Two Shades of Midnight

This is a piece I did for my creative writing class.


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Two Shades of Midnight


Everything was a blur between the two expert warriors, as the silver lightening of scimitars orbiting their bodies collided in blazing fast parries. All the strikes screeched and wailed like one long note. Lilithia panted softly, the sweat cascading over the white fuzz of her eyebrows, over her cheeks, to her tongue, where she could taste the salts mixing with the metallic taste of blood. Blood from a broken nose than slurped and burned inside her nostrils with every breath.
Drizzt was agile wearing his magically enhanced bracers, but Lilithia could keep pace as he feigned left, right, right and left. Neither could work the other off of the offense, so timed-out was each single manuever. Drizzt felt her strength in the hand-numbing blows her scimitars made on his, at times nearly sending his weapons soaring away from his grasp.
Time seemed to creep by, despite the flurry of their weapons.
Lilithia sensed Drizzt’s distraction when she held her breath, the questioning look in his eyes and the slightest, tiniest drop of his weapons. He was growing weary, and now he was open. Faster than lightening, like a comet’s tail, both of scimitars connected with his solidly, locking them together before twisting them from his grip.
The blades clanged to the floor, leaving her holding nothing as she shoulder blocked him into the far wall. As nimble as an alley cat walking down the chain link fences, Lilithia leapt onto his back and set her feet over his shoulders to pin him.
“I promised.” She said, snickering. The sheer white of her teeth against her ebony skin made her a spooky, but intricately beautiful, wraith. At perhaps sixteen, quite young for a drow, Lilithia had bested all but her uncle Jarlaxle with his nasty magical tricks. She had the body of a seductress, but looks were so often decieving with her race, for though she was barely five feet tall, she was a forced to be reckoned with. As Drizzt knew well.
Blacker than freshly mined coal, more supple than rabbit fur, a drow warrior of either gender was a ferociously deadly enemy to be avoided at all costs. Unless, of course, you’re a drow.
“Oh okay. Just… don’t tell Catti. This is… embarrasing.” Drizzt managed to grunt, trying to push her off of his back, to which she responded by grinding her heel into the nook of his spine, behind his head. Drizzt silently thought to himself to remind her of where she was.
“Ow!” he groaned, collapsing back to the floor in an armor-covered, mushy heap of body. “I give.”
“Exactly, now let’s go get something to eat, and perhaps procure a bath for ourselves. You look like the black tar in the deep mines.” Lilithia said, leaping again off of him and crouching to untangle the metal jigsaw that was their scimitars. With a curse, and some luck, she pried her weapons away from his, nursing a new, deep gash in her palm. Drizzt seemed concerned of the crimson creeping from her nose, or what had been but was now crusted over her lip.
As she looked away, turning her shoulder to him, Drizzt could see that most of her simple blouse had been shredded off of her shoulders, everything but what was sheltered by her thin, mithral chainmail. Her naturally, and wildly, curly hair hung damp to her shoulders like lilies with too much sunlight, darkening the lavender highlights she had recently dyed into her snow white locks.
“You dyed your hair?” Drizzt asked, stepping up after gathering his own weapons and replacing them in their sheaths. His hand coasted through the air to curl his fingers into one bunch of hair and gently tug it. “It’s beautiful, Lilithia.”
“Yes, believe it or not, Regis helped!” she said, laughing and turning on him. He saw his own violet eyes reflect in hers, and the contrast of the hues. He could see what he thought might be stars in a purple midnight sky, but in truth, they were flecks of gold and silver that speckled her lilac pupils. Drizzt became lost, and he didn’t notice when his daughter, for that was why Lilithia had the same color eyes, stepped closer and hugged him, her head finding the crook of his neck.
“Better next time.” She whispered, listening as his heart beat. Still faster than her own. Together, in thoughtful silence, the father and daughter warrior couple walked out the wooden door of the private training room they had in the large house of the gracious Lady Alustriel.