Of Faith, Power, and Glory

[Knave]

“One of these days you’re going to tell me where you’re coming from.”

The old monk spoke with none of the asceticism his brown robes suggested, and the amiable neutrality with which he played card, and rolled and smoked his cigarettes most definitely spoke of a life that lacked nothing. For example, his yellowing teeth gleamed gold through the mesh of his ever expanding beard as the black varnished table divided their bets and left his opponent with an ever increasing array of gold pieces and a sensation that the old man simply allowed him his win.

Az-ram, an Aibron monk whose position and will were as unquestionable as they were unknown, had invited Ace into one of the more well-furnished sitting rooms of Dansdel. All the world’s wealth might have been tastefully put into this expansive and richly dark room, monks sat talking, sharing secrets and laughing atop black cushion seats around tables. Will o wisps, balls of spirit fire, were dyed red and hung from the roves and so slaved to the monk’s passions were they that each flaming orb would wax dim and flashed to rising emotions brought on by monkish bliss and euphoria. A central column rose from the center of the floor, and from this massive instrument all manner of basses and beats throbbed through the air.

The smoke relaxed…clouded the mind, and hence here in the den of the lounge lizards, Az-ram acted as Ace’s agent and took liberties to be frank as he fed the man gold, though he was sure that neither of them cared for the stuff at all. “I heard you were looking for me earlier, any requests?” The old man’s tongue was nothing like silver, more like crude steel, but there was a certain fascination about it, like one long used to being heard and obeyed. As such, the question seemed alien, uncomfortably so, as the man laid three cards face down on the table’s middle and set two in before each of them.

Usually warm and explosive in his passions, the old man took in the man across from him and saw his reserve in the half-lidded disinterest with which he shifted and sifted gold through his fingers. Az-ram could not blame the man, he spent many of their encounters in the throes of violent senility, but the sanity that always remained looked at Ace with his plane features and short, red hair and odd qualities, and saw beneath it all something huge and portentous of unspeakable evil. Ace had from the moment Az-ram laid eyes on him been the enigma he had taken the greatest joy in. The man had no footprints beyond Radasanth’s walls, and threw away his safety in the Citadel with the kind of aplomb shared between fool and white knuckled of heroes. It was a mystery Az-ram had to stop himself from simply tearing apart.

“Just wanted to know who was watching.” Ace said, his smile and posture open and easy as he reclined and threw an arm over the back of his recliner, looking ever so relaxed as he increased the distance from the sage. “Rebels aside, we’ve still got plenty of big names under imperial rule more concerned with one good battle than an entire war.” Shifting the gold back to his ever increasing heap, he took the glass that had sat so still previously upon his knee. “After that, I wanted to make sure that you didn’t put me on another falling star.” He laughed with none of the bitterness Az-ram might have expected from being forced to fight while falling at miles per second.

“None.” Was the curt reply.

And there it was, a split second of strain in Ace’s face before it all settled back into simple curiosity. Ace’s lips rarely settled into even a neutral complacency, any departure from the present never touched the reality of his thoughts or feelings—what a wonderful secret!—it was almost enough to make monk wonder just how far his deceit might lie. Then it was back to boyish curiosity, as the man leaned in again with the question why?

“Oh I set up something special alright, a darkling plain turned swamp after a flood from the summer thaw in Alerar. The air is so clear; the country picturesque, even the moon hangs fat in the sky.” The two of them grew closer, sharing a fiendish delight in the setting for action and drama, but that soon passed for Ace when he realized no one would be watching. “Of course, while I can make the arena, I can do nothing when the first man to apply demands something so sad as privacy.” Az-ram his lies small, if he had discovered anything of Ace it was that he was so complicated under his simplicity that he could smell intricate deceptions…and was blind to small ones.

“I see…anyway out of it.” Ace asked before being immediately answered with a shake of Az-ram’s head. “Well, it won’t be a total waste,” Ace said, rising from his chair to greet the unknown enemy, “I get to try out some new toys and tricks while I add another nameless tally to my score.” Nameless? By the end of the night, Ace would likely forget his opponent, but before he could leave Az-ram raised his hand.

“Take the gold with you; else it’ll end up in the trash.” The monk said, the value of all earthly money lost on him like highest art to the lowest beggar. “And you’ll find you’re battle on the eighteenth floor; through the usual arch and usual door.” He would call, as the shapeshifter finally took up his spear and left. ‘And there I’ll see you at your game, at your worst.”


They had not even done a good job of sheering back the soil and bedrock and roots, but instead trapped them into their walls, and crushed them into a smooth and icy surface. In some places, bones and skulls peaked through the grime of ages, and while there was no proof, Underwood was rife with tales of necromancy rising from the depths of the Dansdel pit.

Free from the scrutiny of dangerous sorcerers, Ace escaped the lounge with neither the usual excitement of an upcoming battle or the joy of gathering distance. The stone ceiling of the Citadel was deceptive, and the very lack of windows alone obscured the facts of nature; such as whether it was night or day or how far the surface was from this sorcerous hole in the Althanian earth. The best and only indication of Ace’s depth and the druids’ power were the glowing numbers that marked stairs for either further descent or an ascendance of what felt like miles. Ace’ paced through the archway that at its apex read: 24. Without awe he reached the circling steps of stone, which, rather than being built upon one another, protruded abruptly from the earth below with brief interludes of growing space.

Unlike the Citadel, which attracted attention enough for the monks to keep the halls bright, and bustled with enough life that the place was often cleaned, the Dansdel was a place of less repute, lower protection, and gained greater attention for its use of untested magics to alter rooms, lands, and even the sky; though the reality of these things was dubious—None could be so powerful!—the more mundane facts of Dansdel suggested more and worse.

Flights and stairs passed in slow succession, but in the absence of druids, who seemed more and more to reject all solar light, the will o wisps glowed blue again, and provided another servant with their radiance. Servant was indeed the word, his grinning mask concealing the kind of slavery that lay beneath his skin and convinced him to play among mad men rather than flee this place and Az-ram. A pointless existence, and he knew it.

Finally, eighteen burned above the doorway, and passing onto that floor, Ace followed the beaten path into the gaping maw of another passage way. Innumerable doors were fitted seamlessly into the walls and stretched on until sights limits ended in ever retreating darkness. Someone new, even someone escaping, would soon find that starving to death was a real possibility. The only sounds that replied to each other were the echoes of passing tread of feet.

Finally, the door came, it carried no number, but at its head was the graven image of six snakes devouring each other in a Mobius strip as they turned and wrestled to consume each other even as they actually consumed themselves. Artists studied years to create the third dimension on paper, the monks had done so with wood, and likely with ease.

A swift rapping, knuckles pounding an irreverent tattoo—noknoknoknoknok— as Ace asked entry as though at any moment he might smash the door down with his boot. The snakes roiled in their wooden world, choking upon one another to hiss at him, but they moved all the same, and circulating on their path they turned upon one another and opened the lock. The door opened to reveal sweet air—fresh air!—and the light of day!

True to Az-ram’s word, Ace’s first foot steps into what he assumed to be elfin land splashed up water and sank through four inches of water and two inches of mud. The second was no more pleasant, though Ace was glad to have his boots. Thus, the world Dansdel created… or had stolen from time and space was revealed. The Mountains of Dawn in their cloud robed majesty stood in the near distance, their white caps gone; the proof of this sloshing, chill above Ace Mandelo’s ankles.

The plain itself could have never been a desert; trees flourished and spring up by great numbers, but remained distant and apart by twos and threes. Though Ace had poor knowledge of geography, his best guess of this places origin would be L' Renor Harlilen. The hills were many, and scaling one Ace soon saw that so too were the gulleys that now ran with water like ravines. Mists wafted and danced with the wind upon the water, disturbed by passing boots more than the setting sun, which cast its blazing halo wide as it sank beneath the horizon.

Taking in the land, Ace stood beside one of the larger trees, and seeing no one when he looked either left or right, and often over his shoulder, the shapeshifter gave voice to impatience.

“Oy! I’m here! Can you hear me?” He shouted, and with an eager courtesy he belted out a greeting, “It’s going to be a wonderful night! It’s going to be a wonderful fight! Get out here so I can see you!” Perfect teeth gleaming, he planted his spear in the ground and setting his weight against it, he continued to marvel at nature as something deep within him… the truth, marveled at the world and how it allowed things like this to be done. Out, out toward the very limits of vision, there was nothing but the mountains and the threat encroaching night.

[Vigil]

(Sorry for such a long post, but you gave me a helluva entry and I decided to take complete advantage of the opportunity.)

Liam awoke in a daze, bleary eyed and with the acrid stench of bile heavy on his breath. Picking his head up from a puddle of his own fetid vomit, the old man opened his eyes and did so groggily, waiting for his own vision to focus and to make sense of such a bizarre situation. His lips were numb and his mouth felt as if it had been packed with cotton. Truly, he felt hungover or like he had been drugged, but neither of which he could settle on. Feeling that he was on the verge of a moment of senility, he waited for the eventual clarity to follow. But, it hadn't.

What did was a throbbing migraine that began to chew and gnaw upon his brain, making it especially painful to string more then a couple words together into a coherent thought. However, while the migraine could eventually be negotiated with and dissuaded, what could not be negotiated with was reality and the sheer confusion that followed.

"W-where in God's name am I?" Liam croaked as he tried vainly to remember how he had gotten here. But for the life of him he couldn't grab at the strands of what had brought him to such a place. The last thing the old man remembered was being in his apartment at night. Preparing dinner, he thought, examining files for the next day's council meeting.. and then..

Nothing.

Again and again, looking past the bowl of potatoes he had been peeling and the roast he had been preparing for himself, Liam could only recall the sweet, chemical stench and taste of cotton. Vaguely as he looked down upon his own hands he noticed the deep, purple bruises on his wrists. He had been bound for some time. He still had his clothes and immediately fishing through his pockets he still had his wallet and all of his belongings. So, at the very least he hadn't been robbed.

Struggling onto his own two feet, Liam picked himself up from the cold, hard and wet earth. Immediately he staggered and braced himself against a nearby elm as his vision began to blur and he swooned while staring into the bright, disorienting light of a rising sun in a swamp he had no business being in. Naturally, to most people, losing consciousness in one place and waking up in an entirely different area must be especially terrifying. But this hadn't been the Irishman's first time.

His condition demanded a certain familiarity with such bizarre situations that it had happened more then once, especially when as a young man he had ignored the lunar calendar. "It is the monster I carry that invites such regular misfortune." He admitted aloud, if only to himself. But this wasn't one of those moments.

For the rest of the day, Liam wandered the vast, foreign landscape he was convinced he was a stranger of. For most of his life, Liam had rarely, if ever, traveled out of Corone. And nothing he saw here he even vaguely recognized to be distinctly Corone. Where could he have gone in the country and how far could he have gotten in just a night? Even the climate didn't feel right. The season was wrong. Feeling like Rip Van Winkle, Liam distinctly remembered the night he had spent in his apartment it had been summer cresting into July. Here, in the cold, harsh mire never visited, the Irishman saw that it was in the midst of a spring thaw.

As the day grew on and the ragged, confused old man wandered the area, he inched closer and closer into falling into hysteria. His infamous calm and stoic nature was breaking and while he expected his memory to return it hadn't. The facts he knew in the present were these;

He was in a place completely alien to what he was used to. He may or may not have been taken from his apartment. And for some bedeviling reason, he suspected he might have slept through an entire year to end up in such a place and in the wrong season. But, as Liam stroked his scraggly chin that he knew to be only a day old and in a dire need of a shave, he immediately discounted such an idea.

However, with little to go on and no clue as to how he had gotten there, there was little reason to remain calm and apply rational thought to a situation he had only just very recently come to have control over. But it was with years of age and practiced discipline that Liam was able to keep his faculties and let alone his temper. And for the moment, the idea of losing his nerve had been dissuaded.

Liam came around to eventually examining himself for clues. He was soaked and covered with mud. Dressed in brown slacks, a white cotton shirt and his pants held up by black suspenders. His dress shoes had been scuffed and much of his clothing had been torn as if he had been in a brawl. Eventually, the old man came to wonder why he had been walking with an actual limp. He found a large, black and purple bruise up and along his right leg. It looked as if he had been hit with a chair, but it didn't feel as if anything had been broken. The same story came from a couple of bruises along his chest and what may have been a cracked rib that caused him to draw in sharply every time he touched it or moved too fast. Had he been beaten and dragged here against his will?

As Liam continued to speculate, the day began to wane as it approached the middle of the afternoon. At a loss for why he was here or who had brought him here, at the very least the Irishman had settled on him being kidnapped. Especially when he had taken the time to wash out his mouth with cold creek water and removed the taste of bile and was replaced by a sweet, chemical taste he was all too familiar with but couldn't quite place. Peering into the creek as he watched the sun begin to descend into the horizon overhead, Liam stared at his reflection and suddenly remembered a question he should have asked himself hours ago.

What day was it?

Racing to a nearby tree, Liam ignored his limp and climbed up the tree with surprisingly alacrity for an old man. He shimmied to the top and braced himself against two stout limbs. With old, tired eyes Liam searched the sky for what he was so desperately looking for. It was late enough in the afternoon.. and back in his apartment had been the night before. It was then he found it hanging in the darkening sky flecked by purple skies and a crimson horizon found within an ever dimming light. A full moon, growing ever more visible in the dying light, loomed in the distance.

Liam panicked and nearly fell out of the tree when he lost his grip, only narrowly catching himself from an almost certainly fatal fall. The old man now wide awake and aware of a coming change. Unable to console himself that he was in a land where he had no idea the population or how close to a town he was, he instead did the only thing he knew he could do after decades of suffering the curse of lycanthropy. He prepared and then waited for it.

Thumbing through his pockets, Liam had pulled out about five feet of string and in another he had found a butcher's receipt for an entire chicken breast. Why he hadn't connected the dots before and realized he was in the process of beginning a meticulous ritual he had practiced for years was beyond him. In a matter of minutes, Liam found a nice secluded spot and began to undress. He folded his clothes meticulously and sat them from slacks to shirt on top of his shoes and under the lee of a rock to keep them from getting wet.

Now bruised and naked, Liam began to wander away from his clothes to find a spot for his transformation. From what he had seen earlier, the swamp had been rife with wild game. Deer and rabbit abound. Finding a miserably cold rock to sit on top of and keep his bare feet out of the fetid mud, Liam could only sit and wait for the Wolf to come.

"With a little luck and God's grace, no one will find me here." Liam whispered, rubbing his chest to keep it warm against the growing chill. "Maybe the Wolf will catch the scent of a rabbit or some miserable creature and chase that for the night. Around here."

He hadn't had time to scout for rabbit holes or feeding spots for creatures. So making due, he had sat at the shore of a nearby creek. Silently, he thumbed the crucifix around his neck and prayed he was the only person for miles. It was then that he heard it. He couldn't have been sure of whom it was or what they were saying, but his head snapped in the direction he heard the shouting. His worst fear realized, Liam wrestled with the idea of his Wolf becoming uncaged and free to kill again. He couldn't live with it. Naked, cold, beaten and desperate, Liam jumped down from the rock and began to run in the direction of the noise.

"Hey!" He shouted, dodging nearby trees. "Hey! Whoever you are! By God, you aren't safe here! Run!"

Beginning to feel the pains of a coming change, Liam wrestled to suppress it as he ran vainly to the source of the voice, determined to warn them. If they were smart and quick, maybe they could get a head start and escape the beast. The old man couldn't bear another person slain by the werewolf, he thought as he yelled and screamed hysterically.

"Run! Save yourself! Run for your life!" He bellowed. As night fell and twilight glimmered, Liam didn't even realize that he could be heard for miles. From both friend and foe.

[Knave]

Standing in on an island which have easily sat at the edge of the immaterium or some fay kingdom wreathed in white, Ace leaned folded his arms over the spear’s shaft, looked to the infinite he could not fathom, and thought of his birth into the poor servitude and foolishness as an actor—a distant origin he knew vaguely despite all its family and friends—he wished he had been born a monk. He chuckled quietly, spitefully, and he enjoyed it as a rare pleasure, the prime fruit of for once being alone. “Perhaps they’ll let me stay a while.”

Ace’s life was a long story, one too long to tell without stripping both it and him of any dignity he had left. This place, he liked this place. The cold was refreshing as it settled beneath Ace’s clothes, his burgundy shirt no protection, his synched tight pants already a deeper shade of gray with the water and mud Ace had picked up in his ascent to the highest hill.

He could even hear the echoes of his voice made hollow…and, ‘So childish.’ He judged, it was real, and human, but what human being could put such earnest sugar on his words without laughing at how ridiculous it was? Only the gods were free, only masters, rich and mighty, knew happiness like that.

“…great fight, a great night…”

A realization struck Ace as he furrowed his brow, and worried his lower lip with perfect teeth. The fact that there was even an echo at all was important. A phenomenon which meant, “This isn’t someplace special, just another arena, just another box.” Oh! The prizefighter was speechless. There it was: a voice that was so alien and cold to Ace that he knew it was his own. Ace had forgotten that voice years ago when he had first began this death march to glory.

“Hey…” The serenity of finding a moment of peace, the illusion of safety that banished paranoia died with the withered shout of someone Ace would now gladly kill. And rolling on his shoulder, Ace looked down from his high-rise view, and saw splashing across the soaked plains the form of a man—solid and unmistakably unshapely—and as that man covered the distance and the fog’s shroud grew thin enough to reveal him, Ace closed his eyes. The gesture that followed was universal, known well in Fallien, oft used by the Akashiman in his fields. He raised his hand, covered his face, as if to weep, and then dragged that hand down to glower between thumb and forefinger with narrowed eyes. It was a gesture known in all languages, and by any facsimile, through any translation, it equated to raw exasperation. In the common tongue it was pronounced: “What-the-fuck-is-this?”

The heft of Mauvasia, his spear, was comfortable in his hand as lowered its tip down, still not willing to stand to greet someone old, naked, and screaming. “Perhaps he’s insane; senile even.” Ace’s relationship with Az-ram had been a long and spiraling one, Ace fought often, he fought well, but in his senility the old dirty bastard had over stepped his bounds countless times and impossibly stupid threats! Material and verbal threats! Drugs! Drowinging! Explosives! Kidnapping! Ace had no interest in battles that were truly dangerous, and every turn had made Ace hate him more. So when he saw an old man, and thought him deranged, there was little doubt that in some passive-aggressive way—“I might just enjoy this.” He whispered, finally standing, descending the steep slope slowly, aware that the lush, nearly blue carpet of grass was treacherously slick.

‘Easy, just because its only he and I doesn’t mean I can do as I please and no one will know… he’ll know.’ Ace maintained his restraint, never leaping down with the wild excitement that would have gladly used Ace’s seven foot spear with its gigantic bronze head as little more than a club. It was still in his veins, and fueled the courteous smile that returned to Ace Mandelo’s lips and the warm, welcoming tone of his voice. “Running isn’t something that anyone can do, right now, now how about you put on some clothes and find yourself a weapon before the cold kills you.” ‘Before I do.



((first, awful post preserved for austerity and comparison.))

“Hey!!!”

Ace shifted his body as he reclined against his planted spear, the scenery was beautiful, and nothing in the travels of Ace’s other lives had yet to meet with that beauty. Even for flooded fields, the water as it ran rippled with reflection, and beyond that, clear inches and feet to the waving, drowning grass. It had been so captivating that when the cry pierced Ace’s reverie he was less than pleased to cease gazing where fascination took him, and focus on the source of that panicked sound. He wished he hadn’t.

Ace to his credit never did react—for anything he did would be less than amiable—at the approach of what was increasingly a worrying sight approached with a worrisome energy that bounced and jostled in Ace’s direction. The old man was getting along in his years, but that did not explain the lack of clothes. The old moustache, shades of gray all over, ran naked through water, the wrinkles of age doubtless accumulating mud with every step of the man’s wild, frantic gate. Ace had faced knights and fools, thieves and villain…


‘And now look at me, the season was once sweetly slow; I all the more bored and restless for it. Yet here I am now: engaged by some less than worthy monster.’ He thought, his thoughts nothing like his speech. Ace‘s suspicions of tonight spent as a tonight wasted were confirmed not ten minutes into the main event. ‘For all those monk’s fine interests, they indulge their subject’s passions too much.’ Though Ace would never say it— he could never say it—beneath his passive expression he suppressed a glance of revulsion and contained a smear of contempt for what he suspected was a pervert. A pervert demanding Ace flee him, an impossible pleasure.

Standing from what had been a leisurely lean, Ace pulled his spear from the ground. The great bronze head a downturned a huge flame in its waving tip and color. He spun that dark wood and felt the weight august destruction turn as it came full circle to stop at rest near inches from the ground. ‘So naked he forgot all but his most dear of arms,’ he observed, the rules of décor so frustratingly limited that in spite of Ace’s distaste, Ace could not raise Mauvasia in defense of his own ever diminishing personal space. Ace was an act that existed for conduct, and even alone with such a person as this old moustache where no one else would know, there was still the old moustache.

“Run?” Ace called cheerfully, his attitude and eyes avoiding the strangeness of the situation. “I would if I could, but I’ve got reputation that demands upkeep, besides, the way the game is played leaves my leave in only one direction.” Ace raised his voice and free hand to playfully jab and point through the distance and Liam before jerking his thumb back at himself as illustration. “And I won’t be doing the deed by my own hand.”

The evening was dimming to reveal the increasing presence of the moon above, and below, already the nocturnal flora, Haibanum Fliare, spread it nine lengthy white petals to wax iridescent in their reply to sky. A single flower bloomed at its brightest before being trample and crushed beneath Liam’s feet. “I don’t suppose you have anything else with you? It will be a cold and wet night, you’ll need protection, Sir, or you’ll be diminished before your time.”