Solo and the gods receive our souls.

Part Two.

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Built into the cliffs overlooking the Suvan Sea, Riverfall resides on the edge of grasslands of Cyphrus where the Bluevein River plunges off the plain and cascades down to the inland sea below. Home of the Akalak, Riverfall is a self-supporting city populated by devoted warriors. [Riverfall Codex]

and the gods receive our souls.

Postby Caelum on November 30th, 2013, 7:58 pm




part two:

and the gods

receive our souls.


red sun risin' like an early warning.
the lord's gonna come for his first born son.
drag him into the water and let it pull him under.
don't you lift him, let him drown alive.
the good lord speaks like a roll of thunder.
let that fever make the water rise, and then let the river run dry.
- delta rae.
Last edited by Caelum on December 5th, 2013, 7:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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and the gods receive our souls.

Postby Caelum on December 4th, 2013, 1:29 pm

Caelum gripped the strap of his bag tighter, hauling it up his shoulder as he moved to follow Haev Provedan deeper into the darkness of the former gem mine. Sunstruck eyes lingered on the figures of the slaves through the stone doorways and pressing back against the scarred walls as they passed. It was not out of anything so simple as curiosity. He was performing intense visual inspections, gaze lingering on the shape of limbs, the skin around their eyes, the tangles of hair that matted against the fitted metal collars many of them wore. Kelvics, he deduced, kept in their human forms. Caelum knew from experience that made them easier to contain.

“They get out, what? Two, three times a week?” The road of his life seemed to rise up behind him as they walked, pressing at his back, between his shoulderblades, lifting lips to his ear to murmur. Funny, but his life sounded like it was wearing Nikali’s husky tongue.

“Three to four regular,” Haev grunted. “’Bout every other day to go on a morning run with my me. That’s enough, healer. Here –“ And the head slaver slanted his torch, trailing streamers of light, at hollow hole in the wall of the tunnel. The entrance, previously crowded with half a dozen girls and at least one young man, swiftly cleared. Such was the power of slavers. People didn’t often require the incredible insight of ranuri to read between the lines of their desires.

“Needs to be every day,” Caelum countered. “Not a measly hour a few times a week. A few hours at least. They run? That’s good. Rotate them around, Provedan. The ones who aren’t running on a day can work in the gardens.”

Pale, flat eyes cut toward Caelum as Haev waited in silent impatience for the ethaefal to proceed him into the little room. “Gardens,” he echoed without inflection.

“Gardens with certain vegetables that are laden with the nutrients required for healthy mothers in healthy pregnancies,” Caelum answered without missing a beat. He rose an eyebrow and then ducked into the room that was better lit than the hall. Little niches and long scraped out sills in the walls held a congregation of misshapen candles, each and every one of them lit in an attempt to fend off the gloom.

“There,” the slaver instructed, stepping in behind him.

On a bed of stone lay a young woman whose soul had fled this place. Plain trousers and a tunic, ragged and worn, had nonetheless been straightened and likely the same, thoughtful set of hands had arranged the girl’s limbs into a semblance of repose with her hands folded about an empty secret against her chest. Candlelight flickered over her sunken cheeks and finally combed hair, pooling in the valleys the curves of her body made amidst her limbs. Veins of trace minerals glimmered faintly along the walls, useless promises to the ghosts of the miners who had once slaved for things more precious here. It made the room almost pretty, as if without the clutching air of desperation and despair that sickened all who entered this little room in this dark little place would have been special.

Gazing at the dead girl, Caelum remembered well the lies slaves could tell themselves.
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and the gods receive our souls.

Postby Caelum on December 4th, 2013, 3:02 pm

“Lettuce,” Caelum heard himself say and the brutalized walls of the room echoed back at him. He did not know a great deal about gardening, but he knew more than a little about herbalism and medicine and what strengthened the body. The details were shading slowly in on the map of Rattling Chains needs. “The leafier the better. Asparagus. Collards. They all contain large quantities of folates which are necessary for the health of women trying to conceive. Turnips.” He moved forward and dropped his kit onto a stone ledge near the girl’s bier. “Now there’s a stroke of brilliance. What you need, Provedan, are turnips.

“What the actual petch,” Haev muttered. With an air of resignation Caelum suspected veiled a steadily peaking interest, the slaver folded himself stoutly against the wall by the door and snapped his teeth at a loitering slave in a gesture so casual that it was thoughtless. “Will you get the key out or not?”

Caelum slanted the slaver a look while slinging his jacket over the back of jut in the stone. “Bring the torch closer.” He rolled up the sleeves of his worn tunic and dug a small wooden case out of his bag to set it on the ledge and flick up the top. A revelation of physicking tools glittered in the candlelight, everything from small, wicked looking scalpels to the jagged edged bone saw. “Turnips, Provedan,” he continued on, expectation determining his words as he attempted to impress his ideas upon the master of Rattling Chains. “Turnips are cheap to plant, easy to grow, and yield a large harvest. They’ll stretch far and provide a great deal of necessary nutrients to your stock. Your stock who you can use as labor.”

“You’re forgetting that I’ll still have to buy the seed,” Have pointed out. One hand reached over to push a young slave woman closer to where Caelum stood, sticking the shaft of the torch into her hand. “Not to mention the land.”

“Are you kidding me?” Caelum squinted at him. Then he looked at the girl who would not meet his eyes, and his expression gentled. “Hold it high,” he encouraged her quietly and then selected a steel scalpel from his kit. Figures and numbers and tidbits of knowledge he had on Riverfall and the nature of men and leadership shuffled through his mind, sorting and rearranging as he continued to try to fill in all the details of the map. “The Council of Elders will no doubt lease you the land at practically nothing, and if you can’t convince them to make gift to you the seed crop then I will. They need this as much if not more than you, and for more profit than mere coin.”

Caelum felt the weight of the slaver’s regard as his own eyes swept over the corpse before him, shifting mental gears. One hand reached down to pull the girl’s arms down, away from her chest. It was an easy task, limbs giving easily.

He blinked. “She didn’t die last night.”

Haev tilted his head. “My, you’re quick.”
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and the gods receive our souls.

Postby Caelum on December 4th, 2013, 9:39 pm

“This girl has only been dead for a few hours,” Caelum deduced. He sank into a crouch in order to prod gently at the lifeless limbs. “No more than three, I’d wager.”

“How do you know that?” The slave holding up the torch spoke. It surprised Caelum who spared her a considering glance before looping his fingers about the wrist of the corpse. He gave a slow tug and the limb moved with relative ease.

“It is entirely too cool in these mines for her to have died earlier,” Caelum explained. “Although she doesn’t possess much muscle mass, rigor mortis would be past these earliest stages and liable to last for nearly two days until you bore the body to a warmer environment.”

The slave stuck her tongue into her cheek, brown eyes intent, but eventually she nodded and rocked back on her heels. She flat out avoided Haev’s cool regard.

“What’s it matter, sunlord?” The slaver groused with disinterest. “Get me that key and tell me where it is you’re thinking I ought to store these turnips. Deeper into the tunnels aren’t safe. Roof could crumble on top of my crop.”

“You won’t need to store it,” Caelum muttered distractedly. He laid the corpse’s arms along its sides and the flipped the scalpel deftly in his hand to slice right through the threadbare fabric of the tunic, slicing it from neckline to hem before he tilted the chin back. The dead girl’s throat was bared and Caelum brushed his questions regarding how she had died and when and even why.

Nobody here desired his curiosity in that regard.

“Turnips pasture well. Besides, what you don’t use here you can sell to the Warren.”

He paused to consider while adjusting his grip on the scalpel. A few ticks were taken for mental preparation as he delicately broke his mind into pieces so that one could chug away at the gears of meeting the varied needs of Rattling Chains while the other piece of himself could focus on the physical task at hand.

Careful to apply enough pressure, he sliced a deep, slow incision right down the corpse’s throat. There was almost no blood, nothing to bead up and well to stain his hands or drizzle down cold flesh. All of the dead girl’s blood had already settled due to the gravity.

“In fact, you won’t require too large of a land grant,” he spoke, slow and thoughtful. “Turnips are high yield and you can make trade for harvest percentage to the city. Additionally, your second rate harvest yield can be sold as animal feed.”

“Your solution to improving the health and thereby sale quality of my stock is turnips,” the head slaver drawled. There may have been a hint of incredulity in his tone.

Caelum slid a pair of metal tongs from his kit, eyes unwavering from the corpse, and inserted the gripping ends into the incision he had made in the throat. Skin and sinew, tendon and stale air squelched as he parted it wide.

“Pretty much,” he replied. “It will get your slaves into the air, gain more them exercise and nutrition, and serve the purses and purposes of you and the city in a combination of ways.”

Not to mention that it would improve the conditions and quality of life for Haev Provedan’s “stock”.
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and the gods receive our souls.

Postby Caelum on December 5th, 2013, 2:18 am

The head slaver made a guttural hum in the back of his throat and shifted his back along the scarred stone wall. "What about assessments? Like physicals and the like," he inquired. "You need more light?"

Caelum took this as a positive sign. He had pleased Haev, and so Haev offered him something that was doubtless often in dearth down here -- light. He jerked his chin to the side in assent and listened as Haev called out into the mine his command. The slap and patter of footsteps, echoed and rebounded through the gem mine acoustics, made the resulting stomp through Rattling Chains like a stampede.

Meanwhile, Caelum's torchbearer inched closer and he pried his index finger into the throat of the corpse. Slick, cool skin and slow softening tissues were spongy in his hands as he sought the outer edges of the larynx to pry the opening wide.

"This isn't surgery, you realize," Haev remarked. "Rip her open. Get it out."

"I might have to," Caelum found himself muttering. "There was swelling in the throat muscles. These ligaments are strained. Did she choke on it?"

"No, that's not how she died." The slaver's shadow wavered along the wall. His words were colder than the corpse's flesh. "If that's what you're asking. I think it's in her. In her belly, I mean. So what do you think?"

"Shyke, man," Caelum swore. "How long was it? From when she swallowed the key to when she died. She might have passed it." He withdrew his fingers from the corpse's throat and picked back up his scalpel. It left a gaping wound that was pink and pale and lurid but failed to faze him all the same. The dead were dead, her soul was fled this dark place. There was nothing pretty or honorable in decay.

"Maybe a bell," Haev grunted.

"Half of one," the torchbearer whispered.

Haev shrugged. "Well."

"You want your slaves to get physicals?" Caelum shook his head and picked back up the string of conversation, realizing that this particular line of questioning would end in nothing but annoyance. The pieces he had cracked his mind into were humming industriously, calculating everything from the length of time this was going to take to just exactly how many physicals any of the women and scant men down here were likely have received in the whole of their miserable lives. "How often?"

"How often they need them, healer?" Haev answered pointedly.

"Once a month, at least. Considering." Caelum grimaced and flexed out his elbow, rotating his shoulder in a quarter turn to stretch the muscle there before he took up the appropriate surgery tool. It was an evil, long looking blade that looked like it could be made of use by a butcher.

That wasn't far off.

Skin split like the flesh of a rotten fruit, the incision beginning at the dip of the collar bone and carrying right down to the lip of the pelvic bone. Caelum heard his torchbearer gag and then the unmistakable sound of a hand being slapped over the nose and mouth. Foul air wafted up and he wrinkled nose automatically, but in all truth it was rather mild. The breaking down and ultimate dissolution of tissue began almost immediately after death, but it took more than a handful of hours to build up into a stench that could knock the living down. One golden eye shut and he peered at the black and red streaked bone that guarded the silent heart muscle, and traced it visually down to the ripple snares of ribs. He would prefer not to snap through the breastbone, but he would also rather avoid the bowels altogether if possible.

He decided on the stomach, and held out hope that he would be right. Surely the digestive process would not have had time to slip the slaver's precious key into the large intestines.

"Where's that light?" He straightened over the half mutilated corpse, firelight catching against the season changing copper and gold of his horns. Red and brown streaked his hands halfway up to his elbows and the blade he had used to cut the dead girl open was pointing at the floor, held loosely in one hand. He did not even think about what sort of image he made, but for the space of a breath the shadows themselves seemed to shrink back from him.

A stir of breath from the slaver suggested humor to Caelum's imaginings. "Coming."
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and the gods receive our souls.

Postby Caelum on December 5th, 2013, 7:19 pm

Caelum snapped shining eyes towards the slaver as if he might reply, but he hesitated long enough to remember that he did not want to be here. He had forgotten that small but terribly important fact while being immersed in the needs and desires of Rattling Chain’s desperation.

He did not want to be here.

He could not forget that again. This was the sort of place in which his name could be erased and even memory of the sun and the goddess who had dropped him back to Mizahar like a rock into a grave might fade in time. Such was the power of Nikali’s gnosis, steadily attempting to bend and break him to the shape of the world’s will.

Surgeon’s fingers tightened against the metal cored handle of his knife and he watched Haev watch him do it, his expression curious. The slaver opened his mouth as though to speak, but smooth-cheeked boy appeared in the opening to the little room bearing a torch in each hand.

“Come in,” Haev said, eyes sliding away from the healer.

Caelum felt the brush of a hand against his arm as the young woman who had been his torchbearer all along stepped closer to him.

“The key,” she murmured. “Then you can go.”

His eyes snapped down and met hers for the first time. They were whiskey colored in the torchlight, and the smile she wore beneath her promising gaze was an invitation. Nikali rolled through him, velvet and amused against his insides, even while in the young slave’s eyes Caelum caught a glimpse of her mirror mask. In the eyes of the slave he witnessed his own need to leave, to go and run far, far from here until the wind could wash him clean and all of the shuddering memories within him settled and ceased to fear.

The slave was marked by Nikali too, and he had missed it amongst turnips and autopsies, trying to improve the health of a race through the slaves of its city.

Without a word, the ethaefal turned back to the dead. He sank down to roll aside the cold, hardening organs of spleen and liver, easing across the curl of the aoteric vein for the stomach. He used his bare hands rather the tools, not wanting to accidentally perforate the delicate intestines. That would be nothing but unpleasant, and he was still holding out hold that the key would be found before he had to search them too. Sliding his fingers beneath the stomach, he lifted it above the other organs of the abdomen and only at that point lift up a scalpel. He used the blade to snip through the mesentery tissue connecting them together.

In the freshly revived light of now three torches, Caelum set the stomach organ down onto the stone bier beside the body and made swift work of a quartered dissection. The organ’s contents spilled out, measly and jumbled with dried blood that had grown grainy with the drying up of digestive chemicals. Only dimly did he recognize the scuffle and gagging noises behind him as that of someone, one of the slaves no doubt, choking on their disgust. He kept digging, flipping a deteriorating flap of tissue aside to discover the slime covered brass key the slaver so badly wanted.

Satisfaction thrummed through Caelum, washing him with an adrenaline-sick heat for having successfully achieved the completion of Haev Provedan’s most pressing desire. He gave a slight shake of his head and wiped the key off in a fold of muslin from his kit before shoving up to his feet. He thrust out his hand to Haev, key resting on his palm, and watched as the head slaver smiled for the first time in his short knowing.

“I thank you,” Haev muttered, pleasure making his rough ways almost formal. “I’ll look into this turnip business. Will you come if I decide my stock needs physicals?”

“Send word to the Sanctuary,” was the best Caelum could mutter, attempting to sidestep a promise in that regard. He wiped down his tools and tucked them back into his bag. A bucket of water appeared before him, held by the hands of the ranuri marked torchbearer, and the healer dunked his own in for a brisk wash without daring to glance again at her face.

“You want to go,” the girl told him below even a whisper, softer than a dead girl speaks, too soft for the slaver distracted by the return of his precious key to hear.

“I’ll be going now,” Caelum obediently stated. He shrugged into his jacket, hefted his bag over his shoulder, and swung around for the door. He would not think until later that he had essentially mutilated a corpse and then left strangers to see to its keeping. Terror was an ache in his throat.

“I’ll see you later, sunlord,” Haev chuckled after him, the sound as eerily flat as the rest of him.

Caelum walked out of Rattling Chains, barefoot, big eyed women and girls scattering before him. He jogged up the creaking metal steps and gulped cold air into his lungs once back in the sunlight. He did not run, despite every frantic beat of his heart; but he did not stop either, throwing up a hand in farewell to the light eyed Decath who had seen to his horse. He did not stop, but rather vaulted into the saddle, squirming the second strap of his back over the other shoulder so that it would not fall. Vega shifted, ears flattening as his long time mount picked up on his great need.

Then the horse was off, chasing the wind down the worn path past the chain-strung tree and out into the Sea of the Grass. Caelum wondered if a storm would come tonight, grumble out of his dreams to walk lightning once more over his lives. He couldn’t think, could only run, chased by the knowledge of all he had left behind.

And all he too easily could have.

The End
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and the gods receive our souls.

Postby Translucent on December 6th, 2013, 9:37 pm

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Congratulations On Your Hard Work!


Player:
XP:+2 teaching, +3 medicine, +2 observation, +2 investigation, +1 intelligence. +1 socialization
Lores: Medicine: Girls need to be exercised every day. Pregnant women needed to be fed vegetables laden with nutrients. Leafy vegetables contain Folates. The dead girl didn’t die the night before.

Notes: Wow, the raw emotions implied in this thread were massive. Thanks for the read. Don’t forget to edit.

As always PM me if you have issues.


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