Thanqol

Sunshards

Chen!

You're being lowered. Soft and as gentle as the earth's gravity after too long in space. You're held for a moment, horizontal, then set down on bench. There's a crackle of lightning and a fire starts burning nearby - an old piece of metal evaporating in a strange azure fire, fragments flaking off and evaporating into cosmic black sparks. Autumn falls at bay for a moment, settling down at the edge of the blue firelight like a wary hound.

+Everything I've seen of you today has been perfect Princess behaviour,+ thought Jessic. Her thoughts were alert but dispassionate, an eagle's curiosity. +You charmed me, defied Keron, stole a heart and bought great happiness to my people. I would disagree that you were a bad Princess, strongly. Does knowing that change how you feel?+

Rose!

"Countess Keron!" a handmaiden squeaks in surprise. There's a sudden rush as everyone gets to their feet and bows - and you are pulled to your feet and made to bow too, Rose - but some signal passes and everyone relaxes and returns to their duties. Keron takes a chair, reverses it, and sits facing you as you are pulled back to your chair for another round of hair brushing as two more handmaidens take your hands and begin working magic on nails that never truly learned how to not be talons.

The Countess' eyes are fire and her heart is hard, but in this place she too is somehow softer. As she sits handmaidens detach pieces of armour from her shoulders and back, gently kissing marks where leather straps have dug into her skin. Her command here is certain and because of that she has no need to impose it. Instead of the dominating mistress you saw earlier now she has a certain arrogant, casual satisfaction - something that you might have recognized on your own face not so long ago.

"I was right," said Keron. "You do clean up nicely... but you're nowhere near worthy of being presented to a Princess. You've got a lot to learn about manners, etiquette and obedience. Thian, have Rose pour me some tea."

Thian takes you from behind like a dance instructor, one hand on your hip and the other on your wrist. She half lifts, half-guides you just so and teaches you how to walk to across the room, her legs swinging in unison with yours. She guides you like a puppet through the steps, hands soft and cool against yours, control invisible as she guides you through the curtsy, the pour, the stirring, steeping, sugar, and teaches you how to fall to your knees without spilling a drop so that you might offer your gift to the Countess with the proper respect.

Yue!

Curses can be terrible things. They're all the pain and hurt of a heart in turmoil, sharpened and thrown like a knife. But they're also magical things, and magic has certain laws - the chief of which is, as it ever is, that love conquers all.

It's not a wolf you hold in your arms as those words sink in. It's a girl. A beautiful girl with red eyes and long wet hair and a smile that's like the sun trying to fit all its light through an upstairs window at sunset. It's the face of a rogue who doesn't have a trick for this, it's the face of an enemy you disarmed at last. She leans in to kiss you and hold you tight and you know the wish in her heart and it's much the same as yours.

And you try to hold her back... and you can't. Not easily. Not with these paws.

Because you see, Yue, while love is powerful, curses are cunning - and this one has slipped right off Hyra and stabbed itself into you. And somehow in that moment where the only thing you could see was Hyra you didn't notice that you, yourself, had been transformed into a wolf in her place.

What kind of wolf are you, Yue?

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Robena was in no mood for heroics today.

The traditional form of the hunt in the English way was an eight part quest involving the glorious pursuit of the hart until it could run no longer, at which point it would halt and bay and a knight would move in with a sword to slay it in heroic battle. She knew, though, that was not the only option. The Germans had a style based on stealth and patience, advancing slowly and cautiously over ground, using their horses as cover until they were close enough to fire with arrows. And would that not be such a wonderfully relaxing method of hunt on a day when she ached so? Wouldn't it be suited to her horse's temperament, and her own? Wouldn't it guarantee a bounty of meat, to win with stealth and cunning, and would not the meat be all the sweeter when its life was taken unsuspecting?

Robena stares at her horse who chuffs his vote. If this was to be her last time hunting a hart on this earth, why could it not at least be an easy one? Perhaps even Constance would agree it would be kinder to kill gently -

She stops, her face like iron, and she stares the Devil Sloth straight in his equine eye. No! "Set the hound relays," she said, "and ready the horses for chase. We hunt par force."

This was not an easy decision. Even after she had made it she felt tired. Even after she made it she felt like listing into second and third place in the ride, 'accidentally' giving up her position. She resisted, step by step. Xristos bled three days and nights before the chalice was full, and the hart likewise had no easy chance to avoid suffering. Even if she had dishonoured herself she would not dishonour them, as she had dishonoured Constance.

Breathless Dead

Redana!

If Mynx had a desire in all this it would be to avoid having to talk about this. She squirms and shifts under your gaze in a way that you only have ever seen when questioning her about a mysterious wound she somehow acquired in the line of duty. But her heart weighs the scales and comes to the exhausted conclusion that she, shield and guardian, has to protect you from your own aching heart.

And so she speaks.

"Do you know the meaning of life, Redana?" said Mynx. "I do. It is to die in someone else's place. If I close my eyes and let my mind wander that's what I come back to. When I imagine where I'll be as an old lady it's dying in the place of an old lady. It's, just," she twitches her tail. "I'm not talking about me. Bella's not like that. She was made differently. She was made to be perfect, to be the best. The fastest. The strongest. The smartest. The most beautiful." Again Mynx shifts, hands in her lap in a demure maid's pose. "And you have no idea how scary that makes life for her. Because being the best isn't worth anything, Redana, and doesn't and has never given her control over anything. When she fails it's always for reasons outside of her control but she has to carry the consequences anyway."

She took a breath and, at last, made eye contact. "And she has carried so many consequences. All of palace security's consequences fell on her. All of the household staff's consequences fell on her. All of your failings fell on her. All of my..." she blinks for a moment. "She has all of the responsibility and none of the power, Redana. And she's in so much pain because of it. The only thing she can control is herself and time and again that's not enough."

Her voice, her ears, her head have all dropped. "I can't say she doesn't hate you, Redana. I can't say she doesn't hate me either. And I can't say she doesn't deserve to. Here I am, warm and comfortable here with you, and Bella... I could fail here so easily. I could just... give up and go with you and defend you and fulfill my purpose. It'd be easy and I'd love it. But Bella doesn't have that option. She's trapped between perfection and powerlessness and nobody has ever once supported her when she needed it, the way she needed it. So if I go with you I'm letting her down, just like you did."

Her voice is sore and her eyes are wet and her fists are clenched so tight her knuckles are white.

Alexa!

"Forgiveness?" said someone who was probably the Magos. "Forgiveness is unnecessary. I hold no grudge. You are beneath my notice. You are merely a stranger to me."

And then (s)he gestured coldly and the Coherent cast you down a shaft to land upon a heap of garbage.

Vasilia and Dolce!

You meet in the kitchen. The pasta is boiling. Hestia tastes it and holds up three fingers; not quite yet.

She is there for both of you this time. Salt, too, is there for you. And pepper. It's not a meal that'll change your life, but it's quick, it's warm, and it'll fill you up and give you time to talk.

Bella!

"Oh, you're from the Reaches!" said Thist, smiling brightly and immediately rummaging around in a drawer. "On behalf of Xerxes CVI, The Violet Sunbeam That Kisses The Graves Of Her Foes, Shah of the Endless Azure Skies, welcome to civilization! I've got some pamphlets - ah!"

Thist scatters an array of beautifully illustrated pamphlets across the table in front of you. Stark, simple colours and shapes that captures the imagination with landscapes and laws in a way a lesser bard might need great battles and heroic deeds to achieve. These hold up, even to Imperial eyes, and have titles like SUMPTUARY LAWS, THE PATHS AND THE ARISTEIA, LANDMARKS OF GORGAN.

"Those'll cover the other basics, but here in the Skies we trade in coin," Thist held up a single, round piece of metal, stamped with a sun-and-mask icon. "This is a daric. One of these is worth about a kilogram of flour, ten of these will get a fine meal prepared for you or ingredients for three of your own. Accommodation is... ah, you won't have any trouble finding places to sleep here, put it like that. Eighteen hundred daric is enough for a woman to live in modest means for about two, three months, longer if you're cautious with it. Not that you'll need to be - if we work together, I can develop a legal case before the Senate that'll extract tribute from the Order of Hermes for their negligence towards your safety and the insult they have cast before mighty Xerxes and all that. You'll get a cut, of course!"

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

For all the might of yearning, it is and remains only half of the cosmic dance. The other half is denial. The fly yearns for sugar; the Nepenthes denies it and takes its life. This requires strength. Strength of will above all, for if the Nepenthes lacked will it would have evolved into one of the uncountable blossoming flowers of the Flower Kingdoms, yielding its treasure to any claws that demanded it.

But the kingdoms lack this strength, just like this priestess lacks it. She dances a dance of power and denial but how long will that last, even against this weak and opportunistic craving? How long would it last if the rakshasa applied its <disruptive> hunger? Not long at all, she thinks. All of the confidence here rests upon her own shoulders and if even one decision in the chain of her life was proven to be wrong it would crack. In the time it took to recalibrate from a shaking of the self the battle would be over and the ropes would be tight.

Zhaojun's arm clashes with Crane's, and her heel sweeps her from her feet and sends her to the mud.

The logic is inescapable. If this maiden's confidence is destined to be broken then it shall be Zhaojun who breaks it. She shall not leave such a critical task to these mere bandar-logi. That would be an abrogation of responsibility.

"Once there was a maiden!" she declared, tossing her hair that flared and floated with blue fire, eyes ablaze with the same. Her voice boomed out, raising and flowing downhill into each beat. "She danced upon the Blessed Isle, and the stars fell from the skies to watch her! She danced upon the isle of Wavecrest and the pirates sailed from every sea to watch her! And then she danced upon the head of a pin and not even the philosophers would bother to contemplate her."

She shifted, flowed, serpentine as she performed the martial kata of the Earth Dragon - but she performed it wrong. Instead of immobile stability her posture swayed; a mountain in motion, a mudslide or an earthquake where the soil moved like the sea. Trust not your foundations, foolish priestess! What yearnings brew within that heart other than complacent trust?

[Figure Someone Out: 7; she may ask one of me.
How could I remake you to become capable of withstanding the bandar-logi?
Truth of Heart and Blade: What are you most afraid of?
One to ask later]

Sunshards

Chen!

+Good evening, Princess Chen.+

The thought was soft like tracing one's fingers along a silent engine was. Hard and fierce and capable of filling with fire and heat... but choosing not to do that. Soft for all it wasn't in that moment.

Princess Jessic had come to sit below you, her head almost but not quite coming up to your eye level. She radiated the warmth and shine of having been bathed, cleaned, and made up. Her clothing was rugged and fashionable; a dragon-sized leather aviator's jacket, lined with fur, set with a crimson thunderbolt pin. Well worn and traveled, thick with pockets - clothing to brave exotic lands in. She also wore scarf, gloves, and boots - autumn's wind was here and she evidently was not somebody who liked the chill.

+Qiu told me you were having trouble,+ said Jessic. +Is this a good time?+

[Take a string on Jessic]

Rose!

You are washed. This is not left to your own care, it is the work of many hands, many soaps and many gentle sponges. Your hair is cleaned. This is not left to your own care, it is the work of many brushes, many shampoos and conditioners, and many light and gentle scissors. You are painted. This is not left to your own care, it is the work of many artists who can work on eyes and skin and lips in tandem, all working towards an outcome that seems so natural as to be invisible. You could not tell where the makeup ends and you begin, you could not say for sure where the you of this morning ended and where this new you arrived, perhaps all of the changes might be a trick of the light. But it's a good trick. It holds no matter what angle you look at it from. You can't see the seams or the paint or clearly express what has changed, but somehow everything has. Your eyes are bigger, your cheeks are warmer, your shadows are softer.

You have seen this face before. But this time, as much as you would like to, you cannot blame fox magic. All the paints and brushes and artists are still here before you, as real as the daybreak.

"Absolutely lovely," said handmaiden Thain, the director of this work, leaning back amidst her cooing assistants. "Absolutely. I can see why the Countess likes you so much, there was so much beauty in you waiting to get out."

Yue!

Tail! Tail! Aackpbbt!

Once again you're sneezing away a faceful of tickly wolf fur. Once again Hyra's crimson eyes are sardonic, amused and confident as she scores yet another win. Once again you struggle to come to grips with how little the sword matters in this sword duel.

Those crimson eyes flash and fill with confidence, brilliant and sardonic and amused but with that wary, attentive edge of a consummate performer sizing up her audience after each new trick. Then she turns and her eyes are sharp and intense and powerful and while you're catching your breath she's in so close swords are useless and she's tangled amidst your legs such that she only needs to flex her back to send you falling to the ground. A paw presses on your collar and a cold nose touches yours and a smirk - and then she's back again, standing on her hind legs and leaning on the crossguard of her sword.

Do you see it yet, Yue?

Do you see it when Hyra leans against the coat-rack, sending it toppling? You might not then, because that rack is carved mahogany and is fancier than Mr. Witthord's coat rack and you can't let it break! Who knows what they'd do to you if you broke the prison furniture!? You go for the save but - thwack! Thwack! Two more sword-blows across the thighs and Hyra is trotting away again as content as the devil.

Do you see it when she drops your sword on the ground, causing you to lower your guard and letting her rush you? Do you see it when she carves a magic pattern on the ground and you're so freaked out by all the possible things it could be that she can rush you? Do you see it when she suddenly barks and makes you flinch so badly that she's able to rush you?

Don't worry, Yue. Even if your brain is a useless fluster, eventually your bruised butt will get the message and your body will start reacting on its own. The lesson will dawn, one way or another: fighting like this isn't about skill at all. If Hyra wasn't a wolf she could no doubt move faster, more precisely, hook your chin under the tip of her blade rather than giving a clumsy whack with the flat of the blade across the thigh, but that's not what's letting her get close in the first place. What lets her get close is that she's confident. That she knows you, your habits, your instincts, your reflexes, your weaknesses. That she can stare you in the eyes so intensely that she can walk right up to you and your heart is pounding so hard that you can't lift a finger.

Hyra of the wolves is teaching you that the truth of the blade is in the heart. The head, the hand are useful. But it's the heart that sends maidens falling.

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Consider trust: a nonsense concept. Either one yearns so badly one will sacrifice one's defenses to achieve it, or one yearns for defenselessness itself. Either way one has ceded control over one's desires, for what is more malleable than desire? In the paws of a lioness one can be remade to want new and terrifying things. Such is trust! Nothing more than a failure to defend one's own desires!

There is no value judgement attached to that failure, though. It is natural! If you place yourself in a position where you do not defend your desires then your desires were not powerful enough to command your absolute allegiance. As one's heart is run through Venus' crucible the slag is burned away and the steel is alloyed and purified ever towards the transcendent cravings of the constellations! So trust is not a weakness, it is the act of submissively seeking a purer desire!

"Is that so, sister Crane?" said Zhaojun. "Can you render your heart vulnerable? Can you render your charms superior? Can you weave your mind and soul and body into a trap so sweet that it will drown a gluttonous fae who tries to drink from you?"

She doubted it. This was raw sugarcrane, not pure rose honey. Take her, thresh her, purify her in heat and wet and dissolve her in coffee and she could be a pleasant sweetener at best. One couldn't satisfy the hunger of a soul as decadent as her quarry with a snack, even though she was a snack.

"Of course you can!" she said radiantly. "After all, as I said, you are a priestess just like me! Your soul is ready for this duty. You will open like the Nepenthes Thai and enchant the fae so entirely that it falls into you - and as it falls enraptured by your beauty, I shall work its undoing. Each knot you untie from your dress shall bind the rakshasa ten times over!"

[The Mask: 6!]

Breathless Dead

Redana!

The Auspex answers. The Hunt - Artemis, the chibi expression of her sitting behind a desk pushing papers that cause starships to fall from the sky. The Harvest - Demeter, as radiant as the highest summer, with a bounty so mighty that simply looking at her glyphs causes alfalfa to sprout from your pancakes. The Heart - Aphrodite, smoking with his feet on the table in the midst of a destroyed home, torn book pages drifting from the sky around him.

Mynx, for her part, gave a tired little smile. Of course she's eaten the pancakes already - you once caught her licking your utensils in case they had been poisoned. But she takes the offered food anyway because it came from her Princess and she can never refuse you anything, least of all your kindness.

"Princess Redana," said Mynx, "we did not go through all the trouble of putting on a show for you because we hated you. We all did it because... well, an Empress who never learned how to smile would be a terrible thing indeed, wouldn't it?"

Alexa!

One goes low, sliding in for a sweeping kick to your ankles. Another leaps high, pipe swinging in a wide horizontal sweep in the other direction. Pure flash. The Coherent know how to put on a show.

Their attack is either devotion or hubris, filled with fist-bumps to each other followed by unnecessary flips, lay-ups, flexes and poses. Perhaps their displays of ostentatious skill and co-ordination glorify Athena, perhaps she regards it as tacky or frivolous. Whatever her opinion, hers of you is worth and the blows start coming in. Strike after strike, punch after punch, knocked hither and thither with an intention to hurl you out of the workshop as quickly and fashionably as possible. They intend to have that pride of yours one way or another.

Do they take it?

Vasilia!

"Get some lunch," said Hestia. "You've forgotten, again. It wouldn't kill you to learn how to boil some pasta either. Food is important, drink is important, it's not just something that happens on the way to the next final showdown."

Dolce!

"I once heard a philosopher," Hera's regal nose crinkles a little at the word, although she still speaks it with respect, "say that mortals can never truly know what they feel because feelings aren't real and desires aren't real. Instead they experience the inexpressible and, in anguished inarticulation, invent linguistic narratives to cage those feelings. This pain must be because of love. This joy must be because of revenge. The stories mortals tell themselves give meaning to a meaningless existence, and so all it is simply a case of telling yourself the right story. Aphrodite cursed her by making her an inveterate shipper of romances that would never canonically happen, but I always wondered if she had a point."

She stands up, sweeping her regalia and her court around her as she prepares to leave. "If the philosopher was correct, then the answer would be to experiment with narratives of the self. Invent an achievable desire and tell yourself your impossible desire is the same thing. Adjust as you learn. In time you will build a vocabulary that gestures at your heart, even if it is not its true voice."

Bella!

You have never been in a room so crooked.

To be sure, you have spent your life amongst Imperial politics; poisoners and assassins and dissemblers and professional liars. You have been in rooms designed fundamentally around surveillance or intimidation. You have met some of the most profoundly wicked hearts hidden behind servile smiles. But those deceptions were high class and far ranging, or ruthlessly direct. This is...

That wall is filled with expensive looking heavy bound book covers. You take a breath; not one particulate of paper dust in the air. Not only are those books unread they're quite possibly empty cardboard shells to give the impression of an impressive library. That wall has a bust of Tiaephon, an ancient Azura lawmaker. It has a coffee stain upon its crown where a mug has been periodically set down. An ice pack rests upon your head. It is in actuality a single huge tray of chocolate fudge brownies that, rather than having pieces cut from it like in a civilized way, has simply had bites taken out of it like it was a gigantic cookie. The room has no less than seventeen flags. Big ones, small ones, little ones on the desk, all the blue and violet of the Endless Azure Skies. The walls seem to be held aloft with expensive marble columns and floating Azura grav-rail technology. On closer inspection it's just a thin vinyl sheet textured to look like marble wrapped around a cheap gypsum plaster core.

It's at once the least and most trustworthy room you've ever been in. Least because it overwhelmingly wants to pick your pocket. Most because that's the extent of its ambitions.

You're resting on a couch, tight red leather that looks amazing and has the comfort of a dilapilated park bench. There's a small tray of food on the coffee table in front of you, not counting your headache brownie - three peanut butter sandwich halves, a whole egg, and a glass of milk mixed with sherry. There is also a styrofoam cup half filled with pills with a scrawled post-it note attached reading DRUGS. And no sooner have you sat up and looked around than Thelis Thist has burst back into the room in an array of silks that even a complete cultural outsider like yourself suspects must be A Bit Much. She's smoking a cigarette and counting a stack of low-denomination banknotes when she sees you, which she hurriedly crams into her bra when she notices you're awake.

"You're up!" said Thelis Thist. "Have some drugs! My shop guy tells me that your deathtrap belonged to the Order of Hermes, which is a hell of a coup. That takes us international! Oh and he reckons he can give you fifteen eighty for the salvage but that's bullshit, don't believe a word of it, I can get you eighteen hundred by week's end, that's a promise."

TSL: The Excess of Flowers

Ten thousand frenzies from the sky. Each raindrop yearns.

THIS is what it is to be a GOD. To feel the YEARNING of the natural world. To feel the craving of the leaves for the sun. To feel the hunger of the earth for the sky. To feel the imperious craving of the hundred-billion parasites that scratch and claw and chew at the mighty roots of the trees. And above all in this, the season where the sea and sky are one: the desire of the rain! Each falls in prayer, seeking prayer. Let me strike the face of a maiden, they cry! Let me be the first raindrop to fall upon the face of a newborn rooster, their first and eternal taste of life! Let me crash against a leaf and knock a beetle from its perch so that it might scream its devotion to me as we fall entwined into the earth! Let me! LET me! Let ME!

The rocks below her feet strain and yearn for the kiss of her shoe. Let me chip and break and tell a story forever that it was you who broke me! Let your foot fall into my mud and shape this path forever with your footprint! Crush my delicate newly-sprouted stem and punish me for defying the Law of Man and Gods by daring to grow upon a sacred path!

The rainforest yearns. The world yearns. The sun and moon and skies and everything yearns, governed by the timeless stars of blue above. No clouds or rain can hide the constellations from her now. Even her own falling gaze is insufficient. She feels them against her skull as they shift and move, ascendant and descendant at all times and at all places. The Musicians. The Pillars. The Lovers. The Ewer. The Peacock. Once a King upon an empty field said: I am, that you might not be, and within that cosmic decree were the seeds of love and violence and otherness and uncertainty and not. Even when the heavens burned and the King fell, unable to drag all down with him, his decree was still enforced. If anything, it was enforced even more diligently for now the decree reigned alone, having overthrown the King who made it.

So what is it to Zhaojun that these mortals yearn too? What is it to Zhaojun if some part of her yearns? All things yearn, and what they yearn for is not theirs to decide. If her masters decreed it she could teach this mere guide and this mere priestess that they belonged at the feet of the fae. That they belonged at the feet of Zhaojun. That they belonged at the feet of each other. Such was the administration of Heaven and such was their luck that they were not to be corrected.

Yet. The constellations ran through her hair like fingertips. The Maidens might ever change their mind. They, too, yearned.

The rain yearned for her face. Her mask denied it. The rain yearned for her skin. Her parasol denied it. The rain yearned for her blue-glowing spirit lantern. Its heat denied it, cloaking her in an ethereal haze of steam and mist as it sizzled away before it touched the eerie metal. Not every love was worthy.

"You do not comprehend the natural order, sister Crane," said Zhaojun to the priestess with a smiling voice. "I did not either, before I [met/became/submitted to] the Goddess. You seek to build cages with your words; insufficient. Only good for caging other words. Build cages with your heart, your mind, your body, your soul. Why else send a priestess to deal with a god rather than a common minstrel?"

[Center of the Web: What does Sagacious Crane of the Reeds love the most?]

Sunshards

Countess Keron snapped her fingers imperiously. Immediately guards in flowing scale armour with black and white capes surrounded her. "This one," she said, pointing at Chen. "Has spoken out of turn. Have her strung up by her heels above the market square until she learns respect." Another snap and two of them have moved to take Chen by the arms.

"This one," she said, looking at Rose. Her voice was the kindness of authority, so certain it overrode all doubt, "is weak. Fragile. Useless. Look at her, she doesn't even know she is meant to apply makeup, the pathetic creature. Take her away and teach her how to be presentable for goodness sake. The next time I see her I want her to look soft."

"And you?" said Countess Keron, bending down to look at Yue. "And you, little knight? You need strength, and the only way to gain that is by taking it away from someone else."

Despite the harshness of those words and the coldness of her eyes, Countess Keron is not cruel when she says that. She dealt with Chen and Rose like they were nothing and oh, that made her mighty, but there is no contempt in her voice for either of them. Having power, rendering another weak kneed and short of breath and trembling against the ropes, is not the same thing as being mean.

"And so you will fight in the arena," she said, drawing herself up again. "And there you will stay until you can overcome me in a clash of blades. Challenge me whenever you like, but be assured you will need the strength of many victories to stand against me."

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Oh, Xristos. Now you've done it!

Apricot sets his heels in. He's seen enough. The sweet salt is on offer and he will not take a single step until he has received his due. Blasted beast! Idiot girl! That stuff must have come all the way from Arabia in the pockets of a pilgrim who knew better than to drag holy relics, and might have paid for a fine dagger! To give it to a horse!? In front of her horse!? Where in this blasted, foggy island was she supposed to find sugar!?

Suffice it to say, she and Apricot were not destined to get along today. He had his demands and she was too impoverished to meet them even if they had been reasonable. Knight and steed lock eyes. He knows he will have no profit from this, and yet he stamps his foot for the principle of the thing mattered.

[Undertake great labour: 9]

There were no negotiations. They both knew they were past that. He had his demands - assault Liana from behind like a brigand and rifle through her pockets for spare sugar. She had the state of her soul in the face of her impending death preventing her.

So it came to strength once more.

Apricot was an unusually large and strong horse - but he had to be, for Robena was an unusually large and strong woman. He had mass and bulk on his side but she had a lower center of gravity and boots that gripped better on the slippery stone, along with the low cunning to spill water from his trough to make the ground more slippery still. The reins were useless here - if they were the point of contact between the strength of knight and horse they'd snap in no time. Instead she gripped him in a headlock and hauled as he did his best to bite her. It was hard going, and at one time he got his teeth around her gauntlet and left dents in the steel. But after a morning of sweating and straining and doing her best to keep her vocabulary Xristian, at last she pulls Apricot into the daylight. Immediately his stomach got the better of him and he gave up the struggle to go and chew on the grass by the side of the path while Robena wheezed for breath.

Bastard horse.