It was a beautiful, cold, clear day, and the champion in his shining armor was enjoying himself, as always.
Vesryn was a self-proclaimed champion, of course; no city that still existed would claim him as their protector. He preferred to see himself as a champion of the lost, the forgotten, the ruined places that no one but him could find. This, he had discovered, was one of the few things Saraya liked about him, and not even in a grudgingly admitted sort of way.
The clash of the dulled training weapons rang out through the crisp air, as the rank-and-file soldiers performed their drills and bettered themselves. Vesryn had been engaging anyone who wished to challenge him all morning, and what had started as a few private duels had turned into a bit of a sideshow, distracting a fair bit from the main body of drills and probably giving the Lions running things a headache. It was proving good for morale, though, as a fair number of soldiers were gathered around in a circle and enjoying themselves. They placed bets, not on the winner of the fights, but on how long any soldier would be able to keep his feet against Vesryn, or if they'd land a single hit or not.
For a man who spent much of his time alone in the isolated corners of the world, Vesryn had a knack for showmanship, and played wonderfully for the crowd, like he'd been trained in arena fighting or some such. This sort of thing had been a near daily ritual for the Stormbreakers, but back in that period of his life Saraya had been very interested in teaching Vesryn some hard lessons. How to survive on his own chief among them.
Now, he could tell she was immensely enjoying this, putting human after human into the snow using a seemingly unwieldy blunted axe. Vesryn's motions were graceful, without hesitation or doubt, but with an undeniable strength behind them, applied in exactly the right way. The presence in his mind did not control his actions, but Vesryn could feel her instincts, and allow them to become his own. Sometimes, he felt a bit of sadness while fighting. How beautiful it would be, to watch her move in her own body, what he considered to be perfection in fluidity, grace, and controlled power. He was a poor imitation of what she could do, he knew this. No one in Haven would be remotely able to challenge her.
The crowd groaned when another was whacked across the upper back and flew face forward into the snow. The soldier in question rolled over, spitting and wiping his face, and Vesryn offered him a hand up. The man slapped his plated hand angrily away, and clambered back to his feet himself. "The elf's a bloody demon!" someone in the crowd shouted. Vesryn bowed, grinning.
"Would anyone else like to try their hand?"
“Couldn’t turn down a challenge to save my life.” The reply was actually almost a grumble, as though the thought had caused some grouchiness in the one who spoke it, and she looked around her for a minute until she spotted someone holding what looked like a heavy practice bastardsword. “Hey Wulf, can I borrow that?” The man in question shrugged and handed it over, and Khari tested the weight with a few swings before she stepped into the makeshift ring across from him.
“Put me down for…” She grimaced, her eyes flicking up and down Vesryn, or rather, his gear, most likely, and a short huff escaped her. “Ten minutes. If I can’t make it that long, I’ll eat my sword, because I won’t deserve it anymore.” Despite the dry tone of her words, there was a very steely glint in her jade-green eyes when they met his, and her mouth curled up at the corner. Whether she thought she could achieve it was not certain, but all the same, she’d entered the ring with the intention of winning. "Give him hell!" A voice called out, belonging to Michaël.
Saraya's judgemental nature immediately sprang into action, something which Vesryn tiredly endured. He could feel her analyzing every inch of the poor girl, and finding every last one wanting. Vesryn had heard about Khari, but they'd yet to have the chance to properly speak, or even introduce themselves. As was his custom, he refrained from making any assumptions long after Saraya had already made hers. What was obvious to Vesryn was that she did not intend on letting Khari stay standing for two minutes, let alone ten.
Vesryn, however, gave her a welcoming smile, his arms outstretched. "There's no one I'd rather dance with, lovely. Best give us some more room, everyone." The circle gathered around them wisely shuffled away from the center, offering the two of them a larger dance floor of snow, packed down from countless feet smashing it day in and day out. "Whenever you're ready," he said, briefly beckoning her to him, "you may throw your storm at my tower." He smiled, with a confidence that had already goaded more than one opponent this morning into recklessness.
Though she might have seemed the type to be exactly the same, she did not immediately spring into offense. Instead, she shifted her grip, using both hands to hold the bastardsword at an angle equally well suited for either attack or defense. She appeared to, at least initially, be waiting for something to happen, but then she shifted her stance, increasing the bend in her knees and rising onto the pads of her feet, bouncing on them a couple times as though to test something.
When she did move, she telegraphed it very little. It was sudden, and neither her eyes nor her feet had given away that she’d be going for the left, which she did, with enough force to kick up snow behind her. She swung in low, which made some sense, since her center of gravity was a great deal below his.
Vesryn, however, was a great deal stronger, and almost impossible to catch off guard. Perhaps he'd taken some of the rank and file soldiers lightly, but he knew Khari was in the same bracket he was, and he knew she had far too much raw talent to be treated the same way the others were. But she was horribly outmatched in terms of experience. His instincts were bolstered by those of a warrior who had lived in a time when elves far outlasted humans in years.
He blocked with the head of his axe low, stopping the blade cold only a short distance from his body, but it was all he needed. His face lost all of its humor as he forced their weapons upwards, turning over their weapons to the other side in front of him. The bottom of his axe head hooked around the blade enough for him to pull forward and manipulate her momentum, and suddenly he brought the haft of the two handed weapon to smack across her jaw.
He sidestepped immediately, extricating his weapon, which he whipped swiftly over his head, aiming a swift, strong blow once he was around her back, aimed for the left side of her ribs.
The blow to her face had stunned her, that much was quite clear, but her own instincts weren’t so bad, for someone so young, and she threw herself into the snow almost immediately afterwards, as far away as she could jump, so while the second blow hit, it didn’t do so with nearly all the force he’d put behind it, and she rolled back to her feet, shaking her head. To her credit, perhaps, she didn’t seem to fear a repeat of the painful experience, and she attacked a second time, this time aiming for his arm itself, before abruptly switching her stride at the last possible second and trying for a cross-slash. A feint, it seemed.
She came close again, but again Vesryn's axe handle was there to solidly block her slash, the clash of weapons ringing out loudly through the air. The crowd had mostly silenced for the fight, knowing the two participating were among the Inquisition's best. Perhaps it was simply because Vesryn appeared to be focusing for the first time all morning. He shoved upwards hard, to move Khari's sword away from her center, before he launched a swift straight kick for her abdomen.
"Faster!" he commanded. "A chevalier would at least make me sweat."
Khari actually outright snarled at him, her face twisting into a sneer. “If I were a chevalier, you’d bleed.” He appeared to have succeeded in drawing out a more aggressive version of her, however, because the next series of attacks she leveled at him were harder to block. She wasn’t especially strong, but Khari was quick, and she did seem to understand how to make momentum work on her favor, because though she didn’t get any hits in on him, she was striking hard enough to vibrate both their weapons for multiple seconds after the impacts themselves, and the clanging was loud.
She appeared to know better than trying to block him, however, because her own maneuvers were overwhelmingly of the dodging variety, and he wound up hitting a lot of nothing when he went to retaliate. It was beginning to look very much like a storm assailing a tower: she only seemed to pick up speed as the fight wore on, throwing herself wholeheartedly into her offense and relying on her own sense of the flow of motion to keep her out of the way of his axe.
"That's better," he growled, when another swing of his axe missed, causing a section of the onlookers to back away from the follow-through of the swing. Vesryn's own blocks were often placed excellently, to deflect the weight of Khari's sword as much as halt it, and indeed, it was a necessary skill, for he rarely dodged her attacks entirely. His footwork was precise, in the way it carefully positioned him on the defensive. He could quite literally do this almost all day, and had in the past. His brow did indeed work up a sheen, but if anything, he seemed to be enjoying the exertion.
Finally he parried one of her blows away and rapped her on the back with the axe handle, creating a brief moment of separation. He ran a hand through his white-blonde hair, eyeing her and walking sideways, circling. "What does a title give you? What do you lack, that being called chevalier would grant you?" He was actually curious as to what would drive her so powerfully just to join the ranks of an all-human group. Saraya didn't care. She just wanted to hit the girl more.
“What makes you think it’s just about me?” The reply was snapped back—Khari was clearly not as capable of separating her demeanor from the inherent aggression of the spar as he was, at least not at the moment. She eyed him warily, moving with him, mostly, and certainly not presenting him with her back, rolling out her shoulders and settling back into her initial stance. She clearly wasn’t going to give him any more than that, though, and she drove forward again. Her endurance was nothing to sneeze at, even if her patience perhaps left much to be desired, and she was just as aggressive on this pass as she’d been on the last.
Ten minutes was swiftly coming upon them, but for all that, she didn’t try to stretch it out, placing herself at just as much risk as she had before, and she paid for it, catching the haft of the axe full in the stomach, sliding backwards on the snow, though she yet retained her feet, closing one eye perhaps from the pain of impact but rebounding with uncanny quickness, swinging, of all things, her fist, in what looked very much like a wild lunge, but was pulled short as she drove the point of her blunted blade forward instead.
Vesryn couldn't make sense of her, and he wondered briefly if she weren't a little bit unhinged. Perhaps it was just the fight that was making her seem that way, as she wielded her aggression as much as she did her blade. Perhaps he should have simply chalked it up to the fact that he knew only one thing about her, and that one thing painted her as a foolishly optimistic, even naïve, person. Her feigned punch, flowing into a stab, was about as effective as it could have been, the point of her blade scraping across plate armor briefly before it was pushed aside by the haft of his axe. Not the wisest attack against someone with armor easily strong enough to withstand a sword point, but successful in its own way.
Saraya's instinct was to grapple with her, use his superior strength to stop her from getting away again, and Vesryn obeyed, snatching her wrist on the follow-through of the lunge. He pulled her into his reach, and then landed a solid, heavy punch to her cheekbone. Restraining the wrist that held her blade, he kicked hard to the back of her leg, to put her down on a knee. Rather than finish the fight, he let curiosity get the best of him. "Are you not already what you want to be? For yourself? For others?" His eyes were searching, confused. Saraya raged in his head, demanding a blow that would end the spar.
Her reply was extremely simple: “Is anyone?” It was a surprisingly lucid question, which perhaps made what she did next all the more bizarre in contrast. She seemed well aware of what would happen if they went into a grapple, and so she pushed herself off the ground, yanking downwards with what was possibly all the strength she had on the wrist he held, though her aim was evidently not to get free. Of all things, she headbutted him, the hard part of her skull hitting him right where his nose met his brow.
Saraya, as she had a tendency to do in these moments when she was displeased, abandoned him when he least expected it. Perhaps he should have begun expecting it, but he was still caught off guard when suddenly his reflexes weren't as sharp, his instincts not as lethal. His nose broke, blood immediately flowing down over his mouth, some of it ending up dripping on the responsible elf's already red hair. He recoiled, but then he felt Saraya return, with grim determination. Before Khari could follow up on the hit, he'd pulled her by the arm into him, kneed her strongly in the ribs, elbowed her in the jaw, yanked her to her feet, and swept her legs out from under her with a swift low swing of his axe. When she was horizontal in the air in front of him, Vesryn gave her a parting boot to the chest, snow crunching and spraying into the air. Yet more of it was kicked up when Khari was thrown across the makeshift arena, sliding and rolling through the snow until she came to a stop near the far side on her back.
Vesryn turned and spat a glob of blood into the snow, reaching a hand up to feel the shape of his nose. "Very funny," he murmured to himself, the words most likely unheard since the crowd had also livened up, excited by the exchange of blows. By the time he turned and walked back to Khari, a smile had once again worked itself into place, many of his pearly white teeth now red.
"What was that you said? A chevalier would make me bleed?" He extended a hand down, to help her up.
She sucked in a breath, one hand up at her jaw. “Should have worn the mask.” She muttered it more to herself than him, then narrowed her eyes up at him, contemplating the hand for a few seconds before she took it, pulling herself back up to her feet. “Hm. Apparently I get to keep my sword after all.” In a display of good sportsmanship, however, she inclined herself in a combatant’s bow, then gestured in his direction, to a swell of applause.
In the wake of the fight's completion, there was a fair amount of both cheering and grumbling among the soldiers, undoubtedly the result of bets won and lost, but in all, they seemed entertained by the fight, and perhaps a little relieved that it had ended peacefully enough, without the need to be broken up by the spectators.
Vesryn bowed back to Khari, his best opponent of the day by a long shot, and nodded his thanks to the crowd. "Perhaps we should visit the healer," he suggested to Khari. "Hopefully she can mend our lovely faces."
Vesryn was a self-proclaimed champion, of course; no city that still existed would claim him as their protector. He preferred to see himself as a champion of the lost, the forgotten, the ruined places that no one but him could find. This, he had discovered, was one of the few things Saraya liked about him, and not even in a grudgingly admitted sort of way.
The clash of the dulled training weapons rang out through the crisp air, as the rank-and-file soldiers performed their drills and bettered themselves. Vesryn had been engaging anyone who wished to challenge him all morning, and what had started as a few private duels had turned into a bit of a sideshow, distracting a fair bit from the main body of drills and probably giving the Lions running things a headache. It was proving good for morale, though, as a fair number of soldiers were gathered around in a circle and enjoying themselves. They placed bets, not on the winner of the fights, but on how long any soldier would be able to keep his feet against Vesryn, or if they'd land a single hit or not.
For a man who spent much of his time alone in the isolated corners of the world, Vesryn had a knack for showmanship, and played wonderfully for the crowd, like he'd been trained in arena fighting or some such. This sort of thing had been a near daily ritual for the Stormbreakers, but back in that period of his life Saraya had been very interested in teaching Vesryn some hard lessons. How to survive on his own chief among them.
Now, he could tell she was immensely enjoying this, putting human after human into the snow using a seemingly unwieldy blunted axe. Vesryn's motions were graceful, without hesitation or doubt, but with an undeniable strength behind them, applied in exactly the right way. The presence in his mind did not control his actions, but Vesryn could feel her instincts, and allow them to become his own. Sometimes, he felt a bit of sadness while fighting. How beautiful it would be, to watch her move in her own body, what he considered to be perfection in fluidity, grace, and controlled power. He was a poor imitation of what she could do, he knew this. No one in Haven would be remotely able to challenge her.
The crowd groaned when another was whacked across the upper back and flew face forward into the snow. The soldier in question rolled over, spitting and wiping his face, and Vesryn offered him a hand up. The man slapped his plated hand angrily away, and clambered back to his feet himself. "The elf's a bloody demon!" someone in the crowd shouted. Vesryn bowed, grinning.
"Would anyone else like to try their hand?"
“Couldn’t turn down a challenge to save my life.” The reply was actually almost a grumble, as though the thought had caused some grouchiness in the one who spoke it, and she looked around her for a minute until she spotted someone holding what looked like a heavy practice bastardsword. “Hey Wulf, can I borrow that?” The man in question shrugged and handed it over, and Khari tested the weight with a few swings before she stepped into the makeshift ring across from him.
“Put me down for…” She grimaced, her eyes flicking up and down Vesryn, or rather, his gear, most likely, and a short huff escaped her. “Ten minutes. If I can’t make it that long, I’ll eat my sword, because I won’t deserve it anymore.” Despite the dry tone of her words, there was a very steely glint in her jade-green eyes when they met his, and her mouth curled up at the corner. Whether she thought she could achieve it was not certain, but all the same, she’d entered the ring with the intention of winning. "Give him hell!" A voice called out, belonging to Michaël.
Saraya's judgemental nature immediately sprang into action, something which Vesryn tiredly endured. He could feel her analyzing every inch of the poor girl, and finding every last one wanting. Vesryn had heard about Khari, but they'd yet to have the chance to properly speak, or even introduce themselves. As was his custom, he refrained from making any assumptions long after Saraya had already made hers. What was obvious to Vesryn was that she did not intend on letting Khari stay standing for two minutes, let alone ten.
Vesryn, however, gave her a welcoming smile, his arms outstretched. "There's no one I'd rather dance with, lovely. Best give us some more room, everyone." The circle gathered around them wisely shuffled away from the center, offering the two of them a larger dance floor of snow, packed down from countless feet smashing it day in and day out. "Whenever you're ready," he said, briefly beckoning her to him, "you may throw your storm at my tower." He smiled, with a confidence that had already goaded more than one opponent this morning into recklessness.
Though she might have seemed the type to be exactly the same, she did not immediately spring into offense. Instead, she shifted her grip, using both hands to hold the bastardsword at an angle equally well suited for either attack or defense. She appeared to, at least initially, be waiting for something to happen, but then she shifted her stance, increasing the bend in her knees and rising onto the pads of her feet, bouncing on them a couple times as though to test something.
When she did move, she telegraphed it very little. It was sudden, and neither her eyes nor her feet had given away that she’d be going for the left, which she did, with enough force to kick up snow behind her. She swung in low, which made some sense, since her center of gravity was a great deal below his.
Vesryn, however, was a great deal stronger, and almost impossible to catch off guard. Perhaps he'd taken some of the rank and file soldiers lightly, but he knew Khari was in the same bracket he was, and he knew she had far too much raw talent to be treated the same way the others were. But she was horribly outmatched in terms of experience. His instincts were bolstered by those of a warrior who had lived in a time when elves far outlasted humans in years.
He blocked with the head of his axe low, stopping the blade cold only a short distance from his body, but it was all he needed. His face lost all of its humor as he forced their weapons upwards, turning over their weapons to the other side in front of him. The bottom of his axe head hooked around the blade enough for him to pull forward and manipulate her momentum, and suddenly he brought the haft of the two handed weapon to smack across her jaw.
He sidestepped immediately, extricating his weapon, which he whipped swiftly over his head, aiming a swift, strong blow once he was around her back, aimed for the left side of her ribs.
The blow to her face had stunned her, that much was quite clear, but her own instincts weren’t so bad, for someone so young, and she threw herself into the snow almost immediately afterwards, as far away as she could jump, so while the second blow hit, it didn’t do so with nearly all the force he’d put behind it, and she rolled back to her feet, shaking her head. To her credit, perhaps, she didn’t seem to fear a repeat of the painful experience, and she attacked a second time, this time aiming for his arm itself, before abruptly switching her stride at the last possible second and trying for a cross-slash. A feint, it seemed.
She came close again, but again Vesryn's axe handle was there to solidly block her slash, the clash of weapons ringing out loudly through the air. The crowd had mostly silenced for the fight, knowing the two participating were among the Inquisition's best. Perhaps it was simply because Vesryn appeared to be focusing for the first time all morning. He shoved upwards hard, to move Khari's sword away from her center, before he launched a swift straight kick for her abdomen.
"Faster!" he commanded. "A chevalier would at least make me sweat."
Khari actually outright snarled at him, her face twisting into a sneer. “If I were a chevalier, you’d bleed.” He appeared to have succeeded in drawing out a more aggressive version of her, however, because the next series of attacks she leveled at him were harder to block. She wasn’t especially strong, but Khari was quick, and she did seem to understand how to make momentum work on her favor, because though she didn’t get any hits in on him, she was striking hard enough to vibrate both their weapons for multiple seconds after the impacts themselves, and the clanging was loud.
She appeared to know better than trying to block him, however, because her own maneuvers were overwhelmingly of the dodging variety, and he wound up hitting a lot of nothing when he went to retaliate. It was beginning to look very much like a storm assailing a tower: she only seemed to pick up speed as the fight wore on, throwing herself wholeheartedly into her offense and relying on her own sense of the flow of motion to keep her out of the way of his axe.
"That's better," he growled, when another swing of his axe missed, causing a section of the onlookers to back away from the follow-through of the swing. Vesryn's own blocks were often placed excellently, to deflect the weight of Khari's sword as much as halt it, and indeed, it was a necessary skill, for he rarely dodged her attacks entirely. His footwork was precise, in the way it carefully positioned him on the defensive. He could quite literally do this almost all day, and had in the past. His brow did indeed work up a sheen, but if anything, he seemed to be enjoying the exertion.
Finally he parried one of her blows away and rapped her on the back with the axe handle, creating a brief moment of separation. He ran a hand through his white-blonde hair, eyeing her and walking sideways, circling. "What does a title give you? What do you lack, that being called chevalier would grant you?" He was actually curious as to what would drive her so powerfully just to join the ranks of an all-human group. Saraya didn't care. She just wanted to hit the girl more.
“What makes you think it’s just about me?” The reply was snapped back—Khari was clearly not as capable of separating her demeanor from the inherent aggression of the spar as he was, at least not at the moment. She eyed him warily, moving with him, mostly, and certainly not presenting him with her back, rolling out her shoulders and settling back into her initial stance. She clearly wasn’t going to give him any more than that, though, and she drove forward again. Her endurance was nothing to sneeze at, even if her patience perhaps left much to be desired, and she was just as aggressive on this pass as she’d been on the last.
Ten minutes was swiftly coming upon them, but for all that, she didn’t try to stretch it out, placing herself at just as much risk as she had before, and she paid for it, catching the haft of the axe full in the stomach, sliding backwards on the snow, though she yet retained her feet, closing one eye perhaps from the pain of impact but rebounding with uncanny quickness, swinging, of all things, her fist, in what looked very much like a wild lunge, but was pulled short as she drove the point of her blunted blade forward instead.
Vesryn couldn't make sense of her, and he wondered briefly if she weren't a little bit unhinged. Perhaps it was just the fight that was making her seem that way, as she wielded her aggression as much as she did her blade. Perhaps he should have simply chalked it up to the fact that he knew only one thing about her, and that one thing painted her as a foolishly optimistic, even naïve, person. Her feigned punch, flowing into a stab, was about as effective as it could have been, the point of her blade scraping across plate armor briefly before it was pushed aside by the haft of his axe. Not the wisest attack against someone with armor easily strong enough to withstand a sword point, but successful in its own way.
Saraya's instinct was to grapple with her, use his superior strength to stop her from getting away again, and Vesryn obeyed, snatching her wrist on the follow-through of the lunge. He pulled her into his reach, and then landed a solid, heavy punch to her cheekbone. Restraining the wrist that held her blade, he kicked hard to the back of her leg, to put her down on a knee. Rather than finish the fight, he let curiosity get the best of him. "Are you not already what you want to be? For yourself? For others?" His eyes were searching, confused. Saraya raged in his head, demanding a blow that would end the spar.
Her reply was extremely simple: “Is anyone?” It was a surprisingly lucid question, which perhaps made what she did next all the more bizarre in contrast. She seemed well aware of what would happen if they went into a grapple, and so she pushed herself off the ground, yanking downwards with what was possibly all the strength she had on the wrist he held, though her aim was evidently not to get free. Of all things, she headbutted him, the hard part of her skull hitting him right where his nose met his brow.
Saraya, as she had a tendency to do in these moments when she was displeased, abandoned him when he least expected it. Perhaps he should have begun expecting it, but he was still caught off guard when suddenly his reflexes weren't as sharp, his instincts not as lethal. His nose broke, blood immediately flowing down over his mouth, some of it ending up dripping on the responsible elf's already red hair. He recoiled, but then he felt Saraya return, with grim determination. Before Khari could follow up on the hit, he'd pulled her by the arm into him, kneed her strongly in the ribs, elbowed her in the jaw, yanked her to her feet, and swept her legs out from under her with a swift low swing of his axe. When she was horizontal in the air in front of him, Vesryn gave her a parting boot to the chest, snow crunching and spraying into the air. Yet more of it was kicked up when Khari was thrown across the makeshift arena, sliding and rolling through the snow until she came to a stop near the far side on her back.
Vesryn turned and spat a glob of blood into the snow, reaching a hand up to feel the shape of his nose. "Very funny," he murmured to himself, the words most likely unheard since the crowd had also livened up, excited by the exchange of blows. By the time he turned and walked back to Khari, a smile had once again worked itself into place, many of his pearly white teeth now red.
"What was that you said? A chevalier would make me bleed?" He extended a hand down, to help her up.
She sucked in a breath, one hand up at her jaw. “Should have worn the mask.” She muttered it more to herself than him, then narrowed her eyes up at him, contemplating the hand for a few seconds before she took it, pulling herself back up to her feet. “Hm. Apparently I get to keep my sword after all.” In a display of good sportsmanship, however, she inclined herself in a combatant’s bow, then gestured in his direction, to a swell of applause.
In the wake of the fight's completion, there was a fair amount of both cheering and grumbling among the soldiers, undoubtedly the result of bets won and lost, but in all, they seemed entertained by the fight, and perhaps a little relieved that it had ended peacefully enough, without the need to be broken up by the spectators.
Vesryn bowed back to Khari, his best opponent of the day by a long shot, and nodded his thanks to the crowd. "Perhaps we should visit the healer," he suggested to Khari. "Hopefully she can mend our lovely faces."