《High Crew》Chapter XV: Chilling News
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Two warriors clashed, the noise of colliding weapons ringing through the cold air. They circled each other, maneuvered, surged forward, kicking the snow from under their feet with remarkable fervor. When both were on the move, it looked as if they were surrounded by a miniature blizzard.
Ymdaton struggled. He was dragged down by many things: his weakened body, his equipment, but, mostly, by his opponent. Abimnupal was an outstanding warrior, equal to Crewslayer, if not better. He saw Ymdaton in battle before, he understood opponent’s style, habits, weaknesses. Crewslayer tried several approaches during their confrontation, yet none were successful this far. His comrade was always finding a countermeasure, always pushing him back, always forcing him into defence.
He tried another trick. After letting the adversary to make an advancing attack, he shoved Abimnupal back with a knee to the shield. Surprisingly, the opponent stumbled. Crewslayer expected a feint, so when the other man made an uprising attack with a buckler, he was just far enough to avoid it.
Too late he noticed that the force of a move was not focused on the shield, which hung freely on leather straps around Abimnupal’s forearm. The opponent was grasping a snowball in his fist. His comrade released it as soon as it became visible to Ymdaton. Crewslayer raised arms to block it, following reflexes. Yet his muscles were still sluggish, not quite fast enough to keep up with his perception.
The small projectile hit him square in the nose. It was not that painful, yet distractive enough to make him blink. When he opened his eyes next moment, Abimnupal was right at him, his axe’s edge pointed at Ymdaton’s neck.
“You are dead,” informed he in a most dispassionate tone.
Panting heavily, Ymdaton dropped his axe and shield.
“Three moons in the bed, almost without movement were not beneficial. You would have destroyed me during your better days. I told you from the beginning that expedition was a bad idea,” told him Abimnupal and then added, “We should spar more.”
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“You are not really subtle with your motivational speeches,” shrugged Ymdaton, “I am weak though, you’re right. For once, I need a break now, I’m out of my breath. Don’t remember that happening to me before.”
“Honoured warriors,” a voice from behind cut them off. Crewslayer turned to see Dragomir stepping from the house into the courtyard. He eyed the light leather clothing of kinani men, “Don’t you feel cold?” asked he and wrapped himself even deeper into his fur coat.
“On the contrary, looks like it is too hot for him,” pointed Abimnupal at Ymdaton and mocked his heavy breathing. His friend made a sour grimace.
“Anyway,” smiled the merchant, “A messenger from the knez came to inform me of a council meeting today. I am invited to attend it, alongside members of High Crew that are lodging in my house.”
“Did not bother to mention me by name,” shook his head Ymdaton.
“I will go prepare myself for the event, so that I look somewhat civilized,” told Abimnupal.
“I’m not sure if it’s even possible for you,” said Ymdaton with a grin. When his comrade turned towards the house, Crewslayer made a gesture to the merchant, asking him to stay.
“I have a question,” uttered he, when Abimnupal left. His face instantly became dead serious.
“Speak,” answered Dragomir with an interest written in his eyes.
“You travelled a lot, saw a lot of cities, a lot of warriors,” the kinani man paused, “Have you ever seen an emblem of a single mountain upon the shield.”
The trader was silent, bearing a thoughtful expression for some time.
“I saw quite a lot of warriors, that is right,” finally said he, “yet no militiaman or mercenary that I can remember bore such an image.”
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“Thought so,” nodded Ymdaton.
“Where did you see it?” asked the merchant.
“Doesn’t matter,” shook his head the warrior, “I just can’t tell anymore what really happened in the eastern groves from what I saw in my fever dreams,” he headed for the door, “I’ll go prepare myself as well.”
Dragomir did not ask him anything else.
The meeting was held in the same immense building as before. Weak winter sun barely squeezed its light through many windows of the house. It was noisy inside. Many walks of life gathered there: distinguished crewmen, militiamen of renown, Azytenisar’s court, the city council. Men were idly chatting, arguing, laughing even. The lord of Abeneewy himself was sitting on his throne, discussing something with Lulaton in low whispers.
Head of the council Tridum stepped into the middle of the hall and hit the floor with a butt of his stuff. The impact was loud and ringing. Everyone’s attention instantly switched to the old man.
“Let there be silence!” his voice was surprisingly powerful, “We came here to present the most urgent matters before our lord, Master of the Lands among the Sea and among the Forest, Lord of the House and the City, Knez of Khaldnetz Azytenisar. Let us hear the initiator of the gathering.”
Forward stepped the old grizzled drevlyani warrior.
“Look at him,” hissed Hasdruhy at Ymdaton’s side, “He calls himself ‘the elected commander’, when a crewman commands any squad stronger than ten people.”
“True,” nodded Abimnupal, “Our lord should dismantle this title altogether. Master over the house is master over warriors. There is no other way.”
Ymdaton simply shrugged his shoulders.
“You are quite simple,” came Azandahy’s voice somewhere from behind, “Lord Azytenisar honours local traditions. That is why forest dwellers love him. You sound like you want us to be shoved outside the walls by angry townsmen.”
“Greetings, men of Khladnetz, greetings, men of the islands, greetings, o mighty knez,” began Likhobor, the elected commander of militia, “It is true that I have requested this meeting. I will not be going circles around my case,” he paused, his face brightened with inspiration, “Our case. So, the point is: drevlyani cities, major and minor, have formed a league and are currently plotting to make war with us,” the crowd exhausted an avalanche of protesting and surprised utterings.
The commander did not seem to notice and concluded his speech anyway, “Supposedly, the attack will come this spring.”
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Benji and The World Spike
What happens when an all-powerful, inter-dimensional being named Bob gets bored? Benji Ferrell never thought he would need to know the answer to that question. Turns out that Bob sends out The World Spike to mix things up a bit. Benji soon finds his peaceful life thrown into chaos. Turns out that underneath the facade of a perfect utopia created by a one world government lies resentment, greed, and evil. The good news is that The World Spike gave him, and everyone else, magic powers and their own personal A.I. helper to protect themselves. The bad news is that everyone now has magic powers. The cover image was taken from a royalty free picture website.
8 205The Oresteia (Modernized)
All three of the great Greek Tragedians have written plays about the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. Yet theirs is in fact not a story of tragedy, but rather one of redemption. As they move from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, their spirit of struggle and regeneration becomes an everlasting song of celebration to be heard throughout the ages. Forming a discourse set against the emergence of Athenian democracy out of a period of chaos and destruction, the Orestian plays are compelling stories of the tensions between our obligations to our families and the laws that bind us together as a society. In the beginning, we witness how a king’s decision to sacrifice his daughter and turn the tide of war inflicts lasting damage on his family, culminating in a terrible act of retribution. In the aftermath of regicide, we behold how a son must set out to avenge his father’s death by committing a most egregious sin. In the end, the sinner is tormented by supernatural powers that can never be appeased, but ultimately finds redemption and ends the curse on his house once and for all. Woven through all of this is the story of a friendship so close that it elevates itself to brotherhood - Where the blood of the covenant is shown to be indeed thicker than the water of the womb. In this very brief twelve-chapter modern rendition of the Orestian plays, I have chosen to place my focus mainly on the lives of the characters Orestes and his best friend Pylades. The chapters, each around 2000-2500 words, are split up evenly between them in first-person narrative. I hope that you will come to enjoy reading this heartwarming story, but more importantly, that you see how the conflicts portrayed in the story, whether human or institutional, are still much very relevant to our societies today. Note on Sources: The details of this story is very loosely based on The Oresteia by Aeschylus. And I mean very loosely. Other sources that I referenced for detail and inspiration are Mythology by Edith Hamilton, Electra by Sophocles, and Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides. You may also find that I have quoted some of these works, and others (such as Shelley's Ozymondaeus), without citations (average of 1-2 such quotes per chapter). I did this because I do not have the ability to describe certain scenes nearly as well as some of those writers. If you read a particularly beautiful piece of prose here, chances are it's probably stolen lol. Also, I wrote this during the summer between my high school senior year and my college freshmen year. It was the summer of 2020, and being quarantined apparently gets my creative side out lol.
8 191One Man's Journey (2nd Draft)
Adam's life was normal; he teased his sister, daydreamed of becoming a powerful spiritualist and slaying evil dragons, and absolutely loved staring at the colorful night sky. All of that changed on one nightmarish night. AN: Hello once again! This is the second draft of my work that makes many changes tothe first. It's not just an edit, but an entire rewrite! Hopefully I am fixing some of the issues both I and others perceived with the first draft as well as improve the overall quality with everything I learned from writing the first draft. I hope you enjoy my work ^_^ Current cover by ChaosPenguin
8 120Through the Fog
Love in the shape of poems. Pain in the shape of words.
8 196SIPPY CUP
❝ blood still stains when the sheets are washed ❞Obsession: BLACKPINK Jennie's fatal flaw. She is willing to kill anyone just for Kim Jisoo to love her. Will she succeed?[ BOOK 2 OFTHE DOLLHOUSESERIES. ]ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 2017RE-PUBLISHED: 2020
8 208Let Me Start Again [Completed]
Start Date>>>> 1.4.2020End>>>20.5.2020ကိုယ့်ဘက်က အချစ်တွေပေးခဲ့လည်း ပြန်ရခဲ့တာက နာကျင်မှုတွေတဲ့လား မင်းအမုန်းတွေကိုထပ်ပြီးမခံစားနိုင်တော့လို့ ငါထွက်ပြေးပါရစေ'ခက်ထန်'ငါအရမ်းမုန်းနေတုန်းက တွယ်ကပ်နေပြီး အခုကျထွက်ပြေးတော့မလို့လား အရင်ကမှားခဲ့တာတွေအတွက် တောင်းပန်ပါတယ် အပြစ်တွေကိုပေးဆပ်တဲ့အနေနဲ့ မင်းကိုဂရုစိုက်ပေး ချစ်ပေးမှာမလို့ ကိုယ့်ကို အစကနေပြန်စခွင့်ပေးပါ'မင်းစစ်မောင်'ကိုယ့္ဘက္က အခ်စ္ေတြေပးခဲ့လည္း ျပန္ရခဲ့တာက နာက်င္မႈေတြတဲ့လား မင္းအမုန္းေတြကိုထပ္ၿပီးမခံစားႏိုင္ေတာ့လို႔ ငါထြက္ေျပးပါရေစ'ခက္ထန္'ငါအရမ္းမုန္းေနတုန္းက တြယ္ကပ္ေနၿပီး အခုက်ထြက္ေျပးေတာ့မလို႔လား အရင္ကမွားခဲ့တာေတြအတြက္ ေတာင္းပန္ပါတယ္ အျပစ္ေတြကိုေပးဆပ္တဲ့အေနနဲ႔ မင္းကိုဂ႐ုစိုက္ေပး ခ်စ္ေပးမွာမလို႔ ကိုယ့္ကို အစကေနျပန္စခြင့္ေပးပါ'မင္းစစ္ေမာင္'
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