(Apologies in advance if this is confusing to readers, as the characters will be similar to that of the Creativity story. I have set up two categories for the two stories so that it will be easy to follow both narratives. If it really is too confusing, please feel free to let me know)
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Book Five of Ties that Bind.
Gabriel’s Endgame
How has it come to this?
Gabriel stared across the battlefield from atop the hill, gazing at the scene before him through a solitary feline eye, the other a white pupil-less ball with a scar running vertically through it.
Ranger was in his ascended form, his great feathered wings curled defensively around his body as he barrel-rolled between two clawed swipes. As he landed, his wings unfurled, freeing his arms to swing his katana, slicing through the neck of a nearby fiend. He lowered himself to pivot on the spot, slashing through his enemies in a wide arc. Several other monsters dove at his exposed back, but he repelled them with a powerful sweep of his wings, slamming them back into several others. In the next moment he sent himself skyward with a powerful downward beat, his foes cowering in the wake of the wind blast it created.
Gabriel watched his friend soar, ignoring the blinding glare of the sun as Ranger hovered in front of the sun with two wing beats, drinking in the its rays. The katana seemed to be doing the same as it pulsed and glowed with a renewed energy. He then curled his wings, tilted backwards and plummeted back down towards the ground. Gabriel’s eyes struggled to keep up with winged elf’s speed as he descended. unfurling the wings once more to streak across the land, cutting through the fiends like a scythe through wheat, decimating all in his path before rising into the sky once more.
Gabriel slumped down onto his knees and numbly looked at his chest. His skin was coated in a light fur. His hair embraced his head and down to a point between his nipples like a fiery-red lion’s mane with electric blue tips. In amongst the hair on his chest, one of his sais was buried to the hilt.
He coughed, spraying the ground red and one of his clawed hands tried to grasp his weapon to pull it out. It gripped the hilt, but no matter how hard he pulled, his arm was too weak to budge it and limply slumped back down to his side.
Damn.
Gabriel looked down at the battle once more. Ranger had returned to the ground and was being harried by the swarm, scaled creatures coated in an acid that burned the flesh while it paralyzed the muscles. His vision blurred briefly and then sharpened on two fiends leaping at the Elf who parried with his wings once more and escaped further assault by pushing skyward once more.
Suddenly, Gabriel’s head and torso felt too heavy to hold up and he slumped forward barely catching himself with his weakened arms. His chest felt tight as he tried to catch his breath, coughing more blood onto the grass and turning his hand more red than tan.
Surely it can’t end here can it? he thought. Not here, not like this.
The light about him slowly faded, closing in like a shutter of a camera lens. The last thing he saw was feathered wings closing around him…
* * *
“Now this is freedom!”
Gabriel stared about him with a broad, satisfied grin. His spiky blue hair bristled gently in the light breeze. The sea around him was still, with only a gentle ripple occasionally rocking the boat as it lapped at the sides. He rubbed his cheek, marred by a pair of scars crossing each other. In fact, his face in general was quite battered. His nose had been broken at some time and not set properly so that it looked like a chunk had been ripped out of it. A scar ran down from this forehead, through his eye and down his other cheek, an injury so bad that all he was a pupil-less ball. His other fiery red one once more surveyed the horizon as he took in a deep breath.
“Just me and the open seas,” he said.
He reached inside his brown jacket that swept down to the backs of his knees and billowed in the light wind to reveal blue trousers, a pair of sais strapped to them in brown leather sheaths, the hem of a white shirt and the tail of a waistcoat. Gabriel pulled out a small golden pocket watch from the waistcoat’s pocket, clicked the latch to spring it open and looked at the bearing.
“No annoying Elf marching me from one side of the world to the other.” He tucked the watch away and rummaged in his jacket once more and then patted down the outer pockets while his eye kept a wary watch on the clouds that were beginning to build near the horizon line. “Not even a bit of bad weather can ruin it!”
He beamed once more as his thumb flicked the corner of a stained bit of paper in his back pocket and dragged it out into the open. It was folded into quarters which he opened out to reveal a map of the northern part of Everia, along with a dashed line leading from a port to a large cross.
“There’s only one thing that bothers me though…” Gabriel mused as he regarded it before folding it back up and tucking it away in a different pocket with a sigh and scratched at his head. “Where in the realms am I?”
400 Words A Day 