May Vignette #4 [Archive]

Etheryn

05-29-12, 05:29 AM

Dan knew from years of experience where to spot a bed. In a place as sleepy and non-important as Nelligin, somewhere between Radasanth’s eastern plains and north of Concordia forest, he snuck in to find the most comfortable, most hidden corner of the town’s massive communal barn. It was rustic and the oldest figure of the farmland village, a converted cathedral converted to multi-purpose stable and workshop. The steeple was appropriated to a lookout tower and repositioned to the roof’s centre as opposed to the front façade of usual churches to gain better vantage of the rolling, verdant plains that sprawled in all directions from the town.

He slept heavily amidst the jumble of saw horses, half-cut planks, and empty corrals, tucked away beneath a pile of linen tarp and straw. He was heavy and weary and fell asleep fast, glad to succumb to the beating exhaustion from only the first link of a long chain journey to find his estranged brother. It was baby’s rest, until the sensory inputs of battle filtered into his irreverent dreams. The basso bleat of a rider’s horn, the cymbalist crash of a battalion’s worth of men clashing swords and exchanging arrows and artillery, and the acrid stench of ignited varnish roused him with a jolt. It was overload and his fogged mind couldn’t digest it.

Someone else was with him. A teenage boy with buck teeth and freckles and a farmer’s tan, all gangly and maladroit, dressed in a dented suit of plate mail with the Empire’s emblazoned symbol across the chest and shoulders. The boy grabbed Dan by the shoulders and shook hard, clearly terrified.

“Help! We’re stuck in here! Help me open the door!”

Dan blinked lamely and rubbed the corner of his eye, still swatting away his coddled blanket and stems of straw that poked in all the pockets of his olive drab overalls, and caught in the crevices of his limb-strapped weaponry. He hated being woken up too earlier. “Stop shaking me,” he said, and pushed the teenage soldier away with ease by his musculature advantage.

The soldier tripped over nothing, recoiled into an ungainly backwards somersault, and launched back at Dan to plead some more. The scabbard of his longsword scraped a gouge in the dirt. “Rangers! I came in here to hide, man—and, and…they locked the door behind me! Place is lit up! We gotta go or we burn!”

The booming wallop of a supporting rib beam crashing down and spraying embers like a buzzing cloud of fireflies brogut context. Dan looked up and saw flames licking the timber pillars, catching hay in the loft, and billowing a noxious and suffocating cloud would quickly what little oxygen remained. An oil torch crashed arced high through a broken pane window and impacted a nearby vat of tar, causing the surface to burn like a slick pouring from an ocean tanker. He rolled out of the way when it quickly began to bubble and spit skin-eating black slops.

“Help me open the door or we die! You hear me?” the soldier continued, hammering his fists against Dan’s thick chest in a tantrum. “Dead! The roof is coming in!”

Things clicked into place. Dan’s mind accepted the reality before it, instead of vaguely swimming in non-thought and denial. “Move!” Dan shouted, tearing the soldier out of his way and making a flat sprint to the great doors that ordinarily took two strong men to budge.

It was an autonomous decision, and in hindsight, perfectly witless. He didn’t slow to fiddle with any latches or try jemmy them open. He didn’t have time to consider an engineered response. He just dropped his meaty shoulder, jumped into the air and made himself a battering ram. The immovability of the object, when balanced against his own plainly stoppable force, caused him to bounce off like a ball from a bat. When he could stand up again he was looking through a galaxy of stars.

Dan started to cough and choke, and saw the coils and tongues of flames lick from the loft towards their only other option; a spiral staircase that lead to a lookout tower built into the roof of the barn. It would give them access to the roof itself, and maybe they could climb down from there. Still acting on reflex rather than thought, he abandoned the doors and streaked toward the stairs, hurdling over toppled farrier’s tools and scattered kegs and spilled sacks of grain.

The teen soldier saw Dan’s failed attempt to barge out and was already halfway up the stairs before realising he should've assisted. The flames struck patterns like candelabras wrapped with detonation cord and he flinched back from them. They were a moving tapestry on the vaulted ceiling, almost beautiful in their desire to consume the medium upon which they were created, and then sup on anything nearby.

“Up here!” the soldier shouted. “I’ve got rope!”

Dan caught up quick and barged past, unwilling to let the narrow window to the roof close by the inferno. His eyes stung and a tatter of his shirt and overalls caught flame as they breached the top of the staircase to the peak of the lookout tower. It was there Dan could see the bedlam that’d come to Nelligin. The soldier caught up, huffing and clanking, and stood next to him.

Dan turned awestruck, spending sand that’d run out of the hourglass to share a view of horror with the low crescent moon peaking up from behind distant mountains. Satellite melees raged in the streets, orbiting around a larger skirmish at the western gate. Siege engines beyond the walls launched sprays of boiling pitch onto fleeing crowds, and what was ordinarily green and earthy brown now oily black and grey and violent orange, quickly reducing to ash or rubble or gore. The sight was barbarous and scarcely believable in its scope and intensity. It couldn’t be fathomed why there was need for such gross violence and unfettered murder of civilians; the town seemed of little tactical value to either Empire or Rangers.

Dan spoke no hyperbole. “Holy Hell.” The syllables were lost to the explosive roar of all the chaos.

He looked down. Their lookout tower rose ten feet from the angled slat roof, and it would be easy enough to descend the roof proper and gain a solid foothold. The moment for caution was gone. He needed to move fast and risk slipping.

“It’s the only way we’ll get down from here,” Dan barked, pointing to a narrowing space rapidly encroached on by tongues of flame.

“How?” the soldier replied. His tone cracked with strain, and his knees quaked so hard the plating of his greaves rattled like a can. “How do we get down?”

“I’ll tie us off on the guttering drain and we can climb,” Dan said. His throat tasted of soot and his eyes stung red.

“It’ll break if we both go together!” the soldier added.

Dan nodded. The drain was little more than an open trough to run off storm water and catch leaves. It wouldn’t bear the weight of two grown males and armour.

“Who goes first?” the soldier said. He lowered the visor on his red feathered helmet like he was about to duel with gravity instead of just circumventing it by knot and rig.

Dan vaulted over the railing. He landed both feet on the incline of the roof and slid down on his backside, catching splinters in his palms while barely controlling the descent. He came to the precipice, thirty feet from the ground, and halted by planting both heels onto the guttering drain itself.

The soldier was too afraid to climb over. He still had the rope. Until he moved or threw it they were both stuck.

“Get over here!” Dan shouted.

The soldier trembled, small and unworthy beneath the imposing figure of his armour.

“Now!” Dan screamed.

The spiral staircase lit up beneath the soldier and consumed his only exit. Angry gouts of dragon's breath tore up from under his feet. He was forced to shamble over and hurry to Dan’s position or be roasted. Awkwardly, slowly, he rattled along the tiles until he came to rest next to Dan.

In a flash Dan took the rope, bound a stable enough hitch to the guttering, and tossed the other end. There was length to scamper down without injury. Dan hadn’t looked up—so busy and frantically occupied with applying his experience of years as a boatswain and fisherman—to see the soldier draw his blade and point the desperate tip at Dan’s jugular.

“I’m going first,” the soldier spat, half conviction and half shame. “There’s no way it’ll hold once you go."

Dan saw red. Literally. A breaking wave of inferno rushed in a wall from one end of the tiled roof as the insulation layers combusted, and it surged straight for Dan and the soldier. There was no chance to plea or bargain or even think. Dan swung his forearm horizontally, swatted the soldier’s leg out from beneath, and the desperate teen fell to break and bleed and expire and be swallowed up by the battle below. Dan’s ears were spared the soldier’s gristly snap of bone and popping sinew by the boom of a meteoric trebuchet strike. The launched boulder crushed a row of houses perpendicular to the barn sidewall into splinters.

He took two hands on the rope, coiled a bit around his boot to ease the friction, and slid down to comparative safety. As soon as his feet were on the ground, he ducked a weighty carve from a claymore which looked more like the blade of a windmill than a sword. Dan juked out of the way to see an armoured juggernaut come at him again.

It was understandable, really. There were no other assumptions to make. Dan—armed like a willing combatant with a caustic black knife, additionally wearing a borrowed Ranger camouflage sneak suit underneath his overalls and shirt—had just tossed an Empire soldier to death. Without any choice but to fight, Dan ducked another frenzied swipe and came up between the soldier’s arms, grappled a while, and eventually squeezed on a guillotine headlock to bring the suit down by his hip. They scrapped and tumbled and made no gains on the other. Dan eventually won by fully rotating the soldier’s helmet so the grated visor was where the neck guard should be, lifted the visor up, and ran his steel into the spinal cord. With a yank and a twist Dan’s assailant went utterly limp.

Dan scanned his environment and felt it best to remain here for a moment until he decided on a path to take out of the battle. Somehow, his immediate vicinity was clear of Empire forces. Nameless men with faces streaked black and brown by paint, wielding lethal hooks and exotic curved blades of those trained in guerrilla fighting, darted in and out of the shadows and barked commands at Dan like he were one of their own. Rangers.

He crouched over the graceless young soldier from inside the barn. Deep red blood coagulated from his internal injuries and seeped out his nose and mouth. Gurgles blew bubbles in it. His back was broken, so he couldn’t really feel anything but a numbing pressure. It wasn’t sympathy that made Dan swiftly drop to a knee, and use the falling momentum of his two hundred pound body weight to deliver a killing thrust by a weakness in the chest plate. The Rangers would gut Dan at a sniff of Empire allegiance. He needed to show them a reason not to, a reason to let him be. The execution of a guileless victim caught up in someone else’s war.

Absolutely necessary. No choice, Dan reminded himself, as he stood, offered a feigned comrade’s nod and struck off into the night. A Ranger officer, somehow distinguished by an embroidered red tabard, continued barking orders. Dan evaporated into blotted shadows and hid from the baleful, evil glow of incinerated homes.

I had no fuckin’ choice.

In this element, men at war were little more than beasts. No civilisation remained in their thoughts. They were reduced to a bloodthirsty hive mind of primitive needs and traded their humanity for survival because it was necessary. It was by that token, the soldiers—the men at war—could feel it was excusable. It was how the dying soldier, a witless child thrust into men’s shoes, could feel it was excusable. Dan wasn’t sure the exoneration applied to him. He was no soldier, flew no flag, and certainly didn’t give a damn about whatever cause drove each faction to bloodshed. He was just…there.

Necessary, Dan thought. I’d rather be alive than dead.

His eyes were elsewhere, darting for hides and spotting opportunities to feint and parry and disembowel men carrying more and sharper steel than he. Still, his eyes saw a buck-toothed boy with freckles all shattered and pallid beneath him. The perpetually black second branded his conscience forever.

A lull in the fighting caught Dan’s attention. He saw a crumble in the drywall some hundreds of metres away. Through that hole he could see the plains. They burned like dry cornfields in summer, yet untouched parts were long enough to conceal. Whole trees, like lone scarecrows all out of place in their posture, burst in domes of fire and superheated sap and showering shards. The sky was choking with arsonist’s plumes. Skeletons of homes, of entire lives and families and generations of histories, smouldered in the aftermath.

Dan dodged and weaved and cut his way out. He breached the hole in the Nelligin’s perimeter and tore away from the massacre. All the while telling thinking, saying, humming, and screaming to the sky…

“I’d rather be alive than dead!”