#eldritchbled

         “ since when have i cared when something was appropriate or not? ”

    she cared quite a lot about her appearance to the others, truthfully, but the hamlet was deep into winter and she couldn’t stand it anymore. when she had been wed before, they would spend the winters around their manor with a roaring fireplace, or in some foreign land untouched by the same snowy hellscape that blanketed their home.

     there’s no snow yet here, but she can practically taste it on the wind. just a matter of weeks now. and if nesdin walked around in the same state of dress as always, he must be keeping the cold off of himself somehow.

     the chains he closed around himself were bitingly cold, true, but the touch of her fingers along his side showed he himself was quite warm. that made him a perfect target for leeching some heat from.

     “Forgive me if this is crass,” she begins. “But do you ever wish that you were not what you are?”

     a strange place to find a kindred spirit of sorts. melusine had thought herself a rarity amongst the shadows -- an ocean’s wraith wrapped in finery and lies. a few questioned the reasons a woman of noble birth might join them amongst these sordid ruins, but most simply kept to their own business.

     it seemed all manner of folk joined them: a man who killed for money with a fearsome axe, a quite comely woman with a deadly looking crossbow, and now -- a man of mystery with quite a mind to match. . .and a secret not much different than her own.

     it would be an understatement to say he had simply caught her attention. he had raptured it the moment his other side came to play.

     she shuffled a bit closer to him as they examined the strange cavern they had come across in the cove, the center dominated by an ancient looking shrine, and gave something of a hum to catch his attention.

When the touch comes, it’s unlike anything he’s grown accustomed to. The careful, almost methodical caress of a set of slim digits is much different from the coarse handling that occurred whenever he fell in battle or if he needed rousing to take up his shift to watch the company’s camp at night.

It’s a curious thing. He almost flinches at it, despite not detecting any malicious intent. The drag of her fingers ran along his bicep, tracing the faintly viridescent veins that damned him. Strange to have someone treat it with such care.

“Umm-” He doesn’t pull away with a jerk, inching away with each beat. “Is there something… that you ahh- need?”

In truth, Morven’s curiosity lies in bold rebellion. She’s heard tale of some wretched man living among them, who decorates himself in chains and whose cough produces poison, whose body thrums with a deadly plague or demonic proportions, and who can be told apart from the others by the great mark on his head, the branding of a letter ‘A’, the mark of the Abomination.

Much of the stories, she’s brushed off as fancy, fairytales, stories you tell to children to make them behave. And now she finds herself in his presence, and she’s determined not to be scornful or afraid.

Of course, being Morven, she cannot express it with a friendly handshake or a kind word or a beer. Instead, she takes the opportunity to sit beside him and, as though mesmerised, she slides a dainty, slightly-callused hand along his bicep, marvelling at how lean and yet defined his muscle is.

“Antiquarian, Hound Master, Abomination, Bounty Hunter.

Their alleged titles, written out on a piece of parchment pinned to the noticeboard with a flimsy nail, caught the eye with greater success than their actual names. He had a feeling the Heir preferred that, it helped to depersonalize his mercenaries, to… objectify them in a way. The names: rosai, gordon, nesdin, sammael seemed to be added only as an afterthought, lacking the careful penmanship applied everywhere else.

The courtyard hadn’t seemed like a dreadful location to go. But the perquisite of their expedition being aninvitation of all things, Nesdin expected a great deal of sinister happenings in exchange of the typical brutal work of exploring, say, the Weald or the Warrens. Looking back on the moment, Nesdin had to bitterly laugh at his naivete.

Because, of course, danger came both overtly and by underhanded means.

Bloodsuckers. “

My friend @xxgoth-holicxx decided to read a bit of a roleplay between me and @eldritchbled! I love how it came out and how nice it sounds aha...

@eldritchbled

It’s been a week, since it all happened. Since she was rescued from the hole in the ground. A mere day since she had been led by Crevecoeur back to the Abbey. It stunk of rotting flesh. It stunk of some otherworldly corruption. She had searched the halls, thinking it was a dead rat, something, and then she reached the sanctuary, and she saw them.

Them.

Toustain shies back when she sees their bodies, a hand clasped over her mouth, bandages still covering most of her fingers. Oh, Vesta. She knew that Randal had done it. She had been told, yes. Didn’t the man know how to clean up-

She looks down. Vesta. She closes her eyes for a long moment. It smells awful. It has to be taken care of. Toustain inches closer, looking down at the bodies. Maggots writhe and squirm in the viscera. They weren’t mangled, no, aside from the body of the father - she’s never seen a corpse look like that, half-blasted in from the front, nose crumpled, eyeballs completely gone, blood congealed on the chin, as if he bled from the mouth. She swallows.

...There’s nothing left to do, but bury them. Toustain is just grateful that the churchgoers, it seemed, had stayed away. She wouldn’t have wanted for any of them to see this. This. Scene.

         “ oi, scoot. you’re hogging all the space by the fire. ”

    audrey does little more than nudge her boot against him in warning before settling down next to the flickering campfire that is their only solace in the ruined halls of the old manor. their companions snore nearby, shoulders rising and falling in the little bit of sleep they could get while they were safe, albeit tenuously.

    sleep escaped audrey without the help of absinthe and laudanum, so she wandered ahead while she could. she had told them not to wait up, but she couldn’t say she was terribly surprised to see nesdin sitting up. she didn’t know much about him, but if his disheveled clothing and branded face said anything, it was that he had demons nipping at his heels too.

         “ this almost feels wrong. i think we’ve gotten too domestic. ”

    audrey spoke quietly from where she sat shaded in the eaves of solomon’s home, watching nesdin pace up and down between the flower patches that grew behind the little manor. he seemed keen on looking for specific colors of them, some. . .theory that audrey didn’t care to wrap her head around.

     she turned her eyes back to the bolt of cloth in her lap, the remains of a coat that someone in the hamlet had asked her to mend. taking over as a tailor in this place seemed almost surreal -- she’d gone from luxury to crime to. . .a stable, almost normal job. how strange.