#goselayde

The latest installment in the Lion’s Arch Romance Novel of the Month Club.

The couple had taken a room in one of the local lodges, and while it was comfortable, it was not quiet. Or peaceful. Or private. In fact Shayde had thought to find a nice, out of the way cabin to rent, but there were none available. If they made this trip again in the future, and she suspected they would, she wanted someplace more like home for them to stay. Someplace with a separate bedroom and living area. Some place utterly unlike any norn dwelling she had seen. Gos had once mentioned wanting to build a cabin up here somewhere. Well, the word he had used was ‘shack,’ but whatever. They would work out the details. Shayde would tell…ask Gos as soon as he got back.  Their own cabin in the Shiverpeaks, how romantic!

Gos, her lover, sporting his new luscious locks, came sauntering up the sidewalk toward the spectacle. He pushed through the crowd and stepped up to the edge of the blood pool, careful to keep is boots clean. He shook his head and then sighed. “Shayde, why must you always be so dramatic? Is this some knew form of performance art?”

Last night had been the final straw. Shayde and her lover, Goseldt, had been in bed. Gos was on top, taking his own sweet time and generally driving her insane. In a good way, of course. He leaned down to capture her lips with his own, and suddenly she was blinded. His overlong hair had fallen into her eyes, again. She shook her head, seeming to tease him with a game of keep away. He tried again, darting his head quickly toward her face. This time the stray tendrils entered her nose, tortuously tickling her sinuses. She tried to hold it in, but could not. “Ahhh-chooo!” She sneezed in his face. Gos started to laugh, but his smiling expression soon turned to a mask of confusion as Shayde shoved him off of her onto the other side of the bed. “That’s it!” She snapped. “That fucking hair has got to go!” Gos’ hair had been a bit shaggy back when they met, roughly two years ago. At the time she thought it was cute, in a scruffy puppy kind of way. He eventually got it trimmed, and she had been very pleased with his new look. The look she shot him now was anything but pleased. Gos’ hair was much longer now. It didn’t just touch his collar, it embraced it sloppily, like a drunken groping stranger one might meet in an alley. Shayde thought the length of his wild mane might approach her own, if left unchecked much longer. His bangs, if you could call them that, weren’t any better. A curtain of thatch hung limply down his face, nearly obscuring the deep, dark, luscious pools that were his eyes and threatening to clog his own nostrils. When neatly trimmed, Gos’ hair was a shining bistre hue, reminiscent of sunlight on coffee. And running her fingers through it had been one of the sweet joys in life. Now it lay flat and greasy like a mop that had been used to clean up after a night at the Busted Flagon when the black bean soup had turned out badly but was served anyway. The oleaginous strands left stains on the backs of his shirts and on the pillowcases in her bed! The man claimed the mangy ruff was difficult to wash frequently due to its extreme length, and the fact of their only having a bath tub and not a proper shower. Shayde didn’t care if Gos took a waypoint out to the Shiverpeaks every day to stand under a frigid glacial waterfall. She wanted it clean. But mostly she just wanted it gone. She had been suggesting, asking, pleading, then begging Gos for weeks to cut his hair. Each time he quietly refused. As he sat there across the bed with that shit-eating grin on his face, she was convinced; his sole motivation for not cutting his hair was to make her life a living hell. It was time for an ultimatum. “If you don’t cut your hair, I will shave my head,” Shayde stated in all seriousness. It was clear the jerk thought she was bluffing as his smile only seemed to increase in size. “No,” was all he said. It was rare in times of domestic strife for Shayde to abandon her bed instead of kicking Gos out, but she did so now, meaning to stress the sincerity of her threat. She gathered the quilt and her pillow, and stormed down the stairs to sleep on the couch. Fuck him and his hell-hair! The light of day did nothing to change his mind. So now Shayde endeavored to show she meant business. As she didn’t trust herself not to draw blood with a razor in her hand, she had journeyed down the street to the local salon. There she was told she would have quite a wait. Evidently there were some new hairstyles that were all the rage and absolutely everyone had to have one. Or so said the girl who took down her name and told her to wait in one of the chairs. Shayde grabbed a copy of the local newspaper off a side table and sat down to pass the time. When she read the headline on the front page she sat up in shock. “Pact Betrayed!” And underneath, “Turncoat sylvari slaughter hundreds, maybe thousands!” She skimmed through the article, appalled by what she read. Shayde, as well as Gos, had both worked for the Pact a few years back. In fact Gos still did jobs for the Priory from time to time. They probably even knew some of the dead. How could this have happened? Of course Shayde had never trusted those strange plant people. All those leaves and branches and glowy bits. It was unnatural! Even the ones she’d met that seemed nice had left her feeling uneasy. But to think that they were working for an elder dragon all this time! How could the leaders of the Pact not know this? She sat up straight as a thought hit her. How many sylvari walked the streets of this very city? Were they all just waiting for the right time to turn on their human hosts? Perhaps even now they were metamorphosing into dragon minions, poised to slaughter everyone man, woman, and child in the Reach! Ayli! Shayde’s sister had hired one of those evil weeds to care for her baby daughter. Melissa was far too trusting for her own good. Shayde stood suddenly, throwing the newspaper to the floor, and rushing out onto the street. She had to save Ayli. Her niece was in mortal danger!

So, I placed a custom picture in my house. This is from a drawing that the wonderful splendidpuffings did for me of our characters Shayde and Gos.

Oh, and there was a strange man lurking in the trees...

As for Celia, Shayde decided she would go ahead and track down the Lionguard for a little chat before breakfast, just to set the woman straight. It would probably be best if she left her weapons behind though. Just in case.

Where would she be in 50 years? Or rather, where would she and Gos be in 50 years? That was a better question. Would they still be together? Would they still be alive? Shayde considered these questions as she crawled over a collapsed heap that used to be one of Lion’s Arch’s more prominent inns. Yes she was small, and no she couldn’t lift as much as a grown man, let alone a norn. But she could climb, and she could fit into tight spaces. So the Lionguard had found a use for Shayde. She now spent her days climbing up and securing ropes around fallen support beams and other large debris so they could be hauled out by the workmen with their hoists and pulleys. As this type of work didn’t take much thought, it left a lot of time for introspection. And right now the subject of her musing was the future. The night before they had come to LA, she and Gos had been flirting. Since they would be staying in the barracks at Vigil Keep, it had been their last night alone, and Shayde thought they would spend it making love. She had been joking around, trying to goad Gos into ‘sparring’ with her, taunting him to ‘teach’ her something since he had been a master at his craft in his former life. But as soon as she broached the subject, he shut down cold. Shayde shuddered as she reached the top of a beam and searched for a place to brace herself while she wound the rope around it. At that moment Gos had sounded just like one of the priests back at the orphanage, the way they scolded her when they caught her doing something bad. It was all she could do to push past her own discomfort and try to draw out of him why he was acting that way. Finally it came out that Gos had only become a master and teacher after he had separated from his wife; after he had given up on love. He didn’t believe he could have both, in his past life or this one. He assured Shayde that this time he was choosing love, and that he wouldn’t leave her. But she wondered what that would do to her lover over time. Would he feel like he was missing out on something? That he wasn’t as successful in this life as he had been in the past? And why couldn’t he have both? Shayde didn’t know what it took to be considered a master assassin, as she hadn’t been trained by one herself. Surely not every master out there was an unloved bachelor. But she knew Gos, and nothing was likely to change his mind except time itself. Shayde extricated herself from rubble and walked over to the water station for a drink. She was covered in mud and soot from head to toe. She would get to scrub down at the end of the day, but she yearned for a long soak in her bathtub at home before climbing into the soft bed she shared with her lover. As it was, they had been squeezing themselves into a single cot at night. She wished she could afford to get them set up in their own tent, but every copper she earned was going toward the upcoming taxes on the house. There were easier ways to make a living. Even bounty hunting was easier than this. But there was one thing this job had over others. She got to spend every night curled up next to her man. So, where would they be in 50 years? She hoped they wouldn’t still be sharing a cot, but as long as they were together, she thought she could put up with just about anything.