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 Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 5:33 pm
A small village rests in the foothills of the mountains that form the western border of FEF Kingdom. Although it is within the realm of the continent's most modern kingdom, this village is fairly isolated and traditional, populated largely by lumberjacks who harvest the plentiful trees in the mountain foothills. It is also a popular place for mountaineering hobbyists to vacation. In that village is a bustling tavern, and on this wintry night its light shines bright in the darkness, illuminating the falling snow as smoke winds its way up from the chimneys.
A red-nosed, burly man was laughing raucously by the fire, his heavy coat drying on the floor by the fire as he drank from a huge tankard of hot cider. The black-haired, bearded mountaineer was in a red flannel shirt and suspenders and brown padded pants, with leather boots up to mid-shin.
He was also clearly drunk.
The man stumbled over to a table and thumped his mug on it to a chorus of shrieks and glares from the ladies sitting there. "Y-y'know they callsh me th'..." He seemed to pause, then continued as if he hadn't completely lost his train of thought, "Y'know I know these mount'ns all over? Ghsheah.... hurrp..." He belched into his hand, then staggered away from the table, leaning on another table and leaning up to an equally scruffy man, a local lumberjack who was getting a little tired of outsiders coming in and acting like idiots.
"'Ey, now, 'ere's a hansum fella... 'Ey fella, call me Darbeh... 'Ey, yeh name aneh mountain up thar, an' an'... an'... uh..." He started to drift off, leaning back and looking up, his eyes wobbling like a pair of soggy eggs.
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Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 5:38 pm
He rolled his eyes. It figured that of all the people that could visit the bar, it would be another arrogant idiot that thought they could rule everything in the world with a tankard of ale and a grin on their faces. Honestly, men like him made him sick- chased away the women, too. A man like that would've made a good wing man to chase the women to him, if he wouldn't repel them like negatively charged magnets.
So why not combine the man's bragging behavior with something that could get him the hell out of the bar, out of his hair, and away from possible women? He didn't come into town from the mountains often, and when he did, he didn't want to go back out into the cold without at least a warm body to spend one night with. He scratched his scraggly red hair, thinking on what to do for a minute while dislodging minutes amount of dirt from his shaggy beard.
"Look... ur, Darby? Y'know the mountains, eh? Why not show us, then?" Leaning forward with a grin, Marshal seemed to salute Darby with his mug of beer and laughed heartily.
"After all, you know those mountains backwards an' forwards, right?"
His smile twisted into something more sinister. He knew of a local legend that no one ever dared explore before, and if this man was from outside of town... well. It'd be the last time he'd be irritated by him, that was for sure. The mountains always killed the unprepared.
"There be a man in the mountains. An ice man. Get his brooch, an' come back. Then I'll call ye a man."
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Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 5:39 pm
Darby blinked groggily at Marshal, then something clicked-- slowly-- in his pickled brain, and a smirk made its way cautiously across his face (not because he was nervous-- he was too baked to be nervous-- but because he had to think about how to smirk first).
"The ol' icy king, yuh mean?" Darby leaned forward, laughing raucously and loosing a blast of rancid breath in Marshal's face before he staggered back from the table and nearly spilled his mug. To prevent this from happening again, he quickly drained the rest of it while Marshal and the others were forced to watch it trickle out and soak his beard. "Blehaahrrraaaaapp!" He thumped his own chest and looked quickly around to see who had just punched him in the ribs, scowled at a few of the closer suspects, and then turned wiped his mouth on his sleeve, pointing at Marshal. "Jush' tha'?"
Darby grinned an idiot's grin and stumbled to where his coat was hung. "U'm a' be back'in... hhhrpp... two dj... mmp, two daysh..." He laughed again, buttoning up his coat and opening the door.
A chorus of previously restrained laughter rocked the tavern once the door closed behind Darby, and more than just a few rounds were bought in honor of Marshal's cleverness. Not to mention that the girl Darby had brought in was so grateful to be rid of him that she was content to perch herself in Marshal's lap for the rest of the evening.
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Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 5:41 pm
----
Castle Town of FEF Kingdom
----
A hooded, robed figure passed through the streets unseen. Fresh snow covered the rooftops and lined the street, but the hooded figure left no tracks. His robes dragged through the white, powdery ice, but no trail marked his passage. The light of a street lamp shone straight through him, solid as he was, so that no shadow betrayed his presence to the denizens of castle town as they rested in their warm homes. Children pressed their noses to the glass, excited by the first snow of winter, but none saw him pass.
He was quite real, perhaps too real, but no one could see him.
No one could see his scraggly hair hanging down in front of his face.
No one could see his gleaming gray eyes with their tiny pinpoint black pupils.
No one could see his lips curled into a withered smile.
No one heard him softly speak of ancient kings and long-awaited rulers.
No one seemed to notice as the colorful banners that hung from the street signs changed as he walked past them, from Nino's fanciful mark of the FEF Kingdom to the blue and silver coat of arms of an ancient and dead royal family.
The mysterious stranger reached the end of the street and disappeared very simply, gone in an instant.
Snow continued to fall and thicken on the streets and rooftops. The wind picked up and died down again a moment later.
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Mysterious Shadowy Figure
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Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 5:42 pm
Icy wind blasted into Darby's face the next evening as he dragged himself up the mountain. Snow was falling heavily around him, and ice made footing treacherous on the steep slope of the ridge he was climbing. In a moment of respite from the biting wind several hours previous, Darby had by chance caught sight of a curious aurora cast onto a mountain, and traced the shafts of light to a strange ice formation some way up the mountain, refracting the light from the sun. Surprising as it might be to think that a king would trek up so far on his own, Darby was nonetheless mysteriously compelled to investigate the strange phenomenon. Hours of climbing had left him with ice hanging off his beard, soaked to the bone and freezing to his very core as he sidled carefully along a ridge just below the ledge on which the ice formation rested. He hacked in with his pick, and finally found enough of a handhold-- He pulled-- He strained-- He heaved himself forward-- He slid onto the ledge and lay panting on his stomach at the foot of the enormous crystal. It was indeed entirely made of ice, and the moment Darby laid eyes on it, his mind scrambled to make sense of it. It was tall, perhaps fifteen feet high, and the ice was perfectly clear, without even tiny bubbles trapped inside it-- how it grew this way was curious enough, but that it could be a frozen crystal of pure water was nearly inconceivable. The outside was straightforward enough, jutting up from the ground with branches sticking off it. What truly bent the mind was the inside. Spirals twisted and curved incomprehensibly inside it, outlines of deeper formations within the crystal formed patterns that Darby's eyes could not help tracing, even though his mind rebelled against them. By the time he tore his eyes from it, he could feel a terrible pounding behind his eyes, between his temples.. He swung his head aside, closing his eyes tight, then opened them slowly. The mouth of a large cave yawned at him from the rock-and-ice wall of the mountain, like a great dragon ready to swallow him. Another blast of wind howled against the mountain face though, and Darby hurried inside despite the terrible images that raced through his fevered mind. In the freezing cave, which was lit by the eerie glow of the light from the crystal outside reflecting off smooth ice walls, he found another shocking ice formation. This ice formation was not shocking in the same way that the previous one had been. Where the previous ice formation was shocking because of its shape and structure, this one had a very ordinary shape and structure by comparison. What was shocking was the thing trapped within it. The thing trapped within it was a man in fine clothing, wearing a circlet. He looked very solemn, almost as if he had fallen asleep standing up, and the ice had just sort of formed around him. Held under one arm was unmistakably a magic tome, in the other hand a long scepter. "Th' ice king," Darby murmured, suddenly realizing he had fallen on his butt. He scrambled up and stumbled forward across the icy floor to examine the trapped figure. He was ghostly pale, his skin a bluish white, and darker blue lines crept up his neck and onto his cheeks. He looked no older than thirty, but according to legend he had been frozen here for hundreds of years. Reflectively, Darby considered that that probably had something to do with his peculiar complexion. Darby was grateful that the king's eyes were closed-- he felt better about his mission without the king's eyes on him. He leaned forward, his breath rising visibly as vapor in the frigid air, and spotted the brooch he had been sent for, on the clasp of the king's cape. New vigor and warmth rushed into Darby's arms as he began to hack a hole in the ice with his pick. Hours passed as Darby chipped away at the block, making a hole wide enough in the six-inch ice for him to get his hand in. At last, he pulled off his glove and reached in... His fingers touched the king's brooch. He paused, then began to spread his fingers out to take hold of the silver clasp... The block of ice around the king exploded forcefully, driving massive shards of ice through Darby's chest, neck, and stomach. His corpse was thrown back against the cave wall, pinned up by the ice that had impaled him. He had no time to scream. The king stood in the middle of the chamber, freed from his frozen prison.
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Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 5:43 pm
Years and years, trapped in an icy coffin, and he had never once stirred. His dreams had faded, melding together over time and folding over themselves time and time again- rather than a tapestry that time wove, it had become a tangled mess that gave no meaning to all the time that had been spent weaving the mass. And yet, even those faded into a deep, serene gray haze that he had grown to embrace as a reality, and he let himself slip away from the harsh clock of time.
His skin, pale as death itself, felt nothing for many, many years. Time passed by like an outsider, never reaching into his icy confines to so much as caress his smooth skin. All it could do was move on, wrapping itself around his tomb of invulnerability and letting out a mournful sigh for the one man whose fate it could not touch.
And yet, despite all its power, it was not time who finally broke through the confines. Rather, a man- an indignant drunk, digging through the ice with nothing but greed and arrogance in his heart. The feeling of the pick pounding the ice did not so much as stir him- it was not until that searing heat of the man's finger, hesitantly brushing against his brooch that the icy king's mind first wakened from his slumber.
It's hot... Why?! This should not be!
The feel of those fingers, which felt hotter than fiery coals on his breast... it was almost more than he could bear. With the opening of his eyes, the king let out his first cry in centuries, and let his magic loose against his first victim in many, many years. He watched with a sense of anger as the man's body was forced back, no more than a bloody rag doll as it was thrown back against the wall. His face was virtually indiscernible- the large shards of ice held him in place while the smaller ones had all but sheared ribbons of skin away from his face, leaving it a steaming, crimson-smeared mess.
As he clutched his hands into fists, still catching his breath from where that hand had touched him, he looked at the man and then back down to his brooch.
How dare a mere peasant touch him. A man with no education, no semblance of intelligence, and most likely illiterate. The base worker of society, daring to touch him, a scholar and powerful sage who ruled these lands?
He was Leander. And he was king.
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