Manticore Rampant

Ch 11 - The Long Arm of the Troll

She wouldn't have picked him for a runner. The human perhaps, if anybody, but in truth all three had seemed the death before dishonour type, the type she'd obliged by providing said death more times than she could be bothered to remember.

It mattered not. She'd be finished with these two before he could get far. It wouldn't have been long in any case, but with the dwarf's axe removed from the equation the conclusion was now even more foregoner.*

So, she kept a casual eye on his running form as she effortlessly evaded the two blades still clumsily hacking away at the spaces she had occupied moments before, and pondered on which of the human or the elf she would kill first.

The elf was tempting, as it rankled that the unworthy creature had actually managed to draw blood, something no other opponent had achieved since those long ago days in the training arena. But then, given her attempt to save him, it seemed the human meant something to her, so perhaps it would be more satisfying to kill him first and prove just how vain those efforts had been.

In any case, she should decide before the dwarf's flight carried him much...she blinked. With a momentary lapse of concentration, in which the human's blade actually managed to nick the sleeve of her robe, she saw the stocky figure was no longer running. Instead, he now stood at the entrance to the alley, silhouetted against the sunlit street beyond, where—bafflingly, inexplicably—he proceeded to remove his shirt, revealing in the process that while his figure might be stocky, it rocked a serious sixpack.

Defending now on reflex alone (which would still have been a match for half-a-dozen Slashes or Carris), she stared in perplexity at the dwarf as he raised his arms above his head, stretched his muscled body to the limit of his not at all considerable height—and began to sway, as if to some rhythm apparent only to him.

While she was no student of dance, lest it be the dance of death, she was transfixed. First with confusion and next with derision, but then with...something else. As the dwarf's movements became more powerful and purposeful and...and...personal, a trace of curious and unprecedented empathy stirred deep within her, just the tiniest of chimes, like a tuning fork in her heart. And much as the merest tremor might bring down a mountainside, as the harmonics of that chime reverberated through her, something buried deep in her psyche broke free. Something troubling and mysterious and raw. What exactly that something might be, whether the swirl of heady emotion rising within her was something new or something discarded and long-forgotten, she could not say.

Although she still defended every slash and thrust with ease, her lack of attention—for she spared them scarcely a glance—soon became apparent to her foes. As she continued to stare beyond them, the ferocity of their attack waned, until at last their evident curiosity as to what the hell could be more interesting than the two blades trying to kill you overcame them, and they too turned to watch the dance of the dwarf.

Moving with rapturous abandon and yet breathtaking precision, his compact form tumbled and flew, floated and spun, as butterflies flittered in the pit of her stomach and long-dormant feelings stirred and stretched, expanding to inhabit every fibre of her being. A mysterious moisture formed in her eyes (tears, she realised, the first her eyes had known since the day of her childhood abandonment, a lifetime ago) as the beauty of the dance, the purity of the dance, the sheer, breathtaking truth of the dance stripped away the scar tissue she had so assiduously built up over the years in order to keep her innermost self safe in this world of danger and death.

There was no music, beyond the cadence of his dancing feet, the sounds of the street, the rush of blood in her ears and the intoxicated pounding of her enraptured heart and yet, she realised, what more fitting music could there be than this, the very music of life itself? What better soundscape in which to take stock of the state of her soul, to catalogue and accept the vast and varied range of scars and blemishes it bore, and to understand that, irrespective of its battered state, while it was hers and hers alone it was also as one with the universe?