OCKISS WEEK - DAY ONE
Adrigo & Ezekiel
This wasn’t planned I just got inspired so I’ll double post up on day one 🫡 Ezekiel belongs to @new-austin !!!!
“You might do yourself a favor and try to avoid getting hit by weapons,” Adrigo sneered, grabbing Ezekiel’s chin in his hand. Doing so made it easier to tilt his head and get a better look at the nasty cut that bled along his face.
Ezekiel forced his lips into a pout. “Where’s the fun in that?” He asked, blinking up at the aasimar.
“You’re insufferable,” Adrigo growled, and released him with a dismissive flick of his wrist that made Ezekiel’s head spin. He grinned.
“You suffer me.”
“I tolerate you,” Adrigo said as he began to walk away. “If you’re going to run your mouth, I won’t help you. Enjoy the new scar, Ezekiel.”
“If scars bothered me, I wouldn’t enjoy picking at yours so much,” said the tiefling, eagerly following Adrigo despite the blood trickling down his temple. Ezekiel was taking two steps for just one of Adrigo’s.
“Are you incapable of silence? I’m surprised your master hasn’t muzzled you yet. Maybe I’ll take those stitches meant for your head and put them to your mouth. Everyone would thank me.”
Adrigo tried to pull his hand away as he felt Ezekiel grasp it in his claws, but the tiefling gripped him tight with his talons.
“You’re a cruel man,” Ezekiel purred as he raised an eyebrow. “But I didn’t think you were that cruel. How do you know so much about Kuthite traditions?”
Adrigo tried in vain to wrench his wrist free again. “Nidal is not so far from Cheliax—and in fact many of us Chels have settled there. I make an effort to know my neighbor’s faith. Now let me go.”
“No,” Ezekiel said plainly, before he pressed a kiss to the back of Adrigo’s hand. “Well, I shall. But now I have you in my sights, and I don’t intend to let you escape me.”
Adrigo was finally able to pull free of the tiefling and, scowling, glared back at him amidst the growing distance. His hand was covered in Ezekiel’s blood.
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Owlcatober 13. Shadow
part 2 of The Prodigal Tiefling (on AO3)
It was only well into the following day, bruised and ragged from a night of running, that Woljif’s mind caught up with his legs—legs that ached almost as bad as his stomach.
He could outrun the gargoyle disaster but he couldn’t outrun the images cycling in his head. Sosiel snatched up in demonic talons and carried off. The Count, too. (What were they doing with them anyway? Tearing them limb from limb to feed their big ugly gargoyle chicks?) Dead crusaders littering the camp. That one paladin who almost fell right on his head, the crunching sound of armor and bones colliding at high speed with the ground.
Not to mention the chief.
Wonder if he made it, he thought morosely as he stumbled up another rise in the cliffside over the Sellen. There was something so sad about the image of the chief’s crumpled body lying among the ruins in his colorful clothes like a crushed flower, it made Woljif forget to get choked up about his own predicament for whole minutes at a time.
He should have been smarter, whispered the shadow in the back of his mind, which had been gradually inching into the front of his mind since the night of the gargoyles, so much so that he almost thought he could hear it for real now.
You made it, and that’s what matters.
He itched his ear and looked around to be sure there wasn’t really someone—or something—hanging over his shoulder. About him loomed nothing but the tortured branches of Worldwound trees against a stark sunless sky.
He was hungry, thirsty, exhausted and freezing but true enough, it bore keeping in mind that that was a sight better than being torn up and fed to gargoyle chicks.
“Well, I’m still alive, but not for long if I don’t find some sign a’ civilization soon. You don’t reckon you can conjure up some spicy pastries insteada just chatterin’?”
The shadow lapsed into sullen silence.
Clenching the Moon of the Abyss in his fist as he negotiated a tangle of underbrush he carried on muttering, his breath forming bitter clouds in the chill air. “How do you like that. Finally get my hands on my legacy and here I am, lost in the Worldwound. And unless it can conjure some breakfast this amulet’s no more use than a plea for mercy with the Prelate.”
As long as he kept talking the shadow stayed quiet, and so did certain thoughts that kept creeping up on him from a secret place in his heart he’d rather not acknowledge.
It got so bad that night that in a fit of remorse he lost a lot of time doubling back toward the Crusade camp, frantically inventing excuses.
The shadow had things to say about that. They hang deserters, you know.
The chief ain’t the hangin’ type. He’ll take me back.
No, he won’t. After the shenanigan with the necklace in his pocket, and now abandoning him to gargoyles?
It was true. The chief probably hated his guts now. Respectable sorts always got up on their high horses, when really all he ever did was try to get by on the little he’d been given in life. Yet even as he thought the words he knew they weren’t true. He and the chief had had some good laughs; Siavash wasn’t like that.
Which made his stomach hurt worse, at the image of the chief lying betrayed and dead among the smoking ruins of the Fifth Crusade. They said after a battle crows came and ate people’s eyeballs.
Coward.
On the third day, waking shivering from a restless nap, his face still wet with—admit it, tears, lodged in the gap between two tree trunks, Woljif began to worry more seriously. He’d wandered off track from the Sellen because he had to loop around some steep hills and he was pretty sure the river lay somewhere to the east, but it was hard to keep track of east in this cursed forest.
Desperate with thirst he stumbled down a steep slope to the bank of a creek. Like a dog he drank from it on his hands and knees, splashed his face and then sat back on his haunches with water streaming down his front.
If he were to stick to the plan of just following the Sellen downstream he’d have to cross this tributary. It didn’t look over his head but if he tripped and the current caught him—well, Woljif’s only relationship with deep water was staying out of it, literally and figuratively.
So it took him most of the remaining daylight hours to find a fallen tree he could shimmy across to the other side, and once he made it and started trudging downstream again soaked to the bone and shivering so hard it made his skin hurt, he suddenly stopped and stared around at the sun setting behind the trees to his left.
Wait.
He was meant to be heading south. And how’d he get this far from the Sellen, anyway?
By the fourth day he was engaged in a bitter debate with his inner Lann about the nutritious benefits of lichen.
Lann won. The lichen offered little besides a sour dirt flavor, and was too tough and dry to choke down even if he wanted to. How’d a big guy like Lann survive on this anyway?
Oh yeah, Lann was a hunter.
Not exactly Woljif’s skill set. Besides, he hadn’t seen one animal out here. He glanced around as if there would be a few nice, plump ones just standing there, should he bother to look.
It couldn’t be that hard, if a one-horned cave-lizard could do it. I could stun one and then run up and stab it. Nah, too much blood to muck around in. Better to zap it. And then just slice off a nice steak and barbecue it over a magical fire, easy as toast.
Now if he could just find an animal that wasn’t too scary.
He trudged on, trying to remember the words to a song to keep his mind off his cramping stomach and failing legs, but that reminded him of the chief and made everything worse, which in turn made the shadow impatient.
Quit sniffling, it hissed.
No animals turned up, but he did find a snail. People ate those, didn’t they sometimes? With a dubious frown he picked it up and inspected it. It tucked into its shell, leaving a sheen of slime around the edges. How hungry am I?
No. He’d need to be closer to death than this.
Tossing the snail over his shoulder he plodded on his weary way through the brush, changed his mind and went back and found the snail and put it in his pocket, just in case.
And all the while, as if hovering just behind the back of his skull, the shadow continued to whisper.
They would have done the same.
Woljif stopped in the middle of a frosty clearing and looked around in despair. He had no idea which way was east.
Surrounded by nothing but barren trees, lost and starving. Some kinda survivor. He hugged himself around his aching middle.
I’m gonna die alone out here.
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