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Between Shadow and Light
Posted: 22 Oct 2006 09:18 AM |
2nd Tetradi of Myridarre, 1001
Beneath the gentle light of a smiling moon, the quiet town of Paws sleeps. In the coolness of the crescindille night, nothing stirs. The dusty, ill-kept roads are empty: this is before the massacre necessitates the need for patrols of red knights. This is before The Hunter's baleful attention descends upon the helpless farmlands. This is before the storm clouds arrive, never to leave again. This is a time when Paws still has a sun by day, still has the moon and stars by night: they have not yet been hidden by permanent gloomy cloud cover. This is a time before the miserable rains that just won't stop, before the fear...
A scraping, shuffling, clanking, wheezing sound breaks the silence. A grunt, a thud. The sound of dead weight hitting dirt. The blonde knight leans over, hands on her knees, gasping for breath. Wisps of hair are plastered to her sweat-drenched forehead. At her feet, slick with blood, is the body she's just had to haul, running at what passes for top speed in heavy armour, through the tangled and haunted and hostile Paws Woods.
A rustle in the woods. Footsteps crunch over dead leaves. Seconds behind her, two adepts in chainmail crash through the foliage and run full-tilt down the road, taking up defensive positions without even being ordered.
"W... where's.." she gasps.
"Dead."
The younger one is Ennerson. Barely fifteen, and tonight he already has that look she has only seen on older veterans.
What a way for the boy to have to grow up.
Not that he will live that long. In five months, he'll be on the Isle of Midoran when it is disintegrated, so completely that nothing will remain—not even ashes.
"Diomara... wake Kusin... get priest..."
The dark-haired adept, not much older than Ennerson, gives a nod. "Yes, Lady Sanner," he says breathlessly, before sprinting off again down the road.
The moon is no longer smiling. Its light has been hidden by a stray cloud. |
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Re: Between Shadow and Light
Posted: 28 Oct 2006 01:53 PM |
Four days prior, Kusin's cart rolls into Paws with five passengers aboard. In five months he will be indiscriminately slaughtered along with the remainder of the adult population of Paws. In five months he will be rescued as quietly and discreetly as he was killed, never to return again to the place he has called home for nigh on three hundred years. The Midor/Paws trail which he blazed, the route he so dutifully adhered to for a century and claimed as his own, will be abandoned. One hundred and sixty-two years of hard work gone in one night. Oh, there will be other trails to turn his attention to. But they won't be the same.
The first to disembark is a man in his forties. Officially, Davin Castell has been forgiven for his stint with the Loyalists and welcomed back to Midor. Even so, the decision nags at him. Something about the entire situation feels wrong, but he can't quite put his finger on it. Subconsciously, he is beginning to remember why he left Midor in the first place, why he went over to the Loyalists in the first place. He does not know his days are numbered. In four days he will be torn apart by flesh golems and his worries will be over.
Carl Ennerson is next, wide-eyed and painfully young, completely uncomprehending of what it means to be a soldier and a paladin. In four days he will know. In five months that knowledge will not do him any good when he is casually murdered along with half a thousand people. He bounds down the ramp energetically, eagerly taking in the sights and sounds and smells of Paws. Having lived in the city and at the Academy his entire life, the sight of the idyllic rural town is a novelty to him. He's never seen anything like it. And never will again.
Gareth Diomara manages to carry out the completely mundane act of walking off a cart with a level of ceremonial dignity and pomp that only a Midoran could manage. The young acolyte is only three years Ennerson's senior, but already acts like a full priest. In five months' time he will end up in Asashi, believing that he will live out the rest of his days there quietly. He is wrong.
Cherilyn Marcelle is older than either of them, and bears herself with a ballet dancer's poise. A transfer from Icy Vale, it doesn't take a genius to work out that the occupation of the vale by the Righteous Swords is what has led her to Midor. In four days' time she will save the lives of her companions by absorbing a living shadow that will haunt her for the remainder of her life. In five months' time she will still be in Paws, narrowly missing out on the same fate as Ennerson only to have to flee into exile. In seven months' time, she will encounter Madeline Sanner on the run from a squad of Righteous Swords and inexplicably get entangled with Midor all over again.
Madeline Sanner is the fifth and final member. Under Cassell's supervision, she has undertaken to train the three adepts. The daughter of Reginald Sanner, renowned Lion of the Kobai, it is surprising to note that she has spent nearly a decade doing quiet and inglorious duties such as this one rather than stealing the spotlight and blazing through the ranks like her younger brother Percival. A neat summation of the story of her life: in the years that have already passed and in the years to come, she will be defined by such small-scale acts.
Half a minute later, after bidding farewell to Kusin, they make their way down the road in an orderly Staggered File towards the south coast. Neither the Midoran church nor military have a permanent presence in Paws yet; an old shed outside the main part of town is what temporary detachments such as this one use. It takes three hours to clean the place and set it back in order after four months of disuse.
In three days, their neatly regulated clockwork lives will be thrown into disorder. |
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Re: Between Shadow and Light
Posted: 04 Nov 2006 02:46 AM |
Zacch:
The residents of Paws know the name well. For decades he has terrorised their small country town. Every now and then, someone will vanish into the cursed woods, never to be heard from again. Every now and then, an adventurer will boast that they have slain him once and for all.
Yet always he returns.
He is a petty and malicious man, vampiric in nature if not in fact. Pain and fear and blood are his hallmarks. His abominations litter the surrounds of Paws, hedged in on one side by Elbereth's Tears and on the other by the sea. The stink of disease and rot and acrid alchemical solutions clings to him, the result of decades of being surrounded by his own foulness. His hair has long ago fallen out. His nails are filthy claws. The wooden staff he carries has the twisting form of a serpent curling up and around its shaft, identifying him as a minor servant of The Void.
Within the woods there is a gigantic and ancient hollow tree, once the home of a dryad, wherein he has made his home. Its diameter is that of a small house. Once, it stood proudly over its fellows. Now the tree has withered and rotted away, leaving little more than a decaying stump, alive in the barest sense.
In the dead of night, two knights and three adepts enter the tree. But only four will depart. |
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Re: Between Shadow and Light
Posted: 31 Jan 2007 03:20 AM |
She
is a thing of rot and shadow, fey turned monster, hair straggly and skin grey and blotched with bruises and patterned with sickly veins like a zombie, and her voice is no longer dulcet, it is a snake's hiss, it is The Void's hiss, and her eyes are blank and full of nothing...
The Cursed Dryad lurches out of the shadows, wrapping her long, clawed fingers around Ennerson's face. His surprised gasp becomes a muffled yelp of pain as blunt, rotten teeth dig into his neck. In these close quarters, with the Dryad clinging like a parasite, his sword and shield are next to useless. Academy training forgotten -- they never teach you about anything like this -- he tries in vain to push the abomination off himself. She smells like poison. She smells like a melange of every foul sickness imaginable. She smells like something dead left to fester in a damp, dark place.
There's a sound, the sickening crunch of metal against bone. The Dryad's grip goes slack. Someone pries the Syncursed off him and lets the body drop lifelessly to the slimy ground.
Shaken, he leans forward, hands upon knees, the muscles in his throat and jaw working to fight down the urge to be violently sick. Sprawled on the floor, the back of the Cursed Dryad's head has caved in under the impact of Sanner's mace. He gags and looks away.
Diomara starts to move towards him, but Sanner puts a restraining arm on his shoulder. "No," she says decisively. "Let him deal with it."
By degrees, Ennerson's posture changes, until finally he straightens with shaky determination.
"Ready to move on?" Sanner asks crisply.
The hollow tree squirms with sounds: squelching, scrabbling, gibbering, rustling. Ankle-deep in ooze, Diomara plucks an oversized roach from his boot and flings it away. It's nearly the length of his handspan.
Ennerson nods. "Yes, ma'am."
"Good. Stay alert. There's more where that came from." |
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