Thyse... and Sned!

Thyse snarled, her long yellow fangs gaping wide before sinking into her foe’s scaly hide. The crocodilian creature that she was fighting gave a roar of pain and slapped its tail around in an attempt to dislodge her. She was flung off of the beast but renewed her attack, this time using her claws and her lightning speed to dodge attacks. She slashed at the creature’s joints, weakening it until it collapsed onto the ground. Then she could finish it, leaping atop it and snapping the neck with a sickening crunch.

Thyse leapt off of the creature’s back and watched it transform. Before her eyes its form shifted into that of a regular human and from his face fell a piece of wood carved with scales and with gleaming yellow stones in place of the eyes. She had done it. She had acquired the twelfth mask.

Her fingernails shortened and her teeth shrunk, another mask falling off of her face. She had been using what she called the Swift Mask for this fight, a mask that greatly increased her speed as well as giving her a few useful weapons for fighting with. As far as physical transformations went, it wasn’t nearly as dramatic as others. The one that she had just recovered, the Scale Mask, had a much greater effect.

Thyse picked up the Scale Mask slowly and turned it over to see the mark on the back, the mark of a dragon. That had always been her father’s symbol. He left that mark on all of the masks he had created and what artifacts he had created previously as well.

There were thirteen masks in total and Thyse had to find all of them.

If she didn’t she would die.

Thyse slowly put the Scale mask into her leather backpack, hearing it slide in next to the other ones that were already in there. The masks were heavy but she had long since strengthened enough to carry them without complaint. The weight of them always served as a reminder to her, a reminder of what she had to do and why.

Her father had been a wizard of no equal. He had been a maker of magical artifacts and, like him, they were the best in the land. Thyse could remember playing with toys when she was a child, magical toys that would light up and sing when she came near. That was before he started becoming obsessed, started laboring day and night to make artifacts that would make him more powerful than ever before.

Thyse couldn’t quite remember when her father had made the first mask, but she knew that things began to go downhill sometime around then. Rumors started circulating about her father, rumors about secret experiments going on in the tower that he had made his study. Thyse discounted them as jealousy for a long time, but one day when she had come to visit her father and found a monster instead she finally believed them.

That had been the Fangs Mask, one of the ones that she carried with her today.

She had been frightened then of the monster that her father had seemingly become, but when he took the mask off and held her in his arms she had thought things were fine again.

And a demon told her of a curse.

Her father had sold his life to the demon for power and the demon had accepted. He had also sold his family’s lives. The demon had placed a curse upon all of their heads, that their lifeforce would slowly be drained away until they withered and became corpses to feed the crows. The only way to break it was to find all the masks and break them, the masks that held the demon’s power.

And the masks had been long since scattered.

Her father had given or sold the lesser masks away as he had created better ones and had left no record of their passing. Thyse had taken it upon herself to find them, find them and end the curse that ran sluggishly through her veins in every moment.

And now she had twelve... twelve of the thirteen and no idea where the last one was.

“Well, where do you think it is, Rega?” she asked, smiling at a small flitter who sat in the branches of a nearby tree.

Rega chirped cheerfully and Thyse couldn’t help but smile. “Come down here, you.” Rega chirped again and obeyed, flapping down to land on Thyse’s outstretched arm.

Thyse scrated at Rega’s neck and the flitter crooned, arching his back with pleasure. Rega was one of the last gifts that her father had ever given her. Supposedly he had gotten the flitter egg as a gift from a dragonknight that he had done business with, but it didn’t matter much to Thyse. Rega was always there for her and she wasn’t about to lose that.

Thyse turned her back on the corpse then, walking back down the path that she had followed to find him. She didn’t like thinking about the dead bodies and the people that used to inhabit them. She knew that they weren’t nice sorts of people, at least, the ones that she killed. Some of the people who had received the masks gave them back willingly. Some were less easily persuaded.

Thyse remembered the first person she had had to kill, a girl not too much older than herself, possessing the Water Mask. She suppressed a slight shudder. She had used the Swift Mask then too and the blood on her hands was something that she didn’t like remembering.

Blood on her hands like now.

Thyse glanced down at her palms and felt the cooling liquid between her fingers. She liked the Swift Mask but hated that feeling afterwards, after killing. She always felt so dirty.

“Well, at least that is easily cured, right?” asked Thyse in a tone of false cheerfulness. “Come on, Rega, let’s take a bath.”

Next page. Fly back to Cy? Rega is from Darkling Dawn, where Thyse and Sned are candidates! The background is from AAA Backgrounds.