Throne of Steel

Chapter 7 - Unseemly Ties

Being a prisoner of the Separatists was a harrowing experience. The Commander, Rytlock, Rox and what few legionnaires remained of the Citadel's army were loaded onto carts and shipped into some cave. They kept the survivors' heads wrapped in burlap sacks and were never allowed to see where they were going. If it weren't for someone explicitly saying they were headed for 'the caves', they might not even have picked up on that.

They all tried to escape several times, but the cuffs holding their hands behind their backs sapped the Charr's strength and somehow deprived the Commander of his spellcasting abilities. And they certainly didn't neglect punishing them for these attempts either. When the burlap sacks were taken off of them, they were in a set of narrow corridors, barely wide enough to fit a single Charr, dug either into a mountain or underground.

All the prisoners were dragged into side rooms and tied to chairs. From here, the Separatists would go on to punch them. They repeatedly punched the Commander in the face, enough to bloody his nose several times and to avoid their jaws, they took turns punching and kicking the Charr in the stomach.

Between beatings, they sent in monks or priests to heal their wounds, just so they would stay alive for the next one. No amount of protesting intimidated them, no amount of taunting agitated them enough to make a mistake and no amount of bargaining persuaded their captors to even talk to them.

"Enough games! If you want to interrogate us, cut to the chase and get it over with!" Rytlock tried appealing to reason a lot of times, but it took a solid day of torture for the captors to give him any kind of response. "Let me at your leader and I might divulge a thing or two without a fight!"

Several more people entered the room where the Commander and Rytlock were held. One of them, a Charr with a familiar voice, answered him. "Interrogate? Divulge? You think it's intel we're after?" Much to the Commander's horror, the Charr standing in the middle of the humans was the very person he thought the voice belonged to.

"Siegeblast! I knew you couldn't be trusted! First you sell us out to the Renegades and now you sign up as a goon for those mice too meek to lay hands on us!" Varrock Siegeblast, the same one who replaced the Citadel's intel and was trusted with their siege convoy, stood here uncuffed, untied and side by side with the Separatists. Rytlock never really trusted him and now, his suspicions were fully vindicated.

Varrock ran right at Rytlock, feigned an uppercut punch at his jaw but instead of going through with it, pushed it up from below to line up a sideways hit with his other hand. This punch bloodied Rytlock's jaws and had enough force in it to overcome his weight, tip the chair and send him falling to the side. "A goon, huh? I thought a few hours of getting roughed up by humans would teach you better, it seems like you're still clueless."

Rytlock simply raised his voice further and roared up at him: "Cut the games, crawl back to your leader and tell him we're not talking until he shows up!" Varrock pulled one leg back to build more momentum and gave Rytlock a kick, much stronger than those of the humans and with his claws, inflicted several bloody wounds.

Before this could go any further, the Commander startled him: "Stop! Varrock, I can tell you have some kind of pull here, where's Rox? Where did you take her?"

"The female? She's in one of the other rooms, my friends here have been taking turns trying to punch her ever since you got here. They couldn't manage hitting her even once. They just keep stumbling or missing the mark, it sure was a sight to behold. Either she's got the world's best survival instincts or some kind of god or spirit gave her one hell of a blessing."

While one of the monks got to healing up Rytlock's jaws, but that didn't stop the Tribune from writhing on the floor and continuously screaming at Varrock. "Worthless traitor! That 'second fiddle' talk on the battlefield - that was you, wasn't it? How's it feel to play second fiddle to humans?" Varrock tried giving Rytlock another kick, but that only managed to startle him for a moment. "What do you think you're getting out of this? You here for the Renegades, huh? You had your quick centurion rank and all the special treatment, why give that up to settle for Renegades?"

"You still don't get it, do you? I didn't leave Iron Legion to join the Renegades. I joined Iron Legion to collect intel for the Renegades. Pull him back up." The humans grabbed onto Rytlock's chair by the lean and the side and raised it back on its legs so that Varrock could see eye to eye with him.

Getting pulled back up only spurred Rytlock on into antagonizing Varrock further. "Who in their right mind would even want to be a Renegade? What's the point of your whole cause? You want us to go back to our old ways? What old ways, turning Ascalon into a perpetual warzone?"

Right then, Varrock took two decisive steps forward and threw a powerful swing at the same side of Rytlock's face again, but now with enough force to launch him a little further. He stepped aside to where the Tribune had fallen and lowered himself to talk to him from up close. "TURNING it into one? When has Ascalon ever NOT been a warzone? Ignorance is bliss I guess. Coming to Ascalon was a mistake. A dark chapter that our ancestors were so ashamed of, that most of us have long forgotten why we came here to begin with."

"We took back what was ours, what's there to be ashamed of?"

Varrock wagged his index finger at him. "There's that ignorance again. You know, I grew up believing the exact same thing. We all did, didn't we? I was wrong. We all were. But unlike you, I was able to accept that."

"So what, I'm supposed to believe you're against Charr being in Ascalon? Is that why you're working for the Separatists? To drive the Charr back north? To throw away everything we've fought for, destroy everything we've built here?"

A furious snort escaped the centurion and in a fit of rage, he gave the Tribune another kick in the stomach. He snarled at Rytlock and spoke with increasing anger, to the point where he screamed at him towards the end: "We've spent centuries in this barren husk of a land, wasting what little resources we can carve off of it, fighting wars we don't need, against enemies we shouldn't have, ALL TO HOLD ONTO A LAND THAT ISN'T EVEN OURS!"

"Every man who ever taught me of our history, would disagree. Ascalon has always belonged to the Charr until the humans took it from us."

The Commander added: "The same goes for any historian I've spoken to before."

Varrock stared at both of them with an expression that bore both disdain and frustration. Humans and Charr, in fact all the peoples of Central Tyria were in rough agreement on the historical accounts they were referring to. The common belief as taught in every school and written in every history book, was that King Adelbern took Ascalon from the Charr, drove them north and then built the entire kingdom of Ascalon within the span of his twenty-year tenure before the Charr incinerated the entire country using the 'Searing Cauldron'.

But clearly, Varrock had some other ideas about it. "Believe whatever comforts you for as long as you can. Won't have that choice for long."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that I'm having the Separatists ship you off to travel with Flame Legion. We're taking a southern path through Ashford and make a stop at the catacombs. Which is where you guys will learn a thing or two."

"Why would they listen to you? They could use us as leverage to pressure Kryta into sending them aid."

"If you haven't figured it out yet, you won't believe me even if I told you. But I'll give it a try with the Commander." He nodded towards the Commander. "Untie him but leave his cuffs on. Keep the Tribune here and keep an eye on him." And without any reservations about it, the disheveled Separatists did as he told them.

Rytlock protested: "If you're going to give your guests a tour, why not both of us?"

"So you can make a break for it? I don't think so. The human seems more cooperative." He turned to the Commander. "If you want answers, you'll play nice. Anything you want to know besides actual intel like hideout locations, I'll be happy to tell you."

The guards untied the Commander and wiped the blood off his face. With two armed Separatists following from behind, the Commander was led through the narrow and dimly lit caves. The intricate network of straightforward tunnels was barely wider than a corridor in a human house. In some places, the Charr had to pay attention to not bang his horns against the ceiling or the edges on the sides.

Without turning around, the Charr asked his prisoner: "So, got any questions for on the way?"

"Maybe one: I thought I was on pretty good terms with the Separatists in Kryta, but now I'm being taken prisoner. Why didn't Count Aldryn set me up to make contact with you? Are the Krytan and Ascalonian Separatists separate movements?"

"Not entirely. Different faction, different goals. Krytans got what they wanted so that's nice and all, but the Ascalonians are still short of a home country."

"Perhaps I didn't phrase it correctly. Why don't the Ascalonian and Krytan Separatists work together?"

"They do, where it matters. They just don't share more intel than they have to. That illusion you saw before the attack? And the fake Imperator? Most of the mesmers involved in casting those came straight from Kryta. Arrived a little before you did."

"But if the Krytan ones were plotting against the Citadel like this, why send me as an ambassador?"

"Because at the time, we didn't know for sure that you'd come here, or when. Besides, the Citadel or even the Charr in general aren't their enemy, it's who is in control of it that's the problem. "

"You mean Smodur?"

"If only Smodur were in charge. The way he's regressed by this point, he can't even take two steps without the cabbages holding his hand. And here we are." They arrived in a much more spacious room with several wooden tables, maps, writing utensils, shelves full of books and stacks of paper. The walls were more uneven than in the hallways and were covered in drapes of cloth.

Varrock grabbed one of the chairs arranged around the tables and gestured towards the rest. "Please, take a seat. I'm sure you want to know why I'm here and why we're doing what we're doing. I don't expect you to believe a word I say, but I'm not letting you claim that we're leaving you in the dark."

"All right. So what is your relation to Count Aldryn?"

"For that, I'll have to go all the way back to how I got involved in all this. The name 'Siegeblast' is made up. I have spent most of my life since the Fahrar as a wandering gladium. I didn't like how the legions went about demanding that you close ranks around one another and I couldn't get into settling down on the countryside either. So I just hired on as a sellsword, to fend off wildlife for Durmand Priory."

He continued. "Obviously a lot of that was just clearing out gravelings in the catacombs. Until I went a little too deep and stumbled on something they failed to mention. I found a wing of archives and a lot of ways to get to it. And there I learned things about Ascalon's history, things that changed me. Things that most of us wouldn't believe because the lies we take for granted are all they ever knew."

"What things?"

"You'll find out soon enough. The Flame Legion's new Imperator owes me a lot of favors and I'm calling in a few of those, just to show you. What matters is that once you know, everything we do here, all the fights, all the excuses for farmland, it's all completely pointless if you put it in perspective. I couldn't keep going on knowing what I knew, so I didn't. Something had to change and as things stood, I couldn't make that happen. Not on my own at least."

He got up, went to a large map of Central Tyria that hung on the wall and drew a route with his claw. "I went out to search for like minds. Wound up all the way past the Shiverpeaks, in Kryta, where I stumbled on the Separatists."

"This must have been a very rocky encounter."

"You would assume so, but the Separatists of then were pushovers. Valid cause, but they lacked a spine. They didn't have what it took to follow through with what they wanted. What they needed was a strong hand to lead them, so I worked for them for as long as I had to until I could meet with their leaders. All five of them in one cave, far away from any Seraph or Shining Blade."

"So how did you convince them to change?"

Varrock grinned. "I didn't." He went to one of the drapes covering the walls on the other side of the room. He ripped the curtain off the wall and revealed a wooden board hanging on it with five severed heads, all still with the horror of their last moments breaking through their disfigured and rotted faces. "I killed them. I locked them behind a door with me and then gutted them one by one like fish! I usurped the entire top echelon of the movement and reminded the rest of their weak leadership by lining an entire wall with their heads!"

The Charr spread out his arms and loudly announced: "You want to speak to the Separatists' leader? You're looking at him right now!"

The Commander wasn't sure what to say. "But - but you're a Charr - a Charr that's a Human Separatist?"

Varrock burst out laughing. "If you think that's crazy, we've got humans that are Charr Renegades!"

"Then what about Aldryn?"

"Therol's an opportunist. But he saw eye-to-eye with me more than any of their leaders at the time. He was waiting for someone like me to come along, he helped me pull it off and I've got to say it worked out perfectly for him in the end. From there, with an army of my own, I came back to Ascalon and did the exact same thing with the Renegades, except that I was better prepared, so I could go about it much faster."

He then returned to his chair. "From that point, the only groups still in the way are the legions. Luckily for me, the Citadel's trust in Ash Legion is their biggest weakness. The legions are so scared of offending Ash Legion that they refuse to point out how they go about gathering intel. See the trick is, they're loyal to no-one and they're all massive tattletales. Anything your side lets an Ash Legion Charr know, the enemy will catch wind of soon later and vice versa."

He put his hands together and then moved them apart as he went on. "So all I had to do was split the Renegades into two chapters. A smaller one made up mostly of Ash Legion who are told nothing and whom I use to keep an eye on the legions and one completely without Ash legionnaires who carry out actual operations. It's easy to outmaneuver the enemy when all of their intel is false."

"What about the convoy?"

"Half the people in it were plants. Since we knew where the convoy was headed, jumping the rest was easy. Those weapons we shelled the legions' army with? All the Citadel's very own weaponry. So now the situation in Ascalon is completely flipped. The legions' main force is obliterated, all their warmachines are at our disposal and our new alliance, the Axis Infernalis is marching for the gates of the Black Citadel. We'll take the front door and there is little they can do to stop us!"

"They still have the Citadel's defenses, don't think they'll just let you through."

"They can close the gates all they want, but all those are, is a bunch of metal plates and metal can melt."

A silence took hold between them, at least for until the Commander ran out of patience. "So where do we go from here?"

"You'll join the Flame Legion as prisoners, at least until we get to the catacombs. What happens after that is between you and Baelfire." It wasn't long from here, until they made all the prisoners ready for transport again. Varrock had told the truth about Rox, she was completely unharmed by the time the prisoners saw each other.