Pleasures2

“You were wild.” You noted, as your hand extended out above her groggy face, looking up at you for a moment with horror, then recognition before slowly calming herself enough to take your offered hand. “I may have gone just a bit overboard, but I tend to be just a bit overzealous when in combat.”

She returned a wan smile, coughing slightly as she checked her rattled tender chest for broken bones. “It’s alright... sometimes I think a person’s got to get knocked down a few pegs. I think it’s probably for the best that someone who wasn’t going to take advantage of me kicked some sense into my head than anyone else.”

The smile on your lips only grew wider as you thought back to the other ideas you’d had on how to deal with her. Your blood was still up from the battle.

“Indeed, for the best.” You finally added.

“Now don’t go playing gentleman on me now… time to put some drinks in and I don’t have time for anyone who can’t hold their liquor.” She sniffed. “Just because I’m paying for it, doesn’t mean you should hold back anything at all.”

You laughed at her brazen bravado.

The rest of the night would be spent in alcohol and merriment as the two of you began to drink and recount fierce battles and adventurers. Slowly but surely you drew out a picture of her life and thoughts. The eldest of three sisters and surrounded by boys, she’d come to be rougher than any other, pushing forward into a talent which she’d only found herself to have as lean times came and went.

Adventurers might not always make a profit, but the talent for combat, and the myriad of other skills often put them in places where others feared. The Dwarven burial grounds hadn’t been on purpose, just a refuge spot for her team as they ran from something much bigger, and scarier. And what had been a mere story of adventure morphed slowly into a heart wrenching tale of the hunted against a superior foe, of being picked off, harried, and herded as the beast played with them, pushing them to the brink of exhaustion and beyond, until finally it forced one last desperate confrontation, underestimating its flagging prey.

Most of their group did not survive much less see the aftermath.

After all, Shadow-drakes were a hellish foe to face, you’d killed more than enough of them to know that you’d rather do most anything else. Assassins and ambush hunters by nature, they could naturally walk though shadows, infect wounds with a toxin that essentially allowed them to spread their shadowmagics though another being’s veins, and literally control shadowy constructs which allowed them to arm and armour themselves as well. Not to mention they were each as big as a bear.

It didn’t exactly take a whole night for her to end up swooning, then tipsy.

You encouraged her further to drink even as slowly you stopped in taking your own, having nursed the bottle for a while as you listened to her ever more rowdy drunken behavior. Songs, and laughter saw her though the night as round after round of drinks would drop.

“… annne den We couldn’t get the bloody thing to budge.” She gesticulated wildly, spilling beer all about from her mug as she was told the story of one of her many exploits.