| "You look suprised to see me," he said with a wry grin, while he wiped the gore off of his blade. Not that that wasn't typical of her half-brother. One moment she's struggling to keep herself alive and the next her big brother shows up to save her neck in some dazzling display of heroism. She appreciated when he did so, but she hated him for it all the same.
"Shouldn't I be? Or would you prefer that I run headlong into danger, knowing full well that I'm being stalked by my own brother? Who, I might add, always shows up at just the right moment to make me seem completely inept," she said, narrowing her eyes at her would-be protector.
"Well, it does help with my image of being the daring hero," he started, before she let out an exasperated sigh.
'Bastard... he has every right to be smug about it... Too bad he isn't useful in any other way. I know who's going to be stuck with cleaning this mess up while he starts writing his ballads of praise for himself. I'll never hear the end of it when we return home for the winter,' she thought to herself. She shook her head as she tried to regain her breath from the recent exertion, watching her brother sheathe his sword and jump lightly up onto a flat rock next to him, probably just to mock her for being winded.
"I think I have the first verse worked out," he announced, "Care to listen to it?"
"No, thank you, I'll hear it from the bard when it plays in town next season. However, I would like a little light to see how big of a mess you made on my bedroll," she retorted. As he started wandering away trying to find a word to rhyme with "beholder", she realized that he would be absolutely no help at all. With another sigh, she turned her palm upward and gathered some of the moonlight above her hand, shedding violet silvery light onto the ground around her.
As she took in the ghastly form of the dead beholder, she shuddered to think what would have happened if she hadn't woken up when she did. The monsters were downright unnatural, from the way they focused every one of their hundreds of eyes as they ensared prey in their hypnotic gazes, or simply they way the tangled mass of eyes, tentacles and hideous mouth floated ominously towards their prey. She glanced up toward her humming brother, and realized she was glad that Victor was around this time. Recently things had been getting pretty odd. She wasn't sure if she wanted to tell him about the other deadly encounters in the middle of the night that had, unfortunately, started to happen to her on a routine basis. She decided against it, as she kicked a bloody portion of the beholder off of her bedroll. She grimaced at the sight off all the blood on her bedroll and decided to empty a waterskin over it to rinse off some of the sanguine mess. As she knelt down to roll her sleeping gear up, she had an odd sensation creep up her spine. Something didn't feel right all of a sudden.
With a sickening sense of dread, she realized that the piece of beholder she removed from her bedroll wasn't where it had landed. A knot formed in her stomach as she looked up to see that the pieces of the beholder were nowhere to be found. She lifted her eyes to where her brother was standing on the rock, looking every bit like a statue poised in thought, and called out to him.
"Tor, something isn't right here..."
He looked over towards her, with that grin on his face and replied, "Of course not, you haven't thanked me yet!"
She couldn't help but smile at her brother's omnipresent sense of humor. Slowly, she saw the look on her brother's face fade to one of concern, right after a mask of abject horror had dawned on her face.
"Sis, what is it?" he asked cautiously.
Her mouth worked as tears slowly crept down her cheeks. She couldn't form the words that she so desperately wanted to scream. He couldn't imagine what she saw in that single horrific moment. There was little light shed from the moon, but there was no mistaking the sight that would haunt her for the rest of her life, the image of her beloved brother standing in a maelstrom of a thousand terrible eyes.
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| All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?
I guess the answer is "alone," isn't it?
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| The below post was posted while Andy was absent from his computer.
- The Webmaster
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| Andy is totally in love with Nick. He just doesn't know it yet.
--Definately not Nick sneaking onto Andy's Xanga...
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