Fate - First Reply Cheers to You, Magnificent Dead.

[Violetta Amrita Primrose]

Aberresai Savannah - Northern Entrance to Falwood.

Splintered wood. Broken wheels.

Had to be more than wolves. Much more. Something giant, like a troll. Why would a troll be in the Falwood? It didn’t matter. Something of that size was the only real answer.

Spilled goods. Smashed fruit.

Must be Anirian. Likely a trader. Disconnected from its comfort in this dry place. Things in the savannah didn’t tend to wander this far. Monsters, at least.

Torn tapestry. Skid marks.

They’d tried to escape their fate. They wanted no part in whatever had come for them. It was tragic. There was often no consent in battle. Always devoid of it in ambush.

Bodies.

Horses, men, women. Corpses strewn about. Some disemboweled, some bludgeoned. It was senseless, cruel and a reminder of the world as it was in its current state. Demons were upon the world, and there were those who still pointed towards her horns as blame.

The lone Violetta stood amidst the rubble. She’d just finished searching for survivors and given up. Her recently acquired hooded shawl covering her horns as she traveled from home. People showed no kindness to her away from her village.

She should bury them. That’s all she ever did anymore.

Maybe she should buy a crypt.

 

[Garrod Arlette]

"Bloody shame this," the lone wanderer happened upon a figure busy at its work. He laid his sword to rest against the wreckage of a still smoldering carriage, his pack down next. Hooded neath his own cloak and mantle, the wanderer moved about the debris, picked up a corpse, still intact, and carried over by the one who dug. Quiet, for to speak would feel a shame, Garrod piled the dead.

 

[Violetta Amrita Primrose]

She hadn’t responded immediately, still sitting through the wreckage. She drew out one of the few remaining weapons the caravan had, a dulling short sword, and slid it into her belt.

The presence of the stranger came as a surprise, but she failed to show it. The whistle of the wind haunted the scene and his voice had jarred her away from the emotion. Plus, there was no telling their intention.

Once he started to move the bodies, she calmed a bit, and stuck the spade she’d found back in the ground to address him. Hand on the hilt of the recovered blade she turned, and the man was familiar.

They’d fought side by side. Felt an enternity ago.

“You protected my village.” Violetta spoke as she pulled the hood from her head.

“You must’ve a well of kindness to keep assisting me the way you have.”

 

[Garrod Arlette]

Another body laid down to rest at the edge of the fresh grave. His still living flesh ached, warm from the toil, stretched and tired from his journeying, and he could feel some sweat start to work along his brow.

"So I did," he would admit, unsure of it himself, crouched low near the dead, hands rested on his knees. His eye turned up and he stood to regard her. "Don't know if it has much to do with kindness though," he said, and looked over the results of their labor so far. "More like to do nothing just doesn't feel right,"

It clicked in his mind. The memory wrapped in a thick haze of coppery mist. Her village. She had stood against the carnage, and raised her axe in salute.

"Such are the twists of fate," he looked down at the sword she had slipped into her belt, and went back to moving corpses. Layed another one down by the last. "When all is done and buried, what will you do next, I can't help but wonder?" he asked, and took a moment to close the eyes of the young man, dead with so much horror still wide in them.

 

[Violetta Amrita Primrose]

She continued to pile dirt atop the bodies as Garrod laid them in their makeshift tombs. A dirt mound on the side of the road. Better than some got. Not what they’d anticipated, she was sure.

“It is kindness. Some watch. Some leave. You put yourself in danger when it’s unnecessary. Our village was no one to you. You didn’t have to make it your problem.”

Violetta stuck the spade into the ground. Just a couple corpses more. Her eyes wandered across the vacancy of the wreckage before them. A cold portent of things to come if she pursued whatever dealt this blow. She had envisioned her own death many times, yet, it never came.

A hand clasped tight around the hilt of her stolen sword.

“Nothin’ special. Just kill whatever did this. Shouldn’t be hard t’track if it insists on leaving messes like this. I’m so fucking tired of monsters.”

She drew the blade and examined its faulty metal. An inferior weapon that would have to do for now.

“I think it time they start paying their due.”

 

[Garrod Arlette]

Garrod let down the penultimate dead. "Kindness, huh?" he asked as he looked upon the fallen. To just leave them out to rot. He frowned at the thought, made so vivid by too many memories. "Suppose it is that then, and cruelty is just a more common currency," he moved off to gather the last body, hearing her as she spoke of what came next.

Old. Someone's mother or grandmother. Likely her kin was in the shallow grave the woman had dug for all of them. He could not help but notice the old woman had died with her hand clenched into a fist. Her face down in the dirt, blood pooling out of her midsection. Had she fought whatever assailed them? Or was she fighting to live on, there before death's door?

No way of knowing really.

So curious, Oh Bearer Mine, your... sentimentalities. Came the whisper of his cursed relic. Could be I can let you see, those last moments of this old crone, should you give me but a drop.

Could be. Garrod near smirked, but thought better of it. Put himself to work instead, grabbing up the old woman and carrying her to the grave so she could be put to rest with the others. He let the woman down gently, stayed low a moment to look at the dead. "I think you are right, " he said, and bowed his head to them in solemn salute.

He rose, and hooked a thumb against his sword-belt, arming sword and dagger hung ready at his side. "Blood for blood," he said as he worked free his side-sword and offered it up to her. "Death for death, a deal old as life itself," he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder, pointing at the gleaming hunk of metal that was his runed great-sword. "Count me in,"

 

[Violetta Amrita Primrose]

She wished she hadn’t expected the response. So she could be happy about the desire he had to help. She should be, but, that was rarely the case these days.

Violetta’d not been lying. She meant what she said about the kindness. But she still felt it was what people should do. They just didn’t. There were heroes all over Arethil, ones with much greater power than she could ever dream of. And yet they sat in tall towers or gorged themselves, coasting on their previous accomplishments as if the generations to come could ever give a shit.

Idiots. This world was full of fucking idiots.

And monsters.

Why she couldn’t bring herself to thank him didn’t come to her. Probably because she wasn’t grateful for another idiot willing to march into death with her. Guess that made her one, too, proving her own perception even further.

“You might die, stranger.”

 

[Garrod Arlette]

"Then I die," he let out.

A simple truth.

One you denied, oh Garrod mine. Came the cruel whisper of his own demonic weight.

But that had been different, had it not? Death then... Was a thought for another time.

Belephus laughed, warm as the last curl of smoke that rose from a dying flame.

"The name's Garrod, by the by," he said, and gave the woman a nod, walked over to the spade she'd stuck into the earth, and began the work of burying the dead. "Whatever it is we are tracking looks to be big," he said between shovel-fulls. The cadence of his work a soft crunch and whisper of mettle sliding through sediment. Steady. "Didn't see any tracks, but did see some blood trails leading deeper into the woodland," he flicked his head toward the woods behind him. "See any signs of the thing?"

Crunch. Slip. Ring. Thud. Crunch. Slip. Ring. Thud.