The Enemy Within (WHF Witch Hunter Quest)

XXXVII - In Sigmar's Name

She offers you surrender. She offers you humiliation and suffering, imprisonment in the depths of some forgotten pit to be tormented by daemons and their pets, a stay of execution until your spirit or your body succumbs. She offers you death by any other name, and expects you to believe that it is a worthy trade.

She damned your father. She poured poison in his ears and kindled the darkness in his heart until he fell from grace, and she made you send him to the pyre. She alone of all beyond your family knows of Rickard's condition. It was her schemes that set the dwarves and humans of Grissenwald against each other, and her patronage of murderers like Knud has cost the lives of good men and women from here to the very streets of Altdorf.

She killed Max.

Perhaps it is your expression that betrays you, some look in your eyes or shift in your stance. Whatever it is, Etelka Herzen is ready for it. As you raise your pistol she mirrors the motion, a long wand of some oily black stone held in her dainty hand, and when she spits a word of command the shadows obey. Long ropes of darkness erupt from the darkness around your feet, hissing like snakes as they wrap themselves around your torso and drag your arm down before it can aim the gun, but you are not so easily denied. Your heart burns with inner flame, consuming everything you are and all that you have to give, and before the force of that inferno nothing a mere sorceress has to offer is enough.

"Die," you say, and pull the trigger.

Your bullet strikes Etelka Herzen between the eyes. There is no bone behind that pale skin, no skull cradling the soft mass of her brain, only a gelatinous mass of squirming black filth that loosely apes the proper shape, and so the shot does not so much shatter the witch's head as puncture it. Ichor erupts from the wound in a lumpen spray, filling the air with the same nauseating reek that she once used perfume to disguise, and like a puppet with its strings cut, Etelka collapses.

You have no time to celebrate, or even truly process what you have achieved, for the beastmen roar with outrage and lunge to the attack. No mere raiders these, like the brutes that attacked you in the tunnel. These are Bestigors, the vile champions of their forsaken race, and their battle fury is a thing of terrible wonder to behold. The thin line of mutant spearmen who step up to support you as little more than kindling before the flame, hacked and bludgeoned and torn apart before they even have the time to scream, and then it is your turn. Your rapier is a swift and deadly weapon, but it is one thing to cross blades with a fellow duelist or ward off a charging bandit, quite another to stand against a snarling pillar of muscle and fur wielding an axe as long as you are tall.

An axe bites into your shoulder, tearing open an artery and soaking your whole side in blood. A horn tears through your gut and pulls forth ragged ropes of muscle like so much string. An attack you do not even see cuts straight through your thigh and sends you spinning to the ground, and in the face of such wrath even the fire blazing within your heart is not enough.

You fall, and darkness swallows your world.


-/-

You wake to pain and the smell of burning flesh.

You gasp in breathless pain, the taste of blood and bile mingling in your mouth, and thrash like a worm upon a fisherman's hook. Your clothes are gone, your weapons taken, everything you had plundered by the bestial horde before they left you here. A length of rope runs beneath your arms and across your broad chest, holding you in place against the tree even as it squeezes the breath from your lungs. Through eyes blurred by tears you look down at the ruin of your right arm and the empty space where your left leg should be, seeing the burned and bubbling mass of cauterised flesh that spared you the death you had earned. The beasts, it seems, wanted you alive. Or, at least, they wanted you to suffer before the end.

Your bare skin is covered in signs and sigils, some daubed in blood and filth, others simply cut into your broken skin by tainted blades. You look upon them for a moment, then add your own vomit to the mess.

It is almost dawn. The sun is coming up in the distance, and by its pale light can you see the ruin of Black Peaks. The ground has been churned to mud by a hundred stamping hooves, the wooden buildings shattered and the stone tower turned black with flame. Everywhere the signs and symbols of Chaos have been marked, cut into wood and daubed in blood and constructed from lengths of broken meat. And among it all, the corpses, broken and defiled and displayed for all to see.

There are so many corpses. Max, Elvyra, Rolf and the people of Black Peaks. Everyone who followed you here, everyone who listened when you spoke and fought when you asked. You came here to kill Etelka Herzen, and this is the result.

Darkness takes you again, and this time you welcome it.

Article:

Choose:

[ ] Live
Markus will survive, and in time will find a reason to carry on. Unable to forgive himself, he will instead decide that there is nothing to forgive. This outcome was inevitable, even justifiable.

[ ] Break
Markus will survive, but his will to continue will not. Unable to bear the burdens demanded by his faith and service, he will resign from the Holy Orders and seek some other path.

[ ] Rest
Markus will die.