Heroland

The large figure off in the distance stood on a perfectly placed jutting rock. The rain was pouring down, doing a great job of blinding a tall sedate figure hunkered at the edge of the woods but it made a fantastic backdrop for the current crisis. Damian Broadsword had just slain his recent sworn enemy and was now holding the body of his dead lover in his arms. Again.

Magpie turned her head to give a look to her companion, a ferret named Chuckles that had the habit of running up pants legs and taking chunks out of anybody she didn't like. That covered the vast majority of the population. She shook her little fuzzy head at Magpie in exasperation.

"Yeah, I know. I really liked this one too," she sighed as she turned back in time to catch the thrown back head and the look of agony on the hero's face as he howled into the next crack of theatrical thunder and lightning. She couldn't help but roll her eyes. "This is the third one in two months," she grumbled as she turned, grabbed her shovel and began the soggy mud march toward the man who had saved her from a fate worse than death. She owed Damian Broadsword her life so the least she could do was bury his dead women and silently thank the heavens that she had been too young when he'd found her to become another death notch on his bedpost.

The trek toward her one-time savior, many-times endangerer felt like a long one. The ground was soaked and seemed more marsh than functional walking terrain. She kept slipping and was beginning to have a hard time ignoring the fact that half of the mud she walked through felt as though it were squishing through the holes in both soles of her worn out boots. It spurted in and out from between her toes with each step. She'd complained about her footwear in the last village they'd stopped at but Damian had been too busy courting a busty barmaid to pay much mind to his distressed charge. No, instead she'd had to scrounge for fabric behind a dress shop to shove some wads of fabric in to the breaches in her boots. She'd secured them there with long ragged hanks of truly atrocious swamp green fabric that appeared to be some type of canvas. Magpie had been mistaken for a beggar at least twice as she'd trudged back to the inn they'd been put up at and had been silently seething ever since.

Her spark of fury was renewed and fueled by the time she set the shovel down and started to clamber up the near sheer face of the craggy rock. Now she had sharp shards of cliff embedded in her hands and was soaked to the bone. Chuckles ascended beside her, looking more like a wet tube of muscle on stubby legs than an animal, and chattered at the young woman in encouragement. Magpie bit her lip as she strained to grasp a handhold. With a soft curse, her fingers slipped on the wet rock and she centered herself again, holding so tightly to her perch that her knuckles were stark white. If I die, I swear to the Universe that I'm coming back and haunting Damian Broadsword until his death and then I'll chase him in to the Everafter too, she promised herself as she lunged again and this time made her target. Sprawled across the rock face, she tried to heave herself over but this time, it was her feet that slid and she found herself kicking at empty air. A short scream burst from her lips as one hand lost its grip. Chuckles started making horrible screeching noises and tried to wrap a paw around a finger or two but it wasn't much use. Without much preamble, Magpie had enough time to let out a longer shout before she was falling the thirty feet to the soggy ground.

Her eyes scrunched shut and she curled in on herself, expecting an end-all impact. What she got instead was a pair of muscled arms wrapping themselves around her and she felt the body against her twist a few times in the air before her head thudded against a hard chest plate. Her ears were ringing and her whole body felt as though it had been tumbled but she knew that she was obviously alive because things hurt. The arms squeezed her and she finally opened her eyes on a shaky breath. She looked up the short distance to lock gazes with the devastatingly handsome man beneath her. His face was chiseled, perfect even. Sharp cheekbones, a strong jaw and dimples framed his luscious pink lips and his straight nose. His eyes were a gorgeous just-after-sundown cerulean blue, slanted and deep set beneath thick hawkish eyebrows. His hair was shaggy and, at the moment, long enough to fall in ebony waves down to his shoulder blades. He was built like a tank, perhaps 6'4" flat-footed, and armed to the teeth. His name was Damian Broadsword and he was the whole damn reason Magpie had been trying to scale the death rock in the first place.

Her eyes narrowed as she sat up on his chest, straddling him in a rather inappropriate fashion. He didn't seem to mind, or even notice, as was expected. As of yet, the Universe hadn't deigned to recognize her as a grown woman. Men wouldn't notice her, wouldn't approach her as anything more than an androgynous, non-sexual individual until she was ordained as an adult upon reaching final puberty, and elves took their time to reach that point. Only the pedophiles looked after her in lust and she was happier that way. At least those were few and far between and she took care of them behind Damian’s back when she could. She preferred her current existence to that of many other fair maidens.

Nothing at all appealed to her about being chased down like a hunted beast by a large part of the sex-starved male population once she became a woman. Not every woman was beautiful and Universe-forbid a man want to bed or marry one who was not outwardly as close to perfect as possible. It was only the beautiful ones that produced hero-worthy children and that was a sign of status.

She'd shuddered as she'd watched one distressed maiden trying to escape capture by a band of out-of-control village men. They’d suddenly noticed her out drying her laundry one day and lost their heads. Fights erupted in the streets as men jockeyed to ask for her hand in marriage. The woman had caught a horse and beat it out of town fast, but half of the village swelled through the gates and came after her. Magpie had been rushing to help fend off the men when a hero-type fellow came swooping out of the trees and plucked the woman cleanly off of her horse. Magpie had watched them ride off in to the sunset and had hated every moment of it: the look of sudden absolute devotion that spread across the rescued woman's face, the triumph on the hero's. It was like a switch had flipped and suddenly, all was well. She'd seen how the story ended, though, had been a living consequence of such dalliances and didn't want to see any more encores, certainly didn't want to experience it firsthand.

She'd bucked the societal expectations early on by leaving home as a young teenager. She'd had to in order to stay on her toes and get ahead of the Universe’s plans for her. She knew that she would stand out from the crowd. Her parents were taller than average, her Elven magii mother 5'11" and her father a massive man-bear at 6'6". She'd grown to a whopping 6'2" before the Universe had finally intervened, and thank goodness it had because her mother had begun to break down and fashion clothing from her father's trunk, the only thing he'd left behind besides Magpie herself. Where her father was fair-haired, she had shoulder blade long, curling dark hair like her mother. A very generous swathe of snow white grew at the nape of her neck so that when she tucked her hair behind her ear or pulled it up with a leather thong, the purity of it was like a beacon. It was the whole reason why she'd been named Magpie in the first place. Her eyes were the dark blue of ocean depths like her mothers, almost indigo in their intensity. She was muscled and broad shouldered with a feminine flare of the hips and haunches that made it impossible to be mistaken for the opposite sex. She'd thanked the Universe multiple times after she'd hit human puberty that her breasts hadn't grown too ample as there were no chest plates made for women and squishing her current lot in to a battered hand-me-down was only just this side of uncomfortable. Then of course was her face. Her lips, bee stung like her mother's, were pouting and quite full. Her skin was topaz brown, an evident dominant trait from her mother who was two shades darker than her. She had broad cheekbones like her father, a small yet stubborn chin with a dimple to it – also like her absentee parent, to her consternation – but an abnormality in her once slightly upturned nose from when a bandit had accidentally hit her in the face with the flat of his broadsword and broken it. She'd hoped it would disfigure her enough to cause perturbation later but it had only made her more interesting to look at.

She knew what she looked like, she wasn’t stupid. The women saw her and whispered to each other about her with knowing smiles. It was a woman’s dream to be beautiful, to be scooped up by a handsome hero. Maybe he would stay with her and they might raise a family. Maybe he might not stray from their marriage bed. Maybe the moon was a large wheel of gruyere. Her beauty was not a gift. She did not want to be hunted like an animal to be wed and then kept barefoot and pregnant. She didn't want this "gift" from the Universe. Magpie had already made the decision to leave Damian as soon as the Universe bestowed adulthood upon her. Because then he wouldn't take her sitting atop him like a cowgirl as an innocent act. No, he and the rest of the heroic world travelers would want to possess her like a precious trinket, a royal jewel. Magpie would have none of that.

"I thought that the Elven were supposed to be graceful, one with the earth," Damian said with an easy grin, as though he hadn't just saved her a deadly plunge that she had put herself through for him.

"I'm only part elf, as I've told you many times before. You know that I can't climb to save myself. Why do you always have to stage your damn battles atop places that I can't reach easily?" She shoved off of his chest to her feet, was unsatisfied when he didn't even grunt and thought about kicking him while he was down. He wouldn't expect that, she thought with a glare. Better to save it for when he's really pissed me off. The warrior got to his feet and she was calmed to see that his perfection was muddied a little bit. If he'd escaped the rescue with not a hair out of place, she might have screamed.

"I mean, for Everafter's sake, couldn't you find somewhere with some stairs?"