Shrike's Heart (#3)

[idolpro]

The woman before you is beautiful—fair of features, with lovely golden skin and luxurious long black hair, petite. You have the immediate and distinct impression that she's just let go of your hand, and she steps back, and smiles.

It's not quite a happy smile.

"I'm sorry," she says. "There's just nothing I can do, as things are. But the way is there; it just needs to be lit."

You open your mouth—maybe to say something, or to express confusion—but you have to cough, and taste something metallic, spattering black blood onto the ground in front of you. Then you realize—blood seeps from opening wounds in your arms, your chest, your stomach, your face. It rims your eyes and trails from your nose and you feel like you're dissolving—

—and you fall through the ground like it's the surface of a lake, and go down, down, down.

> Wake Up

Comments

Re: THE BATTLEFIELD

[handpuppets]

[ You pick up the bag of seeds—it looks like they should still be good, and there's a lot of them. Clearly someone hadn't quite finished sowing this field.

The nearest soldier turns, and nods to you; she's ashy grey in complexion and has a wicked scar running across her face. ]

Ma'am, we've secured the city. The city and the fields should be safe to traverse if you wish to survey them—not that anyone would doubt your ability to defend yourself, of course.

Re: THE BATTLEFIELD

[unbr8kable]

Yeah...yeah. Think I might.

So--everything went pretty smooth? We got...the objective...?

Re: THE BATTLEFIELD

[handpuppets]

Easily—the city's been undersupplied, and is the least important of the province's outposts, but still, it was a well-fought victory. All that remains is to obtain the surrender of the Prefect.

Re: THE BATTLEFIELD

[unbr8kable]

Where's he? What's he holding out for?

Re: THE BATTLEFIELD

[handpuppets]

He's holed up in his manor, on the near end of the city; he's sheltering a number of the townspeople. Crow went off to deal with it—he was saying something about him being "clever enough to look nice by sheltering poor folks and then use them as a shield, not that it'll help him any."

Re: THE BATTLEFIELD

[unbr8kable]

...Deal with it how? If the prefect's gonna surrender anyways, what's the difference?

Re: THE BATTLEFIELD

[handpuppets]

It's a little unclear if he's intending to surrender or simply stall for time until the province can send an army to assist—but, well.

Crow's impatient.

Re: THE BATTLEFIELD

[unbr8kable]

...Lemme talk to 'im. Just 'cause we been doing this messy so far don't mean we gotta do it messy forever. We're trying to take down their army anyways, right? They come to us, saves us some time.

[Starts walking for this manor]

--Do something with all these bodies, okay? Burn 'em or something.

Re: THE BATTLEFIELD

[handpuppets]

[ the soldier nods, crisply. ]

We'll clean up the ones we can.

[ and then you head into the city. ]