Chapter 35: Loro the Qurtille
It isn’t as if the Dark Herald hadn’t been eaten before, after all, most eternals have likely been eaten at least once, if not several times. One of the downsides of being able to come back like the falling snow is that you had to have had some experience to come back from. Most eternals don’t recommend being eaten.
As it was, while the qurtille was quite nervous, she probably hadn’t actually eaten the Dark Herald.
Yerdl having some tiny sense of gentlemanly behaviour even said as much.
“I-i don’t think you actually ate him?” he comforted uncertainly.
The qurtille shifted about and opened and closed her mouth, fearing the return of the Dark Herald. She then tentatively tried to eat some foolbear leaves.
Sharp ominous tones arose as she opened her mouth!
She quickly closed her mouth, but the music continued to bode ill!
She even looked again inside her mouth.
Nobody was there!
Finally both her and Yerdl turned their gaze to the jade river, realising that was where the music was coming from.
The qurtille began to shake with rage! She coiled her neck around a big rock on the riverbank and then with a roar she flung it into the river. A splash of emerald and metallic fish screeched as they were tossed onto the riverbank.
“HEY DIDN’T I, LORO TEACH AND RAISE YOU? DON’T YOU DARE MAKE THAT KIND OF MUSIC AGAIN!”
The fish flopped about weakly under Yerdl’s shocked gaze, almost as if they were nodding, then the metal fish struggled to get back into the river, making weak throbbing cords of sound as they did so.
All this quite naturally managed to wake Kejo, Ismi and Turmeric. It wasn’t as if Loro the qurtille had any obscure magical sound control, and both her yelling and the rock had been very loud. The metalfish didn’t help either.
Ismi blearily looked around, both her and the other two muttering about what all the fuss was about.
When Ismi spotted Loro’s sizeable bulk, she let loose a shriek.
“AAAAAAAA!!!! KEJO, QUICK TELL A JOKE! THAT BEAST IS ABOUT TO EAT YOUR FATHER!”
“But I’ve only just met him” Loro objected.
“That’s what you object to?” Yerdl wanted to say, but he had to busy himself with protecting his ears from Kejo’s jokes, slipping into into his pot before shouting a warning to Loro.
“Cover your ears!”
Turmeric, not having a pot to hide in from the jokes and possessing no hands to cover his earholes, simply thrust his head into the earth. He didn’t want to see if he was still capable of not being harmed by Kejo’s jokes.
Kejo would have, if he had been fully awake, raised some objection to telling a joke, especially after his father shouted a warning to the person he was supposed to tell it to.
Things being as they were however, Kejo wasn’t in the finest form, and groggily he began to tell a joke that was so bad that the air turned into a kind of turgid fog around Kejo, which prompted coughing from Kejo, which somehow made the joke even worse, causing the waters of the jade river to writhe as if in pain. The dirt of the ground even slowly crumbled away from Kejo, as if too embarrassed to be seen near him.
Yerdl was deep in his pot, fingers shoved into his ears. He was feeling extreme remorse, Loro didn’t seem a bad sort, well, she didn’t seem to be actively aggressive at least. Pirate bandits were one thing, but random river-dwellers was another. He’d have to have a word to Ismi about how trigger happy she was with Kejo. In the meantime however, someone was going to die. Yerdl let loose a sad sigh.
Yerdl was stewing in his own thoughts like this for a while when he felt the vibrations of someone tapping on his pot. It was safe to come out. When he took out his fingers from his ears, he was profoundly confused.
What he heard was laughter.
The laughter of a loud woman.