Shrike's Heart (#4)

[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

[handpuppets]

[ The only people you can seem to find are dead.

but, then... ]

[we_meet_again]

[Oh... everyone's dead already. He was so fixated on the fire he didn't even confirm if there were living people here or not.

Well. This building's preserved now, he guesses.

Then the gold line reappears. He makes a note of where it goes, then turns back to the town. He checks the bodies in his vicinity, checking the pulses of those that aren't obviously dead, and shutting the eyes of the ones that clearly are. He does this to multiple bodies.

After that, he's going to look around the town and see what he sees.]

[softlyfalling]

[ You look around the town; unfortunately, it seems that the battle (or what passed for one) was long enough ago that anyone living or able to flee has fled. For your regard for the dead, you gain +2 WILLPOWER.

There are farm fields, across the way; a shovel lies discarded, forgotten. The houses that were still on fire have mostly collapsed in on themselves, putting their own fires out; it's quiet. Peaceful, in a sense; the breeze blows through the stalks of grain and the reeds, and all it leaves in its wake is a gentle rustling. ]