T
TaterSalad
Guest
Calvacade - An Epilogue of sorts
My first fanfiction.
Working with a world that's already established and well known is interesting, but I think I've played Fable enough to avoid digging too many plotholes.
Hope you enjoy it, and if you'd like me to throw in a hero you might have played just message me. I can come up with them myself, I'm sure, but I think having a sort of variety of minds might spice it up nicely and be more faithful to the Fable series on a idealogical level. At least that's what I think....
Anyhoo, enjoy.
Chap. 1
(In which we witness a number of statues, talk about carpets, and meet two men. One seems unable to age, and one can’t seem to stop. Oh yes, and there’s a photograph of some import.)
Gunslinger moved with purpose through the decadent halls of Castle Brecknock, it had changed since he had last seen it, so many years ago. Then it was his own, the walls bristled with exotic and powerful firearms he’d collected over his years of adventuring, and next to the throne sat a small chair for a young boy, who came to age to adventure, and never returned home. Then it was called Castle Fairfax, but the newly anointed King of Albion saw fit to give his beloved Queen’s maiden name to the palace. Now the place was far more attractive and posh. Lush, colorful tapestries blanketed the walls and gave the rooms a sense of warmth, while expertly crafted statues lined halls leading to the Throne room. Gunslinger observed these as he passed. They were all great heroes or influential characters in Albion’s history, and he instantly recognized a number of them. Thunder, the mighty warrior of old, Whisper, the exotic fighter, Maze, who’s history has been the subject of dispute for centuries, and the Hero of Oakvale, standing proud, the pristine marble scarcely doing justice to the greatest hero history might ever know. Further down faces got more familiar. There was the mighty Hammer, an ex-monk that the man observing the statue knew quite well. Garth, the legendary will user across from her had once saved him from a life of servitude to the late Lucien Fairfax. Reaver, the Pirate King’s tribute was a stand, with a plaque engraved with, “He kept shooting the sculptors.” Gunslinger chuckled at this under his breath, he resented Reaver, the man was a traitorous, narcissistic braggart who had tried to kill him on many occasions, but they held a grudging respect for one another regardless. They had dueled only once. It was a brief affair that resulted in a tie. Two leaden bullets, crushed evenly together were found later, and a rematch was spoken of, but never scheduled. Across from this was a statue of a newer hero, Duke. A titan of a man who Gunslinger had grown quite accustomed to traveling with. His named was Dmitri, and he hailed from the northern reaches of Albion, where he had grown up big, strong, and simple.
Gunslinger passed the statue of himself quickly. It had an honorable spot in the room, across from the King’s monument, but he cared little for such trite things.
By this time the nervous butler who had tentatively let him in broke into a full run to catch him, his voice high and shrill as he reprimanded the adventurer, “I said… The King does not count you among his appointments for toda-“, as the butler fumed he was interrupted by an old man sitting in the high backed chair, “That’ll be enough, Percival.” This was vividly distressing to the butler, and he opened his mouth to speak, but stopped himself, threw his hands into the air in defeat, and left for the kitchen to find something with alcohol in it.
“Jonathan… It’s been a long time.” Gunslinger removed his hat, his unkempt hair falling carelessly around his head without the hat to contain it, “You know why I’m here.”
With a heavy sigh the old king offered a nod, “I suppose. Every year I grow older and older, and my hair gets whiter and whiter. Can’t you humor me and get a wrinkle or two already?” A laugh erupted from the adventurer, “I would if I could. Maybe then people would stop spreading so many of those rumors. But there's always a brighter side; I get to sleep with the granddaughters of all my old friends, so why complain?” A grin spread across Gunslinger’s face. He was young, and overpoweringly handsome, with deeply tanned skin and rich brown hair.
However attractive he was, though, his blemishes were still vivid.
Four deep scars ran parallel across his face, starting at his jaw and stretching all the way across his cheek. They were a souvenir from a skirmish of his youth in which he and his comrade, an ex-monk and mighty warrior Hammer, were led through a great, macabre temple by a seemingly distressed woman into the waiting jaws of a score of balverines. The woman herself was the mightiest, her coat a stark white, her claws like great razors, and her eyes burning with the fires of a thousand hells. His scars were born of her deadly caress, and had bled profusely when they were inflicted. One of his eyes was blinded by blood when he sent a bullet through her misshapen skull.
His eyes were the another blemish. They were empty. Not in a figurative sense, although they might have been if the irises and pupils were visible, but they were empty in that they were clean white spheres, with lightly outlined circles in their centers that once bordered his dark green eyes. He could see perfectly, but he had learned to see in different ways, through the raw will racing through his veins he could see more than just colors. He could see worlds of radiance, perceive light when there might be almost none, and even observe the magical energies exuded by natural things. He had once been floored by the beauty of the world in the spectrum of magic, and still was to an extent. His toughened outer demeanor always came before artistry and romanticism, however.
The final detriment to the face of this worldly Adonis was his great bushy pair of sideburns. He had loved them during his youth, and nostalgia found him constantly returning to them during his weekly, monthly, and on rare occasions, yearly shave. They were handsome and framed his face well by the attrubution of some, but were also confused with dead squirrels hastily fastened to the legend’s face on more than one occasion.
A healthy chortle broke a brief silence between the two men, “If you lay a hand on my little Cecily I’ll have no choice but to shave off that horrible 'beard' with an axe. Now I believe we had some business to discuss, otherwise you wouldn’t have come in so brusquely and prompted my butler to nearly sic the guards on you.” King Jon motioned to two radiantly armored soldiers at either of his sides. Bedecked in silver and carrying wicked halberds and ivory plated crossbows, they gleamed like demigods in the pillars of light that bathed them. They had names, Gunslinger was sure, but they probably didn’t use them too frequently. He briefly wondered what they looked like under their closed helmets, and noted that they radiated a great deal of magic. He wondered for a moment if they were enlightened to their heroic blood before getting his head back to business, “Do you remember the last young lad I reared in the Guild before leaving? You were still touring it frequently then, and I’m awfully sure you still do. He was the Samarkander with the missing eye.” Gunslinger paused while the king bit his lower lip in an attempt to recall, “Ah! Shelly was his name, correct?” A snicker echoed from inside one of the helmets at the king’s flanks, this forced a smile to Gunslinger’s face, knowing they weren’t complete drones, “He was so gifted in everything we taught him… Back when I wagered on things at the guild I’d always bet on him in student tournaments… It’s a terrible shame what happened to his family,” the old king continued, “but I’m afraid heroic blood runs awfully cold to tragedy. We all have ours.” Gunslinger drifted away on his last words, a gunshot, a cry of pain, then a falling sensation, “Ahem… Are you alright old friend?” King Jon’s words brought Gunslinger back to his senses, “Ah, yes… Just daydreaming is all. Well, I’ve got a problem that I think he’s linked to.” Gunslinger pulled a photograph from his inside pocket. It had taken months to develif- develop, but it was the only way he could have shown the man in front of him the scene he had been witness too.
Cautiously the king rose and stepped forward, leaning on a ruby-handled cane, a wooden leg clunking dully against the velvet carpeting in front of the throne; one of the guards moved to help him but was shooed away. As he moved his hand to dismiss the guard his sleeve pulled back slightly to reveal an ages old tattoo decorating his right arm, “What is this now?” Gunslinger extended the photograph and it was pulled from his hands shakily, “You actually took a photogra- My god, what is this?” A new, serious complexion absorbed the old man’s previous livelihood, and he pushed the picture back towards Gunslinger.
In the mercilessly lucid photograph, there was a tree, normal at a very cursory glance, but on closer inspection the fruit of the relatively young oak was a number of anatomical… Pieces, to be gentle.
In harder terms, heads and hands hung from the tree like grotesque apples, the open mouths were stuffed with hearts, but this was only barely visible.
Wrapping around the base of the tree was a thick circle of dismembered torsos had their stump-capped arms spread wide, various swords thrust through them as a way of nailing them to the oak’s base.
Circling the trunk were the leftovers, blotting out any remnants of the tree’s once natural splendor. A large board was nailed to the center of the fleshy mass with knives.
Then there was the blood. It seemed that the picture had been taken at just the right angle to purvey just as much gore as had been wreaked. Everything was blackened. It trickled across the heads and hands in the branches. Waves of black cascaded across the trunk, bathing the central mass in a sick darkness. Great, thick globs raced down the bodies secured to the trunk.
It was the most horrible thing the king had ever seen, “What is this? Who could possibly be so degenerate?” A throaty cough escaped from the king’s throat, followed by another, and then another until he could no longer control is and Gunslinger was forced to intervene, whacking him on the back with his palm until the old king snorted and stood back straight, the adventurer’s hand still on his shoulder, “Read the plank.” Gunslinger pulled the tightly clutched photo from the king’s hand and began to show him when he was stopped, “Just… Read it to me, old friend. There’s nothing in that picture that I need to see more than once.” Gunslinger paused for a moment and nodded, “Rustler’s Army here lies. That’s in big letters, and you can’t read it cause it’s too small, but there’s more…” King Jon hobbled back to his throne and collapsed in it, “Let no man say revenge is bittersweet, for I smiled as these men died.”, finished Gunslinger, folding the picture and placing it back in his coat pocket before turning to the old man sunk in the high-backed throne. He stared into space with the eyes of a man who might be thought dead if not for his nervous, short breaths. In the throne room the air was still, and hanging in it was a gore-drenched tree that had burned itself into one mind, and had reunited an old man with that tingling feeling in your legs when you become suddenly afraid.
Chap. 2
(In which two men share a series of uncomfortable silences and one comes to an unpleasant realization. Later his face is inexplicably covered in something sticky.
It seemed like an eternity passed before either of them spoke, the only noise being the uncomfortable shifting of the two royal guards every now and again.
Finally Gunslinger broke the silence, “You understand then?”
King Jon straightened himself up in his chair and slid his hands back and forth over the armrests. They were smooth and curvy, and helped calm his nerves enough to speak, “Are you sure it couldn’t be anyone else? Rustler’s Army killed more men than the Spire, another one could have done it.” Gunslinger scoffed, “Nothing killed more men than the Spire.” A sense of finality was delivered with this statement, followed by another minute of silence as the two entertained their own thoughts about Lord Lucien Fairfax’s murder machine that was dismantled so many years ago.
“It just… Doesn’t seem possible…” a wheeze broke through the old man’s throat before he continued, “I never saw any blackness in his soul… Just sadness and longing…”
Gunslinger waited before responding, not knowing quite what to expect, but knowing that something was on his counterpart’s mind that wasn’t yet ready to be brought to the surface, “I searched the records at the barracks of all the deaths knowingly caused by Rustler and his crew. Mostly small villages, with very few survivors left to seek revenge, and even fewer that might ever have the strength to do so. I looked at an old file that detailed the deaths of a Samarkand family that was traveling through Rookridge; a father, a mother, two young daughters, and two sons. I read the report given to the authorities by the only survivor, a young boy who’d lost an eye.” Gunslinger reached into his coat again, this time walking to the exhausted king to hand it to him, “This is what clinches it. It can’t be chance.”
For the next few minutes King Jon I, who had been witness to a fair amount of violence and cruelty in life, cringed after every sentence, “Both his sisters in front of him?” was all he could manage as he read.
Gunslinger sat on a bench as the old man read and propped his chin up with his hands. It was a long document, and the adventurer slowly dozed off.
He dreamt of a black shape growing to immense sized and picking up all of Albion, then crushing it as though it were nothing. It had an awful eye made of fire that was constantly dripping with molten lava that would scorch the earth as it fell. In the last seconds before he stirred from his sleep he remembered the thing opening it’s mouth to swallow him. When he awoke the dream immediately grew vague, until all that was left was an unshakable sense of despair.
“Gunslinger? You awake, old friend?” King Jon prodded the sleeping adventurer with his cane, “I finished it. I don’t want to think it’s possible, but you’re right.” With the drowsy man awakened the king limped back to his throne, “Where did you find that... Abomination?” the old man leaned back in the throne and began nervously rubbing his temples, “Bandit Coast, right at that big gate near the tower.”, was all the adventurer said, which was met with a heavy sigh after a moment, “They’re just criminals… The world is better off without the lot of them.” King Jon leaned forward in his throne, his guards had long since changed and had been replaced with the boys working the graveyard shift. They weren’t nearly as luminous considering they wouldn’t have a huge impact on the good king’s image, but they were tough looking and armed to the teeth. “It ain’t a way to die, Jon. Don’t just hang your head like some old codger, you know I’m right”, the hero known as Gunslinger had suddenly lost his patience, “I’ve got to leave, there are appointments I’ve got to keep.” He didn’t know how late it was, but the time was unimportant at this point. He’d overstayed his welcome in his mind, “Think about it, old friend. Please.” Gunslinger paused, waiting for a response. His host seemed lost in thought, and at his age, thought was probably something of a labyrinth; his words were heard, though. Of this he had no doubt.
As the hero left the splendid halls of castle Brecknock he was only fazed once when a statue of Jack of Blades caught his eye. He or it (History’s ambiguity as to the nature of Jack of Blades was appalling) had been gone some five-hundred years and yet his name, and the fact that he might have existed, still had the ability to quiet a room. To talk of his deeds could empty it. Gunslinger was well acquainted with the history, and as he passed the statue was visited by an uneasy feeling deep in his chest.
He had seen things that he thought impossible, and knew they were performed by powerful hands, and possibly heroic ones at that.
Dread crept into his heart and he finally perceived the full blackness of the monument he’d seen. Every limb and every head was revolting and disgusting, and the entire event stirred in him age-old feelings of revilement. However when something as dark as that might have the unfortunate incidence of occurring, the magnitude of it’s blackness can never be initially understood.
Gunslinger now bore that understanding. Something horrific was brewing in Albion, something that would make the lunacy of Lucien seem like nothing more than a distant memory.
Perhaps he was being paranoid. Perhaps his mind hadn’t aged as gracefully as his body and he was mistaking an isolated, if gruesome, incident for a warning of mass chaos and bloodshed.
Or perhaps he was right.
That night was colder than many others Gunslinger had faced. At his bed in the Cow and Corset his dreams were vivid and foreboding, as they had an unfortunate habit of being.
He heard a thousand or more voices cry out in pain, pleading for mercy or death, unsure of the difference between the two. All around him was blinding light, and as it faded he could see he stood on the battlements of a castle. Forming a moat around the base was an impossible number of people, all scratching at the doors. He turned to his right, and the wall seemed to extend forever into the distance. Then to his left, and it was the same.
A voice called him from behind using his real name. It was a hollow, evil voice, injected with an eloquence that offended every fiber of the hero’s existence.
As he turned he awoke, his face sticky from whatever happened to be on the inn’s floor that night, which he had toppled onto.
He had a moment of uncomfortable lucidity while picking himself up, but as seconds passed his recollection of the dream began to fade.
In no time at all nothing was left but the vague remembrance of an eerily familiar voice.
My first fanfiction.
Working with a world that's already established and well known is interesting, but I think I've played Fable enough to avoid digging too many plotholes.
Hope you enjoy it, and if you'd like me to throw in a hero you might have played just message me. I can come up with them myself, I'm sure, but I think having a sort of variety of minds might spice it up nicely and be more faithful to the Fable series on a idealogical level. At least that's what I think....
Anyhoo, enjoy.
~\/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\/~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\/~
Chap. 1
(In which we witness a number of statues, talk about carpets, and meet two men. One seems unable to age, and one can’t seem to stop. Oh yes, and there’s a photograph of some import.)
Gunslinger moved with purpose through the decadent halls of Castle Brecknock, it had changed since he had last seen it, so many years ago. Then it was his own, the walls bristled with exotic and powerful firearms he’d collected over his years of adventuring, and next to the throne sat a small chair for a young boy, who came to age to adventure, and never returned home. Then it was called Castle Fairfax, but the newly anointed King of Albion saw fit to give his beloved Queen’s maiden name to the palace. Now the place was far more attractive and posh. Lush, colorful tapestries blanketed the walls and gave the rooms a sense of warmth, while expertly crafted statues lined halls leading to the Throne room. Gunslinger observed these as he passed. They were all great heroes or influential characters in Albion’s history, and he instantly recognized a number of them. Thunder, the mighty warrior of old, Whisper, the exotic fighter, Maze, who’s history has been the subject of dispute for centuries, and the Hero of Oakvale, standing proud, the pristine marble scarcely doing justice to the greatest hero history might ever know. Further down faces got more familiar. There was the mighty Hammer, an ex-monk that the man observing the statue knew quite well. Garth, the legendary will user across from her had once saved him from a life of servitude to the late Lucien Fairfax. Reaver, the Pirate King’s tribute was a stand, with a plaque engraved with, “He kept shooting the sculptors.” Gunslinger chuckled at this under his breath, he resented Reaver, the man was a traitorous, narcissistic braggart who had tried to kill him on many occasions, but they held a grudging respect for one another regardless. They had dueled only once. It was a brief affair that resulted in a tie. Two leaden bullets, crushed evenly together were found later, and a rematch was spoken of, but never scheduled. Across from this was a statue of a newer hero, Duke. A titan of a man who Gunslinger had grown quite accustomed to traveling with. His named was Dmitri, and he hailed from the northern reaches of Albion, where he had grown up big, strong, and simple.
Gunslinger passed the statue of himself quickly. It had an honorable spot in the room, across from the King’s monument, but he cared little for such trite things.
By this time the nervous butler who had tentatively let him in broke into a full run to catch him, his voice high and shrill as he reprimanded the adventurer, “I said… The King does not count you among his appointments for toda-“, as the butler fumed he was interrupted by an old man sitting in the high backed chair, “That’ll be enough, Percival.” This was vividly distressing to the butler, and he opened his mouth to speak, but stopped himself, threw his hands into the air in defeat, and left for the kitchen to find something with alcohol in it.
“Jonathan… It’s been a long time.” Gunslinger removed his hat, his unkempt hair falling carelessly around his head without the hat to contain it, “You know why I’m here.”
With a heavy sigh the old king offered a nod, “I suppose. Every year I grow older and older, and my hair gets whiter and whiter. Can’t you humor me and get a wrinkle or two already?” A laugh erupted from the adventurer, “I would if I could. Maybe then people would stop spreading so many of those rumors. But there's always a brighter side; I get to sleep with the granddaughters of all my old friends, so why complain?” A grin spread across Gunslinger’s face. He was young, and overpoweringly handsome, with deeply tanned skin and rich brown hair.
However attractive he was, though, his blemishes were still vivid.
Four deep scars ran parallel across his face, starting at his jaw and stretching all the way across his cheek. They were a souvenir from a skirmish of his youth in which he and his comrade, an ex-monk and mighty warrior Hammer, were led through a great, macabre temple by a seemingly distressed woman into the waiting jaws of a score of balverines. The woman herself was the mightiest, her coat a stark white, her claws like great razors, and her eyes burning with the fires of a thousand hells. His scars were born of her deadly caress, and had bled profusely when they were inflicted. One of his eyes was blinded by blood when he sent a bullet through her misshapen skull.
His eyes were the another blemish. They were empty. Not in a figurative sense, although they might have been if the irises and pupils were visible, but they were empty in that they were clean white spheres, with lightly outlined circles in their centers that once bordered his dark green eyes. He could see perfectly, but he had learned to see in different ways, through the raw will racing through his veins he could see more than just colors. He could see worlds of radiance, perceive light when there might be almost none, and even observe the magical energies exuded by natural things. He had once been floored by the beauty of the world in the spectrum of magic, and still was to an extent. His toughened outer demeanor always came before artistry and romanticism, however.
The final detriment to the face of this worldly Adonis was his great bushy pair of sideburns. He had loved them during his youth, and nostalgia found him constantly returning to them during his weekly, monthly, and on rare occasions, yearly shave. They were handsome and framed his face well by the attrubution of some, but were also confused with dead squirrels hastily fastened to the legend’s face on more than one occasion.
A healthy chortle broke a brief silence between the two men, “If you lay a hand on my little Cecily I’ll have no choice but to shave off that horrible 'beard' with an axe. Now I believe we had some business to discuss, otherwise you wouldn’t have come in so brusquely and prompted my butler to nearly sic the guards on you.” King Jon motioned to two radiantly armored soldiers at either of his sides. Bedecked in silver and carrying wicked halberds and ivory plated crossbows, they gleamed like demigods in the pillars of light that bathed them. They had names, Gunslinger was sure, but they probably didn’t use them too frequently. He briefly wondered what they looked like under their closed helmets, and noted that they radiated a great deal of magic. He wondered for a moment if they were enlightened to their heroic blood before getting his head back to business, “Do you remember the last young lad I reared in the Guild before leaving? You were still touring it frequently then, and I’m awfully sure you still do. He was the Samarkander with the missing eye.” Gunslinger paused while the king bit his lower lip in an attempt to recall, “Ah! Shelly was his name, correct?” A snicker echoed from inside one of the helmets at the king’s flanks, this forced a smile to Gunslinger’s face, knowing they weren’t complete drones, “He was so gifted in everything we taught him… Back when I wagered on things at the guild I’d always bet on him in student tournaments… It’s a terrible shame what happened to his family,” the old king continued, “but I’m afraid heroic blood runs awfully cold to tragedy. We all have ours.” Gunslinger drifted away on his last words, a gunshot, a cry of pain, then a falling sensation, “Ahem… Are you alright old friend?” King Jon’s words brought Gunslinger back to his senses, “Ah, yes… Just daydreaming is all. Well, I’ve got a problem that I think he’s linked to.” Gunslinger pulled a photograph from his inside pocket. It had taken months to develif- develop, but it was the only way he could have shown the man in front of him the scene he had been witness too.
Cautiously the king rose and stepped forward, leaning on a ruby-handled cane, a wooden leg clunking dully against the velvet carpeting in front of the throne; one of the guards moved to help him but was shooed away. As he moved his hand to dismiss the guard his sleeve pulled back slightly to reveal an ages old tattoo decorating his right arm, “What is this now?” Gunslinger extended the photograph and it was pulled from his hands shakily, “You actually took a photogra- My god, what is this?” A new, serious complexion absorbed the old man’s previous livelihood, and he pushed the picture back towards Gunslinger.
In the mercilessly lucid photograph, there was a tree, normal at a very cursory glance, but on closer inspection the fruit of the relatively young oak was a number of anatomical… Pieces, to be gentle.
In harder terms, heads and hands hung from the tree like grotesque apples, the open mouths were stuffed with hearts, but this was only barely visible.
Wrapping around the base of the tree was a thick circle of dismembered torsos had their stump-capped arms spread wide, various swords thrust through them as a way of nailing them to the oak’s base.
Circling the trunk were the leftovers, blotting out any remnants of the tree’s once natural splendor. A large board was nailed to the center of the fleshy mass with knives.
Then there was the blood. It seemed that the picture had been taken at just the right angle to purvey just as much gore as had been wreaked. Everything was blackened. It trickled across the heads and hands in the branches. Waves of black cascaded across the trunk, bathing the central mass in a sick darkness. Great, thick globs raced down the bodies secured to the trunk.
It was the most horrible thing the king had ever seen, “What is this? Who could possibly be so degenerate?” A throaty cough escaped from the king’s throat, followed by another, and then another until he could no longer control is and Gunslinger was forced to intervene, whacking him on the back with his palm until the old king snorted and stood back straight, the adventurer’s hand still on his shoulder, “Read the plank.” Gunslinger pulled the tightly clutched photo from the king’s hand and began to show him when he was stopped, “Just… Read it to me, old friend. There’s nothing in that picture that I need to see more than once.” Gunslinger paused for a moment and nodded, “Rustler’s Army here lies. That’s in big letters, and you can’t read it cause it’s too small, but there’s more…” King Jon hobbled back to his throne and collapsed in it, “Let no man say revenge is bittersweet, for I smiled as these men died.”, finished Gunslinger, folding the picture and placing it back in his coat pocket before turning to the old man sunk in the high-backed throne. He stared into space with the eyes of a man who might be thought dead if not for his nervous, short breaths. In the throne room the air was still, and hanging in it was a gore-drenched tree that had burned itself into one mind, and had reunited an old man with that tingling feeling in your legs when you become suddenly afraid.
Chap. 2
(In which two men share a series of uncomfortable silences and one comes to an unpleasant realization. Later his face is inexplicably covered in something sticky.
It seemed like an eternity passed before either of them spoke, the only noise being the uncomfortable shifting of the two royal guards every now and again.
Finally Gunslinger broke the silence, “You understand then?”
King Jon straightened himself up in his chair and slid his hands back and forth over the armrests. They were smooth and curvy, and helped calm his nerves enough to speak, “Are you sure it couldn’t be anyone else? Rustler’s Army killed more men than the Spire, another one could have done it.” Gunslinger scoffed, “Nothing killed more men than the Spire.” A sense of finality was delivered with this statement, followed by another minute of silence as the two entertained their own thoughts about Lord Lucien Fairfax’s murder machine that was dismantled so many years ago.
“It just… Doesn’t seem possible…” a wheeze broke through the old man’s throat before he continued, “I never saw any blackness in his soul… Just sadness and longing…”
Gunslinger waited before responding, not knowing quite what to expect, but knowing that something was on his counterpart’s mind that wasn’t yet ready to be brought to the surface, “I searched the records at the barracks of all the deaths knowingly caused by Rustler and his crew. Mostly small villages, with very few survivors left to seek revenge, and even fewer that might ever have the strength to do so. I looked at an old file that detailed the deaths of a Samarkand family that was traveling through Rookridge; a father, a mother, two young daughters, and two sons. I read the report given to the authorities by the only survivor, a young boy who’d lost an eye.” Gunslinger reached into his coat again, this time walking to the exhausted king to hand it to him, “This is what clinches it. It can’t be chance.”
For the next few minutes King Jon I, who had been witness to a fair amount of violence and cruelty in life, cringed after every sentence, “Both his sisters in front of him?” was all he could manage as he read.
Gunslinger sat on a bench as the old man read and propped his chin up with his hands. It was a long document, and the adventurer slowly dozed off.
He dreamt of a black shape growing to immense sized and picking up all of Albion, then crushing it as though it were nothing. It had an awful eye made of fire that was constantly dripping with molten lava that would scorch the earth as it fell. In the last seconds before he stirred from his sleep he remembered the thing opening it’s mouth to swallow him. When he awoke the dream immediately grew vague, until all that was left was an unshakable sense of despair.
“Gunslinger? You awake, old friend?” King Jon prodded the sleeping adventurer with his cane, “I finished it. I don’t want to think it’s possible, but you’re right.” With the drowsy man awakened the king limped back to his throne, “Where did you find that... Abomination?” the old man leaned back in the throne and began nervously rubbing his temples, “Bandit Coast, right at that big gate near the tower.”, was all the adventurer said, which was met with a heavy sigh after a moment, “They’re just criminals… The world is better off without the lot of them.” King Jon leaned forward in his throne, his guards had long since changed and had been replaced with the boys working the graveyard shift. They weren’t nearly as luminous considering they wouldn’t have a huge impact on the good king’s image, but they were tough looking and armed to the teeth. “It ain’t a way to die, Jon. Don’t just hang your head like some old codger, you know I’m right”, the hero known as Gunslinger had suddenly lost his patience, “I’ve got to leave, there are appointments I’ve got to keep.” He didn’t know how late it was, but the time was unimportant at this point. He’d overstayed his welcome in his mind, “Think about it, old friend. Please.” Gunslinger paused, waiting for a response. His host seemed lost in thought, and at his age, thought was probably something of a labyrinth; his words were heard, though. Of this he had no doubt.
As the hero left the splendid halls of castle Brecknock he was only fazed once when a statue of Jack of Blades caught his eye. He or it (History’s ambiguity as to the nature of Jack of Blades was appalling) had been gone some five-hundred years and yet his name, and the fact that he might have existed, still had the ability to quiet a room. To talk of his deeds could empty it. Gunslinger was well acquainted with the history, and as he passed the statue was visited by an uneasy feeling deep in his chest.
He had seen things that he thought impossible, and knew they were performed by powerful hands, and possibly heroic ones at that.
Dread crept into his heart and he finally perceived the full blackness of the monument he’d seen. Every limb and every head was revolting and disgusting, and the entire event stirred in him age-old feelings of revilement. However when something as dark as that might have the unfortunate incidence of occurring, the magnitude of it’s blackness can never be initially understood.
Gunslinger now bore that understanding. Something horrific was brewing in Albion, something that would make the lunacy of Lucien seem like nothing more than a distant memory.
Perhaps he was being paranoid. Perhaps his mind hadn’t aged as gracefully as his body and he was mistaking an isolated, if gruesome, incident for a warning of mass chaos and bloodshed.
Or perhaps he was right.
That night was colder than many others Gunslinger had faced. At his bed in the Cow and Corset his dreams were vivid and foreboding, as they had an unfortunate habit of being.
He heard a thousand or more voices cry out in pain, pleading for mercy or death, unsure of the difference between the two. All around him was blinding light, and as it faded he could see he stood on the battlements of a castle. Forming a moat around the base was an impossible number of people, all scratching at the doors. He turned to his right, and the wall seemed to extend forever into the distance. Then to his left, and it was the same.
A voice called him from behind using his real name. It was a hollow, evil voice, injected with an eloquence that offended every fiber of the hero’s existence.
As he turned he awoke, his face sticky from whatever happened to be on the inn’s floor that night, which he had toppled onto.
He had a moment of uncomfortable lucidity while picking himself up, but as seconds passed his recollection of the dream began to fade.
In no time at all nothing was left but the vague remembrance of an eerily familiar voice.
How bought Blaze, Blue, Ruby, anything that flows. Cowboys are gunslingers. Sorry I seem to be stuck on the name. :blush: