I drew this on his birthday (November 21st) which is kind of my personal holiday every year.
I've attached this interview-thing I wrote for an RP contest two years ago.
Although this article was unearthed in a library, miles from its country of origin, we presume the text presented here originated from a journal, circa mid 1260 during the Boundary Wars, of an unknown scholar or clergyman – although we can assume he is not Alisian. Wording has been translated slightly for modern readability, but it nevertheless provides some insight into the religious and political situation of the time period.
The first thing I noticed about Rivek Ailinar was how thin he was. He looked awkward beneath the thick soldier’s cloaks they handed out as uniforms. Was this really the half-Alisian fighter, our country’s supposed secret weapon? How was this man – I use the term ‘man’ loosely because he looks like he can’t lift a knife (and he’s got Blackblood in him, anyway, which makes his very humanity questionable) – supposed to stop a blow let alone secure an entire country’s border?
He poured himself a mug of water from a nearby pitcher as I readied my papers. “I don’t understand you scholarly types,” he muttered. “Reading only ever got me so far, you know.”
He breathed into his hands for warmth. Here, at the edge of the world. The hellish, freezing, end of the world.
“I don’t appreciate people prying into my life, but her Majesty” – he made a face, then, as if the title were something laughable – “believes I should talk to you, I will. I trust you’re not here to kill me.”
The look in his eyes said if I tried, I’d be dead first. Death threats, and I hadn’t even said anything, ha!
To my surprise, he dipped his fingers into the water and washed the dried blood off his face. Red blood, so it couldn’t have been his. “Just business,” he shrugged. “It’s what you get, for asking me to speak with you right after a skirmish.” They say people like him – people accustomed to lying – are very good at noticing facial changes, so he must have seen mine. (I admit, I have vomited at the stench of death before. I hate field reports.) Finished cleaning himself, he threw the water into the snow and refilled the flagon with half an inch of whiskey.
“So, what do you want to know?”
“Well, let’s start off with something simple… Do you have an embarrassing or annoying habit, routine, or secret? If not, describe an embarrassing moment from your past.”
“And here I thought the first thing you’d ask me would be my name. They certainly raise them polite nowadays.” Who was he to call me impolite? He sat down on a stump – one of many trees cleared to make camp. Well, he did have some sort of manners. He carried himself like a nobleman rather than a solider – back straight, head high, and mind wary.
He paused as he thought about the question. “Mind you, Milady said this would be confidential – I will personally wring your neck if any of this information is found while I’m alive.” He sighed, “It’s as if she completely expects me to get killed out here…”
I nodded.
“I hope that means you’ll keep this quiet.” He smiled wryly, “I think the answer you’re looking for is that I sacrifice small children to the Dark Goddess. You’d only be half correct. Blood tastes good, I’ll admit that. It just so happens I’ve a habit of eating my meat raw – and often furry. Tastes better that way – mice, fish, you name it. (Although fish aren’t exactly furry…
The hawk-magic causes the cravings and doubly makes sure I don’t get sick from eating carcasses… Or – if you’re looking for something more exciting,” he smirked, swallowing the liquor in one motion before continuing. “I’ve slept with other men,” - he lowered his voice, “and enjoyed it.”Disgusting, absolutely disgusting! Vile.
He waved his hand a bit, “It’s not a big deal where I’m from, you know. Men who like men, women who like women – yes, in that way – are just given different roles. Being they can’t have their own, they become substitute parents for children whose real ones had died. But then again, I still wouldn’t tell anyone even if they were Alisian – if you become a caretaker, no one believes you can fight anymore. I can’t live like that.”
He laughed at me when I coughed, trying to cover my mental reaction. “Well, next question here… what do you do to relax?”
He raised his eyebrow at me again. I hadn’t noticed it before, but his eyes were changing colors – before, when he first spoke to me, they were yellow, and now they’d turned blue, a cobalt color that would be a lot prettier if his eyes weren’t slanted. Changing eyes were, besides blood color, the only tell-tale sign of magic, and his was strong.
“Relax? I drink – tea or liquor, depends on the night. Or hunt mice to give into that previously described habit. I go off into the woods. People who know me have gotten used to it - sleeping in trees helps calm me down, but it can get hard on the spine if I stay like this. I’ll change into falcon form if I have the energy and know that, when I change back, I’ll have a set of clothes ready for me.”
So the rumors were true. The man’s power lay in self-transfiguration. At least he wasn’t super-human, as they also said. There was still no person on record who can complete a change with their clothes on.
“As long as I’m left alone, things are fine. There are very few people I would want to share time with. It’s not so much a period of relaxation as just ignoring everything – and everyone – else.”
“Moving on…” It was clear he didn’t like me, even if all I was doing was reading off a list my abbot had given me. “What sort of upbringing did you have?”
“So here are the real questions. I bet you expected my childhood to be rotten. Actually, it was pretty good up to a point when your church got in the way. Sure, I had the crap beaten out of me a couple times – a lot of times – but that was mostly well-deserved, and if anything, good practice. I was born on the Alisian Isles and lived there until I was eight. Learned to fight there, too. This scar is from one of the rituals.”
He pointed to the cross-shaped monstrosity below his right-eye. “If you believe in the old stories – the historical ones, not the ones your people made up – there was once a general, the hawk-mage Ailinar Vaulkner, whom my family named themselves after. His right eye had been torn out in battle. This is how we honor him – before receiving your first weapon, you take a cut across the cheek and learn what kind of pain you can cause. If you’re like me - your mom or dad is the head of the clan – you get another one, down the eye itself, so you realize the pain your clan causes others is also your responsibility. Of course, these cuts are supposed to heal in days. Mine infected, and I scar easily. Enough said. Magic saved my vision, but it’s still not as good as my left.”
“As fate and religion would have it, my mother and father divorced, and I went with my mother to the Mainland. I knew it would happen, they fought all the time. Mother was only nineteen when she got pregnant and ran off with Dad. They say Alisians are good in bed.” Rivek winked. “Not that you’d know, monk. As for that pregnancy, I have an older sister, Mirab, who still lives on the Islands. I wonder what she would think of me now, entangled in all this, and giving interviews.”
“Mom remarried and had another kid – Artorin is eight years younger than me. When she and my step-father died, my – eh, how did this go again? - step-father’s cousin took me in along with Arti. Suffice to say, I splinted his son’s dislocated arm – basic Alisian medical practice – and Bohren and I became friends. He…” Rivek smiled, obviously this was something he was fond of. “Bohren taught me to read, and without him, I never would have even considered school.”
He sighed, “You know what made my childhood good? I was foolish, but I had friends. Real ones who didn’t care how what I was affected who I was. I’d be dead without them. Literally. I owe my Liege my life, so to speak. And I’ll hold myself to that.”
I wish he had elaborated on that. I know I shouldn’t have been so entranced by the concept of scandal, but what could Her Majesty possibly see in this man?
I continued. Perhaps there was more here than he let on. “So, say, you have just attained something material you have been working towards for a long time but someone important to you also wants this item. What is the item? Who is the 'someone important'? Finally, what do you do?”
“Easy. Sort of.” He reached under his tunic, unfolding a ragged piece of paper he had kept near his skin.
“See this? This is a royal pardon that puts me in the personal employ of Princess Willowren Veruna Solan. It keeps my own army from killing me and negates most of the things I’ve done in the past. Or course, it means I do a lot of dirty work, but that’s a small price to pay. Dirty work’s more fun. The pardon’s not of much use to anyone else, though. It has my name in ink, so scratching it out isn’t particularly effective. The only people who would want it would probably be people aiming to hurt me – in which case, why should I let them get so close anymore? I’d deal with them as I see fit, if you know what I mean. If Will, well… if Will wanted it back, then I don’t know what I’d do.”
He addressed a royal figure by her first name? Just how ‘
ersonal’ was his employment? But before I could elaborate, he said, “Never mind that. A horde of gold would be a pretty nice thing to get, too. I lead a simple life, but I could always use the cash. If anyone I could trust wanted that… well, we’d just arrange a deal. A favor from me now means a favor from them later.”My boss had told me the next question held personal interest to him, and he had insisted I uncover accurate information. “Rivek, suppose you learned a lover, kin or someone else very close to you betrayed you to an enemy. Who was the betrayer and who was the enemy? What happened?”
“You have no right to call me by that name.”
“I am sorry, Sir, I -.”
“I have no title, either. I’m flattered, but someone else’ll be irritated hearing you call me that. To you, my name is ‘Ailinar.’ In our culture, we use our family names in formal settings. I’m sure that one word’s enough for you. I highly doubt you know any other Ailinars.”
“Of course, Ailinar.”
“That’s better. Although, now, your questions are getting a little too personal. If anyone asks, my enemy is the Heilmdor, Prince Sorian – yes, the man who thinks our border territories are his for the taking. The same godforsaken frigid territories we’re sitting in right now.”
“Well, I’m afraid that’s not the question, I didn’t ask you who your enemy was.”
“I know. Part of me thinks you’re not just asking a hypothetical. Does it count, if at the time, you didn’t know your enemy was your enemy?”
“I suppose.”
“… Then I figure, if this is going into a book somewhere, and someone’s going to read it someday when my body’s turned to ash, then I should tell you the truth.”
What?
“The betrayer in question would have been the late Prince Fenne of Brennan. I am half-Brennan, you see, via my mother, but that doesn’t seem to matter anymore. The enemy would be have been the King himself. I suppose, it was my own stupidity to trust him, to let him be my friend – he had always been his father’s boy.”
He fingered a spot between his ribs. “We were young, sneaking out of the palace, and we got assaulted by bandits. Fenne was never a good fighter, so we ran. Unfortunately, he was just as slow as he was incapable of defending himself. I took an arrow in the side. And wouldn’t you know it, I started bleeding. And it hurt. It’s acid. It’s hard you know, keeping it down, the Blackblood. Blood for blood and whatnot, I killed one of them, and it felt good. All in all, he saw what I did, what color came out of the wound. Although he helped me up, we walked back in silence. My roommate, the boy I mentioned before, Bohren, cleaned up the wound when I got back. Fenne disappeared. I thought we were fine, but now that I think about it, I shouldn’t have been surprised when the Royal Guard broke into my room at sunrise. I was arrested on counts of dark magic, heresy, and impersonating a nobleman for seven years… I mean, honestly. I grow feathers. What harm am I going to do?”
I didn’t realize how he had been involved in things, politically. From what the priest had told me, I assumed he’d been some bastard child they picked out of nowhere for his killing ability.
“Suffice to say, things were tense between Fenne and I afterwards. That pardon was a birthday gift from Will, so to speak. A gift so I would keep having birthdays and wouldn’t be roasted on a spit – which Fenne’s father had decided was appropriate punishment for me. Anyway, I… I’m not sure how I feel now, only that I know I’m in debt to Will. Even after he died, I never got over the fact that Fenne was the one who sold me out. I’ve tried to forgive him – he did try to make it up to me afterwards, but only after I’d saved his hide again. I’ve tried. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to forgive him, but there’s no way I’ll be able to forget.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just moved on, “What would you do if you permanently lost your powers or greatest strength?”
He laughed. “Get killed pretty quickly. When I fight, everything is pretty much based on my being faster than the other person – and the hawk-magic is what gives me that speed. Without it, I’d probably be just a little better than average.” He seemed relieved I wasn’t going to discuss his past anymore.
“Well, if luck would have it that I didn’t die in some bar brawl, I’d probably go hermit-style in the woods or take up a trade. I have no idea what I would be good at, though. I’ve always based what I do around being half bird, basically. Maybe I could be a butcher. That doesn’t seem to require much training. Or a moneylender – I’m good with math. But that job might get me killed every quicker.”
He paused, “Actually, I take that back. I think… if I lost it all, I’d go home. Home, not like Tirid and Will – much as I would miss them - , but home to see my father. Who knows, I might end up doing trade work there.”
“A butcher, eh?”
“Well, I did say I liked raw meat.”
I smiled. Maybe he wasn’t that bad. He was at least trying to joke with me. “Ailinar, eh, next question.”
“It better be something along the lines of ‘will you take this offering of brandy’…”
“Sorry, no. How would you deal if you failed in a major undertaking?”
“Clergyman or not, you really, really, ought to buy me a drink after this. If I fail – lord knows I have – then I get pissed, drink some, or fly off into the woods on occasion. Depends on what it is, really. If I lose a fight, then I pick another one and win it. That can be a bad habit, though. Eventually though, if it’s those things where you can try again, and it’s worth your time doing so, then I probably will. I’ve run away from my failures more times than I would like to admit, though. That… that Fenne issue being one of them.”
“What do you think of the society around you and your place in it? Do you feel you deserve your station, do you seek better? Do you support the society or do you seek to change it?”
“I thought you would have figured out my position on that now. Society is a load of horse crap, I think. You know, when they tried me, they never mentioned the man I killed, only that I was some sort of demon – which I’m not.”
He rolled up his left sleeve to his shoulder, revealing a tattoo. The six-spoke wheel was a symbol used to identify dark mages. “No, I don’t think I deserved to be branded. Of course, I seek better if I can get it. I mean, I’ve been lucky so far, position in the royal guard. I’d rather not be some noblewoman’s pet bird, though. To be honest, the only difference between us is what god we believe in and what power we may have been born with. Hell, not even. The only difference is, for us, darkness is darkness, and for you, darkness is evil. Pick up one of my scriptures one day, if you have the time. If I could change the way you see things, I very well would, but I’ll focus on surviving first. Idealists cause too much trouble, and they’re usually pretty pigheaded, anyhow. Nobody pays attention to them.”
He breathed into his hands again, and I was once again reminded of the cold. “Is this conversation over now?”
“I’m sorry, just two more.” He rolled his eyes. “During your travels you have picked up a protégé along the way. As a mentor, what do you consider most important to teach them? How will you teach them this, and why is this so important?”
“A protégé?” he laughed. “Who in their right mind wants to learn from me?”
... I wrote this a long time ago, and I don't have the drive to complete it, so I just kind of have to leave it like this. Sorry. ...
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