So, new story here. This one will focus on more obscure characters for the most part - the main character, Guillotine, is from the game Marvel Contest of Champions; other characters involved will include Punisher, Blade, and Dr. Strange, as well as a few OC's. If that isn't your thing, get out. If it is, enjoy!
A squall ravaged the North Atlantic, whipping waves into a wild frenzy, madly pursuing any of the seabirds foolish enough - or slow enough - to be caught close to it. One such bird, a gull, struggled to get away from the wind, its wings straining, tendons popping. It was headed home, but the storm was nearly upon it. Home was in sight, now, and growing closer, a flat, oblong piece of land only a few square miles in size, sparsely forested, with an ancient stronghold of crumbling stone rising out of the center. It was for this stronghold the gull was aiming; on the leeward side it had built its nest. There it would be protected. But the gull felt its strength flagging, and, buffeted by the fierce wind it began to descend, slowly at first, then faster, until it lost control entirely and crashed, a ball of feathers, into the ocean, drowning mere yards from the safety if the shore.
The squall, too, rushed toward the stronghold, but unlike the gull it reached its mark. Its windy regiments dashed themselves against the high outer walls, stumbled on the cobblestone paths in the forest, flattened one of a set of decrepit straw huts located at the island's extreme end, and then carried on on its journey, searching for more vulnerable prey.
Inside the stronghold, a worse storm was brewing.
Jeannie Sauvage, a young frenchwoman with flaming red hair and eyes to match, sat silently on a large, ornate, and supremely uncomfortable chair at the end of a high-ceilinged hall. The room had at one time been a throne room, where her ancestors, the kings of some island empire, had sat, receiving grovelling serfs, hearing their faint pleas for help and for mercy, and had dispensed judgement. Now, however, it was merely a large, empty room, silent but for the muffled screeches of the wind outside and the faint, tremulous echoes of Sauvage's rapid breathing.
A room for thinking, for privacy, away from the bustling noise inside the stronghold: the murmurs of secret conferences, the shouts of public debates, the clattering of cutlery, and the rending crashes of weapons being swung or discharged.
Across Sauvage's knees lay a large, grey sword with a crimson spine, the edges caked with thick, brown scabs of blood, recently spilled, recently dried. Across her face lay the last vestiges of horror - the horror of seeing evil long forgotten, but this emotion was soon replaced with a grim determination.
The sword's appearance led Sauvage's mind back to a day long past. She was ten, a little girl who lived in this same castle, alone save for her father, an enormous man who was nonetheless disproportionately strong and violent. But he loved his daughter, and she loved him back. He showed his love for her not by pampering her - her large, sparsely decorated bedroom was one of the smallest in the castle, and she had few things of her own - but by pushing her, always challenging her to be better. He was strict but he said that he loved her.
Every night the little girl would hear her father's footsteps caressing the floor in the hall above her room, trying to convince it to stay quiet. He walked to the end of the hall, to the ornate oaken door that always stayed locked at the hall's end, and eventually, after some minutes, walked out again, his steps heavier, quicker, and still (he thought) unnoticed. A door on the ground floor would open and shut loudly. It would be near morning by the time he returned.
One night, the footsteps never left the study.
In the morning, Jeannie awoke. She made her and her father breakfast. He always awoke at nine like clockwork, came down hungry. She liked to have food ready for him when he did - if he had had a long night, and had nothing to eat, he got angry. But he didn't come. She remembered how he had never returned from the door at the end of the hallway and so she climbed, climbed up four flights of stairs slowly and apprehensively, walked down the hallway to where the thick oaken door hung slightly ajar. She pushed it open further, took a step forward, and found herself in a dark, oppressive room. It was empty but for a reddish-brown rug, a plush chair, and a desk made out of a strange black wood. The walls were lined with books - some with French titles, some with English titles, some with titles spelled in strange, cryptic characters.
Her father was there too, there in body at least, but he was quite clearly dead. A huge hole in his chest, and in the chair he lay slumped in, unnatural in its diamond-shaped symmetry, revealed a fire, burning bright red in the hearth behind him. His blood formed a pool on the rug and the hard floor around it, giving the carpet its reddish hue.
All this, all her surroundings, were only noticed later. Her gaze, the first time she was in the room, was drawn inexorably to the artefact that lay on the desk. It was a sword, enormous in size, longer than she was tall but proportionately narrow. It was a dull grey, like unrefined iron, but it had a crimson blood channel, shocking in its brightness. Its hilt was leather. Where the blade met the crossguard there was a ruby skull with glistening eyes. The sword was caked with thick brown scabs of blood - her father's blood. It had destroyed him, and there it sat on the desk.
Unbidden, Sauvage walked toward it, her small bare feet almost slipping in the thick, wet puddle on the floor. She grasped the hilt of the sword - and screamed, because a shooting pain filled her hand and she yanked it away and it, too, was covered with blood, this time her own. But then the blood began to shimmer, and fade, and Jeannie realised that it was soaking into her hand, somehow returning inside of her.
That was when the voices started. There was a great choir of them, a cacophony of voices, each repeating a different phrase. Some warned her of coming danger. Some threatened her. The loudest voices, however, told her how she needed to take the sword and use it to kill and gain power unless…
"Unless," came her father's voice one night "Unless you want to die like I did."
She grew up like this, spending a decade alone in a darkened stronghold, alone except for the dark whispers of fell spirits in her ears. She knew that the sword was a weapon of some ancient evil - she learned its whole sordid history from the voices that issued out of it, following her everywhere she went.
She went often to the room, but she never again touched La Fleur Du Mal. She never wanted to. Not for years.