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RogueKazimeras Vice Captain
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 Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 7:00 pm
The docks reek of salt and fish and sweat and all other things associated with ships. Various vessels can be seen sailing in and out of port at almost any given time, with well-experienced dockworkers shouting out to guide ships in. At night, light is cast upon this district periodically by the lighthouse that rests out on a crag that branches off from the mainland, peering into the ocean.
The docks themselves are a loading and unloading zone for goods, which are then transported to the marketplace next to this district for sale. There are also various places here where goods are prepared for the market. And of course, this is where the fishermen and privateers make their homes, close to the sea. They live largely in poverty, but happy with the ocean visible from any east-facing window.
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Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 8:58 pm
A spray of blood hit the wooden floor.
"I'm going to ask you one more time."
"I... by the Goddess I cannot speak it." The man tied to the chair said breathlessly.
His face was met with another blow, this time a tooth hit the floor.
"Please!" The man said, his mouth dripping with blood.
"Talk." Lankester stood before the man, cracking his knuckles. He was just getting started. Honestly the man wouldn't make it out of this alive. If he talked, he would die, and if he didn't talk, well, the beatings would kill him eventually.
Lankester didn't give a damn if the man talked or not, he was certain he was no more than a layman within the ranks of the Redhands, but he'd still have his fun either way. The muscular man stalked around the chair, and grabbed the man's skull, holding him fast. "I can snap your neck like a twig and leave you here in this godforsaken rat hole till the guards find your rotting corpse." Lankester said, and he could feel the man sweat more and more. He let go. "Now talk. Where's your guild's base?" Lankester stalked around the chair again, standing in front of the man, knuckles still bloodied. It wasn't Lankester's blood.
"It's... ...in the Slums."
The fist connected again, and there was a popping of bone and sinew.
"I know that, idiot!" Lankester spat on the man's dislocated jaw. "Your entire guild infests that damn shithole with your stupid dances about your Goddess and how she'll kill the Allfather and all that sort of s**t." The burly Spinesever slapped the man in the face, forcing the dislocated jaw back into position... more or less.
It was now apparent that talking alone was agonizing for the man in the chair, and he was shaking, visibly, wearing only a pair of tattered cloth pants that were wet around his crotch. He reeked of his own filth.
"You damn Redhands are all the same... Talking so big about your Goddess and how she's so great... where's your Goddess now, hm?" Lankester smiled, showing his pearly whites... despite that some of them were missing. His tattoo bent in a sinister fashion when he grinned at the man.
"Eh? Where is she?" He spread his arms wide, as if in invitation. "If she's so damn powerful, why can't she strike me down and save you?" He flexed slightly, stretching, and grinned again.
"Listen, fella. It's been a long day of beating your a** so let's finish up. Tell me where the Redhand headquarters is... and I'll let you go." He lied. He had no intention of doing so.
"You'll let... you'll let me live?" The man said, pain evident in his voice.
"...Sure." Lankester said, putting on his best bluffing face.
"Very well..."
The man began instructions on how to reach the Redhand guild home from the docks, which were long, drawn out, and long-winded for a man with a broken jaw. Lankester took this time to turn around, listening to the man drone on, to wash his hands in a bowl of water, not wanting the blood to cake around the hairs that lined the back of his hands.
After all, where was a man tied to a chair going to go?
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RogueKazimeras Vice Captain
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Posted: Sat Jan 12, 2008 9:37 pm
Atonement comes at a high price for the heretic.
Hazel eyes peered from beneath the opaque cloak, the shadows about the rafters clustering around her thin frame as if she were a beacon of the night, a manifestation of heavy fog save for the shining of the twin scimitars at her hips, the vicious gleam in her gaze. She padded across the thin, wooden beams with the softest of steps, her body coiling from its once-slouching position like a serpent, a hiss of disapproval escaping her tautly pressed lips as the Redhand layman uttered the directions of their guild with meticulous detail. It disgusted her being, filled her innards with noxious hatred and wrath towards the little underling, seeped from her pores in all its venomous, pathetic disgrace--
To think he had ever graced the Goddess's presence within the Redhands. To think he had ever worshiped her, a part of their sacred community, had participated in the rituals, the blood-letting, the branding. He was the embodiment of filth, even filthier than the heavy-set man who was torturing him, for he had been loyal, faithful, an ultimately useful pawn for the guild.
And now he was threatening the stability of her home, the sacred presence of the Goddess Herself.
Disraeli's lip curled as she withdrew a scimitar from her left hip, its curved body gleaming against the half-moon as an astral omen of death. The man's time on this Earth was up; he had determined such when allowing himself the vulnerability of being caught. She watched with narrowed eyes as the heavyset man turned the girth of his intimidating body towards the waters, presumably to wash, and Disraeli knew this would be her only chance. Pressing her weight into the balls of her feet, she leapt from the rafter with a quiet grunt and sailed through the air, twisting her body in a half-circle so as to land, again, on her feet with the softest of sounds.
With an appraising, careful stare towards the preoccupied torturer, Disraeli pulled her cloak as far up towards her eyes as it would go, nearly completely concealing herself in darkness with the twisting and writhing of the shadows surrounding the two men. The layman would pause in his frantic, slurred speech to groan in abrupt pain, the blood along his being carrying a sickening stench; a stench known to only the worst of cowards, the filthiest of sub-humans.
It sickened her. The way he twisted and writhed within his chair as a worm struggling away from its predator, the way his broken jaw moved forward as if a mechanical testament to weakness, the way he stared so desperately at the man who would undoubtedly kill him when he finished betraying his Goddess...it sickened her, this foul naivety. She pranced forward in a mere second, and as the tortured layman turned, obviously having sensed another presence by the shifting of the light and shadow, watched her then with an abrupt widening of his eyes, a sudden gasp from his lips.
All he could see was a pair of yellow eyes gazing at him through the darkness; his face lost all remnants of color, resembling the wax, lifeless stare of a soon-to-be-corpse, and yet, even then, a gleam of ignorant hope shone in those poor little filthy eyes,
"G-god-...d-dess...?"
The scimitar shot forward, doing the duty with a quick flick of her wrist; then twice, thrice more, red sprays of blood bursting into the stale air, the man's eyes twisting and writhing in their sockets as if in a desperate dance with his body for life, his mouth opening into a contorted O, his body slumping backwards, lax and doll-like, into the chair. Her sword had made a gashing, ripping sort of noise, yet quiet enough that she prayed the man before her would not have heard--and it was a quick death, really, in a matter of mere minutes.
"Heretic filth,"
She hissed into the unhearing ear, before disappearing against the darkness and rushing with the quickest speed her nimble feet could allow outside of the Docks, back into the outer reaches of the Slums, never stopping to examine her work, never catching a breath until she was well out of the reach of the large-bodied man. As she finally slowed down against the darkness of the night, a low, almost pleasured sigh escaped her lips; her eyes shut and a smile twisted across her scarred mouth as the sound of the frightened layman's voice and the desperate look in his eyes filled her mind, again and again.
She had atoned the heretic through death--and it was good. Disraeli brought the bloodied blade to her lips, feeling a bit of divinity in those scarlet drops, and knew the Goddess would have been pleased.
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Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 5:39 pm
"And... when you get to the Docks..." The man continued, but silenced himself.
Lankester moved his hands through the bowl of water, making sure to get every drop of blood and snot that had accumulated on his hands was purged from his flesh, watching it mix in with the water. His hands made the slightest splash in the water, and for a few moments he thought he imagined the slightest swishing sound that accompanied each stroke of his hands beneath the crystalline water in that bowl, the water which was slowly leaking into a cloudy crimson.
"Then...?" Lankester asked, not turning around. There were a few moments of silence.
"AND THEN?!" Lankester asked, infuriated.
He turned around after drying his hands on his crimson sash, and raised an eyebrow. The man was sliced open, multiple times, and no apparent culprit was in sight. His fists relaxed. "Well, I'll be damned." He shrugged.
"I was gonna kill the poor b*****d anyway." He shook his head and turned around, finding the door to the warehouse. He wouldn't bother cleaning up the mess; he'd leave him as an example. It was better that way.
He stretched for a moment, and slid the wooden door open, inhaling the fumes that the sea gave off, relishing the salt in the very air. He slid the door closed behind him, and drew his cloak, which had been thrown over his shoulder, around him. He slipped his hands into a pair of gloves which had been resting in the pockets of his heavy woolen pants, and clasped his cloak shut against the wind, which was picking up. Many people in the docks were already inside but he noticed a few scurrying to the sanctuary of their homes. It was dark, and there was a storm coming.
Lankester wasn't concerned for the storm, he actually planned on using it to hide his path to the Spinesever guild house.
Then a thought hit him. What better way to warm up after handing some a** to someone than with a nice drink? The docks had one tavern in particular, which was known as the Salty Dog Tavern. It wasn't a particularly ritzy tavern, as a matter of fact it was one of the worst taverns in Kingsreach. But it was there, the booze was cheap, and Lankester wasn't exactly a rich man to begin with.
Besides, after awhile, all the booze started to taste the same.
He approached the tavern as the snow began to fall, the wind blowing it in spirals against the cobblestone paths of the Docks district, and opened the door. The crowd was thinner that night, and Lankester eased up to the bar and ordered himself a drink.
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RogueKazimeras Vice Captain
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