i will cut the dragon's feet

Often, it’s over the drinks. (More often, it’s the lack of drinks.)

This is the first time you’ve seen shit start at a pale handfasting ceremony, but hell, you’re down with it. Nothing better than watching a good brawl, especially when it turns out the little teal you’ve been playing with knows how to handle his staff.

He’d laughed like a clown when you’d said that, which, to be perfectly fucking honest, is the only reason you haven’t climbed out of the pit and up into the balconies yet. Ain’t nothing like watching a fight, that’s the thing: normally, if you’re gonna get scuffed, you like your spats to be a little more personal than this.

But god-damn. Bailing to higher ground right now would be a crime worth culling for: the teal boy’s spinning like he belongs at Carnival, each strike so smooth you’re almost having trouble keeping track of your own shit.

Almost! Your whip snaps out, fast enough that the meteor end whistles as it sails through the air. It ain’t even past your wrist before you know the throw’s bad. You’re not meant for tight spaces like this, where one wrong move’s apt to get your strife tangled up and useless, and when you jerk the rope back, it takes a sharp pulse of psionics to correct the course from its upswing.

The blueblood still smirking over your miss when the meteor hits him in the back of his dome. Soundlessly, he crumples, his oboe dropping to the ground.

A moment later, you damn near do the same when a staff goes skidding past your side.

“Careful, brother. Name of the game is watching each other’s hides, not striking,” you snap, twisting away with a warning shower of sparks. (Fighting ain’t so fun when you’rethe one getting sore, and that fucking hurt.) Widsth is crowding forward even as you get out of his way, two even strides taking him right up to the greenblood you’d missed, dwarfed as she’d been by the cerulean’s bulk.

“My apologies!” He’s laughing as his staff snaps out, catching her in the gut and then under the chin in one motion. She staggers, hits the ground on with a clatter of her woodwind, but she doesn’t fall - at least, not until a tap of your psionics drops her the rest of the way.

There’s a lull in the pulse of bodies, like a slow beat in the rhythm that’s driving you all: everywhere around you, fuckers are tangled up, instruments locked and teeth bared, but with the olive down, there’s nobody stepping up in your face to take her place. For a moment, it’s almost calm.

Calm enough that the little teal tilts his head back to look at you, sliding his glasses back up. There’s blood on them to match his bulbs, for all that neither of you’s been striking for the cull, but his teeth are white enough. “Although, alas,” he says, “surely thou cannot blame me? ‘tis certainly a fine enough hide!”

“And a worthy distraction from our combatants,” he adds, waggling his eyebrows, and you actually laugh.