Unspooled

Noa woke slowly, like the sun’s first light snaking its way through the back alleys and side streets of Huzuz. He lay utterly motionless, enjoying the stillness of the air hanging heavy with dust particles that danced privately, just for him, in the gathering dawn. He found his gaze drawn down to the elegant shoulder draped across his chest and smiled at the raucous snoring pouring forth from the bare chest of Jheralyn, whose face was obscured by her tangled, wild mane of raven hair with the faintest lavender sheen. 

Something so small shouldn’t be capable of sleeping so loudly. 

Noa found himself unwilling to move for fear of waking her, but that was fine with him – more time to enjoy this utterly perfect morning. The remains of the day would keep.

He let his mind drift back to earlier exploits. It had been a torrid few months, between finding a love he’d never known he even wanted and the awakening of a new power he knew he’d never wanted. 

Noa raised his left hand gingerly, slowly, and let the purple energy spread from his fingertips until it encased his hand like a glove. He frowned at it. What had Jheralyn told him, again?

Like a dry, distant breeze disturbing a dune on the horizon, he heard her words drift back through his mind.

Your power will grow, and you must master it or it will master you. Such is the way of things. But mastery need not mean combat with yourself. Remember that the power is already yours. It flows from you. It is an extension of you. You need only to be the blade you wish to wield.

Her belief in him was absolute; as sure as the ground kissing an apple falling from a tree. His brow furrowed more deeply.

Be the blade.

 Slowly, the energy began to shift. At first, it simply ceased to cover Noa’s thumb and pinky. Then, it was narrow enough for him to grip. Almost like the hilt of a dagger.

If I just…

“I am constantly amazed at the speed of your progress.”

He jumped as the purple energy vanished from his hands in an instant, glancing down in surprise. Jheralyn was grinning up at him from her perch on his shoulder. He hadn’t even heard her snoring cease. 

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” he murmured as she nuzzled his hairless, unblemished chest, planting little kisses here and there. 

“I was about to say the same…just, not to you.” Jheralyn’s voice thrummed, liquid lust, as her hand wound its way between his legs. She cocked an eyebrow at him lecherously before her eyes flicked down toward his nethers.

Noa’s smile widened, but he kept his legs still. 

Let her work for it a little.

“Didn’t get enough last night, hmm?”

“Never,” she purred, pressing her lips to his.

*** *** ***

About an hour later, now fully dressed, Noa was pacing next to the makeshift bed of leathers and blankets. Jheralyn was taking her sweet time bathing and getting dressed, but his pre-operation nerves were in overdrive as usual, and he was finding it impossible to be still.

“Why do you worry so much?”

Noa barely broke stride as his eyes flicked to hers. She stood next to the metal washtub, drying her body as she watched him calmly.

“I worry an appropriate amount based on the severity of the threat facing us.”

She cocked her head to the side as she ran the thick woolen cloth through her long hair. The shadow of a playful but understanding smile danced around the edges of her mouth as she responded.

“Do you, though?”

Noa paused his pacing with his back to her, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. Jheralyn pressed her advantage. 

“What has all your endless worrying ever purchased you?”

Noa let his nostrils flare as he exhaled slowly. Then he turned to face her.

“Surely there’s more of merit in this world than that which can be purchased.”

Her laugh tinkled around the room like the enchanted earrings swaying on her ears.

“Not in my experience, love.”

Without another word, she pulled on her special white gown with the gold trim. The one she used for honeypots. The one that Noa knew was magically fortified, more than it looked, to protect her a little more than such an elegant dress really should. She adjusted the folds and creases until the garment hugged her petite form perfectly, then spun slowly on the spot for his inspection.

“Well? How do I look?”

Noa pretended to appraise her, but there was no mystery as to the nature of his response. They both knew how good she looked. Noa decided normal words were insufficient for the task at hand, no matter how predictable the sentiment.

“You look like the dew on a lily in the morning, and as effortlessly effervescent and free as a dove alight on a spring breeze.”

She stopped twirling and her smile slid from her face, leaving shocked uncertainty in its wake for a moment barely long enough for his senses to register it. Then, she laughed and turned away, reaching for a pair of bracers on the shabby, rickety table behind her. As she put them on, still with her back to him, she responded in a voice which was valiantly attempting to be cheerful and bright. Noa could hear the emotion constricting her vocal cords, however. 

“You know, for all your skills and even considering your waking telekinetic abilities…the coupling of your brain and your heart is still your greatest asset.”

She surreptitiously wiped her eyes hastily, trying to hide the motion from his vision by pretending to adjust her hair. Then she turned back around to face him, her eyes still shining with suppressed emotion.

“It seems strange to imagine that our future hinges on how well and quietly I can seduce and murder one drow, doesn’t it? The tangled webs we weave, as they say. And here we are, spooled for the loom.”

Noa’s heart thundered against his ribs.

“I still think we’d be better served to take the one who can turn invisible down first,” he said moodily. “The chief lieutenant, whatever his name is. Muraladyr. The glorified assassin playing at being a bodyguard.”

Jheralyn shook her head, the soft smile playing upon her lips once more. “I know, but we can’t, okay? He’s a threat and an unknown quantity, but sometimes things are like that. Taking him down first would be loud, messy, and possibly even too dangerous, as we aren’t sure how strong he really is. Plus, it would alert them that something is wrong. The patron is simply too well guarded; we have to get him alone first, try to do the deed as quietly as possible, and then make our escape with all possible haste. One quick stop at Binzo’s to collect on the bounty, and then we’re ghosts. We can do this. It’s a good plan.”

Noa nodded reluctantly. This was how each of the preceding conversations on the topic had also gone. At this point, rehashing it was more of a comfort blanket than a genuine attempt to change the plan.

“But…listen…” Jheralyn was speaking quietly now, running her hand along the elegant rapier she usually wore. It was lying on the table next to where the bracers had been sitting, and on the chair next to the small table, she’d placed her neatly folded black vestments and robe. “If anything…well…”

She seemed to reach a decision, setting her shoulders and pursing her lips. Noa knew the expression well, loved it, and was currently terrified of it.

“It’ll all be fine. But do me a favor, okay? Hold my belt for me. You know how it works, and you know what it can do. Ideally, this won’t come to a real fight, but if it does, it’ll help you balance the playing field somewhat. Wear it and keep it safe for me, okay?”

She picked up an elegant, ornately fashioned leather belt from the place she’d draped it over the back of the chair. It had four loops dangling from it, and Noa knew that she usually held throwing daggers on it.

He was already shaking his head. “Absolutely not, I wouldn’t even know how to activate it; it belongs with you.”

She smiled and crossed the room, pressing the belt into his chest. She stood on her toes to whisper seductively into his ear.

“Willowshade. That’s the activation word. It won’t work until it’s time for it to work. The belt knows when you’re ready.”

With that, she pulled back slightly, staring into his eyes with passion and intense meaning as she fashioned her belt around his waist. He looked down briefly and saw three of the loops on the belt slowly unwinding. After a moment, they disappeared from existence and left a single loop hanging from the belt. Noa retrieved his simple dagger from its sheath and whispered “Willowshade,” watching with fascination as the blade and hilt unwound like tightly braided rope and then re-wove in place on the belt. His dagger was ready to use. 

Noa raised his eyes back to Jheralyn’s and drank her in. They stood in the same position for a moment, her hands resting on his hips as they stared deeply into each other’s eyes.

“Do you know why I recruited you and Agner in the first place?” Her lavender irises were alight with mirth now. 

He smiled back. “Because he follows me around, and you knew I was the only one in town who can vanish and cut a purse better than you?”

She affected a scandalized expression and playfully slapped his arm. “You dog! We both know Agner has his own skills. And besides that…”

She stood on her toes once more, and her lips brushed his neck a second time as she whispered smokily.

“You wish you could caress the shadows the way I do.”

Then she danced away, suddenly impish. Noa made to follow her playfully, but a clearing throat behind him caused them both to pull up short and face the door.

“It was bad enough having to listen to you two go at it all night. Can we please get this over with?”

Agner stood in the doorway, already dressed in hardened leathers and a cloak. His shrewd eyes flicked down to the belt around Noa’s waist and narrowed, but he said nothing further. 

“Quite right,” Jheralyn said breezily, stepping past Noa - she let her hand graze his groin playfully as she passed - and up to Agner. She was only two-thirds his height, but a casual observer would scarcely notice. Such was her ability to command a room at will. She patted Agner’s elbow bracingly. “Today begins a new future for all of us.”

With that, the trio strode from the room, walked down the stairs, and stepped into the sunlight snaking its way through the alley beyond the dilapidated front door.

*** *** ***

“I don’t like it,” Noa hissed.

“You don’t like anything,” Agner hissed back. Even now, his voice was lacquered in sneering disdain.

“Stop fucking around. We need to get in there.”

Moments earlier, from their vantage point high atop the mercantile trading post across the street from the official guest’s quarters where Jheralyn was currently plying her skills, they’d seen a small contingent of armored Mamluks rush into the building, weapons drawn.

“For all we know, they’re here to arrest the Mizzrym. Gods know his wretched soul deserves it.”

“You know damned well that’s not what this is. Someone sold us out. Probably Binzo.”

Agner’s jaw clenched as he considered this. “I hate it when you’re right,” he spat. “Alright, we need to be smart about this. There were at least six of them. I doubt they’re the best and brightest the guard has to offer; the look of grunts clung to them like flies on a corpse. But still, the numbers game isn’t in our favor.” 

“Tulinary Bolt,” Noa spat tersely, already swinging his leg over the edge of the roof above the extremely narrow alley below. Agner laughed heartily.

“Oh-ho! Pulling out the ballista to kill a cockroach, are we? You really are shaken. Very well, boss, the Tulinary Bolt it is.”

Noa ignored the “boss” barb as he slid down between the buildings, legs outstretched so that a boot rested on each building to slow his descent. 

If I do this many more times, I’ll need to get new boots.

He hit the ground and was instantly in motion, moving with haste through whatever shadows he could. Usually, he’d approach with much more caution, but speed was the true game now. 

The plan was for Jheralyn not to psychically link the trio’s minds, even though they normally would for operations. She claimed it was for the sake of security, but Noa suspected the actual reason was that she was empathetic to his feelings. Simply put, she didn’t want him to have to endure hearing the mental side of her…acting…in the bed with Kelfein Mizzrym. He appreciated her concern, but knew this left them at a severe disadvantage currently. He and Agner had no way to warn her about what was coming. 

“Ready?”

Agner’s thoughts sounded tinny and hollow in Noa’s mind. When Jheralyn used her ability to link their minds, the thoughts were as sharp and clear as if they were standing next to each other, having a conversation. Noa supposed eventually he could perfect this new ability to that point, but for now, there was a lot of interference in the thready mental connection he’d created between himself and Agner. Noa crouched into his final position and answered mentally.

“Go.”

Instantly, Noa heard the front door smash open as Agner burst inside. Reckless as always.

Sometimes it has uses, though. 

Almost immediately, the body of one of the Mamluks came crashing through the small window above Noa’s head. The wounded Mamluk didn’t quite make it all the way out of the window, however…he seemed to have become stuck in the narrow window frame.

Fuck. Need a new ingress point.

Noa reached up and quickly cut the man’s throat. Before the blood had even finished spraying the exterior wall, Noa was in the air, lifted briefly by his own purple telepathy as he hurled his dagger repeatedly at targets inside the room. In addition to the dead man stuck in the window, there were three more targets inside. 

Two of them must have rushed upstairs. Fuck fuck fuck.

Agner felled his second target at roughly the same time as Noa’s dagger found its second forehead. In the span of about eight seconds, all four Mamluks in direct evidence were dead.

“Get your ass in here!” Agner called through the window. Noa caught a brief glimpse of his drow companion wiping the blood off his rapier on the tunic of the last man he’d killed. Noa was a blur of motion as he sped to the front door that Agner had kicked in. 

Then, it happened. For the briefest of moments, time seemed to slow around Noa as he reached the doorframe, and an image leapt to his mind of Jheralyn. Despite how reckless she might appear sometimes, she never entered a structure without using her magical ability to detect how many people were inside. Threat measurement. Noa could envision her reaching across her body with her right hand to touch the doorframe, then repeating the process on the other side with her left hand. 

Should I stop to check?

He had only moments to get to her, he knew. The violence down here had been swift, but noisy. Besides, he knew how many threats there were…right? 

Jheralyn was inside. Two more living Mamluks. And maybe Kelfein Mizzrym, if she hadn’t killed him yet.

No time. Must move.

And so the moment passed. Noa sped over the threshold without touching the doorframe, and he and Agner sped up the stairs two at a time. 

“Halt! Stop right there!”

A Mamluk in full plate armor appeared at the top of the stairs, clumsily drawing his shortsword just before his head exploded inside his helm as the sickly looking bolt of arcane energy left Agner’s hand and impacted the guard’s skull. 

Noa lept over the body as it clattered down messily down the stairs, somersaulting elegantly and standing in one swift, fluid motion as he drove his dagger right up through the chin of the final Mamluk as the guard was turning away from the open bedroom door towards him. Noa kept his momentum going, pirouetting elegantly around the falling body as blood began to spew mercilessly onto the walls of the hallway. Noa finished this string of dance-like moves crouched in the doorway of the bedroom, surveying the scene before him as he struggled to catch his breath.

Kelfein Mizzrym was standing next to the elegant four-post bed, stark raving naked, his rapier in his hand at the throat of Jheralyn. His eyes were wild as they flicked over to observe Noa.

“Ah,” he said snidely, “the rest of your crew has arrived to rescue you. I’d heard there was to be a clumsy attempt on my life, but never did I think one so lovely might be the vector. How foolish I was to think the gutter trash of this festering shithole might be anything else but valueless assassins just because they were comely.”

Jheralyn, still fully dressed, was surveying the tip of the rapier coolly from her position on the floor. She might well have been selecting a cabbage from the market, so supremely unconcerned was she.

Noa’s practiced eye could see that a tousle had taken place. In a flash, he understood: the guards had burst into the room yelling about an assassin, and Jheralyn and Mizzrym had each gone for his rapier. He’d come out on top.

That won’t last.

As if on cue, Jheralyn’s hands moved in a flash. One moment, she appeared defeated; the next, she’d conjured a pair of elegant, finely detailed stiletto daggers comprised of shimmering purple telekinetic energy. She swiped the drow’s rapier away with one, moved the other to Mizzrym’s throat threateningly, and then spoke with the acidic, silky-sweet tone she always adopted for these kinds of operations.

“Thank you for your business.”

She drove the dagger in for the kill, but as she did, a ring on the drow patron’s hand suddenly glowed a bright blue, and he disappeared briefly in a shimmer of mist. He re-materialized almost instantly by the only window in the room, a crazed expression on his face. Noa and Agner both readied their own attacks, and Jheralyn’s arm was already a blur as she flung her purple dagger at the naked elf. And then, the drow did the only thing they hadn’t counted on him doing.

He jumped through the glass of the window and disappeared from view, tumbling to the street below.

Jheralyn was already on her feet, running across the bed and conjuring a new dagger.

“Hurry! If we follow, we can still finish the - ”

There was a blaze of fire suddenly right behind her, and the world unspooled before Noa’s eyes.

Materializing from the invisibility spell as it dropped, the assassin turned bodyguard, Muraladyr, drove a flaming longsword right through the center of Jheralyn’s back. The crimson-coated blade exploded through the front of her chest before re-igniting, and in this moment of calamity as the world ended, Noa’s brain jumped, unbidden, back to his decision not to scan the doorframe before entering the building.

No.

A violent buzzing sound filled Noa’s ears.

If I’d only scanned, I would’ve realized there was another…

Agner bellowed in rage and began firing his magical bursts of energy wildly in the direction of the bodyguard, Muraladyr. 

No.

Muraladyr pulled the blade violently from Jheralyn’s back and immediately dove toward the window to follow his master to the ground without so much as a glance toward Noa or Agner. Agner’s magical attacks all flew wide, missing the assassin by a considerable margin.

No.

Noa still crouched, rooted to the spot, as he watched Jheralyn fall in slow motion. Her mouth was a perfect little “O” of surprise, her hair tumbling past her face, her eyes wide and livid with the shock.

No.

Noa’s scream of agony reverberated soundlessly against his deadened eardrums. There was no sound. No light. Nothing existed but the tears from his eyes and the spittle from his mouth and the blood thundering through his head. He crawled on hands and knees over bedsheets and discarded trousers. The abandoned rapier dug into his shin as he crawled over it. Now there were pieces of the shattered glass from the window grinding into his palms and knees. He felt nothing, nothing at all, until his hands cradled her head and lifted her towards himself. Only then did he feel the softness of her hair, and the fragile thread of life retreating from her body.

The dark brown eyes found the lavender ones. She blinked slowly up at him, and then a sad, wistful smile curled her perfect lips. She raised a trembling, blood-soaked hand to his cheek.

“Shh. It’s…not your…not your fault…”

He was yelling and crying, begging her to stay, screaming for Agner to help, but he could hear nothing but her quiet words.

“I…I chose you…both…because I believe you have…greatness…in you. I…”

She coughed suddenly, dark crimson blood pouring from her mouth and staining her beautiful dress. Still, she persisted, her voice dropping to a strangled whisper.

“I believe…you can be…the greatest. Far…beyond me. There is…so much greatness…in you, and it is…buoyed by…your goodness. Don’t…lose…your heart. Stay…kind…it is…your greatest…”

And then her eyes were extinguished candles, cast forever into darkness.