When the Battle's Lost and Won (Open)

Masarkh bared her teeth in fear-tinted hostility. Pale skin, golden eyes, riding an undead carnivore, spouting specific denigrations -- and those clouds were most definitely not natural -- made this woman vampiric. Masarkh spat rain, wary of what might be in it. She could almost taste the capital letters. Vampires did everything in capital letters.

She leaned heavily on her spear, the iron-shod butt digging into crusty mud, and looked around. Through the drizzle, the trees, and the ramshackle village, she spotted the riders the woman mentioned. She bared her teeth and refocused on the pale woman. "Guess I won't be getting paid, then. Me and mine hired on with the princes in question." Her arm throbbed; she shook her head to clear it and stood up a bit straighter. "Twenty silver and I'll tell you the secret way inside."

The tiny inch-spider, bark camouflaged, a tiny predator with a love of aphids and dirty glow worms, looked down over the goblin's whispy skull. He was a monochrome figure in a faceted amalgamation, taken in through four primary eyes mounted over a miniscule but lethally sharp set of jaw mandibles. It didn't understand what a 'Sharla' was, why the thing cursed, or what it was, exactly, that he rode. These giants were strange and primitive, more deaf than the spider, somehow unable to read the whispers and cries in the trees, rivers, or pick up on the conversations of the ants or deer. The inch-spider shrugged to itself, hopped back down along its route from a tall birch, and scuttled onto a waiting hand.

“How is it?” Arto asked, but not in a 'fleshy' tongue. A crackling, sibilant whisper flowed across the arachnid.

The creature answered literally. It was and waiting for the sun to hide behind the clouds, when the inevitable rain fell, forcing the glow worms out of the birch roots. It would feed with it's kin, scurry away their leftovers to their secreted cities carved in the marrow of dead oaks, and make their dances to honour the memories of the great ancestors that were fathers and mothers to them all. ...But, it had also seen a thing riding on top of a larger, heavier creature. Beyond that, there were walking creatures making a racket in the forest, wearing their 'hard stone'. Arto should beware, the spider warned. With the rain came a foul effluence.

Finished, the arachnid blinked a solemn farewell and disappeared up into the foliage.

Arto draped his cowl forward as rain began falling in earnest. He looked as unassuming and wantonly common as any mercenary, dressed in a muddy cloak, bowed over an equally messy nag, sword buckled at the hip and breathing steam against the cold. He slipped a scarf across his face and goaded his mare forward. Ahead laid a tiny hamlet, encircling an ancient well drop and scattered with abandoned weaponry and a corpse or three. The remains of fleeing soldiers too wounded or too to make it any farther. Miles away were the rhythmic strides of bleeding armies retreating to lick their cuts and regroup for the next fracas on the 'morrow. Half of the lot were coming down with bronchitis and the other half complained of venereal itching.

He could hear them, their weariness. Sure as he understood the tongues of spiders and wolves. Arto snapped his guide reins a bit and trotted his beast onward, following an old animal run that had been beaten and worn into a local road. The rain was coming down in bucket-drops and bringing cold with it. Beware, said the spider. Arto looked up ahead, towards a darkly dressed figure, an armoured and bloody woman at the fetlocks of her mount, a gloom hanging around both as fog trundled in from the emptied battlefield beyond.

Orcs knew the fight-or-flight response intimately. Just as important as making the right choice between the two, though, was the ability to choose your moment. To exert iron discipline on yourself. Like, say, when a four-eyed undead warg was staring you down, while people screamed for their lives.

At least the witchcraft-cloud blocked the rain.

Past the warg's rotten flank, motion stirred between shacks and trees: a ramgar. And not too far away, another warg rider, but not one of the vampires. No, an orc-like being, craven of stature, long of ear, low of wit, yelling for that ramgar. Yelling louder than the human girl being dragged from her hiding place.

More motion -- she thought at first it might be a rider coming to flank her, but no. This one was human or close enough, hunched over, riding a real gluepot champion. Mazarkh's stomach rumbled. Even tough old horse could turn out nice, once properly tenderized and spiced.

"Whatever you say," said Mazarkh evenly, her voice tense. "I'll take it that you're not interested. Fine by me; I'll just be moving along."

There being no chance whatsoever that she'd turn her back on the four-eyed undead warg, she backed away.

“I've found a live one m'lady!”

The child looked like many youths surviving in no man's land. Dirty from head to feet, dressed in scavenged burlap sewn with fishing line, holding on to a single piece of bone jewelry in the form of an ankle bracelet, and scared to death. Her cries had quieted into terrified sobs. There wasn't a parent to latch onto and hide in their shadow. She'd crawled an arm up over her nose, trying to backpedal against the vice-grip pulling her in closer toward the vampiress and her oversized wolf-mount. The air was almost wintry and the plating worn by her abductors was almost aching to touch. The girl looked up into a pale helm, and saw nothing: void where there should have been eyes, and a stricken mouth full of broken teeth.

She hadn't the courage to scream.

Arto's nag wouldn't take him a pace closer. Soldiery in their deathly finery and iconography were making a search, house by house, looking to plunder the hamlet of resources. Both flesh and monetary, though disgusted to find it picked clean of either. Dry, scraping voices coughed out reports in the gloom. Light overhead had become a strange, premature twilight. Arto had a pernicious feeling of lost time. He bit his spurs into the nag's flanks but she still refused budging. Arto soothed her, stroked down her long snout and patted the slope of her nose. Bad nerves, and worsening: she'd bolt if those tracking wolves sauntered any closer or rile and give them up.

“You!”

A rider brought his mount over and padded up beside Arto. It was an officer: there was no telling gender, the way its vocal cadences and rhythms were bent, warped, and impossibly 'doubled'. They curtly nodded and held tight to their riding halberd, a small pennant of Breslan flying under the axe-head.

“You're a local?” They asked.

“Not at all,” Arto answered. He was trying to keep his now thoroughly spooked mare from tossing him.

“No? Pity. Seen you any of these wretches taking flight up the roadway?”

“...I suppose. Trying to find the main roads and go south and east, maybe. I hear in Caedri they still accept refugees, though Calleigh is locked up. Readying for siege.”

“Readying for terror,” The officer countered, with relish. “The Caedreini have their cavalry, true, but what's old chivalry against a modern army? What's horse power against war machines? The west is in upheaval, plots, regicide, princes and baronesses at each others throat, the mage colleges closed, banned. These whore house fiefdoms are ripe for picking, mercenary. I'd suggest you make the right arrangements so you'll not lose out on spoils.”

“Yes. Tiny spoils,” Arto's acid smile melted into the officer's chilled armor. “Little girl slaves, covered in tears and snot, waiting to serve the glory of Breslan on hands and knees. Those kinds of spoils?”

“War is accelerated evolution,” Said the officer. “War is the culling. We sift the ready and worthy from the weak and useless. 'Tis fine for the princelings and bitch-queens to have their wars on each other. But ours is a justified cause, hu - “

With one hand to the reins, catching the officer in a deadbolt stare, the soldier didn't see Arto's hand clenched onto his holstered sword-hilt. “What?”

“...I could swear you've got pointed ears,” The officer leaned over his saddle horn.

One vampire witch owned with reverse psychology, one potential payout inbound. The day had potential to redeem itself. But something told Mazarkh she wasn't going to get her happy ending.

Tension swelled; the hair stood up on the back of Mazarkh's neck. The vampire was throwing magic, that goblin on the living warg was about to encounter some of the armored riders, and others were converging on the hooded rider. Maybe they just wanted a bite of horse -- humans could stomach horse, couldn't they? -- or maybe the loner had said or done something unwise. Oh, there he went, putting a hand on his sword-hilt. She couldn't keep an eye on him; the undead warg was circling her, and she had to keep turning to face it. Not like she had much of a shot at taking it down if things went as sour as her gut suspected. With a living warg, a spear might do, but this monster had no jugular, no vulnerable guts.

"I'll take the deal," she said, because she couldn't leave that question hanging, even if things were about to get messy.

“When last I saw ears with any curl,” The Sergeant began, reaching for a clasp running under it's armoured chin. “We were driving them into the sea.”

The helm rose free and rested atop the saddle horn, the undead gelding chuffing pale vapour through fleshless nostrils. Its master had lost his face; through rot or an ancient injury, the skin had been stripped like hide, exposing musculature and thinning ligaments, crowned by dark hair that had taken on a midnight lustre. Arto endured the grave-rot in his breath as he leaned over between their horses, relaxing a tensing note in his muscles threatening to freeze him. It still hurt as the Sergeant yanked back on his hair and drew their faces in close, snarling with rheum and spit.

“Took you for a man when I first saw you. Now, I'm wondering,” He grunted. “Must be another whoreson, I think. Some river runt. Parent took a liking to some galley slave with a good face and here we are, eh? Do I have that right?”

The Sergeant let go, and Arto rocked back up into his seat, ignoring the flaring pain where his ponytail had nearly been dug out at the roots. The Woman in the Mountains warned against pain, it's ability to sting his ego and goad a reply. He settled on a steady gaze, blinking dew out of his eyes, as the Sergeant drew up and tried looming over him.

“So what now?” Arto asked easily.

“Huh,” The Sergeant grunted. “Protocol takes the matter of your parentage and status over my head. That's something for our betters to decide. And it so happens, lucky you, that atop that handsome wolf yonder is our Fair Lady of the White Tower. The Bibliophile, our Madam Moroi. Under Article Eighty-Nine, Statute Four, 'all persons suspected of harbouring alder blood are to be presented with all haste to an Imperial Court or such similar authority for pronouncement.'”

He slipped his battered helmet back into place, adjusting the chin strapping and flashing a broken grin. “Now bring your nag along.”

“I'll go with you? Just like that?” Arto balked.

“Look around. These are soldiers drawn from the 8th Rojvidere army. Pikemen, axemen, arbalists, all with more notches on their belts than you've hairs on your head, you young shit. They know what to do with elves and degenerates like you when they decide not to behave.”

A dozen Archdom troopers were picking through their takes of loot wrenched from each hamlet home. Beside the girl, wretched examples of starved peasantry dressed in threadbare moccasins and jerkins tied out of worn sheepskin were herded into a single line, forced to their haunches as a captain made an inspection. Most were raw eyed and so exhausted out of hunger, that even terror couldn't find purchase in their sunken faces. Arto glanced from soldier to soldier, noting their gunmetal hauberks and studded gambesons, molded cuirass's, long blades in hand, pikes at the ready. Crossbow archers patrolled the village perimeter, dead gazes set both on the forest beyond and the town wellspring. Skinny but wretchedly violent war dogs haunted the cold and rainy shade.

“...How's this?” Arto began, turning to the Sergeant. “I won't go with you. You convince your Lady to give up the girl and all these wretches, take their coin if you must, and go on to some other dying place to have your sport. Now I implore you: look around. What's left here? What's left that you or the Awestinians and Caedreini haven't already taken? If the Archdom is so fierce, than this is beneath you. How is this glory?”

“War is always it's own glory. It makes no apologies for its nature,” Said the Sergeant. “And neither will I. Now, keep your hands on those reins and follow me.”

“No elf went into the sea without a sword in hand...” Arto muttered.

“What?”

A steel-brushed pommel cracked into the Sergeant's gorget. Larynx crushed, propelled off balance, the Sergeant flailed soundlessly as he slipped over his mount. A plated boot caught in the stirrup and clinch, snapping the billet strap under the gelding's belly and bringing the weight of a fully kitted captain's saddle down onto his legs. He looked up in time through a muddied faceplate, as Arto leapt catlike from his seat and cantle, a long sword flashing in his hands. The half breed landed and bounced, crunching the Sergeant's pauldron plates deeper into loam, hefting his weapon in a half-sword grip. A sharpened blade point skewered down into what remained of the Undead's eyesocket, into the animated brain rot, and dented out through the back of his helm.

Marzakh was half right: the mess was only a dry skein of crumbling grey matter and snapping hair strands, as Arto withdrew his blade and hunched into a fighting guard.