704 Saun 19

Mister Barnelby’s office smelled live cloves and horseradish. On their own, they were pretty pungent aromas; together? They were Barnelby. Whatever produced the disharmonious mix of scents, it was as much a part of the room as the large oil portrait of Barnelby’s cat, Whiskatz, who...

703 Ashan 51

Hungry hungry hungry. He was always hungry.

He'd heard it said before that growing boys needed food - lots of food -, and he often wondered if that was part of the reason he was so small, so puny. His stomach was more of a perpetually growling alley cat than an organ that supposedly...

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31st Ashan, 718

You seem nervous. Is something the matter? the seductive voice rasped in his ear, questioningly. Ryder's Diri never liked when the man showed fear, and usually he tried not to. But this was the first time he'd seen Noth in a while,...

704 Ashan 2

Mum? She was never there when he woke up. Mum're you okay?

In the dingy light of their drafty shack, his mother's face was pale - far paler than it should have been. Their one room home had space enough for their single bed, one they tended to share in shifts rather than together;...

/gallery/image.php?mode=medium&album_id=330&image_id=11162 What if I fall?

Oh but darling
What if you fly? 2nd of Cylus, 718

Truthfully, the training facilities we're hardly anything at all. Empty, spacious rooms, where the drones ran around and tossed boulders to strengthen their physique....

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26th Cylus

Finally, Ryder found himself alone. Since his raid with the necromancer, and the meeting with the rest of the group, Ryder had been incredibly busy. Some recruits wanted him to teach them to fight, after seeing him take down a fair...

/gallery/image.php?album_id=2&image_id=3292 Ymiden 1, 718
Early evening

Inali swore lightly in the Ancient Tongue, knowing that all the other members of the Old Guard were far enough that they wouldn’t hear her struggle with this particularly difficult cipher. While Lerrik Calloso was fair and...

13th Trial, Zi'da, Arc 713
West Etzos, Underground
20th break

Continued from here

He was forty arcs old, and had become a creature of shadows, and secrets, and sinister reputation.

He waited in the tunnel where he knew his quarry would be coming. Forewarned was forearmed, they said. His...

703 Ashan 13
from here

Meat pies weren't worth this.

He had made the mistake of trying to squeeze through a small opening at the back of the rundown building. As he'd always been small for his age, the concept of being too big for something was rarely at the top of his list of things that might...

703 Ashan 13

He woke to pain all over his body and a grumbling stomach that was more void than a starless night sky. Grimacing, Jinu lay on the itchy straw mat he used for a bed, eyes closed and breathing slow but shallow. It hurt to lay still, and it hurt to move. In the relative quiet of the...

703 Ashan 12

He hated Thomas Wilkes more than he hated being hungry - and he hated being hungry more than just about everything else. Thomas, better known as Toad , was fat. He was fat and ugly and drooled out of the corner of his mouth when he talked for longer than a couple trills and Jinu...

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Inali had done her best to research the letters that one of her students had left her over a season ago. The process had involved ordering books from Viden on Vauni, Ancient Vauni, and Grammatical Considerations for Vauni. While the books had been enough...

/gallery/image.php?album_id=2&image_id=3447 Ashan 72, 717th arc

Inali's visit to the Northern Medical Station was mercifully brief. After she listed her symptoms to the Sev'ryn woman in the waiting area, she had been called back to one of the patient areas within a quarter break of her arrival....

4th of Ymiden, Arc 718

Who are you looking for? the man asked. A purveyor of knowledge, or so he called himself. An entrepreneur within the underworld, knowing neither great success or great failure. He was... inconspicuous, fitting into the niches. And this place, all around them, was discreet....

17 Cylus 718

While it was to be expected for Lizzie to be a little... unhappy about being forced to share her special day with the opening of F'mos Ate Most as the aukari even chose to use the girl's birthday as some publicity stunt, F'mos did not rest in his efforts to convince her otherwise....

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Inali had spent the first portion of her morning working through a particularly difficult cipher. Other members of the Old Guard had each taken a stab at it and the collected parchment of notes was painfully thin. A few of her colleagues had used the...

/gallery/image.php?album_id=2&image_id=3292 Ymiden 2, 718, Early Morning

Inali eyed the letter laying on the small desk that the inn provided her. The message had been delivered to her residence early in the morning by a particularly insistent urchin that pounded on her door until she answered....

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88th Trial, Ashan, Arc 618
South Etzos
23rd break

I'm the luckiest cunt in the city , thought the man who was about to die.

It wasn't just the jingle of coin in his pockets, telling him with every step that his night had been especially...

2nd trial of Ymiden, Arc 718

Poxis’s slumbering eyes slowly opened to the sound of a persistent cat wailing and pawing at his front door. “fucking cat..” Poxis grumbled through clenched teeth. He pressed the ends of his pillow to his feathery ears to drown out the noise but soon found himself...

/gallery/image.php?album_id=2&image_id=3292 71st Trial of Ashan, 717

The overwhelming racism against the Eidisi within Etzos hadn't subsided in the three trials since Inali had arrived at the Great Pahrn Gate. If anything, it had gotten worse. Rumors had filtered out from the Citadel to the...

16th Of Vhalar 718
Lucretia had time to contemplate as she took a deep breath in and exhaled in a fluid and relaxing state of calm as she sat down on a rather large rocky stone that managed to protrude out of the dirt. She was outside the city walls once again, trying to get away from the...

24th Ymiden, 718 Send him in Ryder muttered, sitting back on his chair in the underground room. With a small nod, the other bandit left to go and fetch the man Ryder had asked for - a coward. Despite the somewhat grim circumstances, a small smirk spread across his face, one of sadistic pleasure....

8th Trial, Ymiden, Arc 718
South Ezos, Outer Perimeter
21st break

Continued from here

You hear that?

Deshak's nightmare began and ended with words in his basement. But all the space in between was blood and steel and bestial screams.

He'd seen much of Etzos in the twenty years he'd...

/gallery/image.php?album_id=2&image_id=13356 Zi'da 8th, 717
If there was one thing Nightshade desperately needed practice with, it was the subtle art of dealing with other people. The half-breed for all her elegance with a blade had no elegance with the spoken word. She had her natural charms. A...