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In Sickness and in Death; Open Aldor/Antimony thread
Topic Started: Nov 28 2015, 08:42 AM (155 Views)
DrBusey
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Aldor carefully scanned the note he had been assigned. Taking up an apprenticeship, the young nature priest aspired to become an apothecary, working to help those who ail and suffer in the seemingly endless battles. First, he needed to learn how to craft simple potions and cure-alls for the locals. He had witnessed horrible atrocities at the hands of the rogue Tainted generals and their scattered skirmishes at the borders. They were not enough of a singular force to cause the Sekkaian army much worry, but the small villages and outposts suffered dearly.

The young man briefly shuddered at the memory of the things he saw in his travels along the border towns. He held tightly at his chest, calming himself as he attempted to find a center, to draw himself back to reality. Antimony, seeing the distress, lowered his head to Aldor's level, offering a grounding point. Resting his small hand on the head of his bonded, Aldor found himself once more and was able to remind himself to learn how to face the carnage he endured if he was to help those suffering more dearly. And none suffered as greatly as those that were captured by the roaming and violent berserkers. The Tainted did not take prisoners well, that pair of psychotic generals saw to that.

Memories flooded back of several such incidents. The priest and dragon had traveled to one of the more fortified border towns in an attempt to offer assistance as they were able. What the pair saw still gave them sleepless nights, even months later as it were. The defending garrison of Sekkaian soldiers were able to keep the Tainted from entering the town for several days, using its high walls as protection. However, that did not stop the raiders from capturing travelers, merchants, and wandering innocents. For days, these captives were tortured in the fields surrounding the town. Their mangled bodies sat just out of arrow range; merciful guard wishing they could end the suffering with a quick volley.

Aldor remembered standing on the battlement, staring out at the field of crucified innocents. Arrows littered the ground in front of them, many soldiers trying desperately to end their ceaseless wailing. Whether it was out of mercy, or a desire for silence, Aldor could not rightfully say. He also remembered the stationed soldiers were no saints either, trapped and frustrated as they were by the situation. It was sadly too common to see a unit of soldiers get rip-roaring drunk and harass the locals. They were besieged both outside and in, Aldor had thought to himself at the time. Still, he felt those inside the city were the lesser of two evils. While they defiled and consumed the city from within, the Tainted still guttered and flayed human and dragon alike outside. Days had bled into weeks and the once youthful and arrogant pair felt weathered and aged by their time, by their sentence.

Eventually, some form of good did eventually triumph over evil in that town. The very walls which contained the anxious and violent Sekkaians eventually halted the Tainted. The final battle was fierce, underhanded, and a sickening thing to behold. Still, the right side had one. At least, Antimony and Aldor believed they were on the right side of justice and morality. It; however, was hard to defend the soldiers who gleefully ruined the interior of the city while proclaiming themselves saintly when compared to those who waited outside its walls. Aldor did find one soldier he believed to be a true paragon; he was in fact the same soldier that struck the deciding blow in favor of the Sekkaians.

They believed the leader of the Tainted soldiers died that day; Aldor had even seen the final blow against him. The Tainted had made a final surge to scale the walls while defenders, both human and dragon, battle in the surrounding fields. The Tainted general, Novy Aldor believed he was named, had begun climbing one sheer face of stone, desperate to get his small cadre of berserkers in the city walls. Every day that they had attempted this, the defenders had dumped boiling oil and water over the sides, sending their attackers screaming into hell. Though, as the city began to run out of resources over the several week ordeal, they had turned to more creative substances to boil and dump, namely, their sewage. The nature priest could appreciate ingenuity, but he had trouble appreciating the aplomb with which the defenders dumped their boiling waste onto the attackers. The one soldiers Aldor felt was a saintly type dumped his cauldrons with solemn duty, and his final dump sent boiling piss and feces into the rather surprised face of Novy.

Aldor had seen that man in battle before, seen him shrug off blade and arrow as if they caused him pleasure rather than pain. Maybe it was because he had seen his grinning countenance react to pain so positively before, or maybe it was the legend that surrounded Novy, but something about his screams of pain would haunt Aldor for months after.

Antimony had been helping distract the Tainted dragons to keep the vile behemoths from simply shattering the city walls. The poor crystal found himself ensnared by a horrible abomination of coiling tentacles and gnashing teeth. The crystal had hardened his scales against the twisting and endless coils of the abyssal when Novy's scream rang out across the battlefield. It had been faint underneath the sounds of battle, but the abyssal froze and unleashed a horrid shriek in reply, releasing Antimony from her grip.

She fled in the direction of the sound, careening through friend and foe alike, leaving a trail of wounded. He had not seen what happened next, but something caused the Tainted battle line to break, scattering in all directions. The dragon; however, was present with Aldor when the Sekkaian forces rode out to slaughter the now bewildered and fractured Tainted battalion. Most surrendered, but many preferred to die by the sword. Even defeated, many swore loyalty to the now missing and presumed dead commander. They would rather die than be branded a traitor by him, it would seem.

The second in command of the group, a muntain of a man clad in crimson plate, ralled those he could and fled into the nearby woods, heading for any type of safety. The hunting party found his discarded armor, and the armor and markings of the group, heaped in a great mound in a clearing. Antimony spoke to Aldor about this, wondering why such a fierce warrior and his best soldiers would so quickly discard their colors and cause. Aldor could only shrug by way of reply. Each of them decided, in their own time, that some thing just weren't worth dying over, especially with your leader likely screaming his way into an early grave.

Rumors quickly spread about what happened that day, with many local guards taking credit for dealing the deciding blow against the Tainted general, but Aldor was there. The man who had actually tipped that cauldron was a green recruit. He had begun to vomit at the sigh of scalding skin and the sounds of his screams. Rather unceremoniously, he slipped in his vomit and went careening over the wall. Aldor later found his trampled carcass in the dirt around the city walls. The surge of fleeing soldiers had completely distorted his features and body. Aldor only recognized him by a necklace he was wearing. A necklace that Aldor felt compelled to take and hide, to remember the man for his deed.

Aldor kept the discovery and truth to himself. Let the soldiers brag, he thought, it was better than the people of the city realizing the truth: that their hero slipped in puke and was trampled to death. He remembered walking through the battlefield, looking through the wounded and dying for some sort of reason for why any of this had to happen. Desperately, he found none until he came across a robed, masked, and silent figure moving through the field of the dead. They moved silently, gracefully, and exposed none of their flesh to the air around them. Aldor could not even hazard to guess their gender, but merely watch as the apothecary treated each of the soldiers, Tainted or Sekkaian, either helping them to recover, or easing them into the grave. No matter how they suffered or cursed, the apothecary would hold their hands and not move until they were able to move, or until the darkness took them.

Something about the way the apothecary moved, the way they handled death and life with such grace and splendor, had invigorated Aldor. There was purpose in life, purpose in nature. Even death was a part of nature, and the horrible things he saw that day had meaning if he gave them meaning. The apothecary was unfazed by what they saw. Aldor could mimic, could even learn how to care about life and death in such a way. He would learn from the secretive apothecary.

And so it went: Aldor had become the apothecary's new assistant. The apothecary still did not speak, or even reveal much about themselves. They simply nodded and handed Aldor a series of books and a list of ingredients. Now Aldor found himself in the jungle, desperately attempting to identify plants he had never heard of before in his life. In each town he had visited on his way to the dragons, Aldor left posters on the message boards, hoping desperately that someone would eventually meet them here and help as he attempted to collect rare ingredients for his new master.
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