Border Crossing

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"You're late." Baralai Fairchild despised the rain, almost as much as he despised mages. He was waiting at one of the bridges that crossed the river that in turn divided the two largest kingdoms in their land. It was the same bridge where he had waited countless times. Templar or no, gold was gold, and this gold also got rid of troublesome mages.
"You want the gold or not?" A black clad man snarled as he jumped down gracefully from his equally black steed.
Baralai muttered something rather unbecoming of a Templar, then held a gloved hand out. "Gold first, then the cargo. Try anything..." He words were cut off as the mage he was transporting broke free of his restraints. It all happened so quickly that he didn't see the flash of lightning and the proud Templar was crashing into the raging river below.
Six months. It had been six months and the fallen Templar still woke in a cold sweat after dreaming of that night. The mage had rendered him immobile, though wide awake when he had plunged into the river, his heavy armour weighing him down until a pig farmer had dragged him from the river several miles away. It had taken months to get back to health and pay back the farmer for his kindness. In that time word had gotten out that Fairchild the Templar was a deserter.

Alice Gormanghast was scowling into the mirror. She hated this world she had been born into, even now as her maid pulled tightly on the laces of her dress she thought of nothing but a way to escape. Her brother's were all war heroes, famous to everyone in the kingdom for their brave deeds and triumph in defeating several of the dragons. But Alice... All she was known for was to be the prize her father handed over to the man he deemed brave enough to end the war altogether. She was the proverbial Princess in the tower, useful only for luring in prospective suitors. The young brunette didn't even realise her rose coloured lips were quirked into a slight smile 'if only they knew'. Indeed, her father would have a literal heart attack if he knew his prized daughter had secretly been learning how to shoot a bow and handle a sword. She lost herself for hours at an end in books that told of the thieves guild, and their mysterious leader who was sometimes known to have a higher moral code than the knights of their kingdom.

Blackbeard was watching Alice now, he could see her fighting against the dizziness that preceded passing out from blood loss. The pirate queen knew what was happening and she was still struggling back to her feet, intent on keeping Sharyn from taking Garrik away from her.
"Living with your people will be torture enough for him." The gruff pirate snorted finally.

Auron knew he should look away, but he didn't. He let his eyes trace over the bare skin as the elf made her way to the tub of steaming water. Kane wanted him to be the bad man, someone his enemies feared. Who was he to prove any different?

"My magic will keep him restful aND calm. It's something I could have done for you." Sharyn said darkly. "Deal with her. Goodbye, my love. "

"Look away from me." Yena snapped, getting into the water.

"Keeping him sedate and compliant ain't no life for the boy, lovely." Blackbeard warned. "If the girl even makes it, and agrees to surrender her status as Queen... I ain't gonna stop her coming for the boy."

"You gonna make me, kitten?" Auron mused, upgrading Yena from mouse to something a little more fearsome.

"It figures that you are too weak to kill her." Sharyn laughed. "You are aware the elf is still coming for you, right? Your hell is not ending any time soon?" She went to the edge of the deck and looked down into the water. It had been so long since she'd seen it. "In fact, my love, it is just beginning." Those words were the last Blackbeard would hear from the mermaid before the sea rose up and swallowed her up. 

"If you weren't keeping me from using my magic, of course I would." Yena growled, sliding down into the water and closing her eyes. Bear was gone. He was really gone. She couldn't even sense his heart beating in tune with hers anymore. There was nothing but darkness where that shard used to be. 
She kept her head under the water. If she never came up, it wouldn't matter. No one care. Her chest began to burn but it felt good. She deserved the pain. She deserved everything bad that happened to her.

Alice was stumbling to the edge of the ship as Garrik disappeared into the waves with his mother. The young woman would have been overboard, had Blackbeard not caught her by the back of her shirt like a naughty kitten. "Not now, princess... I'm wagerin' you ain't so good at holding yer breath right now."

Yena would suddenly find herself tipped out of the tub and onto the stone floor along with all the water. Auron was standing there wearing a grin with a boot on the upturned bathtub, a towel in his hand. "Can't have you going mermaid on me now, can I?"

The cabin boy took over, dragging Alice with him to the hold. "It's too bad about your boyfriend. Maybe you should have stayed with your brother when that dragon attacked." He laughed softly.

Yena lay on the floor for several minutes, gasping for breath. She grit her teeth when she realized that she wasn't going to die and then she began to scream. It was familiar to her. She'd done the same thing the night she'd lost control of herself and became the monster that killed an army.

That remark cost the cabin bot a fist to the nose. Weakened or not, Alice could still hit pretty hard. "You and your captain are going straight to the seabed when I get back to my fleet." She warned.

Auron allowed Yena to screem for several moments, then simply dropped the towel over her. "Sit there and scream, not that anyone here cares. When you're done, there are clothes on the bed, unless you prefer to parade around naked. Either way is fine by me."

"He's not my Captain, lovely." The young man said, blood sliding past his nose. He stepped forward and closed the hold door behind him, His eyes glittering with something that would be familiar to her. "At least not really. Tell me, sister dear. How have you been. And be honest. You aren't looking so very powerful. Not like you claimed a few short months ago at my palace." 

"Shut up." Yena muttered, her voice hoarse and angry. She sat up and pulled the towel over herself, glaring at him. "I'm going back to my homeland. This is no place for me here. I'm not welcome and I did what your king asked. There's nothing left for me."

Alice suddenyl backed up a step, her fingers pressing harder to the wound between her ribs. It wasn't possible. It couldn't be him, this fool was just playing a cruel trick on her. "There were a lot of people at that palace, many people heard everything I said to that bastard." She remarked. "You're just some fool who thinks he can trick me."

"You think they would have you?" Auron asked. "The dragon that killed an army? That burned half a forest down? You really think your people, who live within the trees, would accept that kind of liability?"

"All of them belonged to you. None of them were part of Blackbeard's crew were they? And certainly none of them knew what I did to you that night in the carriage. Did they?" The young man purred. "You pleaded with me to stop. Screamed at me even. The sound was so lovely. Tell me, would this new lover have tried to save you? I doubt it." 

"I said my homeland. Not my people." Yena corrected. "No one wants me. Even before I became the dragon."

No matter how hard she tried to conceal it, the terror was right there in Alice's sapphire eyes. She allowed Kane to violate her, simply to save Anaris, and it had all been for nothing in the end. "Get to your point." She told this manifestation of her brother icily. "I don't have time for this."

"You think you know everything, don't you?" Auron snorted. "Have you ever even tried, or do you enjoy playing the part of the wounded outsider?"

"What are you going to do? Hobble away from me? Try to stop me? Don't be silly, sister dear. You're not going any where but then again...neither am I. At least not until I've had my fill of fun and it's been oh so long since I've had any fun." The cabin boy purred.

"My people used to laugh and throw mud at me. They called me the little pig girl. Dragon born they said. I was not sorry when they threw me to the wolves one night." Yena admitted.

Alice was not the headstrong, but scared little girl she had been when Kane violated her. She had been forced to grow up fast, and to learn rather quickly to kill or be killed. Her hands were bloody all on their own now. "I don't know where your body is right now, but here you're nothing. My fleet would crush you without breaking a sweat... you always were over confident, your majesty." She spat those last words with all the hatred she had allowed to build up inside of her these months. She wasn't Kane's victim, not anymore. Alice had made the choice that he was simply another life she needed to crush on the battlefield.

"Then tell me how you're alive." Auron replied simply, taking a seat on the bed to watch Yena. "Surely a little girl couldn't survive being tossed to the wolves, not unless she was stronger than she liked people to believe."

"How much more confident can I get? I have the Dragon's heart. I am able to walk between the veil. I even have your First mate. What more do I need? Hell, I am poised to take over the world. There is nothing stopping me now. Nothing standing in my way. You can't stop me. Your little plan to use Blackbeard and an elf against me failed. You've lost. You always lose. Just like when we were kids. Go cry to your mirror and pretend mummy hears you like the old days. She doesn't. Trust me. There's no one listening. Only me. And I don't care. I only like it when you are beneath me...screaming." Kane advanced on her, the cabin boy's lips curled into a cruel smile that was much like his own. "Shall we reminisce, my dear?"

"You know how I'm still alive." Yena said, yanking the shirt he'd given her over her head and then pulling the leather pants up over her too lean hips. She was little more than skin and bones. "Judging by that pale scar you are trying to hide under your tunic you were there the night I turned into a dragon. I have been testing the skill for a while. The first time was the night they threw me to the wolves. I was so hungry then that...that I...I ate them..." She confessed, turning her head so he would see the shame in her eyes.

It took all her bravery in that moment, but Alice didn't back away. She looked up into the face of the body Kane controlled and smiled herself. "You can;t be that powerful, if you can't even feel that my mother isn't even in the Black City. She isn't dead, she just gave up."

"Not all of them." Auron told Yena rather quietly. "You ate the adults, when all they were doing was protecting their home, their young." He added, not seeming quite so much like the cocky mountain of muscle he usually was.

"Oh I know." Kane said, his smile widening. "Our dearly departed father knew exactly where she was being kept. She had the most lovely cage. You were right about your mother being able to hear you." He chuckled. "Listen...I have to go. My present has arrived. My dragon didn't fail me. I just wanted you to know that you lost. As usual." 

Yena wrapped her arms around herself, her insides feeling like they were on fire. She'd never gotten over the guilt and the giant guard wasn't helping. "Don't you have soldiers to yell at?"

Oddly, Alice smiled even more. Her brother had a dragon, and still didn't know that his little sister was a dragon tongue. The pirate queen wanted to assume it was the same dragon she had previously met, but she wasn't going to. Hell, if she wanted, she could call out to every dragon in the land and convince every one of them to fight her corner. First things first, however, she had a mermaid pain in her ass to find.

"Nope." Auron replied rather flippantly. "Wolves are pack animals, do you have any idea what it is like to have the very ones who were supposed to teach you everything suddenly ripped apart in front of you? To have to live with no pack to care for their young?"

Above her Blackbeard's crew had begun to move the ship. His orders were clear. They had been found. He didn't want it to happen again.

"No and I don't care." Yena whispered. "My people wanted me to die. They were probably waiting and watching in the trees. That pain is lost on me."

Alice could feel the sway of the ship and wasn't about the protest it. She needed the ship on the move if she was to find Garrik again. But her injury was finally too much for her. The young pirate queen would be found slumped on the floor of the hold.

This finally forced Auron to his feet. "I don't care how much you hate your mother... I will make her suffer for what you did to mine." He vowed with a hiss in her ear before stomping to the door.

Garrick sat across the table from his father, his head hurting and his chest on fire. He wasn't sure how he'd gotten here. The last thing he remembered was dying. Opening his eyes to stinging death. But now here he was and being told that his beloved Pirate queen was the one dead and not him. 

"Someone should give you a cookie, here off. You're doing a bang up job so far." Yena hissed, glaring at his back.

"Aye, sad thing it was. Poor thing fell overboard in the storm, never saw her again." Blackbeard could be heard telling his son before he picked up a tankard of ale and took a large gulp.

"You're a creature. Calling you an animal would be an insult to lives of the wolves you killed." Auron told Yena rather darkly over his shoulder.

"And I'm supposed to believe you?" Garrik asked, tasting the bitter sea in the back of his throat. "You'd say anything to keep us from taking you to my mother."

Yena didn't say anything more. Herself worth was extremely low. She simply returned to the bed and laid down, pulling her knees to her chest.

Blackbeard grinned and took a gulp of his drink. "You'd rather convince yourself she just left you behind?"

Auron wasn't his usual self that night. He was somewhat sombre as he skulked around the kitchen, looking for ale that wasn't warm.

Sadly Garrik knew he couldn't argue that Alice would never leave him behind because she had tried to before. Silently he stared at the cup of ale in front of him, almost tempted to drink it. 

Yena wasn't far behind him, her stomach churning. No longer being in the Fafe, her stomach was awake and she could no longer ignore it.

"What's stopping yer, boy?" Blackbeard asked after a few moments of watching Garrik. "Drink and she wont exist anymore, either way, left or dead, the pain is gone."

Auron was hunched over the thick wooden table in the kitchen, in the dark, he had downed a bottle of ale already, not that it yet showed in his massive frame.

"I'm not like you and your crew and that's exactly what this would turn me into." Garrik said evenly. It was something about the dark ale that set off warning bells in his stomach. "I'm not sure why you'd even want me to be. I've proven myself extremely worthless, sir."

Yena ignored the man as she raided the cabinets like a mouse who had found cheese. She was helping herself to some of the preserved meat when she bumped into his warm and pliable form. She did her best to remain calm, knowing that getting panicked would help nothing.

Blackbeard simply shrugged. "Drink, don't drink. Just thought it might numb yer pain a bit, boy." He remarked, taking more of his own drink.

Yena wouldn't get away so easily. Large hands grabbed hold of her and pulled her down into Auron's lap. "I thought mice were supposed to be quiet?" He murmured.

Garrik shook his head and pushed away the ale. "It's not going to change anything." He said softly. "But I appreciate the attempt. Give me something to do. It works better than whiskey for me." 

"And I thought you were going out to bully some poor helpless soldiers." Yena said softly. "Why are you in here, drinking like a coward."

"What is it you think you can do?" Blackbeard asked rather bluntly. "Coudln't save or keep the girl, couldn't take me back to your elf bitch mother, hell... you couldn't even fight my men off."

Auron's large fingers grew rather tight on Yena's hips for a long moment before he suddenly pushed her away. "Coward... You would know that word better than anyone." He sneered before returning to his ale. "The mighty dragon... able to tear a family to pieces, but not stop one silly human from staking a claim to the world."

Garrik looked away from the elder man, his words hitting him right where it hurt the most. He was right. There was no use in denying it. "She deserves better." He whispered. "Not the half breed son of a drunken pirate. She is a princess after all." He reached across the table and grabbed for the ale. He didn't notice the unnatural way it burned as it went down, not even when he dropped the glass and wiped at the remainder from his lips. "Screw you, old man." He hissed. "The elf was never my mother. She was the bitch you sold me to when you where too afraid to deal with what I was becoming." 

"Of course I didn't stop him." Yena said, catching herself before she tumbled into a tray of cheeses. Ironic for his nickname of her. "Why would I? I want the bastard to destroy the humans. They deserve their fate. They are murderers and liars. All of them. No better than my own kind. I will help him burn the world if I must. I have nothing to live for. And I am not sorry for what I did. Your family tried to kill me. I was defending myself."