As promised, a small update on Sheeva's circumstances.
Sheeva stared at the field of wheat and foxgrass, admiring their luscious golden-brown color, signaling that fall was on its way. Or maybe, it was already here. She couldn't determine which, lost in the way that the fields that spanned the vast steppe swayed like leaves in the wind. They looked like waves of gold crashing on an ocean shore. Truly, it was a sight to behold, and she felt at ease as she gazed upon it, forgetting momentarily where she was.
If only her family could see this beauty of her once-homeland. She felt the corners of her mouth curve in a smile as she imagined Jeffrey having a blast running through the fields, disappearing in their height. She could almost see his face, beaming with childish joy as he ran through, feeling the wheat tickle his young, innocent hands. She chuckled as she imagined Severus annoying Nayeli by throwing foxtail heads in her hair, making them stick like velcro. Her eyes began to tear up as she almost felt her husband's hands holding hers, their fingers intertwined.
She closed her hands, and opened her eyes, dismayed at the reality. Her husbands and children were not here, nor would she allow them to be, for their safety. She shook her head and reprimanded herself.
Get it together. This isn't a pleasure cruise.
"You ok, woman? You spaced for a second." Joseph piped up in a mocking tone. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and he shot her a cocky, arrogant grin. She rolled her eyes, scowled, and began to walk on through the fields, holding out her hand to feel the wheat tickle her palm. If Jeffrey couldn't, she'd do it for him, at least.
Joseph rushed in front of her, propped his hands behind his head, and turned around to face her. He walked backwards, trying to flaunt his talents. She stared at him, uninterested.
"How long do think it will take us to get there, woman?" He asked. Artix walked to her left, reading his book, while Kalas walked to her right, lookin ahead. Zakkari walked behind in tow, as he preferred.
Joseph growled as she ignored his question, and stopped, staring her straight in the eye.
"You know, you're making it really difficult to get along with, woman." He snapped, crossing his arms and giving her a stern look, tapping his foot impatiently, demanding that she pay attention to him. She scoffed.
"We do not have to be chummy, chauvanist arrogant boy. I have a name. If we are to be civil to each other on this mission, I suggest you use it." She hissed, having to look up to stare at him. He smirked.
"Whatever you say, Sheeva Chorea." He said, raising his hands in mock defeat. She frowned even more, displease with his sardonic attitude.
"Zabini-Malfoy, Cowles." She growled, correcting him as she walked on. He turned away as she walked by, not really caring. Still, "Cowles" was better than "chauvanist arrogant boy". Kalas huffed, and stretched his wings.
"At this rate, we'll be gone for years. Let's quit playing grabass and get going." He commented.
At this, Sheeva pushed her wings out and spread them, lifting herself into the air with skill and grace. The weightlessness felt good. It'd been a while since she'd been able to fly. The freedom was invigorating.
The males looked at each other, slightly shocked at seeing a female with her wings unsealed, bared, and in use. Tradition had it deemed indecent for a woman to show her wings, let alone use them, which is why they were sealed away at birth.
Sheeva noticed their gawking stares, and shook her head, scowling. She owed them an explanation, it seemed.
"I broke the seal with my own power. Get over it, and let us go." She stated. Kalas and Joseph's mouths dropped open slightly. Joseph closed his and smirked. A woman with power. She was definitely something else.
Sheeva smirked at their faces and rose higher into the air, scanning the horizon. The fields went on for miles. She looked up in the sky, and judged the position of the sun. It rose in the west, and set in the east, opposite of the human's sun. She found herself wondering if her two worlds even shared the same sun.
The men took flight as well, and in a v-formation, they flew to the west toward Tryptic Village in the Jutted Mountains, the sun beating down on their backs as it set in the east.
A bright red fire blazed before them as they sat around it in a circle. They'd flown until sunset, the moons peeking out from the horizon, in an almost perfect alignment. Kursu, the smallest, was just ahead of Celeste, the larger. As Sheeva gazed upon the stars, she wondered if her family was looking at the same sky, too. She shook her head. A silly idea.
Two moons was proof that they didn't have anything close to the same. However, if she could just point out a few similar constellations, maybe she could disprove her theory.
She'd been gone for a week now, making small progress towards the village, as it was on the coast. Kadessa was roughly the size of China, and Raynak was smack-dab in the middle of the 'continent'. She wasn't sure if she could call it an 'island', its steppes and mountain ranges being too vast.
She pondered how they were doing. Her twins would be finishing their finals, and saying goodbye to their friends. Her husbands would be busy grading final after final. Jeffrey would be bored out of his mind, coloring away in a book or asking his fathers question after question, until Blaise would get tired of answering and send him off to bed.
She caught herself smiling, and hid it away, but too late. Artix and Kalas had noticed.
"What are you thinking about, Sheeva?" Kalas asked, trying to make small talk. Since they'd met, they'd hardly spoken amongst each other, trying to keep their relationship strictly business, if that. The males were still unnerved that they were working with a female that wouldn't let them chide her or boss her around. Rather, she bossed them with polite and direct requests.
To his surprise, she answered.
"My family. They are the main reason I am here." She crossed her arms and her right leg over her left, leaning back against the tree she was nestled under.
They looked at her, silently expecting her to continue. Even Joseph was paying attention, waiting for her to say something for him to pick at. Even if he did remark with smart-ass comments, he was beginning to become a little more tolerable, especially since she'd saved their asses from an angry woodland tortoise that was trying its damndest to finish them off.
She fished out her notebook from her bag, expanded it to its normal size, and took out a photo. She looked at it briefly. Normally, her family would be smiling and waved at her, signing "I love you". However, it was frozen, their faces in a smile and their wands stopped mid-wave. She sighed, and handed it to Zakkari, who was sitting at her right, smoking tobacco from a pipe.
Zakkari couldn't help but stare, baffled. Among five, two were dark-skinned, and he stared at them in amazement. He couldn't help but wonder if they were naturally dark-skinned, if they were dirty, or possibly even sick. He could see a striking resemblance between the two oldest children and their fathers. Both twins had green eyes like their mother, and the female had the blonde's light skin, while the male had the darker man's skin. The youngest standing between the twins had blue eyes and blonde hair, matching the man on the right.
He passed it to Kalas, who soon bore a baffled expression that voiced Zakkari's thoughts. Kalas stared at the photo for a while before passing it to Artix. Artix's eyes widened.
"The dark-skinned ones, are they ill?" He asked. Sheeva couldn't help but laugh, remembering the first time she'd seen an African. She too, thought they might be ill.
"No, that is their natural way." She answered, holding out her hand to take it back from Joseph. Joseph smirked at her.
"Which one is your husband, then?" He demanded to know.
"They both are." She answered honestly. The males looked at her as though she'd confessed to a heinous crime. By their laws, she had.
"Polygamous marriage is not a crime in some regions of the human's world. Draco, Blaise, and I love each other equally, and we see nothing wrong with it. We have raised our children to the best of our ability with love, kindness, and an open-heart and mind." She stated calmly, tucking the photo back into the notebook and shrinking it, putting it immediately back.
Joseph crossed his arms and glared into the fire. She was too mushy for his liking. Just like a woman to be such a lovey-dovey. He thought.
Artix and Kalas stared into the fire, contemplating her words. She'd only been traveling with them for a week, but they began to wonder more and more if their traditions really weren't needed. Here traveling with them was a woman who could throw a mother bear off of their tracks or even take out a deer without so much as a retch or a blink of an eye, and then turn around and continue on her merry way.
Kalas retrieved a flask from his bag, unscrewing the cap and taking a swig of the contents. He licked his lips and sighed, passing it to Joseph, who also took a swig. He glanced at Kalas before handing it off to Sheeva. She took it, and smiled slightly.
"May I?" She asked, tipping it in Kalas' direction. He nodded. She nodded back in thanks.
She unscrewed the cap and tilted it back to take a drink, letting the alcohol mull around along her tongue before swallowing it. She screwed the cap back on and passed it. Zakkari passed it along, not being a drinker. He preferred tobacco.
"Ah, Kadessian vodka. I have missed this." She admitted, smirking. It was almost twice as potent as human vodka, which was why she only allotted herself a sip—she could handle wine, but not hard alcohols. She found herself wondering how her husbands could drink the stuff.
"These strange customs must be natural for you now, aren't they? Considering you've been living among these humans for thousands of years." Artix mentioned, still trying to wrap this stunning idea around his brain. Sheeva slowly nodded, a realization coming to her. True, after all she'd experienced at the hands of humans, the only close-mindedness she had was towards her own kind. She smirked at the irony.
"Yes. I have seen many things, and been to many places. I have watched humans evolve, gather, love, and hate. I have fought alongside them in wars. We fight with our own kind, as you do, sometimes to gain something, other times to protect it. We come together in times of strife, and help each other after disasters. Men and women work together to heal and maintain survival." She blurted. It was deep, and it chilled her as she contemplated its honesty. Zakkari was listening intently, unaware that his pipe had snuffed itself out.
"We're… the same, you say?" He asked. As his pipe shook, he lost the grip of it between his teeth, and it fell out of his mouth. He caught it, and rested it on his knee. Slowly, Sheeva nodded.
"Aside from our anatomical differences, yes, Lotte. We are much the same." She muttered, folding her hands and setting them in her lap. She was trembling slightly, and grabbed a blanket, and wrapped it around herself. She continued to stare at the flames, now short and dissipated. The bright orange coals emitted the last of the heat they'd get for the evening, as they were all tired, and needed rest.
"You talk as though you are one of them." Joseph stated sternly. She looked at him. He was obviously upset, frustrated. She took a deep breath, and stared back at the coals, the next few words coming straight from the depths of her heart.
"After eons of history, I consider myself as close to a human as I can be." She admitted.
Joseph scowled, and spit into the fire, agitated. One of their kind, albeit a woman, was denouncing her claim as a Kadessian, and laying claim to being a human. A creature he hadn't even heard of before her arrival. As far as he was concerned, these humans were lower on the totem pole than they, being unable to use their energy in the form of magic or take to the sky with wings. He couldn't wrap his mind around it.
"We should sleep. We are almost there, I believe. Another three days, yes?" She asked, curling herself up into her blanket, keeping a knife handy in case of an ambush. They settled down as well, stoking the fire to release a little more heat to keep them warm as they slept.
Sheeva and her team raced through the ruins, ignoring the aged hieroglyphs littered along the pillars. Instead, they were focused on murdering dead warriors as they maneuvered through the compound. A captain was ahead of them, and Sheeva fought against her foes as hard as she could, hell bent on catching the man.
He was their only lead now to their real target.
She sliced off the head of a skeleton, the 'zing' of the blade echoing through everyone's ears as the last foe of a small risen group fell again. She replaced her blade and motioned for them to keep on his heels and they did so. They chased him down, gaining on him when he tried to slide under a fallen pillar instead of jumping over it.
When he rushed inside a tomb, she fearlessly followed, disappearing into the darkness.
The man in front of her turned and shot a fireball at her, and she jumped out of the way by rushing against the wall skillfully. It flew straight past her leg, and she could feel the burn as the heat passed on to the air around it.
She was closer now because of his attempt at stopping her, and she grabbed a knife out of a bag strapped to her thigh. She lodged it at him, and it whistled as it traveled through the air and embedded itself in his left shoulder.
As the light at the end of the tunnel drew closer, the man spread his wings, and as soon as he reached the outside, he took off into the air. Sheeva copied him, drawing Shinigami and spreading her wings as well. She jumped out of the exit and took off, swooping up.
The man dived down at her from higher up, trying to ambush her. She countered his attack and threw him aside, and he hit a pillar behind her that he hadn't calculated for when planning his attack.
She immediately pounced on him, yanking the knife out of his shoulder and holding it to his neck. She formed a sign and pushed his wings back into his body, and then another to paralyze him from the neck down. As he fell off of the pillar, she grabbed him by the collar and flew to the ground.
She flipped him over and tied him down with the vines that grew around with a 'snap' of her fingers, and then sat down on his chest.
She scowled down at the man and grabbed his garnished helmet and yanked it off of his head, scowling down at him, panting. He was panting too, sweaty from his feeble attempt at escape.
She sneered at him.
"How you became a captain, I will never know." She hissed. He glared back at her, enraged that a woman was sitting on him like he were a carpet.
"Get the hell off of me." He ordered. She shook her head.
"Not until you tell me what I want to know. I have been here for three damn weeks, and not once have I seen your commander's face. I have not even heard his mocking voice. Tell me. Where is Tazaro Chorea?" She demanded. He sneered this time.
"Like I'll tell you, woman." He hissed. She raised her hand and smacked him on the cheek. The sound echoed through the tunnel the two had just entered through.
"I can make you tell me. Now tell me, before I force you to!" She ordered again, picking him up by his collar, lifting him, and slamming him back down on the ground.
Her team skidded to a halt as they exited the tunnel, slightly shocked. Joseph began to laugh at the sight, and Zakkari even had a hard time holding back a smirk.
The captain beneath her laughed at her, and went to spit at her, but she punched his cheek. He groaned in pain, and blinked it away.
"Tell me!" She ordered for the final time. When he shook his head, she looked up at them.
"Kalas, would you kindly assist me? Hold his mouth open. Do not break his jaw, though. I need him to speak." She asked, fishing around in her satchel for the vial of clear, lethal liquid. She unstoppered it and waited while Kalas forced the man's mouth open. She tilted and dropped a single drop into the man's mouth. It trickled down into the back of his throat and involuntarily swallowed it.
He growled and glared at her.
"What the fuck was that?" He questioned, struggling to get away from her. She laughed down at him.
"Give it ten minutes. You will be spilling your guts to me against your pathetic excuse for will." She snickered, putting the stopper back in the vial and putting it back in her satchel.
"Now...What to chat about?" She asked, looking at her team, smirking. They smiled back at her, amused. This Sheeva was quite interesting.
"Skeletons? Really? Was that the best you could do?" Joseph began, a gleeful smirk on his face. The man glared at him as he tried to cut him down.
"That fireball you shot at me, you need to work on your aim." She commented, checking her watch. It'd only been three minutes. She looked around, examining their location. She nodded as she remembered where they were.
The Tomb of the Mountain King. When she was younger and still traveling, she'd stopped here only once. At night, she could have sworn she saw ghosts, and it scared her so badly she couldn't sleep for the evening. Now, the place didn't creep her out quite so much, used to the ghosts at Hogwarts.
She frowned as she felt homesick.
"I can't believe I got trampled by you, woman." He snapped at her. She turned back to him, and smirked again, laughing.
"I get that a lot. Are you ready to answer my questions now, fool?" She asked. He found himself nodding, and gave her a confused look.
"What did you do to me?" He asked. She ignored the question.
"Your name?"
"Audis Adi." He blurted. He shook his head, and bit his lip. She laughed.
"You cannot resist answering anything. But, just for good measure… who is the Senator of Mayfil?" She asked.
"Senator Rookwood." He blurted. That was true.
"Now. Where can I find Tazaro Chorea?" She demanded. He frowned, and tried to hold back, but grimaced as his jaw began to burn.
"….ahhh! He's in Porcia Valley, looking for you." He admitted. Sheeva smirked. That wasn't too far away. A day's travel, if not less. She stood off of him and began to walk away. The team smirked, and walked away as well, leaving him still tied up. Joseph rushed back to him to dig through his pockets, taking out a spell book and a coin satchel.
"Thanks for the paycheck!" He said, tossing the bag into the air and catching it as he ran away with it. They all laughed as they spread their wings and took off, heading towards the valley. Sheeva found her resolve wavering as she neared the valley, thinking about the upcoming battle. She had to steel herself again, something that seemed much more difficult. It wasn't her average bad guy. It was her "dead" husband.
You can do it. You have to. She reminded herself, picking up speed.
Hope you enjoyed it. Please review! I miss seeing them...