"Binoculars"
October 5th prompt - Inktober writing doodles!
I cheated a bit. Come at me. This is a little snippet I did in response to the Inktober prompt “Binoculars” but set in and inspired by a world I created for a TTRPG campaign I’m running called Titans Rising. So this was a real moment the characters improved, and the spyglass appearing was the result of me snarkily going, “Yeah, I’ll let you randomly find a spyglass in your Bag of Holding if you roll me a Nat 20.” That’ll show me. Now they roll every time they try to pull something random out of the bag, hoping for the next Nat 20. I’ve done this to myself.
Also, the cover art is art my player generated of his character, wanting to capture the moment, so I had to use it for this!
If cussing bothers you, don’t read! It’s disguised under Britishness, but it’s there.
Flint stood on the inn balcony squinting out into the distance. The strange, pale woman with the tattoos that twined across the often blank canvas of her face had stepped from the railing in a puff of white feathers, and a moment later there had been only a fluffy sphere of a bird, zinging out over the city skyline like someone had hurled an overly-graceful snowball.
The guy who’d been following him since the Riverlands was chattering on behind him over the drinks he’d bought with the Warden’s gold. Flint had stopped listening—well, immediately. In his defense, Heath did tend to jabber, using scores of words to get through ideas that could have taken ten, but maybe it was for the best since the man’s Grennish accent was so thick that Flint could only make out every third or so thought anyway.
“Oi!” Heath’s voice cut more sharply through the background noise of the Golden Crest, indicating that Flint had missed some key moment of expected reaction. Without looking back, Flint unfolded a hand behind him, making a beckoning motion.
“Spyglass.”
Heath bristled for a moment. The slosh of four or five drinks in his veins—so far—didn’t knock him off-kilter enough not to be able to tell when he was being right-out ignored, and where did this pointy-eared prick get off? He dug through their Bag of Holding anyway, muttering to himself over the bad form of this new-fangled party, together all of five minutes before they’d scattered to the four corners of who-knows-where in this sodding city, and not even with the good sense or decency to grab a drink together first. How were they supposed to put together what was going wrong across the whole six lands when they couldn’t even get six people at the same bloody table?
“Spyglass!” Heath demanded of their new bag, shoving his sleeveless arm shoulder-deep into the opening, expecting, as he had gotten each time before when he’d tried this, exactly nil. What were the chances, anyway, that some dumb bugger who’d owned the bag before had left a spyglass in here? Or anything, honestly. Any tosser with more than two coppers to rub together knew that if you got your hands on a Bag of Holding, you gods-damned-well emptied it before selling it off. But Flint had asked for one, and the golden-haired git should know well enough that they didn’t have a sodding spyglass, so there wasn’t much harm in at least—
His fingers curled around something metallic, and a second later Heath was blinking open-mouthed at a cylindrical, brass instrument in his hands, a little scuffed, but none the worse for ware as far as he could see.
“Spyglass!” he called out, this time with a note of baffled excitement, and the river-wading twat didn’t even do him the justice of turning around as he snatched it out of Heath’s hand, raising it to his eye with an easy air as though they’d just had one of the bloody things lying around.
Flint set the spyglass to his eye, following the trail of the small bird’s flight off toward the outer walls of the city. Yümen was strange, stacked in on itself over and over again up the side of the mountain, like one of those fancy cakes, if the baker had mucked it up and made the sides so steep that the icing would slide off. So, from their point here at the city’s highest inn, he could see farther than he ought to be able to in a proper, flat land.
He’d kept his eyes set where the-bird-that-was-Aoife had dipped down among the tiered buildings, and with the help of the instrument, he was able to find just the right angle through the alleyways to find her. He’d searched for the bird, but found the woman, standing straight-backed and blank-faced next to the city wall, her silver-white braid cutting a neat line between her shoulder blades and coming to a stop just over her folded hands.
She was speaking with a couple strange figures. Well, one strange figure, and one regular-looking merchant with an oversized sword. The creature had been at the Council of Kings—but it was even more alien now. It seemed to have…unfolded itself, extending into a looming assortment of slender, prismatic limbs, its elongated legs bending backward at the knee like a bird’s, its body stretched to where two great feathers burst like wings from its back, scaled, and feathered, with jagged antlers and eyes like the ice in the depths of a frozen riverbed. Even hunched, it towered over Aoife and the merchant man like a being carved from the Gloam itself.
And it did not look happy.