The Huntsman's Reverie

[Hadals]

With a barely audible breath of relief, the Elf eased himself into the plush white couch, his head resting on the lap of his companion which was met with a quiet giggle. His arms and shoulders pained him, a headache rattled, and his feet were sore. It was in these moments that he felt a momentary regret that his occupation did not allow him to wear something more cosy, before another voice in his mind told him to stop being ungrateful. The Elven Chain he was clad in was very expensive and thankfully light, but it still was not the most comfortable thing he'd ever worn. He closed his eyes, colours that nestled somewhere between amber and gold, and took a deep breath.

"What do Elves actually... do when they reverie?" She inquired. He could feel her pale fingers moving against his skin, brushing strands of auburn hair out of his face, tucking them behind a pointed Elven ear. It rose a small smile from him, a curl in the corner of his mouth.
"Depends on the Elf." He answers, before softly clearing his throat. The Amnian accent was always a little heavier when he was fatigued. "We can relive our past experiences, good or bad, walk through memories as if they were happening once more. Some commune, and have visions. We can also perform mental exercises to keep their minds fresh. There is... more, but it's a little hard to explain."
"Oh. And you? What do you do?"
"Usually the memories."

The conversation came to a halt, and just as she had done for him, and he for her many times, she rubbed his head as he rested. There was something oddly calming about it that he couldn't explain, but he always felt far more refreshed after a little head-scratching. Maybe he was like a cat.

[Hadals]

“I broke fourty!” The Huntsman shouts, loosing another arrow from the great black longbow. Before his sentence had finished, the arrow had scored him forty-one in the neck of a rushing Goblin, who fell and was buried under the stampede of his tribe.
“I count thirty-two!” Came the unseen reply, a female Elf on the Eastern side of the ramparts they were defending, the towers of the castle’s gatehouse in between them.

The Goblins before the castle crashed upon the walls like water from a burst dam. The floor was thick with them, corpse or otherwise, as they screeched, spat, and scurried into the narrow kill-zone the Wardens had created with barricades and fire. They carried torches in the dark - polite of them to illuminate the battle for the Huntsman’s archers - but in a strange way it reminded him of Waukeen’s Promenade in Athkatla. Barely room to move among the crowd, the deafening clamour of the hundreds of voices that merged to form an unintelligible buzzing sound, like a hive of angry bees.

These bees had many barbs, and several of them clattered against the waist-high wall he stood behind or passed by him with mere inches to spare, shot by crude Goblin crossbows. He returned with his own, and two more disappeared beneath the crushing feet of their tribe.
“An’ash! Any movement from their commanders?” Came the shout from below, the unmistakable voice of the liege Lord. On the Northern hills, beyond the chaos of the melee, stood the enemy commanders observing the battle. They carried no torches or lights, and it was hard to make out any distinguishing marks or symbols other than size or carried weaponry. One small, Deep-Gnome sized, one was unmistakably a male Firbolg, and the others seemed an assortment of Drow. They all wore dark and blackened garb, and in between talking among themselves, heckled the castle’s defenders.

A bolt from the horde snapped his attention back to the bedlam beneath him, a flash of white-hot pain in the side of his neck. The half-second of seeing it was enough to identify it; blackened damask shaft, bolt-head glistening in some poisoned coating, sized small enough for a Spinneret. Drow. Don’t take your eyes away from the fight. Either his wards had worked or the poison hadn’t entered his system, even with the dribble of red that was slowly making its way down and into his chainmail. The Drow and he locked eyes; shorter than him, seemingly female, with hate and fire in its eyes. It’d snuck through in the chaos, using the horde as a smokescreen to hide within, and fired as soon as his attention had shifted. Clever girl.

He knocked an arrow, but one from the Eastern ramparts struck the Drow in the shoulder, and it disappeared once more into the crowd before he could loose his own. A shout from the archer across in a laugh, before an addition; “If we don’t see her again, that one counts!”

[Hadals]

“This is it, this is where we die.” A ragged response from a worn and battle-weary man.
“Us? No, and you know why?” The Huntsman replied, forcing his best attempt at being jovial, but fatigue was bleeding through. The slap of string on leather as he loosed another arrow, passing through the gap between the Knight’s pauldron and jawbone before finding its mark in the eye-socket of a rushing minotaur. The beast went down immediately, crashing into the mud before the Knight, spraying his reds and steels with dirt and rain.

He was beginning to run out of arrows, and the horde before them circled on the edge of darkness, eyes watching like wolves in the night. A narrow strip of land connected to the old graveyard at Kholingen Keep, just enough room for two men to stand shoulder-to-shoulder at its narrowest with a perilous drop into the tempestuous ocean below, and the jagged cliffs that meant certain death. One man was holding that gap currently, a Knight-Commander and old friend, but they were both worse for wear. His armour had been broken, his sword notched, and his shield cracked and splintered. Arrows pierced his metal shell, and he bled from many wounds. He was running on magic and potions, and he knew it.

The greater force had rush-marched to the ship, hoping to sail about the island to retrieve one of their own that had fallen to the sands below, while the Knight-Commander, the Huntsman, and one of his Wardens protected her. The Warden was doing her best to patch the woman up, but she was close to passing over. Far above them, the final two held the line as best they could, but this was the third wave. It was impossible for him to tell how many had fallen against them, and he’d stopped counting some thirty or fourty slain ago. Lightning flashed in the black of night and torrential downpour, and illuminated the dozens of white and yellow eyes before them, circling.

Undead, Orcs, Minotaurs, shapeless beasts of tentacles and thought, Spirits, Vampires, and more had funnelled down their narrow strip and found wanting upon the wall of the Knight-Commander, and the arrows of the Huntsman. Their bows and crossbows had found him however, and he carried their scars to this day on his abdomen. The line before them shifted in the dark. With a grunt, the Knight-Commander stood, and cleaved arrow-shafts from his shield with a sweeping motion of his sword. One man to hold the line. The Huntsman reached back to his quiver, and found only two left. They left his bow before the horde reached them, and two more fell into the churning, inky waters below, before the rest disappeared back into the dark once more.

“Hrk- no, I don’t.” The Knight-Commander replied, his breathing deep and ragged, a pained grunt in every exhale. The Huntsman didn’t know how long they had left, but he knew the next assault was to be the last, one way or another. He tore a shallow arrow from his chainmail, a brutish and uncivilised thing of bone, before firing it back across the strip of land. Seeing him without arrows and the Commander barely able to stand, the horde before them found their courage, and rushed forward into the gap once more. He dropped the bow, and drew the jagged kris from his belt. The finality of it all made him grin with curious amusement, a sliver of white canine shown through his lips.
“We’re just too damn handsome, I mean look at me.”