Forty Seven

That evening, Fyndraxis and Bird were enjoying a fire and discussing uses for his growing cohort of hunters. He hadn’t recalled any yet, but their numbers were approaching an amount that could start being useful.
Fyndraxis wanted to use the hunters to craft Bird a set of radiation proof(ish) armor. Bird on the other hand suggested that Fyndraxis could use them as a means of locomotion. He could make them into arms and legs and stop bumming rides everywhere. Fyndraxis did like the idea, but was more concerned with keeping Bird safe when he inevitably needed to be used as a sword. He had certain narrative obligations to uphold, and Chekov’s gun certainly wasn’t an unknown concept to him.
The Cannibals to the east had been getting closer to the territory that the G held, and they had been causing trouble in the valley below. Bird was of the mind that she should just go down there and kick their asses a little bit and scare them off. With a sufficient show of force, the cannibals could be persuaded to leave the G alone.
While this seemed like a pretty good idea, there was the matter of severe radiation poisoning to deal with. Bird had just barely survived the last time she had wielded Fyndraxis, and that was only due to a miracle that Terra was able to conjure up.
Bird seemed to think that she could just go scare the shit out of them and they would depart the valley and move on to easier targets. Fyndraxis had never encountered the cannibals and didn’t really know what they were truly like, but the plan just seemed too simple to work.
She had run the plan by Solomon a couple of times and he had ended up in the same camp as Fyndraxis. No show of force could reasonably scare them off of such a juicy target. The matter would only escalate and they would redouble their efforts. In other words, Solomon had forbidden it. Bird, of course, being Bird, refused to drop it because she knew in her gut that she was right. Rightness or wrongness aside, they were at an impasse. Solomon didn’t want her to do it because he didn’t want a full scale war on his hands, and Fyndraxis was reluctant for radiational reasons.
Bird and Fyndraxis were interrupted by a knocking at the door. Bird got up to check who it was. It was Solomon. Solomon normally was a very impressive figure. This was due to his size and the fact that he looked like the idea of what a viking was. This viking aesthetic that he had adopted through no fault of his own, had a feral quality about it. Wild long auburn hair and an unruly beard with a few braids in it along with the general ragged appearance of his clothes was the institution that lent this air.
This evening, he had chosen to participate in some personal grooming and hygiene. He had combed and oiled his hair. His beard was tamed and trimmed. Two braids came from his mustache and terminated in ornate beads that matched his gray green eyes. The oil that he had used on his hair and beard were scented with lilac. The scent was pleasant and not overwhelming, it had been used tastefully and you could only really smell it if you were within hugging distance. He had dressed in his finest leathers. They were black with tan accents. They too seemed to have been freshly oiled, this time with lanolin scented with sage leaf.
The combination of the lilac and sage was a real winner. What this scent was designed to inspire was a sense that Solomon was a dependable person with deep emotions. The herbaceous bass note of the sage was what spoke of the steadfast nature, the lilac was what sang of his passions.
“Liberty,” he said formally, “could we speak alone?” He shot a glance to Fyndraxis who was ensconced on the wall.
“Sure, Solomon,” Bird went and removed the Daemon sword from the wall. She then walked him outside and leaned him against a pile of firewood.
“Are you going to be alright?” Fyndraxis asked. This was more a platitude than anything, there wasn’t much he could actually do except talk.
“I’ll be fine,” she answered.
While the woodpile that he was leaned against was a good thirty feet from the yurt, he could still hear them inside talking. Yurts are many things, waterproof, windproof, fire resistant, and portable in a pinch. They are not known, however, to be sound proof in any significant way.
“Liberty, I’ve been thinking,” Solomon began his pitch, “we were magic together. Having you back here has reminded me of that. I want us to have that again.”
“I’m not the woman you fell in love with, Solomon. You’re not the man I fell in love with. We’ve changed. Those people fell in love. Hell, they are probably still in love somewhere, but that’s not us,” she reposted.
“With you as queen by my side, this place would be a paradise,” Solomon did his best to paint this glorious future.
“I didn’t want to do this Solomon,” Bird began the bad news, “but you’ve already picked your queen and it’s killing you. Everyday I watch you die just a little bit more, it’s why I left in the first place.”
“You’re my queen Liberty, you always have been,” sometimes flattery worked in these kinds of situations, so the King gave it a shot.
“Well, I don’t hold a candle to your whiskey,” the flattery had been deftly sidestepped by Bird, “you have your one true love Solomon, everything else is just an affair for you. I’m not the starry eyed lovesick girl you found in the woods.”
“I’ll quit. I’d quit for you,” Solomon, was probably pretty convinced that this wasn’t a lie.
“That’s bullshit and we both know it,” Bird had decided that some hard truths were in order, “you’d quit for a week and have Roxy patch you up for the millionth time, but after a while you’d want to have a drink to celebrate how proud of yourself you are. We’ve been down this road. Listen, I love you. I’ll always love you. We can always look back on those kids that were in love and cherish those memories. I wouldn’t take back that time, it was wonderful. I don’t want to wake up every morning wondering if I’ve been sleeping next to a corpse.”
It got very quiet for a while and Fyndraxis couldn’t hear what they were saying. After about twenty minutes Solomon walked out of the yurt and headed to the lodge. He tried to look as if he hadn’t been crying, but the signs were all there.