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Bridget Corey, King Avalanche, Gareth; The Kingdom of Aeris
Bridget Corey, King Avalanche, Gareth; The Kingdom of Aeris
This was going to be Bridget Corey's year.
She'd wanted to participate in the Royal Games ever since she was a child, held aloft on her grandfather's shoulders so she could see from the sidelines. Everyone was so fast and so strong and there were no rules that kept commoners from entering the general ranks. It was an even playing field, she thought, unlike any other in Aeris. Sometimes, the King even selected from amongst the winners a few choice souls to join the King's Guard. Bridget had no dreams of knighthood, but she did have dreams of being able to compete and be admired and show those rich knights with their fancy diet that there was nothing like good, honest work to make the strongest and fastest around.
But unfortunately for her childhood dreams, while there might have been no rules about commoners competing, there were rules about monsters, and when Bree was nine, she became a monster.
She'd never given up on her dream, but it was mostly due to the unique determination of a child. She was never going to get to be in the Royal Games, and no King was ever going to cheer for her.
That was, until a monster became King, and such rules suddenly started seeming very silly.
Bridget, who lived on the outskirts of Aeris where land became wilderness inhabited by elves who weren't overly fond of the spread of industry, had been largely unaffected by royalty to begin with. She wasn't too worried about a dragon king, and thought the whole thing was kind of funny. At sixteen, the whole thing smacked of a good story, and when she heard the story of the King eating the gentry, she laughed. Why not? She'd been raised on a steady supply of isolation and elven stories of the human King's foolishness and greed. The only reason her family was allowed to farm so far out towards the wilderness was because of their Uncle, and the nearest Baron had hated that the elves allowed the Coreys to do what they wouldn't allow his people to do.
Never mind that the Coreys had been there longer than the Kingdom had, or that they took care of the land that kept them alive in the face of cold winters.
So when the Baron died, she laughed, and when things had settled down at the King declared there would be the first Royal Games of his reign, she begged her family until they scrounged together enough gold for her to travel to the capital and try to compete in the Games.
And now, here she was! Oh, sure, her tail was getting a lot of looks, but she was allowed to compete. She'd signed up for every race and contest of strength they'd allow her to. It was going to be an interesting Games... she wasn't the only non-human in the ranks, from the looks of it. Even the King's entourage was colorful! She could see them, a bit, when she looked up and squinted. It was kind of hard to pay attention to literally anything other than the King, who was huge and white and shimmered in the harsh summer sunlight. But if you looked there, in his shadow, there was a great hulk of a man, with horns!
She couldn't stop her tail from wagging as she stretched. The first of the races was going to be starting soon. It was a relay, and she was in the first group, so her opportunities to shine were somewhat limited. It was a glorified sprint, and one where she didn't even control whether or not she won. But it was just the first of the races, just to whet everyone's appetite and give the maximum number of runners a chance to show off. She'd wow the crowd early, and become a favorite by the second race. Oh, sure, she was nervous--she'd never raced anyone other than her family and a myriad number of elves--but she wasn't going to let this opportunity go to waste.
The starting canon sounded, and Bridget took off. For a few seconds, there was nothing in the world except for an expanse of grass ahead of her and the distant hand of the person she had to hand off to.
And then there was a scream. Several screams. Lots of screams. A gust of wind, and the runners up ahead scattered, bolting off the field. A shadow passed over her, as if something was blotting out the sun. Still running, she looked up.
Ah.
The King had taken flight.
And was currently flying towards the field.
...Fuck!
Most other people had the good sense to scatter, splitting up and looking for cover. Not Bridget Corey, who had been gifted with an excessive amount of book smarts but had the instincts of an apex predator combined with a brick. She ran straight. She ran as fast as she could, clear down the field. When she hit the edge of the field, she launched herself over the hedges and kept running. She got just a little bit further, running through a wildflower-strewn meadow that seemed out of place this close to the castle, before the shadow fell over her again, and then something hit her from the back. It knocked the air clean out of her, something she'd only ever experienced once before when she got knocked clear into a tree by a furious bison. She smashed into the ground, and then rolled, tumbling ass over end with whatever had hit her still clinging on. She tumbled to a stop an alarming distance later, stained by grass and covered in wildflowers, dazed and unable to breathe.
When the stars in her vision cleared, she was looking up at a very excited man, whose grin was broad and full of sharp teeth. His hair was long and black and fell in whorls around them, and his eyes were the most striking, beautiful shade of blue she'd ever seen. This was very unusual, but more unusual because she had been about to be eaten by a dragon, who was now nowhere in sight.
Later, Bridget would blame shock for the amount of time it took her to figure this out, despite being a shapeshifter herself.
"I won!" the man said, so visibly pleased as to be almost vibrating.
"That's... not really how relay races work," Bridget replied, dazed and possibly mildly concussed. He'd hit her with such force that she suspected someone other than her might be genuinely very injured.
"Of course it is. You were running, and I caught you," the man said, pouting. "I even did it like this, which makes it very hard to aim, so that you would be uninjured." He preened. "I was at a disadvantage."
"You caught... wait, are you the King?" Bridget asked, belatedly catching on.
"Of course I am. Just look at me. Who else could be so beautiful?"
"...A fair point, your majesty," said Bridget, who was slow on the uptake with most things, but very quick with others.
It was at that point that a man came bursting through the hedges. He was tall; Bridget could tell from even this disadvantaged angle, and--oh! It was the man with the horns she'd noticed earlier, standing near the King's massive form.
"Your majesty," he exclaimed, panting. "You can't just take off in the middle of--oh god is she dead."
"Obviously she's not dead!" the King said, sounding offended.
"Horribly injured?" the horned man asked cautiously.
"No," Bridget assured him. "I'm very sturdy."
"There are skid marks," the man said, looking back over the torn-up grass and flowers.
"I'm sure it looks worse than it is," Bridget promised. "I can move and everything!" She attempted to move, then frowned. "I'm confident I will be able to move when the King lets go of my arms."
"Oh!" the King said, glancing down at his hands, which had her wrists pinned against the grass. "I didn't even realize I was doing that." He hadn't stopped. "Well, it doesn't matter! I won; I can do whatever I want."
"That's not how a relay race works, your majesty."
"That's what I said," Bridget agreed.
"It is if I say it is," the King said, pouting. "It's like you don't even understand how royalty works, Gareth."
Gareth, who must have had a very difficult life, ran a hand over his face.
"But she came in second! To me!" the King said happily. "That's almost like winning! What should we do with her?"
"...Let her go?" Gareth suggested hopefully.
"No!" the King said, pouting. "You're always saying, you know, about useful people."
"That's not what I meant."
"She's so fast and very strong! And sturdy, look, all of her bones are intact!"
"Are we sure they are?"
"I'm pretty sure," interjected Bridget.
"I'm sure we can find a use for her," the King continued.
"I don't... She's not interested in being useful, your Highness."
Bridget, who had been sat on by a fairly large man for a while now, after running faster than she ever had in her life, chirped in, "I could be persuaded to be useful if I were given back full use of my lungs, your Majesty."

"Yes! I knew it!" the King crowed. "You heard her; she wants to be useful!"
"Your Majesty please," said Gareth, with the air of someone who said it a lot.
"What are you, anyway?" the King asked, returning his focus to Bridget. He released one of her arms to run the tip of a claw over one of her furry ears. She shuddered underneath him, and he looked closer, with renewed interest. "Are you a human? Cursed? A werewolf? Faerie?"
"Don't just ask people that, Avi, it's rude."
The King pulled at her ear slightly, and she barely managed not to squeak. It wasn't getting any easier to breathe. "My! Genealogy is somewhat complicated, your Majesty."
"Oooh."
"But the short answer is human and werewolf and also some elf... Um, is it relevant?"
"That's so many things!" the King said, seeming delighted. "I don't know I've ever seen an elf werewolf before. I thought they were immune." He shifted his weight up somewhat, but didn't get off her. It was even harder to breathe as he investigated her, running his hands through her hair and then down to her jaw, tilting it this way and that.
"The elf blood is very diluted," she told him, before a claw went between her lips. She opened her mouth, unthinking. He opened it further and tilted it this way and that.
"Oh! Those fangs! Look, Gareth, they're almost as nice as yours! An elf-blooded human werewolf. I wonder what all you can do!"
"I didn't bring my resume," she said, regretfully. She had a very nice resume. She worked on it a lot. She didn't think she could recite it all while being sat on. "I've just learned that I'm the fastest--er, second fastest runner in all the land; I can lift... Well, given your permission, your Highness, I could pick you up?" She could have also picked up Gareth. She might, if he'd let her. The King was strong enough to keep her very pinned down, but he didn't seem that heavy.
"See, your Majesty?" Gareth interjected. "She didn't bring her resume. Let her go--"
"No! I want her to pick me up!" the King exclaimed excitedly.
"There are still... we have to do so much cleanup. People stampeded."
Bree, being very aware of who called the shots here, was already putting her hands on the King's waist to pick him up as soon as he released her other wrist. "No offense, but does the King do cleanup?"
Gareth narrowed pure black eyes at her. "He has to be there for morale."
That sounded weird, but what did Bridget know about Kingly things? "Alright, well..." She went ahead and lifted the King up by his waist. It wasn't particularly difficult, but it felt nice. "We could schedule something?" she suggested. "I have to go back to the farm eventually, though. It's summer."
The King clapped gleefully in the air. He reminded her a bit of one of her nieces or nephews or niblings, who loved being picked up and tossed in the air.
"Your core strength is very impressive, your Majesty!" she praised, genuinely impressed. He was straight as a board up there, and clapping to boot. "Most people can't maintain that kind of rigidity while being held by the waist!"
"Yes!" Avi agreed. "I'm very strong!" He glanced back towards Gareth, and then back to her. "I want her."
"...She can schedule a job interview. Where she brings in her resume," he said, sounding pained. "Assuming she even wants to work in the castle. She might prefer her farm."
"Oh, but she doesn't need a farm! I can give her free meat!"
Bridget perked up at this, despite herself. They never had enough meat on the farm. She wound up hunting almost every single night to bring enough in to sate her appetites. Seeing her interest, the King continued.
"All the meat she can handle!" he decided, smiling.
"Oh... A lot of high quality meat sounds very good," she said, waffling uncertainly. "But they really do need me for heavy lifting on the farm. I'd need wages to send back home, so they could hire someone, or buy meat from the hunters." Or, well, spend the money on other things so they could have stuff to trade the hunters, who were all elves. "Maybe hire some help..." Or build another house so they could have more babies. That was the Corey way.
"As I've said before," Gareth said, looking exhausted. "You cannot pay people in meats, or related goods and services."
"My family's very elven," she promised him. "Meat is a valid currency."
"Currency! Yes. I have all the currency. But, of course, if you'd like a high wage and high quality meat, we'll have to figure out what you're good for first."
Gareth buried his face in his hands, for reasons Bridget couldn't decipher but wasn't worried about. Hadn't she wanted to win fame and success? She'd done it with only one race!
"I'm good for a lot of things!" she promised excitedly. "I'm very strong and very fast and I've--god I wish I had my resume, I read every single book I find so it's really--I've had apprenticeships! I've got a lot of qualifications, I promise!" Her resume was extensive despite the fact she'd never had a single real job.
"Come back tomorrow!" the King decided.
"That's very short notice," protested Gareth.
"No, it isn't."
"Okay. Okay. I'll find someone to do an interview with her tomorrow."
"Yes. Absolutely, we'll do that," the King agreed, and Bree nodded excitedly.
"Okay! I'm staying at the Gold Lion Inn, I'll just extend another night!" She couldn't believe it. She was going to have a job interview for an unspecified job in the castle! She could move to the capital! Oh, sure, it would be culture shock, and she'd miss her family, but a job in the castle! Everyone was going to be so proud of her! Unthinking, she hopped right up while still holding the King aloft. She might have even spun him around. She was just very excited.
"Tomorrow," the King decided. "Will be delightful."
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