The Vile&Violent (Solo)

[Slayer]

Desperate whispers in his head told him to rush out into the snow, to dig it up, throw it around, find the bottle. But common sense told him it was gone. It was most likely shattered, its contents soaking down into the permafrost. Taking several deep breaths and bracing himself, he reached out to his dining table, and hauled himself to his feet, glaring wetly at the dwarf. Carefully, he gathered a dozen of the books, pulled his leather belt free of the loops of his trousers, and wrapped it around the stack. He had no bags to carry them, and Mabel would complain endlessly if he only brought one or two back. "We don't have dick to talk about. Unless you wanna tell me what the fuck Gianna's problem is."

The dwarf stared patiently instead as Dan dressed himself, threw a bucket of water into his fireplace, packed his thin silver pipe, and finally slung the belt and the books over his shoulder. The flakes falling outside were thin, but he immediately felt the cold through his vlince clothes. Despite the relative safety and warm welcome he received those many months ago, Dan was starting to hate Geflen too, with its never ending snows and eternal gray sky. Gram came around the house, and tossed a fluffy bundle his way. Catching it, he carelessly let his load of books fall on the thick flat rocks on his door step and unfolded the furry package. He instantly recognized the white fur, spotted with small, cyan colored spots. The dwarf had made him a knee-length coat out of the hide of the wolf-hog they'd killed. He wondered how long Gram had been working on it, with those big, rectangular fingers of his.

Instead of following the path into town, the odd pair trekked off into the nearby tree line, seeming to follow the path in parallel at first. Every step he took was worse, pain pulsing from his scalp, to his fingers, to his belly, down to his toes, and the nausea that shook his stomach made it no better. His mind screamed to turn around, sprint back to the cabin, and take his chances ripping up the drifts. He could find the morphine if he looked hard enough. Dan was snapped out of his slavish thoughts by a rough rumble from Gram's throat.

"She only told me once, and only cause of my charm, heh. We folk in Geflen like to leave our past right there - in the past. So, don't tell anyone this, or I'll beat you bloody, aye?"

"I'd like to see you fucking try, short stack," Dan growled, and the dwarf sighed and shook his head. The snow was deep, and a pain in the ass to walk through. The books thumped him in the small of the back with each lurch forward. His patience was already worn thin as decades old paper.

"Gianna's a very smart girl, and she grew up in Corone. Took to medicine when her father died in the war, got trained by some high class doctors and alchemists. We're lucky to have her, aye, that we really are. Well, her learning was put to the test on soldier's wounds, and there she met her husband, a boy named Killian. Had a girl, named her Tilliana, probably had a laugh about that, aye? Well, don't know if you noticed it, but Gianna is quite the looker. Some other soldiers noticed it, too, thought, why does Killian get to have the fun? I'm not gonna mince words here, boy - three of them soldiers took her to a far side of the camp, and they...they raped her. When they were done, careless and dumb, Gianna killed them as they took shifts out pissing. Well, their buddies didn't like that. Wanted to do worse to her. Killian took her and the child down to the dock, got them on a boat. When the soldiers caught up, they were too late to stop the boat...but not too late to take it out on Killian. They did it slow. She saw most of it." Dan blinked slowly, then looked around, surprised to find they'd gone farther into the forest. He couldn't even see the road anymore. But, he could see that they were back in the clearing with the huge wooden nest of broken trees, where they'd hunted together, all those months ago. He'd been listening so intently, he hadn't even noticed where Gram had been leading him.

"The way she looks at you, I think she sees Killian in you. It ain't the tales of what you used to be, aye? What you were don't make you special, there's a hero in every tavern like there's a whore on every street corner. She wants you to be like Killian."

"I don't care," Dan replied callously, his frown deepening. If anyone had ever done that to Claire, he would have done worse than kill those men. He would have killed their entire families, broken them slowly, peeled them like apples. The dwarf groaned, slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead.

"You do, aye, I can see it in your eyes! Is that all you can do, boy? If you can't hate it or kill it, you just run from it?" Dan dropped his bundle of books and surged forward, clenching his teeth as he leaned down and jabbed a long, pale finger into the dwarf's scarred chin.

"I've never ran from shit. I've stared into the jaws of dragons, been hunted by bladesingers, been abandoned in a world overflowing with the walking fucking dead. Don't ever accuse me -"

"Just us out here boy, no need for the blustering! You change names as often as I should change my underwear! You're still running, you'd be running back to that morphine bottle if you'd think I'd let you! I can't believe you've lived this long, aye, as blind by hate and anger as you are." A muscle jumped under Dan's gray eye, and he fought hard not to wrap his fist around the dwarf's burly neck.

"And what. Could you ever. EVER know about that?!" Gram scowled, then pulled the furs away from his body. They fell at his wide feet in a huge pool to reveal hundreds and hundreds of scars all of his bare arms and neck. All sorts of different ones, puckers and zig-zags of blades, craters of gunshots and arrows, rippling taut waves of burns. "I am Gramyr Coaltongue, son of Yggdrike Coaltongue, twenty-eighth of my name, sixth axe of Kachuck, and once, heir to the Breath of the Mountain."

Dan slowly drew back, his irritation and anger gone from his face, and without a word, lit his pipe with a match. The reek of stale tobacco was both offensive and welcoming to him, even as it tried to sting his eyes with transparent gray fingers. Coaltongue. The only true warrior caste, born and bred of Kachuck, guardians and killers of the mine. The only time they touched a pick, was to sink it into someone's skull. Their rite of passage into adulthood was an age old tradition of swallowing a white hot coal from the forge. If it didn't kill them, they were given the name.

"When I told my father I wanted to be a huntsman, he told me he'd see me dead before his heir would leave the mines to chase sparrows and squirrels. He raised his axe on me, and I killed him. And then I left. I kept my name, and I began again. I ran from my life of killing aye, but I didn't run from my past. It's as plain as these scars." Dan stared at the dwarf for a while longer, then looked around at their old hunting ground, feeling it all roll around in his head. Uncomfortably, he shifted his feet around in the crunching snow, then looked up, watching the pipe smoke rise through the rywan branches, seeming to shift ever so slightly out of the path of the falling snowflakes.

"Okay. I'm starting to think Mabel doesn't give a shit that I still have all her books. So why did you lead me out here, to the nest, and the clearing?"

"Well, boy," Gram rubbed his huge, scarred forearms, then threw his head side to side, making loud, rough cracks and snaps, "I think it's high time someone showed you a different path, aye?" The snowflakes suddenly became smaller, then simply stopped. Sighing, Dan knocked the ashes, and the tiny little ember out of his pipe. It glowed like an infernal eye at his feet for half of a breath, before the snow snuffed it out.