@nifhilium
He almost welcomed it, the growing anger. Feeling the slow, creeping sear of white-hot tempered rage so fierce, it was cold.
Like the center of Hell.
If there is a Hell, this would be it- Fug of stale sweat and grime and blood and the cold cement floor of a cell with a fat subhuman clad in display armor with his face all red, huffing and puffing like he's about to have a coronary as the lash comes down again. And again. And again.
The marshal even loses track, laughing about it. Shadows crouched in the corners, grinning and cheering. His wrist wrenched painfully and chained to the heavy stockade around his neck and he can’t even raise his head in defiance like he wants, not with the other infantrymen stalking around. All sniggering and sneering at the fallen prince with their hateful, beady eyes. Laughter ringing around the barracks, elated and nasty- echoing in a sickening din of donkey-like haws.
Ravus gets up close and personal with the ground in the meantime, just lays there and bleeds and hopes the world will melt away and everyone will die.
When he wakes up, Ravus didn’t have to imagine them, he could feel them. The scars upon scars. Like those pictures painted on the walls in the older wings of Fenestala Manor. Zealous fanatics prostrating themselves before altars to their dark Gods, flaying their own skin raw with many-tailed whips.
He wanted to cry, gnash his teeth, rend his garments or however the books described it. He wanted to scream at the Lucian Kings of Eld: How is this fair? How is this justice?
Then it hits him, how naive he was. Because it isn’t fair.
Fairness is something you’re born into, the self-righteousness of having nothing but an easy life practically handed to you on the jewel-encrusted platter. Where the past can just be the past and maybe those old pains might still ache, but that’s what doctors and therapy were for, right?
But that doesn’t happen in the real world.
Verstael showed up looking like he was on the verge of manic glee, clutching the armored prosthesis between his gnarled fingers. Rattled off a litany of words Ravus didn’t understand and frankly didn’t give a solitary shit about, just get on with the fucking procedure already- before necrosis set in.
Rehabilitation was a bitch. Every mug or glass pushed in his direction shattered between the clawed gauntlets, grip as rickety and jumpy as a rabid dog in the middle of having a seizure. His own name illegible, frustrated scrawls before he just stabbed the table with the pen nib. Grabbed the nearest doctor’s throat and just squeezed, until his eyes bulged out like a frog’s- wheezing and struggling before Ravus let him drop.
The Chancellor haunted the doorway, his ridiculous hat nearly scraping the ceiling as he lifted it off the loose waves of hair flaring out from beneath the brim.
Ravus flexed his new fingers slowly, tremors running on and off through his Magitek limb.
“Chancellor Izunia,” he greeted the other man politely enough, even giving a curt bow of his head despite how badly he wished to slam the metal fist clenching at his side into Ardyn’s smirking face. The expression alone made his blood boil.
