Wet Fire

The Fallen and the Risen (E7)

Petronel

She sat there and cried for a while, feeling small and weak as a child. Her mind raced with thoughts about the arsi, her family, and life itself. She wondered again and again how she had survived. She thought about the dream, and how it felt so real. She thought about how incredibly stupid she would look when she returned home. After a few hours, Petra drifted into a dreamless sleep, and woke up soon after, feeling much better about herself. She stood up and walked down the rocky hillside, down to where she had tied up Princella, her mule.

It was harder to find the place where she left her belongings that she anticipated. Navigating the Flats was a difficult task, and especially difficult when looking for things you have left behind or lost. There was no way to see into the distance. Looking for Princella, Petra followed a ledge of rocks around the eastern half of the hillside, the side she had come up. Without any luck, she moved down another ledge, and then another, climbing over boulders and leaping over fissures.

Walking eastward, she came out onto the flat plain, squinting her eyes for any sign of life. "Princella!" she called, "PRINCELLA!" The only thing she heard was an echo in reply. Her foot suddenly snagged on something and she fell down, hard. She landed into a small rocky pit, which was extremely dusty. Petra coughed. Her ribs felt bruised, but her head was luckily unharmed. She looked up to find a glass jar lodged between the ground and the bottom of the rock...pickled yams.

She found the rock where she had tied Princella nearby, but the shaggy mule was nowhere to be found. The rope she used was cut and fringed at the end--she had chewed clean through it. "Princella?!" The supplies she left with Princella were strewed all over the ground. It took her a while before she managed to collect them and bind them all together back into her trusty grey blanket. One of the jars was cracked, so Petra threw it into the distance and watched it vanish into the smoke.

With the food slung over her shoulders, Petra trekked back up the rocky mount to the corpse of the arsi, still dead and unmoving. She set down her things and approached the arsi's torso, which was still heavily covered in scales. She dug her hands in between a scale and ripped. The scale came clean off and Petra managed to catch it before it landed on the ground. A shiver went down her spine. I am rich. Pleased with herself, she placed the scale into her scale pouch which was still tied around her waist. She scratched her nose, and began to pop off more of the scales, filling up the bag.

Scaling pouches were usually made of a study leather, which prevented ripping, and were designed to hold anywhere from three to six scales at a time. Petra discovered that the pouch was capable of holding twenty scales comfortably, if they were all stacked horizontally right against each other. Thirty scales could barely fit, but at this number, a few would stick out of the top, which left the bag partially open. To accommodate the scales, Petra finished off a jar of pickled yams, stuffing herself sick, and put them in there. The jar held ten scales. But there were so many more that needed room.

Petra undid the grey blanket holding together her food and supplies, and, instead of wrapping them back up again, she formed the blanket into a type of cup, which she would pinch off with the remaining rope. She counted two hundred scales and squeezed them into every sort of crack imaginable, in between the jars of food and other stuff. The sack was now incredibly heavy, and she nearly fell over trying to put it back on again. Into her hood she stuffed a total of fifteen scales and then ten scales up each sleeve. She even fit twenty into her pants.

The weight of the scales was difficult to bear, but she thought of it as armor. She had become a knight who had slayed the monster. But this weighty prize did not belong just to her, no, it belonged to every single scaler who had suffered whilst fighting the arsii in the Southern Volcanic Flats. It belonged to Vynce. It belonged to Keiko. It belonged to Tyrek and Jelen. It belonged to her father Niles, and all the men and women of her tribe. What she had done would go down in history. This time, the arsi was the fallen, and she was the risen.