The Vile&Violent (Solo)

[Slayer]

As they moved into the treeline behind their cabins, Salvar's brief break crumpled as thick snowflakes began to fall. They fell between the tree limbs, gathering on the shoulders of his cloak, and Dan pulled his hood up, knowing if he did not, the cold would be burning him as harshly as the curse. Not a single new centimeter of skin had grown from his amputation. The pain was all encompassing, and if he chose to regenerate, he'd never feel the morphine drive the agony of the curse away, giving him a scant few hours of relief. The second time he'd woken in the empty cabin, he'd found the brown glass vial, half the size of his fist, beside the candle on the table. He'd quickly tucked it into his pocket. Gianna or Mabel, whoever had been dosing him, had been giving him what they'd give everyone else, but for Dan, such things wetre never enough.

He found he hated them for that. And he hated Xem'zund most of all, for the way his blood pumped sluggishly through him, carrying sweetly-sick suffering through him. When he'd defeated this curse, he would find the necromancer, tear him into bite-sized pieces, and bury his bits hundreds of feet deep all across the world, anywhere his feet would take him. For good measure, he'd piss on every grave, too.

Gram didn't speak a word as he moved through the forest - he didn't even make a sound. His thick feet were wrapped in arctic beast mocassins, but every step he took didn't make even the smallest crackle of ice. 'He knew I was there, long before I did,' Dan thought, carefully stepping in the dwarf's footsteps, trying as hard as he could to be as silent. Dan had never been a hunter, and certainly never an assassin; he'd always preferred to kick in the front door, eyes wild, gun and axe in hand. Likewise, every dwarf he met was a lumbering brute without even the hint of subtetly to their step. Aside from being exceptionally tall, Gram was nothing like any of the Kachuck residents he'd ever met.

Five minutes after picking at the icy bark of a rywan tree Dan judged as being nothing at all, they strode up to a hoof print nearly four feet across, and the Dwarf grinned broadly, showing off a handful of black iron teeth. With Gram motioning to him, Dan followed another few minutes until they came across a series of broken and bent trees, snapped and pulled into a bowl shape by something with monstrous power. Patches of white snow had begun to collect on its edges in a broken belt, and some in a small, but growing plot in its center.

"Its near by, aye? See the absence of the snow and ice? It ain't come down in an hour or so, but if the nest was abandoned, it'd be totally covered. Picking up what I'm putting down, aye? The animal went off to feed, couldn't have gone far. And its a big predator," Gram pointed out some mounds of snow around the edges of the nest, that looked suspiciously like the angles of rib cages. The dwarf dropped down on a nearby broken tree with an audible groan, rubbing at his back through his furs. "So, no need to cover our scents. It'll just come at us, fangs bared! C'mon, have a seat, aye, watch the sky in through the trees." Dan sat down, ignoring the snow on the cracked trunk, and began to pull out his pipe again, until Gram swatted at it with a frown. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the wind sighing through the forest, watching the fluffy snowflakes dance through the air.

"You can ask, I ain't never lied about it."

"What's a dwarf doing in Salvar? I thought you preferred fire and stone, not this shrivelling cold."

"Everyone expects that. But we weren't all born for one singular purpose, aye? My father told me, you'll be the one to inherit my name, the first to it! The forges and the gems and the precious metals, aye, all of it. Did you know most dwarves are born in the tunnels of Kachuck, and never hope to see the blue sky? Or wish for it? The pickaxe and the hammer is all they know. They only go deeper into the world, like they're running from it. Sure, some of the kin take up arms and adventure, but they long for their cramped tunnels and the sweat from the forge fire. When I was a boy, my father took me to Corone to sell our wares. And I saw the sky. And the oceans. And all the birds and fish and beasts in them. Their calls, they rang in my breast like a bell. When I went back to Kachuck, the picks were hollow sounding. They did not have the call of the world to them, only an empty din. So I left. Became a hunter. The forge is one thing, aye? But the world has so much more..."

The thought rang very true for him. The Wilmhearst hoped his one singular purpose had been to unite their deeply troubled, militaristic family. Xem'zund had hoped having the Red Beast, and one of the last living saraelians with him, would make his conquest much easier. But Dan had always gone left instead of right. The path the Thaynes had given to him had never much interested him. Hromagh wanted his violence, and he was sure N'jal wanted the death he scattered across the world. Everyone wanted a turn at his puppet strings, and Dan had always done his best to bite them off, when he noticed them.

Before he could answer, a great crashing and stomping came to them, to the east of the nest. While Dan visibly stiffened, his posture straight as iron, Gram didn't seem to notice, staring wordlessly at the gray sky, the rywan's peaks trying to strangle it in their long, green claws. Snow trickled from theirf boughs as the crashing grew closer, and the forest shook with the primal power of the carnivore closing in on its nest. The saraelian burst to his feet as the beast smashed through the line of the clearing, great trunks smashing to the earth, one of them slamming down on the broken tree they were sitting on. Gram was laughing when it crushed him.

An explosion of snow birds scattered under the falling tree, flapping and fluttering in the chaos of the clearing, cutting through great billows of snow and splinters. Dan spun on the monster, unable to process his new friend's death, and the enormity of the beast. Tailless and massive, it stretched above him, three times its size, making him tiny from its four black, scarred hooves to the tip of its head, wolf-like in appearance, save for its snout, shaped like a hog's, and the four bone crushing tusks that jutted from its maw where its canine teeth should be. Powerful muscle rippled under its storm-cloud colored fur.

As he was, one-armed, sweating cold, unable to lift his own axe, the huge Salvarian animal would have had a rare meal. But as it threw back its head, ready to release an ear-shattering call, four arrows the size of his forearm slammed into its flank, and it let out a pained shriek, stumbling into more trees with a collection of vicious snaps and crunches. Following the flight of the arrows, he saw Gram on the west side of the clearing, crouched in a tree, holding a thick bone long bow, his face absolutely blank. For a brief second, he almost pulled his handgun. Sure, it could turn the head of a man in plate mail into red mist, but against something the size of this beast? Maybe if he put every bullet he had in it, right into its skull, but ammunition was expensive. When it came down to it, the gun was a showpiece for fear, and not much else. Once upon a time, he'd had the belief that nothing could take a bullet and keep walking, but he himself was solid evidence against that. In the Dajas Pagoda, Jamie Whitizard had once shot him point blank with a shotgun, and Dan had still managed to kill the boy.

Instead, he slammed his palms into the snow, and ripped at the ground underneath the wolf-hog. It hadn't managed to find its balance from the impact of the huge arrows, and as the ground split under it and churned, it went spilling onto its face. He had no time to leap away - it lunged forward, roaring so loud that the snow on the branches of the clearing all fell away, and Dan barely had the time to pull up a column of stone, smashing it in the chin with a hard thud.

'If this is hunting to that fucking dwarf, I want no part of it,' he thought as he yanked another column out of the ground under him, sending him vaulting high into the air. The icy wind ripped his hood away, plastering his black hair to the sides of his skull. He weighed his options in machine gun fire speed as he neared the apex of his jump. His gun didn't have enough bite. His axe was too heavy now, even with both arms. The Blade of Death could bite through the skin, leave a nasty gash, but it wasn't long or heavy enough to cause a lethal blow.

In times like this, he missed his Rotslayer.

The clearing underneath him suddenly exploded with brutal sound and motion. It grew quickly as the tall rywan trees, most likely growing for dozens of generations began to crash down, snow and splinters almost clouding his vision.

Almost.

A great white snow and dust colored bear was grappling ferociously with the wolf-hog, a beast almost its whole size on its enormous back legs. A tale older than tales themselves; animals clashing in the wilderness fro territory, for food, for their young. Dan didn't wonder where the dire bear had come from, and didn't care; its huge claws ripped a deep furrow in the wolf-hog's left side. The saraelian reached down as he fell, to the broken stones among the scarred clearing, and lifted four thin shards, as tall he was. They rose into the air as he dropped, and with a sharp swing of arm and stump, sent them deep into the wolf-hog's legs, ripping through hide, smashing bone. It collapsed to the ground with a horrible keening wail, and Dan landed on its torn side, blood splashing up around him, groaning at the creak his knees made. Wasting no time, he raised his hand to the air, and crude facsimiles of fists burst from the ground around the wolf-hog, snatching at its legs, its tusks, its dirty mane. His feet slipped in the pulsing wounds as he turned on the huge bear, trying to decide on the best plan to kill it.

But the bear wasn't moving. It had sat down on its back haunces, clutching its front claws together, looking like a polite man waiting on his newspaper. Its huge legs, arms, and great furry head all suddenly sunk into its bulk, and then its fur began swirling, shifting, all spinning and shifting in every direction at once, shrinking, further and further, until it was a man sized ball of fur that drew back its deep, heavy hood and revealed Gram's black toothed grin under his bright red mustache. The wolf-hog struggled viciously under his stone hands, and Dan worried for a moment it would break free, until he gritted his teeth, and tightened the grip around its muzzle.

"You'd make a fine hunter, aye! Good instincts! Pull its feet out from under it! Now, hold it, gets its head down, if you can, boy." The dwarf reached over his shoulder and pulled down the heavy axe on his back. Grunting, Dan forced the wolf-hog's head flat against the floor of the trampled clearing. Its blade glinted in the winter sun, just as it had before it had dropped the Red Beast, and the dwarf mumbled something under his whiskers, before killing his quarry with a heavy cleave between its eyes.

"I was expecting deer! Something my fucking size!" Dan jumped down from the dead animal, his eyes flashing as he stalked towards Gram, who only laughed.

"Boy, you think I left them mines to set up snare traps and kill squirrels?!" Taking another step, Dan froze in his tracks as a fresh wave of pain rippled through him, and a surge of stinking chicken broth and cold coffee burst from his lips. Stumbling, he fell face first into the puddle of vomit, gasping as he clutched instinctively at his missing arm.

"Pushed yourself too much, aye? You were on death's doorstep boy, mayhaps I shouldn't have brought you out. That's ok." Dan tried to get to his feet, but another stomach spasm snapped his head back, and he threw up again, splashing the arms and chest of his robe. He dropped back down to the ground, with its soft snow, its welcoming stone, its call to rest. The thought of moving a finger or a toe was an absolute nightmare to him. Gram's thick fingers wrapped under his arm pits and hoisted him high, and the saraelian let out another thin stream of vomit as the dwarf's shoulder pushed into his stomach. "Don't you worry boy. We hold out our hands to the outcasts here. I'll get some boys from Geflen to drag this meal back. You've got all the time you need to fight this, aye?"

Darkness folded over him before he could say he didnt. There was no time. There never had been. Every minute wasted was another he didn't have with his daughter. Every second thrown to the wind was another she was in danger.

But death waits for no man or woman. The grains fall, regardless of the wishes cast on them, and time came to be all that the saraelian had.
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