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On a hot and humid day in Moscow sometime in the seventeenth century, one young prince seeks to make trouble for another, and the first isn't even Russian! Riding fast and bold down a street which will one day become part of the Garden Ring, with a strong body swaddled in rich but plain cloth, the man pulls his red horse to a stop before the most exclusive tavern in all of Russia, spraying some drunks with mud in the process. They fail to notice. Leaping off his animal, the newcomer pats a white horse (which attempts to bite him) then takes the wooden steps two at a time to arrive at an ornate door painted in pastel greens and blues. The doorman pushes it open for him and he enters into an environment hot for a different reason.
Smoke and the smell of alcohol wafts around the building, from room to room, pushed along by gusts of raucous laughter. Metal and paper hit wood, followed by barks of delight or groans of despair. Tiny flames burst into life out of rock and females giggle. Prince Viktor's grim yet handsome face goes into spasms when he hears that most delightful of tunes, the light and shadow he passes through as he walks, alternating between showing the two sides of himself. Eventually he reaches his destination with the gloomy side in place, solely because his other is a matter for his friends and family alone.
“Yurets,” he says, when a gang of degenerates idling away their time amongst silk cushions and gaming cards, look up. “We have something worthwhile to do. Stop whatever you are doing.”
“I'm resting, Vitya.” replies an enervated man leaning back against a plush set of the aforementioned cushions, his exit, should he be willing and able to get up, being barricaded by women of ill repute. They half cover him with their sinuous bodies, their hands manacling his wrists and ankles and neck. At Viktor's entrance they turn and stare daggers at him, wishing to turn him to stone with their eyes, at least until they realise that money may be found in his pockets, as well as blood in his veins.
Viktor snorts. He would also be in serious trouble, were it not for the fact that more than one woman looking at him at a time makes him want to run away and hide in a forest. “You don't look like you're resting. You look like you're gambling. And drinking. And wenching.”
“I am resting.” Urges his friend, in a wispy voice, his skin very pale and clammy. And, true, he is certainly not working.
“You are acquiring the French Pox, is what you are doing. Now, come on. I located the fiend which burnt down the city last week. We have a dragon to slay.”
**Prince Yuri Igorevich disliked that**
Regardless, the D Word has the intended effect, and from an effeminate, the lounging prince transforms into a man, making a gargantuan effort to leap to his feet, to the great dismay of the women, who attempt to pull him back down. “Why didn't you say so immediately? Why must you waste words?” He asks, when he finally makes it to the door, his hand held to his neck to stem a tide of blood. Several healed over holes already exist there, the scars very silvery and aesthetic.
Viktor rolls his eyes. “Me wasting words? Look to yourself, yon wan follower of Plato!”
**Prince Yuri Igorevich hated that**
The boys argue all the way out the tavern-brothel and all the way onto their horses.
Dragons plaguing the land are a regular occurrence, but few people are capable of slaying the beasts which seem to make laying waste to the cities of men their one and only occupation. You don't even need more than one knight to do it. Sometimes a single Greek fresh off the boat from Athens is enough. But people are staggeringly lazy and cowardly, leaving the unpleasant task to their betters. Midday finds the pair of princes walking their horses down a path carved into a field, heading towards a stream.
“I do not enjoy riding with Cossacks. Too much peasantry.” Mutters Yuri, the more degenerate of the two.
“What Cossacks? It's just us.” Answers his best friend, whom he grew up alongside.
“Are you not a Cossack?” Yuri looks over a pair of the teeny tiny gold wire frame glasses that are all the rage in Moscow at the moment. The glasses screw with his extra perfect sight, true, but they also make him appear like he has more important things to do than answer his father's love letters.
Meanwhile, Viktor has not fallen for the fad, because his mama says he looks intelligent enough as is. “I'm Bulgarian!”
“Oh…There's a difference?”
Turning his horse, Prince Viktor urges it into a charge aimed at his would-be dragon co-slayer. A fight breaks out, a pair of horsemen chasing each other up and down the field. Before someone can be hurt by the bow Yuri is aiming or the lance Viktor is hefting, the former's extremely magnificent mirror armour gets in the way of the sun, and blinds everyone, dazzling the duo off their steeds and breaking up the altercation.
🐉🐲🐉
“Can we hurry this up? Where is this thing? I have an engagement party to get to in the Kremlin.”
“Shush! I will hurry this lance into your fat backside unless you are quiet.”
**Prince Yuri Igorevich will certainly remember that**
“Shut up!”
Red horse and white trample the burnt grass a dragon has recently slithered over, the animals snorting, their riders looking around warily at the trees bracketing the river. Many of them are withered, dead, or dying. Across the river, which is low and sluggish, yawns the gaping mouth of a cave.
The insulted one looks down an arrow notched to his bow string. “Go on then, my dear Prince-in-Exile. Let's hope there's a Turk in there for you to exact revenge upon.”
“Don't be such a big baby.”
“At least I have babies. Sadly, your bloodline will likely end up as dead as this dragon.”
Viktor is about to use his horse whip to thrash to ribbons his bestest friend in all the world, when a reptilian roar distracts him. The pair of men stare wide eyed at the mouth of the cave, from where emerges an ugly green and yellow leonid beast with two front legs and two wings on its shoulders. Its enormous tail drags along behind it, the heat stored in its pale underbelly scorching the earth.
“This is not one of our dragons.” Says Yuri, sitting back in his saddle with his arms crossed, from where he glares at his pal like that’s a great crime and it's all his fault.
Scarcely able to believe the complaints being poured into his ear, Viktor risks a glance sideways as the dragon continues its approach. “So what?!”
“It must be Bulgarian. You people are obsessed with lions despite not having any. I bet it crawled from the Black Sea up the Dnieper into Russia. Like a fire breathing rat.”
Unfortunately there is no time to whoop his friend's ass, so Viktor takes out his aggressive urges by charging at the monster, lance ready to pierce.
And piece it does. Viktor and his brave steed narrowly avoid receiving a face full of fire, but his lance strikes true. Once the thing is dead and he's kicking at the scaly, stinking corpse, an arrow lands at his feet. It does not fall either, but strikes the earth hard.
“Uh?” He looks up to find a bow and its loaded arrow pointed at his face, his friend's arm keeping the string pulled back to its fullest extent, the man keeping control of his mount using only his legs. “Uh…Yurets? What, ah, what's wrong?” Viktor asks, in a sweet voice, a grimace twisting his lips into a simulacrum of a smile.
“You've been treating me poorly all day.” Comes the reply, a brown eye showing itself red in the evening light.
“Yu-”
Another arrow strikes the earth at Viktor's feet, throwing soil into the air. So begins a dance, where he must keep moving or else be struck by the deadly weapons, his companion riding round him in a circle, firing arrow after arrow.
“Dragons! Who cares about dragons?! Moscow burns down by itself every other week, but you don't care to save your brother from marauding vampires who covet his rich blood?!”
“V-vampires? What vampires? Yura, please listen! Can we just tal-”
“No! You called me fat!! And Greek!!!”
“It was an expression! You're not fat! I promise! Just, um, undertoned!”
'Aaaaaaaah!!!! I'll kill you!!!"
The screaming and shouting drifts across the tree tops and fields, over to a local collection of serfs, who promptly spin fabulous yarns out of the Voices in the Woods, as they come to be known, transforming the protagonists into a pair of posh and pretty birds, one happy and one sad.