I outlined this crossover three years ago and wrote it ten months ago. I'm the queen of super slow projects. :.D Can you tell this is old as shit? Literally every single character tagged isn't part of the main cast anymore I'm crYIng. I always wait too long to post my fanfics and then they get jossed or become irrelevant as the fandom moves on and expands. *glances sadly at all the teen wolf fic moldering on my desktop* T_T
In the Morning We're Cast Out
A Teen Wolf and Legend of the Seeker Crossover
by YellowWomanontheBrink
"You're sure this is the place?"
Their heavy boots snap twigs and leaves; the sounds are loud even in the wild din of the forest. Derek had grown up in the People's Palace of D'Hara, and though the woods in their country grow tall, the ones in Westland seemed to grow taller still, thick trunks and twisted limbs stretching towards the Creator in the sky.
It makes Isaac uneasy.
It hardly discomforts Derek, and even when he is afraid, he is careful not to show it. He is a Hale, and he has a responsibility to his people, especially the brave four who'd accompany him on this suicide quest. Guilt drags him down every step west he takes. But it is too late to turn back now.
His quad does not falter. Not for the first time, Derek ponders what he has done to earn the loyalty of such remarkable people.
"We're going the right way, Isaac," Erica, one of the best Mord-Sith he has to his name, snaps. She is just as broken as every other lady of red leather, and forbidding. Her long, blonde braid swings side to side like a horsetail. When she leads— the four of them are adamant that their Lord Hale remain in the center position, the safest position— he cannot bring himself to stop staring. Sometimes, when the aches of walking for days on end strain even his well-built thighs, he finds himself breathing in time to the steady rhythm of its swinging.
The five of them had been forced to abandon their powerful steeds in the mountains after passing through Galea.
Boyd's mare, Rink, lasted the longest against the brutal, steep cliffs. They were ambushed by a group of particularly clever gars— they'd figured out that Derek had charmed their flies away from the bodies of him and his quad, but not the animals.
Derek hates himself for that. It seems that no matter how far he goes, his actions are never enough, especially not to protect the people whom he considers his responsibility.
"I don't see the Boundary," Isaac shudders. He cannot stop himself. The five of them crossed the Boundary once, when they were young and relatively unblooded. It is an experience he remembers vividly, one that he wishes he could thoroughly forget.
"I don't feel it," Jackson adds sourly, running his thumb over the shiny hilt of his well-loved blade.
"Well obviously we must be going in the wrong direction, if Jackson's feelings don't tell us we're right," Erica drawls, smacking away a particularly persistent plant. "Please, tell me, where does your feeling tell us we should go? North? South? Fuck, let's turn around and head east to Westland!"
Boyd smiles. He doesn't say anything, but meets Derek's eyes, eyes glittering with amusement. Any man who did not know Boyd would call him silent and stoic.
Derek thinks they don't know how to listen, and his lips quirk up in a tiny response.
"Shh," Isaac says suddenly, instinct driving his hand to his short sword. He looks around, pale eyes carefully roaming the green canopy above them. The five man— well, four men and a woman— band freeze.
Derek tilts his head down, eyes half-lidded, weight balanced perfectly on the balls of his feet, ready to turn at the drop of a coin. He will not be caught off guard again. To him, the lives of those he trusts the most depend on him.
More than that, his people depend on him. He cannot fail, not this time.
"I don't hear anything," Jackson breaks the silence after a minute or so. But it is clear he does trust his senses, not entirely.
After all, the border of Westland and Midland, before the Boundaries were raised, was sorceress country. Colloquially, they call it Argentum— the Silver Land.
The homeland of the most powerful clan of sorceresses to ever walk the world. The birthplace of the witch who'd brought the D'Haran Lords to their knees.
The base of his clan's murderer. Somewhere in these mountains, or perhaps across the Boundary, lives Kate Argent.
"...You're right," Erica's agreement startles Jackson. She makes it her life's mission to deride everything the soldier says, and Jackson is arrogant, not foolish. He will not argue with a Mord-Sith, especially not while she clutches her agiel like her life depends on it. "Don't you hear that?"
"Hear what?" Isaac turns in a slow circle. His apple bobs up and down as he swallows. "It's silent."
Derek's blood runs cold. His blade rings as he draws it, falling into an offensive stance. "A forest shouldn't be this quiet. There's something here."
"Or," Boyd's voice, seldom heard, startles the four of them. "We've reached the Boundary."
He is ahead of them; if he were not so tall, they would not be able to see him through the trees. Derek plows ahead and the others follow in his steps. As he makes his way west, familiar feelings he can never forget creep up.
With every step he takes, an eerie green light arises, subverting the cool sunlight of the forest floor. It grows brighter, nearly blinding the further into it he walks. It is unmistakably the Boundary. This humming, drowning, hopeless sensation is one he will never forget.
The four of them catch up to Boyd. The tall man shudders and shakes, weapon loosely held in his fist. He knows no weapon will save him from the horrors that lie within.
But Derek is not afraid. This will be his third crossing of the Boundary now; Isaac and Erica's first, and Boyd and Jackson's second. He can hear the Mord-Sith cry out behind him. The agiel shrieks as she shoves it deep in the flesh of her imaginary assailant. He barks an order for her to stop;the agiel harms its wielder as much as its target, and with no real target, Erica is only hurting herself.
Derek carefully manages his senses. His eyes are wide open as he gingerly tip-toes his way further and further into the Boundary.
"Behind me!" he roars, and they file into a line— Jackson, Boyd, Erica, and Isaac bringing up the rear. Prior to their perilous escape from D'Hara, he spent years (five years to the day of his departure) planning this. He knows this crack in the Boundary like the lines on his thumb. It was a narrow, snakelike path, treacherous and dangerous, but requiring no sacrifice to the Keeper.
At first, he was motivated partly by lust for revenge, later, as he witnessed the suffering of the People under Peter's cold, manipulative fist, he was driven by a determination to make things right.
The Lord Hale serves as the magic against magic. The Lord Hale serves D'Hara. Dereks knows he does not have the magic, or the skill to overthrow Peter on his own.
But the Seeker, wizard or not, could overthrow kings. And Derek is prepared to do one of two things: claim the Sword of Truth as his own, and use its fabled power to depose him, or enlist the Seeker in his crusade.
After all, the Seeker of Truth has a duty to unveil lies. Derek does not know all the details of the circumstances surrounding his clan's death— he'd been so young— but he knows now that the story he has been fed is curdled with lies.
The five man band makes their way through the Boundary, ignoring the plaintive cries of their dead loved ones. Each one is a tug at Derek's heart, but the dead are in the hands of the Keeper now, and the sole task of their shades is to lure him to his death. But he cannot die yet. He will not die so long as Peter holds D'Hara in his undeserving hands.
His sister, of course, is the first shade to appear, shimmering in green, as if he looks at her underwater. Her lips twist in a wry smile, and she holds out her hand; it is an invitation to join her. DErek turns away from what he now knows is a false shade. Laura had never asked for anything; she saw what she wanted, and took it.
Though all half-children and female children were meant to be killed in the line of Hale, his grandfather was a dangerous combination of careless and promiscuous. Talia was a child of a Mord Sith and his grandfather, while Peter was the legitimate heir— he was male, and he had the magic.
But Talia was beloved by the people, and that was enough for even the superstitious D'Harans to accept. As long as the Lord Hale stood as the magic against the magic and the D'Harans could live out their lives in peace, they would endure any tyranny.
Derek, however, doesn't believe that means they should have to, and just that revelation gives him enough resolve to turn away from the alluring invitation of his sister into the hands of the Keeper, into the hands of death, away from all the troubles of seeking the Sword of Truth.
Deliberately, he deafens himself to their pleas, and ignores their death cries as their murders play over and over again in the green mists. He steps over Cora's choked face, her Mord Sith leathers stripped from her legs, he strides between the bisected halves of Laura's body, he stomps the image of Talia's charred body on the stake into ashes. He firmly does not look as the shade of his mother walks up beside his sister, an identically small smile tugging at her lips. He does not acknowledge the pride in her eyes.
This is his duty as a Hale.
If he were really meant to be the Lord Hale, if his blood were pure enough and not the blood of a bastard son of a bastard daughter, then he would have the magic enough to stroll up to the People's Palace and kill his uncle, Sword of Truth or not.
For now, he has only the strength to lead his quad through the Boundary again. Only these four are loyal enough to recite the Devotion to him, to strengthen him and not Peter. He will protect these four as long as he can, until the sword of Truth allows him to find his clan's murderers and eliminate the threat to the Hales once and for all.
As he walks through the valley in the Boundary, Erica's sweaty palm on his cold, armored shoulder, the other three walking in a row and clinging to each other like ducklings, he realizes that for now, this is enough.
The Sword of Truth will be his in time.
I'm thinking about writing (well I have) a few more one-shots in this verse, including Scott as the Seeker (of course!), Stiles as a male confessor (because why the actual fuck not and Nogitsune!Stiles inspired me :D ) and Lydia with subtractive magic
What do you think?
YellowWomanontheBrink
2:42 PM
February 23, 2017