The Last Satyr: The Company is Formed Part 1

Once he got home, the boy tried out his newfound flattery skills on his aunt. Now telling your aunt she’s pretty would not work. So he shifted tactics and told her how smart she was to have the teacher give a talk about drow for him. He told how much he learned from it and the amazing history he’d gained. Why even today he made special efforts to go over it all again (When, in fact, he hadn’t been to school today at all.).

As he spun his spell of compliments, his aunt’s satisfaction grew like a bubbling potion in a cauldron. The ingredients of his flattery merged into a concoction that brewed her delight. She rewarded him with an extra treat during dinner, leading to charges of bribery from the other end of the table until Sith received his share too. The boy simply savored each bite, a sweet victory of his enchanting words, melting in his mouth like a delectable dessert.

Flattery, he had discovered, worked as sure and certain as any spell. “Satyr” magic, he called it as he went off to bed. Somebody ought to tell women that flattery is a lot like perfume. You can smell it, but you better not drink it.

But it wouldn’t be him who told them.

As the evening’s contentment settled, his thoughts shifted to tonight's impending adventure. The darkness awaited him, and with it, a surprise only Leradien could unveil. Sith was soon asleep and snoring, but the boy lay awake and waited, in restless impatience, listening to hear if his aunt was still awake. Yet he heard nary a sound from her. This was despair. She might still be awake and up and about–or even seven sheets to the wind. He had no way of knowing–and this was a mighty important piece of information for a boy planning to sneak out the window without getting caught. He would have tossed and fidgeted but he was afraid she might hear and come in to see what was wrong. Or maybe she might pass by on her way up to her room while he turned and he’d miss it. So he lay perfectly still and stared up into the dark.

Everything was dismally quiet. Yet, by and by, out of the stillness, little, scarcely perceptible noises began to emphasize themselves. There was the whisper of the wind at the boreholes. Old branches began to creak mysteriously. The needle boughs rustled faintly. Evidently, spirits were abroad. And now the tiresome chirping of a cricket that no human ingenuity could locate began. Next, the startling hoot of an owl made the boy shudder. Sometimes when you hear an owl hoot, it’s not an owl at all, but something far worse that’s just pretending to be one. But, eventually, he began to doze, despite himself. And then there it came, mingling with his half-formed dreams, a tapping sound like a woodpecker outside. But this was no woodpecker. It was a pointed claw. A single minute later, he was out of the window and creeping along the tree branches on all fours before he dropped down to the ground.

Leradien was there in all her majestic form and stature, and she looked terrifying in the dark. But that was fine with him because she was on his side. It was everyone else in the night that ought to be terrified of her. Yet he was safe with her.

“You wanted to ride me,” she said, “hop on.”

She was still all scary and dominating with a polished black spider shell, the longest spider legs imaginable, and a large, sleek abdomen behind her thorax. Up close in the dark, Leradien was just about the scariest thing he’d ever seen. According to her she would grow a lot bigger still, as she was just a pup. He hesitated for a moment to get on her.

“Climb up on my backside,” she offered.

The boy overcame his fear and mounted her from behind her back.

“Put your hands around me so you don’t fall off,” she instructed.

The boy obeyed and put his hands to her narrow, hourglass waist. Leradien was the first girl he’d ever placed his hands around and the touch of her would have been electrifying to any satyr anyway. Yet even more stimulating, his hands could feel by their touch alone just how much she went in at the waist and out at the hips. It was one thing for a girl to look that way but another to actually feel it in the dark. Leradien was probably the most beautiful drider there ever was or ever will be. Why even a blind man would have known it just by his hands alone. Yet she impressed the boy in other ways, too. They say drow women ruled their men, and it wasn’t just by their pleasant shape and beauty. He was a big, strong lad, and yet she nearly matched him though, to him, it just made her look all the more shapely.

They moved off at a scurry and disappeared in the gloom. Leradien’s legs moved with the perfect coordination of synchronized swim team and so fast, you'd think she had a caffeine overdose before the journey.

All that speed from so many legs almost made him dizzy–and yet she never made a sound on their journey of mystery. She never so much as stepped on a twig or brushed aside a branch. At the end of half an hour, they had gone quite a distance and were silently wading through the tall grass of the community graveyard.

It was not a graveyard of the kind humans make. Elves don’t bury their dead. They leave them above the ground inside stone vaults called crypts. The place they left them all at was on this hill, about a mile and a half from the school. No trail led to it and no fence surrounded it. It was just there. It rose up out of nowhere, a place of gloom. And while nights are always quiet, graveyards are just spooky quiet. The moonlight cast solemn shadows over the tombs of the departed.

“Why’d you bring me here?” he whispered to know as she let him off.

“You’ll see.”

Grass and weeds grew rank over the whole place. All the older crypts had sunk in the earth from time, and some had broken with age. Leradien raised her hand and tossed a fiery, flickering flame from her palm. It illuminated the crypt it struck, causing it to temporarily glow. By the light of it, you could see the elfin words carved in the stone crypt for who laid within and the deeds that they had done.

“How do you do that?” he asked of her hand, remembering that drow has special powers.

“Fairy fire,” she explained.

“Can you teach me to do it?”

“Well! Let’s find out. Just reach out your hand and do it.”

The boy tried it but nothing happened.

She shrugged, saying, “I guess I can’t teach a satyr to be a drow.”

That disappointed the boy.

“Don’t worry,” she said, seeing his face. “You have your own special magic.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you know? You used it today.”

A faint wind moaned through the trees then, and the boy feared it might be the spirits of the dead, complaining about being disturbed. Of course, being a drider, nothing scared Leradien. Everything was scared of her, and rightfully so. So he decided to stick close to her, although he’d never seen her in a fight to know if she was any good in one or not. But, being a drow, she could see over 60 paces even in the pitch dark. As for the boy, he couldn’t see much at all and every tree looked to be a troll and every swaying branch a boney hand reaching out to get him. The pervading solemn of the dark place didn’t help his spirits, either. And thinking of spirits, he decided to force some talk and said in a whisper:

“Leradien, do you believe the dead like it for us to be here?”

Leradien replied with scorn:

“Who cares what dead elves think?”

Being a drow, she found the Light Elves to be useless and misguided. She had no more respect for their dead than for their living.

“People mourn the dead here,” he said to her.

“Why do people do that, anyway? Mourning at funerals?” she asked. “Seems they ought to be happy it wasn’t them that died.”

He could only nod in agreement. That made sense to him.

After a pause, the boy asked again:

“Why are we stopped here?”

“So you can see what happens. You can see, can’t you?”

“Not like you,” the boy admitted. “Let me keep my hand on you so I don’t lose you.”

Actually, he figured she wouldn’t lose him, so his hand was unnecessary. He just liked touching her. Leastways, it was certainly a lot more interesting to do than watching the cemetery.

The boy wondered why Leradien felt so nice and pleasant to his hand. With her having so many curves, they all sort of jumped out at his fingertips. It was amazing. The boy couldn’t help placing his hand over the contours of her far shoulder.

He felt her long, thick, smooth hair brush against his own shoulder as she leaned her head pleasantly against him in response. He liked that.

“So what are you thinking?” she asked.

The boy abruptly removed his hand from her. “Oh! Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Why be sorry? I liked it,” she told him. “I like having your arm around me. It feels like it belongs there. That’s part of your magic. Just don’t you work it on anyone else but me!”

“What? I shouldn’t touch girls?”

“You can touch me. You just can’t touch anyone else.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Because I don’t want you to,” she replied.

“Why is that?”

“Because it makes me feel special when you do it to me and, if you did it to somebody else, then I wouldn’t be special anymore.”

“Well, you know you’re special to me, Leradien. Nobody’s more special to me than you.”

“That’s why I wondered what you were thinking when you had your arm around me. I was wondering if you wanted me to feel special.”

It was true. He had been thinking that when he touched her. He was thinking about how nice she felt. In fact, he was thinking about it again already with her head on his shoulder. It was a mighty special feeling, even though he didn’t understand why.

But he said nothing, put his hand back on her, and just savored the delicious feeling and the moment.

He felt her lean her head on his shoulder even more and how her wonderfully long, clean, silky soft locks of hair swished gently against him.

He’d never been this close to a girl before, let alone a drider, and he didn’t know what to think. No. That wasn’t true. He was thinking about maybe kissing her again. Danged if he knew why. The cemetery was hardly romantic and she could easily overpower him and capture him if she wanted. But it certainly was a strong temptation. He only had to turn his head and her lovely lips would have been right next to his and the soft glow of her drow eyes filling him with beckoning interest. But she was also a drider and, therefore, dangerous. He changed the subject.

“What was I supposed to see here?”

“Shush!” she said, suddenly pointing. “That!”