Excerpt from The Saluki- Ames the 3rd, 3E8
As Skye recounts the story of the story of her first encounter with Hawke, she begins to speak a little at a rapidly, as if the subject excites her. When she first moved to Fides, she had initially kept to herself. With a chuckle, she adds that her enthusiasm for her new country grew rather slowly until tragedy changed her routine. Following the sudden and untimely death of her sister, Julia, Skye's once-solitary wanderings through Bright Town became so riddled with turbulent emotion that onlookers couldn't ignore her. Desperate to put some distance between herself and a parade of well-wishing strangers, she fled to farthest reaches of Bright Town, where closer proximity with the rest of Fides blurred the neighborhood's distinct Restan cultural influence. It was there that she ran into James Hawke by chance and began a fateful friendship.
"We had so much in common," Ellie says with a nostalgic smile. "We were both immigrants who were discovering who we could be without our Restan values to hold us back. But what we really bonded over was our siblings."
Hawke would help Skye to accept her loss by talking about the relationship he had with his older brother and comparing him to Julia. These stories helped Skye to put her time with her sister in perspective and enshrine those memories in her mind. Even when Hawke revealed the dark side of his relationship with his brother, with whom he had allegedly had a violent falling out, Skye took solace in the purity of Julia's devotion to her sibling.
"If she could see me now, she'd have no problem recognizing me even though I've changed so much," Skye says. "She was always the first person I would go to for anything. Whenever I was hurt, she would be the one to treat my wounds and curse whoever caused my pain. When I didn't understand something, she would try to explain it to me or help me to find the answers she didn't have. She was easily my greatest role model. When she died, I was so lost with no hope of learning to live without her. But James was the one who helped me to find my way again."
The two future windlords began to spend a lot of time together and Ellie found her way into a close-knit group of friends which included former HDL Captain Phillip Winstrom. The three of them formed a local chapter of the controversial monster-hunting organization, Slayer Club International (SCI). While Winstrom was the clear warrior of the group, even a girl without training could find a purpose in the Slayer Club.
"I was the fastest person in the group at the time and I was always good at climbing, so I was a spotter," Sky explains. "What I'd do is follow our targets along the rooftops and tell the others where to go. Then, Phillith would get the attention of whatever creature we were following while James would finish them off with his throwing knives."
The Fides SCI chapter grew swiftly under the combined guidance of the three friends, but the adventures were short lived for Hawke and Skye. In Gyatal of 3E4, a rogue engineer out of the Fides Academy of Engineering (FAE), activated the Saintal, an insidious machine that was meant to impair cognitive function on a large scale in Fides. Curiously, neither Hawke nor Skye were affected.
"I don't think any of us were, the legacy windlords, I mean," Skye explained. "We're still not sure how, but everyone who resisted the machine's effects seemed to have a curse mark like ours."
With nearly everyone in the city incapacitated by the intelligence-draining effects of the Saintal, the future windlords took it upon themselves to do something. With twelve equally confused bearers of Crane's curse and their background in SCI behind them, Hawke and Skye tracked down the terrorist who was using the Saintal, apprehended him, and deactivated the machine. Although they saved the city, they were quickly met with the same distrust that society had always inflicted on the people who bear the curse once everyone had recovered. HDL responders who interrogated the curse-marked allegedly pressured them to disband the group they had formed immediately and denied them any credit for their deeds.
"That was when we got the idea to try to reform the order," Ellie says with a stern expression on her face. "Our ancestors stood for truth and freedom of information and here we were being involved in an elaborate lie because people were still uncomfortable with us."
So, Hawke and Skye left SCI and began to gather fellow descendants of the windlords and meet in secret. They lacked their ancestors' control over the wind as well as any of the other magic for which windlords were famous, but they wouldn't let that stop them. Even without their powers, they were united in the original purpose of their forebears. They didn't have a plan for their resurgence, but their efforts to organize made it easy for the former Avatar of Crane to gather them when the God of Knowledge himself deigned to break their curse and unlock the memories that comprised the legacy of Aeros Academy. Continued on Page 9.
No comments:
Post a Comment