brigander

Tilly’s not here any longer to fill the air with her nonsensical bullshit, and the rest of the wolves aren’t much for conversation. He waited at the cannon for a few minutes of silence, filled with the howling of ugly dogs and uglier people. His boys moan, grunt, or hiss now, like a bunch of fucking invalids, but they can move fast enough to gut someone, and the dogs move faster than anything he’s ever seen. 

One of them slinks past him, it’s gaping mouth splitting open to its chest. It caught the scent of something and howled. 

A chorus of howls.

The thing had crystals lodged in its throat, moving when it gagged for air. He’d question his humanity if he gave a shit. Hard to give a shit at this point with all the fire. One of the boys points with a razor tipped blade forward, and a Bloodletter lets out a gasp behind him, a barrel on his back.

“Cut anyone you fucking see,” he spat. The square was ahead, and there were far too many alive, still.

He missed the matchgirl’s foul mouth. Instead there was haunting silence and distant gunfire. 

Another massive brigand marched forward, a whip at his side. 

Tilly screams as the ash hits her, and she starts a tirade of cussing. It’s not enough to stop them. 

He shook the flesh off the front of his shield, a swatch of blood painted on the pavement. The rest of the boys start poking their heads into the little square, moaning and hissing spare words. The Bloodletter moves forward before the cannon, and launches his hands into the rubble pile, tossing it aside like change.

Tilly chirruped, straddling the cannon and tapping her matchstick against the hot chassis.

“Feckin’ insane, these folk,” she said. A chorus of growls came behind her. The Bloodletting boy chucked the last obnoxious piece of wall out of the way and lumbered on.

He, personally pushed the cannon forward, his shield at his back. 

Tilly screams, and he’s barking orders while sliding back down to the main road. She climbs higher until she’s pulling on to the roof. Her hat is crumpled and half burned from the match sparks that hit it– she tosses the thing away out of annoyance. Black soot settles like rotting snowflakes in her scraggly strands as they whip around with the fire’s artificial updrafts.

She sees him, a more clear shot. Better.  But she needs to be close. She needs to be on top of him.  Se swallows, fear of dying again filling her gut. Stands for only a moment- considering running away. Two daggers, special made. These aren’t for throwing. They’ve the same arced grooves, but the handle has a little vile filled with black tar like liquid in it. Potent shit. Her most dangerous. Never thrown. Always up close and personal. 

She stands on the roof edge, and looks at the broad shoulders of the brigands leader, cracked and aglow with crystillic corruption. And jumps, each laced dagger in hand. Her body hits his with full force, and the blades bit in to skin, the pressure releasing the stored venom in to the body under her.  Holding on to them like saddle horns on some beast, she scrambles to keep her hold on his back.

Vvulf been shoving rubble and blackpeter into the cannon.

He sees her too late, a woman with golden hair spinning dagger and death, and landing too fast on him for him to grab her. He felt, for the first time in months, hot and violent pain sear through his entire body, and like the beast he was, he screamed. The skin at the impact site bubbled and crystals burst out of him, puncturing the pelt the entire way through. 

Each moment was a moment of sheer, unadulterated pain. He felt everything in him roil and scream. He burned alive from the inside out. 

His hands reach for her, massive things, snaring her by an arm and ripping her off, with one of the blades. The other remained, and the pain continued. She was damn near weightless, swinging from his crushing fingers. He squeezed the bones inside until they mashed together. There was poison in his veins, but he was foaming.

Rabid. Sick and dying. Nothing left to lose either but the dead weight of the bitch who tried to drop him. 

He held her like a mouse in his hand, and sunk his shield into the dirt. 

Pulled the dagger out of his own back and rammed the blade into her thigh. 

Vvulf roared, inhuman and enraged, and with a violent jerk, threw her useless body into the crumbling wall of a building. 

It cracked the structural wood, and he heard a crash on the other side. 

“Tilly you BITCH, Light the FUCKING CANNON.”

He heard a snarl and from the dust, appeared his Matchmaid.

She hobbled.

Struck her baton. 

“What are you doing, girl?”

She watches as Vvulf, the bastard himself, clambers up the wall like a bleeding ugly spider you stepped on but didn’t quite kill. He’s horrible and grotesque, dripping flesh and leaking blue light, and getting toward her way too fast.

Shit.

She doesn’t answer, but scrambles back instead, loading her arbalest as she scuttles to the edge of the roof. A new arrow, this one unnaturally cool, even in this blazing inferno.

She has to slow him down.

She fires off at him, and scrambles to the next roof.

The shield scrapes along the wall, and he’s faster than she can fire. There’s a violent pressure on the shield, and burst of cold wind. rolls around him. It knocked him back from his climb, enough to slow it. He snarls, and finds a new hold, throwing his weight up and landing hard on the rooftop as she skipped to the next roof.

“You wanna RUN?”

It’s not enough to stop him. She’s a few feet away, and it’s a quick swipe of his hand that puts her throat right in his palm. He hits her armor when he squeezes, hard, into the flesh. He’s never been one for the great speeches. Actions speak louder anyways. 

He slams her into the roof, twice, her body like a doll, blood spattering, spilling. 

It was wasting time. 

He dangled her over the edge of the building and let go.

He heard Tilly screaming beyond it.

Godfrey’s remains splinter and scatter across the grounds. It sits still, before it begins to shudder and start rolling back towards the center mass of the spine. It would take a minute, but the flames were already restoking in the skulls eyes.

           “You’re the one daft enough to think I was alone back here.” She hisses, slinging two darts from the first pouch. Her right arm isn’t as strong, accuracy not quite as sharp anymore. But all the same the envenomed needle points would do their job against sinew and muscle, regardless of if you were dead or not. Such toxins were good against undead before– she had a good many prepared. 

He feet dances in elegance around the rubble, moving back and away, weaving between the shadows and near vanishing between them. The faint explosion in the distance and more flash of green lit flares across the next block the only thing illuminating her movements as more daggers met between her knuckles.

Eyes focused and sharp, she invited the cursed woman to dance.

           “Come on sweetheart, keep up.”

She’s hit, and it blows through her eyesocket like a fucking bullet. The dart is frozen there, otherworldly colors weeping from the wound. She rakes her fingers into the socket, rips it out, and the daggers in her person move like the spines of an otherworldly creature. It burns through her, sinking into her dead veins. She felt numb. Slow.

Stupid.

“Fuck, ow,” she says, backing into the dust she kicked up. She blends right in with the dust and ash, more ash than dust at this point. Tilly huffed, and drew a line against the nearest shit pit of rubble.

“Why don’t YOU stay DOWN,” she said, with a mad dash and blind thrust of her matchstick into the ash and dust. There’s contact, hard and heavy, and the stick sparks, green light falling while the creature that had no business being in the fight, reconstituted itself apart from them.

She hit.

She’s clambering along rooftops, determined to keep the hiring ground, following the green flare as the grave robber tries to corral the invaders toward the deserted half of the Hamlet, riddled with more traps than she’s ever encountered at once, even in this damned estate. She ducks and weaves and dodges debris and flame and shot, and finally, finally, finally she’s in sights. There it sits, just between view of two buildings and a lot of smoke, a huge hulking thing pushed by blue-glowing, shambling, absolutely possessed looking creatures that she supposes were once men. It doesn’t matter. She selects a bow and it’s warm to the touch. 

She loads. She aims. She fires.

The wind shifts, and she can’t see well, and the arrow misses its shot. It ricochets off the side of the cannon and thwacks one of the pushers as it bursts into flames.  

Missandei curses. She’s not close enough. She has to be right on it–her shot must be perfect.   

She sets on the move again. 

They’re sending up flares in combat, and for each pinprick of green he starts to see, he has a map of where to find living, breathing bodies. The Hamlet’s a tiny town, built on an advantageous hill, and the old commander, the old fucking dog himself, had stood proud on that hill, surrounded by a pack of screaming, howling brigands. Vvulf didn’t stick around to watch. There’s more to be done and the cannon fodder could preface him. 

His boots are heavy, and crack the earth where he steps. The town’s in chaos, the ring of the damned bells constant. 

The cannon needs to move. It was stuck at a rubble infested street, and Tilly was nowhere to be found.

There’s not a sound but the thump of his feet on this street. Two mercenaries, in ragtag garb savoring a quick victory over two of his boys, looked up to the towering shadow. 

“Shit.... Shit! SHIT!”

One aimed a gun at him and he snorted, lowering his head behind the shield and breaking into a sprint. The full weight of the shield met both men, and the wall behind it, turning them into bone-ridden paste. The foundation shook with the force of the blow. He heard a scream inside.

And then the silence was broken with a tink. Metal on metal. 

Vvulf rose his heavy, malformed face up, and his lips peeled back in a snarl. Cutting a shadow like a bird alight, there was a woman with a bow, firing arrows at a cannon.

Dumb girl. 

He stared her in the eyes, and laughed, shaking the innards off the shield. His front was severed almost completely through. As if he’d been cleaved in half and it didn’t take.

“What are you doing, girl?” he spat, already moving, leaping onto a smaller roof, and slamming his hands into the stone for footholds. He could get her in seconds.

The alley came awash in ash and flame as the bruilding before it crumbled and leaned dangerously to one side, the supports blown out beneath it. The debris caused her perch to rock dangerously. How quickly she had scrabbled up to mount it.  

The taunt as the girl zipped in to view made Sadie want to hiss like the viper she was born to be, but pursed lips stayed silent as the suspended coffin rocked with the rest of the awning it was tied to. Trigger mechanism broke, she held knife to the rope and waited, cloaked in shadows, for the crystaline brigand to get closer.

And closer still, until finally there was a quick slit of the support. One hand holding the spare tether, the weight of the shipping crate freed itself from its frayed bindings and smashed down atop and aside her, leaving Sadie hanging before she dashed two more knives below her and dropped down as well.

The crate splinters and a shower of bones clatters about before they rattle and start to piece together. A bone captain rising up, in heavy curias and with spiked maul, whole body aglow with bright blueish green flames as the ghostly image of a once proud man at arms stood flanked the other side. Here lies Godfrey, lost to the fulminating prophet.            “Awwwh, puppy all bark and no bite?”

Shit. A weight dropped her like lead to the ground, slamming into her broken body. There’s blood, off color, that pours out of her. It’s a dance of colors in her eyes, the smoke and fire, and shit town. She fucking hates it, and the world was sideways. Tilly threw debris off of her, and two more knives sent her down again with a grunt and a few more cusses.

Knives and no pain. Can’t fucking kill me, bitch.

Her body was filled with knives and she stood again, her matchstick still in her hand. The dust invaded her eye, and then there was... more light. Shifting colors. A shape of a man wrapped in bones rose with a clatter, and started moving. 

“You can’t fight your own fights, can you, cunt?” she howls, the flang of her voice reverberating through her throat. The matchstick hits the thing in it’s ugly skull and she pulls back with a hand to cup a handful of black sludge from her sash.

People underestimate her. Even when they know, they never expect the next step. And it’s that moment she loves.

She throws the slop into the monstrosity, and slides the jerryrigged end of her baton against the wall. It sparked with quick-lighting flint.

“Grow up,” snapped, and slammed into the beast.

It exploded. Shattered in every direction. She took one look at the other woman. Fucking shit hat of hers.

And struck the matchstick against the wall again.