Happy Blog Day Everyone!
Chapter 8 of Avalon Tales is here!
Sadly, I'm still behind on my writing but I've had a very busy week! Need to get back on the writing train.
I'll keep this part brief though as I know you'll all want to get on with reading!
I don't think Brennan and Riz are wanting to do that mind...
The Comic Tales of Brennan and Riz
That might be an overreaction...Or you could argue that's the power of saying sorry!
This is the penultimate part, and really the end of the storyline...but there is an epilogue still to come! Not bad for a three parter!
Short Diversions: Avalon Tales Chapter 8
Following on from Chapter 7, Isabelle finds herself being escorted to a extraction point by Lucy, a lady with a lot she wants to say. A chance encounter with a certain man offers her some comfort...
There's a bit I want to say about this chapter but I'll get to it once you've all read to the end, it'll be less spoilerful that way!
Avalon Tales Chapter Index
Chapter 8
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Chapter 8: Differing Opinions
Isabelle walked with her head bowed, alternating between cursing her situation and fretting about those still in the line of fire. Lucy walked behind her, and every time Isabelle looked over her shoulder, she seemed to be on the verge of saying something. Lucy kept her silence though, and even glanced down the same as Isabelle as the pair crossed over a bridge, heading into a quieter area The still waters offered no reflections for them, a fact that Isabelle was glad for, she didn’t really want to see herself. With her free arm, she reached over to her shoulder where her scar was, wanting to offer some relief to that spot but couldn’t, not with Lucy right behind her, silently judging her.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, they reached the destination, a bench situated near a bus stop. The road they were on seemed seldom used, at least at that time of night. They stopped, and Isabelle exhaled, preparing for some sort of snappy comment from her chaperone.
Lucy, as it turned out, did have something to say:
“You don’t see how stupid all this is, do you?” She said like she was holding back a laugh.
“What?” Isabelle replied, not understanding what she meant.
“You. This charade you put on. You want everyone to think that it’s your work that gets you special treatment, and not your status as the boss’s daughter,” Lucy explained as she played with her hair. “It would be pathetic if it wasn’t so stupid.”
Isabelle’s scar started to tingle a bit more, as her own anger started to rise. No matter how she was feeling, talk like that always got her attention.
“You think I got where I am because of who my father is? Were you not paying attention to what just happened there?”
“I saw a man choose his daughter over every other combatant in the area. You’re being rushed out of the battlefield in a gilded chariot, while we have to risk our lives. Well, aside from those two that you almost got blown up of course. Some leader you are,” Lucy sniggered. “Are you going to keep on moving then? We’ve got an ETA to keep to, you know.”
“I would gladly risk my life to fight! I’m not in favour of any of this treatment! I earned my position through my own skills, despite my father! Not because of him.” Isabelle felt a strong urge to hit Lucy, who stood as though she didn’t have a care in the world.
“Please, do you actually believe that? Do you believe that you’ve got to be your Knight Master’s second in command because of the skills you have? That’s really funny actually. If my team had been ambushed like yours, I wouldn’t have had any casualties. Face it, you’re out of your depth princess. You’ve had cushy post after cushy post. That surname of yours is doing all the heavy lifting,” Lucy wasn’t holding anything back, and her tone grew more cruel the more she spoke.
“I never asked my dad to do anything for me, and he’s been actively fighting against everything I’ve done. I wouldn’t be here if he got his way! I belong here!” Isabelle shouted, her voice echoing through the night.
“Quiet now, we’re supposed to be acting under the radar, remember?”
“What is your problem here? Are you just trying to make me feel worse, or do you enjoy kicking people when they’re down?” Isabelle noticed that the wind was picking up around them, and the little windmill in Lucy’s hair was spinning wildly.
“If I wanted to kick you, I would be doing it already. Listen princess, you need to learn your place. If your dad wasn’t the Lord Commander, you wouldn’t be anything.”
“What did I do to you?” Isabelle asked. “Or do you lay into people you hardly know like this all the time?”
“You don’t remember me do you? We were part of the same training squad. In fact, I was on track to break many of the records that you then broke. Your very presence meant that me and everyone else suddenly had to work fifty times harder merely to keep up,” Lucy explained as she started to walk around Isabelle. “Because of your ‘accomplishments’ you got drafted to the prestige of Knight Master Gawain’s tutelage. Me and the others? We passed from pillar to post, plugging gaps.”
Isabelle was taken aback by what she’d heard. Now that she knew it, there was a faint resemblance in Lucy’s features, but she’d been so focused in her training, that she’d pushed everything else out of her life. Her goal had been to join Avalon, and getting through the training was another step in that direction.
“It looks like your skills were recognised regardless of what I was doing,” Isabelle argued, aware that the green necklace around her neck was now glowing.
“It was Rainer who recognised my skills, and who gave me this power. Everything I’d done had been recognised, and I didn’t have a famous daddy to give me hand outs, like that fancy sword there.” Lucy reached out, as she passed behind Isabelle, touching the prototype Saviour Blade that had been put into its sheath.
“My father had nothing to do with this. Rainer recognised your skills, just as Ramona recognised mine.”
“The fact that you believe that is so adorable. People only cosy up to you because of who your dad is. Ramona, your girlfriend with the bow,” Lucy said dismissively. “You had any other last name, and none of them would want to know who you were.”
Isabelle seethed, her scar reacting more and more, making the urge to fight overwhelming, and Lucy seemed to see this within her eyes.
“You’re so easy to rile up, that hard exterior of yours is as thin as ice. You’re pathetic. I think I’ve wasted enough time on you, some of us have jobs to do, jobs where I can finally prove that I was always the best. Good bye, Knight Major…” Lucy turned on her heels and offered a final goodbye, the condescending tone reaching fever pitch.
Isabelle struggled with her emotions, it was almost as if her scar was daring her to attack as Lucy walked away, leaving her back exposed.
“Come back here!” Isabelle screamed out.
“Sorry, not my job to babysit you,” Lucy sniggered as she kept on walking, eventually leaving Isabelle’s sight.
Now left alone, Isabelle shook with anger, and screamed out, before turning to kick a discarded bottle as hard as she could. Despite the distance she sent it, she didn’t feel any better. She flashed back her mind to her training days, trying to remember the faces of all the other recruits, but there was only a series of blurs. Wearily, she slumped down on the bench, putting her head in her hands. Try as she might, everything that had been said to her that night was stuck on a loop, forced to listen again and again to Lucy’s hate.
She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there for, staring into space when she spotted the headlights coming towards her, and at first, she thought that this was it, this was the transport that was going to take her back to the North East Branch and that would be the end of it. Instead, it was what looked like a normal dark coloured family car. The car pulled up alongside her, the engine still running, and the passenger side window was wound down.
“Hello? Are you okay there?” A voice floated out from the open window.
“M-Me?” Isabelle asked in return.
“No, I’m talking to the other Avalon grunt sitting over there…Of course I’m talking to you!” Whoever it was sounded jovial, and it was definitively a male voice, with a reassuring calmness to the voice, despite the sting in his words.
“Sorry, it’s been a rough night…Wait, did you just say Avalon?”
“Yes? I mean, not many people would be out at night, wearing combat fatigues, with a sword strapped to your back, and what I’m assuming to be real guns hanging by your waist. Oh, and of course that little shield emblem on your shoulder. That one is kind of a massive give away since I’ve seen that on my wife’s uniform often enough.”
“Your wife?” Isabelle stood, walking a bit closer to the car, her training had instinctively programmed her to reach for one of the guns slowly, needing to make sure she could be armed in a moment’s notice.
“Yes, my wife. You might know her? Her name is Marie?” At this point, the driver fully opened the passenger side door, so they could better communicate. Isabelle saw that the driver was in his thirties, with dark brown hair and crystal blue eyes.
“Marie…Wait, you’re Marie’s husband?” Isabelle had to quickly sort through her memories till she remembered the name that her friend had often spoken of. “You’re Gabriel?”
“That’s my name!” Gabriel flashed a smile. “I think I know who you are. The snow white hair, that air of professionalism. You must be Isabelle. Marie has said a lot about you.”
“She has?”
“My Marie likes to talk about all her work friends, don’t worry, nothing bad. She pretty much sees you all like her extended family, speaking of which…” Gabriel looked behind himself, towards the backseat of the car. Curious to what he was looking at, Isabelle leaned in just enough to spot a eight year old boy, fast asleep. He looked almost a double of Gabriel, and she guessed this must have been Terry. He had often been one of Marie’s favourite subjects to talk about.
“He told me that he was too old to fall asleep in the car now, looks like I won that argument,” Gabriel laughed.
“Why are you both out here at this time of night, shouldn’t he be at home in bed?” Isabelle questioned.
“My job doesn’t know what reasonable hours are. I was all prepared for an early night, just me and the kid here, but a pushy client wanted their delivery tonight, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. So, me and the kiddo came out for a late drive so I could take care of it. Don’t worry though, I got Marie’s approval to do it, and Terry got to stay up a bit later, so we all won in the end,” Gabriel explained. “Enough about me though, what about you? Why is there a lone Avalon operative just sitting here, alone in the dark.” Gabriel rested against the steering wheel, leaning against his hand.
“My mission ended early…” Isabelle erred on saying something that was half true.
“Okay, I get that, but that doesn’t tell me why you’re out here alone. If your mission was done, wouldn’t you be heading back to base along with everyone else? Marie doesn’t go into the complete details over what happens to you all, but she’s adamant that you all travel together instead of apart. Safety in numbers and everything that goes along with that.”
“I’m…” Isabelle tried to think of an alternate excuse, but the way Gabriel was looking at her, she knew that he wouldn’t believe it.
“...Of course, maybe it doesn’t matter so much, compared to what you do next.” He said after her pause.
“Excuse me?”
“Look, I’m really good at reading people, and you? You’re practically an open book at this point. Your expression is one of ‘I’ve just been floored and my world view shattered’, am I close to the mark by asking if something like that happened?” Gabriel shifted his position, reclining back into his seat.
It was another question that seemed to come out of nowhere but hit hard all the same. She hadn’t even thought of a response when Gabriel smirked, seeing that he had got close to the heart of the matter, he let out a laugh.
“I am sorry, I annoy Marie with that talent all the time. It’s okay though, I also love helping people, and seeing as you're a friend of my dear Marie, then maybe there is something I can help you with?”
The offer was nice, but Isabelle looked around, not seeing any sign of her pick up t all. She did want to talk to someone about what happened, but she wanted that someone to be Robyn,
“I get it, you don’t know me from any other guy off the street, but I do sincerely want to help, that’s why me and Maire make such a good match. I can offer you a different perspective, if you would like of course. A problem shared is a problem halved, as they say.”
“What would you do if people assumed that everything you were, was all because of someone close to you? That every achievement you made, every action you took, was the result of someone? That these people would want you to fail,” Isabelle tried to keep it as generic as possible, she didn’t know why she was even sharing this with him, but given the way she was feeling, it was worth a shot.
“Oh, if I had a penny for every time that happened! Sounds like jealous people if you ask me, but that’s not much of an answer is it?” Gabriel chuckled. “No, what you need is twofold, first off, recognise those voices for what they are, distractions whose only purpose is to stop you from getting what you want. Secondly, you need to prove to yourself that you are everything you think you are, everything you’re capable of and then some. I mean, I’m only going off second hand information here, but it certainly seems that you can handle yourself just fine in a fight, from what Marie keeps telling me.”
It was the second part here that peaked Isabelle’s interest.
“Prove myself?” she mulled the words over. Before tonight, she would have argued that she had nothing to prove, that her work spoke for itself, but that clearly wasn’t the case.
“No idea on how you could do that. Maybe that ride back to your base can help you have that brain wave, kill that demon that’s hounding you,” Gabriel spoke softly at that point, as Terry stirred in the back. “I think you have all the tools you need at your disposal, even if you don’t realise it yet.”
The word demon connected with the response her father had given her when she asked if the Blood Brothers were connected with her mother’s death. Often, he was fast to shoot things down, but this went beyond that. His words were supposed to have been a warning, and she understood that now, he wanted her away from the Blood Brothers. She slowly realised that there was a lot of information that she listened to, but never took on considering what happened with her father. There was something else that was bothering her, the demons she had first encountered that night, they had been running from something else, which was easy to guess as the other ones. Demon on demon violence wasn’t unheard of, but it was a clue. Isabelle looked back to the way she’d come from with Lucy. She had to go back.
“Thank you for the talk,” she said, seemingly out of the blue. “It actually was helpful.”
“Then it was a good thing that we met wasn’t it?” Gabriel replied with a small smile. “Do you need a lift or anything?”
“No, you’ve done enough, plus where I’m going, I don’t want any civilians to go, especially no one with kids.”
“Well, aren’t you being thoughtful? I get the feeling you’re going to go far, I’ll have to ask Marie to keep a tab on you. However, if you don’t need me for anything, I’ll take my leave and get this kiddo home!” Gabriel reached back and playfully shook Terry, getting an automatic groan from the child.
“I’ll be sure to tell her how much of a help you were,” Isabelle replied.
“Oh, I’m positive she’ll be asking you questions about me, and what transpired tonight! Farewell miss Blake, and good luck on whatever your mission is. Keep up the good work!” Gabriel waited till Isabelle had stepped away from the car, and then sped away, leaving her with a new sense of purpose. She clenched her fist, and made a vow to herself.
“I’ll see this mission through, no matter how it ends, and I’ll do it all by myself…” With that, she started running, wanting to get back to the industrial park where her night had gone wrong. She was certain that the key to the night’s events was still there. She looked down at the walkie talkie on her belt, and did think about calling it in, but she knew her dad wasn’t going to give her the time of day. She could call Robyn, but she knew she’d try to dissuade her as well, at least till she could get there, but there was no time for any of it.
“I hope you forgive me Robyn…But I have to do this!”
There was no going back now.
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Next Chapter (not live yet)
Admittedly, this little plot twist (of a sort) came about while writing this chapter, necessitating a rewrite, as the original version just had Lucy being difficult for no real reason? It didn't serve any narrative purpose, unlike giving Lucy a chip on her shoulder having being completely upstaged. This felt more satisfying to me, and I also took out an act that Lucy did that felt completely unneeded. Really it was provocation and a step away from cartoon-like villany. Obviously this isn't quite the tone I wanted.
Now, onto that cameo, is it excessive and self indulgent? Probably. Do I care? Not really. This is the sort of thing Gabriel would do after all. Plus, believe it or not, but this is actually toned down from previous versions of the story where he was a more active participant, fighting alongside Isabelle at one point. As cool as that was, it would hace raised a lot of questions regarding how much Avalon knew about Gabriel before the events of Daemon Soul. Keeping his cameo ti this snippet made things go more smoother. Oh, if anyone is curious, this story is set two years before Gabriel walks away from family...leaving a trail of blood behind him. Also it was very lucky that Terry was asleep, otherwise that might have created a plot hole!
Anyway, that is all we have time for this week. Hoping against hope that I can regain some semblance of control over my life so I can get back to writing! Future events are swirling in my head and I need to ger them on paper...
Till next time...
Keep on writing!
Peter James Martin
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