Monster Party Book Eight: Look down, look down, you're standing in your grave.
AN: Yes, for once I'm doing these at the start of the chapter rather than the end. First of all recapping my last story was getting boring, so we're going to jump straight into this one.
That said this story is going to be based off of Death Unchained and take place in Falkovnia therefor I must advise trigger warnings for Fascism and or military dictatorships and the effects of said forms of rule have on the people who have to live under them. Yes, most of Ravenloft is dark fantasy, but this Falkovnia makes Westeros look like Middle Earth if you get what I'm saying…..
Stuff is gonna get dark people… so, without further ado, welcome to what is going to be the darkest story that I intend to write. I'm gonna mark this one "M" rather than "T" just because of how dark the themes are, but that's just a rough guess on my part, don't expect to see explicit sex scenes or anything….
Anyway without further ado lets take a trip to the breadbasket of the Core… it won't be anywhere near as nice as it sounds on paper...
Chapter one: A nation in despair, weakened by war...
There are a lot of ways to die. Some people don't even realize that they're experiencing one of them, either because they go peacefully in their sleep or the means of their demise has removed their ability to think clearly or death strikes so swiftly that no rational thought can be formed.
Most of those people are lucky.
Some people are all too aware of the fact that they're dying and very few of them feel lucky about the prospect.
Death often comes quickly and violently, but in a few rare cases death comes slowly and violently. No one experiencing such a fate feels lucky about the prospect.
Ilona Beglitzi most certainly does not. A simple woman, whose hair had just begun to turn gray with age, and will not have a chance to see it grow any grayer.
She is hanging roughly ten feet off the ground in the center of one of Lekar's many large public square. A pike has been driven through her stomach hefting her up into the air, and then she was left to allow gravity to slowly pull her down the weapon's length ripping her apart inch by inch.
She and her daughter Smaranda had the misfortune of drawing the attention of one of city's military elite, the Talons' of Vlad Drakov. The man wanted to have his way with Smaranda.
All resisting his lecherous desires earned Smaranda was that both of them would be impaled after the Talon was finished taking whatever pleasure he desired from the young girl's body.
Likely every single person (and there are over three dozen of them) imapled next to Ilona might have a similar story to tell, if they weren't already dead.
Life in the lands of the Mists has few happy endings, but it seems that a great many of the shortest, saddest, and most brutal stories unfold in the kingdom of Falkovnia. It is less of a true kingdom though, then simply one large military camp. It is a land of backbreaking labor, combined with the endless abuse any time one is unfortunante enough to draw the attention of those with power. Natrually, the only way to gain any for oneself is to join the military which so oppresses the nation, in the process also opening oneself up to the prospect of death in a foreign land as part of the Kingfuhrer's latest invasion.
If Vlad Drakov was not so vehement in his hatred of those who practiced magic (and indeed even in the face of his well known prejudice against mages of every stripe from wizards to sorcerers to clerics or druids) it would be easy to suspect him of secretly conducting some sort of massive horrific blood powered ritual. How else could one find any sort of a reason for the oceans of blood that Vlad has ordered to be spilled, especially given that more of it ended up belonging to his own subjects than to his enemies.
Falkovnia is a land where each day of life is another hard fought and precious victory… though many outsiders might consider it pyrrhic in the extreme as all that has been one is another day of life in Falkovnia.
Ilona Beglitzi has no victories in her future, she has no future at all.
Someone else, someone who had not lived their entire lives expecting such a horrific and violent end would be screaming themselves horse in the face of the torment that she is undergoing.
Even though she is alone (save for the other impaled bodies) in the square Ilona will not give the soldiers who did this to her, wherever they now are (she could have been impaled hours ago, she could have been impaled minutes ago, when your entire body is wracked with pain accurately messuring the passage of time is the least of your concerns) she would not give them the satisfaction of her screams.
So she hung there suffering in silence, awaiting her final inevitable fate.
It took something truly unexpected to make her speak up…. Something like a cloud of white mist arising from seemingly nowhere, and people stumbling out of that cloud who hadn't been there a few moments ago.
She can't see the people very clearly, some of that was her age, some the pain that made hard to think clearly, and some simply the fact that it was well past sunset and only a few weak lamps lit the street.
Ilona had no idea who these people were. She does not care who these people were, she was beyond saving, she was beyond any further torment, for how could she be made to suffer more than she already has?
"My daughter..." She whispered, her words faint and swiftly followed by her coughing out a small puddle of blood as even more of it drained from the from her stomach.
The people, assuming they were people at all, were indistinct fuzzy blobs to Ilona. One of the larger ones turned in her direction, she could make out colors a little more clearly than she could shapes, this blob was mostly black and silver.
"Is she still alive?" Ilona pleaded pathetically.
"Which one is she?" The blob shifted slightly, maybe it was doing something with its hands.
Such vauge gestures were how Ilona might have tried to convey the impossibilty of picking one random person out among the forest of dead and dying that surrounded them.
"Blue ribbon…. In her hair." Ilona choked out before coughing up still more blood.
The black and silver blob moved around and began to inspect the other impaled bodies. After a while it returned to Ilona's side.
"Already dead. They did a 'poor' job impaling her, it went through her heart, she would have died quickly." The blob answered her.
Ilona smiled despite her suffering. At first.
Then her face turned cold and cruel as she gazed out at an ever dimming world.
"A curse upon the Talons! May they drown in the blood they so freely shed!" Ilona declared, knowing she would never live to see if such a prophecy came true, if such a thing even could come true.
She was a simple peasant, not some enigmatic Vistana whose dying curse might be assured to inevitably strike those she invoked it upon.
She began to awkwardly shake one of her hands, even though it required a great deal of effort and sent fresh jolts of pain through her.
"My wedding ring. Don't need it anymore. My husband Matthias, the Laborer's quarter, the one with the M&I engraved on the door, tell him is wife and daughter were innocent of any crime. May he protect you, even if he couldn't protect us." Ilona Beglitzi gasped.
Then, having done what pitifully little she could to help these new arrivals, she closed her eyes, never to open them again.
XXX XXX XXX
Alexander Diamondclaw was a tall man with silver hair. He is left eye was a bright green, his right was covered by a black eye-patch. He was wearing a black overcoat cut in a vaguely martial manner and engraved with silver runes.
Seeing that the poor impaled woman who had been talking to a moment ago had died, he reached up a black gloved hand and gently removed the simple copper band that she wore as a wedding ring. He would not deny this woman a chance to have her and her family find some small measure of vengeance against those who had ended her life so cruelly, even if it was only by hiding others from the Talon's gaze.
"I live to hunt rats, it is my job… but at the end of the day what are hawks but rats with wings? Well wings, and big pointy beaks that they stab things with..." Muttered a young man dressed all in red with soulful brown eyes.
"You aren't the only one James." Answered a mostly (it had a single white stripe running down the middle) black haired woman.
Well some of Alexander Diamondclaw's small adventuring group were handling the realization that they'd suddenly been transported to some city within Falkovnia's borders with relative calmness (and why not, it wasn't the first time they'd been transported by an ineffable cloud of mist) others were a bit more put off.
To put it mildly.
"My ears. My fucking ears! My fucking ears Cal! Where in the name of all those stupid powerless gods are my fucking ears?" Demanded Devi Skye as she pounded her hands against the chest of Callan "Cal" Wright.
Devi Skye blue hair that didn't quite cover her ears. Her ears that came to pointed tips making it clear that she was an elf.
Cal Wright on the other hand was a mostly unremarkable looking human with dirty blond hair and blue eyes. If anything about his physical appearance stood out it was the icy coldness of his blue eyes made all the more dramatic by the spectacles he wore. The other unusual thing about his was not his body, but his choice of weapon.
Strapped to Cal's back was a firearm, not that anyone in Falkovnia would be likely to tell one gun from another, but a person from a land more familiar with such weapons would be likely to note that Cal Wright's weapon had a certain serpentine slenderness about it.
As Devi's blue hands continued to pound away at his chest with a frantic energy, Cal gestured awkwardly towards the simple brown bag that Devi was wearing on her hip.
"They're in you bag Devi, that sort of thing is always in your bag, why did you expect me to have them?`" He protested.
Devi's breathing hesitantly began to slow down from its breakneck pace and she turned her attention to the bag in question.
Her blue gloved hands dove into with all possible haste and shuffled around in it, to Devi Skye it seemed to take forever, but to everyone else it couldn't have been more ten seconds. From the bag she eventually pulled a pair of carefully crafted ears and slid them nearly on top of her own. The prosthetic would not pass truly close and meticulous inspection, but they would be enough to keep anyone from recognizing that she was an elf at first glance. That done she began to dig her hands into the roughly cobbled stoned street with a desperate hungry.
"Dirt and mud, there is safety in dirt and mud. We're all too bright right now, too f**king bright. We need to look like everybody else. Look like everybody else, they can't kill everyone in the country, they need to leave SOMEONE alive to make the bread they eat! Look like everyone else, act like everyone else, don't let them notice you, don't let them even consider the possibility that you exist!" She insisted with a desperate gleam in her eye as she began to liberally slap mud and dirt onto her blue outfit.
"Devi, what can we do to help?" Asked Florence Bastien. The blond haired (though it looked rather more like straw than normal human hair) woman was dressed in a green leotard like outfit and had soft blue eyes. She hadn't bothered with any sort of pointless questions like "are you all right" not when the fact that Devi was anything but all right was painfully obvious.
"You all need to get your outfits dirty, now!" Insisted Devi as she continued to deliberately deface her clothing.
Cal Wright took only a moment to consider this another moment to consider arguing, then began to follow Devi's advice.
In short order the rest of the group began to do the same.
Before they could finish however the less than quiet process of ripping up the street drew the attention of unwelcome outsiders.
Four men stepped into the public square, each wearing a quilted doublet of blood-red velvet, dark breaches, a black iron bracer on each wrist, and a swirling black cape trimmed with red. One of the men had eyes that glowed in the dark like a cat's and he was the one who spoke first.
"Halt this disturbance at once! You have broken Kingfuhrer's curfew! Bare your ankles and prepare to receive punishment!" He insisted as he began to draw a longsword from the scabbard he wore at his hip.
As he did so moonlight glinted off of his bared blade, and also off of the large sword resting in a scabbard across Alexander's back.
"They carry weapons freely, kill them!" Insisted another of the men as he drew his own sword.
The six adventurers ceased their efforts to dirty themselves with the earth of Falkovnia and stood up.
"Falkovnian Talons." Reflected Cal Wright.
"I hate Falkovnian Talons..." Muttered James Firecat.
The long two handed blade slid free of its sheath and into Alexander's hands. Florence Bastien raised what seemed to be a simple staff without a trace of hesitation. Cal Wright shifted his firearm around and brought it to bear on the soldiers. Devi Skye twisted her wrists and what might have first in the dark seemed to be an especially large and ornate bracelet untwisted itself into a waiting flail. James Firecat's crimson jacket parted revealing that its insides had been sewn with a multitude of pockets and sheaths, inside which a multitude of knives resided. Mirri Catwarrior simply raised her bare hands in preparation for the coming battle, and smiled… or at least she spread her lips and showed her teeth.
XXX XXX XXX
The next morning, there were four more dead people in Lekar than there should have been… not that anyone was likely to do an exact count. Still, people were likely to notice that these bodies had been stripped completely naked.
That was strange enough, but the fact that they were laying beneath the many impaled bodies rather than jammed onto poles themselves was even stranger.
The strangest thing about the four dead bodies would only have been noticed if someone skill in the healing arts bothered to check the bodies, (which they wouldn't) that person might have realized that these four bodies lacked any clear obvious wounds from which they might have perished. They each bore minor fres injuries suggesting that they had taken part in a fight recently but nothing that should have had any chance of killing them.
If that person had been incredibly skilled (or been willing to cut the already dead bodies open) they might have realized that the cause of death had not even had anything to do with blood loss, quite the opposite in fact.
All four men had died from an excess build up of liquid in their lungs…. They had been knocked unconscious and drowned in the pools of blood that built up beneath the forest of impaled bodies.
End Chapter one.
AN: Like I said at the start, welcome to Falkovnia excrement will proceed in a downwards direction.
