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Blackthornes Do Not Wear Ink

TW: Violence/Torture

The light broke grey around him, tinged with a sickly green. As his blood replenished what was lost and his sight regained its strength, the cause was clear. The walls around him were broken stone, slick with moss and gleaming where water trickled down from gashes in the rocks. It leaked into a pool, turned the dirt to mud and fed the molding algae.

His senses were clear. A cracked ceramic edge tipped against his lips and doused his tongue with water. A cold cloth kissed his brow and he could now feel that the sick of sweat and blood had been wiped from his wounds. The table beneath him was smooth and polished from use and cooled his bare back down to his calves. He could feel every uncut fiber itch the skin on his scalp.

And of course, the pain. So long as he kept still it was a vicious ache. If he moved – he could not move.

His wrists were bound. Yards of rope, un-waxed and raw ground into his arms and ankles. They gouged marks across his hip bones and the width of his chest, chafing his underarms where they were looped three, four times.

Above him a grin conjured through the cookfire smoke. “Good morning, Vincent. I have waited a long while to be your host. I hope you enjoy your stay with me.”

He slipped.

Every time the attention on him wavered, his hand lost hold of the rope tethering him to his pulse. It would flutter erratically, like a moth caught underneath paper shade, wings burned by the light but unable to escape its draw. Even the beast was quiet, still hungry, always hungry, but slumbering and in its rest allowing him to drift.

And drift.

He never hungered or thirsted, senses still so raw with pain. If not for the dribbles of water that wet his parched throat and the honey salved over his lips, he would have simply let go. Falling had little appeal so many times before, but soon his palm was around the frayed end and he only had a gaping maw of possibility beneath his dangling feet. Then he thought, it would be so easy to let go, to stop breathing, to cease.

Of course, fate had other things in mind.

The voice ripped apart the dream state of fevered post-shock, and his eyes opened to the nightmare hovering over him. He moved, instinctively at first, and then desperately when he realized the circumstances, breath catching as his teeth gnashed with lowly snarl in the back of his throat. It may have been a curse at first, but soon it was too heavily influenced by the things that prowled just underneath his eyelids, that were now clawing at his guts and suffocating him with a panic. He tried to breathe, blood weeping out of the cuts once more as his struggle had birthed a fresh wash of red. It felt sticky underneath his back.

“Rathen…” He spat out her name like it was a vile parasite trying to crawl across his tongue, and stared impassively up at his captor, “…Really like what you’ve done with the place. It’s got a… woman’s touch.”

“So’s this.” A hand wrapped in leather woven through broken coins smacked its backside across his purpled cheek. As she gripped his chin and held it tight the cold fingers crowned with broken nails pricked out small pearls of blood.

“Stop slipping.” She shoved his face away. The sound of dead leaves being ground by pestle scratched at his ears. The boiling cauldron gurgled as a sudden stench of black herbs puffed up into the smoke.

The telltale thud and scrape of a boot dragged over stone, the cold whap of a cane on the ground, and again the broken earthenware rested on his lips. It tipped into his mouth what water would taste like if was run through a quarry of iron.

“Stop writhing. Break your stitches and you will be no good to either of us."

Underneath her fingertips, his jawline tensed and teeth bared, threatening to flash underneath the pressure shoving in until the skin cracked open like glass beginning to groan. The eyes that his mother had birthed into the line watched her, slit though they were with the swollen bruises beginning to fade. Trying to dissipate, though her care would delay that natural inclination.

“Fuck you.”

Eloquence abandoned due to the nature of his captivity, his heaving chest soon became his only motion, exhaustion reminding him of the necessity to measure out what energy he had. An opportunistic thing, he could wait. He always could wait. Behind his gaze, there was something pacing now, watching her as best he could with his peripheral focus, his head slowly turning until cheek rested on worn wood and her limping pace as well as the direction it took followed.

He drank, even if he didn’t want to accept anything from her hand, the brackish water a necessity he accepted. And he continued to watch, and wait. He could ask her if it was poisoned or drugged. He could ask her what she intended to do. But the woman who loomed over him now was as much a stranger to him as the warg that had attempted to rip him apart, and so he would not trust a single lie that dripped from her lips. Action was the only consequence he cared about and so he obeyed until fate afforded him opportunity for action of his own.

The scent of warg lingered as she leaned over him. She looked at his eyes, not through them, her gaze only brushing the surface as his rusted haloes contracted around the black.

“Not yet.” Gripping his chin she twisted his face towards the cookfire. Her own eyes were brown, flecks of darker color like gouges in a painted shield, no gold. They barely moved as waited until the black in his expanded and the veins in his neck sink back into his taut flesh.

“Have you ever heard of margh root?” Her grip unclenched from his jaw, a finger stroked his cheek as it fell away. “The goblins in the Misties use it. It grows only in caves. They prefer their captives alert usually, and struggling. The better for sport.” She turned back to the table where the pestle had tried to warn him earlier. Her northern voice, like he had never heard it, echoed against the stone. The cave itself gave firmer tone to her northern voice, diluting the accents that corrupted it in her decades of exile. “They only use it in extreme cases, when they are sure they cannot subdue their victims.”

A blade scraped off of stone somewhere, ringing like tongs from a forge.

“It weakens the muscles without diluting the pain.” She patted his cheek. “You don’t need to worry about ripping your stitches now.”

The knife’s heated tip bit into the flesh above his ribs. A shallow cut, which bled fire across his skin and squeezed the sweat from every gland. The blade pushed flat under the skin, separating the top layer from the muscle, raw and screaming red.

“Blackthornes do not wear ink, Vincent. We have work to do.”

[4/16/2014 12:04:41 AM | Edited 12:05:27 AM] Charls: “No…”

The realization leapt from his lips with the convulsion that gripped his chest, made his muscles seize, this time in quivering panic. Except they couldn’t. The bounds went slack and underneath them a man struggled to breathe through his fear as the hiss-STAMP-hiss-STAMP moved the beast closer. Recognition of his fate was married to denial.

“No…”

This time, there was violence in the syllable, spat off his tongue into her face with the spray of blood from the inside of his mouth chewed in his desperation to test her words. It had hurt, but he could just barely rip open the cheek she now patted. Panting through the fear, his pupils dilated until the blackness was consuming every last fleck of gold in a tarnished wash. Nothing ever stays gold. The anger shook his voice as he moved to bartering.

“What did I ever do you, Rathen? It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there.”

But he had been there for so many after her. And in his teeth was the hunger, always the hunger now trying to claw out of his skin, a fierce and desperate need for power that strained against its chains and vivisected every last morsel which fell within the length of its bounds. There was a boneyard underneath the ink, white scars twisting and pressing up through bruises and blood, violence born in flesh now sweating underneath the blade.

The heat was singing the hair underneath the edge, and he looked up at her, pleading,

“Please…Don’t…”

Nobody ever plans to scream, and no one ever does. For the sound that leapt from his throat was far too twisted and horrific to be called a scream as the skillful hand carved hide from muscle to take its bounty.

“Why?” Her voice was slick like the moss dripping water down the wall. “Give me a reason.”

A palm wrapped in rags and ruined trinkets held the meat steady as she slid the blade along the outline of a former artist’s work. But the scream shook her. The hand paused to steady itself before a vein was nicked or tendon severed. She wanted him alive, for now.

“Should it be me on this table?” She narrowed her eyes to make sure it was only ink being cleansed by red as she carved her tendrils. Again the blade stopped. The tremors from her arm vibrated through his exposed ribs. The beat of her heart so fast it pushed through his open muscle to the fist in his chest wrapped in blood.

“Should it?” She nicked a careless line from unmarred flesh, ruining her work. The proof of her uncertainty cause a rage to release like hot and fatal steam. “What would you do if you found me lying asleep in a ditch on the side of Amon Ros? Would you leave me there? Would you fucking comfort me?”

The hilt rang as the fist it armed banged against the wood. “Scream. Each of yours is one they should have. And they deserve hundreds.”

Vincent knew loss, but not like this. He knew a flinch, a turned head, a hitch of breath in fear. He knew denial, perhaps. He was learning loss, having the meat stripped off his bones, having his memories forcefully ripped away from muscle as his breath hitched and he tried to form words while white exploded against his eyelids, his jaws wrenched apart to supplicate the Valar for intercession. Even in the knowledge that there was no one to seek him, no one to end this, only begging a woman as dead as the gods of the start; even with a complete understanding of this, he hoped. Then her exhale was on the exposed sinew, and his head fell sideways to stare at her, to consider the mess of the body she took now for her own purposes and reconstructed, fashioned to fit her own needs.

“Wait…”

The reverberation of hilt gouging into wood made his eyes close, readying for the next rending agony, spittle flying from his lips as he tried to breath, tried to remember how. Stubborn persistence found words, and he wrapped his tongue around them, panting between the syllables in desperate effort to stave off the flood of adrenaline beginning to creep into his veins.

“Please… let me…go. It’s not me. It wasn’t me.”

Rathen stared with bloodshot eyes, her heart pumping an excess of red that to inundate the smallest veins. Her fingers, ruby-wet, tugged the collar of her tunic free and dropped the cloth away from her shoulder. Snakes of blue cord stretched down her neck beneath her flesh. A pale purple-blue, like a child stillborn, tainted her skin. Over her heart, where the blood had pumped mad and swollen, a black thorn, branded from iron forged to use only once, labelled her as property until she had the nerve to cut it out of her flesh.

She never had.

“You are the only one left,” she growled with gristle in her teeth as she picked up the blade and set again to work.

Every time her hand turned, he screamed, an orchestra of pain and blood welling lazy in rivulets down his skin as she erased everything he had earned by the same measures.

‘Owned, she carved it out.

Every year of service under manacle, she slipped her blade around the edges.

‘Freedom’, something he had almost died for, stripped.

‘Mercenary’ was ripped away from him.

Every last thing, down to the bangle around his finger, until he couldn’t remember how to form words, what his name was, who he was supposed to be. Vision swam, and he tried to cling to consciousness, fingers digging into the surface slicked with red.

“I’m sorry…”

Was all he could gasp, breath shuddering around the exhale as he sank back against his own blood, letting it lap at his spine and his eyes, soft in the low light and distant considered her and he repeated it again,

“I’m so sorry…”

No surgeon had suffered to stand so long over his patient, sweat a crown of love and labour on his brow. Coated up to her elbows in gloves of blood, she paused only to wipe the slick from her fingers, reposition the cutting edge, and flay the line longer till sweat ran in her eyes. Heavy breathing was the only comfort from her lips until the last line of flesh preened from butcher's knife dropped in a heap of strips of skin and soiled rags. Food for the marshes.

Then the sound of water working into a boil. A fresh cloud of herbs chased away the stink of margh. The smoke was cleaner. He could almost see light.

A compress pressed gently at the skin where a firmer hand had minutes ago held the meat steady for carving. The blood cleaned away. A paste applied, burning with contact of skin on the rawness underneath, but then cool, numbing, almost soothing if there was any sense of such a feeling left anymore.

After all of it, after shudders and groans and the dedicated knife work ripping tendons apart, the sound of a woman weeping.

It had finally come, in shivering, half-measured breaths. The herb kept him conscious, aware of the pain, but the heady mix of adrenaline and the slow of blood to his limbs strangling out the sensation into a distant apathy. He had died before, but he never thought it would be like this in the end, the last strip of flesh hitting the rest of the pile in a wet, squelching plop that seemed so insignificant considering what it had cost him to give it up.

There was artistry in her design, the blood draining out of capillary beds in lazy rivulets instead of full flood, the salves now slicked over nicked veins as her fingers ghosted across the arteries spared. Every muscle across his back twitched, and she could see it as the red was wiped away; shuddering away from her tears even as a few strayed away from dark eyes and splattered over her handiwork. A masterpiece that now gulped down air like a drowning man that opened his mouth to scream, light bursting in the corners of his eyes as he tried to anchor himself to this life despite his body’s best efforts to flee.

His lips opened, gaped, and something was whispered. Again, he repeated the effort, this time forcing a small sound from the back of his throat, gagging around the syllables. Gold settled upon her, half lidded and weakening pulse as it was, watching her as he forced life into the question,

“Rathen… What have you done?”

Then his blood spattered features creased with a smile and a low chuckle made the flesh under her hands wriggle as if it could melt into nothingness and find escape.

“Silence,” she spat with venom. Her hands grew quick and careless. The bandage tugged around his chest, up over his shoulder and down the red muscle of his arm, smearing the salve as it went.

She kept her eyes on the task but her vision was beginning to blur and her fingers tremble more madly than before.

“Stop…just stop.” She yanked the bandage and secured it, then cut the hem away with the same bloodied knife. Glaring at her fingers she tipped water again into his mouth, then dabbed the dribble away as it filled with blood and spittle. Only then did she see his eyes.

She paused, the cool water locked between cheek and cloth. Her brown eyes were warmer, like soil freshly cleared of a pile of long-rotting leaves. Tears trickled forth from an unearthed well.

She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.

“Oh, Vini,” she struggled to breathe as if her own skin had been cut from the base of her bones. “Vini I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Everything hovered around his lips, drawn in and condensed in a pull of his lungs, high off of the pain as his fingers dug into the surface beneath him, testing…He wasn’t silent, though the laugh could not sustain, the weight of his smile on the back of her matted black hair more cacophonous than his screams had been. He waited, he watched, perhaps not as apathetically distant as he would have preferred due to the sensation of threads settling around the skin, binding him in mottled pieces, but he didn’t stop.

Then something unseen ripped to shreds between them, and she could taste margh still on his skin while he stole her breath in a hitched gasp. Tentative, cowed, and exhausted to near-death, he made no effort to steal more than was offered, falling as still as the thing behind his eyes, both forgetting how to breathe as there was her. And only her. And she was kissing them. The metallic tang of blood was still on his tongue as he chased away the salt from her lips and watched as she drew back, stunned before brows drew inward and lips offered up a faint twitch of a smirk.

“But you’d do it again…”

He finally mused, his voice distant and sad, before his eyes closed and he murmured, “…So would I.”

The chapped lips lifted from his cold and sickly skin. Her eyes stayed well clear of his gaze as she pulled herself away, every movement lurching, as if the limp had festered and spread through her spine.

“I…won’t have to.” She caught the table’s edge for support and nearly slipped in the slick of blood.

The cane thudded away. The fire cackled, and in the final stage of corrupting the air for her own designs released a fourth plume of smoke, tinged blue as bloodless fish. Then balancing a shallow bowl his healer lumbered toward him, the pale steel smoke rising from its basin and clotting with perfume. In the clear air it might have calmed the senses, but in the rank of margh it strangled the nose.

She set the bowl beside his head and fanned the smoke with a bouquet of river rush. “Sleep, Vini,” she whispered. Her words elongated as her features stretched into unmanly shapes. “Sleep.” And so the pain dulled, the light faded, the sound sank until all that was left was the weakening throb of blood returning to his limbs.

It wasn’t until he was finally asleep, his fingers freed from their fists, that she leaned and kissed his forehead.

“When you come after me,” she whispered, her throat rough with smoke. “I will be waiting.” She kissed his forehead, and sealed the imprint of her lips with a touch of her brow. Then all was water trickling down the glossy rocks, and sobs.

#rhoane #rathen blackthorne #vinicio corso #landroval #lotro rp #breeland #tw torture #torture tw #torture #violence

The beast ambled through town, a clatter of maille jostling his flanks, feathers and beads rattling from his reins. His hips, packed with muscle, rocked his rider back and forth, while she leaned back to ease the weight on his downhill climb from Combe.

The stench of Bree hit her like a splash of filth from the gutter. She lifted the stained scarf over her nose to repel the rot of human waste.

“A mask? What you think we can’t see you?” a Redcloak jeered as she trundled past.

“To keep out your reek,” she grumbled through the spores of dust clotting its fibers.

He had smirked and continued his procession. She turned her steed towards the jail. Bree had not changed since she had ridden south in escort of a company of horsemen.

It was not an insult to have spear-wielding allies in the north. There were advantages – access to oiled leather and crisp metal, horse-head trinkets for barter. But she did not eat with them, nor drink with them, and only one of them she had ever let between her legs.

The horselords traded gifts for favours, gold for loyalty. She had seen the rings men braided into their beards, tokens of their masters’ pleasure. She had none of them. All she had she bought by trading her own.

Plunder fell under different rules. Around the woven rags she laced the broken arm rings plucked from silver hordes. Earrings of gold freshly polished of grave dust hung from the laces in her jerkin. All of them for sale. Even the sword at her hip.

No market today, and the Pony patrons were not drunk enough yet to barter gold for glass. She lassoed her horse to a post outside the jail’s gates and climbed the steps, the wood cane making up for her foot’s drag in rhythm.

He had to be here. Or had Bree already forgotten its enemies?

She scoured the board of wanted signs. Crude renditions of men and women she had seen drinking with their feet up in the Wattle’s front rooms. Easy enough to avoid Watchers these days. And if they didn’t, well, was it the law that guaranteed release from capture in under a week? Or was it simply the idleness of the men who enforced it?

He had to be here.

The pages covering promising sketches of thick-jawed men fell torn to her feet as she ripped them away.

Nothing.

Rhoane turned from the wall. It was useless to do more. She would have to find him herself. Her hand tightened around the pommel of her cane, thinner than a club but as deadly when wielded with vengeance.

Vincent didn’t come north because he had to, she knew that. It wasn’t business or exile that gave him some fortunate excuse to return to the dead fields of their homeland. Two weeks she had been back, and Cyndyn not that much longer. Chance was not something that hillmen believed in.

He was here, and she knew why. He was here for her.

#rhoane #bree #landroval #vinicio corso #bree jail