a castle and the devil within | reiner braun
the night of the ambush on utgard castle; the air, pregnant with the impeding deaths of his comrades. reiner, plagued by guilt, ruminates on the idea of loss and culpability, and with you shares a moment that will undoubtedly come to haunt him.
a.n. – canon divergent in assuming the warriors knew of zeke’s plan to attack the castle.
The group moved in the swathe of night like some serpentine unity towards an unknown. The moon, incandescent and looming high above the earth, enfolded the terrain in a ghostly haze which of all it touched made apparitions. In the air, a disconcerting quietude, silent all but for Equus footfalls dampened by sogged pasture and sniveling muzzles and the cracks and pops of low-burning torches. The topography, undulating, and from it emerged towering palisades of spruce which sectioned the land and curtailed the interminable and verdant hills. Clouds, by lunar glow illuminated and resembling exhalations in cold air arrested, roved the sky and overhung land so primeval Nyx herself present for its creation. Nocturne was refuge from the diurnal beasts who within them harbored a taste for humanity, but the cerement of pitch did little to lessen the unrest among the riders—in this world, serenity, erroneous.
At the horizonal marge of sky and land laid twin towers seemingly erected from the earth itself. Spires traced in moonlight. As the group rode forward, exhausted and pace lagging, drawing with their path the outline of the sloping land and leaving a trail of muddled footmarks in their wake, the castle entire materialized. Surrounding the towers, a crumbling stone bulwark, at once a product of precise masonry now by worldly destruction ruined—the fortress’ impotent aegis. This manmade edifice so alien in its surroundings, as if a misplaced afterthought meant for another milieu but forgotten and left for this bucolic landscape.
The group, looking strange and scarcely manlike, finally was before this decrepit palace—its courtyard, barricaded on three sides, was rife with debris, and vegetation grew over and between the laid stones which once formed the yard’s floor. The horses staggered on the unevenness. Each rider, form sore and tender, dismounted and tied their horses to what he or she could find and uncomfortably shifted between feet, readapting to bipedalism all but forgotten in the wake of such journeying. In this momentary recuperation, his eyes drifted to you—in no worse shape than the rest of the group, situated towards the back of their shapeless unit. Your back to him, slouched as if incurring an immense weight, and shoulders rolling beneath clothes.
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