Ok so Rahovart Saga is now moving along nicely and i figured i could start on something else. This is Lady's life story up until the very instant she arrives at Temen Ni Gru. As previously mentioned, it's not going to be happy but i've done my utmost to make it unique. This first chapter is for my brave editor and spell-checker in cheif, the devil's fangirl. Plushies for President! Bye, Skaye.
The sun beat down on a flat, unwelcoming and wholly unfamiliar landscape which flew by barely noticed by the small figure on a motorcycle speeding alone down the highway. Mary had never travelled so far from home in her life. Driving all day for three days now, she was tired and sore but time passed quickly on the road, the concrete shot by sending dry dust flying under the wheels of the large growling motorcycle.
A signpost standing forlornly in the middle of nowhere by the road said it was 60 miles to the city yet. The sun was just sitting on the impossibly flat horizon in a blaze of red and indigo. Too far to go before the light was gone.
She pulled over and consulted for the hundredth time the road map she carried folded into her backpack along with its odd overlay. A transparent acetate cover with a design like an irregular spider-web directly above it. They all came together at a point directly over the city currently 60 miles to her South East. She'd followed this odd map over 900 miles on motorcycle and still didn't truly know why.
Hopefully the reason would make itself clear when she arrived there.
She drove on until just after nightfall when the sky was still faintly purple over the low buildings of an industrial town where she was able to find a motel with a decent place to eat nearby. She couldn't at first remember the last time she ate. She'd slept a while back in an equally pointless little town about a day and a half ago and had probably eaten then. She bought a pizza and water in the grungy little bar next to her motel and then sat eating and checking over her map, matching up the flowing branching lines of the acetate with the twisted lines of the road map.
Did anything in this world just go in a goddam straight line? Everything was drawn and twisted with little obstructions and complications.
She stirred her water with a straw and poked at the remainder of the pizza, appetite lost as she sank into memory, fully reviewing her situation for the first time since she'd ran out of the door of her home armed, lost and furious three days ago. It had been a hell of a journey; she'd gotten lost, soaked in the rain, baked in the sun, attacked by a tramp, pulled over by the cops at least twice and had four or five rather nasty falls from the perilous bike. All that and it still seemed like a cake-walk compared to the events of the day and night prior to it. When was the last time she'd been able to really rest?
She sank exhausted and aching into her creaking leather seat and watched the last traces of light fade into darkness outside the grimey window as if swallowed by the greedy night. She felt she would be swallowed up as well. Too small a person for an immense and complicated world. She'd never known before how immense. Her life up until this had been highly unusual but it had been simple and she'd loved it. Her little world had shielded her like a shell around her and now it lay in fragments she could scarcely recognise. Mother. Her mother lying pale and dead on the floor, blood on her face, on her clothes, on the floor. Father. Vanished so abruptly it seemed impossible. One day there, the next so profoundly missing she was aware of it constantly aching like a missing tooth. Home. So far behind her, mother's body perhaps still lying where she died on the cold tiled floor, too horrible to think. Home empty now, still and quiet as it had never been for centuries. The dust gathering, the plants dying, the library left in shambles...
As a means of comfort, she clasped her hand around the large rocket launcher she'd only learned to use three years ago and now intended to use with extreme persuasiveness on the person or people responsible for the wreck of her life. Anger flared up making her clutch the handle of the gun so tight it hurt. Mother. Father. Home. I'll tear them all to pieces them for what they've done to us. I'll find every last one and make them beg for death before I grant it. Similar dramatic thoughts and promises of vengeance had been whipping through her head urging her onward ever since home and now 900-odd miles away she had finally stopped to think about how and why...