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 Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2014 8:53 am
 So, this kid. This kid was Mintos and Nos’s grandson, Odhran’s son, and the son of some jerkward arctyra in the Shadow Herd. Oi, vey. Nereocystis had been a member of Sunflare since not long after falling. She and her sister had always been a scout; they were fast, they were hardy, they were observant, they knew how to heal minor cuts and abrasions. It all worked out for them. It was a job that Nereocystis had always liked. Of course, Sunflare had reorganized a bit since then, ever since one of the ard-rhigh’s kin was murdered by that grey b*****d. So now “scout” was no longer an option, and all of the old scouts were now champions. Laminira, personally, had actually liked it. Neri was surprised. Lami was usually more gentle than she was, less inclined towards violence. But apparently, Lami liked the idea of being able to do more direct good. Neri, on the other hand, would rather go back to using her observational skills. She didn’t fancy losing her eye in their first big scrap.
Lami was actually where the problem was. See, Sepaia wanted Ciaradh to have a teacher—multiple teachers, in fact. He needed to learn how to fight, he needed to learn how to be a Good Person, and he needed to learn how to scout. Any of these jobs was not so much a good idea to fork over to one of his family members. Nuh uh, no way. Mintos’s family, well, they were good people, good champions, but a person should never be allowed to teach their own kids. So far as Neri was concerned, if a kid still needed training into their adulthood, especially on things like ethics, then the family hadn’t done a good job.
“That’s not the reason why they won’t be teaching him,” Sepaia had said with a roll of her eyes. “They’re not teaching him because…”
“You think they’ll be too soft on him?”
Sepaia sighed. “Essentially, yes.” The way she said it made it clear she would rather have had her teeth torn out than have to admit that. “Besides, a star should have more influence than just the familial one.”
“And they’ve done a pretty crap job at teaching him stuff so far.”
The look Sepaia gave the other arcturus was disapproving. “They’ve raised him to be a star. Being a champion is a very different proposition. It puts him into different situations. We need to train him to deal with those situations mentally as well as physically. That’s why we’re teaching him about laws and ethics. Why I’ll be teaching him about laws and ethics. I want you to teach him scouting, and the both of us will be teaching him fighting skills.”
“What about message-running? He might have to do that. No use wasting the only lyra in our clan.”
“You can teach him message-running as well. As much as you can teach a lyra to fly.” The smirk on Sepaia’s face restored the rhia’s authority. Neri’s grumble was as much relief as embarrassment.
So now here Neri was, standing in front of Ciaradh. It was his second day of training—his first with Sepaia—and the kid…well, he wasn’t doin’ so good. Not so much. He’d stumbled into a particularly nasty briar on the edge of Sunflare and Shadow territory. Not a good place for a trainee to be. Ciaradh was hurt. Not incapacitatingly so, but enough to be a right bother. Enough to be bleeding. Neri hid a sigh and pulled a branch back gingerly with her teeth, wincing as one of the thorns dug into the roof of her mouth. “Ngah muf,” she said.
The arctyra needed no second bidding. No, wait, of course he did, because he was what was professionally known as an idiot. He glanced quickly back at the Shadow woods. Neri’s eyes rolled in exasperation. Was he born stupid, or did Odhran drop him when he was born?! Neri stamped her hoof and pawed at the ground. “Muf, skugig!”
The words were not particularly intelligible, but obviously her emotion was. Ciaradh pulled himself from the briar and stepped out gingerly. Once free of its branches, he glanced back at the dark forest edge. Neri placed the briar branch back—carefully, deliberately. She didn’t want it whipping back in her face. The branch replaced, she pushed Ciaradh back behind a rock formation thirty yards safely on their side of the border before lowering her head to his wound. She wasn’t a master healer, but she knew how to fix stuff like this. She concentrated, letting the magic in her horn out and into his wounds. Slowly, but surely, the blood vessels and skin began to knit themselves back together. “What. Were you. Doing?! Did I tell you to go over there? No! We were supposed to be patrolling the southern border, not the eastern! You were practically in their territory! Do you want to get yourself killed?!”
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Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2019 9:25 pm
Ciaradh had given up explaining himself to his family a long time ago.
He'd been an insecure child, always afraid that his other father would try to kidnap him. He'd thought that was what had happened to his sister for the longest time, that he had kidnapped her and held her against her will in the Shadow Herd, far away from her family who loved her and was worried about her. He'd been afraid that would be his fate as well--to be taken away and raised in a herd where he had to fight everyone for survival. Eh. Maybe that had happened anyway, in his mind at least, because Ciaradh fought everyone--just not for survival. He fought people because...well, he didn't know why. There was just a terrible energy inside him that he had to get out, and hauling off and beating the heck out of someone felt like the best way to do it. He didn't know why, it just...was.
Then of course, it had turned out that his childhood fear had all been for nothing. Irishstorm hadn't been kidnapped, she had left voluntarily. She'd been bored, and she'd wanted more from life. She'd wanted...well, he didn't know what she had wanted, he'd never bothered to ask her on the rare occasions they had crossed paths since then. But sometimes, late at night, he thought maybe she felt the same energy he did, the same one lashing out, but she had found a herd where they didn't make her feel bad for feeling that...
Ciaradh glanced down at his injury and shrugged. It stung, but he found he didn't mind that too much. "I was patrolling the eastern border." He tilted his head, thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. "No, Neri. I did not want to get myself killed. Maybe a Shadow herder," he added thoughtfully. "But I was not intending to commit suicide today, no." He knew the question would frustrate her, but hey, she had asked.
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Posted: Tue Dec 31, 2019 9:34 pm
Nereocystis was...well, she was dumbfounded, to say the least. She had been expecting any number of responses, but honestly, "I just wanted to kill someone" was not one of them.
This was...going to be a bigger challenge than she thought. For the first time, she felt a twinge of sympathy for Sepaia. Teaching this kid ethics and morality and just generally being a Sunflare champion and not a dark knight was going to be an uphill battle. Sisyphean, even. She had no idea how the rhia was going to do it, none at all, because this kid...man, this kid.
Maybe she should be glad he had no brains. If he had brains, he'd be terrifying. This kid plotting something could end all life as they knew it. Neri sighed heavily at him to hide her discomfort and rolled her eyes. "Yeah, big killer you are," she said. "Most dark knights could mop the floor with your dumb butt. You need to learn how to fight and how to scout and how to patrol before you can hope to fight the Shadow herd. Remember. You're not just fighting for yourself. The Shadow Herd fights for itself. The Shadow Herd fights because it's fun and they want to kill." She spat the words out like they were bitter lemons. "We are the Sunflare. We fight because other people need us to. That is why we fight. If there was no war and no violence and no other Star looked to kill some other Star, we wouldn't need to be champions and scouts and the Burning Sun. We could be normal Stars living normal lives, but because of those lunatics," she gestured towards the forest "we have to be warriors. And being a warrior isn't just...killing people."
She sighed again and turned towards the southern border. "Okay, enough lecture. That kind of lecture is for Sepaia tomorrow. Today, we learn how to patrol. Now come on, pronto, southern border or bust, no dilly-dallying in the brambles on the Shadow border. This is a learning patrol, dummy, and we do not learn by escalating our neighborly disagreement into bloodshed." With that, she flicked her tail and led the way back down to the southern border.
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Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2020 2:35 pm
Ciaradh frowned. "I do know that," he said softly. "But Shadow doesn't." The truth was, as violent as Ciaradh was, he agreed with Neri. The reason they fought was because someone else had started a war for no good reason, and that was why he fought as well. The difference was, the rest of the Burning Sun thought that the best way to defend Sunflare was to douse embers instead of putting out the blaze. They just dealt with little problems with the Shadow--they didn't seem to understand that until the Shadow was pacified, there would always be a threat, there would always be violence and never peace. And the sad fact remained that the Shadow could not be pacified with pretty words. Blod was a power-hungry maniac, and they would never rest until they ruled the world. That wasn't going to happen. The Burning Sun would not allow it. So unfortunately, it was, as Ciaradh saw it, his sacred duty as a champion to attack the Shadow.
Neri didn't see it that way, though. She had been raised in a peaceful place. Although she had spent most of her life now in the Sunflare, it wasn't the same as growing up with the Shadow on the eastern border. Ciaradh had, and he felt like he knew the danger a lot better than Neri did, or ever could.
He would never succeed in convincing her of that, of course, so he just sighed and followed Nereocystis in their patrol. A battle for another day, it would just have to be. He glanced over his shoulder once last time at the forest and shivered. Someday they would have to deal with it. They couldn't keep turning their back on it forever.
Someday. And Ciaradh knew it would end in bloodshed. The difference between him and the rest of his herd, his family, his clan was that he was ready for it. And they were not.
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