Sorry, I've been quite busy this week and last, but here is the next post. This one is a follow up to the escape from the Prison to the character. Said character i changed to be dubbed "The General" as you may recall. As per usual, this is a rough unedited draft, so keep that in mind.
Chapter 1 Cont.
Lorn to his credit didn’t blench. The General had once made greater men wither beneath his gaze. Lorn sneered back, holding the Graft of Command in his hand. Such a tool wasn’t terribly useful down here in the rocks and stone of whatever dwarven hold this had once been. No plants or animals to control. The white shaggy bear druid on the other hand, his Graft of Shifting allowed him to transform into the feral beast that now stood in front of him. The General didn’t know which druid that made him. A large portion of the druids in the Tomb were shifters.
“You should have been killed the moment you were captured, you freak. I guess we’ll just have to take the pleasure for that ourselves then,” Lorn said. In a deft motion, he pulled a labyrinth mace from his side, bringing it up to his side. “Get the doorstop, Kel. The cosmic bastard is mine.”
Ah, that explained it. Kel was another of the warden’s cronies. Kel roared and surged forward in almost fluid motion towards Gromli. Lorn wasted no time either. Druid though he was, he was a master of armed combat with that mace. The General’s own club wasn’t meant for such tight quarters fightinas the labyrinth mace was.
The General didn’t even watch to see what happened to Gromli as Lorn was all over him like a Novenden alfen on a glass of mead. The General had been a master of arms in his heyday, but he had spent the last twenty years languishing below ground. He dodged nowhere near as deftly as he once could have.
Lorn was a frenzy of steel as he hammered at the General with well aimed precise shots that jarred the General’s own club in his hand, sending tingling pains up his arm. The clatter of metal on metal rang in the air as if a demented bell-ringer were with them playing his instrument. The General’s heart thundered in his ears, pumping blood to his system, trying to keep him running long enough to find a flaw in the druid’s attack.
Lorn feinted suddenly and switched the blow of his mace at the last instant. What had once been a downward slam that the General had started to dodge turned into a sideways sweep that glanced off his left arm. He felt a sudden pop as something that shouldn’t break did, pain surged up his arm almost blinding him with agony. He stumbled back, clutching his limp arm. He knew this had always been the problem. Twenty years had left his muscles atrophied and his skills long neglected.
Lorn smirked a fiendish smile and stepped forward after him. The General swung his club with his good hand but without his other arm to counterbalance it, the blow went wide and Lorn casually knocked the weapon out of his grasp.
“They killed your wife for what she was. Spawn of the stars, the unholiest of the unholy. And you had protected her. You were just as bad. No. You were worse. The stars chose her. You abandoned Gaiya to go seek the company of the cosmic touch. That was all your choice,” Lorn snarled. He arced out a leg, catching the General in a blow that knocked him to the floor. He slammed into the wall behind him, and for a moment everything went black.
He was back in Thorozean. Shadows reached across the landscape as the sun slowly dropped down beyond the horizon. Kark and Nark were slowly becoming visible in the sky as the two moons raced each other in their eternal pursuit. Judging by his memory of astronomical events, Kark would soon overtake the other, and leave him far behind, only to eventually come up behind his brother moon in around a month and pass him again. It was the epitome of persistence in the face of overwhelming defeat. Nark always being passed by Kark, yet still advancing forward, never letting anything stop the larger moon. The General didn’t know why he liked the story, but he did.
It was almost a year since the event in the woods. He had taken Leeya and they had fled Blackwell. At best she would be made into one of the Magus. The weapons of war used to fend off the western legions. At worse she would be killed on the spot. She still had no control over her outbreaks. They came and went, and everytime they did, he would make them leave to another area. Thorozean was a lawless country. The king had little control over anything beyond his capital city. It was the perfect place to hide. They had long since been forced to sell their horses for money and had little more beyond the clothes on their backs, a simple tent and the sword at his side.
Leeya sat underneath a large tree, staring out at the rapidly dimishing sun with an inpassive gaze that suggested a blank mind. That’s really all she did then, was stare off into the distance as if she was looking for something. She rarely spoke, and hardly ate. The woman he had fallen in love with had turned into a puppet that was content to play through the motions of life. There had been a wandering vagabond they had encounted out on the trails. His name was Mikal and he was a man out to see the world. The General’s cover story had always been that he was a simple traveler who had encountered Leeya all by herself in the ruins of a farmstead destroyed by raiders. The General had lavished Mikal with tales of finding her caked in blood, and surrounded by the desecrated corpses of her family members. Not one to leave her to his fate, he took her along. Mikal had eaten the story right up.
That was when she had gone into one of her fits. She fell to the ground in convulsions and both the General and Mikal leapt up, one from surprise, the other from fear. Her body acted as a conduit for the forces of the cosmos and the entire field around her was consumed by chaos and fire. A tree vanished in a white burst of light and heat. Soil and grass was lifted into the air, as if suspended by strings when nothing was there. Flames arced out of Leeya’s body as the cosmic forces threatened to annihilate her through sheer strength.
In swift but resigned motions, the General leapt for his sword while Mikal gaped. The wanderer would have known what he seen, and he would run for the authorities. There was nothing else the General could do. As the General spun to hack the man down where he stood, Mikal bolted like a gazelle.The General had chased him for almost a mile but the strength of the adrenaline surge traveling through Mikal allowed the man to run as if the very wolves of the cosmos snapped on his heels, threatening to devour him. The General returned to the camp. Leeya had regained control and sat on the ground gazing off into the distance again. He sat next to her and put his arm around her, knowing there was nothing he could do. The druids arrived the next morning.
A flash of pain and he was back in the Tomb.
“I said get up you worthless bag of mulch! I’m not done with you yet,” Lorn screamed in his face.
The druid slammed his boot into the General’s side again. He dully moaned as his senses returned to him. His head throbbed as if a blacksmith was using his skull for an anvil and he tasted blood in his mouth. His left arm hung limply at his side, and at least one rib was cracked. Pain flared at him from all sides.
“So much for the great Lord of the Fields! The one who so valiantly stood against the Western Legions!” Lorn laughed. The gaunt man knelled down next to him, holding his mace in his offhand while he got close to the General. “So how much of that was really for show, huh? Leading our own boys into the Meatgrinder? Did you enjoy sending them to their deaths? Was it just another act to get as many of our kids killed? Then the sylthanians can come in and walk all over us with their heretical ways? They’d greet you as a savior?”
The General craned his neck to look back at the druid. Lorn’s psychopathic gaze locked onto him and his lips curled up in a sneer. “You got something to say before you die, you karking freak?”
“I loved my wife deeper and more devoutly than a sadist like you could ever imagine,” the General said. He spat directly into the druid’s face a moment later. The spittle splattered into the druid’s eye, punctuating the General’s remarks, and Lorn threw out a curse as he raised his mace for a killing blow.
The shot never came. Gromli’s fist smashed into Lorn’s stomach, knocking the druid back a pace. The mace he had once carried slammed to the ground as his hands shot out under him to keep his balance. The General moved lightning quick, grabbing the mace with his good arm. Before Lorn had a chance to recover, the mace caved in his skull, crunching his head into a formless pulp. The Graft of Command clattered to the floor, glistening with the blood and brains of its once master.
The General leaned up against the wall, gasping in exasperation. He wiped the dripping sweat off his face and shifted his long gangly hair out of his eyes, before he got a good look at Gromli. The gnome was caked in blood, and his clothes had been shredded to a point that the General gaped they even retained some semblance of form.
“You managed to get the shifter,” the General said.
Gromli shrugged and gestured with his chin towards the ruined hulk of the druid. Already the form of the shifter was starting to reassemble back into his human form. The General had no idea how the gnome had managed to tackle such a big opponent, but won he had, and it had not come too soon.
“I knew I couldn’t leave you hanging,” Gromli said.
The General nodded. “I’d do the same for you. Let’s get to the surface.”
Other convicts still swarmed around them as they advanced down the main concourse of the prison. Bodies of both guards and prisoners lay strewn about in a bloody mess, the result of a fierce melee that the General was glad he hadn’t been present to see. There were far more bodies of convicts than there were of guards.
“From here, we’ll break for the forest. We’ll have to go somewhere they won’t expect us to,” the General said.
“To Koldar Hollow?” Gromli asked, referencing the infamous thieves city in Lorhal.
“No, they’d expect us to flee there. No, we head right for Verdesburg,” the General said with a grin. The pain from the gesture made him wince, but it still made him happy to think about it.
“Lorn must have hit you harder than I thought. You’re touched in the head!” Gromli muttered.
“Hit me he did, but where is the last place you’d look? The place closest to your base of operations. Who would be mad enough to hide there?” the General said.
“Us,” Gromli said.
“Right as right,” the General said.
The main concourse out of the prison wasn’t terribly spectacular. Nonetheless it was impressive to his eyes because the last time he had seen it was almost twenty years ago. Then he had been nothing but a broken shell of a man, and had not resisted as his captors hauled him down to the depths of the tomb. A man whose only crime was protecting the one he loved. They had hauled him away before he could see them do the dead. But he had still heard it. The moment Leeya returned to the cycle, he had known, and all strength had dropped out of him. He become so far gone with his depression they had to literally drag him into the prison.
Not now.
Questions:
1. How were the flashback sequences here?
2. What about the druids? I think I didn't have their magic distinctive enough here.
3. Who do you like better? Gromli or the General?
4. Anything of note in the flashback? Blocking, names, actions, etc?
