Don't Say A Word [CLOSED/PM Invite Only]

[kireon]

OOC: Graphic death and medical speak in here.[/i]

The seal she'd placed on her past life sang free of the sheathe to lay heavily in her calloused hands.

Mirror-bright with the occasional pit in its wavy form, the edges were as keen and sharp as the eastern winds through the clothing- and twice as lethal when one was caught off guard. From behind, the closely cropped hair was black, tinged in the soft glowstone's lighting with a greenish-yellow hue that gave her spring green eyes a particularly sinister light. The harsh lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth were unusual, unwelcome by the woman who had so carefully, so passionately fought through every challenge, every experience and every trial and obstacle that had thrown itself in her path. Unusual, and unnerving- as she was one who chose to mock her opponents mercilessly, degrading them and goading them in her subtle way into actions and words that would lead to their unmaking before she would land the final blow herself to drive it home once and for all.

The memories rode her hard these last several sleepless nights.

After nearly twelve years, the longest she'd ever spent in one spot, of being a rider, a part of something bigger than just the daily toil and survival, Durian found herself staring down memory's path and seeing the past come back to life.

Thrown back in time, again, she was staring down one of the many problems she and her crew had faced time and time again in varying forms; and the solution to those problems had come, infrequently though they were, to be solved permanently, decisively, by the tool she held in her hands. This was not her usual knife, nor the blade most dragonriders were proficient in should the need for a duel come about.

No, this was a special blade.

Life on Pern wasn't paradise, though one could be fooled into thinking so, given the surroundings and atmosphere of some of the lusher locations on the planet; it was rewarding in the best of times, and lethal the rest of it. A lot of hard work could be undone in the time it took someone's heart to beat, or their eyelashes to blink closed and open. It was a perilous existence, and Durian had long since grown accustomed to being somewhere near the top of the survival ladder. Routine was something she'd come to embrace in its stability, the normality and need to belong to something, somewhere and to be needed and wanted for the first time for more than just what her skills could provide or do for someone else. In return for throwing her heart into what was asked for her, she had been given gratitude, shown in a variety of ways ranging from formal to informal courtesies that touched the brownrider's heart a good deal more than she let on.

Her efforts had been rewarded in the form of having a place she could call Home.

There were so few left of the Wavewalkers; the children and dragons who'd made up Dalibor's very first Hatching, who had been the Weyr's hope of survival and stability in their new home only a double handful of turns before. Each one of them who remained were fiercely defended and protected in any way she could muster. They were her first family, the next eighteen months of their lives had been closely intertwined with training, lessons and drills in all aspects expected of proper riders. They had become her new adopted “crew”, even when they'd graduated, she'd made sure to keep tabs on the comings and goings of those in her class.

Avalle...

She had failed the new Senior Queen in more ways than one, and the disgust she felt at herself, at that bastard who'd won Callistath's Flight... it was like reliving one of the worst nightmares of her life all over again. It was almost as if she'd lost Calanian all over again.

And seeing Avalle's fury, the desperate, hopeless rage that had no depth had only served to throw Durian back to a similar vein in her own life.

It was a bitter medicine to swallow, there in the dirt ring with each blow blocked, redirected or landed. She primarily remained on defense through the vicious dance, her heart bleeding with each reflected attack as she watched her fiery Weyrwoman, her friend, slowly overlap and merge with the shadow of a younger, harder version of herself. She knew the pain, the anger involved, the humiliation and feelings of betrayal all to well, the loss of something very real that didn't have a name, the blow to a pride that had once seemed to intact and unbreakable.

O'sho and Fajra. Their pain, the image of the copper queen writing before vanishing. Her final words, Fajra's shell of her former self.

Osro.

O'sho's grief lined face, his exhaustion and doubtless sleepless nights keeping vigil over his wife. The faces of those who'd died, dragons vanishing into Between, the bodies of their riders accompanying short times later, the bodies they had to carry and leave Between numbered themselves one after another.

The feeling of all going well, of things settling down from the plague and belief that things were going to look up for Dalibor once more.

All destroyed in the span of moments.

[kireon]

Five minutes was all it had taken her to realize someone was missing, her headcount off by one.

They'd lain low, hiding in their established, pre-planned locations and sounded off one by one when the call came. Whistles and bird calls, imitations of chattering flitters and whersport in coached patterns. One voice had not sounded, and Durian'd felt ice slice deep into her gut. Giving the call to stay put, she'd darted out, slipping in and out of the shadows like the skinny wraith she was back to where things had gone terribly wrong. Retracing her steps, she'd found him too late, laying there where he'd fallen and nearly unrecognizable from the damage.

Her fingers tightened reflexively on the hilt of her knife, eyes still glazed and staring into the past.

Three days it had taken him to die.

Three long, agonizing and heart-wrenching days of suffering, of hope and desperate pleas, vows and promises made if only he would live. Three days of vigilance and desperate, crude attempts at healing when they could not afford to drag him to someone who was more able to help. Not with their history, their backgrounds. They were not Holdless, but they might as well have been for the way they were treated and regarded.

Cleaning the injuries, numerous as they were, attempting to spoon tiny amounts of water, weak broth and whatever filched healer's remedies down his throat in hopes it would help. Nights spent wiping sweat off his brow, meticulously wiping him down to try and keep the dust and grim from his injuries, of talking to him, apologizing and begging him to wake up.

Maggots had been a problem, and she hadn't known enough in the past to know that they could be as big a benefit as they were a nauseating nuisance, and she'd spent hours trying to keep herself from throwing up the contents of her stomach as she picked them out with her fingers, with the aid of forked twigs or whatever she could find that wouldn't let her touch the squirming larvae with her bare hands. Often, she'd forced someone else to hold a tureen, something for her to vomit into before she'd wipe her mouth against her shoulder, a tattered sleeve, and go right back to it all over again.

Calanian didn't wake up, not until dawn broke on the third day.

He'd said her name, a broken, hoarse sound that jerked her from the light doze she'd slipped into in her vigil. She'd woken in a snap, instantly leaning over to check him over when the end began. Calanian had wanted to tell her something, had opened his mouth to speak before his body had gone ramrod straight and everything had fallen apart. With a gurgling choke and wheeze, his eyes hard rolled into the back of his head, spots of red from burst blood vessels in one eye blooming across white sclera as his already damaged skull cracked against the stone and reopened injuries they'd just gotten to scab over.

Bloody sputum frothed from his mouth, flecked yellow as his body convulsed. His teeth had sunk into her fingers, her hand as she'd reached into his mouth to try and prevent him from biting his own tongue in two. Their eyes had locked in the scarce instances the seizures ceased, those blue eyes wide, frightened and accusing as if she were the cause of his torment.

She'd failed him.

Helpless, bleeding and bruised, she watched his final throes until the last, haunting gurgled whimper left his throat and he lay still, silent and unmoving. More than anything, she remembered how his eyes had been; blank and glassy, empty and reflected the cold blue of the sky above.

He had died on one of the most beautiful days they'd had in a very long time; covered in the voided contents of his bowels and bladder, bloodied, broken and otherwise nothing like the carefree sass master she'd known and loved to plot with.

She'd dug his grave with her own two hands, struggled to lay down flat, heavy stones atop, beside, and beneath the body in some perverse idea that Threadfall, should it land, wouldn't touch the place she put him to rest in. Her back and shoulders burned from the efforts, hands cracked and bleeding, flesh split and blistered from her efforts, from the sharp, uncaring edges of the stones she'd found and lugged to the unevenly dug hole with its rocky soil.

After that, she'd gone hunting for those responsible.

Calanian's accusatory stare, blank and empty with death, full of the blue, careless sky above him.

The man responsible had been found, bragging about his part in it to his companions. Holdless scum, they'd been called. Worthless, to be cast out for Thread. Lower than the lowest of drudges, they weren't even worth the effort to keep. That man's eyes had started to return to her as well.

The smug victory in his step, cocksure that he wasn't going to be punished for his actions, for his role in the matter was entirely like D'lios'. Enough of a similarity that her blood continued to run in a slow boil that threatened to burn itself through her veins at the sight, of the sound of him.

She had not learned that man's name, nor had she cared at the time. She had taken her revenge on him as surely as his fists and boots still had the evidence of the fight that had taken her beloved companion's life. After he'd tripped the wire she'd set up down his favorite shortcut, she'd lunged and taken her opportunity when she'd seen it. What happened after she'd landed on his back hard enough to knock the air from his lungs was a nightmarish blur, one full of red haze and black spots in her vision that turned solidly to black.

She'd woken out of it caked in mud, the man's mouth stuffed full of what looked like rags- when she'd managed to do that was beyond her, but it explained why no one had hauled her off and discovered them. A rock, bloodied, was cast to the side, sharp and pointed and with something that might have been hair sticking out of the dark clumps.

Durian realized the mud that caked her skin had a distinctly foul scent, metallic in nature and had thrown up on herself shortly after as her eyes fell on her handiwork.

That look on his empty face had been too similar, the stare had been surprised, though still with that reflective emptiness that death provided. The third of the group had been untouchable, wisely guarding himself when the first had fallen, and when the second turned up grievously injured- there would be no fixing that knee- had taken up watching his back, his food and his surroundings at all times.

Reggae had delivered a message anyway on her behalf that night, depositing it in the man's sleeping quarters, and the man had left the next night for parts unknown.

She still remembered the tears, angry and hopeless, that she'd shed over the first man's body when the weight of her own crime had come crashing down on her shoulders. Her sandaled foot had booted him in the ribs twice as she cursed him time and time again. It was his fault, his for making her do this, she'd told herself, time and time again, trying anything she could to relieve herself of the horror, the guilt and the fear that took her. He'd killed her friend, killed someone else, they would have killed him if they hadn't been homeless, family-less and struggling to survive like outcasts. They would have staked him for Thread, and while his death would have been over quicker, but it would have been more horrific all the same. None of that had made her feel any better, nor had it given her any comfort or disguised the truth. What it left her with was ugly, and she hadn't felt any better for the taking of his life, the assault on the other one hadn't given her any sort of satisfaction either, nor had making the third man run away from his livelihood with his tail between his legs like a coward. There hadn't been a sense of victory, of vindictive accomplishment- there was only a grieving emptiness, a painful, hollow hole within her that wouldn't be filled.

Revenge hadn't brought her friend back, or erased the pain she carried.

It didn't remove the nightmares that haunted her, stalked her like an unseen evil spirit in the middle of the night, the day, whenever she closed her eyes to sleep.

It hadn't made her stronger.

[kireon]

Durian.[/i] The growl that was her name filled the cavern, swelled within her mind as Mesreath began the arduous task of distracting her from the ghosts of the past. Patient, firm, and unwavering he began pulling her bac k into the present. Though the caverns were large, the brown gave a disdainful look to the one serving as the rider's quarters as he tucked his still sore wings tightly against his body and squeezed as much of himself through as he could. Look at me, Durian.[/i] He watched her shoulders hunch subtly, such a slight movement it may not have even existed- but he knew, he felt the keen bunching of muscles, the tension of tendons.

He and he alone knew her the way no other did, be it because he shared the other half of her mind, had integrated himself so firmly within her soul that there wouldn't ever be hope if one of them were to be taken from the other, of it it was a bond forged in the soul that had bloomed into something more as time, and trust in one another, had built into the sturdy, unshakeable foundation between them.

Slowly, she complied, twisting her upper body about until she could look at him without wrenching her neck.

That was the same look, that guarded, sealed expression he had seen on her face upon actually seeing her for the first time. The mind that was keen, sharp and dangerous as his claws and fangs with a passionate protective streak that burned brightly, that he had loved from the moment he had been aware of his surroundings outside the darkness of the egg. That flame of her mind, of her spirit that had called to his own. Her vulnerability and sense of honor had more than appealed to him, knowing that she needed protection and would never seek it out herself; it would be his duty to do it without so much as an offer or an inquiry as to whether or not she wanted it.

Mesreath had seen himself reflected in her soul; he was the raw, primal rage and limitless fury that came with the kind of loss she had suffered so often in her sixteen turns of life. She, in turn, would be the hand that would temper that fury into a weapon unlike any other Pern had known.

Together, he had seen the possibilities, the endless futures that lay out before them, and he knew there could be no other but Durian for him.

They stared at one another for the longest time, neither yielding, neither blinking. Do we go?[/i] He asked simply, allowing Durian access to the images in his mind the way she opened herself, however uncomfortable it made her, to him in return. He knew the blade she held, that very specific, special blade that was only taken out on nights the past rode her too hard for her to avoid. Those nights she needed to grieve, needed to dive down into the sides of her that she refused to let any other see.

He would do this thing for her, should she ask it of him. Peribeth wouldn't last beneath his claws and fangs now that he wasn't under the effects of that poisonous antidote. He could catch the dragonet before he knew what was coming and be done with it.

Sensing her distress and conflicted feelings on the matter, he grumbled. Should have eaten him as a hatchling. Would have solved the trouble before it started.[/i]

The laugh that came bursting out was harsh and cruel, and surprised the both of them at the sound. A grim half-smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she rose silently from the bed furs to go to her dragon's side. She rested her forehead against the broad expanse of his skull, closing her eyes and just allowing herself to share in the heat that radiated off of his body. It wouldn't penetrate the cold that touched her bones, but it was comforting nonetheless. His utter acceptance and understanding of the violence that lurked in the darkest depths of her heart had come as a shock to her, more so than having to deal with his own nefarious temper and attempts at eating people who set him off. It's treason, Mes. We could be staked out and left for Thread for even thinking about doing this.

Treason.

It was an ugly, bitter word with an aftertaste of bile on her tongue.

Calanian's empty, accusing eyes filled her vision again, the memories of hands raw and bleeding, shoulders and back strained beneath the weight of stone flooding back again.

But she was capable of it; their death would not be the first at her hands.

She'd learned how to disguise everything about herself, altering her appearance to make it appear to be anything from a curvaceous, spoilt brat to a nondescript face in the drudge crowd. An assassination shouldn't be too difficult, not if she planned things out carefully enough. Going toe to toe with the ambitious bastard didn't settle well with her, the man was like a greased tunnelsnake and three times as vicious as a red in his cunning. The honor that had been taught to her as a dragonrider warred with the cunning of the holdless; the need to do what was necessary to survive and get away as unscathed as possible. The honorable thing to do would be to raise an objection and bring it to the attention of those who had clout about the weyr proper and the holds as well.

He'll expect someone to try and take him out, at least for the next season or three, maybe even as long as a few turns. Do I have the luxury of time to give? To wait until the moment is right even if it takes turns? Durian was, if nothing else, an opportunist of sorts. But she worried, greatly, that waiting until his guard was potentially down would mean irreversible harm and damage done to the place she called home.

And that was unacceptable.[/size]

[kireon]

They may try.[/i]

Mesreath's response was simple, but the thoughts of violence in his head were anything but. His head moved, shifted just enough to bump against her body. I am Durian's,[/i] he continued. my claws are yours, my fangs are yours, and my wings are yours.[/i] It went without saying that his heart and soul were neatly in her hands on top of it all. His voice was grave, serious as eyes that had gone from orange-yellow back to a dark, merciless red. Tell me, and I will blood Peribeth like a herdbeast before he knows what has stricken him from the skies, Durian. Tell me to do this thing for you, and I will.[/i]

With great pleasure, at that.

“I-” Both of them halted, utterly still at the sound from outside their home. Durian's surface mind, having been filled with the memories of the past suddenly started wiping itself blank as Mesreath's head lifted and a low, displeased rumble grew in volume. Any who'd been spying- and spies were a very real possibility with their new Weyrleader- would find themselves with an eye and heart full of grief and frustration, the memories of someone important lost. Nothing unusual, death was a commonality most Pernese shared in their lives, some just took it harder than others. But the brown was still displeased by the lack of courtesy given, an announcement was proper- and he'd not so much felt even the slightest of attempts to contact him during his conversation with Durian.

Only by Durian's hand on his paw did he save the instinctive urge to launch out bodily, faster than his bulk would ever suggest, and sink his fangs into those who'd trespassed.

And people used to tell me that I had a temper. I think you and Avalle tie for first place. The Weyrwoman's name was still a painful thing, and she did her best to shove it aside for her unexpected guests. The blade itself was slid back into its sheath, placed into the pocket she'd sewn onto a pair of her lazy around pants along the inner thigh. Its weight was a reminder, painful and comforting all at once, as she strode out to greet those who'd come rather unexpectedly in the dead of night.

Mesreath's surprise, laced with cautious approval and confusion as it was, gave her enough information to know it wasn't a potential foe at their weyr entrance. Durian held a single glowstone in her hand, its eerie light enough for her to see by as she walked out to the ledge with Mesreath in close tow behind and above her. She stopped at the entrance, he a couple steps behind, yet still towering above her as a ruby eyed guardian ready to strike. The short haired wingsecond could only offer a glancing smile, one that faded rapidly at the look on her fellow's face. The glint of a metallic hide from the other's bonded the only other telltale sign apart from a familiar face as to who her visitor was.

“You're up late,” Durian's tone was remarkably noncommittal, the glowstone passed back and forth from one hand to another for lack of better something to do with her hands. Placing them in her pockets would only tempt her to reveal the presence of the blade- and she didn't care to reveal that little secret. “something I can do for you?” She might have seen a hint of a brief smile in return, maybe, but the words that followed were nothing to smile about as the wingsecond stated their business there on the spot.

“We need to talk...”[/size]