Post by Canuovea on Aug 24, 2015 0:16:15 GMT
Dorian was getting tired of carrying the loot from the village they had raided. Though he dared not speak his mind, Alexius didn't like complaints, it appeared that their leader had decided that now was a good time to stop. The ten of them went about doing their designated jobs, some finding firewood, others pitching tents, and Dorian sorting out the loot.
“Sun's nearly down.” Alexius announced, stating what everyone could plainly see, “and the local Church or Exarch isn't going to be bothered to do anything about this until later in the week, maybe. We can afford a rest.”
“Say, what is up with this anyway?” One of the other bandits asked. “You say we're actually getting paid to hit these places?”
Alexius grunted. “Yes, once the Bol priests hear about it and we can prove it was us.”
“How do we prove it?” Dorian asked.
Alexius grinned, in a mood to be entertaining questions because, Dorian assumed, he had easy answers. “This is why, my good green lad!” The bandit leader threw a head at Dorian, who sprang backwards.
“Who is that?!”
“Local Tahpesh priest.” Alexius grunted. “Basic church stuff. Easy pickings too!”
Dorian was going to be sick, he just knew it. This wasn't really turning out the way he had imagined it. Of course, what a silly thing to think. How else could banditry turn out? He managed to not vomit.
“Ain't this forest cursed or something?” Another bandit spoke up. “We shouldn't stay here...”
Alexius sneered, and pounded his breastplate. “Anzlov nonsense. Those savages aren't going to scare a proper Gotetra with their talk of ghosts.”
Easy for him to say, Dorian thought, he used to be a catapracht, he is nice and safe behind all that armour. He checked the outskirts of the clearing they had settled in. Already there appeared to be eyes in the darkness, in the trees, on the ground... everywhere. He blinked. No. Nothing really there.
Brenus was now cooking something in a pot, soup, probably. Always fucking soup.
Dorian sat down and began to whittle on a bit of wood he'd picked up. At first he'd been trying to make something pretty and nice, maybe one of the goddesses, he wasn't really sure what, but it turned out to look more like Vek. He hated Vek, everything he tried to do turned out looking like Vek. It seemed like that anyway. In a fit of madness, he picked up his little piece of art and chucked it as far away from him as he could. It bounced off one of the trees and fell into the undergrowth.
“Food is almost done!” Brenus announced.
Dorian went to get his bowl, sighed, and walked out towards where he threw his bit of, pathetic, artwork. “Shouldn't have gotten into this, but no, I just had to...” He shook his head as he scrambled around, looking for the little Vekish chunk of wood. “Maybe I can make it look like... oh, uh, something else? I suppose I could turn it into a toothpick.”
“Oi! Get over here! Food!”
“Right, coming!” Dorian turned around and walked away. Then he started to jog, almost instinctively. He didn't realize why until he was back with the group. He had felt like he was being watched. Still did when he got back, actually.
“...doing the work of Bol. More worthy of worship than any of these other, inferior gods...” Alexius was continuing a bit of a sermon he had been on about earlier.
Dorian ignored it and got his food, eating with his spoon. The broth smelled nice, and managed to taste almost as good. He had a bit of carrot in his and he loved carrots.
“It makes sense that we would be rewarded with spoils, Bol rewards his own.”
“Not bad, either, that we sell our spoils to Bol's church.” Brenus mutters. “Get a fair bit of silver and we don't have to sell it ourselves.”
Brenus was the only one that Alexius wouldn't smack on his face for interrupting him. Brenus was the cook. You don't mess with the cook.
Dorian, personally, was really beginning to find all of this to be disturbing. He had been uneasy about the arrangement before, but now it was clearly bad. From what he could tell, the Church of Bol funded bandits to attack the villages loyal to the Church of Tahpesh, then they could come in and offer protection if they switched their worship and their tithe payments. Low scale warfare had always been a part of the Churches' relationship, at least for as long as Dorian had been alive. Heck, that was the reason he was here anyway. The constant warfare didn't exactly make for the most stable environment to grow up in.
A rock flew out from the forest and smacked Alexius in his helmet.
It took a moment before their leader sprang to his feet, heavy armour clanking, and he yelled “Arms!”
Everyone grabbed their weapons. Dorian picked up his long spear, Alexius drew his sword, Brenus got his axe and shield, and it was general chaos.
Another rock hit Alexius in the face. It did not hurt him, since he had pulled the mail of his helmet down, but it did succeed in pissing him off. He was about to send everyone into the forests when a form emerged from the direction of the thrown rock.
An Anzlov woman of average height, dressed mostly in furs, and carrying what appeared to be a long sharpened stick.
“Get her!” Alexius shouted. And everyone charged forward.
This poor insane woman, Dorian thought as he ran, this is- his thoughts were cut off as she stuck her spear through the neck of the first bandit to come close to her. She didn't withdraw it immediately, however, she actually continued forward, slamming into the dying man, dodging a hack by Brenus' axe, and vaulting up over them, yanking the stick-spear from the man's throat as she did so.
Dorian immediately panicked. It got worse. She landed, not behind them exactly, but on top of the shoulders of the person directly behind Dorian, and stabbed the poor bastard right above the clavicle. She sprang away immediately after, as the man crumpled to his knees and then fell over. Dorian wasn't sure how she was able to maintain her balance on so precarious a perch.
Alexius slammed into Dorian as he span around, sending the unfortunate bandit careening to the ground. Ironically this saved his life, and a wooden spear glanced off of Alexius' armour, right where his face had been a moment before. Alexius attempted to hack at the wooden stick, but it looped around the sword and thrust into Alexius' eye, sending him rearing back and smacking into Brenus and someone else.
Three more bandits sprang forward as Dorian crawled to his feet, still clutching his spear. He saw two of them fall, both clutching their throats. The third fell to the side and started crawling away. Dorian turned to see the situation properly. Alexius was roaring as he clambered to his feet, pushed up by Brenus and another bandit.
Yet another bandit took a swing at the strange Anzlov woman, she leaned backward, let the sword swish back past her, and then slammed into her attacker, sending him stumbling. Instead of finishing off the one she had just sent tumbling, she sprang onto the back of the one crawling away and, with a little bit of effort, pushed the now somewhat ragged stick-spear into his neck. He flipped around and slumped forward, blood and a gurgling sound coming from his neck.
“Demon!” Alexius roared. “I will end you and stomp your innards out with my iron shod hooves!”
The Anzlov turned and looked at the five remaining bandits, her eyes blank and entirely unafraid. Dorian gulped.
Alexius charged, bringing his sword down at the Anzlov, who slaped it aside with part of the spear shaft and slide past him, stabbing the other bandit in the mouth as he tried to shout something. Somehow the spear was still intact as she pulled it out.
Dorian almost just gave up at this point, helping the other bandit, whose name he had not yet managed to know, to his feet. The man wasted no time fleeing, but the woman was already racing towards them. So Dorian sighed and stepped forward to block the Anzlov's way, spear held across his body. “Can we maybe, just, talk about-”
The woman's wooden spear, dull as it was by now, pushed through his gut, out his back, and buried itself in the tree behind him, pinning him to it. He was almost too busy screaming to notice her pull his own, properly metal tipped, spear from his hand and fling it into the back of the fleeing bandit. She then sauntered over to pull it out of where it had hit. Although Dorian couldn't quite see, he guessed well enough the result. He also managed to stop screaming because it only made the pain worse. As bad as it was, though, he didn't dare remove the spear from his gut, even as he realized it was not really stuck into the tree, it had just seemed like it.
Dorian watched what happened next. Brenus tried for a strike with his axe, using his shield to defend himself, but she actually sliced open his wrist with the spear blade as he made the attempt, causing him to drop the axe. As she did so, she swung away from Alexius' sword.
Really, only the two of them left? Dorian thought through the pain.
The woman was now behind Brenus, slicing his ankles with the spear and kicking him forward into Alexius, who jumped back. The spear went in the bandit cook's back, near the heart, and he went limp.
“You can dodge for as long as you want, demon.” Alexius snorted. “You will tire and then I will kill you, you cannot harm me.” It seemed true to Dorian, the armour was impregnable. A spear would not do.
The Anzlov woman didn't listen though. She charged the former catapracht, aiming the spear straight at his chest.
“Hah!” Alexius laughed, throwing his arms wide. “Try!”
The instant before the spear would have clanged harmlessly off the armour, there was a flash of dark magic, and the spearhead seemed to melt its way up through the chest plate and out by Alexius' spine near the base of the neck, which prevented any possible reaction.
Dorian was shocked, he'd never expected anything like that. He didn't believe it was even possible. He had seen it and he still did not believe it.
The woman pulled the spear out and tossed it to the ground. The metal that had formed the spearhead was gone, melted off the spear shaft.
“It would have been nice to have a good spear too.” The woman said to herself, before taking Alexius' helmet off and picking up his sword. She sighed and with several whacks severed his dead head from his neck. She then put the helmet back on and collected the head of the dead priest. Dorian hadn't noticed just how young she was until now, maybe his own age or younger.
He groaned and she walked up to him, grabbing the piece of wood that protruded from his stomach. “No! Don't pull it out, please!” He begged. She stopped what she was about to do and glared.
“If you tell me where all this,” she waved her hand at the pile of loot he had carried into the clearing, “came from, I will kill you quickly and spare you the pain. If you do not...” She twisted the spear in his gut and he groaned as even more intense pain shot through his entire body.
“I'll- I'll tell you, but-”
She twisted it again.
“Please, stop...” She let go and he began to slide down against the tree, crying incessantly as he did so. “Don't... don't kill me. I beg you...”
“You're already dead, why suffer?”
“It will be worse...” He groaned, reached for his pocket where he had been keeping his carving and took it out. It still looked like Vek. He groaned again. “It was a village, not an hour's walk from here... ah... that way.” He gestured.
She grunted, walked over to the loot and began stuffing it all into the backpack she had found there. It used to be his backpack.
“What are you going to do?” He managed to ask, despite the blood in his mouth and tears in his eyes.
With a moment's hesitation she responded. “Pile it up near the village, and leave your leader's head with his victim's.” She gestured to the priest's head she had put down beside the goods. “I do not need any of it.”
“I could help you! You'll have a lot of- of... of trouble carrying it!” Dorian managed. “Please! Don't let me die here!”
She walked over, abandoning her packing of the treasure, and looked at his wound. “Nothing I can do. The wound is fatal, just a matter of time.” For the first time she looked very unsure. “You don't want me to end it quickly? I have a knife-”
“No! I... Vek is going to... Dac and Vek...” Blood loss was making him delirious, but his fear was so very real. They were coming for him. He clutched the little wood figure he had been carving. “I didn't want it to look like that, I didn't mean to...”
The Anzlov began to back away.
“Don't go! Please! If you go... they will come for me! Please don't go!” Part of Dorian knew that it was wild animals that would come for him as soon as she left, but most of him knew it was Dac and Vek, coming to give him what he deserved. “I didn't want this... they can't come... they can't come if you don't go... say you won't go...”
The woman took the Vek figure from his hand, he saw her ears twitch, and then she threw it into the fire behind her, which was still going stong. He could only cry now, as the fire consumed Vek. “I will stay.” She said.
She tried to comfort him, but had no idea how to do it. Still better than nothing. It took him twenty more minutes to die.
“Sun's nearly down.” Alexius announced, stating what everyone could plainly see, “and the local Church or Exarch isn't going to be bothered to do anything about this until later in the week, maybe. We can afford a rest.”
“Say, what is up with this anyway?” One of the other bandits asked. “You say we're actually getting paid to hit these places?”
Alexius grunted. “Yes, once the Bol priests hear about it and we can prove it was us.”
“How do we prove it?” Dorian asked.
Alexius grinned, in a mood to be entertaining questions because, Dorian assumed, he had easy answers. “This is why, my good green lad!” The bandit leader threw a head at Dorian, who sprang backwards.
“Who is that?!”
“Local Tahpesh priest.” Alexius grunted. “Basic church stuff. Easy pickings too!”
Dorian was going to be sick, he just knew it. This wasn't really turning out the way he had imagined it. Of course, what a silly thing to think. How else could banditry turn out? He managed to not vomit.
“Ain't this forest cursed or something?” Another bandit spoke up. “We shouldn't stay here...”
Alexius sneered, and pounded his breastplate. “Anzlov nonsense. Those savages aren't going to scare a proper Gotetra with their talk of ghosts.”
Easy for him to say, Dorian thought, he used to be a catapracht, he is nice and safe behind all that armour. He checked the outskirts of the clearing they had settled in. Already there appeared to be eyes in the darkness, in the trees, on the ground... everywhere. He blinked. No. Nothing really there.
Brenus was now cooking something in a pot, soup, probably. Always fucking soup.
Dorian sat down and began to whittle on a bit of wood he'd picked up. At first he'd been trying to make something pretty and nice, maybe one of the goddesses, he wasn't really sure what, but it turned out to look more like Vek. He hated Vek, everything he tried to do turned out looking like Vek. It seemed like that anyway. In a fit of madness, he picked up his little piece of art and chucked it as far away from him as he could. It bounced off one of the trees and fell into the undergrowth.
“Food is almost done!” Brenus announced.
Dorian went to get his bowl, sighed, and walked out towards where he threw his bit of, pathetic, artwork. “Shouldn't have gotten into this, but no, I just had to...” He shook his head as he scrambled around, looking for the little Vekish chunk of wood. “Maybe I can make it look like... oh, uh, something else? I suppose I could turn it into a toothpick.”
“Oi! Get over here! Food!”
“Right, coming!” Dorian turned around and walked away. Then he started to jog, almost instinctively. He didn't realize why until he was back with the group. He had felt like he was being watched. Still did when he got back, actually.
“...doing the work of Bol. More worthy of worship than any of these other, inferior gods...” Alexius was continuing a bit of a sermon he had been on about earlier.
Dorian ignored it and got his food, eating with his spoon. The broth smelled nice, and managed to taste almost as good. He had a bit of carrot in his and he loved carrots.
“It makes sense that we would be rewarded with spoils, Bol rewards his own.”
“Not bad, either, that we sell our spoils to Bol's church.” Brenus mutters. “Get a fair bit of silver and we don't have to sell it ourselves.”
Brenus was the only one that Alexius wouldn't smack on his face for interrupting him. Brenus was the cook. You don't mess with the cook.
Dorian, personally, was really beginning to find all of this to be disturbing. He had been uneasy about the arrangement before, but now it was clearly bad. From what he could tell, the Church of Bol funded bandits to attack the villages loyal to the Church of Tahpesh, then they could come in and offer protection if they switched their worship and their tithe payments. Low scale warfare had always been a part of the Churches' relationship, at least for as long as Dorian had been alive. Heck, that was the reason he was here anyway. The constant warfare didn't exactly make for the most stable environment to grow up in.
A rock flew out from the forest and smacked Alexius in his helmet.
It took a moment before their leader sprang to his feet, heavy armour clanking, and he yelled “Arms!”
Everyone grabbed their weapons. Dorian picked up his long spear, Alexius drew his sword, Brenus got his axe and shield, and it was general chaos.
Another rock hit Alexius in the face. It did not hurt him, since he had pulled the mail of his helmet down, but it did succeed in pissing him off. He was about to send everyone into the forests when a form emerged from the direction of the thrown rock.
An Anzlov woman of average height, dressed mostly in furs, and carrying what appeared to be a long sharpened stick.
“Get her!” Alexius shouted. And everyone charged forward.
This poor insane woman, Dorian thought as he ran, this is- his thoughts were cut off as she stuck her spear through the neck of the first bandit to come close to her. She didn't withdraw it immediately, however, she actually continued forward, slamming into the dying man, dodging a hack by Brenus' axe, and vaulting up over them, yanking the stick-spear from the man's throat as she did so.
Dorian immediately panicked. It got worse. She landed, not behind them exactly, but on top of the shoulders of the person directly behind Dorian, and stabbed the poor bastard right above the clavicle. She sprang away immediately after, as the man crumpled to his knees and then fell over. Dorian wasn't sure how she was able to maintain her balance on so precarious a perch.
Alexius slammed into Dorian as he span around, sending the unfortunate bandit careening to the ground. Ironically this saved his life, and a wooden spear glanced off of Alexius' armour, right where his face had been a moment before. Alexius attempted to hack at the wooden stick, but it looped around the sword and thrust into Alexius' eye, sending him rearing back and smacking into Brenus and someone else.
Three more bandits sprang forward as Dorian crawled to his feet, still clutching his spear. He saw two of them fall, both clutching their throats. The third fell to the side and started crawling away. Dorian turned to see the situation properly. Alexius was roaring as he clambered to his feet, pushed up by Brenus and another bandit.
Yet another bandit took a swing at the strange Anzlov woman, she leaned backward, let the sword swish back past her, and then slammed into her attacker, sending him stumbling. Instead of finishing off the one she had just sent tumbling, she sprang onto the back of the one crawling away and, with a little bit of effort, pushed the now somewhat ragged stick-spear into his neck. He flipped around and slumped forward, blood and a gurgling sound coming from his neck.
“Demon!” Alexius roared. “I will end you and stomp your innards out with my iron shod hooves!”
The Anzlov turned and looked at the five remaining bandits, her eyes blank and entirely unafraid. Dorian gulped.
Alexius charged, bringing his sword down at the Anzlov, who slaped it aside with part of the spear shaft and slide past him, stabbing the other bandit in the mouth as he tried to shout something. Somehow the spear was still intact as she pulled it out.
Dorian almost just gave up at this point, helping the other bandit, whose name he had not yet managed to know, to his feet. The man wasted no time fleeing, but the woman was already racing towards them. So Dorian sighed and stepped forward to block the Anzlov's way, spear held across his body. “Can we maybe, just, talk about-”
The woman's wooden spear, dull as it was by now, pushed through his gut, out his back, and buried itself in the tree behind him, pinning him to it. He was almost too busy screaming to notice her pull his own, properly metal tipped, spear from his hand and fling it into the back of the fleeing bandit. She then sauntered over to pull it out of where it had hit. Although Dorian couldn't quite see, he guessed well enough the result. He also managed to stop screaming because it only made the pain worse. As bad as it was, though, he didn't dare remove the spear from his gut, even as he realized it was not really stuck into the tree, it had just seemed like it.
Dorian watched what happened next. Brenus tried for a strike with his axe, using his shield to defend himself, but she actually sliced open his wrist with the spear blade as he made the attempt, causing him to drop the axe. As she did so, she swung away from Alexius' sword.
Really, only the two of them left? Dorian thought through the pain.
The woman was now behind Brenus, slicing his ankles with the spear and kicking him forward into Alexius, who jumped back. The spear went in the bandit cook's back, near the heart, and he went limp.
“You can dodge for as long as you want, demon.” Alexius snorted. “You will tire and then I will kill you, you cannot harm me.” It seemed true to Dorian, the armour was impregnable. A spear would not do.
The Anzlov woman didn't listen though. She charged the former catapracht, aiming the spear straight at his chest.
“Hah!” Alexius laughed, throwing his arms wide. “Try!”
The instant before the spear would have clanged harmlessly off the armour, there was a flash of dark magic, and the spearhead seemed to melt its way up through the chest plate and out by Alexius' spine near the base of the neck, which prevented any possible reaction.
Dorian was shocked, he'd never expected anything like that. He didn't believe it was even possible. He had seen it and he still did not believe it.
The woman pulled the spear out and tossed it to the ground. The metal that had formed the spearhead was gone, melted off the spear shaft.
“It would have been nice to have a good spear too.” The woman said to herself, before taking Alexius' helmet off and picking up his sword. She sighed and with several whacks severed his dead head from his neck. She then put the helmet back on and collected the head of the dead priest. Dorian hadn't noticed just how young she was until now, maybe his own age or younger.
He groaned and she walked up to him, grabbing the piece of wood that protruded from his stomach. “No! Don't pull it out, please!” He begged. She stopped what she was about to do and glared.
“If you tell me where all this,” she waved her hand at the pile of loot he had carried into the clearing, “came from, I will kill you quickly and spare you the pain. If you do not...” She twisted the spear in his gut and he groaned as even more intense pain shot through his entire body.
“I'll- I'll tell you, but-”
She twisted it again.
“Please, stop...” She let go and he began to slide down against the tree, crying incessantly as he did so. “Don't... don't kill me. I beg you...”
“You're already dead, why suffer?”
“It will be worse...” He groaned, reached for his pocket where he had been keeping his carving and took it out. It still looked like Vek. He groaned again. “It was a village, not an hour's walk from here... ah... that way.” He gestured.
She grunted, walked over to the loot and began stuffing it all into the backpack she had found there. It used to be his backpack.
“What are you going to do?” He managed to ask, despite the blood in his mouth and tears in his eyes.
With a moment's hesitation she responded. “Pile it up near the village, and leave your leader's head with his victim's.” She gestured to the priest's head she had put down beside the goods. “I do not need any of it.”
“I could help you! You'll have a lot of- of... of trouble carrying it!” Dorian managed. “Please! Don't let me die here!”
She walked over, abandoning her packing of the treasure, and looked at his wound. “Nothing I can do. The wound is fatal, just a matter of time.” For the first time she looked very unsure. “You don't want me to end it quickly? I have a knife-”
“No! I... Vek is going to... Dac and Vek...” Blood loss was making him delirious, but his fear was so very real. They were coming for him. He clutched the little wood figure he had been carving. “I didn't want it to look like that, I didn't mean to...”
The Anzlov began to back away.
“Don't go! Please! If you go... they will come for me! Please don't go!” Part of Dorian knew that it was wild animals that would come for him as soon as she left, but most of him knew it was Dac and Vek, coming to give him what he deserved. “I didn't want this... they can't come... they can't come if you don't go... say you won't go...”
The woman took the Vek figure from his hand, he saw her ears twitch, and then she threw it into the fire behind her, which was still going stong. He could only cry now, as the fire consumed Vek. “I will stay.” She said.
She tried to comfort him, but had no idea how to do it. Still better than nothing. It took him twenty more minutes to die.
