Slayer of the Rot
03-26-06, 04:26 PM
((Solo))
He'd said it once, on a snowy night that seemed a thousand years ago; blood, gunpowder, cigarettes...they were the spices of killing. The smells of each were redolent in the dank cave air, down where only his strong eyes could see with no light. One more spice's smell came to him as he stared dazedly up at the craggy ceiling; fire. More accurately the thick smoke rising from torches snuffed by the winds made with the swings of the Rotslayer. How he'd come to love these smells, scents that would usually turn a man's stomach in too much of a surplus. The slayer (So he'd become again, though less a slayer of monsters than of men), had come very accustomed to it. It ran through his veins, pumped through his heart, lay in his bones. Though any movement he made seemed artificial and hollow, one look at his eyes, eyes glowing with a disturbing green light, would tell a person that he was very much himself. An unlit cigarette dangled loosely from his lips, the white paper dabbed and speckled with red here and there. He had been drenched with so much blood that it had managed to seep into the box of cheap cigarettes he'd been carrying. Most of them had been ruined, but a few had survived; this was the last of them. A surprise, with a flick of his worn, rough thumb, his lighter produced a flame, though he could feel it's metal casing was wet and sticky with blood. There was so much, he was expecting to simply hear the empty and frustrating CHIK CHIK CHIK of it's failure to spark. In part of the knocks and bangs it had taken over the year, as dented and bruised as he, but also in part that it was just as wet as the rest of him.
A surveying torch around the cavern would have revealed a terrible sight; the bodies of a hundred bandits lay strewn across the floor, broken and bloodied and torn as though butchered with a giant's terrible knife. Great gashes and ruptures had been roughly carved through the stone walls all about, stalactites and stalagmites that had gotten in the way of the terrible berserker's path and been shattered to their very base. Innumerable weapons of a moderate quality lay scattered amongst the bodies, metal blades broken and wooden hafts splintered. And in the middle, on a curiously naturally formed, sat the perpetrator of such a massacre. Scars riddled his flesh in a haphazard disorder, his hair cut military short and his beard no more than a five o'clock shadow, suggested they had been cut at once in the same sitting. A once white shirt, gray with grime, clung to his body with sweat and blood. Scuffed black leather boots tied tight and worn, dirty blue jeans, in the same sorry shape of his shirt. The visage of Dan Lag'ratham spoke of a terribly blood thirsty thug and little else, but far worse was the turmoil beneath this off putting exterior. Within, the essence of an ancient destroyer, the titan Adrammalech, and a man raised on how to kill lay intertwined, at a brief harmony. In the desert, the slayer had fought off the titan, focused on his humanity. But no, back to civilization, he embraced an animalistic brutality of. In layman's terms, he let Adrammalech have his fun.
But on his terms.
These bandits had been worse company then him. They'd been raiding a town several miles west of Corone once a month. They'd take everything that shined like gold, and if the town failed to live up to expectations, they took compensation from the women. Didn't matter the edge. The townsfolk would find their pitiful bodies a mile away, cold and dead and used time after time again, mouth forever frozen in terror and disgust, often with a stillborn child inside. The news lit a hateful fire in the stomach, and Adrammalech was quick to stoke it, to build it. They told him where to find them. They had wanted to give him money, but he refused it. He didn't have much need for it at the time.
When he found the cave, he could hear the sobs of their recent loot, grunts of ecstasy, shouted obscenities. A hard slap across someone's face, amplified by the cave.
He turned his back on it and gave Adrammalech reign.
He'd have sat happily for eternity and drank in deep the smells of war, but others came to him. Those that were far less appealing wafting into the air; waste evacuated from the bodies, the smell of decay beginning to set in quickly, in such a humid September night. The slayer scowled, and tore the cigarette from his lips and threw it far off into the darkness. As Dan slowly began to gain his own senses back, swaying a bit even as he stood on level stone, he cursed at the unpleasant feeling of being in his own skin. The humidity and the warmth of the night was making him sweat in the cave, where the heat had become trapped from the day. He felt sticky, felt as though a thousand bugs were crawling over his skin. Sighing, drawing in the final vestiges of a dwindling torch here, a congealing pool of blood there, Dan reached towards the Rotslayer, wrapping his rough hand around it's simple hilt, wrapped in canvas. With a simple jerk, he pulled it from the solid stone, slung it over his shoulders, and began to stalk moodily up the steep incline that had almost sent him tumbling head over heels on the bandits. He'd just walked in, and his eyes where adjusting to the almost literal absence of light in the cave.
He had plenty of time though, to consider everything that had passed over the last forty or so minutes as he walked across the long fields of wheat, a head taller than himself, the massive blade over his shoulders, another cigarette burning between his lips. There had been a time long ago that he'd sought to kill the "criminals" quickly, with one painless swing of the Rotslayer over head, they'd barely feel a thing. Now he liked to hit them with the flat of the blade, or the blunt edge, across the knees. Break bones. Cause internal bleeding. Make them suffer. And then, the other partial guilt; the law of the line was beginning to blur. He was enjoying the killing with each life he brutally took. He wasn't sure so much that he could say that he was any different than those bandits that he'd just slaughtered.
Most of the townspeople were waiting on the outskirts of ramshackle houses, and where ecstatic to find that he'd killed the bandits everyone of them. Even ordered a feast, in his honor. How were these people any different than he, with all that bloodlust pent up inside? They were celebrating the deaths of several men. Evil men, though, but human beings. Living, human beings.
'Kill them.'
'You've had your fill. Go away.'
He eagerly accepted a basin full of scalding hot water to was away the blood and sweat and sin of it. The basin was small, his legs hung out as he soaked in the hot water. A window across the room stood open, a faint, warm breeze ruffling the curtains, offering him a view of the Town's square. Outside, children ran through the legs of their parents, chasing each other and laughing as steaming, heaping plates of food was brought to a table that looked nearly a mile long. Celebrations for the slaughter. After some time, after his eyes were forced to refocus, the slayer looked away with a sigh. After drying himself off, he pulled on another white undershirt, dressed in the suit left out to him. The shirt's collar out over the jacket, unbuttoned to show off his chest. When he walked out of the house, he turned his unaffected eyes to men, women, children forming a long corridor clapping, smiling, thanking him. In his mind, he saw those people, hands slamming together creating a thousand blasts of booming thunder, the corridor stretching on forever, like a gauntlet.
'Kill them.'
There was no argument.
_____
The entire town burned at the foot of the hill he stood upon, slowly smoking, the bloody Rotslayer standing beside him, stabbed deep into the ground. He wasn't sure if anyone had managed to escape the sweeps of the sword, or the fire he'd ignited halfway between, but he didn't care. For right now, he was more than happy to stand here and watch the town burn, all of the men, all of the women. Even the children. Again, here came the smells of a war, a war all his own, waged in his own mind, joined by yet another that delighted him. Entwined with the smell of sizzling blood, full bodied smoky fire, a half smoked cigarette, came the sickeningly sweet smell of roasting human flesh. It all made him smile, made his infernal blood boil. There was no denying it now. It was all he had ever been good at. Killing was his life's work. He was a killer, there was no running from it anymore. He need only to embrace it to finally be happy.
"Burn it all to hell," he whispered to himself as he turned away, redolent of the smells of murder, jerking Rotslayer free and walking away a liberated man.
He'd said it once, on a snowy night that seemed a thousand years ago; blood, gunpowder, cigarettes...they were the spices of killing. The smells of each were redolent in the dank cave air, down where only his strong eyes could see with no light. One more spice's smell came to him as he stared dazedly up at the craggy ceiling; fire. More accurately the thick smoke rising from torches snuffed by the winds made with the swings of the Rotslayer. How he'd come to love these smells, scents that would usually turn a man's stomach in too much of a surplus. The slayer (So he'd become again, though less a slayer of monsters than of men), had come very accustomed to it. It ran through his veins, pumped through his heart, lay in his bones. Though any movement he made seemed artificial and hollow, one look at his eyes, eyes glowing with a disturbing green light, would tell a person that he was very much himself. An unlit cigarette dangled loosely from his lips, the white paper dabbed and speckled with red here and there. He had been drenched with so much blood that it had managed to seep into the box of cheap cigarettes he'd been carrying. Most of them had been ruined, but a few had survived; this was the last of them. A surprise, with a flick of his worn, rough thumb, his lighter produced a flame, though he could feel it's metal casing was wet and sticky with blood. There was so much, he was expecting to simply hear the empty and frustrating CHIK CHIK CHIK of it's failure to spark. In part of the knocks and bangs it had taken over the year, as dented and bruised as he, but also in part that it was just as wet as the rest of him.
A surveying torch around the cavern would have revealed a terrible sight; the bodies of a hundred bandits lay strewn across the floor, broken and bloodied and torn as though butchered with a giant's terrible knife. Great gashes and ruptures had been roughly carved through the stone walls all about, stalactites and stalagmites that had gotten in the way of the terrible berserker's path and been shattered to their very base. Innumerable weapons of a moderate quality lay scattered amongst the bodies, metal blades broken and wooden hafts splintered. And in the middle, on a curiously naturally formed, sat the perpetrator of such a massacre. Scars riddled his flesh in a haphazard disorder, his hair cut military short and his beard no more than a five o'clock shadow, suggested they had been cut at once in the same sitting. A once white shirt, gray with grime, clung to his body with sweat and blood. Scuffed black leather boots tied tight and worn, dirty blue jeans, in the same sorry shape of his shirt. The visage of Dan Lag'ratham spoke of a terribly blood thirsty thug and little else, but far worse was the turmoil beneath this off putting exterior. Within, the essence of an ancient destroyer, the titan Adrammalech, and a man raised on how to kill lay intertwined, at a brief harmony. In the desert, the slayer had fought off the titan, focused on his humanity. But no, back to civilization, he embraced an animalistic brutality of. In layman's terms, he let Adrammalech have his fun.
But on his terms.
These bandits had been worse company then him. They'd been raiding a town several miles west of Corone once a month. They'd take everything that shined like gold, and if the town failed to live up to expectations, they took compensation from the women. Didn't matter the edge. The townsfolk would find their pitiful bodies a mile away, cold and dead and used time after time again, mouth forever frozen in terror and disgust, often with a stillborn child inside. The news lit a hateful fire in the stomach, and Adrammalech was quick to stoke it, to build it. They told him where to find them. They had wanted to give him money, but he refused it. He didn't have much need for it at the time.
When he found the cave, he could hear the sobs of their recent loot, grunts of ecstasy, shouted obscenities. A hard slap across someone's face, amplified by the cave.
He turned his back on it and gave Adrammalech reign.
He'd have sat happily for eternity and drank in deep the smells of war, but others came to him. Those that were far less appealing wafting into the air; waste evacuated from the bodies, the smell of decay beginning to set in quickly, in such a humid September night. The slayer scowled, and tore the cigarette from his lips and threw it far off into the darkness. As Dan slowly began to gain his own senses back, swaying a bit even as he stood on level stone, he cursed at the unpleasant feeling of being in his own skin. The humidity and the warmth of the night was making him sweat in the cave, where the heat had become trapped from the day. He felt sticky, felt as though a thousand bugs were crawling over his skin. Sighing, drawing in the final vestiges of a dwindling torch here, a congealing pool of blood there, Dan reached towards the Rotslayer, wrapping his rough hand around it's simple hilt, wrapped in canvas. With a simple jerk, he pulled it from the solid stone, slung it over his shoulders, and began to stalk moodily up the steep incline that had almost sent him tumbling head over heels on the bandits. He'd just walked in, and his eyes where adjusting to the almost literal absence of light in the cave.
He had plenty of time though, to consider everything that had passed over the last forty or so minutes as he walked across the long fields of wheat, a head taller than himself, the massive blade over his shoulders, another cigarette burning between his lips. There had been a time long ago that he'd sought to kill the "criminals" quickly, with one painless swing of the Rotslayer over head, they'd barely feel a thing. Now he liked to hit them with the flat of the blade, or the blunt edge, across the knees. Break bones. Cause internal bleeding. Make them suffer. And then, the other partial guilt; the law of the line was beginning to blur. He was enjoying the killing with each life he brutally took. He wasn't sure so much that he could say that he was any different than those bandits that he'd just slaughtered.
Most of the townspeople were waiting on the outskirts of ramshackle houses, and where ecstatic to find that he'd killed the bandits everyone of them. Even ordered a feast, in his honor. How were these people any different than he, with all that bloodlust pent up inside? They were celebrating the deaths of several men. Evil men, though, but human beings. Living, human beings.
'Kill them.'
'You've had your fill. Go away.'
He eagerly accepted a basin full of scalding hot water to was away the blood and sweat and sin of it. The basin was small, his legs hung out as he soaked in the hot water. A window across the room stood open, a faint, warm breeze ruffling the curtains, offering him a view of the Town's square. Outside, children ran through the legs of their parents, chasing each other and laughing as steaming, heaping plates of food was brought to a table that looked nearly a mile long. Celebrations for the slaughter. After some time, after his eyes were forced to refocus, the slayer looked away with a sigh. After drying himself off, he pulled on another white undershirt, dressed in the suit left out to him. The shirt's collar out over the jacket, unbuttoned to show off his chest. When he walked out of the house, he turned his unaffected eyes to men, women, children forming a long corridor clapping, smiling, thanking him. In his mind, he saw those people, hands slamming together creating a thousand blasts of booming thunder, the corridor stretching on forever, like a gauntlet.
'Kill them.'
There was no argument.
_____
The entire town burned at the foot of the hill he stood upon, slowly smoking, the bloody Rotslayer standing beside him, stabbed deep into the ground. He wasn't sure if anyone had managed to escape the sweeps of the sword, or the fire he'd ignited halfway between, but he didn't care. For right now, he was more than happy to stand here and watch the town burn, all of the men, all of the women. Even the children. Again, here came the smells of a war, a war all his own, waged in his own mind, joined by yet another that delighted him. Entwined with the smell of sizzling blood, full bodied smoky fire, a half smoked cigarette, came the sickeningly sweet smell of roasting human flesh. It all made him smile, made his infernal blood boil. There was no denying it now. It was all he had ever been good at. Killing was his life's work. He was a killer, there was no running from it anymore. He need only to embrace it to finally be happy.
"Burn it all to hell," he whispered to himself as he turned away, redolent of the smells of murder, jerking Rotslayer free and walking away a liberated man.