Queen's Gambit Chapter 23

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Draconic Fortune (Noelle)
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3
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4
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5
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6
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7
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8
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9
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10
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Draconic Fortune

Chapter 11

Bad Apple
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"This is it, right?" Now more hopeful over their chance at catching up with Temptress growing closer, the previously silent archer paced ahead of the rest of their growing group to keep up with Kris. He was leading them in a different direction from the one Dasher expected, which made him nervous. This wasn't the first time he asked him. "We have everyone and everything we need. We should return to the Journeyman for our passage up the cliffs." He wasn't that intent on leaving just yet. There were two more things he had in mind.

Instead of heading straight for the tower, Kris led them further inwards, to the squares that made up the market district in the centre. They were a bit like a Christmas market, or the one at the carnival in Canyon City. From within and behind small, wooden stands that filled the entirety, the monsters here offered all kinds of little toys and souvenirs and curios to the strange newcomers to the city. But he in particular already had a vague idea what he was here to look for.

Asriel wasn't much of a fan of detailed cities. So the things he drew didn't really fit with that. Asriel was mostly about villages and open landscapes. And what pointed in the same direction as to what Kris was thinking, was that he hadn't heard anyone mention an actual city in that other kingdom they were headed for.

If he wanted Noelle to gear up for the trip, his best chance at finding something for her, was here. He made sure that everyone stayed more closely together in those crowded areas, since with Starlet, the expensively dressed wife of the Journeyman, there were now five people that he had to look after and avoid losing.

And to top it off, half-way through the first square, he realized that Headbanger had stopped following when they came across the water pipe stand, where she somehow managed to strike up a conversation with the merchant behind the counter by the time he noticed. "This isn't what I'm looking for, come on!"

He was already trying to pull her along by force, when Noelle interrupted him. "Wait, what are you looking for?"

He flat out told her. "Something for you." And when he did, he didn't quite understand why she was startled the way she was. For a second there, she froze completely again, too.

"What? - I mean - what?" Or was she confused? He was never good at telling either way.

"It's going to be a dangerous trip and I don't think there will be a market like this there. You have to gear up. Find something that covers your head better than this." He reached over to the reddened doe and tugged at the ribbon bound to a lock of her hair. "Maybe even a better staff."

After that, she calmed down again. "Oh..right, okay. So you want me to look for..." A red and white Christmas hat was the best thing she could imagine to match her robe.

"A cap, something else, I don't know." Well at least now, Noelle was helping him look for something. And Headbanger was starting to give in and follow along as well.

They didn't find what they were looking for on the first square they visited. But at one of the last few stands they passed by, Dasher stopped. Kris had already moved along into the road between this square and the next one and only stopped to emptily stare at those that too far behind for him to move on.

When Noelle walked over to the archer, she saw a look on his face like that of an infant that had grown attached to their favourite new balloon, only for the balloon to fly away and be lost forever. He was standing in front of a stand attended by a slime monster and littered above and below with pots and bouquets full of flowers of all kinds. But Dasher was staring at one bouquet right in front of him. "Uhm..." She gave him some more time to notice that he was being talked to before she came too close for him to ignore. "What's wrong?"

He didn't bother to face her. He kept staring at those flowers. "It's a tulip." Indeed, the bouquet in the middle of where he was looking indeed held several bright pink and red tulips together. "They're Temptress' favourite flowers." He pulled out a little white cloth from within one of the likely various hidden pockets in his coat and cleaned his nose. The many feathers and little decorated layers of leather made it hard to see through them and knowing where those pockets were.

He cleared his throat, and then pointed at one of them, asking to buy it. And once he had his own tulip, he took off his hat, widened the elastic band that held his longer blue feather in place, took the feather away and wrapped it over the stem of the flower instead. "Sorry for that."

He followed only slowly and Noelle stayed with him. "It's okay. She's got good taste. I like lilies more, but tulips are a close second." When the still distraught human looked her way, she met him with a smile.

"Thank you."

With them a little closer to the rest of the group, Kris didn't strictly stand in place and watch them follow, so long as they were close enough when he checked on them. "Tell me more about Temptress. What is she like?"

"I'm not even sure what to tell. She's changed. We both have. Until...until things changed, we had been together for as long as we've existed. I used to make jokes and snarky quips whenever we came across other people. And she always laughed at them and was sincere about it. Many of our days, we spent at the windows of Fortune's Keep, gazing upon the many different realms the lightners used to bring the castle to."

"Not far from where we emerged from the castle, there is a little garden with a tree. We would sit under it, look down at the beach or the caverns or the forests or what other sight we found from there, and I would recite poems to her. Then recently, the castle's travels across realms stopped and we were stuck in our home realm. It's a mountain range, with tunnels and towns carved into the landscapes much like here."

"And that's when this 'feeling' started. Our times together quieted down. For both of us. It's just like what Donnie described. I was terrified that it could be us drifting apart, but there was no reason for that, so it made no sense to me that it was. In retrospect, it still seems like that was what it was after all."

He sighed. "I just can't believe she would do this. All our days together, did it mean nothing to her? Was I just a good on display? Was she just stringing me along in case she didn't find a 'Knight' to trade me for?"

Bringing up what Sinwielder said about their feeling left more of an aftertaste in her mouth than hearing him talk about Temptress like that. "I uhm..." And the thoughts he had put into words, visibly wore down on Dasher as well. "No. That's not fair to say. Maybe - maybe she...your ring. I know you had a ring for her. Did she?" He only gave her a silent, questioning look.

Understandable, seeing as he didn't know where she was trying to go with this. Granted, she only half-way knew herself. "I mean try to remember: Do you remember ever getting the impression that she knew? That she somehow got the sense that there was a 'ring' for her to expect - maybe something else like it, only that it never came?"

He froze in place. He stared at her for several moments. "You're..." He couldn't fathom what he was inferring. "You're taking her side in this."

"No! No, I..."

"I've been having second thoughts about this for a while." He backed off from her, and while he did, his eyes drifted upwards. When his looks fell upon her antlers, he gasped and his mouth tensed up. "No...this is a mistake. I have to go." All Kris saw when checking on them, was the older human staring at Noelle while slowly moving backwards, then turning around and running off down a path between the stands.

Kris ran back and chased him, but after just a few corners, the archer managed to shake him off and vanish behind a few monsters and a woodperson, only to be long gone when Kris made it past them. Upon looking further, his hopes of Dasher leaving a trail of feathers while dashing away, were unfounded as well.

When Kris gave up finding him right now, and came back to the others, he stared at Noelle, in a way that was no more pleasant than when Dasher did it. "What did you do?"

The tone he addressed her with, felt like needles, poking her wherever they got. She trembled. She trembled because the way Dasher reacted to her hurt. All she did was open up to him about something she didn't share with anyone else - even if just a little bit - and already, she had made a mess of everything. "I..."

"What did you say to him?" She felt like starting to cry right about now. It was all so sudden, she wasn't aware it was happening when it did. Now he was gone. Just like that. "If he doesn't want to come, we're going to have to go without him."

Their newest addition, Starlet, came closer and bent forward to speak with Kris from up close. "I hold the key to the Chariot, but no-one except Dasher can operate it. We won't make it to the other side without him." Well in that case it was settled in Kris' eyes. They had to find Dasher and convince him to look past whatever Noelle said.

He continued looking at Noelle and made a face, pulling his lips off to the side in an overboard attempt at looking upset. But he only wound up looking strange and almost made Noelle chuckle. "You know it would really help if I knew what exactly you said."

"I - uhm..." She wasn't sure what to answer. "I think he was holding in how much Temptress' loss got to her until now. I just asked him if he got the sense that she expected him to do something he didn't, and he took it the wrong way."

"So he's given up on catching or saving Temptress? What else would he get busy with instead?"

Starlet tipped his shoulder to draw his attention. She stepped closer to speak into his ear. "Dasher and Temptress have been lovebirds for as long as I remember. I doubt there is anything else that matters to him."

Headbanger twitched and gasped. "Ah! I know where he went! Where does a guy go when he's given up on everything?" Kris proceeded to raise his head and stare up at the corners of the buildings that surrounded the square. "What're you doing?"

"Checking for the best roof to jump off."

"No, dude! You've gotta drop the edge, man." She patted his shoulder, walked past him in the direction they just came from and turned around to wave him to come closer. "Come on. I'll show you."

She led them to the other side of the square. The businesses here, on the ground floor right around the square, were taverns. With monsters and the new residents sitting at the tables, drinking, talking and laughing. The dragon went far enough into one of them to be able to check all the tables for Dasher, and then left to go to the next one. And then the next one and then the next one.

It took them checking several more of those bars until they finally found him. Sulking far in the corner of a bar that lay furthest in the corner of the market square. It wasn't even facing towards it, it was on the outside. They had already been checking the bars around the square and Kris had been starting to suspect that dragon was just looking for an excuse for them to check out all the bars there were around here.

Dasher sat there, already with a half-empty mug in his hand, filled with some drink alcoholic enough that you could smell it from across the table. When without a word, Headbanger sat right next to the human and Kris and Noelle on the other side of the table, he glared at all of them. Mostly Noelle. For a while, Headbanger stared at him in anticipation of him saying something, and between sips, he did. "Go away."

When the grinning dragon leaned onto the table, her face came weirdly close to his. "Aw, come on. Wanna talk about it?" He said nothing. "It's about antler-girl, isn't it?"

He swallowed his fears and flushed them down with a good lot of whatever was in that mug. "This whole journey is pointless. She chose the Knight over me. I'm never getting her back. Even if I did, it wouldn't be sincere. At that point, I'd know that the moment someone comes along that looks more attractive, even if he's not interested in her, she's gone. I just can't believe it just ended just like that. She was everything to me. I...I..."

Now, with his mug empty, he dropped his head onto the table and buried his face in his elbow. His vest's feathers were peeling off as if he was a sick or heavily distressed bird and the feathers were his own. "I can't go on like this. Not without her." He began to sob, enough for the others to see it through he motions of his shoulders.

Kris gestured his way with an open hand. "He was just smiling and laughing half an hour ago. What happened."

"Dude." Headbanger grabbed him by the shoulder, took off her sunglasses, brushed her hair aside and gave him a long, scolding look. "Guy was just burying all that stuff. Now it's coming out all at once." Dasher mumbled up an apology in response to that and she responded to that by rubbing his back. "It's okay dude. We're here for you."

After that, Kris turned to Noelle and stared at her. Without a word, he stared and stared as they listened to a grown man crying in front of them. It was obvious to her that he was thinking something and expecting her to understand it as she usually did, but this time, she couldn't decipher from the context, what it was. "I - uh..." She could only guess that he wanted her to do something about this. After all, he blamed her for this whole situation, too.

She tried reaching for the human on the other side. "Listen. Giving up like this now isn't a solution. What happened, happened. She just found someone better than you. You just have to accept that it's over and move on." The only thing that accomplished, was that the previous sobbing, still possible to cover with the three of them around him and Ralsei and Starlet standing off to the side, was replaced with loud whines, impossible to conceal from anyone sitting at the other tables or even outside.

Now it was Noelle that the unusually concerned Susie-lookalike was reaching for. She froze mid-motion when she felt the dragon's claws grasp her. "Babe. Babe. Stop. Just stop. You're not helping." Once she had Noelle backing off and leaning against the back of the bench, she turned to Dasher again. "Dude, even if she's gone, life isn't over, right?"

Counter to what she was implying, he nodded at the notion of life being over. "You're a pretty decent looking guy. You said you used to have poems ready to recite, I've seen how you wiped the floor with goody-two-shoes-girl, you said you can use a bow, and the jokes and all that, if you bring all that back, who needs that whore, right? Bitch is out of touch with what she's missing out on. Lotsa fish in the sea waitin' to get hooked by you. You've just got to cut that out, straighten yourself out and get all that stuff back that got her in the first place. I'm sure there's someone out there who'd love for someone like you to show up in their life. Maybe for a little longer than just one trip."

It was working. He was calming down. Kris took this as to mean that a confrontational approach was what worked. He tipped at one of the arms that covered Dasher's face. "Hey. Hey." When the older human finally raised his head enough for his eyes to peer through between his wide hat and his arms, Kris pulled off one of his armor's gloves and held it with its flattest side pointing to Dasher, to use it as a mirror.

"She's right, you know. There's plenty of fish in the sea. But that won't help you if you don't come with us. Look at yourself." That was the point where Dasher understood and took Kris' gauntlet and stared at what little of a reflection of him it could conjure.

"That's all her. She did this to you. And any new girlfriend you find won't have a reason to treat you any better than she did, unless you make an example out of her. Unless you make Temptress pay for what she did. You have to come with us, you have to reach Temptress, and then you have to take all that anger you have, stop directing it at yourself, and direct it at her instead."

He started describing what he was saying both with words, and with his hands. "You have to let loose. You have to make it hurt. You have to make it hurt so badly, she'll spend months, maybe years, recovering from it. Rip her antlers out if you have to. Make cuts to her skin with a knife to bleed her out, but not enough to kill her. Unless you don't care if she dies, then you can just cut away as much as you like."

His approach didn't appear as successful as the dragon's. In fact he already saw her get ready to scold him again. And he didn't notice how his out-of-the-blue recommendation to take bloody revenge at first surprised, then terrified Noelle, until he heard her involuntary squeak, faced her, and found her pressed against the wall opposite from him. "What? Am I wrong?"

"Ah, so much young life, teeming with desire to put evildoers to the sword." Starlet was silent up until now but now, she knelt down next to Banger and grabbed Dasher's hand with her own. "Don't we know a few people like that? Remember that Judas and Legis are in the Kingdom of Heaven, too."

"Judas, Sinwielder, father Asmodeus, you know what they're like. Sooner or later, they will gather together and hold judgment over Temptress. A jury as uncompromising as them would surely see to Temptress' death. Do you want that? Do you want their judgment to go unchallenged? If you have any love left for her, shouldn't you travel after her, even if only to stay the angels' hands and save Temptress from what doubtlessly lethal punishment they will see fit for her betrayal?"

Some clear words from an old friend like this, were what it took to finally reel him in. His nose was still running, but after nodding in reaction to Starlet's point, he pushed himself back up. "So if you can't do this for yourself, do it for her."

He was still trembling when he was standing. When he turned around after paying for his drink, he still had leftover tears that needed wiping off his eyes. "I'm sorry. It was all a little much at once."

Kris stared at him, closely observing his movements while Starlet came up to him to cheer him up while he was still at the counter. Had he been holding all this all this time? The memories this brought up in him only made him more uncomfortable, but before he could go further into that, he felt Noelle tug at his cape.

"What you said earlier." She seemed very unsure and stuttered while talking to him. "You...you didn't actually mean...I mean you don't really feel this way about this, do you?" He stayed still, staring at the cup that Dasher never bothered to pick up. Still with what little was left of the liquor he had filled it with, dangling back and forth from the force left over from when the archer had gotten up. "Kris!"

She wasn't going to drop this. He didn't look back at her, he knew she knew he was talking to her. "He trusted her. Completely. You saw him. And she just tossed him away like it's nothing. It wouldn't have gotten to him like this if that wasn't the case. She did this. It's not fair. No-one should be allowed to treat someone that trusts them like this. I just sometimes feel like...if someone in this situation - someone like him - took the 'Temptress' to his 'Dasher'. And really made an example out of her. Maybe in the future, other 'Temptresses' would think twice about treating their 'Dashers' like this."

"Kris..." She shuffled closer and held him by the arm. "Is this about your dad? You've got to learn to move on. What happened, happened." He didn't feel like moving on. He didn't feel like moving on at all. What improvement was there to be had from moving on? What had anyone learned from 'moving on'?

Nothing. Moving on - to him at least - seemed like forgetting the past and being prone to repeating the same mistakes. "Kris...say something." He was trembling. Struggling not to make a similar scene to the one Dasher had made. He said nothing to her. He didn't look back at her. He just got up, and walked to the exit to wait there for the others. With his arms hanging straight down, and his hands clenched into fists.

From that point forward he ignored any of Noelle's further pleas for him to talk to her. He just made sure they all tagged along before he moved on. Through the crowds they had traversed twice now. He needed time to calm down. Noelle had really gotten to him, bringing up his father like that. He could feel that if he engaged with her any more, that he would lose control of what he said and did.

And sooner or later, Noelle took the hint and turned her attention to Dasher. She adjusted the pace she followed Kris with and walked alongside the archer. Waiting until he picked up on her wanting to talk. "Hey...I just wanted to say, I'm sorry." This wasn't easy for her.

Her voice was shaky, enough that she could assume he heard that. "I'm just - I'm sorry about what I said earlier. Reason I said it is because - I'm going through something similar to her. In my own life I mean. And I feel like if we could somehow resolve all this amicably for Temptress, then maybe it'd turn out fine for me, too."

Dasher seemed much more relaxed now. "It's all right. I overreacted. I'm sorry, too." Noelle was relieved to see the air between them was cleared.