Summary: Nirina, horrified by her own crimes, agrees with her family's mad plan to wipe their entire bloodline out of existance. She is sent back in time, according to plan... only to be caught up in the problems of a swordswoman named Lyn.
There was originally a paragraph of rambling here that I chose to remove when I went back to edit. Aren't you happy?
To Toss the Dice
Prologue: In the year Three Hundred and Ninety After the Glorious Conquest of our Lord
"Spirit of Ninis, full of grace," muttered the human girl, not caring in the slightest that she was praying to a dragon goddess. Frankly, she had never been into saints, and as far as she could tell the dragon gods were far more likely to listen to you than any of the human ones.
She halted her frantic pacing and stared out over the balcony. The balcony had an excellent view of the bleak and bleary landscape that had once been beautiful and fertile land before her master had crushed the land of Lycia for its rebellion. This spire, which was built on the ruins of a castle named Ostia, was the second most grand fortress on all of Elibe.
The grandest was in Valor, of course. Where else would her master rule from but the site of his greatest victory?
"Nergal," the girl spat. Oh, how she hated him so, the man who had bred her into the monster that she was, the Bloody Crescent. Her brownish-red eyes seemed to turn a muddy almost-crimson in the fading light as she glowered her hate in the direction of the slaves toiling in the mostly barren fields.
Those people had once been proud Lycians. No more. Now they were pathetic slaves, as their fathers and their father's fathers had been, to broken and spent to rise up anymore, too weak in body and spirit to do anything other than pray to Elimine for deliverance.
It must be done soon. Lord Nergal is busy in that place… what was it? Magvrel? Wherever the heck that other continent was, they have dragons there, I think. He's been furious about their resistance... almost angry enough to summon me to his side to help command the armies. Limstella herself said that the last time she'd seen him this livid was over the Three Lords, all those years ago when he was coming to power. But it must be now, while his attention is occupied. Magvrel is the last continent to resist him… when it falls, there will be nothing to occupy his attention anymore, and we will have lost our opportunity. Gods willing, perhaps I can undo the evil I and my bloodline have wreaked upon this world.
She'd have to try and stir up a rebellion somewhere to give the researchers more time if they didn't hurry up. And that would be risky as all hell, especially since she'd already done so twice when the Black Fang had been getting to close to what her siblings were working on in the basement of the Sacean Compound.
I used those poor people like pawns. May Filla strike me down!
Truth be told, part of her wanted the plan to fail. Her secret, greatest fear was the fear of ceasing to exist, and that was exactly what was going to happen to her if this mad scheme worked the way it was supposed to.
But the world will undoubtedly be a better place without me, she reminded herself, AND my cursed bloodline. We all deserve to disappear.
"Lady Nirina?" came a flat, hollow voice. Nirina didn't even bother to turn around; she could recognize her twin sister Ninian's voice anywhere
"The preparations are ready?" she asked with a sigh, picking up the sack that she had thrown some things into for her journey. She had long ago given up begging her sister to address her as an equal.
After all, even for the twin sister of Lord Nergal's Tactician General, disrespect meant death.
"Of course. Come, we shall join our brethren, Lady Nirina." Ninian extended a hand and they both vanished.
They reappeared in a room filled with people of varying appearances, heights, and occupations. There were three things these people had in common: Their bloodline, their service to Nergal, and their stark hatred of the man. Almost everyone in the room had either gold eyes, black hair, or deathly pale skin from the amount of morph blood in the bloodline. Only Nirina, with her red-brown eyes, coffee-colored skin, and leaf-green hair had no traces of the morph blood that had cursed her line. That was not the only thing that made Nirina stand out. Instead of the customary black or crimson, Nirina was dressed in an ancient looking leather tunic and off-white cotton dress, covered by a ragged green cloak. No point in going back in time if I stand out like a fire dragon in the sky on a sunny day…
"Silence, everyone," intoned the leader, Nidan. "Daughter of the Angel, Child of Death untainted by the black blood, you are the only person we can send through the time portal to undo what we have done. Do you understand what you are to do?"
"I am to travel to the past, to the time before Nergal," – she repressed the part of her mind that tried to shut down at the thought of a world without tyranny – "And I am to kill the progenitor of our bloodline, the man with the marks of the bloodline on both his arms. This will erase us from the face of Elibe, and shall weaken Nergal's power."
"Do you understand the consequences of your failure?"
"I do," she replied. If Nergal kept on the way he was going, everything and everyone was going to die. Nirina had no illusions – once the man was out of enemies, he'd turn on his own next. He was a madman who cared for little besides increasing his own power. He had to be set back somehow…
Her musings were halted as Nidan asked her a question that she had not been expecting, but one that she had been dwelling on nonetheless.
"Do you understand the consequences of your success?"
"No one truly understands the consequences of meddling with time, but I am willing to take responsibility for my actions, come what may."
The man paused, his golden eyes filled with a emotion that Nirina had never seen from the normally expressionless man. It was regret. For her, of all the Angels…
The world has truly gone mad, the day that the one who sired me feels any pity for me whatsoever.
"Then go, Bloody Crescent. Go, and turn back the wheels of fate."
Nirina stepped into the magic circle, pausing only to give her twin a hug. The last thing she saw as the chanting started and the complex circle started to glow a dull golden color was her sister's brilliant crimson eyes staring back at her.
A pair of bandits yelped in surprise as a woman appeared quite literally from the middle of nowhere in a flash of dull gold light right in front of them. She was unconscious, and dressed in the plain clothing of a traveler. She seemed to be unarmed, and her only possessions were hidden in her shoddy-looking traveling sack. Once it became quite clear that she wasn't going to wake up and blast them with some sort of strange magic, they approached her cautiously.
"How much do you think she would sell for?" asked one, prodding her with his ax handle and getting no response.
"That depends on how much she's carrying, and what she looks like under all those heavy clothes," the second one replied. "Though that scar on her face is going to take the price down a few gold pieces." On the woman's right cheek was a scar, a curved slash that ran from just beneath her eye to just above her jaw line. It looked vaguely like a crescent moon. "A good body or lots of gold would – AAACK!" the man cried as a katana blossomed from his chest.
"You're not going to be taking that poor woman anywhere," snarled the assailant – quite clearly a woman by her tone of voice and the cut of her battle robes. "You're going to be too dead to do anything to her or anyone else."
"S-spare me," spluttered the first bandit as the woman callously pulled her weapon out of his companion's corpse.
"No mercy for scum," the woman snarled, slitting his throat before he could get his clumsy ax up to defend himself.
The woman sighed, and cleaned off her blade as she stared at the unconscious woman she had just saved, wondering who she was and how she had ended up unconscious on the plains. Guess I'll just have to wait until she's awake to find out.
About half a mile away hidden by the tall grasses of the plains of Sacae, andright in the center of the path that the swordswoman had been taking before she had been distracted,a male tactician with brown hair and a dark green cloak had collapsed from exhaustion, starvation and dehydration. Damnation, Mark thought before the blackness of oblivion rose to claim him, It looks like this is as far as I'm going to go…
Questions? Comments? Flames? Did anyone else find the part with Mark funny, or am I just being sadistic?