Memories of Sael

[Falcon Darkflight]

((Closed))

"Canen..?"

The voice of Buren August slipped over the small wooden table, barely audible over the sound of clattering cutlery and background chatter.

"Yeah?"

"This ain't good..."

Canen raised his eyes from his plate, forking a mass of pale pasta strands into his mouth slowly.

"What, the spaghetti?"

August was caught off guard, and broke into a grin at what he recognised as a fragment of humour from the usually brooding Khaian sat opposite him. "First attempt at a joke you've made since...well...when? Three, four years ago?"

"Something like that..." Canen replied very sullenly. His eyes did not budge from the china dish containing his long sought for food, and as he brushed away the long black strands of hair from his face the expression of sadness was apparant. He idly took a swig from a tankard of ale, and stared down into the silvery bottom. "Not been a lot to laugh about since then, given our recent day to day situations."

August, running a hand through his threaded blonde hair, responded instantly. "There's been plenty to laugh about."

"Like what?"

"Well..." August paused for a moment, chewing a mouthful of fine, tender steak with the ferociousness only he was capable of. "You have friends. Many more than when you first arrived to Corone. Kaiser came back, Rayne Lunitari knocks about from time to time. What's more, you have a few nice ladies on your tail after your public appearances...all in all, life can't be too bad?"

Canen placed the tankard on the table and shifted his body sidewards. He could feel the rough texture of his wounds from The Cell grind against the seat of the chair, burning as if they had been branded onto his skin with a hot iron poker. They were a long way from healing properly but the emotional wounds were worse. Recently, his confidence in himself and his ability to fight had taken a tough hit. His only console was August, who he had met during his first trials with Step. A good man who had done a tour of duty with the Coronian Army in recent times, serving to protect inland interests, August had gone on to become a vital member of the secret organisation. Of course, he wasn't supposed to know this, but in doing so Canen had found a good friend and a close ally.

"Those things, those public battles...they are all diversions, Buren." Canen retorted, shovelling the last of his pasta into his mouth. "...recreation, as such. You know what i've spent my life doing?"

Buren shook his head.

"My life has been spent running away, wishing for everything I never had. You know the story. Nocturnis is gone, Khaia is wasteland. I use these small things to vent, to take my mind off the one thing that threatens to destroy it every single day. It feels like i'm in a nightmare that I can't wake up from..."

Buren's eyes locked onto Canen's.

"...since when was recreation a bad thing my friend?"

Canen looked back towards his empty bowl, and placed his hands firmly on the table.

"...since it became the only way I can live my life with a small measure of peace, Buren."

August knew he had touched the sore tooth of conversation. He knew about Canen's past, how the Haicheyanne had brutally murdered every occupant of his homeland under the command of the demonic Icarus Pentagathon. The Nocturn had obviously decided to let some of that raw sewage out into the open.

"I can't relax. We are living in a world that has run away from responsibility. I feel I have done the same. Even if I had become a martyr, would it not have been right for me to die fighting? Would it not have been honourable to do that? Maybe i'm getting tired of living with the fact there is a constant burden hanging over me instead of getting up and doing something about it."

"Yeah, but you have always fought for what you believed in..." August replied, finishing off his steak. "...there's still time in your life to go and correct those mistakes, if that's how you feel?"

"I guess I didn't realize what a mess my life is." Canen said. "You face an enemy like the Haicheyanne, or the Castigars. You put everything you have and everything you are into that fight. Then, all of a sudden, you don't have them anymore and you take a good look around. You see that everything else has gone to shit while you fought your battles. Values, initiative, compassion. Everything. Now I just want to take the fight back to them, the Haicheyanne. They know where I am...it won't be long before they make an appearance."

"All very heartfelt, but also beside the point. We ain't doing too bad as a nation...and you as a person" August argued, trying to pull the conversation back. "You have to lift yourself out of the muck."

"That's you. I get angry, bitter. It's how I work, it's what helps me fuel myself to fix the links that are broken and get rid of the people who are trying to spoil it for the rest of us."

"And what happens when you can't get back at the bad guys?"

Canen remained silent, and finished the remainder of his beer. August slipped back into a preoccupied stillness.

[ViGoR]

We join our adventurer in yet another stunning journey of courage and danger. He pulls his black hair out of his face to reveal his true identity. It is the one, the only Sifer Ramius, the man who single-handedly destroyed his entire village that his father and grandfather had worked so hard to protect from the evil bandits that Sifer helped with his own greed.

Sifer zoned back into reality. He was hungry, tired and in need of a drink, none of which could be satisfied at his current location. He could see a small light in the distance. It was another town but he had no idea where he was. He had been walking for a few days with no map. He had not seen a village for at least a day and he had been afraid to enter the last one he had seen. Now he was growing desperate, he could see a bridge about thirty feet away.

Sifer stepped across the bridge that led to a small town, which he did not know. It was small and the people there were mostly smalltime traders and miners. The bridge felt like it would collapse as it creaked and crackled under his footsteps. He passed a small, damaged sign that swung under a lamppost that cast a glowing aura around the area. It reminded him of home.

Tienlee.

Sifer solemnly walked into the small tavern, the only one that belonged to the local village of Tienlee. No one looked as he ventured into the local drinking hole even with his dark past. It seemed as if word of him had not spread to this area yet, something that he was very relieved to discover. He took a seat on the end of the bar and secluded himself from the villagers.

Finally, somewhere I can have a drink without worrying about being run out of town. It’s a good feeling.

The barmaid was terribly ugly but Sifer had been lonely for quite some time. He thought about the possibility and dismissed it. He told himself that something better would come around eventually. Besides, she was absolutely the worst looking woman he had ever laid eyes on, the thought of him even talking to her made him chuckle to himself. He could barely speak when she came to take his request because he feared he would burst out into laughter. He ordered a mug of ale, one after another. Alone, he drank away his current problems but he didn’t know he would only wake up with many, many more.

[Falcon Darkflight]

Tianlee, a quiet, peaceful sort of village, was never the perfect place to find a little action. The kinds of people that came and went were simply travellers using the town as a milestone inbetween the major cities of Radasanth and wherever they were destined or originated, and had little business in this rural, secluded settlement other than to find a warm bed and a hearty meal. Trade was at an all time low during the quiet seasons, and for the guards of the town, life passed by in an agonisingly monotonous fashion.

"Awww, shit..." Jezoir said, tipping the brow of his steel helmet as he wriggled the leather chin strap firmly into place. " This place is like a god damned cemetary in a desert. Ain't nuthin' happening here..."

"Yeah," Delur replied with a great deal more boredom evident in his tone. "And I don't like it one bit. It's like a day on the farm up here..."

Beside them, Hemlock, the senior guard on duty at the bridge gate, leaned pensively by his wooden surveillance shack and said nothing. At their small, ramshackle monitoring station on the edge of the only bridge between the town of Tianlee and Radansanth, the guards were studying the vacant expressions of the regular townsfolk as they went about their day to day business. All three wore black uniforms and faded shoulder patches decipitating a panther aghast a red sword - a symbol of the Radasanth guards. It should have been a fighting force analogous to the infamous Scarlet Brigade, a squad of elite soldiers woth a no-nonsense approach to crisis management, forming the direct basis of the section name. Instead, it was openly described by their own as a reason to get slammed in the local bar during social hours, bed the finest whores and a great way to rot into a tedious schedule of endless guard detail with plenty of unpaid overtime to go around.

Jezoir slid forward on the stone wall he sat on, his features pale in the fog smothered village. His green eyes suddenly transfixed on the borderline ahead through the ghostly vapour, a sudden flash erupting through the shroud in a split second's worth of dimaond edged brilliance.

"What in the hell was that? Not the kind of humidity for a thunderstorm, surely? Maybe-"

Jezoir broke off mid sentence as another guard waved a warning indicator from the fading edges of the bridge ahead. He glanced over at Delur, who took hurried note of the development and glanced back through the fog in an attempt to grasp what was going on. A group of humanoid figures moved around the bridgehead two hundred metres away, alternately closing in and backing away. They were, or seemed to be, garbed entirely in black.

Hemlock thought of bloodhounds harrying their prey as he followed the movements with keen eyes. The Radasanthian Guard's main effectiveness lay in their early alert and standoff capabilities. Their purpose was to be, as individuals, the most reliable guard detail this side of Corone. Their purpose was to engage in close skirmishing once the grounds of their territory and the rules of engagement were compromised. At that stage, getting past one of them would not be easy, and crippling or taking them out just slightly more difficult. His forehead scrunched with tension as he scanned the bridgehead with absolute focus.

"What's going on, Hemlock?" Jezoir asked, hoping his senior had a better perspective, despite his apparant inability to talk. "Can you tell what's going on?"

Hemlock was already reaching for his spearheaded quarterstaff as he lept from his stationary position and ran a beeline down the bridge, before stopping dead in his tracks, as if his feet had been rooted to the floor in cement. His ferocious expression receeded into an anxious gaze, his eyes falling upon what he first thought was a phantom, or perhaps a mirage caused by the mist.

A sphere of sickly night appeared in a snap metres away from him, formed from a merging liquid pool of black, that dripped darkness from its crude oil shell in steady torrents onto the grey stone of the bridge. On the surface of the concrete, the liquid swirled and contorted into a maelstrom, slowly twisting upwards into a jet of shadow that seemed to form a solid pillar. The sound of whirring dark energies and electrical crackling drowned the wind out almost entirely, and a lowly, spectrelike human form appeared from beneath the veil of oily black that now spanned the width of the road.

Hemlock froze as he witnessed this paranormal magic kick further into motion. The humanoid's face constructed itself slowly from fragments of the black magic, each shard slotting together in a jigsaw like motion until a pair of dull emerald eyes appeared aghast a ghostly, frowning face, the only hue on the backdrop of white and black.

"....What the hell?"

The manifesto of dark energies in front of the seniormost soldier regarded him with a cold glare as the final shards of his black robed body locked into place firmly, bound together like pieces of soiltwine. In his right hand, clenched within a balled, snow white fist, the black and brown laced hilt of a nodachi anti cavalry sword began to construct itself from molecules of light. The giant metallic blade formed from almost nothing in no time at all, and shimmered in what dull light was available as the final edge of the massive, six foot sword curved into a visciously sharp tip.

Hemlock's fair hair fell down in front of his face as he removed the steel helmet from his head. Slowly, in a trance like motion, he held out a palm and pressed it flat against the chest of the warrior in front of him, testing the validity of the flesh. The feeling was warm against the bare flesh gap left by the opening in the warrior's trailing black greatcoat, the skin smooth and almost fungal to the touch. The very sensation of that warmth, that physical proof of life left the veteran guard with little doubt as to who he was in the presence of.

"...The Fallen Angel...the other Khaian? But how? Your body was destroyed, obliterated by Arius Mephisto's psionics. How could you-?"

...That name no longer has any meaning for me. Too long I have roamed with this falsification attached to my namesake. The conflict that brought me that title has long since ended.

"...So, what namesake do you travel by?"

...I remain nameless to all but one. Allow me passage at once.

"...I cannot allow that, even for you. We are under siege by those wierd creatures, the guards have signalled for a total lockdown of Tianlee."

...Unless you wish for those 'creatures', as you so aptly put it, to enter this village and destroy it, I suggest you allow me passage. Failing that, I shall take it by force, which will likely result in your imminent death.

"...What are you planning to do? What do you know about those...things?"

I am planning to do what I can to prevent a genocide on a scale your primative human minds could not possibly comprehend. You know nothing of the problems humanity faces in this day and age, although you all seem to think you do. Those 'things'...they are seeking out a threat to their kind in order to destroy it. They come to your homeland in search of the chosen few who they believe will end their oppresive reign, yet they know only one of their targets. Until they find those other chosen few, it is likely they will raze every human, elven, dwarven and drow settlement to the ground. Tianlee is no exception, but...

The cold, almost uncaring voice of Gideon Xerxes paused for a brief moment, before exhaling a small, discreet chuckle.

...What does it matter?...you'd never understand. So, move, or my threat will quickly become very much more than that.