Dakkon [2]

Covered in sweat and with his heart racing, the Shanmao warrior's mind raced. He fought with every scrap of tenacity in his body. He tore flesh with his teeth, slashed out with the claws on his feet and swung his pair of tonfas until they broke.

Then he used the broken shards of his tonfas to stab, stab, stab… He fought and bled. He fought for hours. Retreating from the horde at the front gate while fighting beside his fellow wall guards.

Retreating into the streets as he fought with his brothers.

Retreating into the alleys as he fought alone.

Retreating into a house as he was all alone.

His body was broken. Shattered beyond recovery. He was so tired his arms and legs felt like lead. But he fought on.

For his very life, his very soul.

When the room he was fighting in grew quiet at last, he snarled and spit the throat of the last Shu warrior out between his teeth.

His arms and legs didn't work right anymore, but he still had fought until he savagely ripped the throat out of his last enemy. Then…he collapsed. He had lost too much blood. His bones were shattered in more places than he could count.

Strangely there was no more pain. His body felt heavy, but as he faded he felt that he had given his people enough time, and had died with honor. He had no regrets.

He had done all he could.

So why…why did he feel pain before he opened his eyes? All over his body he felt a radiating pain. It was excruciating. Was he in Hell? Why had he been cast into the pit of suffering when he gave everything he had to buy one more hour, one more minute, one more second for his people?

As he finally struggled to ignore the stinging pain in his head and open his eyes, he saw a Goddess.

She was the most beautiful creature the sun had ever deigned to shine on. No, perhaps the sun itself was made specifically to cast that warm glow on her face through the…hole…in the house? As his head started to clear, he looked around and coughed.

"Wo..who…are…you?" He managed to strangle the words out of his throat, coughing up chunks of dried blood. He winced with the pain but the fervor in his eyes was ever present.

"I'm Luna. Are you ok? Do you need some water?"

He felt the pain recede as the Goddess offered him a sip of water. It was a strange green tint, but he paid it no attention. If this Goddess meant him ill he couldn't resist anyway. As the water went down his throat, he felt a fire burn like a proper belly full of good hard mead. He was going to comment in surprise, but he felt that fire spread to his whole body and he felt…lighter…than he had initially.

'Ah, the Goddess has poured a miracle elixir into me. I am truly blessed.' He thought. He suddenly heard a masculine voice from his shoulder and glanced over to see…what the hell was that?

The man had muscle, that was for sure. But he seemed obviously lacking in the looks department. He had no beautiful fur, his ears were small and round, unlike Dakkon's own proud and prominent ears. He also didn't seem to have a tail. Was he a cripple who had his core in his tail cut off? Perhaps he was a Eunuch that the Goddess brought to serve her. Yes…a eunuch. That's what it was.

As Dakkon's imagination wandered, he heard the… well not man but eunuch…say "You seem to have a tenacious vitality. If it isn't too much of an inconvenience, we'd like you to tell us what happened here. We just passed through in the aftermath and discovered your body on the verge of the door of death."

'Ah, he must be her retainer. She deigns it beneath her to speak to me. Completely understandable.' Dakkon's mind was still warped into some weird self-made form of royal court etiquette as he tried to understand the two people before him. He looked at the 'retainer' and then coughed a few times. Finally, he spoke "Water, and nothing stout this time."

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Liam gave him a bottle with a screw-cap. After some confusion from the Shanmao warrior and a brief conversation explaining how to open it, the warrior drank thirstily.

'He seems completely at ease. As if he didn't just go through a battle. He either is broken or he has been through far more warfare than I thought was likely.' As Liam mused to Noona, she responded in kind.

<It's closer to the former, but not quite. He's completely out of it right now and he has been giving looks to Luna as if she is an object of worship. I think there's a chance he thinks he went to the Shanmao version of Valhalla.>

'Valhalla? They believe in that?'

<I have no idea, but his response is appropriate for that belief. Don't be surprised if he gives Luna some crazy high honorific title when he finally talks. He'll probably ignore you since you don't fit into his paradigm of understanding.>

Liam grunted in assent before leaning over to Luna and whispering in her ear. Luna nodded before asking the Shanmao warrior, "What happened here? Can you explain in detail? Just so you are aware, you are the sole survivor…We didn't come in time to save anyone else."

The Shanmao's eyes narrowed with a brief flash of grief before he steeled himself and continued with a reply, "Sun Goddess, my lowly name is Dakkon. We Shanmao had tried to start fresh after being ostracized from the Laohu[1] two hundred years ago."

"We may not be as strong as our Laohu brethren, but we are more adaptive to our environment, so we moved further North. We have been settled here for a little over sixty years."

"We learned from our outlying villagers that the Shu were spotted in large numbers. We built our foundation, set our barricades and prepared for invasion in the ways of our legendary Shanmao ancestor 'Stun Tsu.' Sadly, their numbers were to fierce."

"We fought with everything we had, even though we were outnumbered more than fifty to one. We managed with our fortifications to hold them back for three days. In that time all the women and children were evacuated to the direct South."

"By the time I fell, the only sound I could hear was from our Chief, who kept screaming "To the North, these rat bastards hate the cold! To the North quickly!" Even at the end of his life, he used his last weapon, his voice, to deter the Shu for just one more second."

Dakkon's voice crumpled at this point and nearly broke, but he persevered. Liam thought he saw a tear fall from Dakkon's eye. As if an illusion however, his tear seemed to disappear into the shadow on his face.

Dakkon's eyes gradually became fierce. "They will eventually move south to attack the women and children of my tribe. Our efforts gave them roughly a three day head start, but the difference in speed between the two means the Shu will probably catch up to them in the evening of tomorrow. Please, Sun Goddess, use your light to purge the filth that should never had left the ground and save the descendants of our tribe!"

Dakkon scrambled his body despite his pain and forced his body over into a placating form where his head was on the ground and his hands were neatly on his knees.

<Wow, looks like a kowtow lasts forever after all.>

Dakkon heard the new feminine voice, as well as the strange word for ancestral worship she just spoke, but he didn't lift his head. He simply awaited the voice of the Goddess. Dakkon's eyes opened wide on the ground however when he heard the 'eunuch' speak up.

"Luna, I want to see if we can help him. I don't know how big the Swarm is, but it's along the way, so lets go ahead and take a look."

Dakkon's confused mind spiraled as he tried to figure out what was going on, when he suddenly heard from the 'eunuch'.

"I'm Liam, this is Luna. If you are willing to travel with us we'll see what we can do for your people. If you continue to focus on recovering you should be good in a couple hours. Oh, and if you hear a weirdo Idiot speaking, that's Noona."

<Call me an idiot again and I won't explain to your girlfriend the birds and the bees.>

Dakkon was confused as he watched the Goddess slap a weird little creature on the arm of the Eunuch. 'Girlfriend?'