there'll be only a hole in the soil (closed)

[unsheathedfromreality]

Who: Emperor John Gaius, Illarion Albireo, various other worthies from Bone House and their extended CR
What: A duel goes very wrong.
When: The day of John and Kiriona's network post
Where: Bone House, Gaze –> the Salt Lake via the woods

Content Warnings: Inevitable violence and body horror; spoilers for MHA and Nona the Ninth; additional warnings per thread.

Choose your time, Illarion had said to God, offering him the right of one challenged. The shrike had accordingly chosen the place: On the grounds of the house in Gaze, where the Reckoning's blade had scarred the earth. He stands beside the great gash, an unassuming figure in unadorned black, and waits with Death's own patience for his opponent to arrive.

Comments

[unsheathedfromreality]

Perversely, his first thought on ((feeling)) her draw near is so she is real. It's a testament to his state over the past month that he'd left Riteoir's private hell with that doubt intact--but the twist of hair she tosses him has real heft in his hand, and there is no disputing the strands that separate beneath his pinning thumb.

Her words, louder and quieter, get as much of a smile from him as yuck did. "I expect she will not," he replies. "I don't begrudge her. She must be his loyal sword for now."

Then he closes his hand around the favor, bringing his fist to his chest over his unbeating heart and bowing over the lot. The metaphor's a strange one, but the blood magic offers the apotropaic intent--neither fur nor feather, the hunter's well-wish. "Go to hell," he replies in kind, his own amusement quiet but as unforced as it can be.

Then, as quiet as she, "You are being followed, you know."

From their name to their frame to their diet the draugr were a particular offense to him--but in the quiet space before a duel, the necessary ceasefire, he can't deal with this one as he'd like. (He does not know there will be no time after.)

[acidjail]

The thin tilt of one full corner of Mercymorn's mouth might suffice as a smile for someone else, but there is a set of exhausted satisfaction to it that renders it something other, and more terrible. She plucks at the run in her sleeve's elbow to collect another length of yarn, severing the natural fibres as she did her hair before she raises her hands up to bind the braid once again.

"What courtesy," she says, to the wish or the warning, or both, "Small wonder my siblings seem so nauseatingly fond of you."

She glances over her shoulder, her eyes gliding like a drop of old blood in whites lightly flecked by green at their edges, to where the draugr quivers and lurks, ever hungry. It took another century overnight, she thinks. She wrote it in her journal in the cipher she has yet to lose.

"It's an interesting subject," she says, knotting the yarn simply, a few strands escaped to hang loosely in framing her oval face, "Novel. Maybe that's what we'll do next, to fill our time - open a menagerie of the varied undead. My companion here - you - the infant someone really ought to begrudge, at least the once - charge a shiny pebble to do the tour. What do you think of that?"