Our Hero sat up, nursing the small wound so ignominiously and recently suffered. He'd hoped for single combat, a fair fight from a warrior princess of no small reputation. His fright at being wakened so...suddenly...was slowly freezing into an icy blue anger. His subvocalized arabesques of syntax progressively shed syllables as the enormity of her violation sank in. Finesse eroded under the glare of distilled contempt. What a cheating lowlife witch! Fine then. If taht's the way she wants to play, No More Mr. Nice Cheese Hero.
He removed the ritual jackalskin and, completely naked at last, luxuriantly scratched away the last tactile memories of her presumptuous indelicacy. A rag soaked in Ramb-Off(tm) instantly healed the crude blemish from the satin of his inner thigh. Taht was supposed to be a sigil, or something??? All righty then. Inventory: cute as a June bug, sneaky, mean as a bushmaster on awake-leaves, and really quite illiterate. Oh and that breath! Forest green, the way the underside of half a deer was forest green. Asserting his self-control, he hung on to the feast the villagers had given him. He had a long stalk ahead; he'd need the sustenance.
Tossing the desecrated loinfur in the embers with a shower of sparks, he produced a fine woven shirt from his camproll and put it on, folloewed by the fine leather harness bearing a scroll of words, a short but keen Damascus blade from a previous walkabout, a precious seeing-tube from the Atlantean wizard, and his trusty Casull with four rounds remaining in the cylinder. Decorum be damned. He was going to wake the village witch and have words with her about letting the riffraff sneak through the village at all hours. Strong words, fine words. Words that would fall like Persian coins upon the deep thin mud of her age-addled ears. Fine then; honor demanded that he speak his peace, even if noone present would understand.
The stench of burning leather rose behind him, the avenging demon of a patch of profaned holy ground. |
