18.4 To Be a Hero
General Summary
Day 223
We spend a full day resting in the shade while Zidi and Caravel continue to recover. It takes nearly the whole day to catch Caravel up on everything that has happened since arrived here. He tells me that Mistress would be so proud of me for everything that has happened and that she always said I would end up as a Hand one day. Part of me thinks that ‘ends up’ is optimistic for how things seem to be going. More and more it seems like the world has a specific path for me and I doubt I will retire from duty having finished with the title of Hand.
And now Caravel asks for my directions. I think I’ll send him to Dreamfall where he can recover (though Camellia makes a good point about bringing him to the Northern Grove where there will be healers).
For now, at Camellia’s advice, he, Zidi, and all the apprentices will remain camped here while the rest of us go on ahead to Afan and circle back to let Torrick and Puddle escort them back to the Armed Nation.
In the evening we listen to Caravel’s stories around the campfire. Thankfully he leaves out some of the more embarrassing parts of my early career, though there are certainly parts of these stories I hadn’t heard before!
Day 224
Our smaller party moves onwards towards Afan but are caught off guard by plumes of blackened smoke coming from the canyon as we approach. From the lip of the canyon we see a party going on with drums and celebrations raging - tuskan, atir, dwarves, troll and fae dancing together. The only elf present is a young girl only a few decades older than Zidi. She stands at one end of the canyon with a small dragon curled protectively around her...almost exactly like the one Caravel described.
Alder and I approach her while the other three split up and speak to some of the celebrants to gather information. As soon as the girl sees me she dashes forwards and crushes me in a hug, stammering surprise that she’s not alone anymore. At arm’s length I take a good look at her and nearly laugh aloud. It’s Zidi’s sister. The resemblance is striking, and I can see even more why Bran called her a fatebreaker.
She tells us that a bunch of people with collars found her about seven days and brought here to be collared as well. The short man who collared her spent several nights molesting her and left her in the outdoor pens during the day. When she saw the dragon (Crag) being treated cruelly as well she made a point to slip over to him and speak to him. She realized that the collars were the source of everyone’s obedience so she just...took hers off. Then she removed Crag’s. Then she took off everyone else’s collar, found a knife, and killed the short man next time he tried to take her.
They’re waiting here to free Crag’s mother when she returns.
Alrudian tells me that she just wanted to be a hero and couldn’t stand to see all these people in trouble. She tells me that she wanted to be like the Dread Lady and the Hand, if a Frontier girl could do all of that then so could she. I catch Alder’s eye and shake my head slightly. This is a surprise we can reveal once she’s back with her sister and everything is settled down more.
We spend the night in the canyon, though Torrick sleeps a ways away from the others. His grief is complicated. I leave him alone for now.
When Crag’s mother lands and we help remove her collar I get a glimpse of Alrudian’s magic. She has a personal talent for entropy and it certainly helps her with the collars...I wonder also if the magic of Afan simply wouldn’t affect a sworn elf. There’s nothing left of us to shackle. We’ve already given that freely in a different way.
With Basalt freed, she tells us that she will return home. To me, she advises that Crag and Alrudian will want to stick together and should not be separated. He may be old enough to be on his own but ‘my little one’ seems young still and he can look after her.
“Be kind to one another,” she tells them, “That is the way of dragon and rider,”
And again to me, remarks that it has been a long time since there were elves who rode with dragons. Once upon a time elves protected the young of the dragons and dragons protected elvish cities. Perhaps in a few hundred years the same thing might happen again. Regardless, Alrudian having saved her and her son will mean a lot to the Kindred. She says she won’t forget it.
