Private Tales The Failure of Nobility

[Kristen Pirian]

Kristen glanced about the room, feeling perhaps more alert than she had ever felt before in her entire life. Everything seemed clearer to her eyes, sounds more crisp to her ears. Even underneath her skin she could've drawn a map of her veins, aware as she was of the pulse of blood and adrenaline through them.

Nothing went beneath her notice.

Until she became aware that something, someone, had. Where the rest of the bedchambers were empty, both Lord Oren and Herim Urahil having migrated with their conversation elsewhere, there remained one last occupant.

A woman. A servant. A full foot shorter than Kristen, a bundle of folded sheets held to her chest like a protective shield, silent eyes wide and full of shock. She met Kristen's eyes, and Kristen met hers.

What drained from Kristen immediately was that earlier resolve. Everything that she had said in the inn room vanished from her consideration, for in her mind when she had spoken it she had imagined only rough, armed men seeing them, trying to stop them. Men who by picking up the sword had volunteered their lives to be in peril.

Not this. Not a scared, cowering woman.

Whom Edric would absolutely kill if he saw.

So Kristen was quick to try to intercept Edric's attention before he had a chance to look to the corner. As he pulled himself up and out of the dumbwaiter, she touched his arm firmly and pointed toward the double doors and whispered, "I heard them go that way. Come on."

Her spine chilled with worry and a variety of fears, Kristen took her first few (stiff) steps to cross the length of the bedchambers toward the doors. And she hoped Edric would just follow.

And if he doesn't? And if he sees her?

Edric

 

[Edric]

Edric's attention was caught, grabbed. Kristen whispered in his ear, his head turning towards the door as his companion already quickly moved across the room.

He took a step.

A single step.

Then he stopped. He might have missed the servant girl pressing herself into the wall. He might have been fooled by the shadow she stood in, the absolute stillness that had come over her in hopes not to be noticed. She hid herself as best she could.

But it didn't matter.

Edric didn't see her. Didn't need to. He felt that flicker of life. That pinprick of a soul in the corner of the room. His next step was towards the corner, so silent and unexpected that the Servant girl didn't even have time to scream.

A hand covered her mouth, another reaching towards her throat. Within the span of a second Edric grabbed the servant and pulled her from the corner, his hand covering her mouth as his arm locked around her throat. His face utterly blank as he choked the life from the girl.

 

[Kristen Pirian]

The worst came to pass, and Kristen found herself at a defining moment in her life. She was here, at what was both a line and a fork in the road, and what she chose would forever be a part of her. There was no way out, no running nor hiding from this. She had to choose. For the choice itself was action or inaction.

Kristen turned the moment she lost that sense of being followed. She saw Edric sweeping into the corner, a very brief and very violent flurry of motion that settled quickly back into relative stillness. Her heart stilled with boundless agony in her chest, her eyes wide and filled to the brim with horror.

Edric—enormous, hulking, monstrous. The servant girl—tiny, demure, innocent. She could not help but to see a flash of Duresh and herself. She could not help but to see a fiend predating upon the helpless.

All thoughts of the mission abandoned her. All thoughts of Adriana and the Ironclad and the foreign city of Salesia abandoned her. All thoughts of the Academy and Dreadlords and House Pirian abandoned her.

In the servant girl Kristen saw herself. In the servant girl she heard her own cries for help, her own prayers for the same. No one had come for her in that privy room within the Embassy that fateful day of the Homeland Parade.

"No..." a whisper most tiny.

But she would come to the aid of this stranger she did not know. This stranger who meant only peril for herself and Edric and mayhap even for the fate of Vel Anir itself. She had to...because for all her fear, this was the one thing that she could not run from, the one thing that she could not stand by and allow to happen, the one thing that touched her heart so deeply that its compulsion could not be ignored.

It would prove to be her greatest folly.

With one hand she drew the mace on her belt and with the other she stretched out her hand and she recited the words. Withering Chains burst with explosive clamor from the floor, from the walls, from the ceiling, the serpentine bindings seeking to slither all around Edric's limbs, his torso, his neck and his head, to enwreathe him in their debilitating touch.

"RUN!" she yelled to the servant girl, knowing not whether she was alive or dead, and blind to everything but this once quiet room and the three of them locked now into this mortal struggle.

Kristen charged, mace raised. Her face a torn expression of anger and sorrow and pure horror at what she was doing (for there existed some tiny part of her watching all this happen, aghast, from the furthest reaches of mind, powerless to stop it).

And she swung the mace at Edric. This with no plan save the raw, burning intention to force him to free the servant girl.

Edric

 

[Edric]

Edric was utterly bewildered as light flickered from the ground, ethereal chains springing forth from the wooden floors. They wrapped around him like tendrils, grasping, pulling him away from the girl.

HIs eyes widening in utter shock as the chains bound around him. They pressed and cut into his muscles, pulling his grasp forcefully away from the girl. Wrapping around his throat and jerking him backward. ”WHAT THE FUCK!”

The words echoed loudly in a shout, and then Kristen rushed forward.

Anger, pure and simple rage spiked through Edric’s chest as he watched his companion charge forward. Bound the ethereal chains he tried to pull free, jerk the girl in front of him to act as a shield.

Yet Kristen’s magic proved too strong.

He couldn’t move, and before his own magic could lash out Kristen struck.

The full swing of her blunt weapon crashed against his head. A loud crunch echoed through the room. Bone shattering, skin ripped and torn, eye half exploding as the Noble lashed out with her full strength. Edric’s arms fell to the wayside, his muscles slackening, his head lulling to the side as he went tumbling to the ground.

With a startled jump the servant pulled herself free, her mouth finally opening in a desperate scream as she rushed passed Kristen and away from Edric. Shouts echoed out from the halls beyond as she cried.

“HELP! HELP ME!”​

Boots thundered in the hall beyond, two men appearing in the door. One wielded a sword, the other simply had a look of utter bewilderment.

Lord Oren and Herim Urahil stood in the doorway, the former reaching out and pulling the servant between them so she could get away. Behind them two guardsmen rushed forward, lagging only slightly.

“INTRUDERS! GUARDS!”​

It was Oren that shouted, his voice booming outward in slated confusion. Eyes entirely on Kristen and the shadowed figure now dripping blood onto the floor. Herim seemed to back away, moving slowly down the hall in a guarded step that would take him away from the intruders. Panic and chaos set into the manor.

People shouted.

Alarm bells began to ring.

Then Kristen would feel it.

They all would. A slight tug at first, as though a string had been tied around the center of their chest and was being pulled. It drew forth and forth. Dragging desperately towards the corpse upon the floor. Slowly, with a heavy jerk Edric began to pull himself up and off the floor. Half his skull caved in, eye bloody red, jaw unhinged.

 

[Kristen Pirian]

It felt good.

(the shock and vibration traveling down through the mace and up through her arm)

It felt powerful.

(the crunch and the quiet patter of dripping blood from her mace and from the grievous wound)

It felt like claiming her heart's desire.

(standing over the fallen, looking down at the result of what her will had wrought upon the world)

Kristen lost track of the servant girl. Shouts fell onto deaf ears—may as well have been an indistinct call a mile distant. The anger and the sorrow and the horror had melted away into a kind of fascinated awe, and she stared down at Edric on the ground. Her eyes saw the blood, the shattered bone, the ejected eye and for the first time none of it truly registered. She'd seen gore before and it made her sick and she'd come to see more gore yet in the future and it too would twist her stomach. But this time, for at least this one, prolonged, echoing moment, it didn't.

Shouts again from a mile distant: "Intruders! Guards!"

Slowly the wordless fascination began to fade, the world unnarrowing itself and expanding gradually back into its fullness. Kristen blinked, yet the continuity of her consciousness remained unbroken. Now with the surprise and fascination gone she could see it in total: coming out of the dumbwaiter, seeing the servant girl, whispering to Edric, Edric turning to and assailing the girl, Kristen turning on him and calling forth her Chains and charging forward, the strike then against his head.

And now here she was. Caught back up with the present, as it were. Back again in Lord Oren's Estate.

And her eyes widened terribly as the full weight of what she had done struck her. There was even a tug in her heart.

"Loose bolts!"

Kristen turned.

Two mercenary guards had become four, and the new arrivals were armed with crossbows. They fired. One bolt struck the wall just over Kristen's shoulder and just to the left of her head.

The next struck her straight on.

Violently she jolted back. She slammed into a window and the force of her body shattered the glass and out she tumbled. From outside came a loud, reverberating BONG as she struck the balustrade of the balcony below (the very same they had used earlier), the sound powerful at first and weakening to stillness.

The two crossbow mercs drew swords, and the four of them advanced toward the grotesque, and now moving, figure that was Edric.

Edric

 

[Edric]

Kristen flew from the window.

Glass and wood shattered through the room, echoing, resounding. A loud thud called forth from smashed wood and broken stone as the Princess of Pirian fell. A panic should have arisen at the fall of a companion. A thunder of the heart. A moment of concern.

Yet the emotions never even came close.

Never even breached the surface.

There was no sympathy. No concern. Not a flicker of regard or worry.

All that existed within him was rage. An unkempt and untamed seething that roiled like magma in the bounds of a volcano. It coiled and ruptured upon itself, bubbling and roiling as he slowly stalked forward. Every step a thunderous echo, every twitch of muscle a pooling of strength.

Life flowed into him, dragged and torn from those around him. The arms of soldiers shook, growing weak as they held their weapons. Swords quivered, crossbows shifted, their weight become almost impossible to hold as life steadily streamed from them. Yet as their vitality left them, it did not heal the monster that stood in front of him.

"FIRE! FIRE! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR KILL THE DAMNED THI-"​

Lord Oren's voice cut off as the air itself seemed to quiver.

There was a shift, a shake.

One of the soldiers pulled the trigger of his crossbow. The drawstring snapped, the bolt shot forward, and yet the weapon itself shifted and flickered as the soldier holding it exploded.

Skin roiled and ruptured, eyes popped open wide, lips parted in a scream. His whole body seemed to shake and quiver, a mass of blood and bone exploding outward in an instant as the very life sustaining him forced his end. His vitality violently rent and turned into malicious entropy.

Blood splattered on those besides the man. Organs burst onto the walls and floors. Bones splintered and shattered, piercing through thin lines of ringed mail and cutting into skin. Crimson decorated the halls, and those who did not scream found themselves utterly silent as the sight before them struck the nerves within their minds.

Abject terror floated through the the room.

Guardsmen having stepped forward to attack shook. Nobles calling for the press of their defense slowly began to fled. Servants, innocent and without a card to play ran as fast as they could. Screams echoed through the empty rooms. Calls for mercy, cries for anyone, anything to save them from the fate of their own life.

Their pleas fell upon dead ears for the monster before them. His flesh still half formed. An eye still sunken and crushed, a jaw hanging loose from his skull. Edric stepped forward, his visage of the very monster that he was at his core. His steps seemed to echo above the mewling cries of soldiers and servants. His rage an encapsulating, unstoppable force.

Thus began the massacre in the House of Oren.

It was a story that would be told in Salesia for years to come.

A tale of death an woe. Of misery and horror. It was a tale which would ring in the ears of children for years to come. A warning whispered to those who might venture out at night, who thought themselves safe and would dare press the dark.

The story told was one of lords rent into scraps of flesh. Of soldiers pinned to walls by the broken edges of bone. Of women left as little more than shadows of the vivacious lives they had once lived.

The fable would live on in Salesia. For that was all it could be. Something that someone had made up. A thing born of the most devious bard's mind.

A warning to those who dared buck against what was known to be safe. A horror that most would deny could ever be true.

A tale which ended in a monster walking down the street, dragging a girl behind it.