Fight For Favour (Closed)

[Duffy]

Fight For Favour (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_LVAwtqq3I)


2420


Continued From Dancing With Ourselves (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?22189-Dancing-With-Ourselves-(Closed))

I`ll sing you a song how first we began,
Our toils and our troubles our plot and our plan.
We left our fair country, our friends and our homes,
Across to the deserts wild and the mountains to roll.
We travelled three weeks `til we came to the platt.
Set up our camp ahead of the pack,
In just a moment low we heard a faint yell,
Five hundred cavalry they were riding from hell.

We fight for favour,
we will fight for pride,
And oh we will fight for favour,
We will fight `til they die.
They made a bold dash came near to our train,
Bullets fell around like showers of rain,
With long rifles at hand we fed them hot lead
`Til many a brave warrior around us lay dead.

We travel by day but guard in the night,
Across all those mountains so high in their might,
Now in a green valley we live beside a clear old stream,
Our journey now ended in the land of our dreams.

Seth Lakeman

2421

[Duffy]

Jensen Ambrose, the Enigmatic Immortal and blood brother to Duffy Bracken grinned.

Then without fanfare, died.

All the pieces of a long, convoluted puzzle came together softly, and with a glamorous sparkle Lucian died with him.

The battle was short, swift and sweet, but it was over, and the many allies and enemies of the Dark Bard watched. Their hair and clothes were swept to life in the fury of the wind and into death by the magnitude of what they were witnessing.

"Jensen..." Duffy mumbled, teetering between staying still and rushing forwards to his brother's side.

The hilt of the sword in his chest had dug into his torso to the very limit of the blade, and blood had started to pour from the wound and run down his limbs in concentric spirals. Ruby, Blank, Lillith and Sei stared in horror, and Delilah and Celia held hands at the very edge of the tower's uppermost limit.

"How did it come to this...?" Sei proclaimed, distraught and tattered by his confrontation with one of Lucian's spectral forms. His wings beat in the infernal gale, and his charisma cast an aura over the gathered people so they could not help but listen, and could not help but question.

It had been the Hero of Radasanth's very own hand that had slain the Enigmatic Immortal. Jensen, however, was eternal no more, and as he fell into a dishonoured heap atop the tower, sorrow flocked to the highest point of the dark needle on Scara Brae's horizon.

The true battle had just begun.

[Duffy]

"Sei, we have to go." Duffy said flatly, whilst exacting a scrupulous eye over the spiral stairwells which lead down into the library and the many levels below.

For a moment, nobody moved.

"Now!"

Nervous glances slowly bounced between them, until Duffy saw Ruby's expecting look out over the windswept horizon to the glimmering sea to the East. He found a moment's peace in the anti-silence of the wind, before walking defiantly to Sei Orlougnes' side.

"You did what you had to do, and it could not be helped!"

Duffy plucked the strings of his own heart to enact a performance he had been rehearsing for a long, long time. Sei could not know that his actions were part of the design of the troupe, and that Jensen had agreed to be the sacrificial lamb to save not just their lives, but the lives of everyone on the island.

"Why?" The mystic's weary eyes glared up at Duffy, and he grabbed the bard by the forearm with a death vice. "I warned you, after the meteor shower and throwing your friend's lives under my blade, I warned you!" He gritted his teeth.

Sei had warned Duffy quite clearly, but this time, the person he had sacrificed was as good as a brother. "Jensen would have wanted this, for all of us."

Duffy shook himself free and made to the Immortal's corpse to reclaim the jewels around his neck and the elegant components of Wainwright's Dressage. A ring, a necklace, a dagger, an orb, and with a heart wrenching pull, a sword.

He wiped the blood from the relic on his trousers and sheathed it under his belt. The other items he folded into a square of Radasanth silk, which he tied together with a length of red ribbon before sealing the knot with pewter and gold ore collected from a thievery spree in the market squares below. He jostled it in his hand like a ball, to make sure that they were neatly secured then handed it to Ruby.

"Keep it safe, for now. Lucian's soul remains in these items, we shall destroy them..." he stared at her with a knowing smile, and made sure Sei could not see his lips as he whispered into her ear, "when Jensen wakes up..."

[Duffy]

Not more than an hour ago, the heroes gathered under Duffy’s friendship and oath stood in a circle around the Dark Bard Lucian Lahore. He had an air of malice about him, but also an aura of serenity that seemed content with the coming confrontation.

He seemed to know he was going to die.

“Wainwright…” Duffy said, idly twiddling the dagger that had killed Delilah and took the skin off his palm and many other ill deeds aside.

The shadows around the man’s form flickered, and he turned his head to face the man who had once been his leading actor, the enigmatic Defoe. The wind swept over the crest of the tower and stole away the tension, the heart ache, the readiness of the heroes’ gathered to smite their foe.

“Five centuries, five, long centuries it has taken you to rise to the challenge.”

“You did not make it easy.”

“It would not be a challenge if it were…” he snarled, levitating a few inches from the ground with a well of energy. Sei and Jensen flexed their muscles, and Ruby and her harem of red headed minstrels, past selves and mothers plucked notes from the air and prepped them like arrows notched to a bow string.

“Duffy!” Jensen roared, bouncing from heel to heel and punching his fist into his palm. Sei stepped closer alongside the immortal, and everyone shuffled their feet.

Talking, it seemed, was off the agenda.

“I am sorry, Wainwright, but things will be different.”

“Everything comes full circle,” said the bard, with six different voices at once, each more spiteful and nightmarish than the last. The remnants of past lives rattled in Duffy’s mind, as if they were being subdued one by one.

“Not this time,” was all he said as he broke into a run.

The clap of the Tinder Gear echoed out across the higgledy-piggledy rooftops of Scara Brae, bouncing vibrantly along the dockland harbours and out further still through the Numarr Slums and into the rolling farmland beyond the great imposing city wall.

The first note of The Last Song came from three mouths, and rose up to the heavens like an angelic choir, searing air from air and splitting hairs on the backs of necks. Ruby let her heart free, Celia her mind, Delilah her rage. Together, they drove every heartache committed by Wainwright right back at him tenfold stronger and laced with wrath.

Blank and Lillith held one another’s hands for a moment, one good eye staring down at Kitsune mask of his sister. They spoke without words, and the swordsman pulled her into a spin. With heavy footsteps, she spiralled around him and flew towards Lucian with tanto drawn and hair flapping in the wind with the guile of a ninja.

Sei and Jensen charged side by side, feet pounding the obsidian spire with the repetitive beat of a battle-worn drum. Soon, fists would strike ethereal flesh and dissipate souls, and wings of Fae intent, swords driven by the will of the Thayne and Radasanth herself would speak in Scara Brae’s defence.