the tavern she had seen last night, and entered. She wasn't diplomatic enough to talk her way out of a box, let alone get the Elf King to back down, even with the Oracle in tow to clarify... because surely the Oracle hadn't intended the destruction of the Drow.
She entered the tavern, not even noticing the stunned silence at her appearance. Her baggy black shirt and breeches wrapped tight to her arms from elbow to palm with gray leather, and wrapped tight to her ankles above soft black boots with the same. Her belt held twinned rapiers, well-worn hilts wrapped with deep violet. What appeared to be a blindfold covered her eyes, protecting her from the sun's brightness.
She seated herself at a table in a corner, and murmured to the nervous waitress for a cup of the Astartin, a notoriously touch liquor made locally, with a taste fit to strip the flesh from the tongue. She downed half of it in a gulp when it arrived, then propped her head in her hands silently, baffled and hopeless already. She had no chance of making a difference at all.
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