#riksfalto

"Vase of Wishes"

Slayers Week 1/Day 2: Mazoku (Riksfalto)

Typical Rezo didn’t surrender to fate for an excruciating interval.  He cast an amplified Resurrection, a series of hybridized shamanistic spells he’d designed to clot bleeding,  some desperate black magic, even half of a holy magical incantation, and then when magic did not work, he fell back on biology, and he beat on the corpse’s chest, and tried mouth-to-mouth, and finally realized not enough of Philionel was left to salvage.  And when there was nothing left to do, he wept. He has just called the time of death, and left the room to compose himself.  The blood of, in every way, his granddaughter-in-law’s, father, still cakes his fingers.  She is still inside the bedchamber, wailing in his grandson’s arms, wailing for her father to move, to breathe.  Inconsolable.  A humanitarian and a parent better than Rezo, for all his fame, could ever be, is gone forever. 

And the murderer dares sully the sacrament of mourning with her presence, twisting the words of a saccharine platitude into something snidely taunting. 

Rezo’s face is drawn with fury, and he visibly trembles. But he does not rise to the bait. He speaks in a voice hoarse with restrained tears.  

      “You expect me to do something ill-advised, and leave those two children in that room even further without the counsel of an elder? Sorry, demon.  I can’t, and I won’t, oblige you.”  

His lip curls, like something stinks and he’s too polite to point it out.

      “Goodness me. However will I recover from so devastating a verbal bandy?  Miss Riksfalto, I am cut to the quick.  I bleed.  Ballads shall be written in honor of the plankton-brained buffoon who felled me. ”  

Xelloss slow-claps.  

      “Not if your bottom were the last bottom on the Astral Plane … . ”

    “ … . and the hole the sole gateway to the alternate dimension of my salvation.”  

Another sip of tea.

    “But you can eat the entirety of mine.”  

Xelloss smiles at Riksfalto.