Private Tales A Pair of Survivors

A private roleplay only for those invited by the first writer
Volker

Volker

The Man of a Thousand Souls
Member
Messages
271
Character Biography
Link
Volker favored the slums. They were claustrophobic and dark, and guards tended to avoid the area. The filth masked his scent, and the scents of his activities. An older gentleman might be ignored as a beggar or clever thief.

Volker was neither.

Some thieves thought to trail him, thinking him lost, but when they got a good look at his figure they wisely abdicated that course of action. While Volker was bald, older and graying, he had the muscles of an ox and the bright blue eyes of a hunting cat. If they were too greedy or unobservant to see that, the knife roll around one thigh definitely was a cause for alarm. The blades were hilted in human bone, most intact enough to identify at a distance. Mainly the large femur blade tipped in an intimidating ball joint.

Volker moved like a cat. Oor wouldn’t fetch him until there was a job to do, which meant he essentially had to provide for himself. The slums were a great place to do that. He wasn’t here for the scraps behind pubs and inns. He was here for the people who sought such scraps.

He found a good spot. The pub here set out food for the beggars, possibly out of kindness. Volker sniffled at it. Going old. Possibly a bowl poured from several other patrons who hadn’t finished their meals. Edible, but the flavor was questionable.

Volker snorted at the congealed mess, and waited. A young man scurried over to the bowl, and looked around. Perfect. Volker lunged. Not with a knife, but his teeth closed around the other man’s throat and pulled him into a dark corner, like a great cat protecting a meal. He held on, tight. The man gurgled, kicked and scrabbled at him, but Volker was patient. He kept his pressure, squeezed his eyes shut, and waited for the struggling to die down. He shook him experimentally. Good.
 
  • Yay
Reactions: Maranae
Night was not her favorite time of day, for all that she could see in the darkness as well as a cat. The gangely-framed youth moved through dark streets, unseen by the thieves and cutthroats. Of course, had they seen her they would not likely have paid her much noticed. She had been prowling around Elbion for the better part of eight months, and all the more intrepid thieves had learned one of many things.

The first was that the girl was fast. Unbelievably fast, capable of outpacing the best runners yet. Secondly, she had nothing of value on her. The clothes she wore were ragged leaving picked up from the streets, discarded by the people of the city or otherwise stolen from lines. They did not fit her scarecrow farm well, and were filthy to the point of being able to stand up on their own.

Lastly, to the very few unfortunate souls that managed to catch her and had other ideas about what to do with a girl her age...well, she was quite strong. The broken bodies were found later, and the city watch had already given up trying to figure out their cause. The dead had ceased being found after a few.

And so the feral child ran the streets, interacting minimally with the people. They were humans, and she was quite clearly not. Eyes that shifted from green to yellow, catlike things; scaled forearms that gleamed in any light, which - if and or when she went unclothed despite anyones concept of decency - also spread across her back between her shoulderblades and down to her tailbone, and gleamed across her chest and belly. Her incisors were long, much longer than any humans and they impacted her ability to speak. In so much as she did.

She had been all over the city, looking and looking for something she could not find. Something she could not really remember. Her mother and her father, neither of which she could recall; her home, of which she remember even less of. A faint memory, just the ghost of something right at the tip of recollection. Sometimes, late in the night as she lay curled in the rainy darkness, she wept for the things she could not remember. For the humanity - she thought it was humanity - that had been lost. Except she could scarcely understand what she had lost - home, family, humanity - and so these periods of disconsolate sorrow came and went without any real impact, imparting only confusion.

Maranae had been confused for so long. And the sad thing was that she did not understand what the confusion was about, which only served to make it even worse.

Something caught her attention. She had been slinking through another part of the slums, without any real place in mind to go. It was close to time for sleeping, but she was not of a mind to sleep tonight. Something was tense, something in the air. Like so many things, Mara was driven by instinct more than she was by logic or reason.

A sound. The sound of struggling, of someone fighting? Mara slowed in her forward progress, eyes peering into the darkness, seeking the source of the sound, and of the unnamed feeling, somewhere between apprehension and curiosity.
 
Volker shook the body again, and crunched down. Well, if he hadn’t been dead before, he was now. He released the man’s throat and knelt, hitching him up and over his shoulder. Hunting here was work. He’d have to clean him, carefully, and see what sort of food he could glean. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, and Volker had learned a long time ago not to turn up his nose at meat of the human variety.

He shifted his burden more comfortably along his shoulder, and grabbed the corpse’s thigh to keep him steady. Volker eyed the area, quiet. Waiting. While he didn’t expect interruptions, he also didn’t want to temp fate. Guards were strange about creatures like him. Men who made men disappear and reappear in pieces.

Volker stepped forward and paused, lifting his head and flaring his nostrils. A tiny fragment of scent. Not filth or the corpse on his shoulder. Something different. He snorted the smell out of his nose and shook his head. He carried the man to a refuse pile and laid him down.

He could at least strip him here, and take out the inedibles. Intestines, genitals, most of the head, hands and feet. He worked quickly, using his victim’s rags to keep his kill off the filthy stone. Blood would disappear just as fast as cleanliness in this place. While he had his back turned, his ears were still listening.

“You may come out now.” He called experimentally.
 
Words, but words were seldom enough to draw her out of her shell. At least, not quickly. Mara hung back in the shadows, her eyes - shining yellow like a cats' at this point - the only thing that was visible.

She studied the figure before her. She was not what one would call a connoisseur of the human condition, but even so the thing before her was...off. She was not a particularly spiritual (or particularly person) person, and was not attuned to discerning such things as that about a person. But she could smell blood, sharp and old, about him. Some human, some other species. And...something that was out of place, inexplicable to the feral child.

She cocked her head to one side, crouching low. "Mara may, but she does not want," she replied in a low whisper. There was still many paces between the two of them, more than enough to give her a clean escape if whatever this human-not-human proved to be a threat. Maranae despised fighting, but she was capable of standing up for herself when it came to it. Blessedly few events like that had ever happened, and the ones that had were hazy in her recollection, as though remembered through a red fog.
 
Volker listened. He was quiet and stock still, the only thing moving his chest as he breathed. Then, a reply. Someone was there. By the sound of it, a child. If this child wasn’t afraid that he’d just butchered another human...he looked at the corpse, tilting his head in the direction she’d spoken from.

“If you have come to the food you are welcome to it. It has half chewed potatoes in it. But if you wish a better meal, come with me.” Volker told the voice. He stood and slung the corpse back over his shoulders, letting her see it in the low light. Letting her see blood drip down, and identify it properly. Would she run?

Or would she, much like himself, be curious?

Volker waited, his eyes sweeping back and forth in the darkness to try and get an idea of where she was. He wouldn’t kill her; he had enough food and he didn’t kill unless he was hungry or fighting. He was, as he stood now, harmless. If she ran, he would not stop her. But he was offering her food, and possibly protection.
 
She could see quite clearly in the darkness, and saw the body. A human body. Maranae did not kill people, not unless they gave her no choice. She did not slaughter them for food, and had never eaten their nor did she have any desire to. She only went for meat in stalls, when she was in the city, and when in the country it was cattle, sheep, deer, or anything else that was not fast enough to escape her.

But never human. In fact, among all the things she had seen since escaping a year prior, she had never found anything that deliberately fed on the flesh of sapient beings. It caused a certain disquiet in her, to even consider it. She did not trust people, and outright hated some of them...but not like this.

"No people," she said. Her words were impeded by her teeth which, like many aspects of her physical appearance, seemed to change at random. Longer, shorter, not present at all; her fangs, claws in hands and feet, her changing eyes. All of these things could change between one breath and the next without any rhyme or reason, and all hinted at the bestial nature of what she was. A chimera, something crafted with a human base and attributes of animals both mundane and magical, all fused together with high sorcery.

An abomination. Whatever and whoever she had been was gone, replaced by the amalgamation of spare parts and haunting memories disconnected from any part of the life she lived now.

"Why kill people?" The words were filled with open curiosity, but she still remained bathed in shadow, unmoving. "Did they hurt? Why not run away?" Incomprehension of the concept of murder was starkly there in her young voice.
 
Volker had been right. Someone had been watching him, something not entirely human. He listened, carefully. The voice was young, but in a world where nasty things sometimes threw their voices to sound that way...it didn’t mean much. It could be a far greater predator than he in the shadows.

Then questions. Why had he killed this particular person? Why not run? “I need to eat.” He said simply and frankly. Volker was a painfully honest man. He took what he needed, when he needed, and nothing further. He despised waste. “I only kill when I need to. Livestock are missed. They cause people to look, and make people angry. People are more likely to assume a pig has been stolen for food than a man vanishing out of an alley for the same reason.” Volker explained simply.

It was a lesson he’d learned over decades. Steal a chicken and you had eight farmers with crossbows up in arms over what they thought was a coyote. Steal a person no one cared about? Silence.

Volker shifted the burden on his shoulders. “If you wish to share in it, this is not all I eat. But I have not known fae to spurn the taste of human flesh. You are unusual in that. If you mean to harm me, I am more dangerous than I appear. I would prefer not to fight you, however.” He told the voice. He wasn’t so foolish as to put his back to it, so he backed out of the alleyway and waited for her.
 
She could offer no wisdom to counter his words, not that she had much by way of wisdom, anyway. She was a child, twice a child; once human, now inhuman and in either case she had been young. She also had a great deal of difficulty in following what it was he was saying; her vocabulary was quite limited to start with, and the words he was using were a step above the commoners in any case. She did not know what this fae was he spoke of, but that was unimportant.

"Harm? Mara does not like fighting," she said. She crept forward, curiosity compelling her more than anything else. She was not particularly hungry at the moment; she had managed to run down a deer a few days before and in a feat that was uniquely her, consume the entire thing. She came out of shadow, light gleaming on the exposed scales of her arms, revealing the scrawny girl she was to the stranger. Claws appeared and vanished on feet and hands - appeared, to say, not being unsheathed and retracted. Simply there one moment, gone the next.

She slipped forward a few steps, eyes gleaming i nthe pale light of the evening. She seemed alert in the same way a cat might be, wary of sudden movement. "Mara never wants to fight," she repeated.
 
Volker waited patiently for her to come forward. He was stock still, his eyes roving until they caught sight of her and held. She definitely wasn’t human. She had claws and teeth, a huntress of a different sort. Mara, she said her name was.

“You do not want to fight? And yet you are here, in the toughest part of the city.” Volker looked at her. “I can teach you to use those teeth of yours. Those claws, as well.”

Volker inclined his head a bit toward her, flaring his nostrils and breathing deep. He wasn’t quick, or given to unpredictable movement. “You need a bath. Come with me.” He turned his back on her, and shifted the burden on his shoulders. He needed to get to his smaller alleyway, something defensible.
 
"I do not want to fight," she repeated just in case he had not heard her the first time. She knew quite well how to use her claws and teeth, but only willingly against creatures she considered to be prey animals. Those animals seemed to be hard wired into her subconscious mind, a product of the many fold animals that had been used in her creation.

And in any case, actually skill had never been needed on her part. She could take hits that would kill a human, and still get back up. And up. And up. The memories of those experiments still kept her awake some nights, like so many other things from that terrible period in her short life.

After a moment of thought, she padded along after him. If nothing else, maybe he would know how to find her parents. Certainly he did not seem to be an immediate threat. "No bath," she said around her teeth, which had visibly lengthened.
 
Volker waited for her to follow, and began to walk. No bath? He turned his head to eye her. She most definitely stank. He snorted derisively; he wouldn’t force her, but he clearly disapproved of her disdain for cleanliness.

He led her to a smaller alleyway. He’d set up camp there. His belongings were rather sparse, but he’d scrubbed the alleyway clean. Buckets of water hauled or stolen had scrubbed away years of grime from the stone, at least enough that he could put down a bedroll without fearing lice. He’d also pulled up some of the cobbles in places to make a rudimentary fire pit. He added some paper to it to give it new life, and began calmly breaking down the corpse.

“Why are you out here alone?” Volker asked her as he worked, spitting one of the thighs over the fire and stripping the rest to preserve as jerky. A man could last him a while this way, meaning he only needed to scavenge vegetables and fruits.
 
She stopped at the edge of the camp, eyeing the fire burning there with a level of distrust more akin to a wild animal viewing fire than a human. Rather apropos, all things considered.

It was too clean, too. Mara usually made do with any place she could find, without concern for parasites or filth. A warm place was more important, at times, than a clean one, or one that was secluded where she could either defend herself or where it was difficult for others to access her. Makeshift dens were a favorite, and in the city they were hard to come by.

"Mara am looking for her mom and dad," she said slowly. The words 'mom' and 'dad' were spoken as if by someone who didn't really know who or what they were, but the firelight revealed determination reflecting from the eyeshine that allowed her to see in the darkness. "Mara does not know where to look," she added.
 
Volker ate quietly, slicing off bits of the roasting meat with a blade and watching the girl on the other side of the fire. He frowned a bit. She was looking for her parents? Did Chimeras have parents? Either way it was strange to see such a creature shifting through refuse in a major city. He wondered if her parents had been hunted down and killed, or had just dumped her there and vanished. Both were equally possible. He’d killed enough fae in his day to know.

“Is that why you are in the slums? Seeking them?” He asked her. He thought as he put another piece of meat in his mouth and chewed. “My name is Volker. I am a killer for hire, but I am not beyond doing work such as yours. Both require tracking.”
 
She shook her head, filthy locks of red hair shifting as she did so. The question brought about confusion in her mind, which was not entirely surprising. There were vast swathes of her memory that were gone, or little more than atrophied husks of what had once been. Why was she in the slums? What was it that made her think that this would be the place to find her parents?

The trouble was that she did not know. She had an impression, so vague it might have been mere fancy, that her parents had not been poor, and neither had they been rich. She could almost see them if she closed her eyes, ghostly shapes - afterimages from the time before the dark sorcerers had torn her body apart and put it back together in a maelstrom of pain. She could still remember echoes of that pain, not only physical but spiritual as well.

"Mara does not know," she said slowly. She did not come any closer to the fire; she seemed to have little fear of Volker, though. "Mara does not know much," she conceded. "Mara knows her parents live in a...in a...city? Many people." She tilted her head to the other side. For some reason, she did not know if she trusted this man, who ate the flesh of his own kind, to help her find her parents. If it wasn't for the growing desperation to find her place in the world, where she belonged, what and who she was...she wouldn't even entertain the notion. The series of thoughts were shockingly clear and lucid, especially for her.

"Mara...needs to find them. Needs to," she said, the last words ending in a low growl.
 
Volker eyed her. “You do not leave much to go off of. Are your parents human, or whatever fae species you are?” He asked. “I would be willing to help you, but if you have no coin you will pay in work. Is that understood?”

He let her think on it, eating his food ravenously. He made quick work of it, eating more to get something in his belly than to enjoy the flavor. The rest of it was set to smoke over the fire, drying in thin strips that would stiffen and dry overnight into trail rations. The bones were settled into the back of the alley; no sense anyone asking questions.

Volker washed his face and arms from a waterskin, and offered it to her to either drink or do the same. “Creatures like you are not usually born; they are made. If we know who made you, it is a first step. You will never find your parents wandering around aimlessly. There are thousands of couples here.”
 
"Work?" It was a word she had heard before, but did not understand. She ignored it as being unimportant for the moment - and for her, it absolutely was unimportant. She understood the concept of being made well enough; it had been explained to her before, although she did not understand the concept of birth. To her, birth was being made, shaped by hands that knew what they were about. She had never been able to understand what all of the people she had seen wandering in the world had been made for, but she knew full well what it was she had been made for.

As a weapon. It made her sick to think of it, that her sole purpose for existing was to kill enemies of whomever her owner was at the time. The Robed Ones had treated her like a pet - a particularly bright pet, to be sure, but no less an animal than a dog or a cat despite her ability to speak and to reason.

"Mara...Mara does not remember her parents," she said in a whisper. "But she knows she had parents. They lived in a city...," she repeated. She could not comprehend a number like a thousand, let alone thousands. Her education was sorely lacking in many places. Not surprising, for a creature intended to be a weapon and nothing more. "The Robed Ones might know, but Mara does not know if any left the Den to live."
 
“Yes. Work.” Volker reiterated. “I am not the only slave in my master’s house. Chaceledon will like the look of you. He is tough, but he is kind if you are kind to him.” He listened to her. It seemed they had struck an accord of some sort. Chaceledon would never let him hear the end of this bringing a creature like her to Witherhold.

The Robed Ones? It was hard to know if that was the name of a faction or simply men who wore robes. Either way he had to get to the bottom of that. “You will show me where the Robed Ones are in the morning.” Volker told her, glad to have a lead of some sort. He couldn’t find parents going door to door. He could interrogate slavers quite easily though.

Volker laid out his bedroll and curled up, yawning. “Get rest.” He told her, though he didn’t dare turn his back to her. He watched her through the fire until sleep took him, and he went down into the Well.

“You cannot be serious.” Nestor gave him a look. His ancestor of eight or nine generations back was decidedly more bookish, and had a permanent look of disapproval about him. “A contract from a child with no money?”

“Oh piss off Nestor not everything’s about coin,” A young boy of about twelve shoved at the studious spirit and grinned up at Volker. “Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing you’ve done to piss the wraith off.”

“Just the dumbest.” Nestor groused, turning to head into the shadows of the Well. “You’d best not bring her in here.”

Volker shook his head. Very few people got to take the journey into the curse in his skull. “I may turn you loose to speak with her, Aluid.” Volker informed the boy.

“Fun.”
 
She visibly shivered at the thought of returning to the Den. She could remember a lot of that place quite clearly, and she did not know if this man, this human predator thirsting for the flesh of his own kind, would like what it was he found in that dark place. The images were enough to reduce her to tears if she thought on it too long.

In the darkness, below all the world, with nothing but the company of the damned. They had deserved their ultimate fate, but the administration of that fate had been so utterly brutal as the defy any sane persons' logic.

"The Den...it is not close," she said in a trembling voice. She did not like thinking of that place. "One passage of the sun, and then another. In the big hills."

She felt a thrill of fear at the name, and at his words - most of which she understood. What would this man make of her? She had a singular purpose - it was what she was made for. And yet, she did not want to. Killing and fighting were not desires in her life. She wanted to find her parents, and anything beyond that was as hazy to her as it was to anyone else. One singular goal...

She did not sleep, not for a long time. She did not interact with people often. People were often spiteful and mean spirited, and she had been chased and beaten by people many times in the last year. Without a conceptualization of money, or how to trade things, she often stole and was despised for it. And then...and then there were the others, that wanted her for other purposes.

"Mara is no slave," she whispered to herself as she finally managed to drift off. The dreams, when they came, were more troubling than they had been in a long time, filled with grim specters that had no face, only clubs and harsh voices that were noise but no words. The laughter of madness echoed through the darkness, and outwardly the girl shivered and shifted as she was caught in the nightmare again.
 
Volker listened. A few passages of the sun. That would be a decently long trip but nothing he hadn’t done before. He woke in the morning with a yawn, stretching his arms in front of him like a cat and pulling himself up for a stretch. He shook his head and stood, checking his jerky. It had smoked all night, and was cured enough that he felt it could stand being wrapped up and tucked away in his pack. He rolled his bedroll back up as well, kicked filth over the fire to smother the last coals, and threw his belongings over his shoulder.

“Time to go.” He told her, offering her a chunk of the jerky. “You will need to eat something.” He put a piece in his mouth with the other hand, chewing as he waited for her to take the food. If she rejected it, no matter. They could find more food on the road.

Volker didn’t leave much. A few things he’d picked up around the alleyways that could be replaced. He was used to traveling on few supplies and little notice. “Point us in the right direction.” He instructed her. “We will interrogate those men and find out where they took you from.”
 
She awoke when he did, as if the change of his breathing was enough to stir her from her troubled sleep. It had been a restless sleep, and she woke feeling completely unrefreshed, as though the weight of the world had settled upon her shoulders. She turned her nose up at the piece of flesh offered to her by the strange man; she did not like meat that had been kissed by fire, preferring it fresh and hot. Once they were clear of the city, she would provide her own meal; for now, the last thing she had eaten sustained her quite well. It was appalling the amount she could eat in a single sitting.

"Mara does not like the Den," she repeated again, as if they man would listen to reason. Nevertheless, he held out a flickering flame of hope. There might be something that could be found that would point her in a direction where she could find something. She did not know how he would interrogate anyone, though, if none of them had managed to survive. It was the unknown that was the thing.

She was on the eastern side of Elbion, and her destination was to the west. Paradoxically, she went east, out of the slums and into the surrounding countryside before doubling back, moving with the easy stride of someone that could maintain the pace for hours without rest. She said little during that time. She stayed away from roads, away from houses where she could. Away from people most of all; she was a known quantity in some of these places, a killer of livestock. She didn't contemplate whether her enigmatic companion was a known quantity out here, too. Morality was not something she thought of; survival was often the most pressing of concerns.

Once they got to the western side of Elbion, she seemed to relax a little. Sharp eyes started to look across the fields and the increasingly common copses of woodlands, looking for prey. She was not hungry, yet anyway, but it had been two or three days since her last kill. It would be time soon. "Watch for brown four-legged jumpers," she said as the walked a hundred meters or more away from a traders path. She was speaking to the stranger of deer, for which she did not know the proper name of. They were, strangely enough, fun enough to bring down. Not easy, like cattle tended to be, or horses. Best of all, even though they did kick, they were not strong enough to break bones (usually), which was a bonus.
 
“Do you want answers or don’t you?” Volker asked her sharply. “I cannot conjure your parents out of thin air, girl, we must find them.” He kept up with her easily. He might have been older in age, but clearly he didn’t have a problem with her ground-eating strides. He could keep up with her easily, walking on the balls of his feet like a dog.

She seemed to calm away from the urban centers, and so did Volker. Fewer guards. He could take a few farmers with pitchforks and crossbows. Men in armor with reinforcements were slightly more annoying. He noticed she was avoiding them as well. Brown legged jumpers? He looked at her. He had already offered her food! Here she was hunting? Now? “Deer are crepuscular, girl, we are far past the time of day for them.” He told her.

It did give him an idea of her speed. If she was fast enough to chase deer, she was truly fleet of foot. He paused in a thicket, a knife flicking up from the roll on his thigh into his palm. It went spinning into the bushes, and he came back up with a rabbit.

Volker offered it to her. “Eat and walk.” He instructed, nodding his head to the path.
 
Words she did not understand. The man was full of them, but it was unimportant for the moment. There was only the journey into darkness to look forward, something that Volker did not understand in the slightest. Oh, he probably had his own devils to contend with, but the child was anything but world weary. She was fragile, her sense of self only recently found and explored, and the ability to put the events of the past into context was also something more recent.

Maranae did not like the things she had done. She found them repugnant, and liked the idea of facing the accusatory stares of all that she had wrought not at all.

"Mara can smell them," she said simply. They had a woodsy smell to them, difficult to explain to someone that did not have her acute senses. The usual tactic was to come upon them bedded down during the day, and either stalk close enough to pounce and take them down, or else flush them out and run them down. It required a great deal of energy to pull off, but a deer was more than enough to replenish those stores.

She looked at the rabbit, and blinked. It was so small, but she had spent no effort to get it. Blood dripped from the wound that had killed it. Mara took it, running a finger through the fresh blood before licking the salty vitae from her finger. She turned and followed, her fangs visibly longer than they had been before, and unceremoniously bit its head off and chewed it up and swallowed. Bone, hide, and all. She worked around one of her fangs with her tongue, and spit a incisor from the rodent out. She took a chunk of its shoulder next with every evidence of enjoying her snack. "'ank 'ou," she said around a full mouth, spraying droplets of blood and chips of bone.
 
Volker looked at her for a moment, and nodded approval when she simply bit down and started chewing. No waste. No whining that it still had skin on. No fussing about cooking it. Just eating the entire thing. He nodded his approval and hunted another for her as they walked. Nothing he hunted would be wasted. Even he had a small modicum of waste, as one couldn’t use everything that came from an animal. Likewise she only seemed to spit bone and teeth, things that had doubtful use especially in a beast so small.

Volker didn’t seem out off by it in the slightest. Instead he seemed to reward her behavior with a few more rabbits and a quail or two. Animals in farmland grew fat and lazy next to sheep and goats. They were piteously easy to flick a knife at.

They walked amicably together, Volker keeping an eye out for prey. He did keep one or two rabbits for himself, offering her bits he couldn’t eat and tearing chunks of the meat away for himself. In his mind it was the perfect compromise. He had eaten thoroughly last night, so the majority went to her. At the same time he didn’t have to worry about pelts.

“Tell me of this Den.” He asked, offering her the rest of the rabbit.
 
The question was not a welcome one. She did not like thinking of the place where she had been born, and where the shaping of her life had begun in truth. Everything before that violent reforging was a heat mirage in the summer out on the desert, a shape that shifted constantly, forever out of reach.

"Was under the ground," she said, tone evasive. "Many Robed Ones there. They did...things," she said, gesturing with her hands in a way to mimic someone making the gestures in working magic. She did not know what magic was, nor could she use it nor even sense its use. "Mara was there long time, but does not know how long."

Locked away in the darkness, sun unseen since times only remembered. A prisoner and a slave, less human than she had been before but still more than a mere animal, however she had been treated. A weapon, to be sheathed when not in use, bared when it was time to kill or otherwise train.
 
Volker watched her closely. “They performed magic on you in secret.” He clarified. Somewhere underground. Close quarters were a specialty of his, as was darkness, but knowing they were magic users was a critical piece of information. Magic users were dangerous, but also prone to overconfidence and leaning on their abilities. Once exhausted, they were helpless as lambs.

“We must catch them unaware then, to prevent giving them time to prepare for us. We will have to watch for wards as well.” Volker nodded, satisfied with the information. “It is unlikely they know the names of your parents, unless they purchased you, but they might know a region or village.”
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back