The Vile&Violent (Solo)

[Slayer]

Six Months Later
_____
"You pathetic shit." Dan stared out of his pitch black window into the eyes of the skinless dog-thing, the orbs in its sickeningly glistening face so much darker than the shadows. Its form was warped and twisted in the window. The scarlet metal and darkly twinkling crimson gems impressed into its deformed body slithered through the whorls and spirals, shining like a bloody pools on a battlefield beneath a noon sun. It had tormented him nightly for months, until he simply stopped fearing it. So, it had changed tactics.

"The grains fall, and everyone is still breathing in this little latrine in the snow. Lukas talks every day about killing you. But you can't bring yourself to kill him, can you? Flaccid Beast. Impotent Beast. You're nothing but slave-shit now. Can't even lift your axe." He'd discovered long ago that talking to it did nothing. It only increased its fervor, and it demanded one thing - to be let in. He'd paced, he'd reasoned, he'd ignored it, had even went off into a classic rage, but that only seemed to make it smile. It would stroke the window lovingly as he viciously cursed at it, throwing every obscenity he'd ever learned, in every language he'd ever learned at it with white knuckled fists, drawing close to the window, baring his new teeth.

"You're not even a shadow of yourself. You shook the earth once. You broke hundreds of people with just your hands. I can make you that again." There was a time when he would have leaped at that chance, the stupid, dumb animal he'd been. Anything for more. A part of him screamed out, how? But he strangled it down, as he strangled down his old killing urge every time he saw Lukas trudging through Geflen's roads, anytime he saw him in the town's center, surrounded by young men and women armed like him, being trained by him to protect their homes. He saw deep, old hate in the man's eyes, a look that once upon a time, would have had him torn limb from limb by the saraelian. For a while, he wondered who in Lukas' family he had killed. A child, a parent, a spouse? But those thoughts fell to the wayside as he spent more days and nights secluded in his cabin, pouring over dozens of books on curses that the sour old woman Mabel had.

"Know what? I'll just let myself in." The thing suddenly moved away from the window and vanished seamlessly into the night. His little cabin, with its furniture shaped from the walls and floor, didn't make even the softest creak or groan that it usually did in the frozen nights. Absolute and complete silence buzzed in his ears. Holding his breath, he listened for anything, the scrape of claw on stone, the skin crawling noise of wet meat being drug across wood, hissing breath across wickedly broken teeth. Dan Lagh'ratham laid there in the pale yellow candle light in his bed for what felt like hours of sheer, unadulterated stillness.

A huge wet, red arm burst out from beneath his bed and snatched his face, folding it completely in its grip. It stunk like hot copper and the damp, rotted garbage in a city's sewer pipe. Dan grabbed at its wrist but its strength was an echo of day's past; titanic, immovable, and merciless. His hand flailed blindly in the air, the fetid, gummy claws closing tighter around his skull, smothering him with its power and stench. His fingers hit the shelf over his head, and his fingers scrabbled across it, searching desperately. The handle of his gun slid smoothly across his palm, and he whipped it around, shoving the barrel against the forearm.

At once, he realized he could breath. The pressure that had threatened to crush his head was gone, and the stink too...now he could smell jasmine flowers.

"What the fuck?!" He dropped his gun instantly onto the mattress when he heard the familiar sound of Gianna's voice. She pulled the warm, damp washcloth off his face, and blinked, taken aback by the wide-set, lunatic look in his eyes that vanished the second he drew in a deep, long breath. "I don't think I've ever had a gun shoved into my face for treating a fever. What is wrong with you?"

Dan groaned, and pushed himself up to sit against his head board. The dark wool blankets fell to his waist, revealing a long and horrible story ripped across his torso, the calligraphy of the tale in heavy knotted scars. Webbing of dark and green purple sewed its way through it, the Forgotten One's curse sliding its hateful fingers down his skin, inching their way up his neck, melting into the darkness under the blankets. He ran his fingers through his sweat damp hair, only making it curl weakly at the gesture, and he stared quietly out the window, expecting to see a flash of crimson in the heavy white snow drifts.

"You look worse than when Gram brought you here." Her tone was almost scolding, as though she expected the saraelian to just wish himself into good health. "It's been six months since we brought you here. You re-grew your teeth, but not even a finger of your left arm. Why?"

"Fuck off," he mumbled, still staring out the window. He hoped she took the not so subtle clue. He hated visitors. For a while, new visitors to Geflen would trek up to the cabin; some to spit on his door, some challenge him, some wanted to just talk to him, only Hromagh knows why. They stopped in three months, either from his obscenity filled rants, or just plain physical threats. Gram had stopped coming by a month ago. Gianna came by often, but he barricaded the door when he was awake, and ignored the pounding.

It took him some time to accept, but when he'd read through Mabel's books, all one hundred and ten of them, the second time, he finally accepted that he was going to die here.

They would bury him in Geflen.

The hard, open palmed slap snapped his head against his left shoulder, and he whirled around to face Gianna, eyes flashing dangerously. "Snap out of it. Do you think you deserve this?" Yes, yes he did. It wasn't just the skinless dog that visited him. His nights were violated by hideous swirling nightmares of bone and fire and the nauseating stink of copper. Faces all too familiar rising up from pools of coagulated blood. Claire's face, weeping and asking one word, again and again; why?

"Damn you, listen to me! I used to hear tales in camp of the slayer of the rot. The man that waded into the undead, let them rip at him as he tore them apart, just to save a few scared families. I was told of a Lagh'ratham of the Black Hand that once protected Ithermoss and the Red Hand like blood family. You were a man before you became the Red Beast. People still need you. Your daughter needs you."

"MY DAUGHTER IS DEAD!" He roared the words into her face, every ounce of pain and grief and regret on his tongue. Both of them fell under a stunned silence. Gianna pulled back away from him, her fingers clutching at the collar of the purple blouse she was wearing. Dan's mouth hung open for a breath more - and then his face crumpled into a tumult of emotions, all slashing down like a lightning bolt, cutting away the illusion of stoicism and bitterness. Slowly, the saraelian raised a hand to his face, turning towards the window again as he felt the stinging at the corners of his eyes. Oh, it hurt. It hurt so much more than thinking it, having it there, in the open air, right off his tongue. The words had burrowed bluntly at his tongue and cheek for the past month and a half, but he had never had the strength left in him to admit it.

"It's been...too....too long. I failed. I failed as a father. I've killed men in every corner of the world because they didn't know where to look. Nothing....nothing I've ever done ever meant anything. For all the strength I had, for all the blades and the guns, it was for nothing. Everytime....every time I pulled myself back together, every time I took another step forward...oh, Hromagh. Derium lied to me, my little girl died there, I....I..."

"Coward." Gianna's quiet insult couldn't reach him. Its barb was nothing to him in the moment; even the steadily growing pulse of pain was tiny compared to the words he'd just said. "You can't be serious. If you really believe that, you owe it to her to put her to rest. The least you could do is bury her bones." The woman watched his shoulders shudder, but there wasn't any sound as the tears fell. Without a word, she picked the gun up off his bed and set it quietly down on the shelf above it, then carefully sat down on the edge of the bed, waiting.

"You wouldn't cry if you believed that though. Deep inside you. If you did, you'd already be dead. Nothing could kill a parent quicker. So why are you giving up? Why are you so content to waste away?" Instead of answering, Dan groaned, reaching to his bedside table, where the brown bottle of morphine sat. He wasn't looking, so Gianna had no trouble hopping off the bed and snatching it from his trembling hand.

"Really? Did you think you could just numb this fucking pain forever? Oh, you stupid man. You really want to drift through some dream, and hope the world stops caring about what you've done?" She stomped across the cabin and practically ripped the window pane free from the wall as she wrenched it open, cocking her arm back, primed to throw. Everyone that ever heard of Dan Lagh'ratham knew he was a man who loved his vices, but falling into a morphine dream was the least thing she'd have expected about the beast that shook Raiaeria as Kross.

Dan's hand clamped down on her wrist. She hadn't heard him get up, and she was a bit surprised with how fast he'd moved, considering how drawn and gaunt his wet face looked. Even with gritted teeth and huge, red eyes, she could see Killian there, in his features. Killian, floating face down in the waters of the dock. Killian, who had loved his wife and little girl so much, he'd died for them, smiling his last when he'd plunged dead, into the waters. It only strengthened her resolve.

"If you throw that out the window, I'll make you wish Gram had killed me in the woods," Dan gasped out. Her scowl deepened, and she spun her head back to the open window. The flowers tattooed around her ears and the back of her neck swam as he watched her. Wildflowers, purple and blue and orange and red. He remembered the way that the wildflowers looked in the fields outside the cottage, through the window that was splashed with Claire's blood. How they'd danced in the wind. His fingers lost their strength, and Salvar swallowed the brown glass bottle in its enormous white maw. She raced out of the cabin and slammed the door hard enough to knock loose the snow from his shingles, sending it cascading over the window, blocking his sight. Dan sank to his knees as a fresh hell of pain tore through his body, starting at his heart, sliding into every inch of his body like the searching legs of a great spider.

The morphine got him out of bed. The morphine kept the agony of the curse away. The morphine took him away from a world of regrets and slaughter. Another drop could have taken him through the day. Maybe it would have been the day he fit the puzzle pieces back together. Maybe it could have carried him, swaddled in a cocoon of comfortable numbness, to a weapon that he could have wielded against Xem'zund's last curse.

When he looked up, drool hanging off the side of his lip in a long, cold string, he found Gram there, leaning on the window sill with his huge, beefy forearms. The look in the dwarf's eye was pity, and a shade of disgust. "Get a shirt on, aye? Mabel's wanting her books back, boy. And mayhaps it won't hurt to talk a bit."