Image - Chapter 1

Image - Chapter 1

"Wake up, sweetie! You need to see this!" an attractive, dark-haired young woman shouted in fascination as she barged into the inn suite where she and her lover had been checked into. Her lover barely sat up and stretched his arms, letting out a loud yawn. He had no clothes on, only the sheets covering his nakedness.

"What is it?" Ymmyj Thyms, the young man on the bed, replied as he ruffled his medium-length, light brown hair and briefly looked out the window, finding hints of sunlight brightening the otherwise dull winter. "Damn, almost noon already?"

"A mysterious metal thing just crashed in the middle of the city!" she exclaimed, seemingly in disbelief.

"A what?" Ymmyj questioned lethargically as he tried to regain his focus and put his clothes back on his slender, lithe silhouette. He had slept in until late morning after a long day of delivering goods from the mining town of Kirlsa to the grocer across the inn. He had trekked through the snow-covered Traum Mountains east of Airyglyph, withstanding the harsh weather and hauling the town's meager supply of food for what would be about a week or so. Winters in Airyglyph tended to last for about four moons, and the kingdom's territory had inadequate expanses of viable farmland to grow food on, so his deliveries of the rations from Kirlsa were needed in order for the city's people to not starve to death. Later that same day, he had wound down in the tavern, had several glasses of various kinds of cider, and made off with this young woman who had been drinking her sorrows away after a rather long-winded conversation about her rather mundane life.

She pulled on his arms and dragged him out of the inn towards a part of the town close to the northeastern fortification wall. People crowded around the mysterious object that Ymmyj's lover had been referring to. It broke part of the city wall and the right side of the private home of one very unfortunate sap. The object was huge; almost the size of a house, and it could fit people inside.

"What could it be, anyway? Is it a star? It did fall from the sky, after all," the young woman questioned as Ymmyj quietly looked at every detail of the object.

"It's too large to be a star," Ymmyj replied, although he did know from his past astronomy lessons in runological school that stars were, in fact, larger than most towns, planets even, and that the sun they see during the day is a star. He was simply adjusting to his lover's lower educational attainment by pretending to be an everyman. "It's most likely a new weapon from Greeton, judging from the details on the object that seems to be a product of their more advanced technology. Or perhaps, a new runological weapon from Aquaria."

Glyphian soldiers had surrounded the object's perimeter to secure it, and just as Ymmyj and the young woman had made it to the front row of the crowd, he saw several soldiers push some people out of the way. They have restrained two strangely-dressed young men who seemed to have come from inside the mysterious object. One of the men had blue hair, pale skin, and a scrawny built. He was wearing a white, sleeveless shirt with a shoddily-drawn doodle on the back and shorts with the same color as that of parched earth. His companion was much-larger in built and clad in all black. He had blond hair, tan skin, and well-defined, huge muscles that bulged from his bare arms. For a guy of that size and musculature, he still couldn't do anything to break free from the powerful grip of the soldiers.

"Well. Judging by the way they dress, they seem to be engineers from Greeton-" Ymmyj conjectured.

"Greeton!? But what do they want from us!?" his lover interrupted him in shock. "Haven't they closed off their gates to all of us on the continent of Gaitt centuries ago? What can they take from us? This backwater kingdom? These infertile lands that are often affected by harsh snowstorms?"

"I have no idea myself," Ymmyj replied. "I don't know what the hell they could possibly want from this kingdom, or perhaps, even from Aquaria as well. Then again, the three military brigades: Dragon, Black, and Storm, might be able to handle them. Well, if those soldiers could actually restrain that blond beefcake, what more with their often-scrawny engineers who rely on their machines instead of on their own strength to fight?"

"Yeah, of course! Now that I think about it, maybe Albel the Wicked himself will paint battlefields red with Greetonite blood," the young woman replied too happily that it was almost scary in a sadistic way that is reminiscent of Albel's bloodthirst. Albel, after all, is a warrior renowned throughout the kingdom as the captain of the Black Brigade, and he has become a living legend. He was known to be ruthless, zipping through battlefields, leaving trails of blood in his wake and taking no prisoners. He was also said to be quite a desirable man, popular among the women, and some men who swing that way, of Airyglyph. In fact, some of the men who have enlisted to join the Black Brigade did so because they were infatuated with its captain despite the no-nonsense, unbelievably harsh way he handles his subordinates. Because of him, there were women who wanted to join as well, but Airyglyph's patriarchal traditions still held fast.

Ymmyj inadvertently shuddered at the thought of spilt Greetonite blood, especially in Albel's hands. Sure, Ymmyj may be an adept eskrima warrior and a Rank B bounty hunter working for the Affable Hector's Hunters' Clan headquartered in Kirlsa. After six years of experience in the field, the sight of blood is not new to him anymore. He also does delivery jobs and other errands on the side for more Fol, but at the end of the day, if he would be asked what his dream is, he would say that he's always aspired to become an engineer in Greeton. He would eventually find a way past the tightly-shut eastern gate in the Trading Town of Peterny and live his life out on the technologically-advanced continent.

"What's wrong, Hans? Are you okay?" the young woman noticed the grimace on his face. She had referred to him by the alias he had chosen to introduce himself to her as on the night before. Ymmyj was already feeling rather mentally fatigued from everything that had just happened, and his head started to ache.

"It's just that... I have to go. I... just remembered that I still have errands to do," Ymmyj replied and bade her farewell with a gentle kiss on her cheek. The young woman took off her corsage with a pressed flower as its main ornament.

"Take this," she said with a smile, handing over the accessory to Ymmyj. "It's a little something to remember me from. Thank you for last night. That was amazing. Maybe we could do that agin sometime? Y'know, I'm just usually at the tavern here in Airyglyph. If you wanna see me again, just drop by and have a drink or two."

"Of course," Ymmyj replied and took a closer look at the pressed flower. "This is beautiful." He then kept the corsage in his pocket and ran off to a secluded area and changed back to his real form to prevent his mental fatigue from worsening and revealing his true form where he would be seen.

Ymmyj is, in fact, a shapeshifter. His real form would be that of a short, young man who has long, black hair with a fluffy top layer of shorter fringes, brilliant brown eyes, fair skin, and rather effeminate facial features. Being partially a Menodix, a race of diminutive humanoids living in the Sanmite Republic to the west, he also has a tail. But other than his tail, his fluffy, thick hair that conceals slightly-misshapen ears, and his less-than-average stature of four feet ten inches, he looked mostly human. He would usually be seen wearing a dark blue woven winter hat, a black coat opened in front to bare his slightly-muscled chest, pauldrons that have slightly rusted on the edges, dark blue short shorts with an ornate, silver codpiece, black thigh-high socks covered in leg armor that still bared his thick upper thighs, and black leather battle boots with balsa wood formed into wedges four inches in height hidden inside to make him look taller than he actually is. His coat was trailed by two long coattails with tassels that looked similar to the way he bound his tail with a long, white ribbon, making it seem as though he had three coattails with the middle one sometimes inexplicably moving on its own.

He then began the long trek back to Kirlsa so that he could file a report to Hector that he had already delivered the rations of food to Airyglyph's grocer and tell him as well about the strange object that had crashed into Airyglyph's walls, along with the strangely-dressed young men that came with it. Other than seeing a strange object fall from the sky and crash into Airyglyph, this is what would constitute a typical day for Ymmyj ever since he had quit Aquaria's runological school six years ago. By day, he would either: perform various errands for money, hunt for meat in the two hills adjacent to Kirlsa, or try to slay the marks posted in the various taverns. By night, he would shape-shift into other forms and lengthen his list of 'conquests.' He would leave his 'conquest' the next day and repeat this cycle. Since the people were near-constantly in a state of war, the pleasure of bedroom intimacy was deemed as a luxury. Ymmyj had offered 'comfort' to the women who had lost their lovers in the war by taking on the forms and personalities of various desirable men. The young woman that he had kissed goodbye moments ago was just another one of them. For him, each woman (and the occasional effeminate man) he would take to bed is just another conquest, another notch on his bedpost, another log on his journal.

He had led such a carefree, debauched lifestyle amidst all the warring going on ever since that fateful day when he had decided for himself that it was not his calling to become the scholarly runologist that his caste-climbing adoptive parents wanted him to be. That had been six years ago, when he was fifteen years of age. Back in the Runological School, he was ostracized mostly for his small size compared to just about everyone else. It had been considered rather chimeric, after all, for Menodix like him to become one of Aquaria's esteemed runologists. He had been taught by the otherwise-childless merchants who had adopted and raised him as their own child to hide his tail, lest he be exposed. At first, he had been bullied only because of his short stature and scrawny built, but the bullying worsened after a wardrobe malfunction that had revealed his tail.

However, the straw that broke the lum's back for him was a certain girl who had completely pushed him over the edge. Lemeena. A tall, beautiful, and seductive young woman who could surely turn heads with her wavy, aubergine hair, smooth, sun-kissed skin, long legs, and voluptuous silhouette. She also had a sultry, velvety voice that reminds one of decadence and chocolates. She was about two years his senior, and his hormonal, teenaged self was hopelessly infatuated with her. As he would have already expected, though, she rejected his affections and cast him out, not being subtle at all about her aversion to him. This was the fatal wound to his self-esteem that had long been crippled by the way he believed that people in general perceived him as a subhuman. It also did not help one bit that his rival for her affections is Mackwell, the brilliant, handsome, dour alchemist with a high opinion of himself, and that he was going to be held back by a year for flunking his compounding and alchemy classes despite having aced his sacred geometry class. Truth be told, however, Lemeena pined over Mackwell to a near-obsessive level. What Ymmyj never knew was that Mackwell just wanted Lemeena to go away, and that he makes those explosive potions to scare her off.

He left Aquios on that fateful day without a word, without a note to anyone, not even his adoptive parents who were able to become rich enough to afford a home in the Sacred City about a year before he had set his heart on his new life. With only about five thousand Fol in his pocket and a pair of ordinary wooden sticks he used as improvised weapons, he started anew. He worked especially on his physical strength which he had so lacked back then, leaving him defenseless against bullies because of the anti-runology field applied in all areas of the school save for the training grounds. He also took this time to practice his shapeshifting runology, which was actually a forbidden art which he had surreptitiously studied in the deep archives of Castle Aquaria's library during off-hours.

He had already planned for quite some time that he would learn shapeshifting, change into the form of a man desirable beyond all conceivable imagination, and finally worm his way into Lemeena's heart and up her skirt. However, he would later change his game plan; he would seduce as many women (and some effeminate men) as he could just so that he can reassure himself time after time after time again that he is worth more than what Lemeena thinks of him. He simply wanted to get over his unhealthy obsession with her, even if it meant the usage of similarly unhealthy coping mechanisms. And when he would meet Lemeena again, he would finally give her the comeuppance that she deserves. He reinvented himself by growing his hair longer, wearing an outfit that is decidedly skimpier than the standard issue runologist robes, and, when he made his way to Kirlsa, joining the hunting guild, which he considered to be the place where he truly belonged, the place he called home.