Thursday, October 14, 2010

The Heist

The old man squinted through bleary, rheumatic eyes at the piece of parchment arrayed in front of him. He had been working for hours, mindlessly completing the tedious, repetitive task of decrypting the scroll, his own blocky, hurried writing contrasting sharply with the precise elven lettering circling the perimeter. His spectacles had long ago dug deep furrows on the sides of his nose. They were inflamed enough now that they were nearly as red as the dye in his itchy wool nightshirt. He had pushed himself well beyond the point of fatigue, working into the late hours of the night by flickering candle light. Feverishly he pressed on, obsessed with the need to KNOW, to understand what mysteries the parchment held. Every letter decoded added to the tantalizing hints, drawing him on, keeping him from the warm, inviting embrace of his bed. The sheet was now criss-crossed with his black notes, lines drawing arrows to the terrain features on the map in the center. All the vital landmarks were marked out and pieces of terrain were highlighted, building up and organizing the clues to the location of the greatest mystery of all: the location of the tomb of Acerak the arch-mage.

Balthus didn’t remember when he first sat down and started writing. Days prior? Weeks? Months even? It didn’t matter. The mystery had to be decoded, and he’d long since abandoned as ridiculous the suspicions that had initially grasped him: that this map was an accursed thing, and that to truly understand its secrets would lead only to madness and death for those that pursued them. None of that mattered anymore. The mystery had woven its way so thoroughly into his desires now that no spell or curse was required to keep him at his task. This was all to him, the only thing that mattered. And now, at last, after so much toil, the answer was in front him.

His eyes widened as the last word of an ancient, lost elven language stared up at him. Elrohir it said, a name or a place if it was anything. He turned, frantic, to the pile of reference books stacked up next to him, throwing the top three to the side and onto the floor in irritation as he scanned the page in question, at last alighting on the needed detail. “Ha ha!” he cried, drawing on the map one last time, tracing an arrow to a non-descript field and triumphantly circling an open glade. He stood, his moment of victory for a moment pushing out his feelings of fatigue, dancing in place and singing a victory song. Finally, with a groan, he stopped and put a hand to the twinge in his lower back, his age and arthritic joints finally making themselves known, and stared down at the scroll with a beaming smile on his face. And then, as he had done upon completing so many mysteries prior, his mind set it aside. He put his feather quill back into the ink pot and, a satisfied sigh on his lips, at last retired to his bedroom for the rest his body screamed for, safe in the knowledge that his patron would be pleased with his efforts the next day.
He never even noticed the shock of black hair and emerald eyes staring over his windowsill.

“Hold still you great oaf,” Esmeralda grunted, watching the old man shuffle off towards his bed, an eager gleam in her eyes. “This is our chance. Don’t blow it!”
“You hold still,” Rexar grunted, his olive skinned face flushed an unusual color of maroon from the exertion of lifting Esmeralda to the windowsill. “Your squirming is not making this any easier.”

Esmeralda didn’t even hear him, her eyes locked on the scroll lying carelessly open on the desk. Had Balthus thought to close it up in his desk, had he remembered to reactivate the magical wards that sealed his home, all would have been lost. But the silly old fool was too wrapped up in his work, as Esemeralda knew he would be. “The man never changes,” she said under her breath, her mind wandering back to a forgotten eon long ago, when she had spent hours of her own time seated at that same desk, laboriously inscribing scroll after scroll while Balthus (who still looked ancient, even back then) stood disapprovingly behind her, correcting every aberrant pen-stroke. Her hands ached just thinking about the whacks from his ruler. Now, however, as she saw him blow out the candle and lie down on the mattress, still clad in his red robes, she knew her chance for some payback had come.

She waited another score of heartbeats before sliding open the window as silently as she could. She looked down, gesturing for Rexar to give her a boost through the window, and slid lithely into the study, pointedly ignoring the half-orc’s muttered curses from outside. She crept across the room, eyes darting side to side and ears pricked for even the slightest noise, and finally stepped up to the old man’s desk. She looked down at the map and the tapestry of hasty notes scrawled across it, sighing in bittersweet satisfaction, knowing it would take hours of her own work just to decode the old man’s terrible penmanship. In her eagerness to snatch the scroll up from the desk and begone, however, she neglected to watch out for the old sage’s ink pot, accidentally bumping it with her hand and sending it tumbling towards the ground below. She cringed and ducked behind the desk frame as it exploded on the ground, an ear-splitting crash filling the previous silence.
“Huh? Whazzat? Who’s there?” came a sleepy voice from the bedroom.

Esmeralda knew she was in trouble even without hearing her half-orc “backup” sprinting away from the windowsill at full speed. Thinking quickly, however, she conjured the magical energy she knew and loved, filling the old man’s bedroom with the deep reverberation of purring. “Mitsy?” came the voice from the bedroom again. “Blasted cat. How many times have I told you to stay off my desk? I should have you skinned…”

As Balthus’ voice faded back into sleep, Esmeralda let out the breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding, waiting a few tense moments longer before reaching up and hastily grabbing the scroll from the desktop. She crept to the window and slid out, landing with a thud in the soft mud outside the windowsill and running for the light of Rexar’s lamp flickering frantically as the warrior waved her over to him.
“Did you get it?” he whispered, climbing up into the driver seat of their cart.
“Yeah, I got it. No thanks to you, you bloody coward. He’s a broken down old man! What did you think he was going to do, throw his chamber pot at you?” Esmeralda gave him one of the sharp looks she had inherited from her mother, a kind that could nearly cut to the bone of a man if she was angry enough.

“You said he was a wizard,” Rexar returned, feigning innocence. “I didn’t want to get magicked.”

“Bah, don’t tell me Rexar, fierce half-orc warrior, is afraid of a seventy plus old man who happens to know a few magic trick.” she said, the glare replaced with the mischievous twinkle she had picked up from her father. “I’m sure you could deflect any spell he threw at you with a twirl of your spiked chain, anyways.”
“Yeah,” he said, at first doubtful but growing with confidence, “Yeah, that’s right. But I didn’t want to attract attention, you know? With our luck, there’d be a town guardsman wandering by when it happened, and I’d hate to have to kill the old man and a member of the watch in the same night.”

“Obviously,” Esmeralda wryly agreed. As usual, the undertone of mockery was lost on the half-breed as he gestured towards the passenger seat of the cart. The young mage obligingly climbed up next to him and, with a flick of the reigns, Rexar got the cart making its bumpy way down the cobblestone trail.

Eagerly, almost frightened, Esmeralda unrolled the scroll, laying it flat on her lap and examining it closely. Immediately her eyes were drawn to the circle in the middle. The ink was slightly smudged from being rolled up while still wet, but she could see it there nonetheless, clear as day, with the old mage’s writing next to it. “Tomb of Horrors” it said, in small letters that didn’t do justice to the thrill she felt upon reading them. THE Tomb of Horrors. The tomb to end all tombs. The brass ring for someone who made their living plundering the vaults of the rich, powerful, and tragically deceased. It was said a mage could set herself up for life if she could survive a trip inside and make it out with even a handful of its riches. She had searched for years for even a sign of where it may be located, and now here it was in her grasp. If she’d have been paying attention, she may have felt the sensation of the tomb’s allure worming its way into her mind, adding to her already great desires and prodding her with an unnatural desire to come and find it as soon as possible, the same desire which had led so many before her to their untimely death in that pit of misery. But Esmeralda saw only one thing, the thing she had spent years searching for: the end to the quest that had driven her for as long as she could remember.

“I’m coming, Dad,” she said, rolling the map up with satisfaction and stuffing it into a scroll case. “I’ll find you soon.”

The cart rolled down the path in silence for a moment longer before Rexar turned to her, a quizzical expression suddenly appearing on his face. “Hey wait,” he exclaimed, “I thought you told me you were gonna steal the old man’s gold?”

Monday, October 11, 2010

Running Workout

http://www.active.com/running/Articles/The_best_running_workout_you_ve_never_done.htm?cmp=17-6030

This is more for my own purposes, but I really need to get myself back into running shape. I know I can do it, but I have to actually get up and get out there. Support from people I know can help.