Pariah of Wolves

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Sillian Cassat’s camp was constructed from pre-fabricated longhouses, all built from a kind of white-stained steel corrugated siding, linked end-on-end by umbilical halls and arranged loosely in a broad semi-circle before a cleared, electro-fenced yard. Seydon peered from a high escarpment wooded thickly with elder yews and massed red-pines, hidden behind trestles of carmine needles and yellow dapped leafing. The interior yard was empty: three log houses flanked the west end fencing, blackened occasionally where electricity leapt and bit into the log-walls. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nothing was moving. Bodies lied discarded in the courtyard, denuded, pink with open wounds where rock-gulls and fanged magpies had bitten in, scavenging. Guard posts were left unmanned; Seydon could spot abandoned weaponry strewn on the ground, beside camo flak-armour, strapped helmets, bolted munition crates, dressed with emptied ale bottles. He set his sight in, trimmed his hearing, tasting at the air. There was faint mechanical motion stirred by inclement breezes alongside odd echoes of muffled industrial sound. Whiffs of air were stiff with floating breezes bearing chemical scrubbers, blood, sweat, and varied human discharges. The place wept with fear and pain.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon slid down from his high spot along an egress of shale, stone, and earth, brandishing Razorlight. There were nineteen meters between the tree line and a main entrance post left-unmanned. Imagination envisioned a potential sniper’s killing ground. He hit flattened earth, bolting, propelled by muscle along at a blitzing gait. Unnervingly, only the quiet acknowledged his approach. Leaves rustled under-boot, stinking of slowly caking blood. Seydon looked to several powered-off shield pylons torn with gaping, toothed punctures in their metallic casing. Animal stench traced a line of savaged loam and lichen-grass towards the nearest pre-fab hall; oscillator-doors were crumpled in, smeared with ragged, vermillion strokes and fur-thatches.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Somewhere, muffled by plastics, Harcress loosed throaty cackles. Seydon came into the longhouse… slowing to a pause. Inside, he spanned his gaze over incredibly technical machinery blinking diodes of holographic light, with rowed resuscitation beds framed by overseer terminals. Sheathed power cords hung tepidly along the ceiling ridge, stapled in with steel brackets. There was a hum of electric power, stinks of chemical washers and metal scrubbers. Each station was immaculate, cleansed and idling for the next patient. One back-lit cabinet hosted x-ray graph-plates. Seydon ventured in, easing around the beds, tables, vaulting a strange, iron-lung-esque apparatus that sounded like it was breathing on its own. The x-ray graphs were off. Something in their hints of back-scattered light. Seydon edged over, peering from plate to plate.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One showcased a skull split by a third, mangled jaw protruding ragged saw-teeth. Another, a cancerous femur rife with marrow-swells, looking for all intent and purpose like a sickly tree shaft. Rib-cages compacted into ninety-degree angles, scrawled over with permanent markers jotting short-hand notes he couldn’t quite decipher. All were annotated, either with intricate script or sprawling swathes indicating temper, rage, disappointment at a failed venture. Post-mortem picto-plates of Sillian Cassat’s ruined victims. Seydon clipped them off the light-board, compiled them on a nearby stationary desk and burned the lot with fire gusting from his palm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blood trailed on white locked brick-tiles strewn on leveled earth in the connecting-tunnel to the next adjacent medical-shed. Seydon tautly stalked past further pews of recovery beds nestled modularly against thickened wall-sockets humming with power imparted by unseen camp-generators. A solar was installed overhead, a bright triangular of plasteel skylight allowing vacant illumination to beam in. Again, the beds were emptied. Discarded laundry piles of stripped fatigues and further soldierly gear lied nestled in a disused corner; waste-bins were swollen with crumpled flimsies. A missed stain of rusty blood crusted beneath one gurney. Suffering lingered on the air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You’d never tell unless I gave away all the intimacies seen in these halls, Mister Seydon,” Cassat said over the PA. “I prefer pristine. There’s something ethereal in crisp white linens, washed beds, floors scrubbed until microbial sterility is a reality~ If you can’t take pride in maintaining upkeep, than I’m afraid you’re simply lost, boy.”

Seydon wished he’d shut up. The third house was dedicated to imaging and spectrographic radio-scans, the fourth a walk-in freezer stocked from flooring to ceiling with flash-dried plastic boxing topped with frost-scalded, hardened liquids and medicating tablets. A temperature gauge on a far wall couldn’t be read: ice caked the holo-emitter. Light was cold and blue. Freeze ached into his bones, stinging his lungs before filling up his belly with a tremor. Seydon hurried through, replacing Razorlight for Winterfang. What scents there were old, bare, caustically washed with bleaching agents. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Black Vermillion had had his way down to his own personnel. Seydon found a few of them in the fifth longhouse, converted into a trio of separate operating theaters divided by lengths of heavy, insulate tarpaulin curtains. Flood-lamps hung suspended on power-cabling and tensile wiring. Make-do scouring showers were pieced together with vacuum-sealed elliptical bacta isolation-tanks, fed with bleach water hosed from caulked nozzles, leading out into dressing chambers before the theater proper. The Dunaan jammed his sword into the first tank seam, jawing it open and stepping through. Abandoned, unwashed scrub-gowns were hung as they were on plastic hooks; hardened with flaking entrails and surgical gore.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In Theater One, he discovered Edver Dunhun. His effects were cased in a clear tray atop an emptied gurney: partially soiled underwear, a length of belting fed with hooped package-compartments, thick, steel-toe velcro boots, lho sticks and a plasma-lighter, steel toothpicks, sub-dermal ident trackers still stringy with meat, several forged digital passports, contraceptives, a bottle of proscribed anti-epileptic tablets, a cheap penny-dreadful holo-novel titled ‘A Sum of Lies’, emptied injector vials stinking of Devaronian obscura, and a faded, rare polaroid of himself, a woman, and a small child hugging at their knees. Edver Dunhun himself was a relic of meat-clogged bones left to rot on an upraised pneumatic plinth. What he’d been and what he had become were beyond Seydon to describe. Save to tell that his shadow cast by a small attendant lamp by the plinth profiled into a grizzly depiction of a torn ribcage issuing forth scrabbling, vestigial arms and sticky nets of tooth-laced, once semi-animalistic gut-worms.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Theater Two hosted Wilvox G’quin, and Joyia Sae in Theater Three. Similar tableaus of ruined cadavers hazarded by failed attempts at alchemic augmentation. Their surgeries had killed them. Wholly. Indelibly. Each was a sight enough to turn Seydon’s stomach over and upset a need to hurl. Bile washed up in the back of his throat. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Wilvox G’quin had his sexual organs replaced with a grafted length of spinal stingers, attached to the tail-bone then sheathed with further nerve-skeins, hands amputated in favour of pincer-manipulators. His teeth had received ossification; molars were grown out into stubby tusks, breaking his jaw to poke up through his cheek-pouches. Incisors were crooked fangs. Skin stripped from his left eye-socket up along a tract of skull revealed an onset of bone cancer, lengths of cruel growths feeding spines into the ocular cavity. Joyia Sae was scrubbed down to just her skeletal frame: four extra arms had tried to grow from her ribs. Her jaw was a chromium trap, polished steel with ceramite teeth, feeding augmentive implant-wires into plugs screwed into the skull. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“As you can see, waiting on Lord Sennex’s schedule left me inconsolably bored. We ran out of prisoners so damned quickly, it was impossible! Malnutrition, sickness, these ghastly varieties of STV’s, general weakness, they could hardly survive a single procedure let alone the whole gamut I intended to subject the heartier ones to. Save there were no ‘heartier ones’, Mister Seydon. Three months ago, the last one pissed away,” Said Cassat again, whining on the intercom.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The ‘help’ were hardly accommodating either. Tried cordoning me off in my own facilities, can you imagine! When that didn’t work, they fled for the hills. Of course, they were attempting to outrun our mutual acquaintance Harcress, so you can visual how that episode teetered off. They were more hardy but this tract of isolation’s left me with little inspiration. It’s cruel, boy, packing an artist away with canvas and brushes, then asking them to paint with just air.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Little inspiration, Seydon contemplated. He looked down at Joyia Sae; four juvenile limbs warped painfully in proto-socket growths molded out of her rib bones, jaw replaced with an augment-attachment. Committed on her out of boredom. He shut out Cassat’s meandering drones of red-herring monologues and broken down the auto-doors sealing off the tented corridor linking to longhouse six. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Every sight warranted fierce and instinctive loathing the deeper he tracked Harcress’ meager trail throughout the trailers. By the sixth longhouse, following piddling rimes of blood, Seydon figured he’d dream of Black Vermillion’s caustic horrors long into whatever unkempt century he’d survive to see and battle through. In longhouse eight, he found someone alive. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She was middle-aged, grayed in both her hair and her tanned epidermis, dressed in a dirty medicae gown that hadn’t seen a wash in weeks. By her bedside, where she laid settled on a likewise gritty table stinking warmly of sour, earthy odors, were aluminum stalks training intravenous tubing down into necrotic patches along her arms and legs. Dozens of spent IV bags littered below at his boots. She’d not been bathed or attended to in some time. Glib, hanging flies buzzed in concentration around her moveable gurney. If only for the gentle rise in her haggard bosom, he would have thought her an ignored cadaver slowly wasting into liquid rot. She opened cataract-eyes when she sensed Seydon’s approach, peering around blindly as she gripped to a panic bar on her bed-seating.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ohhhh Gods…” She moaned, reaching out. Seydon stowed Winterfang away, taking her hand in his glove.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Easy,” He said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Huh!? Ohhhh… Ohhhh, someone... Someone else…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye, ma’am,” He leaned over her pillow, looking to disconnect the IV lines. The woman shrugged his touch away, coughing bracken spittle over her lips, grimacing. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No… No, don’t… Don’t, please… It won’t make… Make any difference now…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ma’am,” Seydon murmured gently, maybe even desperately. “Ma’am, I can get you out of here.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Here… From this Ninth Hell…? No, no, no, young man… Are you a young man…? You sound it…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How old are you…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Maybe a sight over thirty, ma’am.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh… That’s a good – “ She stripped on her tongue, hacking up phlegm and beads of motley tissue. “Hhrrggkkk!! …Good age… Ooohhh…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ma’am, stay with me, don’t let him win this one.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Who…? Ohhh… Ohhh, yes, that… Whining little cudgel… That… Beastly little man…” She hocked up a burst contemptive spit. “Can you see what he’s… Done… To me…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He lifted her covers aside. In her ribs was a wide cut-away exposing naked bone, rotted on the edging with necrosis and maggot cultures. Against her lung was some installed patch of rubber-black film casing the veined sponge. Seydon replaced the blanket back. “What is it, ma’am?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I… Couldn’t tell you… They never told me… He had… Doctors here… But then one day… I heard him killing them too... Did… Anyone survive…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I haven’t found anyone else…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Damn!” She cried. “Damn! There were… Hundreds of us… And now only me…?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m sorry.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Don’t…!” Weakly she smacked her knuckles across his lips. “Don’t… apologize… To me… It can’t… Fix this bind… Not at all…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Ma’am…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You need to… Go…” Came her sob. “I heard… That other… Other one… Trample along this… Way… He’ll kill you too…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’ll be away before sunset, ma’am. Did you hear where he went? The Beast?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She bent her finger left across her sternum, pointing for the far house portcullis leading out to the last medical shed. “Came striding in… All rage… And hate… He sounded in… In pain… That Doctor yelled… Hhhrrnnkk – Yelled at him constantly! Berating… Displeased… Terrible to hear… Thankful they were… Ahem… Were content to ig-ignore me…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Despite clouds of shaded blue and smoke in her eyes, Seydon could see light was fading quickly. He held onto her hand and wrist with both his own palms, Winterfang leaning up against the footrest. Slowly, by syllable, the woman jogged her numbing mouth over a few half-heard words. The IV drip had run dry hours prior. Trauma and illness came to claim her. Seydon was fast to disconnect the vital monitors from weeping out electronic bleats before they ruined what little calm dignity the nameless woman possessed. Later, he’d learn she was Tessa Rhopqist and worked as a supervisor for the Pontius Fulrun Gaveat Financiary, in Hythe Park’s squalid ‘Bhank Road’. Seydon stayed with Tessa until she stopped trying to peer his way. Standing, he folded her arms, plucking her flesh free of intravenous cords and then drew up her blankets onto her brow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was in the connective-corridor draped between medi-sheds eight and nine when Seydon found Harcress. Paws drove through the flimsy cadmium awning stretched across the tunnel ribbing, peering through the yawning tears with eyes sickened with bestial rage, motivating a groaning roar from between flaps of torn jowls. He reached in, plucking Seydon up his skull and throat with one paw and his waist with his right arm in the other. Winterfang dangled at his side, wrestling in his grip, baying soundlessly its need to bleed the Spawnwolf out. Drapes of shredded weather-textiles whipped against his shoulders as Harcress hauled him out into the sun.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hhhrrrggggnnnn… And where is your feckless little sting now, you bastard?” Harcress asked. Pressure began crunching in Seydon’s skull-pate as the Wolfman began to bellow out his haunting laugh. The architecture of Seydon’s skull resisted fracturing, prodding Harcress to try harder. That laugh. That damned laugh, sour with mocking triumph. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Teeth grit, countenance snarling in canine grimace, Seydon reached up and, with tremendous strength, grappled with the hulk of Harcress left wrist and twisted. Bone popped, then broke, skewering up through his hide like ice-shaves running jagged up from a frozen water trough. Foul blood sprayed out, churning vents of high-pressure arterial spray. That quick, broken agony savaged into Harcress limb thumped him back with pain. Falling to the ground, Seydon staggered just briefly to find his footing. Winterfang spun around in his palms, changing his grip out for the peak rather than the hilt. The Dunaan stepped back, hefting the sword back over his shoulder and swinging down in a perfect vertical. Harcress reeled, buffeted by pommel and guard smashing onto his snout. Seydon slackened his arms to allow the blade to come up again under its own momentum, steeling for another strike. He hacked, stabbing a length of silver-plated cross-bar clean through muzzle and hard-palate. More blood. More spitting chunks, chewed to gore by Harcress pained gnawing, scrabbling to loosen Winterfang from his face. Seydon brought up his right leg in a crossing snap-kick and took him off his feet with a glancing blow to his midriff.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Together, they tumbled down a length of slope. Harcress’ massed bulk smashed through cedar, pulped birch, wrecked pine into clouds of fiber-vapor and ricocheting splinters. When he clawed with his right paw into the loam, trying to slow, Seydon was there to smash into him. He ran, tucking his knees, butting them into the Wolfman’s bleeding chin. They left the encampment behind and all its medical monstrosities. Pebble scree started after them to roll in little scattered waves, welling into rocky puddles at a U-bed hollowed out two conflicting hills. Harcress tried to back away, picking up a length of fallen cypress in his good-paw. The fashioned club swung, not whistling overhead so much as juddering the air. Seydon ducked, then ducked again, tucking into his waist and back-stepping into a clean roll, rising with Winterfang aglow in the close, dark air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Boots and hind-paws tried to maneuver the scant forest flooring. Everything was upraised and uneven. Seydon jumped from a moss-boulder onto a termite chewed log, leaping in a neat, twisting flip as Harcress attacked and crushed the log to wet bark and mulch. He ran up and planted one foot against a still standing yew, clutching Winterfang up close to his right ribs and arm pit. The yew provided grounding and a means of platforming, as Seydon kicked off to come at the Wolfman. Light flashed from the sword’s peaking. Harcress turned with his log in-paw, trying to deflect the spearing blow away. Seydon went with the deflection, letting the smack to his blade-flat spin him about. He spun into a half-pirouette and cut. Wintefang cut with a suck of rending flesh from hilt to point, right through the Wolfman’s midriff. Stomach, intestinal tracts, kidneys, liver, all were sundered. Blood just gushed. He’d never seen something with a lupine face suddenly appear so pale.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A bright, hard lance of red-rimed light blew down into the forest shallow. It impacted a scant meter away from the Dunaan, missing his cheek and brow by inches and throwing up a ragged plume of caked earth. Ozone stunk over his nostrils. Seydon turned, spotting Sillian Cassat himself standing at the high ridge above. His hands grasped a ferociously high-powered dual mode blaster and disintegrator pistol. Cassat cocked something behind the slide-catch. The Dunaan turned and hurled himself aside, missing the sight of a larch a meter behind him getting struck by screaming last-bolts. More shot shrieked down into the half-light forest gully. Shrubbery and fern caught fire sympathetically next to neat pock-craters smoking up cooked stones and dead leaves. Cassat kept firing. Further las-fire drew a neat line chasing after the man. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon slid up to Harcress; by now he’d let go of his log-weapon, clutching at his stomach. It was all he could do to keep his stomach and entrails exactly where they were. True lupines lacked sweat glands, but the Wolfman’s brow was awash with water. Great, reddened eyes were dilated. Breath was drawn, shallow. The witcher skidded in behind him as temporary cover. Cassat could be heard cursing, running south on the ridge to get a better angle. When he next saw the witcher, he was turning something over in his arm and hand. The sheathe knife hurled straight, true, keening as a spear. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It smashed into Black Vermillion’s carapace-belly and flew him back off his feet. Pitches of shocked, screaming pain echoed down the gully-slope. Seydon could see booted-feet laced with small, emergency injector vials stamping down. Heightened ears heard Cassat gasp, tugging the knife from his torso in soaking, gory discharges. The doctor was on his feet in a moment, hobbling into an aggrieved run.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He turned back to Harcress. The mutant Shistavanen was by then trembling, drawing shallow gulps of air. Both his broken arm and augment-limb curled close over his belly-wound. A piece of intestinal tubing draped over his forearms. Harcress looked up when Seydon approached, pausing. Suddenly, his visage seemed so tall, eyes gilt with gold and slit, animal like. Sunlight perched strokes of late-noon illumination over his tied back crown of white hair. Winterfang waited in his right-hand, gripped tight and fast. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You know…?” Harcress gulped, bleeding out between his teeth. “…It hurt to hate that much…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Winterfang rose and struck. Seydon took him with one perfect blow to his ribs, sundering bone, the meat behind, stabbing through his overgrown heart. The Wolfman turned over on himself, crashing bodily onto the gun-blistered earth. Somewhere, the witcher was certain, he was off to meet against the thousand vengeful dead of Hythe Park. They wouldn’t leave a scrap of his soul to remain.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cassat he found in a second clearing cut out behind his prison-encampment approximately fifty meters out. The good doctor left wet streaks in the grasses, on the branch and tree-trunks he leaned across temporarily for brief support, like Harcress before in his attempt to put distance between himself and the Dunaan. Pitches in the earth told of his stagger; pain could be a crippling agent, blood loss compounding damages done to basic locomotive control. Seydon read his stumbles, tripping over exposed root-curls stuck up from tracts of pine-needle beds. He replaced his thrown sheathe-blade back into its thigh-catch, taking up the trail.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Despite desperation, and the flood of toxic adrenal stimulators pumped into his bloodstream to dull agony and fear crawling up into his faculties, the physician celebrated as Black Vermillion, Kharnast of Ord Mantell, was cornered. Seydon broke through a tree-line wall in time to watch Cassat stumble headlong over his feet. Injector-vials scattered out of his hand and reached, rolling aside. Ahead, nestled on a leveled plane of compacted river-rock and concrete mortar, rested his shuttle: a sleek-lined TCS-950 Corellian Panther. Light winked off its prow and aft ballast curls.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]At noticing Seydon’s presence, Sillian Cassat clawed back up to his feet. One mandible-hand clutched on his oversized dual-las pistol. The witcher watched the other recede into his bloodied coat, withdrawing a small, black-gloss rectangle blinkered with a single light diode. Cassat levered his claw-thumb just above a rubber nipple installed in the controller.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Preparation!” He shouted. “Preparation, man! You just stay there, and don’t take a step! There’s enough crentex buried into top-soil to burst this whole cliff-side into burning rubble! Just stay there and don’t make a move! Damn you, this hurts - !”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He whipped up his sheathe-knife regardless, cocking its blade-point twixt his knuckles. A twitch and he could send it flying straight and true as any lance, fast but perhaps not fast enough before Cassat depressed his trigger switch. Their impasse matured into stand-off. Black Vermillion ‘eyed’ him, though his face lacked any ocular cavities. His skull was still a spine-bristled crustacean-like construction of interlocked plates, dyed nefarious red, now blood flecked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A year in this arboreal nightmare, fool, and you presumed enough that I’d neglect contingencies? Any warrior plans for defeat as much as victory, Mister Seydon, any true commander will tell you that. …Where’s Harcress?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Gone to meet the dead, Cassat,” Seydon called back. “Gone to wherever souls travel for judgment at the end, same place we’re all destined for. Right now, I imagine there’s an army of phantoms tearing his soul apart for what he did to them.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The hard grain of his sutured visage made expression impossible. Cassat looked impassive, hideously neutral, clicking a barbed tongue against his fleshless teeth. “I took you for a creature of substance, man. But you’re just like all the others: wasteful, always on some self-righteous vein, out to avenge every encountered wrong. Though… Presumably, this is all Stenwulf’s fault. That’s pride for you, Mister Seydon. Arrogance. It’s always the hubristic bullshid that comes up from fissures in your mistakes to come kill you later.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Silence reigned for a beat. Cassat shifted on his back heel, taking a step. Seydon took one likewise, in a longer stride, necessitating the Doctor to raise his remote high and call back. “Not a step! I said not a step!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What, Cassat? Come what may but you should know: you’re not leaving this place.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So what? You’ll murder me? Stroll up here and smash my brains open in your hands?” Sneered the doctor. “Is that what it’s come down to?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You helped facilitate the abduction, experimentation, torture, and murder of hundreds if not thousands of innocent displaced on Dromund Kaas,” Seydon replied with his voice tinted cold and flinty. “That’s what it’s come down to, Cassat. That’s why I came back from the dead. Tracked you here. Took your greatest creation and broke him. Because maybe they were imperfect, ordinary folk, but they didn’t deserve that. They didn’t, Cassat. No one does. What do you think you deserve? What did Sennex say you deserved?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He didn’t say much to that, but there were promises, boy,” Cassat edged closer on to his shuttle. “Splendor. Power. Ability. If that had to be paid by the blood of a few useless souls bound for suffering anyway, what’s that to pay, really? Don’t lecture an old mercenary, Seydon. This is a game played to win. Pardon me if I stepped over the starving, scrabbling hands of the poor and needy destined to turn on each other in the end anyhow. …You stay there! Don’t move, I can see you twitching! I’m boarding my ship, Seydon, and I am going to Ys! I am getting what I was promised!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do you even know what Ys is?” Barked the Dunaan.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No. Does it matter? Sennex told that it’s the Fleece of the Gods!” He cried. “A last virgin trove that hasn’t been raped by privateers, by every fool-bastard with ambition to be the next Velok. If it’s enough for Borja Sennex, High Inquisitor, to be convinced it’s tangible reality and reward, than I needn’t bother wondering!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Why Ys, then? Why a fairy tale, Cassat?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s Sennex’s obsession, not mine. The man disappeared west beyond that paltry Fringe empire for a year. Gods only know what he saw. He returned, true, but changed. You’d never known someone so driven to make sense of nursery rhyme and myth, Mister Seydon. But I know this much. If what he’s spoke of is even half true…” The rigid corners of his gum-less jaw actually contorted up in a brief smile. “Then it’ll be enough. I can take this reality and strip it of all bogus pretense. Turn it all on its head, so we can leave behind all these dumbed existentialism. I’ll make them like me, Seydon. And really… When everything’s uniform, what’s there to fear? What’s there to despise? I’ll not be the one strangers turn to spit upon and scorn. Not then, no. They’ll come for ones like you, man. Then there won’t be anywhere you can run.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Cassat. You were never hated for your visage. That was never what frightened your victims. Never what you were despised, loathed, reviled for,” Replied the witcher, almost softly, fixed in an almost sorry expression as he came to glean a few last moment truths about Black Vermillion. “They touched at your soul and found void. Just blank, fathomless malice… That’s all. And making everyone as monstrous as you doesn’t lessen what you’d still be.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A pause. Silence beat in the quiet drawling over the landing clearing, winds scurrying loose motes of rock and dust across and over their shoulders. For a very long, wordless time, Sillian Cassat faced Seydon of Arda, rigid as a redwood. Lost in immovable thought. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then, in a very spiteful gesture, he laughed and raised his left hand. His claw-thumb clicked onto the detonator’s activator nipple. Seydon charged forward as woodland behind him disappeared in explosive balls of filmy, blood-orange fire and ball-flame. A roiling wall of rapidly activating crentex nodules buried meters below ground chased at his heels, hurdles of rapidly expanding air ripping at his backside. There was no sound. Ears ringing, Seydon drove past Cassat for the edging of the hammock-valleys forty meter drop-off into further tree thickets below. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He never saw what happened to Black Vermillion. Nearby, plastic explosives went off beneath the shuttle-grounds, shredding the Corellian Panther into wind-storm of flesh-shredding pyroclastic debris, into razor shrapnel hurling clouds of billions of razors his way. Seydon leaped into empty air. Rock, granite mixed with bluish veins of flint, came out from under his boots. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon fell ahead of the massed earth-slide thundering off the cliff-face to bury and pile into a hundred meter half-cone slope. Viridian, jade, and emerald canopy flashed up to meet him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]When he awoke, it was hours on into Cholganna’s chilly twilight. Night was a rising blanket in the south, pin-pricked with starlight, painted with the creams of the Galactic Bar. By sheer, fraught luck, he’d landed entangled on looped ropes of velvety silk-vines. Above, where Cassat, Harcress, and their dissected retinue had parked their single shuttle, was traumatized stone. The shuttle was steel litter upon the debris hill. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And Sillian Cassat was gone.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]~Outer Rim Territories~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]~Tingel Arm~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]~The Indigo Reef~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]~Arda~[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt][Three Days Later…][/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]The navi-comp put Arda out as a three day flight, by way of the Empyrean of Lightspeed, hurtling soundlessly past colourless star-fragments and immaterial ‘reality’. Seydon trimmed the Iron Snake, rerouting several redundant functions, cutting main lights and a portion of atmospheric interior-support, and funneling power into the hyperdrive motivator and any attending sub-systems. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]For three days, he idled in frigid dark, passing time in preparation. Razorlight and Winterfang were washed, cleansed with a kind of odorless alcohol, edges stripped and sharpened down with an adamite whetstone. Harnesses wrecked or showcasing signs of thread-baring were replaced. Kit exhausted by the episodes upon Cholganna were likewise restocked. Seydon half slept, partially meditating, perhaps frightened for what waited in his dreams on the voyage for home. Spare hours were practiced in honing blade-velocities and close-quarter dexterity.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt] Ominously, translating from hyperspace to realside proved rough. The Snake shuddered, jolting with stress-groans along its dorsal lines, worrying her pilot that some integral weakness was fracturing support ribs sealed up in the hulling. It woke Seydon from a rest, napping in the pilot’s chair; retooled web-gear and his trusty swords sat piled in the co-pilot’s seat. He wanted every necessity for the coming struggle to be on-hand and within able reach, ready to slap onto his body-frame the minute his Snake set down. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Borja Sennex had come to claim Shev Rayner’s personal effects. The High Inquisitor could not be underestimated, though Seydon’s resources were sparse and manpower amounted to only himself. Vox missives sent via data-packets into Sanctum Space net relay buoys heralded were met with cool silence, not a word in reply. Ahead in the void, Arda turned on invisible spokes and wallowed in the gravity tethers anchoring it to its singular, hot main-sequence sun. Seydon gripped at the pilot-yokes, aft-engines flaring nova-bright as the Snake peeled forward like dark lightning.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He chased into a high orbit, anchoring just briefly on the night-side where shadow was heavy and deep, extending sensor screens and vox-thief nets to dredge up ghosts and phantoms of enemy communication traffic. Speakers installed in the chair neck-bracing broadcasted brief flits of phantom exchanges; bursts of electronic noise, indecipherable, human voices warped by channel encoders shielding outside ears from deciphering anything further than the fact that they were relaying audio commands. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]By his arm-wrest, a pict-slate rose. Despite inexplicable, monstrous interference, tell-tale neon markers on a magnified grid-screen sniffed out drive-wake traces, engine signatures, operating over on Arda’s sun-side. Seydon paused, scrutinizing the thrust-trace count. One was piloting erratically. It zig-zagged out of group formation, jinking about, spinning on its own axial plane. Others were fairing little better. A trio of three ship-markers blitzing up through what topographic overlays displayed as a straight of upraised coral stacks simply disappeared. Seydon taxied the Snake forward, climbing down from the exobase, threading west into sunrise over the planetary horizon. Cockpit screens automatically tinted out the glare. Too slow. Seydon throttled up. Re-entry fire ghosted over the prow. A predatory gleam caught in his eyes as he bruised the vessel’s underbelly, forcing a ragged vector approach. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was around the sonic breach through the tropopause into the troposphere proper when Seydon found himself confronted by increasing shrill atmospheric alerts. He flicked the speaker’s off, glancing at the readouts in earnest. Jet-stream currents were measuring out to high gusts of some seven hundred kilometers per hour. Below were befuddling pressure eddies stroking around in massive axial pressure-twists, funneling south west and north west respectively. Seydon boosted the scanner range, opting for a detailed topography display, slating on false-colour filters. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Black Gods…” He breathed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon forgot to reconcile realside time with Arda’s local orbital position and season. By the year’s end, in Ardan reckoning, they were in the Season of Woe. A cool-off period lasting roughly forty days, where cooler southern weather systems met against hotter migratory equatorial storms pushed by northern pressure fronts. Typhoons stewed, bolstering with moisture, thundering in a wide system belt before they regained traction over warmer currents, climbing north again. Sometimes, storm-cells would merge. Sometimes, there would be Calabed. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Hurricane. A singular storm of utterly destructive might that spanned in continental measurements. There’d be Sue-enae, bane of the Sendan, the folding tidal waves of iron water, shrieking water-spouts, winds slinging water-drizzle into killing hail. They said it was suffering of the dead come back to haunt the living, wroth of ghosts, phantoms, enraged poltergeists having met terrible ends and unleashing their ire onto the Ardan seas.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Iron Snake rose to cruise altitudes, breasting the eastern storm face. Below writhed cyclonic bars of snow-white clouding; lightning cast dizzying spells of off-illumination, framing contorted rain-banks in pitch black-on-silver reliefs, making it appear as if nebulous monstrosities stalked the cyclone like giants. Seydon consulted cockpit sensoria. Disregarding occasional diameter fluctuations, it measured across at its thickest roughly six thousand kilometers. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He yoked the Snake up and up, daring rather to skirt over the hurricane-cap than risk flight through inner wind-currents and rain-bands. Vibration routed up through the durasteel floor-decking. Scanner maps recorded local electrical discharges, a hundred lightning-blasts a minute and only climbing. Condensation streamed off the Snake’s wing tips, banking for on a northbound course, bursting through cirrus blooms in pluming scatters of collected rain-water. Seydon increased cabin dampening; thunder was constant and ear-splitting. Every so often, he called up the topographical slates, watching for faint thrust-trace indicating vessels in flight. Sure enough, returns would blink on, portraying roughly two-dozen pinnace cloud-cars and a one larger parent ship passing through another cloud wall before vanishing or breaking apart. Sennex was flying with all due haste for a small atoll sixteen clicks away from little Fadapo Isle. Radar returns echoed their ghostly eminences on the read out displays. Two pinnaces rocked slightly before their signals collided on-screen. Seydon watched their screen markers fade out.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A combination ultra-sonics and lidar purported a calmer twist of wind on the westward Calabed face, sustaining as rain-walls caught on a riot-band of basalt stacks defying the weather and standing high despite the wind lash. Seydon grappled with flight-yokes, bending the Snake about despite a slight protest as the prow knifed into an atmospheric gale. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It flew for Sycaela. Arda’s second largest permanent settlement behind sprawling Karybdis, ancestral fisher-clans happened upon a ridge-line of mountainous, black growths edging crag-like up from a lip of bent, partially destroyed tectonic plating smashing in against a brethren plate warping an opposing direction. The stacks were all hexagonal juts, staggered in grainy, complex patterning, ribbed with bamboo-thatch drawbridges and gangways compiled from driftwood. Housing ran up the entire length of the rise-faces: stone anchored longhouses roofed with slate tiling, skewered to the jut-faces with crude iron pins, interconnected with further bridging and hemp ladders running vertically. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Despite reducing visibility as Seydon guided his vessel down into breakers of fierce, haughty gale-force, he could make out enough hazy, rainy detail for his belly to begin sinking. Smoke arose from Sycaela. A dozen softgrain longhouses were gutted with fire-blasted char and drifting columns of white, hissing smoke. Bodies laid soaking under the rain-fall; Seydon counted maybe twenty, each blown apart and ripped to burning shreds. Figures, grasping what he could only guess were long-pike whaling harpoons, ran through the storm gloom, gathering up survivors from house-wreckage. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Iron Snake burned its downdraft thrusters hot blue, hovering overhead. Her pilot gently nosed her on a curling line for one unoccupied basalt-cliff, just wide enough by a bare margin to host the vessel’s weight. Rain was drizzling from its perched, fixed wings. Lightning flashed, howling Sycaela with thunder-claps. The sonics were enough to briefly blitz rain-drops into mist. Ardans were already rapidly scaling up to the stack flat. Seydon reached and cycled on landing protocols. Stanchion-legs pried out from the belly-holds, hissing hydraulic groans and coughs of steam, looped with armour-sheathed cabling winding up into throbbing machinery. Local Scyaelans waiting on the stack edging, peering up worriedly at the mean Winter Eagle profile. All harpoons went up when a landing ramp tongued down from behind the fore-mounted cabin, Seydon stepping out into the storm in his jacket and harnesses. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Ardans weren’t budging, nor pleased to see the stranger loping towards them on long legs, tall, bulked, dressed in blue-stripes over his jacket coat while Razorlight and Winterfang flashed light off their metallic pommels. Each was a sinewy fisher dressed in minimal shark-leather, decorated with hunting trophies and urchin-acid tats denoting unique identities. One of them stepped forward through the crowd; she was a thick-set woman girded in a skirt of linked kraken-rings, standing naked otherwise, arms corded enough to probably lift a Great Black Shark overhead with a single wrist. Her harpoon was an aged relic, amalgamated between strange metals, an ivory grasp, scrimshawed with runic blessings. Crag-fangs dangled in a loop off her wrist.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t know you, White Gull!” She had to cry over the wind, such was its roar. “I know your iron boat! But not you! You come to grant us further grief, White Gull?? Where is the Ranger??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Xe’ga, you blind bat!” Seydon called back. “Don’t you know your row-mate when you see him?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What??” She grunted. Xe’ga came forward, accompanied by two tree-tall Sendan fishers with similarly fearsome harpoon-poles. Bending slightly, wincing whilst rubbing her left knee, dark eyes peered up at Seydon’s face. A meaty hand with hooked fingers reached to grip his stub-grown chin, turning his cheeks side to side. “…Seroth of the metal serpent??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No other, Xe’ga Kee, I swear.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sycaela answered to only woman and likewise she to them. Xe’ga was Kee, their saying for leader, though its meaning resembled more into a translation of ‘One who is for all’. She’d accepted the station since her times as a sand-maiden, manning the whale-dugouts in their epic voyages for the cyclopean Deep Spinebacks. Seydon had gained her friendship as a matter of easing village fears; he was a figure descended from the sky on wings of strange material, sharp-eyed, deadly, yet not all like some terrible figure of the Su-enae they first took him for. Xe’ga was perplexed by his appearance.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Darker were your locks the last time we went rowing, yet now? White as clam-lips, silver like the marlins. Your eyes, Pilot,” She murmured in close. “You’ve the witches light burning there now. …What tides did you go swimming in, Seroth?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon shook his head lightly. “It’s a tale, Xe’ga, and you might not believe less than half of it. But what happened here? Longhouses burn, there are dead on the rocks.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Fiends!” She cried, forced by another gale. “They came like you! The Calabed was coming upon us when they fell down from the sky. Their boats were like yours, skimming the waves, but more! They came to our docks and… things emerged. Faceless. Dark like the slicks beyond Cesta Bay. Only two gave their faces away, and they were fair like you but not so pale.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What did they do, Xe’ga?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Kee screwed her face up in a rare expression of rage. Wind washed rain off the tall, flinty wall of rock nearby. Droplets in their millions plinked off the Snakes wings. “I saw their Kee. Tall, terrible man, growing hair about his face. Older. But so much unkindness in his eyes. Like someone too much enamoured by the cold light beyond the trenches… His friend was worse. We could not see his eyes. He talked in a terrible voice and held tools like yours. …They asked after you, Seroth. Where you roosted, where you slept.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon looked forlornly over the wrecked, heat-blasted houses thick with still hissing palm-wood coals. “…You withheld from them?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nothing about them felt at all right or certain,” She spat. “We said nothing. Silence was all we offered. This angered the eye-less one. He made threats, came forward to see them through but his chief held him at bay. There were offers made, cajoling, so much cajoling, putting on this air of significant friendship. They wanted no such thing. I don’t know greed, Seroth. But I know when there’s a bad kind of hunger in someone’s gaze. Still, we said nothing…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…So they began to kill us,” Xe’ga’s voice dropped. Seroth had to virtually duck by her mouth to pick up her words beyond the wind-screams. “Fire and light erupted out of their tools. The eye-less one liked it. He went after some of our girls. He… He was merciless! I could do nothing to stop them. When we could not get near, we retreated. But their weapons had such reach! More died. …They found my husband, Seroth. Do you remember Hanni’ble?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I do,” He said. Hanni’ble. Whipcord thin but with an almost constant smile, large teeth and small eyes, almost comical but so utterly sincere. Brave to a fault. “They slew him?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. But not before their Kee caught him. I do not know what they did. But their Kee came down on a knee and took Hanni’ble’s brow into his hand. …Then my husband began to scream. It was finished in a moment. The eyeless man took his head…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Xe’ga, I am so sorry…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just tell me who they are, Pilot,” The Kee looked up. Her eyes were wide with reddening skeins. “Why do they know your name? Do not tell me they are you friends.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They’re not. They’re my worse enemies and what happened to your husband was dealt to me likewise. They found Arda from me, ripping it from my memory. They’ve come here for something of mine, but I can’t let them have it. The grief they have visited upon you would be magnified in… In… Untold ways, upon uncountable others.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Pilot, I don’t understand,” Xe’ga shook her head, trailing dark, braided and bone strewn hair. “Why have they come to kill??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Because they can’t help themselves, Kee Friend. I don’t know who counts as wholly evil anymore… But they don’t care for inflicting pain, and they are greedy without recourse. They will murder, again and again. I’ve hunted them here, to stop them?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t think you can now,” She pointed out into the massed, grey swirl of hurricane wall somehow serenely curling around. “They took their iron boats and sailed off into the winds. One fell in fire before it ever breached the first wall, struck down by the witches light.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Lightning. Seydon nodded, but took Xe’ga by her arm. They began to brave the trembling stack-bridges between the multi-levels, winding down for the swamped docks by the rock columns wave smashed shorelines. Distantly, the hurricane wall was closing. Wind lashed until it began to rip and smote any material or objects not yet pulverized to splintered debris across Sycaela. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon watched Ardans scurrying into hollowed out tunnels ground against the rock-stacks, seeking last minute shelter. One hut, atop an overlooking crag collapsed into soaked ruin, fish hovels flooding with downpour until bone carcasses went washing down into the storm spoor. Bridges disappeared. The wind picked up and scoured their vision until a bare meter was left for navigation. Seydon heard a cry and turned. One of the followers had vanished, pole-pike and all. Hemp and bone step-ladders tumbled up away into the air, as salting pits were ruined, store-jars reduced to chalky rubble. Rainfall was frigid.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What are you looking for?? Seroth!” Xe’ga arrested him before they made a drop onto a rock-spar littered with wrecked planking and still upright docking trunk-pylons. “Pilot! Calabed is making its fall! We take shelter now or we perish! What are you dragging me about for!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I can’t find a Runner!” Seydon cried back, trying to balance precarious footing as he searched the upraised spar, fighting wind-drag threatening to pitch him off his boots and slam him bodily into the basalt-stack. An Indadh Runner was a polished dugout, a smoothed length of sanda wood stuck with a boom and sail by an attached universal-joint, swept through precision carpentry to ensure both board and sail would take water and wind respectively. Indadh utilized them in their record sail-runs between the varied island clans, transporting news, small gifts, whatever could be carried in their liver-parcels.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They were also the only wave-rider known locally as able to surmount the challenge of navigating cyclonic storms. Seydon was scrabbling along the spar, hands over knees, trying to lessen his profile against the wind-shriek. He couldn’t hear Xe’ga calling anymore. Water was sticking to his inner ears. He swabbed one out, looking about for a Runner. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Pilot!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon peered back while clutching to a small rip in the smoothstone. Xe’ga was wildly gesturing forward, trying to point at something at the far edge of the spar as the remaining Sendan grabbed her bodily round her waist to try and tug her back up the rock-face. He looked up, saw it. A Runner lashed to an wooden crossbar not yet shattered by the gales was threatening to catch a terrible breeze in its sail. Seydon rose and sprinted, diving into a slide, reaching. Fingers entangled into the bar roping, coarse and bristly to the touch, crusted thick with sea-salt and a few tinier species of hardy mollusk. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Out flashed his sheathe-knife, severing the lines and freeing the Runner from the spar-tip. Seydon got to one foot and roughly levered the boot-toe into a board foot-catch, trying to steady the board as he kept the rigging snapped away from the gales. The board bobbed terribly, upset by sucking currents eating away at the shallows. It took a solid minute before his foot could find the latter foot-catch, feeling a kind of spiny velcro fashioned out of hardy shrimp-legs bite into his boot sole. Seydon looked on at the orgrish maelstrom, virtually lightless as cloud turned the sky into brackens of overcast, swamped hellishly with untapped water and enough natural rage to bring Arda to her knees. It was said on occasion no Indadh survived travailing Calabed; he’d roughly a hundred hours logged on a personal recorder, taking up lessons with a few gutsy sail-runners able to make the time showcasing to the ‘Pilot of the Serpent’ how to handle a boat and rig. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon stood and cut the sail to the breeze. A delay of six seconds allowed the witcher to catch his breath, before a squall hurtled down from behind along the basalt ridging, kicking the Runner up and forward off the spar, skipping Seydon along. Swiftly, his figure turned diminutive, swallowed up by the Calabed maw, as he tacked into the gales and ran up high over a wave breaker, bruising the Runner forward into the first hurricane rain-wall. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Lightning broke overhead. Bolts struck into raised sand-dunes stripped naked by rearranged tiding, crisping the mounds to glass and smote refuse. The Dunaan grit his jaw and pushed against the sail-bar, flying up a wave-curl. Now for Sennex and a measure of vengeance.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]It was the daftest brand of suicide.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Looking through the rain walls was peering through washing grey-noise, tumultuous, unreal with wind howling at a constant even keel, until that too became a kind of background hum purring in Seydon’s water-logged ears. Visibility was devilish, if not non-existent. At best, rising along the wave crests for a higher vantage, he could make out vague details in local landmarks not yet pitched over the ferocity of the wind. Fifteen clicks, he hazarded to guess, every so often lit for split-moments as lightning swung in and cratered into drifting hulks blazing hot with oil-fire. Seydon steered the Runner close, bending the rig to hop a brief stroke of wind harrying his backside, carrying him high atop a nine-meter wave egging in too close. He cocked the sail upright to relinquish the glide. The dugout board crashed onto pitching water, sending aching tremors up along the meat and bone of his spine.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Pilfered navy pinnace’s floundered half-sunk. The witcher wove around a trio showcasing buckled hulling stripped down to the frame-joists, a few metal plates swirling in the waters, leaking out various onboard chemicals. Still-warm bodies dressed in puffed, liquid swollen flight-suits bobbed away, turning over with the current, disappearing in short order as Calabed claimed them. Overhead beamed further shafts of lightning, excited by the presence of Sennex’s atmospheric flotilla. These pinnace’s had suffered under repeated electric strikes and probably had their shields soured by repeated kinetic buffers. Lightning tore into through their engine blocks. Seydon saw one, a length of bulked, cable strewn rectangle attached aft with a black-scored conical emitter, still afloat. He hopped the engine and turned the sail-rigging, tacking a course north.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Navigation was uncertain at best, unreliable at worst. Visibility shifted from those fifteen clicks to less than fifteen meters. He nearly ran aground a half-drowned atoll; Seydon wrestled with the sailing, skipping across thickened ponds rife with sand-grit. Sea-beasts were washed ashore against exposed sand-bars; tuna measuring twenty five feet, three tons of meat, flopped helplessly, trying to shift down into the sea. Salt stung at his eyes. There was enough inclement moisture to drown by breathing. He couldn’t take his hands off the sail-mast and still keep his balance on the dugout-board to fix on a cloth-mask for his lips and nostrils. Seydon bore up, blinking, at a constant check on the in-case his harnesses had come undone. Razorlight and Winterfang, strapped over his back, howled silently at the operatic hurricane.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Shapes loomed in the storm-gloom: tall, almost cyclopean stacks of upraised white granite bleached by millennia of sun exposure. Seydon knew them. Ardans never gave them a name of their own, but anyone in the nearest three hundred clicks knew the ‘Whale’s Jaw’. He skittered the Runner around, dodging left, right, left along again, right past another stack to glide between a narrow passage between a pair of columns just barely a meter in width. Water crashed up and across the board-prow. The witcher was freezing. Hands grasping at the rig-steering had gone fast numb and salt-caked. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was soon enough when he could follow after what little remained of Sennex’s patrol boats. They flew high in ill-advised attempts to navigate wind-currents, shields glittering in the night-dark. Each was roughly ten meters from fore to aft, grey-matte, plating buffered where grind-blades wore off ident manufacture marks. Custom low-atmos gun-runners, prickly with rail-mounted las-repeaters cocked on their pectoral hulling. Seydon counted maybe seven, six, by the over-raw back-quarter engines revved to maximum throttle, trying to accelerate against the concrete walls of storm wind. One faltered and was snapped out of the sky, turned over its prow before smacking onto the top of a passing tidal crest. Its canopy ruptured and broke in, despite detonating implosion-bolts. The pilots screamed above the wind-howl before sea-water flowed in and gagged them into silence. Another pinnace tried to juke before lightning fell and tore it in half in an ugly rupture of billowing fire. Two fliers lost control of their stabilizing thrusters, twisting in on planing axials until their hulls collided. Another burst of ball-flame and inky-smoke, more cascades of tree-lightning. Calabed suffered nothing for fools. One by one, it plucked the cutters, the scouters, disassembling them vessel by vessel, walloped into the sea, or ravaged by electric-bolts, pitching gutted hulks to sink and become center-pieces in the coral trenches deep below.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahead blinked running lights. A steadied profile took on definition in the hurricane fog. Fin-backed and heavy bellied; some Mon Cal shuttle-freighter, ventral thrusters flaring magma-white, constantly adjusting to compensate for unpredictable wind eddies and seven hundred kilometer gales that could sunder it out of the sky. Lightning licked in scalding cracks, attracted by deflector screen outputs. Seydon cut his Runner into a sharp gouge, mounting up a ramp of water-crest, all but flying as he rebounded the foot-board across whatever calmer flats of seething current-spoor. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The shuttle was tracking over the Den of Crete; skinny atolls linked by coral bridge-lines and half-buried beach heads, more swampland than lagoon. Fish of paradise utilized the disconnected pools as spawning grounds, entering through narrow drainage tunnels hollowed out by long gone rock-eels. Somewhere was Fadapo Isle and beyond, a narrow spit of tropical beach Seydon oft utilized as training grounds. Where he could, in confidence, leave Shev Rayner’s inheritance. Six chests buried in scattered graves detectable only by sensor-paddles. Seydon could feel his skin throb; Sennex’s shuttle was bringing its imaging suites to bear. He tacked his Runner harder, trying to make up for the torturous distance between himself and the cruiser. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Briefly, wind and rain-smog and fog-banks retreated, calmed momentarily. The air brightened. Grey sunlight beamed in strafing cones, breaking cloud-cover. Seydon could see the shuttle gusting landing jets, rolling a length of debark-ramps from a wallowing, sectioned berth-hold. Thin shadows, small, sticky with hints of grasped implements, disembarked onto a blade of beachhead dominated by thickly ordered rows of yellow-balsa palm trees. Before them, on a nearby sand lot encircling an azure pond flitting with brightly scaled band-fish, a marker was planted into the earth-grit: a fashioned ‘crows frame’, a crossed ‘T’ with additional ground sinks anchored from the outstretched ‘arms’ into the ground. A body was lashed to the wood by corded hemp-line. Seydon could see it was naked and still, drooping off its wrist-bindings in a pitiful respite pose. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He coasted his Runner up into the shallows, pitching its nose into the loamy sand before driving down an anchor-wedge. The sail-rig was popped out of its socket and partially buried. Wind nor tide would drive away his only form of able transportation. In time, too. Visibility shot down to just bare arm-lengths before him as the Calabed renewed its swollen might. Gales lashed teardrop hail-stones, pelting with stinging force, landing blitzes of lightning off-coast that briefly set exposed reefing with flame. Tidal-crests swamped in, extinguishing each small conflagration in gusts of displaced steam. Seydon drew Razorlight and crawled up the beach.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The man left to hang and die from the scarecrow cross wasn’t any Ardan. Though stripped bare save for elastic briefs, fraught with severe welting and profusely bleeding pokes skewered through lung, belly, and liver, despite darkened flesh, their hands and feet were lacking customary callusing and were otherwise barren of acid-tats or bone-pierce decorum. A flash-burned barcode stuck out on their throat. Seydon came in close and gripped the man’s head back, peering into an oval face with sunken, dead eyes. The motion loosed their jaw, empathetically vomiting a well of clotted blood onto the sand. He regarded the slain man’s skinny, taut frame… and his almost fleshless lips…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And maybe… You’ll pay... Your debts… Then!” Seydon remembered a twiggy killer sneer up at him with a skinless mouth and too dark eyes, pigmented pale by decades spent out of sunlight. That one fell away to die in the cold.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His hearing and touch were what saved him. Simultaneously, picking up a prick of plastic micro-cogs stick and grind against briefly jammed steristeel gearbox springs, near indecipherable shifts in the sand-grit shuddered up his heels, lending vibration to the infinitesimally fine hairs running microscopically across his whole epidermis. Seydon twisted aside, planting his toes down. Powered strength leapt him clear of the trap crucifixion by seven meters. A trio of silver-cased pressure plated ordnance spheres popped up through the grit, motivated by miniature jet-apertures detonating timed propulsion. They detonated in a simultaneous sequence, glossing a four meter ring into scorched, dirty glass, blasting furnace-hot sand. Someone garbed in optical cloak came down from the upland scruff-grass, strolling with a cocky gait that was easy with cruel confidence, briefly shadowed by the rise of acrid smoke and streaming rainfall. Seydon gently stood up into a stooped pose, facing the incomer with his profile angled, Razorlight cocked up in a hooked guard. He’d barely avoided being reduced to pitted, discoloured meat. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I fethin’ buried you, boy!” Said the man. Seydon knew the voice. He watched the cloak disengage in a shudder of electronic grille-sound and arc-jolts. “Broke ya inta pieces, left ya to scream yaself inta suffocashun! Whut’s it take to kill you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He was Stenwulf. Garbed a gilt surcoat of bossed gold fibers wove together with armour-silk, richly detailed with pen-etchings describing blessings of benediction from the Many-Faced God of War, atop a steel-finished exoskeletal-frame gleaming with power electro-mechanical super-strength and purple-grey fatigues below. His hands and feet were garbed in a similar rubber polymer form-fitted, laced with shielded epidermal circuit grafts, fitted over by plexi-glassed holoboard display emitters. Stenwulf now kept his facial visage cowled by a wrapping cam-mount where his eyes should have been, lacing a hood behind flitting out into a segmented, matte-grey cape. One hip sported his favoured vibro-katana, the other a trio of modded vibro-knives stuck in recharge sheathes, more strapped across the servos on his thighs and calves. He stood across the detonation crater; a vox-mod installed or replacing his vocal chords entirely amplified his voice.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We awl get paid our wage, Seydon. I dealt mine out three years in a shidhole cell fightin’ off the rats comin’ for me in the noight! An’ errytoime I snapped a tiny neck, I figured it ought ta ‘ave been yours. Ya bastahd! Ya wrecked whorseson! Whut’s it gonna take to make ya jus’ stay? Down!? Fethin’ ‘urricane can’t finish ya off!” The mercenary spat cobalt-stained spittle onto the smooth-sand, drawing his war-sword. Power-arcs rippled along the edge-curl.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m finished when you are, Sten,” Seydon called back. “Not a moment before.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Anythin’ else to say, ‘fore I split you, gut your bastard belly, and throw ya head at Sennex’s feat?” Stenwulf taunted. “Somethin’ for your missus? Ya know, boy. Been meanin’ to tell ya this: s’not been the same since Nat Gunn died, ya know. Fethin’ terrible fashion to get booted out, ya agree? But ah’d feel worse if he ‘ad to see you now. Lookit you. Snow-haired freak. Cahn’t save ‘imself, let alone anyone else~ Always jus’ a little too late~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher stared Stenwulf down the length of his blade. He just drew himself up a touch more, snickering now, draped with lengths of flailing sea-weed swept up by the air-wash. “Can’t foight~ Can’t ‘unt~ Can’t screw~ But he’s good sumhow to always feth with my good fortune, ya know tha’ about yisself, Seydon boy? Put a bad taste in me mouth on Saijo, and fethin’ tugged us all down’ill frum there, didn’t ya? Couldn’t get a job done wit’out you goin’ off about this and abou’ that. Like assif any uv it mahtard! Wonder what ol ‘Nat ‘ave to say about it~[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ya took th’ Sayda frum me. Ya took Guen frum me. Left me to rot, Seydon, left me to live out th’ toime until the rats came fer me in th’ noight. Somethin’ hit me tho~ Thought… Thought I’d share it wid you. S’loike evah since ya came along, baby or all grown uhp, ya just been canny bad for folks~ Mean, considah poohr ‘Nat! Bastard ‘ad ‘is brains punched out utha’side o’ his face! Wouldn’ta happened if he weren’t so fethin’ adaman’ on your account, lad. But… Ya remember wha’ I said, feelin’ funny since Nat was wasted. Figured out wha’ it was.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Past stickin’ that prick Shev? Past givin’ th’ bizniss to ya Ma on a nightly basis~? Worst regret? …Ah didn’t beat out your blessed Ma for bein’ the one to blow out ya father’s skull~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Razorlight rang off Sten’s raised vibro-katana in a wail of metal on metal, piling him off his guard-footing, forcing his toes to dig in and scrabble for purchase in the muddied beach grit. Seydon had only taken a single step to address his blow, still set in a unstable guard, waiting to answer the Merc with any number of counters. Stenwulf had been forced back by two meters, a touch more. The servos in the exo-frame round his bent knees whined out of protest. Helm-cams twisted about, focusing on the Dunaan.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Ya got tricky.”[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Stenwulf got Seydon’s better a year prior, when the hunter was wounded, sore, spent out by Harcress in a grueling contest that he’d won out by less than a hair’s breadth. He took a las-shot through his thigh and with crippled mobility, suffering exhaustion, fractures, a sprain, half-drowned besides, faced off against a fresher opponent. Stenwulf got in his licks. He’d favoured since before their initial encounter on war-torn Saijo a kind of exo-frame bolted to his skeleton, rigged to a mind-impulse unit secured to the back of his skull, able to perform combat feats of strength and speed beyond the need for any prerequisite training or tutelage. Stenwulf found it expedient. Shev Rayner decried him as a motley, contemptive bastard. Stenwulf came on with his katana, point-forward and ripping the blunt back curl upwards.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher saw it. It’d connect with his edge, to force his blade up and away from his body, in time for Sten to reverse his arms and cleave down in a chop. Seydon stepped out then forward, meeting the chop with a horizontal left-to-right blow, notching Sten’s sword aside enough for him grip the peak in one hand and shunt the hilt and guard in for a chasing punch. His knuckles met Sten’s jaw, stung his teeth, rocking him back. Seydon scattered blood with a clean left hook, splitting the merc’s cheek open. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Razorlight keened through rain-water. Stenwulf redoubled his guard, hammering with flat hacks, whipping his vibro-katana in wide, shivering strokes. Seydon locked their guards, forcing one another to strain in physical contest. There was an actual stink of ozone, emanating from suit hydraulics, piston-sheathes straining terrifically as the witcher’s musculature seized. The armoured braces keeping Stenwulf’s augments anchored to his skeleton likewise robbed a modicum of mobility. Seydon gave ground on their strike-lock, only to seize his legs about Sten’s ribs and left shoulder, tucking into wall and stealing the center of gravity. Stenwulf’s feet flew up and over, flipped bodily over onto his spine and hips. Sand planed out beneath his collapse. The witcher was up fast and ready with a knee-strike, lashing a blow to the mercenary’s throat. Stenwulf choked, found himself grappled in a small-joint lock, forced to abdicate his sword-grip before soaking up a straight, right jab into his helm cam. The upper track-ball came away, trailing torn cabling, venting spark-sheets.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Augh!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The merc let the collision lend his stuttering agility momentum enough to stand. His left food struck sand up at Seydon as he tried to guard in a kneel, the right kicking at his fallen sword. He was wily enough to snap his toes beneath the gripping, jerking up his knee. Seydon observed Stenwulf handily snatch his weapon from the air and readdress into a strict guard, stepping into ringing shriek of practiced velocities. The merc was an ogre, battering at the witcher’s guard , enforcing pressure to delay a counter-action until he’d pushed the man into the tide. Then his sword chopped on an angle and missed. Seydon had stepped gamely aside, pirouetting out of reach. Stenwulf needed an extra pace to slow, stuck momentarily as surf blasted over his thighs. He turned, meeting a strike cutting at his sternum but fell for a feint. Razorlight smacked into his jowls. Stenwulf screamed wretchedly, redoubling his strength.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Calabed was as nothing compared to their Ulbramid: the Ardan word for Dragonfin spoor, the rage-waters of super-massive sharks gaming in mating displays, frothing oceanic waters into rippling frenzies enough to decimate islands into broken tidal detritus. Seydon refused Stenwulf’s urgings for murder. Razorlight was lightning, ripping in staccato parries before tending cleaving strokes that carved slivers of metallic grit off the mercenary’s blade. The vibro-field choked and lagged with the spit of constant, drowning rainfall. Winds picked up and carried sand-clouds into their eyes, nearly walloping both off their feet as they fought on regardless. They were briefly separated as a balsa tree torn up by root-ball and all came hurtling past, caught in the wind-clutch. Overhead, the dead of Arda howled in cretinous laughter at their sport of combat. Iridescent crescents shone as they struck for purchase and blood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon drove Stenwulf back, boot over step, harrying him back up the beach egress and out of the tidal waters. He was matching the Corellian blow for blow, outpacing his machine speed. Sten struck overhead. The witcher stepped out of his line, holding Razorlight in a tail guard, striking up with the false-edge. It battered into the merc’s webgear and stunned him back a pace. Seydon repositioned and sprung his arms out, darting the point for Stenwulf’s face. The blow was guarded, but now a warding space was erected, with Razorlight forcing Sten to capitulate further ground. Control was out of his court. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“ – Wait now!” He groaned. Seydon didn’t. Sten failed in addressed a slash for his forearm and watched his enemy’s sword rend an inch-deep score through both gauntlet and flesh. “Wait!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Razorlight tore in with the Zornhau; the powerful down-right blow delivered from behind the shoulder, regarded as one of the ‘master strokes’ in Ysian longswordsmanship, applied in spinning assault. One line took Stenwulf through his armoured surcoat and exo-brace, sundering steel pistons in wretched halves, tracing down over clavicle and rib, down through his right hip-bone and planing flesh off his thigh. Seydon reversed and nicking out with the peak in a curt snap-cut. The mercenary watched his left-hand separate at the wrist. And before he could utter a word, down came the third slash, held back hand with the left palm firmly steering the pommel. The Witcher took apart his knees. By his ninth hack, Stenwulf was sparking arc-bolts from cuts dealt to his augment-skeleton, his liver cleaved in half lengthwise, sternum split wide, the whole of his surcoat diced into filament, bleeding like a stuck bore.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now Stenwulf was allowed to scream as he toppled, weighed forward into the mud by the ruinous weight of his surgically clamped exo-frame, severed and broken into disconnected sectioning spitting globular pustules of rain-warped sparks. The mercenary reached for a snug-pistol anchored to his right thigh in a catch-holster. Seydon glanced at the rising barrel. There was a liquid roll of steel. The slide parted in half and dropped beside the grip and magazine slide, into the sucking scree. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Reaching, the Dunaan knuckled his fingers into his foes hood-cowl. He tore off from Stenwulf’s skull, popping audio-visual feeds running in bundled optic sheathes free from implant plugs screwed into the occipital plate. In place of a once unkempt mane of moping hair, the scalp was shaved, forested in dark bristles, bumpy with suture scarring nailed in place by still-stuck butterfly clamps. Watery blue eyes blinked rain off their eyelashes, looking upwards, brightened by lightning-skeins sewing searing lines overhead. Sten was breathing in heavily, wheezing and panting. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon watched him work his jaw, wracked with agony. Words were too much to form. Stenwulf disgorged a puddle of viscera and reddened ichor over his tongue, teeth, and lips. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Y… You c-cah-cahn’t…” Stenwulf choked. “You… C-cah-cahn’t… Win… Boy… Sen-Sennex… Is ah… A… Ah kynda… Future… Y… You c-cahn’t d-deny. He… He’ll find your proice… H-He’ll g-g-give you… Miracles… Any-think ya… Ya want… Wh-What’s y-y-your swords… An-An your c-cuh-codes… G-Gonna d-do then…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Do you know what I want most of all, Stenwulf?” Seydon murmured, with even thunder unable to deny the edge to his tone.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Those broken eyes peered up. A wolf glared back, a shadow of bestial rage held at leash by a man with golden, slit-eyes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I want my father back…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Razorlight rose. Seydon’s hands trembled[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I want my mother back! You son of a queen!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Razorlight fell, and Stenwulf’s head rolled into the surf-crests to vanish out midst the careening waters. Seydon turned and roared at the hurricane darkness cloaking the heavens in natural wrath. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sennex!”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt] A solitary lookout kept watch from a blade of soggy kelp-ferns flagging upright in the wind-sheer. It turned, too late, alerted by a sixth sense or tell-tales on a possible mask HUD, seeing Seydon appear from the storm-gloom with powerful abruptness. Razorlight split the creature and hewed blood and organ viscera onto the sands. He strode by the jiggling corpse-thing, crushing a displaced ceramic-polymer mask molded into the visage of a cackling jester.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The enemy waited across the other side of a narrow dune; Seydon climbed up the rise, forging hand-holds despite the grainy gain of sand-mud and washes of running water eroding temporary rivulets down from a small puddle gradually thickening with the rain lash. Overhead, the shuttle-freighter provided an oblique formation shivering in the half-light, rocked by extremes of atmospheric turbulence, struggling to remain on hand at the Master’s call. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He came to the breaking edge and peered down, blades sheathed, as lightning back-lit the sky behind and thunder rumbled so close it shivered the air enough to pause falling water in mid-flight. Below was where he kept a small napping hammock and half buried coolers for refreshment. Or, he surmised, had. The hammock was gone. Shredded rags caught around wildly swaying balsa trees were all that remained. Each cooler had been dug free and turned out for their contents. Unopened beverages scattered with terrible litter over the beach front. Beside the upended containers, five six-foot by three wide holes had been laboriously dug in. Five gene-locked compartment chests were stacked in careful arrangement, surrounded by homunculus savants dressed in storm-gear, dragging auspex-sensors and data-paddles over their durasteel casing. Why they simply hadn’t blown the locks mystified Seydon. Perhaps they feared phosphor was rigged to scatter and burn if intrusion was detected. He looked for Borja Sennex and found him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]High Lord Inquisitor Borja Sennex stood by a trio of help sunk waist deep inside a sixth digging hole. Another thirty watchers surrounded him: an assassin-killer retinue, all decked in their dark livery, their singular silver pauldrons caked dirty with sea-bracken, hands to their individual weaponry. Seydon spotted one that somehow seemed distanced from the ordinary guard. He guarded beside Borja Sennex directly, dressed in a studded leather bodyglove plated with duraplast across the pectoral fabric and thigh-lines. There was no face: just a length of cowling pulled over a black-iron slate fixed with one-sided mirror lenses, jutting with decorative bull-fangs scowled in permanent overbite. An ornate hand-and-a-half sword idled on his hip. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The diggers tossed aside their power-spades and sand rakes, crawling from the hole before turning and bending back in. Skinny arms took especial care raising the last casket. Sennex quietly observed, stroking a gloved palm over his saturated beard. The Inquisitor was dressed impeccably in dark clothes of good quality cloth, draped with a sleeved storm-cloak edged in pearlescent white, an elegant lightsaber hanging from his torque-hide belt. He watched after the casket’s travel from dug-out to the rest of the gently piled lot, marking the collection as six effect-chests in total. The whole of Shev Rayner’s personal keepsakes and sequestered belongings that he’d compiled from a lifetime of forbidden adventure and secreted questing. It was now or never. Seydon began stalking down the shadowed face of the dune towards the mob.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sennex paused, tilting his brow just slightly, before turning with an overly emphatic swirl of his splendid cloak. The guard turned with him, not stiffening at their notice of the coming witcher, but drawing blades, pikes, mauls with practiced liquid motion. The iron-faced swordsman remained still. Sennex called a barking word over the wind and stilled the lot from advancing. He pressed through his assassins, coming out to their fore. A singular look of earnest triumph curled smiles on his expression. Seydon paused on the dune slope, less than twenty paces from. Wind pounded tenebrously. Rain spat and drooled upon them in glassy, unceasing curtains. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon, my lad, is that really you?” The Inquisitor had to modulate his tone just to speak over the clash of water-fall. Thunder slapped the air. “How you’ve changed. The spitting image of Dathan Gunn, come back from beyond to haunt me one last time.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s finished, Sennex,” Seydon answered back. “Get your men away from Shev’s chests. I won’t tell you twice, Sennex.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon, I can’t do that. No more than you can allow yourself to stand by idly. This isn’t impasse, my lad, this is inevitability.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How do you figure that?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Inquisitor fixed his high collar, wiping moisture out of his eyes. “Your family, since I’ve known it, studied it, has the most peculiar ability to consistently, constantly surprise. You’ve a wonderful lineage, Seydon, quite something to behold. You should be proud. To the point, when Stenwulf dragged you off to bury you away, I warned him the only way to be sure you’d stay in Jurgoran Prison was to fix you with a stake through your heart. You can’t stop a Child of Seyda otherwise. That you’re here now and that he is presumably dead is proof enough. Did you, in fact, encounter our mutual character?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf is dead.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just so!” Sennex crowed. “Did you know? When Mr. Cassat failed to respond to our daily hails, he drew up all perturbed. Perhaps excited. You were his fixation for the longest while, Seydon. He’d rave to anyone who’d listen how all his misfortunes added up from the time you were born. He hated you. But only because, I think, you’d get the better of him someday. I suppose all those debts came up trumps today.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan drew his face into a hard crag, just peering down. Lightning once more sounded and flashed behind, spearing the skies, ripping through oxygen in plasmatic bolts, breaking thunder like shot-bang across their bodies and ears. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He looked to Sennex, staring up. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon, neither of us has to commit to this folly. Have I done gross things? Have I sanctioned torture, death, mutilation? Yes. Yes, I have. Because I can’t bring myself to have a care otherwise. Only I can grant my personal wishes, only me. Everything else is just… cast off.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cords of muscle bunched in Seydon’s jaw. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That must upset you. It always upset Dathan and Guenyvhar, once upon a time. But it’s my own truth, Seydon. I think you must understand that by now. But you’re no fool. Surely you understand the weight behind all this. I’ve spent the better part of twenty years questing after ghosts in the shadows. On the cold trail of dead nursery rhymes and half-tales everyone save you and I know to be true.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]At Sennex’s imperceptible signal, the killer-entourage strolled with slow care up onto the dune-face. With care, they took to surrounding the witcher, fixed in a flanking pincer, weapons raised and readied for the blood-work that was sure to come. Seydon didn’t address them with a glance, nod, or expression. He was fixed upon Sennex, who was still kept company by Iron-Mask.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If I’d known Shev Rayner had been the closest key all along! Ha! Dodgiest old crust that he was. All his secrets. All his elusiveness! We all respected him immensely, Seydon. Myself, you parents, those days running the Seyda. I’d always wanted his confidence but I think he’d seen through me since the moment we laid eyes. Perhaps Ajax was cut from the same cloth, wily cur. Again, Seydon, inevitability. That you, last apprentice of Shev Rayner, last Son of Seyda, should be here now to challenge me. What are you now? Dunaan? A witcher? Is that what you made yourself into, just to come fight my monsters?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You’ve fought your way from the pits of Dromund Kaas all the way here. No acolyte of mine, not even Stenwulf could ever replicate that kind of feat. You have no idea of the value inherent to you, Seydon. I wish your mother had the sense to instill that before she had to let it all go dark. My lad, Ys is our inheritance! The last repository, the last great mystery, the Road for the Grail! Adventure’s always been in the blood of Gunn’s and now it falls to you. Don’t waste what I offered you before. I can only give you this opportunity one more time. Seydon,” Sennex reached out with a gloved hand. “Come with me. And we can take Ys for our own!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It took a terrible beat before Seydon regarded the High Inquisitor, and spoke in a single, terse reply. “…Shev Rayner trusted I’d keep what he left me in safe keeping. Perhaps the White Fox as well, somehow, all those millennia ago. I know exactly what you’d do if Ys secrets were yours to abuse, Sennex. Worlds would burn, looted, raped, scoured until you’re satisfied you’ve had your way. It’s not your place or anyone else’s to judge an individual’s worth. And it’s my lot now, come hell or high water, to try and protect them from monsters like you in the night. I’ve learned there’s good in evil. Evil in good. There are two sides to everything…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…But now hearing yours? I name you Thrice Extremis Diabolis, Traitor and Enemy of All Free Life, Borja Sennex,” Razorlight keened from its scabbard into his grasp. “And I condemn you to death.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Very well,” Sennex looked to his men without hesitation. “Kill him.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher whipped his sword around into the face of the nearest killer and smashed them off their feet. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was enough tip-off each surrounding killer into action. From behind his flanks came that rushing pincer, threaded with poking swords, all charged, vibrating the air with smoking ozone as their vibro-coatings hummed and pitched the metal through super-heating high frequencies. They crashed in with a simultaneous crunch of steel on steel, Seydon pirouetting on the spot, lashing out with a keen tornado-slice. It turned the pincer around itself, forcing bodies following after their swords to run with the smack delivered to their fullers, trying to twist in and surround the Dunaan. He turned and felled on, cleaved vertically through mask, shoulder, and arm, falling away in a tumble. Razorlight stroked and relieved another of their falchion and buckler, juggling both briefly off the point of his blade. Seydon snatched the falchion in and hacked it down like a butcher’s cleaver. It took their owner through its skull with enough force to explode their head out. Dead, the assassin pitched over, tripping another that was spit upon Razorlight and swiftly kicked away.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The melee boiled down the dune-hill. Seydon could see Sennex retreating back along the beach-slip toward the piled caskets. He pried one down onto the ground, lighting his lightsaber and taking care burning through the lock, prying open the lid. The Inquisitor busied checking through unorganized contents, cursing aloud, flicking through for one particular journal, examining the collection book by book. Seydon himself couldn’t remember which casket housed Shev’s accounting of his journey on the road to Ys. It’d be only so long before the Inquisitor made a discovery and departed with the prize. The witcher ducked a slice over his brow and slashed, taking a killer through their waist, toppling backwards as intestinal tracts, stomach, and liver poured onto the sand.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He left dead in his wake. Sedyon would not be denied. Iron-Mask, who by then was keeping careful attention by his master’s side, drew out his ornate longsword and strode to join the pitched contest. He watched him now, not interfering with the mass of whirling bodies, idling on the outskirts waiting for an opportunity. The Dunaan lifted Razorlight, executed a curt series of timed parries as he was battered at by four sword-wielders harrying with lightning strokes. They were fast. Powerfully skilled. Seydon proved the better. He cut them down into gory chunks, his blade hardly seen. Another was hacked down as he made a step over their remains and executed the Zornhau, splitting the thing from shoulder to hip in a sucking diagonal. Blood disgorged. Rain diluted and washed the stains underfoot in the sand and grass. More fighters came. Seydon turned into their blows, running them down.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Thirty became fifteen. Became five. One virtually fearless assassin remained, attempting to charge with a length of vibro-halberd, spinning its haft smoothing in his hands, letting the shaft roll across his chest, waist, shoulders, smacking at Seydon from afar. Seydon feinted into an opened guard but hopped aside. Keening, the halberd axe-pike struck into the sandy earth and stuck fast. Panicking, its owner wrenched his hands harder into a desperate pull, attempting to tug the axe-edge free. A boot rose and slammed into the steel pole. It bent, groaning, before a witcher’s incredible strength simply broke the metal away. Seydon looked to the fiend now staring dismally at his ruined weaponry. It attempted to spin the haft around and wield it like combat-pole, but the Dunaan had none of it. Razorlight bisected the pole into eight neat pieces, then kissed into the assassin’s throat and separated the head away.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sennex was still busied with his pilfering, frenziedly searching from chest to chest, all but upending the caskets in a quickening scramble to discover Rayner’s keepsake journal. He turned to give the Inquisitor an address with Razorlight and see the make of Sennex’s swordsmanship, when Iron-Mask filled his vision. Battle-sword cocked high in a falcon guard, Iron-Mask chopped round with a deceptively fast blow that forced Seydon to sever his attentions and regard each oncoming velocity.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Almost immediately, the nature of the extended confrontation evolved. Iron-Mask was a splendid cut above the heads and shoulders of those now dead assassin-hunters, brutally eviscerating with his decorated bastard sword, cleaving patterns in the air with astounding surety. Seydon answered him back with his own indomitable crosses, once student now master of dead Bassandra’s School of the Longsword, Razorlight a liquid beast that turned in perfect sync with its master. Regardless, Iron-Mask drove him back, pitching melee to a crisp one-upon-the-other duel. Now Seydon knew. He could see it through the curt demeanor, dancer-like, svelte, whip-fast and honed under tens of thousands of hours. Sennex was frighteningly resourceful: he’d recruited a Masterblade into the folds of his entourage. Sith Bladeborn were a virtual myth and preferred keeping their martial majesty as mystifying and noetic as possible. Off-hand, Seydon recalled a prior sighting occurring some fifty years before: ten Jedi Masters died on Raxus Prime when challenged to mortal contest by a dark stranger wielding evil blades.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They wove into answering feints. At times, their swords hardly touched. He could hear the enemies weapon purr as it rippled past, ducking out of the way, ramming his forearm down to guard a rising knee-strike before punching into Iron-Mask’s armoured gutting, pushing him back. The Masterblade just readdressed his footing, angled into an unstable guard, hilt jutting in from the right hip. He defeated Seydon’s assault, replied with his own, the witcher nearly weaving the bastard sword back onto its wielder before Iron-Mask upset the attempt. The Dunaan entertained a tempestuous, momentum-driven effort that had his feet dancing in a constant backpedal. With a flick, he reversed the spar, working Iron-Mask back towards Sennex with punishing slashes, cuts, slices, poking stabs that nearly drove open holes in the Masterblade’s guard.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sennex suddenly stood up. He was shaking from brow to knee, furiously scratching crud from a length of leather-bound paging he kept shielded by his chest, incautiously undoing a tie of string. Pencil-scrawled passages flittered in the wind. The Inquisitor couldn’t help a choke that escaped past his lips. Up came his hand, clutching Shev Rayner’s episodic journal, crowing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Twenty years! Twenty years, finished today!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was no time. Seydon broke the rules of the Masterblade’s engagement. Up came his hand, board-flat, clutching into Iron-Mask’s bodyglove. Precious micro-seconds were spent conjuring kinetic force into his palm. Walls of pulsating Force energy struck the Masterblade like a mallet over a divot-nail. His body sailed back. Seydon credited Iron-Mask with curling up before performing a dazzling helix-flip but his landing was spoiled. The Dunaan had tossed him at the Inquisitor. Falling boots crossed into Borja Sennex’s shoulder blades, walloping him off his legs. Iron-Mask tripped over, landing upon his head, poleaxed. Rayner’s journal went flying, skipping a few handfuls out of reach. Sennex went scrabbling for it.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon blitzed into a sprint, leaping off a thatch of waving kelp-wheat slowly ripping apart in the storm winds. Sennex’s hand was first in reaching and taking hold of the precious note-volume. Razorlight almost moved of its own accord, slinging water from its alchemic steel, anima roaring inside Seydon’s temples. It flashed down as Seydon landed in the sands beside his enemy, in time with a bolt of crashing lightning skeins. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Borja Sennex, High Lord Inquisitor, Secret Sith Lord and woebringer to tens of thousands, stared at his dismembered hand grossly jetting arterial blood onto his sleeving. More poured from his cleanly hacked wrist. Sennex screamed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Iron-Mask rose up from his bout of dizziness. Up came a gauntlet communicator, speaking in guttural whispers before snapping off the commlink. He stooped, dragging Sennex away bodily by his boots and knees, carrying him back onto his footing while the Inquisitor staunchly attempted to tie a make-do tourniquet around his profusely bleeding wrist-stump. Up above, coming in so low its downwash belly-jets roared louder than the Calabed hurricane, Sennex’s freighter-shuttle arrived to touch down. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was angled, hunched ogre of a ship, somehow elegantly ugly, drawn with spinal antenna masts and bulbous weapon mounts. Forward cannons targeted Seydon as he stood, who was sliding the journal away into a sleeve on his chest harness. The pilots squeezed on their yoke triggers and opened up with las-fire. Cannon-barrels stitched a savage line up the beach-length, scorching glass, rendering glassy pits, tearing through palm-wood copses. Seydon threw himself down behind a rise of tidally sculpted earth. Charred lumps of fused formica rained onto his body.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He heard the downwash thrusters shriek on once more. Daring to peer up over the thumped lip of his cover, Seydon watched Sennex retreat. With some resignation, he expected the carrier to swing about on a firing vector, and then blitz him into scattered atoms with further cannon-fire. It didn’t. Perhaps Sennex ordered just a general retreat instead of risking the destruction of his long-sought prize. The vessel rose away, extending s-foils. Seydon lost sight of its outline as it banked up into the hurricane overcast. Disappearing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Almost breathless, certainly wholly numb, Seydon collapsed against tide-sculpt. Shev Rayner’s collected notations rested in just a small notebook, careworn, flecked with rain-drops. An object a man of Borja Sennex’s considerable intellect, resource, and drive had sought after for the better part of two decades, going so far to trap the Dunaan Ajax on Dromund Kaas to glean his protected lore. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then there was light, if only for just briefly. Seydon peered up familiar too-blue skies painted with coud-tufts. The Eye of the Calabed was sweeping over head, on a northern course to die in Arda’s cold Jayda Seas. A hungry lizard gull riding high in the calmed central eddy landed nearby on a stacked collection of obsidian glass-rocks washed in from far-away volcano-spouts to the south.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Seydon closed the journal between his palms and almost considered tossing it off into the temporarily, chided shore surf. The matter was done, yet it wasn’t. Borja Sennex remained still. Wounded, true, and he’d nurse it for a great deal of time before exacting another conspiracy, but no less deceitful, no less utterly dangerous and willing to turn populations into skeletons dressed in ashen graves to achieve what he lusted for. And Ys was at the forefront of all his schemes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He pulled Razorlight down onto his lap, Winterfang too, stroking a palm along their beautiful fullers and central ridges. His glove was now torn, fingers worn right through leather. The witcher was tired, bloodied, and at loss for something like a satisfying dénouement. Bored, the lizard gull took off, winging back into flight. Soon Calabed would come, with all its howling rage, a creation of spiteful nature that Ardans would always believe was the anger of the dead come alive to have their say. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With effort, he rose back to his boots, putting the journal away and holding to his swords with each hand. What was there to it now, Seydon considered, the Hurricane Eye passing along as back-winds began increasing in tenebrous pitch and brought banks of blinding rain-fall? [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The answer was what was always there for a witcher at any day’s end: the Hunt.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]“So is the matter closed?” Asked Xe’ga Kee.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No. One enemy made good with their escape. This was all I took from him,” Seydon replied, and slid a small gnarlwood salt-box over on the sand.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Xe’ga pried the lid back, peering in at a grotesque item wrapped delicately in kelp leaves and urchin-nettles. She picked up Borja Sennex’s severed right hand and held it high for the sun to stroke through its rigor-stiffened knuckles. For a rare second, something quite mean burned hot ember-flecks in her watery eyes. Ardan temperament was a cool undercurrent, not hurried but a steady calm that never let passing worries or crisis’ sour their laid-back approach. That Xe’ga seemed vengeful felt bothering, perhaps wrong, Seydon thought. The Kee placed the hand away back into the salt-box and closed it off.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So he stands foiled?” She asked and scratched at a scabbed cut beading up along her calve. “Will he ever come back? For… What was the word you explained? ‘Revenge’?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Perhaps,” Seydon shrugged. “But that entails another expenditure of resources. Given what was spent and lost, the Inquisitor will be taking care to recuperate. I caught him flat-footed for a change. I don’t think he ever anticipated some fool-rogue without much sense to come along and deny him at the eleventh hour.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’s the small sickness that can kill a blade-whale, Pilot.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes,” He sank a hand into the shore-sand, turning more over his hip to regard Xe’ga. “And Scyaela?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Scyaela,” Xe’ga said. “Was built upon stone so as to endure any woe. We can’t replace the dead as we can with our homes. Yet, all things can flourish from grief. We’ll be sad for a time and sore from the work. One day, we’ll wake up laughing, remembering all those smiles, and get on with the day’s fish. As we have before and so will continue to do so. We live with the tide, Pilot. Our days are like when the surf crests up over the shallows, only to be tugged back into the ocean. Those lost swam out with the tide, Pilot, and they’ve returned from where they came.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Solitary tears, bright as goda-pearls, creased down her line-worn cheeks. “But I will miss them anyhow…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I’ll be departing tomorrow,” Seydon spoke up after a beat. “A friend of mine warned the life I lead is grievous at best, and I’m terrified of somehow leading further calamity this way. I ought to go.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That is for the best,” Xe’ga agreed though not without a note of reluctance. She sighed, dipping her toes into an eddying pool lined with smooth-worn crystal. Together, they’d rowed out to a bluff of volcanic stone pitching up from the cone of a long dead, long sunken volcano peak. The basalt towers of great Sycaela rose behind them another thirty clicks away, bright in the sunset, painted with ribbon strokes of peach-gold and rose-pink. “You have navigated black, terrible waters, Pilot, and took their dark gifts when the Sea-Devils rose to offer them up. Those sorts of pacts are never made lightly. You’ve resigned yourself to a very hard, very long hunt, Pilot. I’m frightened for the calamities you face.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I was glad for your patience regardless.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh, what, and turn away help in our hour of need? Arda has no patience for the proud and neither do I, Pilot.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It required a day to sail the journey back for Sycaela on the cracked boarding of his borrowed Indadh runner. The Dunaan only arrived at midnight, skirting round the stack-shanks, loathe to tread upon a rare and chest-rending sight. Xe’Ga Kee and the survivors of the rock-township were committing their dead to the waters. Thirty six bodies interred in swathes of broad coral-fern leaves, faces painted white with salt-chalk, signifying the ocean bed and their eyes covered over by cut jadestones, sailed out on lashed together rafts stuck with rigid sail-rigging. Winds took them out from the basalt-shallows. In time, their indigo shadows along the horizontal line of night sky simply disappeared. Their raft-boats would never be recovered. As all attending began filing up the stack-face in one long, mourning procession, voices called out.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The fluke of a truly mighty blade-whale rose high, crossed by glints of pale moonbeams glittering diamond moisture in the darkness. It peaked up, briefly stiffened, then slid away soundlessly. A few Ardans cheered, some cried out and yelled the names of the dead. Most just stood quietly, tasting the cloy sweetness on the breeze. The scent of death and wonder. Seydon found Xe’ga in the morning having slept outside her jaggedly crooked hut bent over by Calabed winds. All he could offer was help refashioning Scyaela into its prior semblance. The Kee accepted.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now, three weeks had slipped by. He’d aided in reconstructing over two score slate-huts, fastening foundational drift-logs together, directed by town overseers committed to rearranging the housing for the next time Calabed rose in tempest-wrath. Hands were close to raw with every evening-fall, fingers stuck as if in rigor, hooked from hours sewing scale-sequin and thatch roofs tiled bright with polished ruby-stone flats. It got hot on the stacks, someone explained. Seydon’s awful strength and incredible speed, dexterity, sectioned him out as a worker of particular worth. Xe’ga directed him towards more strenuous projects, taking obsidian pick-axes to the rock tunnels to help widen them out width and lengthwise, or manning the ropes by himself as storage longhouses were raise, pitched, and sunk into augered pole-grips ripped down into the stone. Matters now were simply seeing to the details. Work that hardly required hundreds of bodies to adeptly complete. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon took the slowing daily pace as a cue to take his leave. He found Xe’ga peering up at him. Sunset glows turned her ruddy skin to rich ochre bronze, where all the silver scar-lines endured from hard fishing runs hued white as chalk. Winds were picking up warmth from southern mud-volcanoes and stroking across their brows.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Do you know what they call you now?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Karcharias. Only the great black sharks ever dare swim or navigate the currents when Calabed awakes. You went into the storm and peered into the eye, Pilot. You came back with the hand of the one who wounded us so sorely. Our dead have a little peace now,” Xe’ga rose up, retrieving her discarded ceremonial harpoon-pike from its catch in a slit between shards of pulverized surf-rock. “…If we face that sort of danger again… Will you still come?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Always,” Seydon promised. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Kee reached and stroked her fingers through strands of white-silver locks, over his scalp, walking by as she did. Her row-dugout waited in a nestling pool at the feet of the egress slope they’d climbed to reach the bluff’s sheer brow. “Strong winds, Karcharias.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Strong winds…” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon remained where he sat, listening to the sounds of row-oars plunking thickly in practiced strokes, Scyaela’s Kee settling into the proper, physical rhythms. He heard her still when the dugout prow gently scraped up over a side of felt-moss, hooked into the wood of the harbor piers, some thirty kilometers out over the constant sigh and roar of ocean tide. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He waited atop the bluff-face through the sunset hours, as darkness crept up behind his shoulders in a wide, inexorably dark blanket slowly peaking with diamond-pricks of multiplying stars. Soon, from the Northern ice-wastes rose Priad, first of the moons. His brothers Memnes and Andromak joined him in another half hour, bright as Songsteel, swaddling Arda’s night face in snowy illumination. When he’d judged it was an hour past midnight, lit by the Three Brothers, he descended down the cliff-face. A rucksack was hung over his shoulder, beside Razorlight and Winterfang, twin swords forged for the Hunt of Monsters and Men. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Boots touched onto a low rock field, all fallen sheets of stone that had crashed down from the sheer bluff and split into a maze of upraised shard-knives that could cut at the touch. The descent had taken the better part of a minute, Seydon weaving his body from hand-hold to boot-catch with uncanny speed and surety. He slung off the rucksack and maneuvered through the stone-juts, drawing a stringy line to where waters were flicking up at foreboding, jagged rock squares. Seydon had to balance himself between an angle of stone meeting at ingress against a rise of granite, laying on his side with one boot raised and stuck against the small obelisk. In his rucksack was a wide coconut dish, still fresh with its inner snow flesh, a length of fish-oil candle that smelled terribly, and water-proof graphite matches that were a custom invention of local Sendan loving to have a kelp-smoke while out tending the nets. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon dropped onto a smoothed roll of grit-scoured shale, taking heavy care in sinking the candle’s wax-rod onto the coconut bowl where it wouldn’t topple off at the slightest roll. Up came a match, struck off a length of flint repeatedly until it began to spin fire. He fed the little flame onto the candlewick. A moment, and then it too caught some fire, bucking and dancing gamely. Seydon waited on the wind to change tack into the west. When at least the breeze was coasting down the bluff and over his nape, he lowered the bowl to the waters and slipped his wet fingers away.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The bowl and candle began to sail out into gentle swells of black water, glistening with highlights from the light of the Three Brothers watching overhead. It wasn’t hardly like the memorial they surely deserved, but Seydon desired some means and manner to tell the dead of Dromund Kaas and beyond their memories were not discarded. Though it was long after the hours of that fragile, painful half-victory seen on Eel’s Coil. Borja Sennex scream’s of undulating agony as he grappled with his sundered limb were trails of voices haunting the eastern winds. The tiny flame continued to bob out and away. One candle for a thousand…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He was turning when he thought he heard song. Seydon paused, turning to look back over the seaway. Nothing, save black breakers spitting up against the rock-jags. But… He sharpened his stare, glaring at a float of wisp ethereally drifting about a click out into the waters. The shape was vague, modeled on the small, tight frame of a maid-girl not yet begun to grow up through adolescence. Her face was a suggestion of melancholy, smiling sadly. A boy joined her at her side. Adults began to come out from thin air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Soon, Seydon was gazing upon a thronging congregation of silent, wordless ghosts lighting the waters up with their spectral illumination. At their fore was a man and woman, hands linked, dressed for their wedding day in humble robes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dathan Gunn smiled. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guenyvhar Gunn smirked ruefully.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The dead raised their voice in choir, vanishing soul by soul. Seydon blinked the tears from his eyes and drew out Razorlight in his right hand, Winterfang up in his left, shattering the night with a saluting battle howl as the song drifted on…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The dark world had no name, though its forests were bright with laurel and mantis green foliage, and their shade thick with frothing gloom.[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt]A man, dressed black, clothing modified for wilderness travel and choked with lengths of belted harnesses, walked beneath chokes of pine-canopy barely giving him enough clearance to stand upright. One tomahawk and one knife hung off their waist-sheathes. Paired blades idled in their scabbards over his right shoulder.[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt]Signs were in the loam. Depressed dirt heavily sunk by something passing along, incredibly heavy, sporting four claw-hooked toes and paired vestigial ‘thumbs’ either side of the heel. The man could smell aromatic discharges, extremely faint, virtually undetectable, foetid like a mixture of fish-rot and biodegrade. Eyes picked out trace heat warming the paw-tracks. Blood was drying on the dead bark gardens.[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt]He heard distant, bellows-lungs breathing deeply, their heartbeat too, so loud to him it pounded like steel drums. The man picked out a well-disguised pathway kept hidden by a sway of dried out willow-fingers still attached gamely to a length of bow by a spar of half-twisted, knotted wood fiber. It fell aside, shunted out of his way.[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt]A clearing, decorated by droopy-headed sage, stalk-thin thyme, wilts of parsley nestled interwoven beside nettle-beds and blooming rosemary, opened at the path’s end. Nearby trickled a calmed pool, waters rustled by spade lillypads and ceratopteris ferns, beetles swimming over the glassy surface tension. Bones still dressed terribly with tooth-ragged strips of ruined clothing were scattered in fly-buzzed piles, composting into their own putrification. Three holes of stooped, ogrish shadow turned at the intruder’s presence.[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt]Three Terentatek, fanged with envenomed tusks and washed in gore, plodded forward, wrecking earth and grass.[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon picked up into a run. Winterfang swung free in his hand. [/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt]Blood flashed and death filled the air~[/SIZE]​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

​

[ Playlist ]​

​

~ Tracks ~​

​

1.) Main Titles​

2.) Rave's Missive​

3.) Dromund Kaas, On Approach​

4.) Slahtiz Port​

5.) Sithspawn​

6.) Ajax​

7.) At Gargant Hall​

8.) Hythe Park; Missing Faces​

9.) Snows on Scale Mile​

10.) Battle on the Ice​

11.) The Dead Swamps​

12.) Harcress' Trap​

13.) Dinner with a Witcher​

14.) Letters to Rosa​

15.) Fires over Hythe​

16.) Sewer Trudge​

17.) The Wolfman​

18.) Stenwulf​

19.) The Lord High Inquisitor​

20.) Buried Alive & Ascension​

21.) Dark of Jurgoran Prison​

22.) An Offer​

23.) The Walk​

24.) A Lodge of Shade​

25.) Submerging; Trial of the Waters​

26.) Dathan Gunn​

27.) Trial of Heat​

28.) "Kinslayer!"​

29.) Visions of Ys​

30.) One Last Examination​

31.) Trials of the Dunaan​

32.) Razorlight/Winterfang​

33.) Scale the Pit​

34.) Catacombs & Phantoms​

35.) The Beast​

36.) Temple Nave ; Assassins in the Dark​

37.) Snows of Dromund Kaas​

38.) Cholganna, Arboreal​

39.) Bone Field & the Wolfman​

40.) Forest Haunt​

41.) Death & All His Friends​

42.) Storm Season​

43.) Hurricane Duel​

44.) The Journal: Dunaan Vs Assassins & Masterblade​

45.) Ghosts - End Credits​