Chapter Four: Claroosa’s Valuable Lesson

Claroosa was not about to leave Ivak behind, but she also wasn’t going to just let the thief get away without a chase. This of course meant she spun around, gently flung Ivak’s comatose body on top of the huge backpack she had stuffed with supplies. Then she shot off, the fluttering figure still in her sight.

Claroosa danced her way through the crowd, not once touching off of anyone, though quite a number of people fell due to the shock of so nearly getting bowled over by such a fast moving person. So swiftly did she move that she had caught up to the thief, who was really kind of struggling with the orb being not much smaller than herself.

The thief in question was a small person with butterfly-like wings, patterned in such a way as that they looked like odd blue eyes. She wore a green and white chequered handkerchief, which had a hole in it for her blue haired head and was secured at her waist with a piece of string. Her limbs were bluey black and chitinous, a rarity for her kind.

As for her kind? She was a pixie, a type of fairy descended from flower fairies, and like many races severed from nature. Though in the case of pixies it was not by their actions their ancestors lost their connection to flowers.

Claroosa reached out a hand to snatch the thief from the air.

The pixies winging fluttered and the eye-patterns flashed. There was a crash and several heated pots fell from their stand, the lids fell off, and out from the pots fell a colourful array of serpents or varying levels of lethality!

Claroosa pulled back from the pixie and swiftly snatched pots from the air, then she batted the serpents into the pots, and caught the lids and replaced them before they hit the ground. She did all this without getting herself or Ivak bitten. She tried to continue the chase after the thief but an extremely grateful merchant blocked her path. He kept trying to give her one of the potted serpents as thanks for saving his merchandise.

She caved in a got a small fangless non-poisonous and magically inert serpent, which she deposited on Ivak’s body. The thief had made surprising progress, but was still within sight. This time Claroosa was determined to capture the pixie.

She jumped up and began to leap her way over the crowd, landing on things strong enough to take the weight of herself, Ivak and the supplies. So, things like a few sleeping uraz. The thief looked back not expecting her pursuer to be coming. There was a look of shock and fear in her green eyes as Claroosa pounced towards her. Though to be fair, she wasn’t the only one unnerved. Many of the market goers had stopped to look in awe at this woman agilely leaping with such weighty burdens.

The pixie however was not about to give up her prize. A huge banner was attached to one of the tunnel walls, it proudly proclaimed “fresh fish and chips” with a picture of a disturbing grinning fish eating more unsettling smiling chips. She fluttered up and loosed the banner from its moorings. This flew into Claroosa, covering her. She managed to land without falling over and with a growl of rage tore the banner apart to get free.

She saw the pixie dart into a side tunnel. Furious, Claroosa charged after her. The market goers parted out of her way out of pure fear, she looked like she would trample any fool who got in her way.

Claroosa spun around the corner and down the sidetunnel. It was however a dead end, with nothing but a trio of thugs and their actually quite cosy looking makeshift den. The thugs were shocked at first by the appearance of a panting angry woman with a massive pack on her back which had a limp body thrown over the stop from which a serpent was peeking out from.

The fur clad thugs however quickly recovered.

“Well well, look mates, what have we got here?”

Thug number one spoke, he was a tall thin greasy wedge of a man, with dirty blond hair and wicked grey eyes. He was a tisan. One of the breeds of hulf, the wolven toothed humans descended from wolves.

The tisan are native to nortrieln and apart from having floppy slightly hairy ears aren’t really that special, though unlike some of the hulven they at least have claws still, blunted claws, but claws all the same. Well as some people point out the hulven are generally pretty great at smelling things. This leads to a lot of off colour jokes to the nature of “How does a hulf smell? They breed fairly fast so they are common too, but the age of the great hulven empires is long past, and as before their kind’s golden ages, they find themselves ruled by longer living races and entities.

“I reckon we got a pretty little princess here”

Spat one of the tisan’s companions, a doughy squat wide human, a hath dwarf with a mess of black braids for a beard and a mohawk as tall as his head.

“A right dainty one” Sneered the other, also a hath dwarf, but this one was a woman and was more like the dwarves’ ancestral rock than dough, and in the nature of dwarves she had of course absurdly long hair. As some dwarf women do, she had braided her red hair into a long false beard.

“Did any of you fine people see a pixie come down here?” Claroosa asked politely.

The thugs gave each other incredulous looks. The tisan grinned and swaggered up to Claroosa.

“Oh yeah, we saw one all right, along with Lady Snow herself and her wintertaken”

The tisan then gave a barking laugh.

“What we did? I didn’t see anything” The dwarfman complained.

“It was a joke you stonehead!” The tisan snapped.

“Pretty terrible joke” muttered the dwarfmaid.

“Oh I agree, as jokes go, that was a king among failures” Claroosa said.

The two dwarves snorted.

“Hey! Don’t you two start with me, and I thought it was pretty good” the tisan snarled.

“Well, if it was a king among failures, I guess that would make you the king’s fool.”

The two dwarves sniggered.

The tisan howled in rage.

“Enough o’ this, lets just skip to the part were we mug her for all her belongings”

The dwarves picked up some rather shoddy weapons. The Tisan however frowned and grunted, as if he was trying to pass wind but was having some difficulty. He made some nonsensical motions with his hands and a small pitiful ball of flame puuted into existence, hovering above his fingers.

“Now then, youse just leave all your junk here and we don’t have to get nasty, it’d be a shame if anything happened to that pretty face of yours.”

Claroosa’s response to this was to smile, reach out a hand, and crush the poor excuse for a fireball with her hand. The tisan yelped as his magic casting was shunted off, his spell extinguished without even harming Claroosa.

“I’m sorry” she said “I’m in a bad mood right now, and you should have just given me an answer, now I’m going to beat you all up and teach you a valuable lesson”

The dwarfman gulped. “Thievery is bad?”

Claroosa smiled serenely. “No, I’m going to teach you how stupid it is to think of assaulting a huldre”

Claroosa was not a full blooded huldre, but regardless she made short work of the trio of thugs, leaving them moaning on the ground.

“So, did any of you see a pixie come this way?”

There was a chorus of nos.

“No what?”

There was a chorus of no ma’ams.

The moaning resumed, but Claroosa heard a fourth moan. Her master was rousing. She left the thugs where they were and went back up the sidetunnel a bit. She set Ivak down gently.

“Ohhhhh, what happened? Why is there a fuchsia house serpent in my clothes?”

The fuchia house serpent is famed for being a very affectionate and loyal pet, the one in Ivak’s clothes was rubbing against him trying to get some head rubs while purr-hissing.

“The serpent was a gift from a merchant and the thief sadly got away, I am sad to say milord that the two are not unrelated.”

“Well, I’m sure you tried your best Claroosa” Ivak said glumly.

Ivak slowly stood up and brushed himself off.

“I guess we’ll head for Fionnwyr then…” He said, facing away from Claroosa, he was trembling a little.

“A moment milord, I do not think we need to give up quite yet, I believe I know of some people who could help us.”

Ivak spun around eyes glittering. “Really?”

“Yes milord, I’m sure the Lords and Ladies of the Hands can help us”

Ivak only said one thing.

“What?”