A/N (Aroihkin's Notes) 07.27.05:

There's now a sketch of Akara up on my deviantart gallery.
deviantart dot com / view / 21075264 /

Ahn-Li Steffraini prodded me into continuing the story, and gave me a "sick" idea.

So "blame" her. XD

05.02.2010: All scene-dividers have been eaten, again, on all of my stories. I give up. Please just go read this story on arowrites dot net where it hasn't been made incoherent; I am unable to keep up with this site's stupidity.

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TAF: SNAFU
entry two, all fouled up

The fading light of evening passed through the branches of a tall tree before streaming in through the loft window of the Golden Hourglass tavern and inn. It made patterns on the far wall, over the top of the closed trapdoor, and every time the wind brushed the leaves outside the pattern shifted.

Akara yawned, watching the dance of shadows and light for a few moments, blurry-eyed, before rolling back over on her straw pallet and tossing an arm over her eyes. A light snoring was soon coming from the thief, proving once again that light and noise could be ignored by the nocturnal.

And there was noise. The tavern two levels down had opened its doors for the evening a few hours ago, and the dinner crowd had filed in accordingly. Pots and pans were banged and slammed in the kitchen two levels directly beneath her, and the inn level began to show life as well. Travelers returned to their rooms after wandering the town for the day, shuffling belongings and slamming doors, yelling back and forth on the second level.

Out in the street, horses neighed and people yelled, fights broke out and children screamed. But here on the third floor of the building, Akara snored on.

It wasn't until several hours later, after the sun had set completely and the tavern below had settled into its nightly pattern, that she stirred again. The thief rolled off of her pallet in a tangle, her threadbare blanket wound tightly around her legs until she sat up and pulled them free. A soft tinkling of her loot bag was heard from inside the deliberate mess, and she pulled it free as well.

Nobody got the drop on Akara while she was asleep, that was -her- job to do to -others-. The only time anyone had tried it on her had been her first morning in this room, asleep on the pallet directly under the room's only window. The figure had slid the expensive pane of glass aside, and put one leg over the sill before his foot caught mid-air.

Off-balance like that, it had only taken a good shove to send the figure crashing three levels down, entirely missing the tree branch he'd used to get to the window in the first place. From the sound of it, though, he'd hit a few others on the way to the ground. Akara had peered out over the window to look at the mess, (he'd had a broken nose and leg... but was alive), before she had wordlessly slid her window shut again. And back to sleep she'd gone.

Apparently word had spread fairly quickly that the loft room of the Golden Hourglass wasn't a good spot to loot, because no one had bothered her again. Not that they would have gotten very far, with a bell rigged to the trap door and her sleeping right under the window. Never mind that she always kept her unsold loot tangled in her blanket with her on even the hottest days, and most of her legitimate money was hidden elsewhere.

/ Certainly not in a treasure chest that screams OPEN ME! /

She smirked, shaking her head. Yesterday she had sold most of her take from the politician's house, and tonight was a much different sort of errand.

Akara went through her usual pre-mission routine, getting dressed and going downstairs for some food and tea, yapping with the locals a bit before going back upstairs again. The second level was the inn of the place, and it was in the hallway between two rooms that a thick rope upwards dangled. Once upon a time there had been a stairway here, and the loft was used as storage, but Akara paid the owners well for the use of the room.

Fed, the thief made her way to the little hallway with her rope, and climbed it. She pushed the trapdoor to the side at the top of the climb--the tin bell above jingling loudly--and pulled herself in, closing it behind her. It was a rather... untraditional sort of arrangement, but that suited her just fine.

Akara quickly pulled on her belt, strapped her torch to one boot, and wound her grappling hook and rope around her waist. She took a moment to extract the golden 'R' pendant from her loot bag, and the note she'd made up last, and tucked them both into a pocket.

With that, the cat-burglar opened her window, stepped with practiced ease out onto the tree branch, and then turned to close the expensive glass with care.

And then she was ready... and it was show time, again.

It had been five years, but it felt like a lot longer until she thought about it. Oh, not that her visits were long and dreadful... generally it was only an hour or two between stepping into the protective Grove and stepping back out again. Sometimes it stretched to four or five, sometimes it took a mere twenty minutes.

Sometimes the Master of Past and Present seemed to be ignoring her, as though if he acted this way she would grow bored and stop. Akara always made sure to figure out where he was, these days, before anything else. Because sometimes he would be sitting at that massive desk of his and she would hear the scratch of quill on parchment through the door, and sometimes...

She'd been extraordinarily lucky, the yule before last, when she'd realized he was lurking just on the other side of the door she had almost opened. The scent had caught her attention, her hand inches from the doorknob. Spice and decay, the hairs on the back of her neck had leapt up as though she'd been struck by lightning (and really, she knew, that would have been the least of her worries if he'd caught her). Akara had backed quickly away from the door, half expecting it to explode, and taken a very careful sniff to either side.

He had been -close-, mere feet away, waiting... and she'd known that she wasn't the only one holding her breath by the strained silence. Once she'd known he was there, she'd been able to feel the heat emanating from the other side of the wooden door, though this was of course merely psychological. The snow falling outside had made more noise than either of them, and she'd bit the insides of her cheeks as she'd lowered her delivery to the floor where she stood, and crept back the way she'd come.

After leaving the Grove, that time, she'd sprinted for her loft room... unsure whether to laugh or cry from the wound-up fear.

Thinking about it gave her the chills now, and she smirked. No, it wasn't the visits to the tower that made the five years seem long, but the incredibly dull times in between. It took dancing in front of guards and leaving hand-drawn treasure maps of nowhere on sleeping faces to liven things up to a tolerable level, and it was barely lukewarm on her scale at that.

Five years ago the crazy old man with the hat had handed her two amulets and a package to deliver, and she'd accepted without really even believing she'd make it alive. Those two amulets were still with her... indeed, they seemed to refuse to come -off-.

One was warming slightly beneath her dark brown tunic as she grew nearer to the Shoikan Grove. It kept the small forest from repelling her, and also unlocked the gates, windows, and doors with a single touch of her hand. This one was a disk the size of her palm, topaz and opal. The other, a plain silver medallion without a crest, hid her from all of Raistlin's creations and Guardians... everything but the man himself.

The old man had been very adamant in telling her that nothing would protect her if Raistlin caught her. But that was fine... preferable, even. This just leveled the playing field, anything more would have felt like cheating.

Bad enough she used the Grove as her stashing spot.

Akara grinned at that as she stepped into the dark, oppressing patch of forest, making her way to a particular tree she'd picked out years back with a hollow niche under the roots. She pulled her loot bag off of her shoulder and rolled it tightly around itself before jamming it underneath. The thief would come back for it in a few months when the Grove's Master wouldn't be on such high-alert.

Feeling a bit weightless with the lack of gold and gems on her back, Akara made her way towards the tower. She kicked idly at a celestial hand that made a grab for her ankle, her boot passing through it.

"Maybe someday I'll pull this pendant off and come visit you creeps proper," Akara said to the ghastly inhabitants of the forest, in a perfectly serious tone. "I've always wondered what it would be like to be driven completely mad, rather than just hovering at a messy 'mostly'."

Nearing the inner edge of the ring of forest, she slowed to her customary creep... coming to a halt just inside the cover of dark trees. The thief crouched low, and with practiced ease loosened the slipknot holding her grappling hook and its rope around her waist. Immediately the coils came loose, slithering to the ground in a neat, organized pile. Akara gathered it carefully, eyeing the tower.

No lights on, he could be anywhere. She looked up, checking the Death Walk first. He'd tried to trick her that way, once, too... like as if a cat-burglar wouldn't think to look upwards before breaking cover. She was just happy it wasn't in his character to try to catch her in the Grove itself, being as that he didn't know which direction she would come from.

Actually, she'd debated that point a few weeks ago, lying on her back on the straw pallet under her window.

"Raistlin's very territorial." Akara had said, in a reasonable tone, "and he's apparently very much into the whole 'I am the Master of Past and Present' gig, which means that if he's going to catch the upstart, annoying, genius little thief... he's going to want to do it -inside- the tower."

Her frayed, patched sock hadn't argued, but had just looked down at her in exasperation. She'd wiggled her toes inside it before lowering her leg.

"Well, I -am- rather good, I'd say, there's no need to call me cocky. I'm just being honest, you know."

So far, he'd stayed true to form and hadn't tried to ambush her outside the tower walls. Except for the Death Walk incident (and she'd just circled around behind him, that time), and whenever he was somewhere else on the fated days.

Akara counted down from ten, and stepped out of her cover of darkness into the twin moonlight, swinging the end of her rope and the grappling hook with it. The pale moon was fuller than the red, tonight, giving everything a silvery sheen tinged in pink. Like blood in water.

She released her hook with more skill than she'd possessed five years ago, catching it on a windowsill with the barest of sounds rather than the rattle of snagging the Death Walk. Then, tensing the line carefully before putting her full weight on it, Akara began her slow climb upwards.

Each time she came to a window, the thief was careful to peek in without being obvious, curious as to where Raistlin was lurking today. Several of the windows had heavy velvet drapes pulled over them, however, which made a full check impossible.

Just like always.

Heaving herself up to her chosen window, just below the one her hook had snagged, Akara hesitated.

This could be her last run, also just like always.

Ah well, it would only be a bad way to go until she passed out from pain the first few times. Then she'd be too nerve-damaged to feel much. Grinning, the thief touched the magical lock of the window with her gloved fingertips and felt it click, the first pendant pulsing slightly.

She was in. Again.

Akara had heard his cough before, of course. Sometimes it was the main thing that gave him away... that and the very, very slight tinge of blood in the air. A thief of her caliber listened to all of her senses, which was good. If she'd done anything less, he'd have caught and killed her many times over.

At any rate, she'd heard it before. Heard -of- it a lot, too, in her cautious digging into what was known about him. Thankfully he wasn't just an evil Archmagus in the cursed tower, but also a Hero of the Lance, so there was plenty of information out there. Rumors and speculation, mostly, but some things she'd been able to verify personally.

But this time, the coughing didn't stop.

Feeling her neck prickle with something very akin to worry, Akara made her way slowly down the stairs toward the library where the sound was coming from, wary for a trap. Would he be faking it, just to draw her to him? Was it even him? She hugged the wall as she grew closer, eyeing the ajar door with some serious second thoughts.

But then there was the sound of a chair hitting the floor, his coughing growing both weaker and more ragged. She could hear liquid in it, now, and she sped up unconsciously. Finally at the door, Akara held her breath and very carefully peered around the open slab, wishing she'd thought to bring a small mirror.

She needn't have worried, as he was far from noticing half of a face peeking around his door at him. The Archmagus was bent nearly double, hands clutching at the edge of a table littered with open books. His chair that she'd heard a moment ago was indeed on its side on the floor, looking somewhat dejected and useless on the expensive rugs.

And Raistlin himself was apparently fighting a losing battle for breath, what few lung-fulls of air he could gasp in between coughs seemed to rattle worse than usual. But that sickening gurgling sound of liquid was completely new, and the way he was slumping against the table more and more said that his energy was leaving fast.

It was when the table started to tip that Akara swore out loud and rushed into the room, mentally saying goodbye to her cover. She reached him just in time to grab his shoulders and keep him from hitting the floor, the books from the overturned table sliding past where he would have been, resulting in a wide heap of wrinkled pages.

But she wasn't paying much attention to that, busy trying to hold the Archmagus up. He was several inches taller than her, and wearing heavy velvet robes besides. Akara found the best she could do was lower him carefully to his hands and knees, and, in retaining her grip, keep him from going face-first into the books.

Long, golden-tinged fingers curled around already-wrinkled pages, but he didn't quite tear them. Blood already flecked across several of these layers of parchment, and Raistlin seemed to lose even more of his strength at this sight.

"Hey, come on, those are still readable." Akara said without thinking, "You're gonna to have to try harder if you want to heave up any vital organs onto them."

Raistlin went rigid, suddenly, catching and holding his breath as though he hadn't even realized she was there. So fast that his grey-white hair whipped through the air, the Mage turned his head to stare directly at her. Akara swallowed, feeling very much like the mouse cornered by the snake as recognition flickered briefly across the mirrored, piercing eyes. Time seemed to freeze for a moment, and she didn't notice the weight of both pendants coming loose and hitting the floor with dull clunks.

But then his head went down again as the coughing resumed, and now his hands -did- tear the pages they were wrapped around.

"Oh come on, no dying on your birthing day. That would just be far too ironic." she said, voice slightly shaky. "Let's get you to your bed before you pass out. I can't carry you, and you'll do better in there, I bet..."

At least she knew the tower's layout rather well by now. Akara braced herself, waiting for a pause in the coughing fit to pull him upwards. He gasped, startled by the sudden movement, and the cat-burglar wasted no time in pulling one of his arms over her shoulders, hanging onto the too-bony wrist with one gloved hand. The other arm was pulled around his waist, and she tried to lurch them to their feet.

"Cooperate, damn you!" Akara hissed, unable to get her knees straightened all the way before they sank again to the floor. Raistlin's head was hanging, nearly limp with exhaustion and possible fever (but who could tell, she groused, with his body-heat?).

"I'm trying to." he barely managed to whisper, the sound hardly making it past bloodstained lips as he struggled for breath.

"Well, shit."

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Dragonlance © someone else.
All here that is not found in the books... is mine.
Never steal if you value your spleen.