Graveyard shift

[Rance]

The night was loose and black, quiet save for the call of the crickets and the rustle of winds sneaking through treelimbs. It was a perfect night to be out and about, to bask in the silver moonlight and linger in the gaze of the stars. They were sparkling pinpricks, eyes that watched everyone and everything. But tonight, tonight, they would hold secrets. The breeze was not the only thing hiding in the trees.

“It’s a gods-damned blessing to see the end of that rain,” Jenkins told his partner-in-watch, wrist draped across the pommel of his shortsword. Their shift was nearly halfway through – Bohemmin was yawning already, idly munching upon a fistful of bread. There were crumbs littering his beard.

Bohemmin snorted to Jenkins. “A blessin’, but ain’t worth nothin’ when we’re stuck on post ‘round this cesspool.” He nudged over his shoulder towards the shadow of the Myrkenwood Meetinghouse, mouth half-full of stale bread.

“It’s not so bad, my friend,” Clucked Jenkins, reaching out a gauntlet to pat the irate Bohemmin on his shoulder. “Say, there are no crowds to hold back, so I don’t mind in the slightest.” He paused, eyes taking in the indigo-stained hills that surrounded them.

They were huddling beneath one of the sparse cobbleway torches, chainmail glistening in firelight.

“Say, did you hear of the Lady Ariane’s apprehension?” He asked the bearded guard.

“You call that crazy for’ner a la—“

Jenkins held up his hand. “Oh, enough of that. But did you hear?”

Bohemmin was busy tearing off another hunk of bread, drawn sword – ever-ready – nudged between his ribs and the crook of his arm while he cradled the loaf. “Nah. What of it?”

“Apparently, she attacked some merchant.”

Bohemmin snorted. “She kill ‘er?”

“What, did Ariane kill the merchant, or did the merchant kill Ariane?”

“I ain’t ever known no merchant who could dismember a swordsman like Herr Carnath-Emory. What else you thinkin’ I’m askin’?” chortled Bohemmin, giving a foreign roll to his tongue amidst the attempted insult.

Jenkins reached out to break a piece of rye from his partner’s loaf. “Neither was killed. Both locked up – some sort of difficulty went on concerning their release, said the fill-in Governor tried to jump the gun on releasing Lady Ariane.”

Bohemmin worked at the bread too, finding Jenkins a piece smaller than the kind guard would have liked. He offered it out in a thick, gloved hand, eyes staring Jenkins through as if to say,
That's all you're going to get.

Instead, he observed in his husky voice. “Lots of strange things goin’ on about Myrken as of late. Fake governors, catfights, corrupt merchants. I’m always wonderin’ just what’s going to happen next.”

A moth whipped through the air just to the right of Jenkin’s jaw. He had the laughter of response upon his tongue just before he went to chew off a piece of the bread, but he paused. Something wet spattered onto his hands, along the crease of one of his cheeks. Was it to rain? But the stars had only been so bright a few moments before! And rain was surely not so dark a color – splotches of something were staining his knuckles, the sponge of his bread.

A split-second later, he heard the quarrel slam into the front of Bohemmin’s throat, and the man’s helmet was hurtling through the air as he fell, dropping the loaf, a river of fresh blood suddenly belched out along with the half-chewed remnants of his last bite. It had been no moth.

Oh, by the Gods... Jenkins cursed in his mind, dropping his snack, throwing his gauntlet to his hip so he could draw free the issued shortsword. It came loose with a shriek. Left hand was reaching out to help soften Bohemmin’s body as it was crumpling forward, simultaneously backstepping, calling out in instinct.

"Meston, Raifley! Disturbance near the entrance! Bohemmin is down!" Bohemmin was dead – he needed not a second glance at the man below him. He knew. "Need assistance with haste! Take cover in approach!" Jenkins was spinning about, backpeddling once again beyond the body of his bread-munching partner, legs apart and stance prepared. He was pulling himself out of the radius of the torchlight, back towards the Meetinghouse stoop as he frantically searched the treeline.

"His was a perfect question, followed by a perfect answer," Hissed the voice of a shadow several yards down past where Bohemmin lay in a puddle. Jenkins could feel his heart pounding like a piston.

“Step into the light and drop your weaponry!” Jenkins bellowed, knuckles nearly splintering around the handle of his blade. “You are hereby under arrest by the Order of Straka!”

"Your two other friends are around the other side of the meetinghouse. I can imagine, with your warning, it will take about twenty seconds before they show up." It took a step towards the light, but Jenkins saw nothing besides the brilliant gleam of fiery eyes.

“Drop your weaponry!”

Silver glistened just outside of the pool of torchlight, streaks of it. "How does it feel, child, to know that you have only ten seconds to live?" Jenkins heart was just about ready to burst through his chest. Sweat tasted of blood on his lips.

The creature was nothing more than a naked figure in the light, carved almost from obsidian, clothed only in lines of spiderweb hair. Body was glistening with a sheen of perspiration. A blade arched from the clasp of the beast’s right hand, seemingly carved from the very stuff of his flesh. Between the crimson of his eyes and the curve of his lips, Jenkins could see it smile.

“Ten,” It whispered, just before attacking.

Jenkins threw up his shortsword just before it rushed him, speed and agility like that of the unnatural – the black sword screeched down against his upturned blade, and Jenkins sidestepped, pulling his weapon away from the parry to whip it down and slice toward the shadow’s abdomen.

“Nine!” It was laughing, wicked blade lowered with simple skill to scoop up Jenkin’s swing into deflection. “Eight…”

Bare, sleek leg thrust without warning to catch Jenkins in his stomach with that moment of exposure. His breath exploded as he staggered backwards, grimacing through the hammering knot in his belly. Shortsword arced in the candlelight as he took no pause in gathering his footing, and thrusting forward to stab at the beast’s belly. It was still counting. “Seven!”

The spiderweb-haired figure pivoted and spun to avoid the shortsword’s sharpened point, and where Jenkins expected to feel steel bite into flesh, he nearly lost his balance – a good outcome, for the guard. He let himself fall, ducking just beneath a backhand swing from the attacker. “Six, and still counting!”

Gauntlet dipped into the soil of the street, and as he leapt back up to his feet, he threw a cloud of tiny rocks and dust towards the face of the beast. It flinched, leaning backwards, fiery slits narrowed in reaction. But even through the dirt, it gasped. “Five!”

Jenkins took not a moment longer. He stepped into the reach of the shadow and slapped away its swordblade before he threw the filthied fist in an arc towards its chin.

“Four,” He heard it say, just as his knuckles were caught in its own free hand. It was squeezing, spitting out a mouthful of dust, staring like it might burn holes through the guard’s face. “Foolish moves – Three! – won’t buy you any time.”

“We’re coming, Jenkins!” In his panic, as the white-maned creature pulled him forward by the hand, he heard feet thundering just beyond the corners of the Meetinghouse. He was trying to pull up his blade with the other arm.

“Two…” The ebon-skinned assassin whispered, pulling Jenkin’s arm to the side. It was grinning – always leering – just before it pressed its body against his, chest touching chest. Icy pain exploded in Jenkins’ stomach then, tearing through him, spilling something fresh and warm down the thighs of his leggings, out the forefront of his belly.

He was choking on blood, stare locked into surprise. .. Oh, Gods, No. Shortsword fell from fingers that had no feeling. He heard it clatter to the stones. Legs were no more – he couldn’t even feel the blood that stained them, any longer.

“One,” It said to him, still holding him close, curved sword nestled to the hilt through the breadth of Jenkins’ gut.

“It seems like even the perfect make mistakes,” It apologized, shaded voice spoken just beside the lobe of Jenkins’ ear. “I should have told you it would only take nine seconds.” Final gasps of breath were gargled from the skewered guard’s throat as the assassin pushed Jenkins’ lifeless body to the grasses and withdrew his razored sword from the bowels of the guard.

Blood had been spilled on the insignia of the Order of Straka.

The naked murderer stepped over the corpse and into the torchlight, pivoting, whipping around with his weapon extended just as the figures of the two called guards came from either side of the Meetinghouse. They were sprinting, swords at the ready, legs pounding in fury across the night-strewn grasses. The one on the left seemed to pause at the sight of his two slaughtered guardmates, but right-hand patrol did not not cease, came barrelling towards the deadly shadow of a beast that must have only been half of his size.

(continued)

[Rance]

“Bodies to add to our new collection!” Chortled the killer as he swept himself aside from the blurring hiss of a sword larger than either Bohemmin’s or Jenkins’. Tresses of white fluttered around the tallish, wooden pole of the towering torch, and splinters exploded from the spine of the towering lantern as the swordsman’s weapon met with the shaft. Fist wrapping just beneath where there was a wide gash split anew in the wood, the agile creature spun about the torch, threw a leg up and over the guard’s extended blade and met stubble-rough cheek with the top of his foot.

The guard grunted, reached his hands out for purchase in the air. Never a pause in the beast’s fluid, balletic movement – as he was completing his twirl, his precious blade split downwards through the air to crash against the smaller guard’s upturned shortsword.

Ah, these were but games!

The figure threw himself forward towards Raifley while Meston – the more broad ape of a man – was just finished reeling from the kick. Raifley met the assassin with quick, definitive skill, weaponry a blur as shortsword and curved deathbringer met in various, parried kisses.

Raifley produced a gap in his pattern as Meston battered his way into the small fray, and it was with this opening that the shadow threw himself to one side as Meston hacked downwards with his still-clean broadsword. The guard’s blade sunk into the earth as the beast flipped, pressed his palm into the soils in the midst of a handstand, and circled himself around Raifley, deft and simultaneously deadly, flow of skill and flawlessness combined.

“Far too easy!” Teased the red-eyed annihilator as Raifley stepped aside to encounter him. The beast was grinning as it leaned back, dipped the tip of its gruesome, blood-painted sword towards the ground, and then hurtled it up into the air. Raifley’s mouth dropped open. It was .. giving up? The curved weapon spun off up into the air, biting through winds in its ascent, leaving the black-skinned murderer defenseless, weaponless.

Raifley was no fool – the beast was a dead one, to him. He stepped forward, lunging towards the gut, shortsword arched downwards as he thrust his sword towards the meeting of the shadow’s ribs.

Yet again, there was no mistake in the choice of their sly new enemy. He turned and idly avoided the jabbing swordtip, leaning forward in response to meet a gray-knuckled fist to the lips of the guard. Soft flesh smashed against squared teeth as he leaned into the blow, and the ashen digits of his other hand were coming up, clenching around Raifley’s exposed tunic collar. Its arms were tense and prepared – it stopped to slur abrupt words.

“Run, before I change my mind. Deliver to your commanders a message – tell them,” It breathed. “that you were outnumbered, that your fellows have been slaughtered. Tell them that Audmathus has come.”

The beast leaned away from Raifley then, pulling him by the collar, bending at the hip to toss the guard’s small body over his own. Extension of the arm, the shriek of a man being thrown into the air – the chiseled beast’s black fingers pressed into the earth as the weight of the guard was released, tossed like a ragdoll down the adjacent hill, a tumbling mannequin of armor and leather and flesh that landed some ten feet off in a patch of wild grasses.

Strings of silver were flicked over his shoulder as he turned back towards Meston, quite expecting the guard to still be struggling with his earth-swallowed broadsword. Boots were storming across the soils, kicking up chunks of midnight-peat in the wake of the human’s massive gait. The assassin found no folly. He sprung off of his feet, rushing to meet the body of the lumbering guard, heels making not even the silkiest of noises as they whipped through the grasses.

A flash of steel – the guard was bringing his practiced sword down to split the malevolent beast in twine, even lopped off the tips of gossamer hair in sacrifice.

Streak of night, the killer was just aside the falling weapon, springing, striking. Meston’s hands slipped away from the handle just as his neck whipped backwards, shouted a stream of glistening lifeblood into the air above his body. A vomiting, uneven gash was smiling towards the night sky. Meston did not even scream as his throat was torn apart.

Just before the guard’s frame crumpled, the silent murderer caught it by the back of its chainmail tunic, pulled it into the cradle of his arms. Left hand was cupped just below the guard’s collarbone, welling with the thickness of warm, oozing blood.
He was showing Meston his right hand, then – showing him its palm, and the rigid, metallic finger that replaced the black beast’s smallest finger. It was stained and streaked with the guard’s blood. It had been that finger, primitive and mechanical, pointed as though it were made for such a purpose, that had ravaged Meston’s neck in passing.

Liquid was burbling in the palm of his hand as the guard tried to struggle. “Do not blame me for this, fool.” the murderer simply said, pressing a bare foot to Meston’s spine, bending his body forward into a pool of gore. The weapon he had earlier thrown in the air was howling in its descent, spinning, falling through the trees not so far behind the elf. It speared through the wet soils, metal shrieking against dirt, falling to impale its tip through the roadway. It shuttered with the sudden stop.

“In your Valhalla, one named Lethal will shortly join you. He is the cause for this finger – he is, likewise, the true taker of your life. I? … I was merely the catalyst.”

Crickets were chirping their sorrowful songs as the silhouette stepped away from the three scattered bodies, slowly strode his way up the few steps of the Myrken Wood Meetinghouse, and came face-to-face with the oaken portal.

It was with that palmful of blood and the tip of his metallic finger that he began to trace large, painted words across the door’s face. He worked for some time in the moonlight, hips quirked to one side, dipping his letters deep and curving widely with blotted, makeshift ink.

Usstan doer … wun gre’as’anto, spelled the fingerpainted remnants of life all across the doors of the Meetinghouse.

No hesitance. He stepped down from the stoop, walked along the pathways and between the two smoking torches. Moths and nocturnal bugs were flitting this way and that, some eaten up into the torchfires, others avoiding the very presence of the sweat-lathered murderer that stood between the pyres of flickering light. He reached forward to disgorge Shadowdancer from where it stood erect within the dirt.

It was pleased, he knew – he could feel the presence of the symbiote blade feeding from his pleasure, absorbing the final remnants of the blood that stained its surface. Indeed, the assassin knew from the tingling within his limbs, from the calm and near intoxication that dilluted his conscience, that the weapon was proud.

Leaving the bodies of the maraudered guards in his wake, Audmathus stepped off into the grasses, disappeared into the tenebrous embrace of the distant treeline.

I come in peace, the message read, flickering in the tired illumination of the pristine torches. Tonight, the stars held secrets.