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Praetor Ruslan Gildal

Praetor Ruslan Gildal

Son of Kadir
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BRUTTAEUM, CAMPANIA
NORTHEAST OF GILD​


With fury and speed did the Gildans descend in ambush upon the convoy. They emerged from their places of hiding among the forested hills, common in the land of Bruttaeum, and Ruslan Gildal, the leader of the Gildan ambush, gave the war cry of "REGELISHAH!" as he and his fellow Gildans ran down the hill. Shock overwhelmed the Bruttites on the path, armed soldiers serving their Tyrant King Brutus, and they scrambled to mount a hasty defense. But daring won the day, as crossbow bolts from shadows unseen assailed the Bruttites before even Ruslan and his men could clash into the melee. The Bruttites, fearing attack from all sides, were thrown into disarray, and the Gildan soldiers cut them down to the last man.

Overcast skies overhead blocked the light of the sun in a thick gray blanket, and, to Ruslan's reckoning, such a thing was apropos for the land of Bruttaeum. Bruttaeum was nothing if not a land of slavery, the wretched practice flaunted and indulged by the Tyrant King. Brutus himself was a formidable sorcerer, and had through his secret arts lived for many centuries. As such, he exclusively preferred his slaves to be of elven heritage, and he engaged in covert trade with slavers from across the world to import fresh "chattel" from afar. Men from Cerak At'Thul, the Empire of Amol-Kalit, and even some Orcs from the Blightlands, all he enticed with profit and power to serve him in his Tyranny, and these men now dead upon the path were of that number.

Ruslan had taken a small number of brave Gildans with him for this mission: only thirty, so as best to keep a low profile, while still having the manpower to overwhelm the Bruttites. His aim was to rescue a captured Gildan elf, who had been kidnapped from the Jemaat, and was believed to be held in this very convoy.

Ruslan cleaned the blood from his axe, and then holstered it on his belt. "Fine work," he said to his soldiers. "Regel watches over us this day." And to this came a round of agreement, Gildans each in their turn replying with "Evet," many with enthusiasm and vigor, some with solemnity (one day, perhaps, all Bruttaeum would be liberated).

The convoy was a small one. Two wagons, the front wagon carrying supplies for the Bruttites, and the second, Ruslan presumed, carrying the prisoner. The Bruttites, scarcely able to be called men for the barbarity they regularly displayed, had been transporting their prisoner in a wooden box, vaguely coffin-shaped, with but a hole here and a hole there such that the prisoner could breathe.

One of the Gildan crossbowmen secured the key from the fallen Bruttite Slavemaster. He tossed it to Ruslan, and Ruslan caught it. He jumped then onto the second wagon. With the key in the lock he gave it a twist and the latch clicked. And then Ruslan threw open the lid.

But who lay inside...was not the Gildan elf Ruslan and his men were looking for.

"Who...are you?"
 
Light fell on her olive features, and she blinked against the sudden flood of in the place of darkness. The young woman did not immediately move as her saviors stared at what they had rescued. Not what they wanted to find, clearly. She stared in silence at them, unmoving and unsure as to the nature of this particular trick.

There was always a trick, another game.


Her heart thundered in its cage of bone. It might burst free and save her yet.

After a fashion. She would rather die than go back to Summer. Anything was better than being merely a plaything to callous immortals that were just as likely to break their toy as to let her live. Broken flesh was hardly as painful as a broken mind.

She wasn't sure that she hadn't been shattered and was too far gone to know it.

The mountain air was dry and cold, the scent of pine and the bitter bite of old snow thick. Its bite at her throat as she puffed and panted, kicking up scree and branches as she pounded down the alpine path. Somewhere behind her were a posse of men on horseback. Many had dismounted and all of them stalked her in the silence of professionals. No ordinary cutthroats, these.

The only reason she had eluded them thus far was simply because the various paths through the forested mountains were not friendly to riders. She was fairly nimble anyway and had slipped their grasp. She was as silent as a rabbit, too, zig-zagging along twisting paths that wove through the slender boles of towering firs and over stony shoulders of ridges. Only the snap of her cloak in the wind of her passage marked her passage; the occasional clatter of chipped stone when she scrambled up steep slopes.

I won't go back. I won't. Her features were grim, dark eyes wild with fear. She could feel the comforting weight of the knifes at her waist and the lute on her back. One of those things would do nothing to help her. Neither would, actually; there were a dozen of them and one of her. She was confident in herself but there were limits to human capability.

There was no way she could face off a dozen.

She slipped round a pile of fallen trees from some long-ago landslide and gasped as rough hands gripped her arm and pulled her round.

"Ho there, girl!" The man pulled her up onto her tippy toes, features hard. No gloating, no leering - just business. She went to drive a knee into his groin and he adroitly turned aside, twisting her arm. "Now, now, there'll be none of that."

He spun her round such that the instrument fell from her back as the strap that held it snapped. In a quick and efficient motion drove a gloved fist into her sternum. Her breath left her in a single whoosh and the world spun.

"Can't damage the goods. They were very adamant about..."

The world faded to grey, then black.


Dark eyes regarded the armed Gildans. She had sat up, but she had not moved from where she had been held captive. Alleria tentatively felt in front her as if expecting to find wood against her fingers. When nothing brushed their tips, she pinched herself hard.

"What are you?" she asked quietly after staring at the man who spoke for an uncomfortably long time. She did not offer him her name.

Names were dangerous things in the wrong hands.
 
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Ruslan glanced back at one of the men with him, Kaan (a dependable and veteran Career Soldier, who volunteered for every levy in his lifetime, and who needed no convincing to join with him). Kaan, judging by the bemused expression, heard the same question Ruslan himself had heard: what are you? A strange thing to ask, even in a place as bespeckled with a multitude of races like Alliria, for many were already known.

"We are Gildan," Ruslan said, taking her question to be more one of nationality than anything else. "This surprise fortune is still yours, but...we were expecting these men to be transporting an elf."

"Ruslan-gazi," called a man from the front wagon. "This cart won't fare through the trackless paths."

"Move it from the road, and hide it as best you can in that gully yonder. Toss the bodies into the gully as well. But take the supplies and the horses."

And then he turned his attention to the woman once more.

"How did you come into the Bruttites' custody?"

Alleria
 
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"Gildan..," she said in her low voice. Perhaps she had heard of such a thing before. A place? It was difficult to recall what was real and what was not after so long spent among creatures that played with her mind as she played with a lute or a violin.

She sat a little straighter, looking round. Where was her instrument? Her lips drew into a thin line as they danced across the wagon bed, then at the men gathered round. A trace of unease etched itself across her smooth features. "I am not an elf," she said in the same tone as someone saying that the sky was blue. She ran a hand through the tangled mess of her hair and looked down at herself. She was in a slave's shift, coarse woven wool that hung off her like a sack.

A look of panic crossed her face as Ruslan spoke, and she made to get up. She had been cramped in that box for a long while, though, and sat down quite heavily from the sudden swimming in her head. "Wait," she mumbled. "They might have put my things on that wagon."

She had no idea what a Bruttite was. She had no idea where she was and still had no idea what these Gildans were. They might have been what they appeared to be - men and women. They did not have the look of fae about them, nor the stink of glamour either. But then...that was just it, wasn't it?

Tricks and more tricks.

"What elf is worth killing all of these men to rescue?" She didn't want to admit that carelessness had brought her to her current circumstance. She also didn't trust these soldiers, either. The poison of mistrust was a hard one to shake.

She moved to stand again and wavered on the brink of falling again.
 
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The woman's wits needed time to regroup—as one might expect. Denied the sunlight, denied good air even, the Bruttites' callous treatment had left her disoriented, and Regel knew what else. But, cognizant enough was she to recognize what was going on with the wagon, and alarm swept across her features.

When she made her plea, Ruslan looked back up and toward the Gildan soldiers already at work unloading the supplies and freeing the horses from their bridles. "Hold for a moment on the wagon," Ruslan called to them, and, though somewhat puzzled, the soldiers nevertheless stopped.

If her possessions were indeed among the Bruttites' spoils, then she would be entitled to them. The rest—from the horses to the gear to the valuables—Ruslan intended to sell once back in Gild, and to pay out the dividends to the men who had answered his call. Bravery deserved reward.

The woman had another question, but such was the unsteadiness with which she displayed in her attempt to rise that Ruslan first held out his hands, making ready to catch her should she teeter this way or that. "Easy, now, easy."

He didn't need to say that she looked unwell, for, by Regel, he was certain that she felt unwell.

And as for her question, Ruslan answered, "She is a fellow citizen of Gild, one of the Jemaat, and that alone is enough for us."

Against tenfold Bruttites would Ruslan have gone to battle, if it could mean, with Regel's help, the rescue of their countrywoman, to save her from injustice and spare her the cruelty of slavery.

Alleria
 
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She shook her head in response to the answer. She was not violent by nature - music and singing and other forms of art were her natural talents. She could not understand the desire to rob another of their lives.

Of course, that had been before being treated like less than a thinking being. Even chattel slaves had their dignity, but to the immortal faeries she had been little more than a curiosity. A bird in a cage - something less than human and there to be admired like a piece of art.

Unwittingly, her fists clenched until the skin went pale. She blinked and looked at them and then loosed them. She let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "Yes, well," she said in that quiet voice and then clambered over the side of her prison. No one had come for her when she had been swept away.

She fell against the frame of the wagon as she jumped off the wagon. Her face seemed serene enough, but there was an edge to her features. Hysteria or terror lie but the thickness of her skin, buried so shallow that it showed through here and there if one knew where to look. "I'll be fine," she said as Ruslan moved to help her. She wouldn't be fine, but he didn't need to know that. "If you're not one of.... one of them, it'll be fine." A pause, a few steps toward the wagon. "It'll be fine," she said again as though trying to convince herself.

Her eyes roamed over the other wagon, looking for her instrument. She could find other knives, but her lute was...where was it?
 
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Ruslan jumped down from the second wagon after the woman. Perhaps it was a point of pride to stand unaided so long as she was able, and in this sentiment Ruslan could find no fault. Yet hopefully, whatever the depths of her disorientation, it would not prove the better and cause her to take a tumble.

If you're not one of.... one of them, it'll be fine.

Again she talked strangely. As before, in asking what they were instead of who they were, now came the peculiar worry so expressed.

He walked and talked. "We are not Bruttites, nor some other people on friendly terms with them. We are who we say we are, and play at no deception. Indeed, a costly ruse this would have been, if it were so." Though hardly would Ruslan put it past the Tyrant King, or any other Campanian nation of similarly lacking scruples, to kill their own if such would serve some desired end.

At the first wagon, a man on top, Erdrim, was busy performing a quick inventory of the Bruttites' items.

"Do you see anything strange, Erdrim?"

Sharp of mind and keen of eye, the lanky Erdrim gave a quick nod and said, "Most of it's to be expected. I haven't looked over everything yet, but have a look at this." And he tossed a pouch to Ruslan.

Who caught it and opened it. And his brows furrowed.

"It's not any currency I've seen," said Erdrim.

"Nor I," said Ruslan, peering into the pouch and at the odd coins therein. He'd seen many different forms of coinage used in Campania, and this looked like none of them. Either these Bruttites had taken this pouch from somewhere, or had been paid in this foreign currency.

He glanced to Alleria, the only one who might possibly know anything of them. "Are these yours?"

Alleria
 
Her eyes roamed over the wagon ever more frantically. It wasn't there. Her lute wasn't there, and they had taken it from her when they took her. It wasn't much, but it was hers. It was special, it was...

She clutched at her head and staggered as pain lanced through her brow. The pain struck as Ruslan and his companion picked up the pouch with its coins. She almost recoiled from the sack as though it were a rattlesnake, her face blanching.

"Keep that away from me," she rasped as she backed away from the pouch. "Can't you smell their stink? That-"

She pressed her hand to her eyes. Stink wasn't the right word; it was more than that, a spectral reek like ghosts rotting in a moldering house. At the same moment, something pulsed from her and washed outwards. When it touched the pouch, the silver and the copper inside it turned to wood, and the leather turned to uncured, half-rotten hide. The glamor shattered at the touch of the null that had awakened... well, sometime near the end of her captivity.

"Everything the faeries touch is poison," she spit in a ragged voice, swaying on her feet. "I don't.... I can't..." She swallowed hard and dropped her hands to her sides, looking at the gathered men with bloodshot, wild eyes. "Where is my lute?" She asked instead.

She looked as though she were on the edge of flight, torn between escaping and the desperation to find anyone - anyone at all - that could break her chains. Reassure her that the nightmare was over.
 
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A foul magic, whose heart beat with malice and whose intent brimmed with deception. The ruse through some means fell away—no, that wasn't right, was it? Not through some means, for the timing of the woman's reaction, her words, and the collapse of the disguising curtain were all too tightly bound. And she spoke with knowledge of the matter, repulsed even before the truth was revealed, even as the Gildan soldiers who saw it were to a man surprised, and murmured sacred verses, or spat on the ground (a specific Gildan gesture expressing disgust at Chaotic magic).

Ruslan tossed the unclean thing to the ground, vile hide and wood chips and all.

Erdrim spat into his gloved hands rather than on the ground and rubbed them together, lamenting, "I can't believe I touched that thing."

Ruslan paid him no mind. Far more dire was this matter if the Fae were involved. Elusive, deceptive, preferring to prey on the vulnerable rather than the strong, Chaos had in them some of its most fell servants. Where Praetors stood a fighting chance against their glamours, those without such powers contended in a grossly uneven contest.

But hardly was this woman here mundane. Can't you smell their stink, she said. Could it be that she was a Detector of sorts?

Yet such questions—or any substantial question really—would at present deflect off of her like an arrow hitting a shield's boss. Her eyes flared like those of a cornered cat, and her body was poised much the same.

"You look as though you will at any moment fall faint," Ruslan said, slow and measured, one hand raised as a sort of peace offering. "Perhaps you should sit, and we will search for your lute."

Ruslan without breaking eye contact with her snapped his fingers back at some of the soldiers. One, in particular. "Kaan. Water, please."

And Kaan approached and took out his waterskin from his small pack and handed it to Ruslan.

"Are you thirsty?" he said to her.

Alleria
 
She eyed him and the others warily. She did not sit, nor did she move to do so. The abuse endured over the last many days - a stretch of time with no frame of reference, no day or night - took its toll. Stubborn pride and fear kept her from admitting that she was at an extremity that she had no recollection of being before.

She searched his dark eyes with her own. There did not seem to be any deception in them. Even so, she remembered. The games the fae played, cruel and heartless.

She stared at the offered skin with deep suspicion. The animal want in her eyes betrayed her desire, though; she had been fed and watered less by these captors than the ones she was fleeing from. The faeries wanted their victims alive - for the most part - and so tended them as they would any other pet. The Brutites, as this man called them only cared that she stayed alive enough.

Enough to collect a pay day.

"I will stand," she said in a voice laced with mistrust. "Are you really real? Am I awake or dreaming?" She shook her head to dispel the fog of exhaustion and hunger and thirst and failed to do any of those things. "If I am awake, it has been too long...too long."

Her eyes followed the waterskin.
 
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Well.

The War College taught Quaestors, those young and aspiring Praetors-to-be, many a subject, the core concepts of philosophy being one of them. And here this woman, afflicted by her misfortune at the hands of Fae and Bruttites, presented quite the conundrum. How exactly could Ruslan persuade her that he was real, that she was not dreaming, and that no other deception was afoot? Her perspective lay in tatters, her very experience of the world open wholly to doubt. Anything, truly, that Ruslan could say or do might well be taken as confirmation of that doubt, that dream, of the falsehood of reality. What could a woman do if she thought her eyes, her ears, her fingers and nose and tongue, to be liars all? Madness, one could say, was a destination which had a number of roads leading to it, and she had suffered being dragged along one such path. Poor thing.

As for Ruslan, it was all he could do to maintain a steady mien and persist.

"Too long since what?" he asked.

Alleria
 
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"Since I have been awake," she said earnestly. If faintly. "Free."

She took the waterskin finally, uncorking it and eyeing its contents warily. She sniffed it as if that would warn her of any hidden danger. Having decided suddenly that if these men wanted to harm her there was no need to play at games she drank from it - first cautiously, then with the desperate greed of a survivor in the desert.

She clutched at her belly a moment as a cramp took her, staggered back a step. Remained on her feet with her eyes locked firmly on Ruslan's. "Is this Summer? Are we...playing?" She shuddered at the last word involuntarily. "If it is and we are, I will run again. You can't stop me," she said in a rush.

If they were Summer, she wouldn't escape again. Bravado was all well and good, but in reality there were mortals and then immortals and there was little comparison between them. Her eyes cut to the others, hoping from the well-worn wood and string of her instrument, and then back again.
 
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Ruslan glanced back at Kaan, and he read in his fellow-soldier's gaze the same thing he himself thought. Playing? A baffling notion, at least in the first reckoning with it. But Ruslan supposed it was well within the ambit of the Fae to make sport of their torments, for they viewed all who were not Fae as lesser. This was their supreme arrogance, unrivaled in its depth, and yet but one source of their callous deeds against the peoples of Arethil.

He looked back to her.

"You are free to go at any time, if that is what you choose. We did not free you with the intent of placing you in fetters of our own."

Most of the Gildan soldiers still busied themselves with moving the bodies (and dispossessing them of valuables—undamaged armor pieces, sidearms, coin pouches). Time remained, yes, but its march was relentless. Ruslan loathed the idea of leaving the woman to her chances in Bruttite territory, but if he couldn't convince her that her best fortune lay with the Gildans, then their paths would part. He surmised that, in large part, she would have to convince herself of this.

"All I can do is to tell you that we of Gild despise the Fae. They are creatures of Chaos, unholy beings in the view of Regel and Jura, and theirs is a menace not merely to Gild or Campania, but to the vast expanse of all Arethil."

Alleria
 
"That is...good to hear," she said. They said they would not hold her against her will. She believed this man, too, even if she did not know why. A certain sixth sense, a woman's intuition - who could say? All she could say for certain was she was not in a box anymore, and nothing terrible was currently happening to her.

She took a step toward the other wagon while keeping one eye on the Gildan. "They are evil," she said. She was not herself a religious person. What faith could she have in anything when they had cast her to the wolves and left her there to rot for...

She wavered a moment, dizziness washing over her. How long had it been? The past was a blur. Not empty - she could remember playing music in a courtyard clear as day while beautiful, terrible creatures glided like ships across the sea, occasionally stopping to listen and admire her. Like a colorful bird, not like another thinking, feeling being. There was just no beginning. And endless procession of...

She shuddered again. "Evil. I do not know what or who Regel is or Jura for that matter," she said in the same quiet and inflectionless voice, "but they cannot be too evil themselves to view the fair folk as such."

She caught a familiar shape in the bed. The slender and elegant curve of the neck was just visible beneath a canvas thrown over the back. She didn't wait to get permission or even ask; she scurried over to it and threw back the cover, entirely careless of whatever other treasures may be there.

She picked the instrument up and held it in her hands as only one who is long accustomed to it would. "Even evil can bring good things round, though," she said. Not quite a gift, the lute had come from her captors.
 
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"The Gods of Order have that power, to take what appears to be an evil to mortal men and bend it to their divine purpose, if such is their will," said Ruslan by way of agreement. The closing parable of The Testimonies, the holy book of Jura, Ruslan held as his favorite, for it implored the faithful never to lose hope, and assured one of the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Evil, in the end, was far too meek to overpower good, no matter how strong and pervasive it might appear.

Ruslan turned from the sight of the woman and her lute and said to Kaan, "Take some men and dispose of the second wagon. We'll need to move soon."

Kaan snapped a hand to his heart and nodded in crisp response, a fine Gildan salute. "It will be done, Ruslan-gazi."

Ruslan looked back to the woman; certainly the discovery of her lute had uplifted her spirits. For all that she had endured, the likes of which Ruslan could only imagine, the lute centered her, brought her back to Arethil one could even say. And this boded well. If it had been the aim to the Summer Fae to break this woman, driving her to madness for their own amusement, then their efforts now met with failure.

"Let me introduce myself," he said to her then. "I am Ruslan Gildal, a Praetor of Gild. You are welcome to travel with us, if you like. But know that our business in Bruttaeum is not yet done."

Alleria
 
She plucked a handful of notes on the lute with a practiced hand. It was a soothing tune, if short, and served to smooth the raw edges and bring her back from the edge of madness. A little closer to who she was, a little further from the trauma inflicted on her.

"I am but a wandering gleewoman," she said in that soft voice. She would not give her name, not until she was sure. Until she was sure. This man was bold to give her his name - if that was actually his name - even if she could do nothing with it. She had neither the wiles nor the inclination to weave the mischief the Fair Folk could with such a morsel. She picked up the soothing melody again, light and airy and quiet as the woman herself. "I ...owe you, for freeing me," she said and only stumbled a moment. Tricks and lies, lies and tricks. No, they were not weaving some deception to gain some leverage. Some advantage.

What would be the point? There were more than a dozen of them and only one of her; they could overpower her easily.

Her song drifted airily among them. "What would you have of me?" Frail-seeming, malnourished and mistreated, she did not cut an imposing figure.
 
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"Nothing more than what you are willing and able to offer," said Ruslan. "I mean not to conscript you, but merely to advise you, that so long as we remain in Bruttaeum our perils are shared. Our aim is the rescue of our countrywoman, and we shall try at this until it is done or until necessity demands our retreat. But there is hope yet. And if you can contribute to that hope, we will be grateful, most of all our fellow Gildan spared from the cruelty of slavery. A kindness received is worth a kindness given, no?"

The woman might not make for an extra axe among the soldiers, but there were other means by which she could aid them. Perhaps more important than another blade could be the seeming skill she had: for if Bruttaeum flirted with the Fae here, it stood to reason they might have done so elsewhere, even in the convoy carrying the captured Gildan elf. And if this woman could sense their presence, their trickery, their illusions and deceptions, if such were present?

Invaluable.

Alleria
 
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She hummed an accompaniment to the tune she plucked out of her instrument, head cocked to one side as she listened to the soldier.

"None should endure as I have," she said quietly, her fingers stopping and leaving an aching silence in its wake. "I know not of Gild, but I do not need to. You might not have snatched me from the clutch of masked miscreants, but you did none-the-less." The manner of speech was almost a song in and of itself; as she built confidence the strength of her words grew, even if she quiet. She was as well-spoken as a noble-born.

Not surprising, if she were a traveling songstress and teller of tales.

She moved to join the soldiery, something of the grace that she must display evident in her movements. A handful of meals and some fresh air, and she might fill out a bit. The almost dance-like quality of her movements would surely become sure and steady. She adjusted the threadbare hood so that it shadowed her face a little more, and resumed the upbeat play of fingers across strings, humming along with it. "Did any of you find my knives?"

She offered a shy smile within the shadows of her hood. Light music hid the anger that had sparked inside, though. At the thought of others being captured and beaten and worse. The thoughts made that smile fade.
 
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