RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

Twinflame · **12-25-2013, 12:49 PM**

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3rd Umbral Moon, Year 5 of the 7th Umbral Era

Four and one half years after Calamity

Mitari paused in his steps. Even in the freezing cold that numbed his sense and body, he could smell the thick aroma of blood. Of fighting. Of dragons. He had come back to the keep, yet again. Whenever he was lost, he always seemed to come back to that place. Even when they had treated him poorly for the most part. Even when they refused to listen to his new name or teach him anything or even recognize he was a damn boy half the time (Some of the people thought it was funny and gave him women's clothing a lot), he came back here. It was hell... but it was also home. And to see through the blizzard scales and lances, Mitari felt something ache painfully in his chest.Â

Grasping at his lance he charged through the snow, hoping to join the fray before it was too late. 'Lyri...!' he thought somewhat desperately. She was an asshole, but she was probably in danger. And for all her bullshit she had helped him out more than she knew. (He especially liked the lances he had stolen from her trashbin and some of her clothing and such as well, spoilt brat that she was.)

Great cries and men in half-worn armor fought, staining the snowy ground black and red with their blood. Mitari came upon the keep in a frightful state, his eyes falling immediately upon the dragon half-embeded into the keep's stone walls. He cursed beneath his breath and ran faster. He could jump, but not as the others could. He had no soul stone of his own to draw power from, and thus could only rely on his own strenght to muscle through the line of heretics that stood in his way.Â

With a great cry, the thin but muscular male swathed in black and purple armor tore a line through the back of the heretics, burning lance ripping through scale and armor alike. His head was covered by a turban, and his eyes shielded by a mask. It was far too cold and white for him to see well without it, and even he knew that looking directly into the eye of a 'heretic' or a dragon would be good cause to get himself even further ostracized.Â

At the center of the Keep was a tower, and every window in the tower had been broken out the first time the dragon had crashed its great body into it. The Midichante patriarch stood in the ruins of one of the windows, lance in hand, but armor unworn. The attack had come so suddenly that he had been able to give no orders to the soldiers before the gates had broken and the walls themselves had been surmounted. Heretics charging out of the blizzard, madmen wearing the frostbite like they wore their cursed necklaces, had brought bloodshed to his home.

His old eyes narrowed as the dragon arched towards his perch, and his thin hands gripped his lance tightly. There was no mistaking his intention.

Lyrique Midichante pulled her father out of the window roughly, depositing him on the floor. She chided him, "You're too old to fight and too young to die. Brother's not ready to take over the family just yet."

His fury was unmistakable, but even from such a slight topple, he'd lost his grip on his lance. Concern overrode his anger as he rolled to his knees. "Lyrique. Don't look in their eyes! Their scales-!"

"I know, father," she said, put one plated boot on the windowsill and launched herself out. Lyrique flew like a harpoon at the passing dragon. Her armor was decorated with gold-capped spikes and number of superfluous glass gems of her own addition, which caught the ambient light but failed to warn the dragon in time. She dug her lance into its hide behind one arm, drawing a groan from its maw and causing it to flail in the air.

She was dislodged when it threw itself up against the tower, her lance coming free and trailing dark, unholy blood behind it. Lyrique arched her back to control her fall, but even so, the roof of an outlying building struck her shoulder and the side of her head. Or, really, she just landed that way, and she plowed through a number of cross-beams before she was able to get her lance in front of her.

Lyrique's momentum threw her clear of the roof and into the keep's main wall. She landed with her feet and one hand against the wall, crouching parallel to the ground. She hung there for a moment before dropping into the courtyard. Â A great deal of her red hair had shuffled forward in her helmet during her fall and now fell over her eyes, so she removed her helmet and shook her hair to see. This was just in time to notice the heretic that was coming straight at her like an oversized crossbow bolt.

Mitari's eyes searched through snow and bodies and dragons for a haughty woman, much taller than him with flaming hair. Mitari's eyes caught her hair, and his nose caught her scent beneath the thick smell of battle. In a strange way, she was a friend to him. Sort of. Maybe. In any case, he knew that he did not want her to die.Â

He saw her form, and the raving heretic running towards her.Â

"Lyrique!" Mitari bellowed before jumping as high as he could into the air and tossing his lance with all his might. The lance soared true and impaled the heretic into the ground at her feet, blood pooling. Landing somewhat clumsily, Mitari shoulder tackled his way towards her again, mostly to retreive his weapon.

Stepping back as blood splattered onto her feet, Lyrique pulled her hair back and put her helmet back on her head. Seemed her hair was out to get her killed. The helm masking her face was painted over with the many-pronged sigil of Midichant, so that the symbol seemed to replace her features. Tufts of red hair still poked out of its fringes.

Moving forward, she took the strange, burning lance from the body and considered it. A magical weapon. Where had-?

A roar too bestial to come from any throat but a heretic's, more unholy than even that of the dragons, drew her eyes upward. Dark elezen forms flew briefly through the air overhead, vaulting the keep's walls as though they were jumping over a fallen branch. Not once did the feet of the heretics touch the ground, colliding instead with the walls of the keep's inner tower and clinging there as though by talon and claw.

She bit down on her teeth painfully. Corrupt Dragoons. Betrayers. Between they and the dragon, the walls might as well not even be there. She counted four and hoped there weren't any more.

Mitari skidded to a halt in front of Lyri and grapsed for his lance from her hands. He too, had seen the dark elezen forms flying over head and crashing into the keep's inner tower. There was no time to explain his return if she even cared or recognized him. The keep was in trouble. There were so many too...Â

Even with all of the well trained dragoons, Mitari knew an invasion this size was going to mean being wiped out. If nothing else, he wanted to save Lyri and her family. As much of them and their history and records as possible. That was something Â he knew was important. Even if Lyri's family never accepted him, he found their history and family a very important thing.Â

"Lyrique!" Mitari called again as he looked to her, face obscured by the visor attached to his turban. "Go! I'll cover your back!"

The sigil of Midichant turned towards Mitari, and was silent for a brief moment. Then she reached out in a quick motion an knocked the visor up off of his eyes, her clawed gauntlets flicking close to his face. She leaned her head back and looked down at him from behind the mask on her helmet . "U'daenia"

Mitari stood akwardly for a second, his brows knitting together while she stared at him. What was it? He looked the same he always did. Still pathetically girly. And if she was going to call him a girl again, she was going to get a lance up her damn ass until she figured it out.

"Don't stare, move!" He snapped, pushing his visor back down and gripping his lance harder. "More important things than me to worry about! Go!" Mitari hissed, turning around to punch a heretic in the face with a gloved hand and send him sprawling on the ground.

Lyrique Midichant pushed against Mitari, hard, throwing his lance against him and throwing him away from her, heedless of the heretics. "Watch you tone with me!" She barked, suddenly furious.Â

Mitari let out a forced breath as Lyrique shoved him away with his lance, pushing the metal weapon hard into his chest. It took a moment to get his barrings and stagger upright again before he ran into someone's blade or something. When he had collected himself and looked back to Lyrique, he scowled and barred his teeth. What the fuck was that for? She was a collassal bitch, but even that was uncalled for.Â

"And don't think you are worthy to 'watch my back'!"

Oh yes. Of course. He had to roll his eyes beneath his visor. The Pretty Pretty Princess of Dragoons couldn't have a lowly miq'ote orphan watching her perfectly scupted ass. Right.

She pointed at the tower, where the dragon circled and the heretical Dragoons were disappearing through the open windows. "Those corrupt Dragoons need to die or what's happening here will occur elsewhere. Still want to be a Dragoon, U'taneh? If you can kill even one of them I just might make you a knight!"

And kill just one? He was going to smother that bitch in the bodies of all the heretics he killed today

Her red lips flashed a smile at the boy, though it was crooked with some concealed emotion. She crouched on the ground and then launched herself into the air, trailing a flurry of snow and dirt behind her. She left Mitari in the courtyard and landed on a distant parapert adjacent the main tower.

Mitari muttered angry curses as she jumped away, just to show off no doubt. "Lyrique!" He yelled back angrily at her. He had a comeback for her, but the wit died in his mouth as he looked across the courtyard for another way to get across and up the tower. Ah yes. Through a sea of raging fights and heretics. Well. There was only one way through.Â

Mitari pulled his lance tight to his body and took up a running stance. He was going to charge straight through the damn line and swekwer the heretics in his way. And hopefully miss the innocents fighting. Although telling the difference was difficult sometimes.Â

On the tower, Lyrique took the briefest of moments to linger on one knee, bent with her face to the ground. She wasn't gong to let anyone see her terror. Imagined images of her father's corpse flickered in her mind, her siblings and friends executed in the cold. The keep had fallen so quickly, she never would have imagined it. Corrupt Dragoons. She frantically wiped the heretic blood from her boot, a meaningless gesture.

She could die today. Her father and her siblings could die. The line of Midichante could fall into the pit of history.

Fear or no fear, though, she tightened her grip on her lance until her fingers hurt and stood. Then she flew, the windows of her home greeting her coldly. Inside there were heretics, Dragoons whose skills may exceed her own, and she would either slay each of them, or she would die.

"Get outta my way!" Mitari roared, lunging forward with a burst of speed. It was more difficult than he thought, and by the first skewered heretic he had to stop and bash the man's face in with his elbow to actually kill him. Then came the task of getting the body off his lance, while simultaneous trying not to get stepped on and murdered by everyone around him. It wasn't going well, but he managed to finally get the body off and beat off the rest of those who were attacking him.Â

This time he tried a slightly more stealthy approach, crawling through the tangled bodies and legs until he got to the door and used his lance like a baseball bat to smash the head of the men at the door and knock them out of the way.Â

Inside the tower wasn't much better off. In fact, maybe it was worse because the whole thing seemed to be crumbling with bodies and heretics and minor dragons littering the stairs.Â

"Fuckkkk." He groaned loudly, grunting as a small dragon charged at him. Mitari braced himself and skidded backwards against the wall as he was hit. He was already scuffed and cut and bruised in a lot of places from the act of getting to the tower, but now climbing the billion stairs against all of these? He was probably going to die. But with that in mind he steeled himself and shoved his hand forward, grasping at the dragon's eye and pulling it. It caused enough pain to make the dragon wail and stagger back, and enough time for Mitari to skewer it through its soft underbelly.Â

He glanced up the staircase and kicked the dragon off his lance. Only a billion more to go until the top.

The cartographer was nowhere to be seen. Lyrique crouched to the floor and scooped up fallen maps, stained with black and red blood, ripped and creased. Her hands felt numb and distant, the action thoughtless. She wasn't completely conscious of the act. The maps were beautiful, intricate both mathematically and artistically, organized by topography, geography, ecology. The feverish work of the cartographer, to catalog once more every inch of Coerthas' new face in the wake of Calamity, lay abandoned like worthless scribbling.

It made her ill. More than the fear and the death, this struck her with bizarre ferocity. She was dizzy and pale, and she could see the maps quivering in her unstable hands. Lyrique stacked them neatly open the angled drawing table, then lay the scattered quills and pens straight.

On a nearby desk, a statuette of a scholar whom the cartographer revered lay broken atop a splash of black blood. It looked like a broken body at the bottom of a crevice carved through the Highlands.

Was the cartographer alive, or had she made it out alive? What of her father and siblings? How many of her attendants could she imagine surviving? Why was she listing the names of the servants in her head like a casualty report? Since when did she even know the names of the servants?

Lyrique Midichant threw herself to her right so forcefully that the bricks in the wall cracked upon her impact. Her armor still bore scratches from the lance she'd barely evaded, a dark weapon that ripped through the room and shattered the cartographers' workplace. Splinters of wood clattered against the ceilings and walls, and torn pieces of maps -- each particle of ink invaluable -- fell over her like confetti at a parade ground. There was laughter, too: a dark chuckle.

"Oh no. I've made a mess." The humored voice of a madman slithered into the room. One of the four heretic Dragoons she'd seen earlier swaggered into the light, snow dappling his pale features. His skin was too cold to melt the snow. It was as though he were dead.

Lyrique pulled her spiked body free from the wall and point her lance at him, strands of hair sitting over her red lips beneath the sigil of Midichant upon her mask. The woman absolutely glittered with gold filigrees and gemstones. "You will never have another day past this one. Repent and your soul may find peace on the morrow."

"Hm," pale lips smirked at her from behind a mask laden with scars. "You think you are worthy to challenge me? Minor noble of a minor house. We all take the dragons in for a fragment of power. How much more powerful am I than you, then, for my life is the dragons'? Would you like to see how much I have taken in?"

She answered directly, "Yes I would."

The room shattered around them.

Amidst the rubble of broken walls and snow swirling in the air, Lyrique Midichant stood with the man's helm in her hands, his mutilated body at her feet. The gold filigrees had become covered in blood, dark, unholy. She couldn't wash it off.

"One," she counted, "leaving only three." And she went through the door through which the Heretic Dragoon had come.

Mitari snarled as he slammed his way into the room, several dragons pierced through his lance before pinning them to the wall. He spent the next several minutes beating them to death with his fists before sinking to the floor in a pant. He looked bad already. Bleeding and open wounds throughout his body. His armor wasn't doing as much as he'd like, and it had ripped over in several places to expose wounds to the cold and dragon blood and what not.Â

The tower shook heavily as there seemed to be fighting still above him. Mitari looked up and got to his feet, glancing around the blood soaked room he was in. He was never going to beat Lyri to the top. Not that it mattered.Â

Shoving his foot into the pile of dragons, he pulled out his lance with a mighty effort and took a moment to catch his breath.Â

"Right... just... another... million stairs to the top..." Mitari groaned again and started up the stairway in a run.

The foyer of her father's seat of power was a broad, open room with windows on all sides, two stairways entering from below and two leaving above, a number of pillars, and a monument to Halone. The room took up an entire floor of the tower. Gold-lined bronze was erected in the center of the room, a shield on a stand with three ornate spears standing on end behind it. Chains of gold and cut glass draped over and between them, blowing in the wind, flickering with light. Glass decorated the floor, bright with reflected snow and fire. Every window was broken, and drifts of snow lay against the bronze monument.

"Halone does not hear the prayer of heretics," Lyrique Midichante's words sounded like they'd been forged in a kiln concealed behind her ribs, echoing empty through the steel mask she wore. Cracked glass beads hung from her shoulders by gold chains. Dented ornaments over her body made her look like a monument to Halone herself, the skin of her face carved from white marble, her red lips artfully paints.

The heretic dropped his hands from their posture of prayer, put them on the ground before him, bent so his forehead touched the bronze shield. The skin of a heretic upon the monument a sick image that did not linger. He stood suddenly, but did not turn when he said, "My family tells a tale of an ancestor of mine, a Dragoon so devoted to Halone that the dragons could not corrupt him. He had three arms, and used three lances. But I think..."

Lyrique walked forward with a measured pace, slow and silent, her lance held to one side. Its point was sharper than the bite of cold.

The heretic spun on her, "I think Halone was holding him back!" and drove his lance towards her.

Her only response was to press that sharp point of lance away, nudging it gently to the side and sliding her blade down the shaft of his weapon. There was a great screech of metal on metal, a few sparks in the snow. She was hoping to take his fingers, but the heretic aborted his attack when it stabbed only the air beside her head, and when she pressed her blade forward he leapt away from her.

Hanging from the ceiling like a taloned beast, the heretic Dragoon said, "How much greater could my ancestor have been? If he had disregarded Halone and fully embraced the dragons?"

Lyrique jumped backwards, not wanting to linger beneath her enemy. There was a flurry of snow when she landed near an open window, flakes dancing about her as gold and glass swayed and sparkled. "I've heard that story," she said calmly, with heat, "Told by the head of the Tidarei family. I will drag your corpse before you father that he should know your blasphemy and make reparations on your behalf."

The heretic tore one of the bronze-and-gold lances from the monument with a clatter of decorative chains and glass. He held it in his off hand, a strange contrast to his bleak armor and dead appearance. The curl to his lips was not sane. "I will exceed my ancestor. The future descendants of Tidarei will tell my legend to their children."

A great shadow passed over Lyrique as the dragon circled outside. She glanced at it, but it was hunting something else. "House Midichante has a tale as well," she said, turning her green eyes back to the heretic. "My ancestor had six arms."

"And you!" The heretic Dragoon bellowed as he charged her, "Will have none!"

Glass was torn up from the floor and broken anew.

Shards of glass and gold decorated the ceiling like quartz in a cave when they were done. The shield on the monument in the center of the room was shattered, but all three of the gold-adorned lances stood point-down in the chest and gut of the heretic, their shafts swaying in the air. The heretic dragoon's corpse did not move, turned black with its own blood. Its shoulders ended in limbless stubs.

"I can only count to two on your weak arms," said Lyrique Midichante as she kicked the man's dismembered limbs out a broken window, into the courtyard. "But that's high enough. Because there's only two of you left."

"This is... total... fucking... chocobo shit..." Mitari panted, the sounds of raging battle above him. No doubt Lyri outdoing him. Not that it was really important for him to be the hero of this battle. He'd done enough already, rescuing a few small children and helping the elderly and injured out of the castle and down to the cellars for safety. But that also meant running up and down the stairs hauling people and occasionally kicking the shit out of the lesser heretics and dragons on the way. Mitari was, rather proud of his accomplishments so far but...

The staircase to the upper portion of the tower on the fifth floor was shattered. And that left Mitari was one option.Â

Which was scaling the wall using his lance and another fallen lance he picked from the ground and a dead body. A lance he was planning on keeping, of course. It was a really nice lance actually...

Swinging himself up and around, he managed to perch on his own lance before stabbing the second one into the wall again. He jumped forward and hung off the second lance, grabbing his own and hauling it out of the wall before repeating the process.

"Chocobo shit!" He cursed loudly again. "And I know what that fucking smells like damn it! Would you people just give me a damn gem already!?"

Her father lay on the stairs, his armor broken. It was a sad mirror of the way she had left him -- why had she left him? -- when she'd gone to attack the dragon. He'd moved, it seemed, but he'd never made it off the stairs.

Something inside of Lyrique broke, and she could feel herself bend as though she'd lost all support. Her lance was suddenly too have for her hands, and she heard it hit the steps, and then stumbled stupidly over it and hit her knees. She clambered forward like a cripple, watching drops of water fall on the inside of her helm, teardrops dangling from the facemask where her family's crest was emblazoned.

"Father," she heard herself say. "Dad!" She was at the old man's side. He wasn't dead, but he wasn't moving either, and his eyes looked like they weren't seeing anything. There was blood underneath him. Was it his?

"I'm trying to keep count!" A strange voice said.

Lyrique looked up in time to see the point of a lance coming at her, and she put up a hand in instinctive, ineffectual defense. The offending blade caught in the crease of her gauntlet, though, and while she felt something inside her hand break and watched the filigrees on her arm snap outward as her gauntlet warped, she stiffened her arm to hold the blade away from her.

"Seven! Six! Five! How many of you am I killing?!"

Her thin body was slammed against the steps, and she felt them break beneath her. Snow and gray debris filled her vision, clouding her sight of the maddened face that was screaming at her. "Seventy-five! Fifty-seven!"

Her head collided with her own dropped lance, and her hand reached out to catch it just as it was about to be knocked out the nearby window. Wordless and thoughtless, she brought it in front of her and swung outward. The heretic dragoon's chainmail gave way, but Lyrique's gauntlet gave way at the same time. Bent metal crushed her wrist as lukewarm innards poured out of the heretics body and onto her own. The dark blade crashed into the stones next to her face, a millimeter from cutting her ear off, and Lyrique could feel the subtle shift of hair freed from her head.

"No more than seven!" Shouted the dying, maddened dragoon, blood frothing on his teeth. "Midichante. Every last one of you! I can't keep count."

"I can," Lyrique said, her voice shaking with adrenaline and pain. She held her arm against her chest like a diseased limb. "There were four of you. Now there is only one."

"Midichante!"

Lyrique left the corpse on the stairs alongside a few drops of her own blood, a line of it running down her chin from a cut on her face. Her lance on her back, she knelt by her father and turned the man over. "Dad?" He did not respond, but he continued to breathe. She put one shoulder under his arm and her good hand around his chest, and began to drag him up the stairs. His legs were stained red with blood. Her legs were stained black with other, dark, unholy blood.

Finally. Mitari huffed as he clambered up the last bits of broken stairs. Finally to the damn. fucking. top. of the fucking tower. Who BUILT these like this? Elezen were so dumb sometimes... all the time. Ugh.Â

The not dragoon wiped the sweat from his brow as he rounded the dark corridor, two lances in his hands. He paused in the doorway, a dark black armored male somehow blocking his path. It seemed to be watching something... Mitari stealthily glanced past towards whatever the thing was watching. He caught the sight of a not so well looking Lyri and held his breath.Â

There was a sickening laugh from the figure in front of him and Mita scowled. With a swift movement, he pushed both the lances through at the weakest point in the jointed armor and felt the satisfying movement of lance embedding into flesh.

"Oh shut up." Mia grumbled, kicking the dying body forward and stepping over it. He moved towards Lyri to catch her attention, but the body wasn't done. A clawed hand grasped his leg and he helped as what was once an elezen heretic morphed sickeningly into a thick scaley dragon. Which Mitari was now being held by.Â

"Fucking really!?" Mitari hissed loudly, scrambling to reaching a lance and trying to yank it out of the body. It was very well embedded, but that also made it hard to pull out. As the dragon grew in size and toppled over the tower in its wake, Mitari did his best not to get knocked out by falling rocks and get his lance out of the damn thing's back.

Lyrique Midichant asked herself why she was carrying her father up the tower. She didn't know. There was nowhere to take him. She was too weak from her injuries to jump from the tower with him in hand, and she doubted her chances at getting to the bottom of the tower with him either. Nor would she simply leave him to die. So she carried him.

A large chunk of rubble fell where she'd been standing a moment before, and Lyrique sagged from the effort of dodging it. She let her father slip from her shoulder, laying him on the floor, and turned wearily to face the dragon that writhed behind her. She felt herself slaw, jaw ajar. Exhaustion pulled at her in the wake of adrenaline, but as she took her lance from her back and gripped it in her good hand,s he felt the adrenaline beginning to renew itself. The pain in her fractured wrist began to subside.

Another piece of weaponized debris flew at her immobile father, and Lyrique spun to intersect it with her lance, smashing it to harmless bits that pelted her and the Midichante patriarch. She launched herself through the cloud of snow and stone at the dragon, and the force of her body alone broke bones inside the beast's chest. Her lance was embedded meters into the hideous body, so deep that the hand gripping it was inside of the gore.

She twisted her lance and pushed off the dragon with the same force, spinning as she did. Her lance ripped out at a crooked angle and threw blood blood, scales, gore and chips of dragon bone. Whatever she ripped out must have been important, because the beast fell still afterwards, and it began to slide out of the tower, pulled by its own weight.

Lyrique stood panting in the center of a hideous circle of dark blood that looked like it had been painted on the floor and walls by a great brush. She hadn't even noticed Mitari was there.

Mitari wasn't even sure what was happening other than trying to get his lance out of the damn dragon's body before it crushed him. But by the time he finally got his lance out, the dragon seemed to have fallen dead and was half-crushing him anyway. He let out a loud snarl as his ribs felt like they broke.Â

"Fucking... god fucking damn these fucking dragons..." He hissed, pushing off the dragon's corpse and pulling himself out from beneath it with his lance.

When the dragon's corpse shifted, Lyrique jumped away from it, landing in a splash of gore near her father with her lance pointed at the dragon.

"What the fuck..." he grumbled again, staring at the ceiling for a moment to try and breathe again. Just a moment of respite, and hopefully he wasn't about to get stabbed by something else.

The cursing clued Lyrique in, though, and she let her lance lilt to the floor as she watched Mitari lay himself out on the floor. "U'ta... U'tanei," she said after a moment, breathless and weak.

"U'tania. But it's Mitari now." He corrected, still in a deadpan voice, before looking over to the source of the sound. So he FINALLY caught up with Lyri. She looked to be in shitty shape as well, so he was glad he wasn't the only person in terrible condition. With a grunt he pulled himself up and had to struggle with breathing for a short while.

With a huff, Lyrique forced herself to stand full. She stood her lance tall on its end at her side and let her other hand hang useless just slightly behind her. Gold and glass still shone on much of her chest and shoulders, but she was mostly broken and stained black. Battered and exhausted and still short of breath, snow landing in pits torn in her armor and on bits of hair that stuck out of her helmet, Lyrique at least managed to hold a proper posture.

"U'denia," she said, this time in a firmer tone, "You need to take my father." She gestured with her broken hand to the old man, laying motionless nearby.

"U'tania. Call me Mitari." More deadpan corrections. Still, as he struggled to stand and breath he glanced over to Lyri. So proud even when she was half beaten down. But, that's just the way she had always been. As for her father.

"Alright. I'm on it. Where should I take him? I took the others to the cellars." He questioned, limping over towards her and her father.

"That's fine," she said, and walked a short distance away so that Mitari could approach her father while keeping a prerequisite distance from her. "There's one more heretic Dragoon and that dragon of theirs. If I can kill them then maybe we can retake the keep."

Her mind was alight with questions, even through the pain adn adrenaline and fear. All the more because of them, in fact. This keep was of minor strategical importance, so what was the point in taking it? They would never hold it for long if the Holy See reacted as it should and staged a counter-offensive. Where had the heretic Dragoons come from, and why were they acting the way they were? Moreover, where the man Dragoons that should have been in the keep to defend them, pleadged to the Midichante family? Why was Lyrique the only one present?

"Once I'm done with them I'll go get help." She uttered mournfully, the idea of leaving the keep for so much as an instant filling her very bones with fire. "A unit of Dragoons passed through the keep yesterday and I should be able to find them."

"You already found us," said the bleak man as his feet struck the stone floor so hard the entire tower seemed to buckle beneath him. The man's armor was unmistable, but his flesh looked frozen and dead. He uncurled like a beast taking perch instead of a man that just feel from the sky. "There's no helpfor you outside of this keep, Midichante."

"U'tani! Get my father!" Lyrique shouted, ducking her head and launching herself at the last of the heretic Dragoons without hesitation or delay.

The Orphan and the Lady Midichant [story, Ishgard pre-ARR, ooc welcome]

RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes