- Location
- Pittsburgh PA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Plan Politics
Great Man Theory (Warhammer Fantasy)
- Thread starter Minyette06
- Start date
[X] Plan: A Question of Honour
You are ignoring content by this member.
Show ignored content
I missed this sorry, and part of this probably down to me cutting down on the shown rolls, but there were still a very significant amount of undead left, that with the Militia broken, and the fanatics near dead, would have done a massive amount of damage before the wall patrols could react.
Rosmalen's men did participate in the battle, they took no damage because the Rattlers were mostly already dead, and the rotters didn't have anything to punch through their armor.
The issue isn't that they didn't participate, but their delayed participation meant there was functionally no risk to them, at the cost of the other forces.
Vote closed
You are ignoring content by this member.
Show ignored content
Brothers and Faith
You are ignoring content by this member.
Show ignored content
[X] Plan Politics
-[X] Have your cake, and eat it too.
As you stand in the aftermath of the brutal battle, an island in a sea of bone and gravel, burnt out houses and torn apart streets all around you, you consider not just the fanatics, but yourself.
Throughout the years, there have been many things that Asavar - you - have embodied. Some of those things you have been proud of, others you have come to regret, and even more, you can only find yourself unsure of.
But there are two, maybe three, things that were so profoundly you that you are not sure they would ever not be an integral part of yourself.
Greed was one of those things. You were such a terribly greedy man, it was deeply rooted in everything you did. You wanted more incessantly, wanted greater and greater in a way that even the world being offered to you was not enough.
Asavar the Brute was a man of greed that outstripped even chaos.
When told to pick between temperance and shallow self-interest. To choose between what was selfish and what was selfless, and what was beyond even both…
There really was only one choice for you.
"Yesterday, I took one hundred of the unclean and unfaithful and crafted them into warriors of the gods." Your voice came from low in your chest, a deep rumble that almost seemed to shake the air itself, the same voice you always used to address congregations. You pause, a heavy uncertainty curling around your throat. You knew how one went almost by heart, knew the other by absence.
You watch six figures stir at the sound of your voice and do little else. An ancient, fundamental part of their brain drives them to respond to another human speaking, but you had ripped out a piece that told them what to do, and in this confusing aftermath, that absent void between mind and man became all the more evident.
You remember that feeling so very well, and it just made the question of what words could possibly pull this off all the starker.
"To be more accurate, I broke them into being such. I twisted them, and I turned them into slaves to the gods. Ripped from them their personhood and replaced it with fanaticism, with false claims of the gods' will." For a single moment, you almost did not register that it was your voice and almost looked for the source. Then you realise what you said, and that terrible weight of uncertainty burgeoned into a whirl of anxiety and realisation as what you had said - out loud - hit you.
You had just ousted what you had done outright, told them in plain terms that you had manipulated them and a hundred others into frothing death. Your heart sinks as you realise there would only ever be one reaction to that and that you would have to choose between your desperate ambitions for the future and the lives of six embryonic brothers.
Then… the six fanatics react differently. One flinched as if struck, one stared at you, one glanced at the other five, one's hand fell to the sickle by his side, one let his eyes close and shoulder slump, and the last's hands tightened into a ball.
Ah.
That was how you were going to do this.
This was going to be… very rough.
"Meissen was teetering on the edge of destruction, and I weighed the lives and sentience of a hundred men against the thousand others within the walls." You stare down at the ground between the seven of you as you let the confession just flow, the timbre that shook the air in your voice long since gone. "The very fact it was teetering on that edge made it easy; when humans are faced with death, so many of the differences between them are stripped away. The buttons to press, the words and the actions and the frenetic press of energy become almost a rote matter."
"Why are you telling us this?" The voice was weak, choked with hardly restrained anger and awful realisation. "Why tell us it was a lie?"
"Not a lie, just put in words to get a certain result." You mutter, half to yourself, words spoken to you so very long ago. Words that took you a long time to learn how awful they were. You wet your lips and slowly breathe in, then with a weight that was so hard to ignore, you look up to meet the man who spoke.
He had his hand on the handle of his sickle, the weapon rattling terribly as he shook.
"It hurts so very much, doesn't it? Like a knife carving strips through your heart and mind. The revelation feels like it's attacking your very soul. The realisation that all those feelings, hopes, and terrors were deliberate manipulations. There because I brought them there." He had blue eyes, and his face was as gaunt as everyone who had gone through this siege, but you could see traces of the babyface of someone barely twenty.
"You're mocking us, Norscan. Answer his question." You flinch at Norscan, a tiny imperceptible thing, but there. Noticeable. You gather yourself again and look to the next speaker. Deep lines carved down his face, a long life of stress and work, and the remnants of facial hair he had torn out were still there.
"Because… because this is an explanation I desperately needed." For a moment, it was all you wanted to do to look away, to not have to physically look him in his face as suspicion and hate blossomed across his face.
You keep your eyes locked on the man. "Because when I was first in your position, ten and three, the slick blood of a warrior priest still drying between my fingers, and I came to confront the awful understanding that I did not die for my gods. I…" Words fail you for a moment, mouth moving without sound. You swallow. "I was torn right back into the personless fanaticism. My only reward for doing the impossible was to be ripped apart further and left to languish in the maddened need for manufactured salvation."
"Because when I was last in your position, ten and seven, and I was finally left adrift, the way I put myself back together was wrong, was wrong for a long, long time." There was a flicker of something across that old man's face, and before you could truly register, the need to look away overwhelmed you.
"This could be another trick, another manipulation." A third voice and it was only because deep in that corner of your mind that Verena had marked her own, you felt a press of just the slightest bit more attention, that you found the strength to meet his eyes. Green eyes framed by still weeping claw marks stared at you, so cold that it would make ice shiver. "Well? Is it? More words that give you exactly the response you want? Any moment are we about to start tearing each other apart again?"
"You would not ask that question if it was." Your lips twist into that mockery of a grin that terrified everyone you ever flashed it to, all teeth and grim savagery. Or it would be if it was not so occluded by the ravages of shame and uncertainty. "You wouldn't answer any question if it was; it would have been as easy as breathing to force you back into the mire of toxic redemption. Twisting you until you broke again in the haze of uncertainty of being alive. I could have done it forever, over and over, keeping you trapped in a prison of self-hate I inflicted on you."
"Then why didn't you." Grey eyes, sharp in a way that felt like it was pressing into your neck, set in a sullen, pale face atop a tall, lanky body.
"Last night, I took a hundred men, and with their own desperation, I broke them. As of today, not even twenty-four hours later. Six of them are still alive, and ninety-four lay dead in the streets. The shame of that should be the reason." But you were so terribly broken in so many different ways. But you ignore that, to gesture at the streets around you, still lined with dead, and for a single moment, you want to leave it as that, the altruistic idea that you brought yourself to care for the people that died at your twisting. But you had long since torn their personhood apart in your mind, and in that moment, you could not lie. "But it is not because whatever shame I should feel is burnt on the pyre of my greed."
"Because in the deepest witching hour, I stood alongside six men, and I felt something I had lost long ago." You stare into those grey eyes, your own eyes filled with enough avarice to shame a dragon. "Brotherhood. A bond that for a night transcended words and forged into an unbroken chain of trust."
"You think you can… you can tell us you did all this to us; you think you can do this to us and call us brother?" The fifth man was shorter than the others and still had patches of blonde shocks left on his head, not properly ripped out in some atrocious mimicry of what you forced that first fanatic to do.
"No." You breathe out, and the weight on your neck falls off as shame bubbles up in you, the emotion both cloying and freeing. "I am telling you all this because in that moment, you became my brothers in arms, and I have to contend with the fact I made you lesser. Six men who in a tide of dead flesh stood beside me as brothers, and I did not know their… your names."
"And after last night, my greed will allow me to do nothing less than fix what I had done, but I don't know how. Please, tell me what I need to say?" Five sets of eyes stared at you with incredulity, the sheer temerity of what you were asking striking them still.
"Was it… was it all fake? I felt…" Another of them spoke up, his face set into a hard line, his eyes so dark as to be black, but they shone with fervent desperation.
Slowly your eyes close and tug on that little place in your mind claimed by a fraction of a fraction of Verena's attention. Divine energy seeps into the air, settling heavily over the seven of you. "This is Verena. My Goddess. I'm not a priest, but the differences are deeply blurred."
You let the energy linger in the air, the same energy that you had used to drive home your inflicted disgust.
"It's different?" Underneath the thread of confusion colouring the man's tone was a low note of hope, and you leapt on it.
"Because it is just Verena." You meet dark eyes, and as you let the attention of Verena sputter away, you gesture around you. "But what we achieved in the darkest moments of dawn, seven against the uncountable, there was no god that would ignore that. No matter how it started, what we achieved was still judged worthy."
Silence descended between the seven for a long moment as a worried weight lifted from the six men's shoulders. Just cutting-edge of worry and paranoia that it was all deceptions and lies, that they could be deceived even to the point of being fooled to their gods' touch… leaving them.
Your gaze falls to the ground again, as in turn, the weight of what you had done heavies on your shoulders.
"My name is Sigric Silber." You snap up to meet Sigric's dark eyes as the hard lines of his face soften. You were not the only one; the other five also watched Sigric carefully. The man does not wilt under their stares, his back straightening. "Don't make me regret this, Norscan."
Struck still for words, you simply nod as relief warred with avarice inside you, desperate to reign it as it drove you to push this further.
"No one comes to the Meissen without reason; no one comes to the borderlands without reason. Why are you here, Norscan?" The suspicious stare of the shortest of the six carved through you, and in that moment, it felt like he towered over you.
"Greed… ambition." Despite the cutting stare, you straighten up. No matter what shame you felt, there was nothing that would mortify you in the face of your drive. "The great Libraries of Verena are not a place of glory and great men. Even before anything else, I would suffocate there."
"The borderlands aren't a place for great men either." He shot back, sharp-tongued.
"Then I will make it one." Your words burned into the world with all the fierce passion that they had carried since your earliest youth, and no loss or tragedy had ever changed that. It was different to the passion that drove your piety, a part of yourself untouched by any kind of divine. The fact that Verena was willing to let you keep it, allow it to remain yours, was perhaps one of the only reasons she managed to get through to you. The short man seemed stunned by the fervent burn in your voice before a fierce grin split his face.
"Now that… that I can understand. My name is Anders Matthias. If you keep that fire, Norscan, then maybe there's hope for you." Ander's grin widens, and yet more weight falls off your shoulders. That was two.
There was a feeling of momentum behind you now, a confidence that had been lacking as you waded through the treacherous confusion of this… whatever you would call this.
"No Norscan tribe worships Verena, I've heard the stories, but I have to know. Who did you worship before Verena?" The question rips that momentum from you entirely. The first man spoke, his hand still tight on the sickle by his side.
A grip that only tightens as the question strikes you silent. You did not flinch away from who you were in your own mind, but putting it into words… you always struggled with it. Partly because if said to the wrong person - who most people were - it would see you in a fight for your life.
But mostly because you knew as well as anyone that words had power, and the admission of what you were before Verena worked away at you… always felt like it was giving just that little more power back over.
Yet under the stares of men you dared to long to call your brothers-in-arms, you forced the words from your throat.
"All of them, at one point in my life. But… the…" You pull into yourself, your mind occupying that ever so slightly strange headspace of not aware but not quite there, as you pull on Verena's attention like a blasted child tugging on his mother's dress. You feel the energy spill through your body, a comforting warmth you drank in like a desiccated man. "But I always came back to the Hound."
"You worshipped Chaos." Slowly he pulled the sickle at his side up, something conflicted darkening his face. "That taint is not… give me a reason why I should not cut you down. Do us all a favour."
"I was born to the Aeslinger, a Sveit in the far north of Norsca. The first man who did not worship the four I met was a Khanite slave. The second was a Solkan Witch Hunter who called me an abomination and told me to drown myself at the age of four." You pull yourself out of the comforting warmth to meet the man's blue eyes without the crux of your goddess's grace. "All I ever knew, all I ever could know was them. Yet, in the end, I looked at them, and I saw they were not good enough for me. That I was beyond them. I did that despite it being all I knew."
His grip was white-knuckled tight as the conflict on his face grew until he let out a deep sigh and let it fall back to his waist. "My name is Gutwin Unberogen, and I will be watching you."
Your chest rises and falls in heavy movements, and you feel Verena's touch continuing to spread through your body as you try to calm yourself.
"You said you killed a Warrior priest to death at thirteen. Was that your first?" But the grey-eyed man did not give you a moment to collect yourself, and as he straightened up from his sullen slouch, he rivals you for height, if not weight.
"I beat the warrior priest to death at one and three." You correct, almost gently, before exhaling through your nose. "But in the Aeslinger tribe, you are strong enough to kill, or you are dead. Even when you're young, you would be thrown into arenas and wouldn't be allowed to leave until the other was forced to break. I was eight the first time that my opponent did not break until his body did."
It was a boy from another Sveit, bigger than you but so thin that when you wrapped your hand around his neck, you could thread your fingers and tighten your grip until it collapsed.
"Did you enjoy it?" There was a moment when you boggle at the question and the implicit sociopathy in it. But under the heavy weight of the sharp grey stare, for some strange reason, you could not bring yourself to believe that it came from someplace of sick enjoyment. For some reason, you could barely see it as coming from a place of judgement.
You hesitate for a moment, knowing the truth is something deeply terrible. But you also knew that you could not shy away from this. "Yes. At the time, it was a moment of brilliant glory. Unquestionable dominance and right in all ways that could matter."
"And now?" Now it was his turn for his words to be spoken gently, and this time your pause was thought rather than hesitation. Thinking back on your first kill invoked a thousand different feelings in you, a thousand different ideas and a thousand viewpoints. There was a time in the days you were first adrift from your once gods and before you had come to fully embrace Verena, where you had poured over that kill. Perhaps rightfully thinking it was as pivotal a moment to you as the kill that christened you with your epithet. Death was common in those pits, but at eight, you were expected to be years away from needing to claim your first skull. It was what had first drawn the attention of your first captain, and later of the Slaves of the Hound, to your first brothers and later the freedom of tragedy.
But in all your thoughts, you never truly came to decide whether that death was something you regretted or if it was simply just a part of you.
"I'm… I'm alive." You answer slowly, and despite how lacking it was in depth, as you look into those sharp grey eyes, you have a feeling it satisfied him.
"We are all alive. I am Manfredo Di Muzio." He gives you a sharp nod before slumping back down, losing inches of height as he does so.
That just left two.
The man whose face was still - worryingly - dripping with blood, and the old man.
"What's your name?" The question from the old man takes a moment to register; after the last two digging at your past, it had not been what you expected. "Well, come on, boy, I'm too old to waste time."
That ripped a snort of disbelief from you, despite the thin that a siege's starvation had forced onto his frame, and despite the age on his face, the old man looked like he had decades left in him.
"Asavar. My name is Asavar the Brute." You knew that each of these men already knew that; no one in Meissen did not know who you were. Izek's pet Norscan priest had been bandied around for weeks, and your name was often a source of contention. A Norscan named after an Everchosen could only have one connotation.
But at this moment, it was not about them knowing your name. It was them knowing you, and as your name settled in the air, you felt like they did know you.
"If they call you a brute, I can only imagine who they call the thinker." The old man scoffs to himself and rolls his shoulders. "Call me Hildenmund, Asavar."
A wide, boyish grin crossed your face at that as the fifth name slid into your mind, and you carved it into your thoughts. Leaving just one, with a strange synchronicity, the six of you look towards the seventh, the green-eyed man with blood still weeping from his cheek.
The man looked halfway thoughtful for a moment as he slowly examined you. "Asavar…" He tastes the word before his head tilts the other way, and he strokes his cheek, blood accumulating in a thick sheen. "I am Rule, and I suppose I could learn to call you brother."
He holds his hand out, slick with blood. You rush to take it, eager and energetic and find a tight grip that strains your bones. But you ignored that to sweep him up in a tight hug, pulling him entirely off the ground.
"Asavar! Put me down! By Ulric, I will beat you within an inch of your life with my shoe." He immediately begins struggling, trying to wiggle out of your tight bear hug and knee you in the side.
You simply laugh.
https://orokos.com/roll/962407 78 (Piety)
https://orokos.com/roll/962408 98 (Diplomacy)
A/N There's a part of me that struggled deeply with this update. Partly because it's so early on and it's emotional thrust feels... not unearned, but unwitnessed. A culmination of an arc that Asavar himself was apart of, but not the quest. The foibles of trying to get everyone in the right mindset of barely prepared by dropping you right into the action I suppose. Added onto that the emotional state I needed to pull together to write it being ruined by learning about the Judge Rotenberg Centre, and it's slightly later than I wanted.
I hope everyone enjoys, and that the other parts of this update come slightly easier to me.
-[X] Have your cake, and eat it too.
As you stand in the aftermath of the brutal battle, an island in a sea of bone and gravel, burnt out houses and torn apart streets all around you, you consider not just the fanatics, but yourself.
Throughout the years, there have been many things that Asavar - you - have embodied. Some of those things you have been proud of, others you have come to regret, and even more, you can only find yourself unsure of.
But there are two, maybe three, things that were so profoundly you that you are not sure they would ever not be an integral part of yourself.
Greed was one of those things. You were such a terribly greedy man, it was deeply rooted in everything you did. You wanted more incessantly, wanted greater and greater in a way that even the world being offered to you was not enough.
Asavar the Brute was a man of greed that outstripped even chaos.
When told to pick between temperance and shallow self-interest. To choose between what was selfish and what was selfless, and what was beyond even both…
There really was only one choice for you.
"Yesterday, I took one hundred of the unclean and unfaithful and crafted them into warriors of the gods." Your voice came from low in your chest, a deep rumble that almost seemed to shake the air itself, the same voice you always used to address congregations. You pause, a heavy uncertainty curling around your throat. You knew how one went almost by heart, knew the other by absence.
You watch six figures stir at the sound of your voice and do little else. An ancient, fundamental part of their brain drives them to respond to another human speaking, but you had ripped out a piece that told them what to do, and in this confusing aftermath, that absent void between mind and man became all the more evident.
You remember that feeling so very well, and it just made the question of what words could possibly pull this off all the starker.
"To be more accurate, I broke them into being such. I twisted them, and I turned them into slaves to the gods. Ripped from them their personhood and replaced it with fanaticism, with false claims of the gods' will." For a single moment, you almost did not register that it was your voice and almost looked for the source. Then you realise what you said, and that terrible weight of uncertainty burgeoned into a whirl of anxiety and realisation as what you had said - out loud - hit you.
You had just ousted what you had done outright, told them in plain terms that you had manipulated them and a hundred others into frothing death. Your heart sinks as you realise there would only ever be one reaction to that and that you would have to choose between your desperate ambitions for the future and the lives of six embryonic brothers.
Then… the six fanatics react differently. One flinched as if struck, one stared at you, one glanced at the other five, one's hand fell to the sickle by his side, one let his eyes close and shoulder slump, and the last's hands tightened into a ball.
Ah.
That was how you were going to do this.
This was going to be… very rough.
"Meissen was teetering on the edge of destruction, and I weighed the lives and sentience of a hundred men against the thousand others within the walls." You stare down at the ground between the seven of you as you let the confession just flow, the timbre that shook the air in your voice long since gone. "The very fact it was teetering on that edge made it easy; when humans are faced with death, so many of the differences between them are stripped away. The buttons to press, the words and the actions and the frenetic press of energy become almost a rote matter."
"Why are you telling us this?" The voice was weak, choked with hardly restrained anger and awful realisation. "Why tell us it was a lie?"
"Not a lie, just put in words to get a certain result." You mutter, half to yourself, words spoken to you so very long ago. Words that took you a long time to learn how awful they were. You wet your lips and slowly breathe in, then with a weight that was so hard to ignore, you look up to meet the man who spoke.
He had his hand on the handle of his sickle, the weapon rattling terribly as he shook.
"It hurts so very much, doesn't it? Like a knife carving strips through your heart and mind. The revelation feels like it's attacking your very soul. The realisation that all those feelings, hopes, and terrors were deliberate manipulations. There because I brought them there." He had blue eyes, and his face was as gaunt as everyone who had gone through this siege, but you could see traces of the babyface of someone barely twenty.
"You're mocking us, Norscan. Answer his question." You flinch at Norscan, a tiny imperceptible thing, but there. Noticeable. You gather yourself again and look to the next speaker. Deep lines carved down his face, a long life of stress and work, and the remnants of facial hair he had torn out were still there.
"Because… because this is an explanation I desperately needed." For a moment, it was all you wanted to do to look away, to not have to physically look him in his face as suspicion and hate blossomed across his face.
You keep your eyes locked on the man. "Because when I was first in your position, ten and three, the slick blood of a warrior priest still drying between my fingers, and I came to confront the awful understanding that I did not die for my gods. I…" Words fail you for a moment, mouth moving without sound. You swallow. "I was torn right back into the personless fanaticism. My only reward for doing the impossible was to be ripped apart further and left to languish in the maddened need for manufactured salvation."
"Because when I was last in your position, ten and seven, and I was finally left adrift, the way I put myself back together was wrong, was wrong for a long, long time." There was a flicker of something across that old man's face, and before you could truly register, the need to look away overwhelmed you.
"This could be another trick, another manipulation." A third voice and it was only because deep in that corner of your mind that Verena had marked her own, you felt a press of just the slightest bit more attention, that you found the strength to meet his eyes. Green eyes framed by still weeping claw marks stared at you, so cold that it would make ice shiver. "Well? Is it? More words that give you exactly the response you want? Any moment are we about to start tearing each other apart again?"
"You would not ask that question if it was." Your lips twist into that mockery of a grin that terrified everyone you ever flashed it to, all teeth and grim savagery. Or it would be if it was not so occluded by the ravages of shame and uncertainty. "You wouldn't answer any question if it was; it would have been as easy as breathing to force you back into the mire of toxic redemption. Twisting you until you broke again in the haze of uncertainty of being alive. I could have done it forever, over and over, keeping you trapped in a prison of self-hate I inflicted on you."
"Then why didn't you." Grey eyes, sharp in a way that felt like it was pressing into your neck, set in a sullen, pale face atop a tall, lanky body.
"Last night, I took a hundred men, and with their own desperation, I broke them. As of today, not even twenty-four hours later. Six of them are still alive, and ninety-four lay dead in the streets. The shame of that should be the reason." But you were so terribly broken in so many different ways. But you ignore that, to gesture at the streets around you, still lined with dead, and for a single moment, you want to leave it as that, the altruistic idea that you brought yourself to care for the people that died at your twisting. But you had long since torn their personhood apart in your mind, and in that moment, you could not lie. "But it is not because whatever shame I should feel is burnt on the pyre of my greed."
"Because in the deepest witching hour, I stood alongside six men, and I felt something I had lost long ago." You stare into those grey eyes, your own eyes filled with enough avarice to shame a dragon. "Brotherhood. A bond that for a night transcended words and forged into an unbroken chain of trust."
"You think you can… you can tell us you did all this to us; you think you can do this to us and call us brother?" The fifth man was shorter than the others and still had patches of blonde shocks left on his head, not properly ripped out in some atrocious mimicry of what you forced that first fanatic to do.
"No." You breathe out, and the weight on your neck falls off as shame bubbles up in you, the emotion both cloying and freeing. "I am telling you all this because in that moment, you became my brothers in arms, and I have to contend with the fact I made you lesser. Six men who in a tide of dead flesh stood beside me as brothers, and I did not know their… your names."
"And after last night, my greed will allow me to do nothing less than fix what I had done, but I don't know how. Please, tell me what I need to say?" Five sets of eyes stared at you with incredulity, the sheer temerity of what you were asking striking them still.
"Was it… was it all fake? I felt…" Another of them spoke up, his face set into a hard line, his eyes so dark as to be black, but they shone with fervent desperation.
Slowly your eyes close and tug on that little place in your mind claimed by a fraction of a fraction of Verena's attention. Divine energy seeps into the air, settling heavily over the seven of you. "This is Verena. My Goddess. I'm not a priest, but the differences are deeply blurred."
You let the energy linger in the air, the same energy that you had used to drive home your inflicted disgust.
"It's different?" Underneath the thread of confusion colouring the man's tone was a low note of hope, and you leapt on it.
"Because it is just Verena." You meet dark eyes, and as you let the attention of Verena sputter away, you gesture around you. "But what we achieved in the darkest moments of dawn, seven against the uncountable, there was no god that would ignore that. No matter how it started, what we achieved was still judged worthy."
Silence descended between the seven for a long moment as a worried weight lifted from the six men's shoulders. Just cutting-edge of worry and paranoia that it was all deceptions and lies, that they could be deceived even to the point of being fooled to their gods' touch… leaving them.
Your gaze falls to the ground again, as in turn, the weight of what you had done heavies on your shoulders.
"My name is Sigric Silber." You snap up to meet Sigric's dark eyes as the hard lines of his face soften. You were not the only one; the other five also watched Sigric carefully. The man does not wilt under their stares, his back straightening. "Don't make me regret this, Norscan."
Struck still for words, you simply nod as relief warred with avarice inside you, desperate to reign it as it drove you to push this further.
"No one comes to the Meissen without reason; no one comes to the borderlands without reason. Why are you here, Norscan?" The suspicious stare of the shortest of the six carved through you, and in that moment, it felt like he towered over you.
"Greed… ambition." Despite the cutting stare, you straighten up. No matter what shame you felt, there was nothing that would mortify you in the face of your drive. "The great Libraries of Verena are not a place of glory and great men. Even before anything else, I would suffocate there."
"The borderlands aren't a place for great men either." He shot back, sharp-tongued.
"Then I will make it one." Your words burned into the world with all the fierce passion that they had carried since your earliest youth, and no loss or tragedy had ever changed that. It was different to the passion that drove your piety, a part of yourself untouched by any kind of divine. The fact that Verena was willing to let you keep it, allow it to remain yours, was perhaps one of the only reasons she managed to get through to you. The short man seemed stunned by the fervent burn in your voice before a fierce grin split his face.
"Now that… that I can understand. My name is Anders Matthias. If you keep that fire, Norscan, then maybe there's hope for you." Ander's grin widens, and yet more weight falls off your shoulders. That was two.
There was a feeling of momentum behind you now, a confidence that had been lacking as you waded through the treacherous confusion of this… whatever you would call this.
"No Norscan tribe worships Verena, I've heard the stories, but I have to know. Who did you worship before Verena?" The question rips that momentum from you entirely. The first man spoke, his hand still tight on the sickle by his side.
A grip that only tightens as the question strikes you silent. You did not flinch away from who you were in your own mind, but putting it into words… you always struggled with it. Partly because if said to the wrong person - who most people were - it would see you in a fight for your life.
But mostly because you knew as well as anyone that words had power, and the admission of what you were before Verena worked away at you… always felt like it was giving just that little more power back over.
Yet under the stares of men you dared to long to call your brothers-in-arms, you forced the words from your throat.
"All of them, at one point in my life. But… the…" You pull into yourself, your mind occupying that ever so slightly strange headspace of not aware but not quite there, as you pull on Verena's attention like a blasted child tugging on his mother's dress. You feel the energy spill through your body, a comforting warmth you drank in like a desiccated man. "But I always came back to the Hound."
"You worshipped Chaos." Slowly he pulled the sickle at his side up, something conflicted darkening his face. "That taint is not… give me a reason why I should not cut you down. Do us all a favour."
"I was born to the Aeslinger, a Sveit in the far north of Norsca. The first man who did not worship the four I met was a Khanite slave. The second was a Solkan Witch Hunter who called me an abomination and told me to drown myself at the age of four." You pull yourself out of the comforting warmth to meet the man's blue eyes without the crux of your goddess's grace. "All I ever knew, all I ever could know was them. Yet, in the end, I looked at them, and I saw they were not good enough for me. That I was beyond them. I did that despite it being all I knew."
His grip was white-knuckled tight as the conflict on his face grew until he let out a deep sigh and let it fall back to his waist. "My name is Gutwin Unberogen, and I will be watching you."
Your chest rises and falls in heavy movements, and you feel Verena's touch continuing to spread through your body as you try to calm yourself.
"You said you killed a Warrior priest to death at thirteen. Was that your first?" But the grey-eyed man did not give you a moment to collect yourself, and as he straightened up from his sullen slouch, he rivals you for height, if not weight.
"I beat the warrior priest to death at one and three." You correct, almost gently, before exhaling through your nose. "But in the Aeslinger tribe, you are strong enough to kill, or you are dead. Even when you're young, you would be thrown into arenas and wouldn't be allowed to leave until the other was forced to break. I was eight the first time that my opponent did not break until his body did."
It was a boy from another Sveit, bigger than you but so thin that when you wrapped your hand around his neck, you could thread your fingers and tighten your grip until it collapsed.
"Did you enjoy it?" There was a moment when you boggle at the question and the implicit sociopathy in it. But under the heavy weight of the sharp grey stare, for some strange reason, you could not bring yourself to believe that it came from someplace of sick enjoyment. For some reason, you could barely see it as coming from a place of judgement.
You hesitate for a moment, knowing the truth is something deeply terrible. But you also knew that you could not shy away from this. "Yes. At the time, it was a moment of brilliant glory. Unquestionable dominance and right in all ways that could matter."
"And now?" Now it was his turn for his words to be spoken gently, and this time your pause was thought rather than hesitation. Thinking back on your first kill invoked a thousand different feelings in you, a thousand different ideas and a thousand viewpoints. There was a time in the days you were first adrift from your once gods and before you had come to fully embrace Verena, where you had poured over that kill. Perhaps rightfully thinking it was as pivotal a moment to you as the kill that christened you with your epithet. Death was common in those pits, but at eight, you were expected to be years away from needing to claim your first skull. It was what had first drawn the attention of your first captain, and later of the Slaves of the Hound, to your first brothers and later the freedom of tragedy.
But in all your thoughts, you never truly came to decide whether that death was something you regretted or if it was simply just a part of you.
"I'm… I'm alive." You answer slowly, and despite how lacking it was in depth, as you look into those sharp grey eyes, you have a feeling it satisfied him.
"We are all alive. I am Manfredo Di Muzio." He gives you a sharp nod before slumping back down, losing inches of height as he does so.
That just left two.
The man whose face was still - worryingly - dripping with blood, and the old man.
"What's your name?" The question from the old man takes a moment to register; after the last two digging at your past, it had not been what you expected. "Well, come on, boy, I'm too old to waste time."
That ripped a snort of disbelief from you, despite the thin that a siege's starvation had forced onto his frame, and despite the age on his face, the old man looked like he had decades left in him.
"Asavar. My name is Asavar the Brute." You knew that each of these men already knew that; no one in Meissen did not know who you were. Izek's pet Norscan priest had been bandied around for weeks, and your name was often a source of contention. A Norscan named after an Everchosen could only have one connotation.
But at this moment, it was not about them knowing your name. It was them knowing you, and as your name settled in the air, you felt like they did know you.
"If they call you a brute, I can only imagine who they call the thinker." The old man scoffs to himself and rolls his shoulders. "Call me Hildenmund, Asavar."
A wide, boyish grin crossed your face at that as the fifth name slid into your mind, and you carved it into your thoughts. Leaving just one, with a strange synchronicity, the six of you look towards the seventh, the green-eyed man with blood still weeping from his cheek.
The man looked halfway thoughtful for a moment as he slowly examined you. "Asavar…" He tastes the word before his head tilts the other way, and he strokes his cheek, blood accumulating in a thick sheen. "I am Rule, and I suppose I could learn to call you brother."
He holds his hand out, slick with blood. You rush to take it, eager and energetic and find a tight grip that strains your bones. But you ignored that to sweep him up in a tight hug, pulling him entirely off the ground.
"Asavar! Put me down! By Ulric, I will beat you within an inch of your life with my shoe." He immediately begins struggling, trying to wiggle out of your tight bear hug and knee you in the side.
You simply laugh.
https://orokos.com/roll/962407 78 (Piety)
https://orokos.com/roll/962408 98 (Diplomacy)
A/N There's a part of me that struggled deeply with this update. Partly because it's so early on and it's emotional thrust feels... not unearned, but unwitnessed. A culmination of an arc that Asavar himself was apart of, but not the quest. The foibles of trying to get everyone in the right mindset of barely prepared by dropping you right into the action I suppose. Added onto that the emotional state I needed to pull together to write it being ruined by learning about the Judge Rotenberg Centre, and it's slightly later than I wanted.
I hope everyone enjoys, and that the other parts of this update come slightly easier to me.
Last edited:
THAT. WAS. INCREDIBLE! I'm sitting here with wet eyes! Goddamn!
BLESSED BE RANALD FOR HE HAS GIVEN US THE DICE TO START THIS BROTHERHOOD AND BLESSED BE @Minyette06 FOR HE HAS WRITTEN IT INTO THE WORLD!
BLESSED BE RANALD FOR HE HAS GIVEN US THE DICE TO START THIS BROTHERHOOD AND BLESSED BE @Minyette06 FOR HE HAS WRITTEN IT INTO THE WORLD!
The gods themselves wanted this six-way bromance to flourish it seems.
I can totally see what you mean, and why it would leave a bad taste in your motuh. I agree with the reasoning. However, I also think that the quality of the writing alone manages to elevate it to the point that I don't mind it. It was just a damn good scene.
DamnedAeons 187
An Ally of Convenience is an Enemy of Opportunity
- Location
- Texas
Imagine wanting to leave these guys to flounder
no it works, i feel like the most important thing is that we aren't playing some young child new to everything in the world but a fully formed adult who is arguably already a paragon character, they're far from the end of their journey but they've had several behind them and that's what makes them interesting, honestly it'd be worse if he didn't have emotional baggage in different stages of being resolved.
And you won a mighty prize indeed. This was very well-done, I was glad to read it!
What about Verena tho?
SHE WHO HAS GIVEN US THE SLIGHTLY SOGGY PAGE TO WRITE THIS EPIC UPON!
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
Egh, soggy paper is terrible to write on. I'll take the smudged and mutilated paper that's been rubbed over entirely with an eraser over soggy.
It was a gift to her from the in-law
- Location
- yorkshire
That was great writing it definitely felt like the beginning of a adventure
The guts of the matter
You are ignoring content by this member.
Show ignored content
-[X] Talk to Misha. {Write in} "Highlight the dangers of Herminia's and Rosmalen's advantages and immediate threat using their treachery during the battle as evidence and offer to make a pact against them"
After the… issues the other two had with contributing their part to the siege, you half expected that when you arrived at Misha's field hospital, for it to be a glut of disease and men dying from the simplest of wounds and there to be some burgeoning conspiracy that he was doing it on purpose.
At the very least, you expected the place to be as ramshackle as everything else in Meissen.
So it was to a great deal of pleased surprise that as you approached the large plaza that Izek's manor overlooked, it was not a hovel of disease and disorder but a strictly ordered camp. Six large tents - far larger than you would have expected to be found in Meissen, sat in two triplet pairs facing one of the larger houses of Meissen, the once ostentatious structure stripped down to provide as much room as possible.
From the outside, you could see men being carried or directed to the tents by both Rosmalen's uninjured swordsmen and by the men and women that avoided the conscription due to a distinct lack of weaponry that plagues Meissen.
Though after last night, there would be a great deal of at least serviceable weapons to go around.
The double doors of the house had been wrenched open and nailed into the wall, which you supposed was one way to save on door stoppers. The entry room was packed, the hallway lined with at least twenty men sitting on pilfered furniture. Two women and a man carefully examine each man in turn, usually to the man's evident frustration. But the stern eyes of one of Rosmalen's men, with his blade drawn, standing in the far doorway likely kept them in line.
You watch for a moment as the group of what you could only assume were assistants that Misha has conscripted confer for a moment before they instruct a man cradling his arm tight to his chest to head deeper into the converted 'house' and 'out to the right.'
One of the women spots you - it would be difficult not to, considering you nearly blocked the sun from the doorway entirely - you try to give her a smile, but like always, for some reason, that only makes her flinch.
As the woman whispers to her compatriots and points you out, Rosmalen's swordsman steps forward. Which was just perfect; of course, Rosmalen's men were not going to trust you around the wounded. Deescalating this, so you did not end up fighting in the middle of a hospital was going to be like pulling teeth, but you should be able to manage it. "Why are you here Nor-."
"Shut the fuck up, Angelo; your dick's small, and no one likes you." Rule, it seemed, had other plans as he shouldered past you and made a dismissive wanking gesture at Angelo.
"My dick was enough for your sister." The Tilean man steps forward and squares up with Rule with a snarl. But despite that, his sword lowers back to his side, tilted towards the ground.
"A piece of straw nailed to the wall is enough for her, and somehow you still didn't touch the sides." There was a moment where the two men just stared at each other, before the swordsman snorts and tosses his head as Rule chortles.
"I will tell her that and will enjoy watching her beat your head in." The smile that stretches across Rule's face reopens the thick wound curling around his face, sending a glut of blood seeping from his face.
"Good, I'll tell her that you don't actually like her vulture stew." Angelo's eyes widen as his face goes pale. "Now fuck off and let us in; we have a message for the Prince's brat."
"Rule, brother-in-law of mine, dear uncle to my daughters. Surely you'd never be so cruel as to leave your sweet nieces fatherless?" The Tilean babbles, his accent growing thicker as Rule simply raises an eyebrow and flicks a glance at the door. He slumps slightly. "It is not my call. Talk to them. They tell people where to go. I just hold the door."
He gestures at the group of three, and when you glance at them, you catch one of them mouthing 'Tilean prick' before nervously straightening up under your stare. You give a reassuring smile, which as always, just makes it worse. "I need to speak to Misha; where is he?"
If you were being honest, you sort of expected them to tell you immediately. Misha, it must be reiterated, is kind of a prick, and you personally would throw him under a cart if someone the size of a door asked after him.
But they shared another shockingly in-sync glance, and when they looked back at you, there was a stubborn defiance in their eyes.
"Bochkarer is busy, and we have an admissions process. Please take a seat and wait to be examined." You blink slightly; between this and whatever that interaction between Rule and Angelo was, you were thoroughly lost.
And that slight moment of hesitance was taken as an opening yet again by one of the six men that had accompanied you. "We're not going to take long, just a quick in-and-out visit" Sigric's gaunt face showed all the signs of his youth as he gave one of the women a charming grin.
She blushes slightly and glances at her other two partners. "Well… if you promise to be quick and be vigilant…."
"We won't let Asavar out of sight." Well, that was slightly presumptive of him: she did not even say your name. For all he knew, she could be talking about the man who walked in yelling about small penises.
The fact she gave a relieved smile as he gestured at you might have indicated he was right that she was solely worried about you, but that was just a lucky guess.
"He's in the surgery tent, the middle left one." She clarifies as a moment of confusion spreads among you. You nod and then glance at the rest of your… posse? Crew? Gang?
Calling them your men all the time was weird, but this was probably not the time for this. Especially as the fact you were in what amounted to a hospital in these parts registered, along with the fact the other six had just come out the other end of a meat grinder, and Rule's cheek wound was likely far from the only injury.
"Good, I'll go see him; the six of you wait here and get examined." Immediately both Sigric and the woman - who had been making eyes at Sigric - whirled on you.
"I made a promise"/" I only told you where Bochkarer was because I thought he would be watching you." They stumble over each other, Sigric cutting himself off as he realises what is happening.
"You." You point at the woman. "Should have thought about that before telling me then." She fumes wordlessly for a moment, giving you an honestly very intimidating glare, and you are very thankful to have the excuse of looking at Sigric to look away from it. "And you just came out the better side of an undead horde. A dozen to one isn't the odds you walk away from uninjured."
"You.. you just came from the same place." He protests to a roll of your eyes.
"Yes, but I, One: am built different, and Two: don't have a six-foot-something Norscan telling me what to do." You straighten up to your full height, staring down the six men that had tentatively given you a chance to call brother. "All of you will be examined - now - and I wil-"
Rule's empty boot slamming into the side of your face and snapping your head sideways cuts you off. You pause for a moment, tasting the shock of blood from where your teeth had split your lip, before glancing slowly over to him as he unlaced his other boot.
"You're going to make this difficult on me, aren't you." He glances up at you, green eyes glittering, as he does not pause for a moment unlacing his shoe. You glance over to the rest of them and arch an eyebrow. Hildenmund scoffs, and Manfredo slumps against the doorway, watching. But Gutwin and Sigric step forward.
You give a longer look at Anders, and the man gives you a so-so gesture that just fills you with confidence.
You sigh; going from fanatical half-men to brothers… might have left them with a need for discipline. You bend down, and pick up Rule's boot, testing its weight in your hand.
Then you roll your shoulders, eye the three men, and let a grin spread across your face.
-
With your unruly brothers-in-arms dealt with, you stride into the middle left tent and are greeted by the thick scent of blood and guts. Which was like shit but had more of an inside smell which made it infinitely worse.
Inside, you immediately see Misha buried up to his elbow in some poor bastard's stomach, the barely more than a teen's mouth twisted into an unpleasant frown as he fiddled around inside the man.
"And as if the smell of shit could not get any worse. Whatever frozen hellhole you were raised in yet to discover toilet paper, Norscan?" He does not look up from where he is working on the man, and he blindly fumbles for something behind him as he keeps careful watch. "Stop being useless and hand me the clamp."
You shrug and walk over. You eye the table he had blindly gestured to, filled with what you could only describe as torture implements. "Which one…?"
"The one with the spring stop between the handles." You pick it up, examining the almost scissor-like tool, if not for the metal not being sharpened and the slight curve to it. You hand it over to him.
"You know, usually when you can smell someone's guts, it's a lost cause." He takes the tool and ignores you as he starts shuffling around to find the right angle. Just when you were convinced he was going to just ignore you full stop, he started speaking.
"Usually, a perforated intestine is normally death for whatever idiot gets stabbed in the gut; if the wrong shit mixes with blood, you're gone, but.." He trails off, and for the first time, he glances up at you. More specifically, your hands. "Get over here."
Maybe on another day, when you were not approaching Misha for something, you would tell him to fuck off. As it was, you carefully approached the much smaller boy. You eye the insides of the unconscious man as they become visible to you, a squishy mess of flesh and not-quite flesh that makes you shiver to look at. "Carefully reach into there, and hold exactly where I'm holding. Not too tight; if it starts moving, you're fucking up."
You reach in and slowly close your hand around the tube he had been holding, and immediately something sick bubbles up in your throat, and you feel your face go green. You knew what intestines felt like, and these felt like they were wrapped around something disturbingly solid. "Is that…"
"His actual faeces wrapped in his intestine? Yes. I've spent the last ten minutes physically squeezing it away from the wound. Poor fuck's guts are never going to be the same, so congratulations, you're most likely holding that man's last solid shit. Now hold it right there while I stitch this back up." He sets about working with quick, precise movements, and considering it was the only thing distracting you from what you were holding, you scrutinised him.
There was almost a sense of ease as Misha went to work that the teenager was usually lacking, the harsh livewire edge he usually teetered on relaxing away underneath the simple motions behind what seemed to be an overall very complex procedure. As he finishes off his stitching, tying it into a tight bow, he glances you up and down. "Now, shitholder, you can let go of the shit and tell me why the fuck you're here."
"Maybe it's for your lovely company." You withdraw your hand from the inside of the man, grimacing at the strange fluids and muck coating it. Misha, for his part, just gives you an unimpressed look. "Maybe I was really curious where you got all these nice tents."
"They're father's merchant tents. He was always a fan of the idea of `if a village doesn't have a market square, bring one'" He walks over to a pot standing at the side of the tent, picks up a kettle and pours steaming water over his hands with barely a grunt. "Now tell me the actual reason, or fuck off. I still have another half a dozen surgeries, and a dozen more still in critical condition, and I won't have my first death be because some Norscan fuck-wit bothering me."
You pause for a moment, the sheer outpouring of emotion and care at odds with what you knew of the bratty Bochkarer son. You honestly expected to come here to find the boy complaining about people having the temerity to die near him and only doing the bare minimum.
An almost fiercely territorial bent towards the lives of his patients was practically the opposite of that.
[] Rosmalen and Herminia nearly put the existence of the entire town at risk.
If it was not for luck, the huntsmen's scavenging, and you, the town would have had the Undead spill uncontained into the streets. That was not acceptable. You wanted his support in bringing the other two to task.
[] Rosmalen tried to kill you, and let dozens more men die than needed to die.
Herminia's failure could be incompetence, but Rosmalen's actions struck you as actively putting political aims above the existence of Meissen. Maybe between the two of you, you could bring Rosmalen down without the town devolving into a bloody civil war.
[] Rosmalen may have put the town at risk, but for now he is near unassailable. Herminia, not so much.
Rosmalen's position as the leader of the only professional force in the town meant that any plan of dislodging him had forty nine problems with it. Herminia's position however, has already been weakened by the lack of trade moving through the town, and the courts being suspended. Bringing her down, and trying to centralise her powers under the two of you could provide a base to work away at Rosmalen with.
[] The triad that the three of them had going on was not tenable. Try and get Misha in on a longer term partnership that would break up the current power dynamic entirely.
Getting Misha to help you bring one, or two of the others to task was all well and good, but unless Izek was feeling particularly murderous when he woke up, the political situation of Meissen would just rebalance itself between the three of them. Shaking that up long term, would require a long term understanding between you and Misha.
A/N Much easier update, less emotions all round if a bit foul mouthed. Getting in Misha's head just sort of puts me in that headframe. I strongly recommend considering what this vote will mean for the future vote dealing with Herminia and later Rosmalen coming up. If you tell Misha you want to do something here, and bait and switch him with other votes, then it is very unlikely he will just roll with it. But even that might be something you could take advantage of. Maybe.
Lets call it an hour and a half moratorium.
After the… issues the other two had with contributing their part to the siege, you half expected that when you arrived at Misha's field hospital, for it to be a glut of disease and men dying from the simplest of wounds and there to be some burgeoning conspiracy that he was doing it on purpose.
At the very least, you expected the place to be as ramshackle as everything else in Meissen.
So it was to a great deal of pleased surprise that as you approached the large plaza that Izek's manor overlooked, it was not a hovel of disease and disorder but a strictly ordered camp. Six large tents - far larger than you would have expected to be found in Meissen, sat in two triplet pairs facing one of the larger houses of Meissen, the once ostentatious structure stripped down to provide as much room as possible.
From the outside, you could see men being carried or directed to the tents by both Rosmalen's uninjured swordsmen and by the men and women that avoided the conscription due to a distinct lack of weaponry that plagues Meissen.
Though after last night, there would be a great deal of at least serviceable weapons to go around.
The double doors of the house had been wrenched open and nailed into the wall, which you supposed was one way to save on door stoppers. The entry room was packed, the hallway lined with at least twenty men sitting on pilfered furniture. Two women and a man carefully examine each man in turn, usually to the man's evident frustration. But the stern eyes of one of Rosmalen's men, with his blade drawn, standing in the far doorway likely kept them in line.
You watch for a moment as the group of what you could only assume were assistants that Misha has conscripted confer for a moment before they instruct a man cradling his arm tight to his chest to head deeper into the converted 'house' and 'out to the right.'
One of the women spots you - it would be difficult not to, considering you nearly blocked the sun from the doorway entirely - you try to give her a smile, but like always, for some reason, that only makes her flinch.
As the woman whispers to her compatriots and points you out, Rosmalen's swordsman steps forward. Which was just perfect; of course, Rosmalen's men were not going to trust you around the wounded. Deescalating this, so you did not end up fighting in the middle of a hospital was going to be like pulling teeth, but you should be able to manage it. "Why are you here Nor-."
"Shut the fuck up, Angelo; your dick's small, and no one likes you." Rule, it seemed, had other plans as he shouldered past you and made a dismissive wanking gesture at Angelo.
"My dick was enough for your sister." The Tilean man steps forward and squares up with Rule with a snarl. But despite that, his sword lowers back to his side, tilted towards the ground.
"A piece of straw nailed to the wall is enough for her, and somehow you still didn't touch the sides." There was a moment where the two men just stared at each other, before the swordsman snorts and tosses his head as Rule chortles.
"I will tell her that and will enjoy watching her beat your head in." The smile that stretches across Rule's face reopens the thick wound curling around his face, sending a glut of blood seeping from his face.
"Good, I'll tell her that you don't actually like her vulture stew." Angelo's eyes widen as his face goes pale. "Now fuck off and let us in; we have a message for the Prince's brat."
"Rule, brother-in-law of mine, dear uncle to my daughters. Surely you'd never be so cruel as to leave your sweet nieces fatherless?" The Tilean babbles, his accent growing thicker as Rule simply raises an eyebrow and flicks a glance at the door. He slumps slightly. "It is not my call. Talk to them. They tell people where to go. I just hold the door."
He gestures at the group of three, and when you glance at them, you catch one of them mouthing 'Tilean prick' before nervously straightening up under your stare. You give a reassuring smile, which as always, just makes it worse. "I need to speak to Misha; where is he?"
If you were being honest, you sort of expected them to tell you immediately. Misha, it must be reiterated, is kind of a prick, and you personally would throw him under a cart if someone the size of a door asked after him.
But they shared another shockingly in-sync glance, and when they looked back at you, there was a stubborn defiance in their eyes.
"Bochkarer is busy, and we have an admissions process. Please take a seat and wait to be examined." You blink slightly; between this and whatever that interaction between Rule and Angelo was, you were thoroughly lost.
And that slight moment of hesitance was taken as an opening yet again by one of the six men that had accompanied you. "We're not going to take long, just a quick in-and-out visit" Sigric's gaunt face showed all the signs of his youth as he gave one of the women a charming grin.
She blushes slightly and glances at her other two partners. "Well… if you promise to be quick and be vigilant…."
"We won't let Asavar out of sight." Well, that was slightly presumptive of him: she did not even say your name. For all he knew, she could be talking about the man who walked in yelling about small penises.
The fact she gave a relieved smile as he gestured at you might have indicated he was right that she was solely worried about you, but that was just a lucky guess.
"He's in the surgery tent, the middle left one." She clarifies as a moment of confusion spreads among you. You nod and then glance at the rest of your… posse? Crew? Gang?
Calling them your men all the time was weird, but this was probably not the time for this. Especially as the fact you were in what amounted to a hospital in these parts registered, along with the fact the other six had just come out the other end of a meat grinder, and Rule's cheek wound was likely far from the only injury.
"Good, I'll go see him; the six of you wait here and get examined." Immediately both Sigric and the woman - who had been making eyes at Sigric - whirled on you.
"I made a promise"/" I only told you where Bochkarer was because I thought he would be watching you." They stumble over each other, Sigric cutting himself off as he realises what is happening.
"You." You point at the woman. "Should have thought about that before telling me then." She fumes wordlessly for a moment, giving you an honestly very intimidating glare, and you are very thankful to have the excuse of looking at Sigric to look away from it. "And you just came out the better side of an undead horde. A dozen to one isn't the odds you walk away from uninjured."
"You.. you just came from the same place." He protests to a roll of your eyes.
"Yes, but I, One: am built different, and Two: don't have a six-foot-something Norscan telling me what to do." You straighten up to your full height, staring down the six men that had tentatively given you a chance to call brother. "All of you will be examined - now - and I wil-"
Rule's empty boot slamming into the side of your face and snapping your head sideways cuts you off. You pause for a moment, tasting the shock of blood from where your teeth had split your lip, before glancing slowly over to him as he unlaced his other boot.
"You're going to make this difficult on me, aren't you." He glances up at you, green eyes glittering, as he does not pause for a moment unlacing his shoe. You glance over to the rest of them and arch an eyebrow. Hildenmund scoffs, and Manfredo slumps against the doorway, watching. But Gutwin and Sigric step forward.
You give a longer look at Anders, and the man gives you a so-so gesture that just fills you with confidence.
You sigh; going from fanatical half-men to brothers… might have left them with a need for discipline. You bend down, and pick up Rule's boot, testing its weight in your hand.
Then you roll your shoulders, eye the three men, and let a grin spread across your face.
-
With your unruly brothers-in-arms dealt with, you stride into the middle left tent and are greeted by the thick scent of blood and guts. Which was like shit but had more of an inside smell which made it infinitely worse.
Inside, you immediately see Misha buried up to his elbow in some poor bastard's stomach, the barely more than a teen's mouth twisted into an unpleasant frown as he fiddled around inside the man.
"And as if the smell of shit could not get any worse. Whatever frozen hellhole you were raised in yet to discover toilet paper, Norscan?" He does not look up from where he is working on the man, and he blindly fumbles for something behind him as he keeps careful watch. "Stop being useless and hand me the clamp."
You shrug and walk over. You eye the table he had blindly gestured to, filled with what you could only describe as torture implements. "Which one…?"
"The one with the spring stop between the handles." You pick it up, examining the almost scissor-like tool, if not for the metal not being sharpened and the slight curve to it. You hand it over to him.
"You know, usually when you can smell someone's guts, it's a lost cause." He takes the tool and ignores you as he starts shuffling around to find the right angle. Just when you were convinced he was going to just ignore you full stop, he started speaking.
"Usually, a perforated intestine is normally death for whatever idiot gets stabbed in the gut; if the wrong shit mixes with blood, you're gone, but.." He trails off, and for the first time, he glances up at you. More specifically, your hands. "Get over here."
Maybe on another day, when you were not approaching Misha for something, you would tell him to fuck off. As it was, you carefully approached the much smaller boy. You eye the insides of the unconscious man as they become visible to you, a squishy mess of flesh and not-quite flesh that makes you shiver to look at. "Carefully reach into there, and hold exactly where I'm holding. Not too tight; if it starts moving, you're fucking up."
You reach in and slowly close your hand around the tube he had been holding, and immediately something sick bubbles up in your throat, and you feel your face go green. You knew what intestines felt like, and these felt like they were wrapped around something disturbingly solid. "Is that…"
"His actual faeces wrapped in his intestine? Yes. I've spent the last ten minutes physically squeezing it away from the wound. Poor fuck's guts are never going to be the same, so congratulations, you're most likely holding that man's last solid shit. Now hold it right there while I stitch this back up." He sets about working with quick, precise movements, and considering it was the only thing distracting you from what you were holding, you scrutinised him.
There was almost a sense of ease as Misha went to work that the teenager was usually lacking, the harsh livewire edge he usually teetered on relaxing away underneath the simple motions behind what seemed to be an overall very complex procedure. As he finishes off his stitching, tying it into a tight bow, he glances you up and down. "Now, shitholder, you can let go of the shit and tell me why the fuck you're here."
"Maybe it's for your lovely company." You withdraw your hand from the inside of the man, grimacing at the strange fluids and muck coating it. Misha, for his part, just gives you an unimpressed look. "Maybe I was really curious where you got all these nice tents."
"They're father's merchant tents. He was always a fan of the idea of `if a village doesn't have a market square, bring one'" He walks over to a pot standing at the side of the tent, picks up a kettle and pours steaming water over his hands with barely a grunt. "Now tell me the actual reason, or fuck off. I still have another half a dozen surgeries, and a dozen more still in critical condition, and I won't have my first death be because some Norscan fuck-wit bothering me."
You pause for a moment, the sheer outpouring of emotion and care at odds with what you knew of the bratty Bochkarer son. You honestly expected to come here to find the boy complaining about people having the temerity to die near him and only doing the bare minimum.
An almost fiercely territorial bent towards the lives of his patients was practically the opposite of that.
[] Rosmalen and Herminia nearly put the existence of the entire town at risk.
If it was not for luck, the huntsmen's scavenging, and you, the town would have had the Undead spill uncontained into the streets. That was not acceptable. You wanted his support in bringing the other two to task.
[] Rosmalen tried to kill you, and let dozens more men die than needed to die.
Herminia's failure could be incompetence, but Rosmalen's actions struck you as actively putting political aims above the existence of Meissen. Maybe between the two of you, you could bring Rosmalen down without the town devolving into a bloody civil war.
[] Rosmalen may have put the town at risk, but for now he is near unassailable. Herminia, not so much.
Rosmalen's position as the leader of the only professional force in the town meant that any plan of dislodging him had forty nine problems with it. Herminia's position however, has already been weakened by the lack of trade moving through the town, and the courts being suspended. Bringing her down, and trying to centralise her powers under the two of you could provide a base to work away at Rosmalen with.
[] The triad that the three of them had going on was not tenable. Try and get Misha in on a longer term partnership that would break up the current power dynamic entirely.
Getting Misha to help you bring one, or two of the others to task was all well and good, but unless Izek was feeling particularly murderous when he woke up, the political situation of Meissen would just rebalance itself between the three of them. Shaking that up long term, would require a long term understanding between you and Misha.
A/N Much easier update, less emotions all round if a bit foul mouthed. Getting in Misha's head just sort of puts me in that headframe. I strongly recommend considering what this vote will mean for the future vote dealing with Herminia and later Rosmalen coming up. If you tell Misha you want to do something here, and bait and switch him with other votes, then it is very unlikely he will just roll with it. But even that might be something you could take advantage of. Maybe.
Lets call it an hour and a half moratorium.
Last edited:
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Are the options going from hardest to easiest?
You are ignoring content by this member.
Show ignored content
While the options do have varying difficulty, they're not necessarily hardest to easiest.
DamnedAeons 187
An Ally of Convenience is an Enemy of Opportunity
- Location
- Texas
@Minyette06 Is this going to change who we voted to confront in front of the council?
You are ignoring content by this member.
Show ignored content
No. If you voted to focus on Herminia in this circumstance, you and Misha would privately confront her to pressure her, before you confront Rosmalen yourself in front of the council. Where you would have no agreement tacit or otherwise for Misha's support, but maybe if you play your cards right you could "trade up" for Herminia's support, and put Misha in a situation where he has to support you or find himself on the out group.
Or he decides to reward you using him to 'collect' Herminia with allying with Rosmalen. Or he stays neutral, and lets the three of you duke it out.
Very many possibilities.
- Location
- yorkshire
make this cart its a bit morden
I think appealing to Misha's sympathy is a non-starter. He doesn't like us, and could give less of a shit about what happens to us. And yet, Rosmalen needs to be brought to heel in one way or another. My thought is try and hammer out an alliance between Misha, Herminia and ourselves to do exactly that.
[X] Rosmalen tried to kill you, and let dozens more men die than needed to die.
[X] Rosmalen tried to kill you, and let dozens more men die than needed to die.
Asavar is familiar with buses? Ha! And they teased us for being a Northron bumpkin!
- Location
- New York
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Rosmalen tried to kill you, and let dozens more men die than needed to die.