eachdraidh | .001 Action | Video [ Open to All ]

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[It was a long walk to Caer Glaem. Fortunately, Susan was close enough that that the road to it was fairly safe. She would feel better about this whole thing if her brothers and sister were here, or if she had her bow, or even her horn. Instead she was wearing her school clothes, and they were none too clean at this point. Still, Susan was hoping for a better explanation, and from what the friendly fairies and townspeople had to say the castle was the place to get it.

She was hungry. Fruit trees and handouts didn't do much in the way of assuaging hunger when one was walking all day. She hoped there would at least be food in the castle; it was looming large in her vision now and she hoped to get there within the end of the day. It was a good thing, too. She'd bathed in a stream that morning, but--

"Lawkamercyme!" cried a high pitched voice, and Susan turned her head just in time to see a small, green-tinted fairy fall into a faint. A dark shadow globbed its way towards the fairy, Susan was sure it had foul intent. Dark shadows with gleam of teeth almost always did. She wished for her bow more than ever, but didn't hesitate to pick up a large stone at her feet. She was frightened - how did one fight a shadow? Oh, she hated to fight - but she wasn't about to just stand there and watch. She shouted, "You! There! Get away from that fairy!"

The shadow did not seem much impressed. And so Susan threw the stone with impressive aim, clipping the beast right in the mouth. It hissed and abandoned the fairy, heading towards her instead. She bent to pick up another rock.]

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[For a long moment, the locket shows a beautiful face with a furrowed brow, staring intently at its own reflection. Susan has never seen anything like this before. She is at the castle now, clean and clothed and fed, so her image doesn't look quite as dire as it had earlier that day, and her dark hair is swept back neatly in a braid.] Ah - so it does work! At least, I assume it does, and this is a message going out all over the lockets and not just some sort of fancy mirror.

[In either case, she's beginning to feel a little self-conscious. She reaches for easily remembered dignity.] I don't mean to intrude, but I have heard that this is something which happens often. And I wonder, is there anyone from England here? [She misses her family; two weeks of walking among strangers in a strange land was more than enough alone time for now, thanks.] Or even [marked hesitation] Narnia?

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"The king and queen, of course. Only, you missed them. They were here two weeks ago and they don't make appearances too often. As for me, it's been four months since I first arrived." He scratched the back of his neck, only now having a thought he hadn't had before. "Might have been the first time they'd collected anyone like us. At least, for a while. There weren't any other shardholders at the castle who'd been there more than a day."

That was interesting. She wondered what had changed. Again, she wished Edmund or Peter were here, but this time she felt guilty about it immediately afterwards.

There was something there, she was sure of it, but she wasn't quite sure what. Best to let it simmer and focus on practical things. She was good with practical things.

"Are there a lot of - shardholders - in the castle?"

He nodded. "Aye. I couldn't tell you how many. There's plenty what have gone off to other places to explore or they're off on tasks for the king and queen."

Furthermore, there were so many natives in this castle that it was never completely obvious who belonged to this world or to another. At the feast it was the easiest to find those new to the world by their clothing or manner, but that changed once people started wearing the clothes made available to them. It did him no favors that he likewise made no special effort to make friends.

"The king and queen give out tasks?" That seemed to be the most important question to ask out of the myriad buzzing about in her mind. This place seemed more complicated by the minute. "What kind of tasks?"

"That's how I was invited to Ser Reynard's. I figure they do send out for other quests like that. Most of will be about the war." That was all something Gendry had no particular desire to throw himself into. He was no coward, but he was not eager to throw his life away either.

"The war that they want us to fight in," she said, nodding slowly. She had heard about that when she first arrived. She was not keen on it at all, to put it lightly.

"You agreed to it," he said dismissively. Like with others like her, he was not keen on offering sympathy to those who agreed to a fight only to back out of it. "So you're in it now. But unless it comes here, they won't make you fight."

"I agreed to help a bunch of fairies," Susan clarified. And she'd thought it had been something very different, she thought at least her brothers and sisters would be here as well. It had been a split second decision, an instinct to go and help, and one she had tried not to spend the past two weeks regretting. "For all I knew, they had a friend who was stuck in a tree. That's not a promise to kill someone for the sake of a war I don't understand."

"Ah. So you went along with them. That's decent of you." He grimaced, not entirely unsympathetic. "I wouldn't go with them. Not until they told me why they wanted me. Need my help, they said. Bugger that. Why should I listen to tiny people with wings? I came for the war, because they needed me. The war in my own land will only ever need me as a corpse."

...oh. That was certainly a significant piece of information. Susan glanced at Gendry with concerned assessment, but decided after a moment that she wasn't sure she wanted to ask about his world's war if it was bad enough that going to another world's war was an improvement. Though from what she's learned about the war in the year or so since it had ended, she probably would have preferred escaping into a Narnian war than dealing with Nazis.

"That was smart of you," she said. "I should have done that. I'm usually more cautious."

But. Well. Not when people were crying out for her help, really.

"I'm usually not. You're just nice, is all." It wasn't quite a compliment, but neither was it an insult. Being kind was not the sort of thing that earned anyone favors, but it was certainly better than the alternative. But in all their talking, they'd at least arrived at the gates of the city. The guard at the gate seemed to recognize Gendry and gave him a slight nod and made no special fuss about his company.

Susan paused before following Gendry. She took in the architecture with an expert eye... and this was a beautiful castle. Not only that, but it was streamlined and well-equipped for defense.

"Will you look at the size of it..." Surely, this was not strictly natural construction - not unless it had been made in the same way as the pyramids.

"Nice, ain't it?" But it was not the size Gendry appreciated. Indeed, having lived all his life in the shadow of the Red Keep, there were few castles that might impress him. But it was the state of the city, which did not seem to have the ugly underside that dominated Gendry's memories of King's Landing. It might have been built unnaturally, but it continued to thrive in an equally unnatural manner as well. "Do they have castles like this, where you're from?"

Did they have castles like this... She laughed a little. Cair Paravel had been like this, equally well-formed and shining, a diamond of a castle: flawless, well-cut, and unassailable. She could find no immediate advantage in Caer Glaem save for size, but perhaps that was because Cair Paravel would always be preeminent in her heart. When last she'd seen it, it had been a ruin and some part of her still ached over that, but she best remembered it has it had been.

"Yes and no," she said, moving to follow him into the courtyard. "None quite so large, I think."

"I'd never been in one before. At least not a proper one." He and the Brotherhood had stayed at Acorn Hall once and he'd even gone inside, but it was the house of a small lord of no great importance. Their forge hadn't been used in ages. "But I grew up outside one. The Red Keep, so it was. You could go anywhere in the city and its towers would still be staring down at you. When I left, I didn't think it would ever shrink away in the distance."

It did, though, and it had been a strange moment when Gendry could no longer look over his back and see the familiar sight that had marked the entirety of his life.

Gendry was very open. Susan wished she could be also, but her story was so very strange and she was so very used to not talking about Narnia; it was difficult. "That must have been a strange feeling, looking back and seeing those towers disappear. It's funny how the things we think are certain can change so suddenly."

For example, this castle. "It looks like this place has seen some damage," she said, glancing about at towers which had not been visible from outside the castle walls. She'd thought she'd be safer here than on the open road, but she hadn't seen anything near this devastation except for the occasional battlefield...

"There was a battle here, some months ago. More recently, a bunch of those shadow creatures melted into a bigger one. I heard it was a tough fight, that."

He'd missed out on the action, but in a place like this, people talked. "A pity no one had a giant dog for it, eh?"

"That explains why so much of this damage is inside the walls," and why the walls weren't damaged at all. She wondered if they would have needed a bigger dog or a pack of dogs or if there had been more magic involved.

It was starting to seem like there was always more magic.

She gave Gendry a smile for his joke - it was a good one, after all, and one that shook off the creeping shadow: she did not feel safe. "I wonder how they defeated it - without the giant dog, I mean."

"I didn't listen to the whole story," Gendry admitted reluctantly. His cheeks reddened to admit it, because a knight ought to not only know these things, but have been in the thick of it. Instead, he'd been half listening as he worked the forge from his fairy tutor that had momentarily tired of trying to teach him to read. "But these sorts of things don't last. Likely we'll be seeing the last of them soon enough."

Graciously, Susan pretended not to notice his embarrassment. Of course, that meant she couldn't at all be reassuring or offer an alternative, instead she redirected her line of questioning to something he knew more about. "What do you mean, 'they don't last?' They just... disappear?"

"Not so much vanish like magic. I only mean that trouble brews here at times, but it don't last. In my first month, it was giant worms. Some as long as me, some longer by far. They would kill anything what got in their way. But their bellies were filled with treasure, so there was no shortage of folk eager to kill them." He grinned at that. It had been treacherous fighting, to be sure. But he'd certainly tucked away a fortune thanks to that.

Susan gave a surprised laugh at that thought. Oh, the dwarves would have loved a hunt like that. "I have to say, I'm not surprised. But I wonder..."

Well, she wondered the sort of things she always wondered: What did the worms do? How did their bellies get filled with treasure? Was the treasure undigested, or was it partially gnawed away by stomach acid - that is, was it food? If it wasn't, why would they eat it?

"...were they all killed off? Or was it some sort of... seasonal thing?"

"Bit of both, I think. I figure they came here because they were hungry for more treasure. I don't know how many we killed, but they stopped attacking before long. Either we killed them all or they were smart enough to let up."

And so he ascribed that same behavior to these shadows. There was only so many of them that could be killed before they would eventually wise up and let up on becoming canine crunchies.

She glanced over the grounds, trying to see any sign of whether or not they had breached the castle - or indeed, come up through the ground. "What did you need to kill them? A giant bird?"

This is said with a bit of sarcasm, but she is also still feeling out her ground here.

There had been long enough that signs of the worm invasion were few, save for the deepest parts of the castle where little priority had been placed on patching up tunnels that had inevitably collapsed on themselves anyway. The dungeons were a sight.

"Bloody hell, but that would have been hard. No, a blade was enough to cut them open."

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