• SCENE 1: INTRODUCTION TO HUSKY

    Nessle was a farm girl. Always has, and always will be, her mother had sighed, scraping her strawberry blonde hair into a rough ponytail before pushing her towards the door. She did farm things like milking the cows, collecting eggs and feeding the livestock, and though it wasn’t a glamorous life, she was content with it.

    But, even where she lived, far out in the country surrounded by verdant plains where the nearest town was around ten miles away, the man that came once a week to deliever goods to the farm always also came with tales of powerful warriors called Dragoons.

    She would always hover close when the deliveryman spoke to her father about them, gasping behind her calloused farm girl hands at the reckless exploits of slaying dragons, ploughing through demons and eliminating any human that dared to stand up against them. The deliveryman painted them with an inhuman colour, whispering how they could leap so high in the air, they could touch the moon, or utilise their legendary lances to pierce through the dragon scales that were as hard as diamonds with the ease of a knife slicing butter.

    Nessle imagined a Dragoon to be a handsome man, muscular and divine without a scratch on his skin as a testament to his prowess. As a young farm girl, she knew that she was entitled to imagine sometimes, to daydream about a Dragoon whisking her away from a dangerous dragon like the stories of princesses locked in towers or cursed to sleep for eternity.

    So, she was surprised when coming face to face with a real Dragoon, that he was nothing like the deliveryman, or her fantasies portrayed.

    He had stumbled into their farm one foggy morning, a slip of a child that was barely into his teens wearing nothing more than a dishevelled tunic and shorts, his sandals falling apart and his white, translucent skin smudged with mud and grass stains. The child was sniffling, rubbing his skinned knees and dragging a lance, pure white with its bladed tip barbed with black thorns, twice as long as his body after himself.

    Husky, he had called himself past childish hiccups of pain, parking his bottom on the marshy floor beside the pigpen and clutching the white shaft of the lance tightly with a lithe hand. Nessle had shivered at those wide scarlet eyes, and his hair, beneath the dirt, was a dazzling white, invoked old fairytales from her childhood about the demon children; Albinos.

    But she wasn’t one to send a child out into the empty fields, dirty, knees skinned and without food, so she left the child by the pigpen and hurried inside to snag a loaf of bread and a smidgeon of butter. Her father was out with the horses, and her mother was off tending to the cows (she belatedly remembered that she should’ve went to help her by now, but reminded herself of the waif shivering out in the fog), so she was met with now questions as she gathered the food and exited out to see the young child.

    Upon asking what the child was doing here without his parents, and, with a dangerous looking weapon, she was shocked by what the waif had answered around a mouthful of bread.

    “M’parents are dead, farm girl.” Scarlet eyes blinked innocently. “I’m sent here by th’ Old Fart to kill th’ wyrm. I’m a Dragoon apprentice, see?” The bread was finished in one more gulp, and the child stood shakily, hefting the heavy spear up off the ground with a grunt.

    Nessle was a little angered at the child. A Dragoon? He was sullying their reputation by trying to masquerade as one! “Now hear, you lying child! A Fey will steal you up if you say false things!”

    “I’ll kill th’ Fey too, then.” The child had answered, utterly unperturbed. His angelic, pale face lit up in a smile, one that sent her hairs prickling up and a shiver roll down a spine. “M’supposed to kill all threats.”

    Nessle’s lips moved silently as the child bowed, white hair rustling in the slight wind that had picked up suddenly, scarlet eyes twinkling up at her with old, old eyes of the elderly soldier that lived in the marketplace, boasting of his once fame assisting the Dragoons.

    They were eyes of a Dragoon.

    “Thank you for th’ bread, miss.”

    Then with a sharp turn, the moist squelch of sandaled feet steeping into a marsh, the boy vanished into the fog beyond the boundaries of the farm.

    The next day, the deliveryman arrived, ecstatic, telling of the bloodied corpse of a giant wyrm outside of town with fervour.

    END OF SCENE 1: INTRODUCTION TO HUSKY