Helping a Friend Out, Part One

Addergoole-verse, Early 2012 (in the middle of the Apocalypse)
I was thinking about Luke during the apoc, his oaths, and… his friends

Agmund Fridmar was, of course, not unaware that his cy’ree, his Students, and those called cy’Luca, Luke Hawk’s Students, were in a bit of a cy’ree battle, and had been since there were more than three of them to glare at each other across the Dining Hall.

But his Students’ animosity toward Luke’s Students – and, sometimes, he supposed, towards the man himself – did not mean that Agmund had to feel anything of the sort, nor did the cy’Luca’s animosity towards cy’Fridmar and towards Agmund mean that he couldn’t help out Luke in a tough spot.

And the fact of the matter was, Luke was in a tough spot right now, although he would probably have preferred that Agmund and the other professors didn’t take notice. There was a war raging – or, at least, there were dozens and dozens of battles raging, and if you shook them all out, you could see two or three sides that were relatively consistent. There were cy’Luca, former cy’Luca but still the same wide-eyed, eager Warriors for Good, out there fighting against ancient would-be gods. They were losing, on average, but there were doing far more good than one might imagine they would have, and their wins were spectacular.

They were, however, dying, slowly and quickly, in singles and en masse, and Luke was trapped here, in Addergoole, staring at the walls and pacing like a caged tiger. Regine had him wrapped up in orders, and she had no sympathy nor concern, it seemed, for all of those cy’Luca out there dying in a battle she herself had seen coming, had planned for, had engineered them conceived for.

Agmund had his own oaths, but Agmund had always been better with words then Luke, their ins and outs, particularly their outs. His oaths left him a lot more room, and today, the room he was taking from them was a field trip of sorts.

This particular cy’Luca had no fondness at all for him. Dominic, the Shifting Shield. His demonic-looking Change — purple skin with black points, horns, claws — had led the cy’Fridmar during his time to try to recruit him, aggressively. But he’d always been cy’Luca material, and he’d gone to the winged White Knight side in earnest.

Tonight, he was going up against three Nedetakaei who were taking over a neighborhood under the aegis of a chaotic would-be god who’d taken over a northern city, and Agmund had reason to believe his expected back-up wouldn’t be showing up. One of them was dead, one of them had gotten captured, and the third one had been lying.

Agmund walked up to the young man. He didn’t bother to try to be sneaky. He was not here to test Shifting-Shield; he was here to aid him.

“They’re not coming,” he said, before Shifting-Shield could say anything. “So I am here. Stand down,” he added, and let his accent thicken. They did believe him more when he sounded like a bad Russian Boris and Natasha imitation. “Am here for backup, not to fight you.” He gave his best scolding-professor expression. “Nedetakaei is the enemy, da, not me?”

The boy relaxed and bristled at the same time, shifting from ready for a battle to ready for an argument. It was good he knew the difference. “Yeah. The Neds are the enemy, yeah.”

“Very good. Now tell me what we’ve got.”

Part II: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1215458.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1211109.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

One thought on “Helping a Friend Out, Part One

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *