Hysteria (Closed)

[Duffy]

Hysteria (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dm_5qWWDV8&ob=av3e)
Reflect upon the darkness, and fall into madness.

2637

Closed to Talen, Captain of the Ixian Knights.

---

In a time long since passed, Lord Brandybuck Defoe would have jumped at the chance to fight an old friend. He would have tingled with excitement at the prospect of being challenged in a moment of erratic reunion. Now, though, he only wanted to flee. The bard wanted to be gone from the sandy domes of the Citadel; he wanted to be anywhere but Corone, and the farther away the better. The once boy named Talen had, or so it seemed, grown up in all ways possible since they had last crossed paths. The letter calling him back to the Empire had been a surprise, by all means, because he had not expected leniency, or forgiveness, from Sei Orlouge. After he had departed the ranks of the Ixian Knights, granted, on temporary leave, he did not think his duties would be remembered, called upon, or required.

His black cane clipped against the cobbles of the fighting circle as he crossed the barrier that divided the entrance chamber from the humid atmosphere. Duffy had considered the ante chamber to be warm, but beneath a Fallien son, the dark tunnel’s temperate climate paled in comparison. The lingering warmth swarmed into the plain chamber, and would surround them throughout their engagement with summer kissed afternoons of the high season. The sun, mock, dry, and livid in its falsity shone vibrantly overhead. The gravel in between the cobbles, formed from magic to mimic the expanse of age kicked up beneath the heavy steel-toed boots of their master. The wide and seemingly endless courtyard, without closing wall or partisan fence felt ironically cold and wistful.

“I expected more from him,” he mumbled with a pair of cracked, tired lips. He remembered their previous encounter, well near two years prior, and the descent both combatants had tumbled through to their ironic, sodden, and log flume deaths. “I guess change can bring out,” he looked to his left, right, and then up to the skies, “the truth in all of us.” He sighed, set his gaze back to the closed door, and pressed both his palms onto the silver tipped knob of his cane. His fingers pressed around the circumference of the walking prop and worked his calloused skin against the eternally smooth wood. Magic echoed against his skin, and reminded him of better days.

Though Duffy had departed the throng of the Ixian Knight castle at the breakout of Lord Orlouge’s ill-conceived war, in his not-so-infinite wisdom, the bard had known deep down that he would not be able to escape their presence for long. Though William Arcus, and indeed, the Gisela Reaper had betrayed their fellow Captains, Duffy remained eternally fond of the remainder. Talen especially was like a younger, more aloof, yet deceptively intuitive brother to the bard, though he had yet found the wisdom, courage, and heart to put it to words. He did not think gutting him with his single-edged Akashiman blade would highlight his fondness, nor would it serve to bring them closer. It was, however, the reason they had been reunited. Their master had commanded it.

“I am ready,” he said loudly, letting his fondling of his cane pass by the moment until he felt prepared to take on whatever came through the chamber doors. Wood, especially oak, long abandoned from the care of the charlatan groundskeepers of the Ai’bron Order would not contain the wrath of the captains that were going to engage within. They would certainly not contain the potency of Duffy’s voice, or the abyssal powers of the Shadowalker. “Let the darkness fall!” he added, unable to leave the dramatics at the door in the wake of his advance.

With a calamitous crack and a rush of air escaping acrid lungs, the doors on the far side of the three hundred foot wide and horizonless courtyard swung inwards. The scouring sunlight fell away against the wood, and found itself swallowed whole by the shade of the midnight portal beyond. Jasmine smoke and lavender pollen rolled in like a ravenous mist, and it faded quickly as the strong and intoxicating smell of heated stone and sand rushed back up into the bard’s sinuses. He had offered acceptance to the night, and the night swarmed into the arena happily.

[Hysteria]

“Always the flair of the dramatic. I'd swear you were born wearing a powdered wig and quoting... erm, some famous playwright.” Talen shrugged, not the slightest bit perturbed by his awkward comment, “Its been a long time my friend. I trust you haven't had your senses dulled too much while gallivanting around the countryside?”

Talen stood tall, a hard thing to do when one is quite short, and walked through the double doors. The crash of them closing toll like a funeral bell, a sign of things to come; of things that had happened. It has been sometime since he had reached out to his former brother-in-arms. The pair had many battles in the Citadel together in the past, something of the truth of battle made Talen return for more. This time though seemed different. A weight, a challenge stood before the youth in physical form. What Talen hoped to achieve in this battle even he didn't know, but he knew that it was important.

The hot and harsh arena was far from what the youth would have normally fought in. The dry, arid landscape was slightly disgusting for the cold loving boy. Regardless though, he would have to fight. Talen lifted his arms and summoned a spiral of shadows around himself. The magic only lasted for a second or two before it was gone, and the boy ready for a fight. His pants were looser than before, his shirt gone for a singlet, and his head covered by a large broad brimmed hat like those found in Akashima. As always his cloths were pure black, technically incarnations of shadows made solid. At his hips he sported two holsters holding his Snake Bearer pistols and a small pouch. The only other thing that stood out was the tattoo across his left forearm, the mark of Hromagh.

Talen reached into his pocket and pulled out a single cigarette and pushed it into his mouth, trying somewhat to mimic Duffy's dramatic movements.

“What'll it be punk?” Talen's eyes stared out from under the brim of his hat straight at his soon to be opponent.

[Duffy]

Ever the cocksure scamp, Talen took on a persona of readiness that Duffy was glad to see. Whilst he was still entirely uncertain about the why, he could see that the boy was very much ready to show him the how. Even now, after many years of knowing the shadow mage, the juxtaposition between the mind and body confused the bard. He appeared to be no older than fifteen, but held within his head wisdom far beyond his apparent years. Duffy smiled weakly, the heat and the lack of fear in the boy’s eyes eroding his ability to remain quite as composed as he had hoped to be.

“What our master commands, that is what,” he said firmly. They were, after all, only here because Sei had told them to come. He had not known which of the Captains of the Ixian Knights he would encounter when he finally arrived back on the shores of Corone, but now he knew it was Talen, he felt glad that he had overcome his fear and reservation about taking leave from his tenure at Istien University.

“Pffft,” Talen spat through his tobacco.

“Let us ensure we do not disappoint,” he brought his cane up, drove its tip into the cobbles, and let lose the simple enchantment the monks of the Ai’bron had set into the grain so that the bard could control his grand arena.

The world itself shook, or so it seemed. The cobbles rattled, the sky wavered, and the air vibrated rapidly so it seemed to dance over exposed skin and linger with a ripple in the air like a heat mirage. When he had arrived at the sand speckled reception desk, the bard had been quite clear that he wished to begin in the ordinary, and slide and slip through the many hells of madness before they reached the natural conclusion. He wanted to reveal hysteria to the Captain, and let his imagination be as much of a weapon as his katana.

The sun turned red, yellow, and then gold, before it settled back into its resplendent corona of citrus shades. The cobbles began to split, forming a vast sea of two foot wide platforms that were interspersed with what appeared to be soft, silken, and enticing sand. The sound of the earth moving deafened Duffy, who could only rock steady on uneasy feet as his own flagstone adjusted and set itself into the symmetry of the first of his challenges.

“Fancy a swim, punk?” he cocked his head, produced a small coin from his pocket, and tossed it several feet forwards. It span through several irradiated rotations before it landed in the gap between the stone, and slipped down into the unknown. Little ripples formed circles on the surface of the sand, which eroded slowly in the soft breeze, before leaving nothing to mark the consumption of the silver coin. “This river will not be quite as forgiving as our last encounter,” he smirked, realising, with irony and relish, which several of the changes he had selected would serve as jarring backdrops to their impromptu reunion.

Shifting in his officer’s jacket, Duffy cast away his cane, which flickered out of existence in a long skein of white light, a crack of thunder, and a peal of regret. Black feathers, belonging to an unlucky raven, danced in the air before they too were consumed by the quicksand. In its stead, he produced the Akashiman blade from its sheath on his hip, half hidden by the long black folds of his outerwear. The Katarhna, as his former, plucky, and nigh illiterate self-had called it sang a medley of street verse, shifting from ironic to taunting until it settled on a gentle hum.

“Whenever you are ready, Talen,” Duffy said softly, as he let the blade drop loosely in his right hand. He had to lift the weight from his injured calf so that his stance was biased to one side, but he used his knowledge of dance steps to make it appear more like swagger, and less like a weakness. “The arena will change for you once, before the reins of volition return to me,” he chuckled. “So let us see if there is more to you than meets the eye than parlour tricks and a fickle blade.” He scraped the katanas’ tip against the front edge of his platform, and shook with a shudder as the sound ran up his spine.

There was no going back now.

[Hysteria]

“It has been a while,” said the youth as he pulled out one of his pistols, “I haven't actually fought with a blade for some time. Parlour tricks on the other hand...”

To emphasise his words Talen lifted his hand to the cigarette in his mouth and lit from a flame that appeared from the tip of his finger. The youth inhaled and shook his hand to extinguish the flame as one would a match. The magical properties of the cigarette flowed into the youth, the familiar pulse of chemicals coursing through his veins was both soothing and energising at the same time.

Talen drew his other pistol and bent slightly to lower his centre of gravity. Like a bullet the youth charged forwards towards Duffy. Each step clicked across the cobble stones and Talen felt the hot desert air rush across his skin. The boy lifted his arms towards Duffy and made to fire. Instead the youth suddenly dived to the right, then back towards Duffy, twisting as his did into a spin. The youth's skin turned a murky black as liquid formed across his body and subsequently flung off in every direction. For a second the youth's large hat and cloud of black liquid make him look like a misshapen dreidel in a sandstorm.

The image only lasted a second before he erupted into a tornado of flames and barrelled down towards Duffy. The youth had ignited his arms as he spun, turning his liquid ooze into a sticky and burning torrent of death.

Almost to despite the fight, the ground around the fighters started to crack and split. From beneath the cobble stones hundreds of thick brown roots twisted their way into the light. The magic of the arena was shifting, calling forth thousands of tangled thorny vines to create a massive labyrinth of spikes. Those closest to Talen were incinerated instantly, but many, many continued their climb towards the sun to form their thick and twisted lair.

[Duffy]

Fire was the giver of life, but to Duffy, it was danger. The flickering flames of the young shadow walker advanced in the direction of the bard, and without thinking, Duffy did what came naturally to men in the face of peril.

He stepped back.

“Oh shi-” was an even more natural thing for Duffy to say, as he realised he was falling backwards, as opposed to simply slipping out of the dervish strike’s path. Talen landed on the flagstone where Duffy had been, small consolation given there was no blood smothering his enflamed limbs.

Duffy expected to be smothered in sand, and swiftly engulfed by darkness, pressure, and a slow, suffocating death. What he got, however, was a sudden sense of ascension. He twisted his neck to look as down as he could, and could only curl his lip at the sight of a knot of vines, thorned and hungry, rising up from the sandy quagmire as if their lives depended on getting closer and closer to the fiery sun overhead.

“How undignified,” he groaned. He began to right himself as the vines pushed up, and when the walls of the crooked maze stopped growing, and began to thicken and expand; he managed to stand atop the battlements of the vine wall. The pained look on his face as he tried to balance the tip of his lacquered cane on the weave of vines told a thousand stories of discomfort, and recited a hundred verses of agony to the arena onlookers. “Not to mention how very clever of you,” he tried to smile, but fell short of the mark and instead formed a shrew like glare.

Though Duffy had implanted a seed of trickery in the dome, he was a fair sort of fellow, and had instructed the monks of the Ai’bron order to allow his opponent the same opportunities. They were to fight on two battlefields; one of swords, flames, and fantasies, and one of terraforming, imagination, and skein sliver dreamscapes. Looking around, he traced the erratic pattern formed by the maze, and sighed as he realised there was no obvious way down.

“We appear, my boy, to be at an impasse.” Which was a verbose way of saying he was rather stuck. He shuffled his heavy boots over the flaking bark, and gained enough leverage to lean off his cane and pull up the sleeve of his jacket. With his right hand buried in his cloth cocoon, and his cane upright in a knot, the bard rested his fingers tips eagerly against the platinum circumference of his bracelet. “If you are going to play , then I'll do dirty too,” he finally grinned, and his wicked smile burnt into the sky as the energy of his trinket pulled him from Radasanth. The afterglow of the bard lingered for several moments, until the blue light of his soul fell away into the vine weave.

[Hysteria]

The ground shifted and moved under Talen's feet. The youth was not however suffering a similar fate to that of Duffy, but rather cursed by his own unbalancing attack. The youth turned his still slightly spinning eyes up to the postulating warrior high upon the thorny ramparts. At the end of the speech Duffy simply disappeared.

The loss of his enemy sent Talen into overdrive. The youth scanned the vines around him, turning a full three-sixty degrees to find the truant bard. There was nothing. Talen lifted his pistols, his arms still aflame from his spell but found no quay.

The boy shoved one of his pistols into his belt and ran towards one of the vines. With a cat-like agility the youth sprung up the vine, using the thorns as hand and foot holds to clear himself from the ground. Each grasp from his burning hand the vine sizzled and the air filled a little more with the smell of singed plant. Talen reached a flat area of vine and drew his pistol once more. The youth poised, scanned the surrounds for any sign of the hidden opponent.

“Come out, come out wherever you are...”

[Duffy]

Just as the ribbons of light faded into the thorn, so too did the afterglow of the bard. When he re-appeared a split-second later the magical world of the Citadel responded bitterly, and without prejudice. The vines gave way, and the bard, already hamstrung by his injuries, fell into the spiked tomb with a whelp. The expression on his face matched the sourness in the air of the arena. He flailed, and kicked, and screamed, and then suddenly fell silent.

“This is most undignified,” he grumbled. He felt the thorns of the weald dig into his legs, arms, and torso. Though they were only a few centimetre in length, they made short work of the limited stamina the bard possessed. Blood trickled slowly at first from his wounds, and then freely, like torrents of water from a watering can’s spout. The arena felt like it was going to swallow him, until it pulsated, and then spat him, like a child disdaining his greens onto the square platform nearest to Talen.

The thud of the contact jolted life back into Duffy, but his cane rattled away, and fell into the quicksand. It did not take long for the lacquered length of polished black wood to slip beneath the shimmering surface, and less time still for it to vanish into the abyssal pit of consequence and memory.

“You asked,” Duffy wheezed.

“You received…” he added, using the pain of his fall from grace to toss him, quite literally onto his back. He stared up at the stars, and half expected his time to end short as Talen descended upon his prone form like a rapid dog. Just in case, he reached for Tooth, which was tucked beneath his military overcoat.

Madness reigned in the Citadel, and the mistakes of cocksure scamps came full circle.

[Hysteria]

The vine that had supported the youth became as solid as a political promise. One moment he was standing awaiting the emerge of his illusive opponent, the next he was flapping his flaming limbs in a futile attempt to stay floating in mid-air. Despite a long and trusted association, gravity had other ideas and soon Talen was plummeting towards the ground. The youth twisted awkwardly in the air and faced the ground, with a look of mild amusement his eyes fell towards the prone Duffy.

Air whipping past Talen’s face he pointed his pistol towards Duffy, the rage the boy felt for the man had dulled none in the confusion, a stream of tears welled in the boy’s eyes and trailed through the air behind him as he roared a nonsensical challenge. A burst of shadow energy erupted from the boy’s gun towards Duffy, leaving trails of darkness through the air behind it. The ethereal equivalent of a skid mark mixed with the streaming flames from the youth’s arms, turning the youth into a arching projectile aimed towards the bard.

Talen did not fear dying more than he feared losing and he easily let his body became a projectile. The youth wanted to inflict the same pain on Duffy that he had felt when the bard had left the Ixian Knights, the day that Talen had been abandoned. The feeling of loneliness, of betrayal burned stronger than the flames on Talen’s outstretched arms.

[Duffy]

The moment the projectile, wreathed in malefic and driven by greed, struck the bard’s torso, the world exploded into colour. Lights, the sort that were indescribable save to those on the brink of death erupted into the world. The vine maze, a seething mass of contempt of another sort fell away from view, replaced instead by a bright, piercing, and effervescent shade of nothing. For a brief second, Duffy Bracken touched the divine, the beyond, and the place he would never travel to – death.

His head, usually full of lofty ideals, crashed back onto the edge of the slab he was unfortunate enough to be now prone upon. With an almighty crack, that winded, waned, and welded his senses clean from his feeble form, he fell disgraced and still to the battlegrounds ephemeral and shifting state. Silence reigned, for just a moment, before his groaning and grinning mixed together into a state of agonising euphoria. Whatever the gun had fired, if indeed it was a gun at all was no mere bullet of steel or iron or satchel of pellet. It seemed to engulf his chest. It seemed to eclipse his heart, and all the good that rested within.

“What in the fucking blazes?” he roared, his erudite self-reduced to a common Scara Brae street dialect riddled with slang. Pain, it seemed, undid a man’s resolve quit quickly.

Whilst the ponderous question was left unanswered, the arena continued to shift despite the melodrama below. The maze sections, which had held man and beast aloft moments before narrowed, continued to rise, and then formed needle like pillars that rose higher still. Each becomes a blade of grass sizing on the gargantuan, slicing the sky with magical intent. Duffy stared up into the strange, open, yet claustrophobic canopy as the pain in his body intensified. His eyes, pupils of bright, fiery green began to ink and glaze over, as if something within possessed him, as if a poison were wrestling through his veins.

He gasped for air.

Whatever had happened to Talen Shadowalker since their previous encounter on the log flume river had, or so it seemed, brought the youth to a new frontier of aggression. He had, from what the bard had seen, been a bubbly, eager to please sort, capable of much, but held back by his innocence and age. Perhaps the bard, in his self-proclaimed veteran state, had underestimated the youth – this, this pain, was the price he had to pay for his arrogance.

“What happened to fighting fair?” he wheezed, just as he rolled onto his side, clocked eyes on Talen, and began to push himself upright. He reached for his cane, which flickered with inner fire to his hand, and rose. “Daggers, swords, spear, whatever takes your fancy,” he hissed. The arena shook.

A scent of peppermint, sulphur, and onion filled the air. Winter was coming, and spring was hurrying itself out the door in its wake.

“Bring it…” the bard chose to ignore the trickle of blood, swift becoming a torrent of red down his chest. Even the thick black material of his military overcoat couldn’t conceal the ichor slick. He had little time, and little time leant desperation much in the way of making a mistake.

[Hysteria]

Talen slammed into the soft sand with a dull thud and a cloud. The youth scrambled like a misshapen crab from the hole and back to his feet with a slight wobble. Talen barely listened to the worlds coming from the bard’s mouth. A blind hate crafted a reality outside that appearing before the youth’s eyes; tears were not the only thing that obscured his vision.

“Why…?” Talen turned his eyes to Duffy, “Why did you LEAVE!?”

Talen started walking towards the bard. His shaken gait became steady as he pushed through the pain coursing through his limbs. A spear burst from the ground near Talen’s feet causing the youth to stumble backwards. A trickle of blood rolled down the youth’s and Talen wiped it on his sleeve. More weapons started to burst from the ground around the pair of combatants. Swords, spears, even the odd trident. The youth stepped to the side as a sword burst from the ground under where his foot had been. The slight tremor in the ground a moment before was all the warning the youth had.

Despite the dangers, despite the pain and death that undoubtedly awaited; Talen walked forwards. The youth threw aside his pistol and grabbed the blade that had sprouted from the ground as he walked. The cold steel was far from the quality that he was used to, but it hardly mattered to the boy as he twisted the sword through the air. The last of Talen’s words left him and he simply roared with anger and charged towards Duffy, the sword twisting through the air with angry cleaving swipes.

[Duffy]

The question posed to the bard was, perhaps ironically, more painful than the sword strikes that followed. As Duffy defended himself as best he could, each blow against his own hastily prepared stance weakening his diminished resolve, he tried to pluck up the courage to give Talen the truth. The boy deserved that much, at the very least.

“I had no choice!” he bellowed, so the dark, abyssal, and vengeful youth could hear the reply over the clash of steel and the still shifting arena. It was as close to the truth as Duffy could muster. How could Talen have ever hoped to understand? He was not there. He was not parlay to the back stabbing, the trickery, and the politics.

Stone cracked, wines knotted tighter together, and the sun soared higher and higher. “Sei’s war was killing my family,” he ducked, just in the nick of time to avoid being scalped, “and I will not,” he stepped to one side as Talen’s blade arced through the space that would have been his spleen, “sacrifice,” he stepped to the left once more, stopping only because the square pedestal ended, “my loved ones!”

“You’re a fucking coward,” the youth spat. Cigarette smoke and ichor filled the air, leaving Duffy nauseous, and teetering on egg shells at the brink of a swift, suffocating end. “We needed you,” he lashed out again, a brat like bash of his blade’s flat edge against Duffy’s quick riposte. Neither of the pair let their guards slip long enough to fill the cold regret of metal in flesh.

“You’re a bastard,” Duffy replied, “You don’t know your own place.” He snarled. He did not mean to lose it with Talen. With a quick decomposition of his own rhythm, he lashed out with his sword, seeing an opportunity to disarm Talen’s aggressive outlook. It was a simple lash, a rap of his knuckles more than a full blown punch, but hopefully, it would bide him time to recover, push Talen back, and get a better foothold on the platform.

All around them, the vines began to bloom. There were lilies, roses, and dandelions; a tri-partite array of colour, season, and beauty. Though Duffy did not notice, if either of the duellists had bothered to look, the thorns on each of the vine’s newly formed stems were dripping with poison…blood…and salty tears.

The world was coming to life.

[Hysteria]

“Family?!”

Talen threw his blade in a long swipe in front of Duffy but the blade swung wide. The bard’s break in rhythm and own attack took Talen by surprise. The blade sliced across Talen’s outstretched arm and the boy cried out in shock and stumbled backwards, thrashing the sword wildly in front of him as he did to defend the follow up attack that never came.

“Family…?” Blood ran down Talen’s arm and dripped to the sandy ground. His voice dropped as he breathed heavily in the lull. “Aren’t I your family? Weren’t we all family? Maybe you don’t understand. Would you have cared at all if I had died?”

The flowers bursting forth from the surrounding dark tangled mess meant nothing to the boy. His focus was on one thing in the arena, and his rage had not subsided in the slightest. The air may have filled with the sweet scent of flowers, but for the little warrior there was only charred flesh and blood. The blooming flowers were accompanied by more weapons bursting from the ground. Spears, swords and axes all burst through the ground as Duffy’s call for Talen to take arms echoed through the boy’s mind.

Talen’s singlet started to bubble and bend. Dark shapes exploded outwards and twisted around the pair. “Thousand Crows” whispered the youth. The crows, Talen’s shadowy illusions, filled the air in a second and twisted and arched between the combatants. In the flurry of dark movement the youth ducked to the side, his feet skidding slightly in the sand as he pushed himself back towards Duffy. Through the shadows Talen leapt and brought his sword down with all his strength.

[Duffy]

The abyssal weave of magic undid Duffy’s composure. Amongst the Tantalum troop, any type of bird was a sore talking point. They were woven into every tragedy and heartache any of the thespians had suffered. Be it Phoenix, Rook, or Raven, Talen had stumbled across one of the three best kept secrets of Duffy Bracken’s life.

He hated failure.

He hated magic.

He hated birds.

To suffer all three simultaneously, well, “hypocrite!” was the only response he could conjure. He flailed, fustily, completely without purpose, and comically without result. It did not take long for the purpose of the spectral birds to dawn on the bard. Talen, falling like a comet, brought his blade cleaving downwards.

“Brother…” he whispered, a sharp intake of breath quelling his rage and his pitch. It would have been a poignant moment for the crowd to remember, a wicked reformation to burn moral into the stars. All it got the bard, though, was a bitter taste in his mouth when, a few minutes later, he woke up on a bed with a start.

He took a few moments to remember. He stared up at the low ceiling of the apocathery’s chamber, one of many beneath the various domes and arenas that comprised the outer regions of the Citadel’s architectural expanse. He felt a sharp pain run down his forehead, through the cartilage of his nose, and down into the centre of his ribcage.

“That kid’s a lot stronger than he looks,” he spluttered. He pushed himself upright, feeling just about strong enough to get a better look at his surroundings. The small room was empty, save for the straw on the floor, and the sick bucket by his bed. The thick iron door was closed, but Duffy knew it would not be locked. Only weakness and shame kept people confined to these places. “Remind me,” he said, figuratively,” to never underestimate him again.” He slid about, dropped his heavy feet to the ground with a thud, and reached forwards for his boots.

The second his fingers, cold digits shaking with hunger, touched the worn leather of his boots, the final seconds flashed before his eyes.

“Ugh…” he strained.

The sword had shattered his cartilage easily, and split apart his clavicle, and the bone between his ribs with little resistance. The downward motion had knocked him, nay, drove him to his knees with such force they ached now repentantly, to remind their owner to consider, just once, the use of armour. Cloth, it seemed, was not the best defence against a bitter man’s blade. He closed his eyes until the migraine, which flared up behind his eyes died down.

Getting through the day was going to be difficult.

Piecing back the family was going to be nigh impossible…

[Hysteria]

Talen sat on the steps out the front of the Citadel with his face resting in his hands. The youth bitterly remember the flash of blood and cracking bone of his friend, coloured worse by the raw hate and despair he felt at that moment. The boy lent back and half reclined on the steps as the thoughts twisted through his head, too many to focus one it was just a torrent of regrets. His small face twisted with annoyance.

“Brother”

The word had cut through the hate, replacing it with just another regret to roam through the youth’s already crowded repertoire. Had he thought too bitterly of the bard? Had his friend really had no choice? There were things that he couldn’t count, just swinging from branches of his mind, never stopping long enough for him to actually see what they were. The restless boy pushed himself to his feet and started walking. Feet pounding stone the boy just walked carrying his cloths and his past.

Much enjoyment had! Thanks D.

[Skie and Avery]

Condensed Rubric requested - for questions on score, feel free to PM me.

Hysteria
Plot - 15
Character - 17
Prose - 16
Wild Card - 4
Total - 52

Duffy Bracken
Plot - 17
Character - 18
Prose - 17
Wild Card - 5
Total - 57

Hysteria receives 825exp and 160gp
Duffy Bracken receives 2888exp and 120gp

[Letho]

EXP/GP added.