Peklo

Dark-Tufted Sparrowmouse Familiar A terror to any dragon who gardens. 1500 Leafy Pack Chests Assembled from woven vines and tough broad leaves. There's something inside. 0 Acuity Fragment Augment Stone When assigned, this fragment empowers one dragon of any element with +1 Intellect. 100 Required Level: 5 Amber Gulper Familiar Sometimes dragon eats fish. Sometimes fish eats dragon. 2650

_______________________________________________________________ Peklo _______________________________________________________________ Princess - Believes herself cursed, for she brings death to all the creatures she touches. - A debt from her sister, which lies half-forgotten under payers of pearlescent shine. She's going to retrieve it soon. - Perhaps if the circumstances had been different, she would be less afraid.

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Failure
Peklo

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In the far reaches of the twisting stone spires of her kingdom, a child sleeps.
With eyes wide open to the mock battle that happens out her window, the game of swords her siblings play, she dreams.
She can do little else.

Night and day blur together, when there’s nothing she’s allowed to do. It’s night, and she means to prove herself not weak.
A quick dash into the armory- she’s familiar with the plan of the castle, even if it’s not her lot in life to walk it. Her siblings are there too; Peklo freezes as the brutish duo turn to her.
“What’s she doing here?”
Podsvetia shakes his head. He stands, taller than any of them, with a sword taken from the rack- Anapto carries a shorter blade, though one no less lethal.
“I’m going outside.”
“You?”
Peklo nods, steel resolve and cutting gaze. Without taking her eyes from either sibling, she walks along the opposite wall. One hand reaches for something, anything, which she could rely on. Defend herself with.
“Think you can use that?” She holds a small staff, one meant as a supplement to a hand-to-hand combat style, one that neither of her older siblings would find much interest in. She nods.
“We’re not really going to let her do this, are we?”
A look passes between the two- one that says nothing less than “she hardly matters anyways.”
Her grip on the staff tightens, eyes narrowed against the force of her anger.

The pearlcatcher walks out beyond the walls of pink stone she’s known her whole life. Hears a world of motion, commotion, the sound of creatures small and large that lurk beyond.
One step and another and another.
Something flies towards her, and with little thought, she strikes- an unpracticed and fearful blow. The sparrowmouse is thrown to the ground, and she runs to it. She reaches for it, but it cheeps, indignant, with one wing at a wrong angle.
She stands over it, quietly. Eyes that see without seeing, she reaches for it again, bearing its sharp cutting beak without notice of the blood it draws.

It is dead by the time she brings it back to her tower. Wordlessly, she buries it, feeling the taunting words of her siblings, her parents, everyone she knows. Taunting her. She couldn’t kill it and she couldn’t save it- a failure in both respects.

Its body feeds the rosebush beneath her tower.

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A Gift From No One
Anapto

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The garden was her haven, one of the few places she could get lost from her parents in. She wasn't afforded the same luxury as her brother, who was allowed to go with Veles into the woods, allowed to join the hunt because he was the favorite of the king.

She twisted the ring about her thumb, staring with fury into the clouds. Podsvetia's the favorite, the special child.
"Do they want us to hate each other?" She asked the wind, which simply breezed past, not answering. "I mean, do Veles and Podsvetia want to hate me, and want me to hate them?"
Again, no answer. She huffed, looking up at the tower which held her sister. She had only the most vague memories of her sister. The last time the pearlcatcher had gone outside her fortress, they had all been but small children, barely more than hatchlings.

Her sister's gaze was there, watching over the garden, staring into Anapto's soul as though waiting for the next question to the open winds. As though she already knew the question.

Shuddering, Anapto turned away from her sister. "Leave me alone."

She looked back, and there was no one at the window. "What..?"
At the base of the tower, something had spilt gold on the ground.

A satchel of treasure, woven from vines that crawled up the sides of the castle, bound and reinforced within with leaves of ivy. She looked up- her sister's face quickly ducking away from the window where she had been watching just moments earlier.

---

I had always assumed we avoided Peklo because something was wrong with her. I guess Veles would have had us be like that. What if nothing's wrong with her after all?

I don't know what her goal was, for giving me this. I guess it doesn't matter what her intentions were. I have my own intentions.

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A Gift to No One
Peklo

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Snip. Snip.
The vines that threatened at all hours to seal her only remaining source of sun were clipped away. A pair of shears were her last tool to reach the outside world.
Snip.

The window was just small enough that going in and out through it, even with the small amount of size-altering magic she'd learned, was a hassle. She would have loved to have... something. A companion perhaps. Someone with whom she could carry out a proper conversation.
Her sister had stopped visiting the garden for the past week, after the bundle of treasure. The recollection that it had been both siblings that once carried their father's favor, both of them who had seen Peklo as nothing more than a burden, had left her feeling shameful for even thinking that assisting Anapto was a good idea. Something to be done.

"She seemed so helpless..." The frailty of her whispered voice was an electric shock. She really hadn't spoken in such a long time. Her tongue was as useless (useless!) as the rest of her muscles.

She stared out into the garden as her brother ran off into the woods, following his father (and it was only his father, not the father of the sisters, he had been disowned by their two minds,) following and smiling and looking half-way between adult- and child-hood, the first straggling bit of his guardian beard barely clinging to his chin.

Not that Peklo could see it, he was too far away, and her eyes too weak. She thought he still looked rather like the overgrown hatchling he was back then.

She rested her chin upon the windowsill, again wishing for company.

Something lumpy and solid flew past- inches away from her face, crashing into the back of her room, and leaving her disorientedly trying to fish herself from the wandering thoughts which had clouded her sight.
Her sister? In the garden, and grinning that self-same wicked grin.

She went to gather the package.
Soon? What- "what do you mean by soon?" Peklo asked as she returned to the window- and Anapto shook her head. It could have been 'I can't hear you,' or it could have been 'you'll see soon,' and the pearl catcher had no way to know which was which.
The guardian sister took her leave without further explanation.

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Obliteration
Peklo

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She was out.
She was out.
Voices in the wind seemed to repeat the mantra as she stood on shaking legs, eyes wide in the moonlight.
Peklo is out.

What would she do now? She could try and prove her worth to her family- what good would that ever do? Her father had written her off as Failure, her mother barely remembered the child locked in the tower.

Faint and incomprehensible memories shimmered in the tiny nacre jewel she clutched. Memories that her parents had passed along when she was young; memories that barely belonged to her. Of enemies and kingdoms and power and domination.

A faint breeze shrouded the moonlight, and in the darkness she drew closer her cape, and marched onwards. The winds would guide her, she supposed; was it not the wind that her father had once fought? It was fire, and wind. And the wind drew her towards the regions ever lit by the bright goddess, Lightweaver.

A family there, a company of seven. Giants and fairies side-by-side, and Peklo unlike any of them. Ridgeback in his iron armor, she approached.
What happened next was a poor memory; her magic, untrained, had struck out without prompting- or maybe she had done it herself. A brown mith, companion of the giant, was struck by the blast- he too, was struck, though it was barely effectual, and she'd seen his eyes bore the color of Wind. But the mith had been in the direct line of the blast, and the giant took so poorly to the death of the insect. He must have supposed it was an intentional attack, though Peklo couldn't say whether that was true after the fact.

If she had stayed any longer, she would have been killed- so she did not stay. Cold, unfeeling iron seemed to grasp at her heart, and she spat black nacre in an attempt to rid herself of the feeling. It would not leave her, for she had been the cause of death once more. Another small creature finding death at her hand.

Perhaps there was a reason she was sentenced to spend eternity in the tower, she supposed there must have been.