Chapter 7: The Scoundrel's PathMiz’ri woke up with a crick in her neck and a brain full of static.

  The peace of the previous night—that strange, silent vigil where she had watched over the sleeping human like a guardian statue—had evaporated with the dawn. In its pce, the familiar, scratching noise of her own psyche had returned. It wasn't the roaring void of the day before, but a frantic, needy buzzing. It felt like waking up sober after a three-day bender, the chemical crash leaving her irritable, skin-crawlingly sensitive, and desperate for a fix.

  She shifted, her long, angur limbs tangled in the thin inn sheets. Talisa was still asleep, curled against Miz’ri’s side like a limpet. The girl was warm—offensively warm—and soft in all the pces Miz’ri was hard edges and wire. Miz’ri’s red eyes drifted down, bypassing the flushed face and the messy brown curls, nding unerringly on the one thing she hadn't touched. The chemise had ridden up during the night, exposing the pale curve of Talisa’s lower belly. The rune sat there, bck and stark against the white skin. It was a date. A deadline. A promise of expiration.

  Miz’ri stared at it, the obsession itching behind her eyes. She wanted to wake the girl, shake her, and demand the cipher. She wanted to know exactly how many days of "ownership" she had purchased. But the memory of Talisa’s total colpse the night before held her back. The girl was a puzzle, yes, but a fragile one. I can’t ask, Miz’ri thought, a scowl darkening her face. But I own everything else.

  The silence in her head grew louder, a demanding whine for control. She needed to drown it out. She needed to assert her pce in this new, strange hierarchy.

  Miz’ri didn't nudge the girl awake. She reached down, her hand sliding under the hem of the chemise, and squeezed the soft, yielding flesh of Talisa’s backside with a firm, possessive grip.

  “Wake up, ste’kol,” Miz’ri purred, leaning in until her lips brushed the shell of Talisa’s ear. “The sun is up, and my hands are idle. That’s a dangerous combination for you.”

  Talisa gasped, her body jerking awake. Her blue eyes flew open, wide and disoriented, before nding on the elf’s looming face. For a second, Miz’ri saw the fsh of fear—the memory of the jail, the deal, the tattoo. But as Miz’ri’s thumb circled slowly, deliberately kneading the soft flesh, the fear transmuted into something else.

  “Golly…I must still be dreaming…” The human bit her lip, but a little twinkle of something sparked in her eye. She looked down at Miz’ri’s hand, then backed up at the dominant woman looming over her.

  Miz’ri smiled, a cold, delighted sliver of a thing. “Welcome to reality,” Miz’ri descended down upon the girl in her p. Dark hands grabbed at the edge of her chemise and yanked upwards, exposing the heavy swells of the girl's breasts. “Your new one,” Mizri once again id her body on top of Talisa and drank in the heat of her body.

  Talisa’s breath was hitching with pleasure, her cheeks flushed a bright, healthy pink. “Be gentle, be gentle,” she squeaked between hot breathed moans. Her hands attempted to come up to get in Mizri’s way but were swatted away each time. She held onto Miz’ri’s athletic body as the dark elf’s obsidian fingers found their way to the perky pink nipples and gently teased the erect peaks. “Do you have to wear your gloves?” Talisa whined.

  Miz'ri looked at her hands marred in the red of her station. She had not removed them for a pything in quite some time. Considering Talisa seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown at any moment, Miz'ri considered anything that would make the girl more apt to corrupting seems like a good strategy. “You wish to feel my flesh? Fine.” Crimson eyes locked in the pools of blue below her, teeth yanking off the expensive leather with a flourish. Talisa giggled a little bit at the bravado of it all.

  Miz'ri leaned in to the side of the curvy humans hear. She kissed against the girl's trembling ear. “But you'll find no gentleness here, only my will for your body.” With a growl she dug her nails into the soft flesh and felt the girl squirm beneath her. A mixture of painful cries and deeply sensual moans exited her mouth as Miz'ri observed this new reaction. “Good toy.”

  The woman beneath her writhed with closed eyes and clenched fists, anchoring herself on the sagging mattress beneath them. Talisa muttered a little prayer “Saints save me…” as Miz'ri took one hand and began to trail down.

  For a moment the dark elf forgot that the Mark was there, waiting on to Talisa's skin. As her narrow obsidian fingers began to cross the rune, the girl jumped. “Please no, please not any lower. Please.” Once again Miz tugged at the frilly hem of Tali’s bloomers with expectant hunger. She was eager for the day that the girl wouldn't even think to stop her no matter where she touched. Miz had the eternal patience of an elf; what was but one moment deyed in the slow unrevealing of a pure soul into beautiful corruption? She let go and leaned into the crook of the girl's neck. “Fine - soon you'll be begging me for it.” She whispered into the goosebumps on Talisa’s skin. She sank her teeth into the pure white flesh, eager to leave her own mark on the already cimed flesh.

  The Julisian pilgrim let out another lie and hot moan as a little red hickie appeared on her neck. Miz'ri pulled back and admired her work. “Unlike your brand, my marks will fade with time, though you may look a bit whorish for half a day. But I think they're kinda cute - little marks of where I've been, where I belong.” Taking her index finger she raked a line across the supple white under Talisa's breasts. “There, that's the line I won't cross…for now… You'll want it much lower sooner than ter, ste’kol.” She'll come to me, she'll break, they all do. The silence in her head was dull for now.

  Well enough because the wardrobe that contained Herkel began to rattle, the door swinging open. Miz'ri rolled her eyes. Lovely, for a moment I forgot she had a chaperone. The skeleton seemed to ‘stretch’ as it exited its sleep, stepping out of the closet to discover an undignified sight before him. The way the skeleton looked at Miz'ri ying on top of his topless and hickie-covered great grand-daughter was full of a contempt that Miz found amusing. “Well Marshmallow, I could py with you all day, but we have to leave this rotten city before we get too distracted.” Miz’ri announced abruptly, rolling out of bed and leaving the girl flushed and blinking in the sudden cold.

  Talisa scrambled up, wrestling her hands over her chest in some sembnce of modesty. “Goof golly, S-sorry, pappy!” she stammered, fumbling around for where her heavy robe y on the floor. “I hope you had a good, uh, rest. I mean, you didn’t see much, right? Oh who am I kidding - you see everything.” half-nude, the girl gave her skeletal retive a gentle squeeze of a hug. Miz’ri watched this curious sight with a little chuckle to herself.

  “Get dressed but don’t get too attached.” Miz said, looking down at the clothes on her body, wondering how long ago she stole them, and from whom. “You and I stick out like a sore thumb, so at least we need to change outfits to not match our descriptions from the jailbreak.” She motioned at the heavy bck and purple robes littered with Julisian runes.

  Talisa clung to them possessively for a moment and then let out a heavy sigh. “You are right, we don’t need to invite any more questions.” She looked over to the skeleton in the room who was now looking out the window at the dawn peaking over the horizon. “Where can we hide him while we change?” His bony fingers beckoned his great granddaughter over to him, and pointed down towards the pier below.

  “Under the pier? It could work - we won’t be long.” Herkel gave a rattling nod. They managed to hustle the skeleton out the back window and down into the shadows of the pier supports, where the smell of brine and rotting kelp was strong enough to discourage loiterers. Herkel rattled a thumbs-up before slipping into the mid-morning light.

  Back inside, Talisa turned to Miz’ri. She was holding her plump stomach and offered a weak smile. “Do you think we have enough time to eat?” A flicker of vulnerability fshed in her big blue eyes.

  “You are not faint. You have enough reserves to survive a winter siege,” Miz’ri countered, fastening her belt.

  “Like my fat butt does us any good if we’re on the run,” Talisa insisted. “who knows when our next meal is going to be?”. The dark elf weighed the idea in her mind; she hadn’t traveled with a human in a while, and all their little needs and desires. She reflected that there would be days between meals for her sometimes. She would often eat half a meal and save it just in case. The constant gnawing of bodily hunger was nothing compared to the hunger she felt for supple flesh and control.

  “Fine, a moment to eat. Then we need to finish our errands and collect your great grandfather.” Fully dressed, the two of them headed down to the common room. The same inn keeper from st night was still up and working, Miz’ri couldn’t help but shoot him a cocky smile. Talisa nearly skipped on her way to find one of the few workers who was up in the wee hours.

  The dark elf took a seat in the uncomfortable wooden chair of the common room long table and waited for the girl for what seemed like an unusually long period of time. She expected the girl to quickly grab a heel of bread and some hard cheese, or a bowl of leftover porridge. Food for the sake of life. Instead, Talisa has seemingly charmed the barmaid into bringing a ptter of fried fish, a warm loaf of this morning’s bread, a pot of honey, and two tankards of dark ale.

  When the food arrived, Talisa paused. She folded her hands, bowed her head, and murmured a quick prayer to herself.

  The moment the end of the prayer left her lips, the piety vanished. Talisa tore into the food with the enthusiasm of a starving wolf. She broke the bread, sthered it in honey, and devoured it with a series of appreciative hums and sighs that were almost as lewd as the noises she’d made upstairs. “This crust is perfect,” Talisa mumbled around a mouthful, her eyes closing in bliss. “And the cod… mmm. Fresh catch. You can taste the ocean. Miz, by golly you have to try the honey, it's from a local wildflower I’ve never heard of before.”

  Miz’ri sat opposite her, picking at a piece of bread with utility-focused grimness. She stopped chewing, watching the human across from her. Talisa had a death date tattooed on her skin. She was being hunted by guards. She was shackled to a sociopathic Dark Elf. And yet, she was finding absolute, unadulterated joy in a piece of toast. “You eat like you’re afraid the pte is going to run away,” Miz’ri commented, a rare, genuine smirk tugging at her lips.

  “Life is short,” Talisa said simply, wiping a crumb from her lip. “Joy is the only thing we get to keep.”

  Miz’ri chuckled a bit, “perhaps for you, human.” She pushed her pte toward the girl. “Eat what’s left of mine. You clearly need joy more than I do.” Talisa beamed at her, a smile so bright it almost hurt Miz’ri’s light-sensitive eyes.

  “Now,” Miz’ri said, standing up as the st crumb disappeared. “Joy time is over. We need gear. We can’t travel upriver looking like a priestess and a convict. We need to blend.” They exited the inn, stepping into the chaotic bustle of the market district. Miz’ri’s eyes immediately began to scan the crowd, not for merchants, but for easy, free marks.

  “Wait here,” Miz’ri murmured, stepping toward an unattended merchant cart. “I see a tunic that looks about your size.”

  “Miz’ri, no!” Talisa hissed, grabbing the elf’s arm with surprising strength. “We are not thieves! It is safer to pay. If you get caught snatching a shirt, we hang. It is safer to blend.”

  “You want to pay,” Miz’ri said ftly. “With your grave coins.”

  “I want to choose my own breeches,” Talisa corrected, pulling Miz’ri away from the cart and toward a legitimate stall. “And maybe a little something for you too.”

  Talisa insisted on paying for everything—using a substantial number of her heavy, golden Julisian coins, which Miz’ri watched dissolve into local Valentian Iron with a growing sense of financial panic. Talisa bought herself practical, neutral clothes: sturdy brown breeches, a thick canvas tunic, and a serviceable wool cloak in a muted gray. She even bartered for real leather boots.

  Miz’ri was harder to fit. Talisa found her a loose-fitting, dark green traveler's shirt that was rge enough to hide her armor, and a pair of heavy bck leggings. But the final items were Talisa's signature touches—for both of them. “You look like you’re waiting for an ambush,” Talisa critiqued Miz’ri. “You need color. Something to draw the eye away from your face.” She presented Miz’ri with a bright, vibrant red woolen scarf. It was long, thick, and utterly impractical.

  “I am not wearing that,” Miz’ri decred, crossing her arms. “It’s loud. It’s foolish.”

  “I think it says ‘ I am an eccentric noblewoman who doesn’t care about propriety’” Talisa said in what was a clear imitation of Miz’ri’s cadence and tone. Before the elf could react, she unfastened Miz’ri’s bck veil and wrapped the red scarf around the tall woman’s neck twice, letting the ends hang long over the dark green tunic.

  She tilted her head. “It hides the shadows under your chin. It’s bold. And red is a protective color, isn’t it? For blood, for life.”

  Miz’ri stared at her reflection. The red was undeniably arresting against her obsidian skin and white hair. It made her look less like a shadow assassin and more like a pirate captain.

  “If we die, I am cursing you for this,” Miz’ri grumbled, adjusting the scarf.

  Next, Talisa bought the disguise for Herkel: an oversized, rain-stained, dark brown woolen coat, a wide-brimmed, beaten-up leather hat, and a thick, coarse woolen scarf in a muted, earthy brown.

  They carried the entire haul down to the pier. Miz’ri walked ahead, checking the shadows, before sliding down to the damp, sheltered space beneath the dock where they had left Herkel.

  “Grandpappy, we have gifts,” Talisa called softly, scrambling to join her.

  Herkel was waiting, patiently huddled in the darkness, but he wasn't idle. The tide had left a rge patch of slick, wet mud and sand, and Herkel was using a piece of driftwood as a drawing tool. Talisa gasped at the sight. The skeleton had drawn a rough, but detailed, picture in the mud. It showed a crude boat with three figures inside it. There was a stick figure with a skull for a head, a very curvy stick figure beled 'T', and a stick figure with a clear scowl, beled 'M' Talisa crouched down, tears welling up in her eyes, blurring the image of her great-grandfather’s pyful rebellion. “Grandpappy,” she whispered, reaching out to touch the mud, then drawing her hand back. “I never knew you were so creative…or could move this much.” She reached out and put a hand on the smooth skull, “How did you get to be like this?”

  Miz’ri stared, not at the drawing, but at the implications. Animated, mobile, creative—this was no mere golem. This was a sentient being that had been in hiding.

  Herkel’s empty eye sockets were fixed on Talisa. With the stick, he quickly traced a word in the mud below his boat cartoon: ‘M I R I A M’.

  “Miriam,” Talisa breathed, her hand flying to her mouth. “That’s… that’s Great-Mama’s name…Pappy, what did she do?”

  Once again the skeleton used his stick and etched into the mud. ‘S H E S A V E D M E’

  his empty eye socket stared back, nodding and tapping the dirt, and then tapping on his ribcage where his heart once beat a century ago. The skeleton dropped the stick and extended a bony, covered hand towards the newly bought pile of clothes,

  “Alright, Pappy…I have so many questions. But for ter…time for your costume,” Miz’ri said, her voice strangely low, her mind clearly buzzing with thought.

  Working together in the darkness, they pulled the heavy, oversized coat onto Herkel’s frame. The coat swallowed him, concealing his skeletal thinness, creating the illusion of hunched shoulders. Miz'ri yanked the wide-brimmed hat low over his skull, and Talisa lovingly wrapped the coarse brown scarf high enough to conceal his neck and lower jaw.

  From a distance, Herkel now looked like an impossibly tall, terribly hunchbacked old man, heavily bundled, wearing a massive coat and a wide, suspicious hat.

  “Perfect,” Miz’ri announced, dusting a patch of lint from the skeleton’s shoulder. “You’re a hunchbacked human handler with a very rge bundle of undry. Let’s go.”

  They snuck out from under the pier, a fugitive trio: the dark elf in bck leather and a startling red scarf, the bonekeeper in new traveler's clothes, and the skeleton disguised as a very odd, hunchbacked man.