Chapter One, Scene One: HARBINGERS
A few standing against many: A fair-haired youth with bright eyes, a diseased and deranged woman with untamed dark hair, and an old man with misshapen legs and a walking stick. They are standing against six soldiers of the western imperium. The first, their captain, with black eagle pins new upon his collar, rushes the unarmed boy. The second, a raw recruit, with eyes of green to match the green of the imperium’s uniform waits with eagerly shining eyes, and the third, a grizzled veteran with a scar running from left ear to left eye, charges the old man; the remaining three go for the sick woman.
The captain feints and the boy dodges right into the captain’s second strike, his bright eyes reminding the captain of his own son's. There is an audible click; the old man moves like coiled lightning with a single mirrored flash in the air. The raw recruit’s hand lies upon the ground and lying next to it, dead, is the veteran, his throat cut wide open. The handless one screams. The forth soldier closes with the sick woman but before his blade leaves its scabbard, his feet lift off the ground and his throat makes a disgusting crunch. His body then flies onto the fifth soldier’s blade, trapping it, the fifth soldier’s eye explodes in his head, his screaming drowns out the handless one. The sixth soldier makes a quick thrust and strikes something solid he cannot see, and the blade sticks in the air. Then the sixth soldier’s elbow inverts with a satisfying crack bent the wrong way. His screaming makes for a calliope of sound with the other two soldiers. “When attacked with arms, destroy the arm” the sick woman says in precise, clipped tones as if she is quoting some esoteric martial text. The captain turns and flees, and his remaining men follow him. “Spread legend, fear and that your only hope is to flee before us” she finishes, in the same concise and exacting pattern of speech.
Stooping over the boy’s body the crippled old man grumbles in a voice strained by years and hard use. “Time for us to flee, was before the price was paid.”
The old man’s twisted legs slow them all, but they crash through the dark forest. Slipping in black mud, falling, tasting fear and the hunger of their own need, “Gold doesn't lose its worth, when it falls into the mire,” says the sick woman as she laughs her maniacal laugh. The diseased woman lifts the boy’s body and pulls the old man along with a strength her body could not posses. She does not feel her broken toes or her bruised ribs. Her illness long ago robbed her of those senses, along with most of her mind.
The old man groans more from the constant foolishness the sick woman spouts than the constant pain in his legs. “Luck hates me” he protests rather loudly. Suddenly, the captain bursts out, wielding a long knife—the old man’s sword-cane flicks out and is then a cane again; the captain lay dead. “And death loves me” the old man whispered. The sick woman giggled, “The uncontrollable hunger, uncontrollably hungered for.” The old man groaned again. He could not decide if the sick woman meant death or love, he hoped she had meant love. The boy said nothing.
He had not had the heart to tell the sick woman to leave the boy behind, not that the sick woman would have listened. It did not matter. He had one last duty to perform before he would lie down and die. A message to the Exemplar and they had almost reached his haven.
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