03. Whumpuary 2025
Choice | Storm | Black eye
CW: human weapon whumpee, war, slavery, collar, necromancy, imperialism and institutionalised abuse
The storm was raging outside, Kai crouching next to the window on top of the enemy tower.
A choice, in front of him. Either way, he expected to bleed.
“The rebels are retreating, my Prince,” the Fallen said, respectfully, from the other side of the room. The fool they’d sent him, the liaison with the foot army waiting downstairs. The fuckers Kyriel had put him to lead, to pick up the spoils of his incursion south. The rooting out of the rebels that had sprouted on the Ellenic islands, the bastards that couldn’t be put down, hiding out at sea.
The storm raged, and they were getting away.
“I know,” Kai said, softly. The rain plastered his white hair to his skin, the too long braid tight and looping over a shoulder, the armoured top. His wings shielded him from the cold, his body not feeling it as he crouched and looked out at sea. “I can see.”
The problem with undeads, he thought, was that they didn’t do well with water at all. Undeads sunk, remerged half nibbled by fish months too late, covered in weeds and with rotten flesh off their limbs — which was exactly why Kyriel’s empire ended where continents did, and why islands, especially remote ones with a history of flourishing civilisation, were excellent for rebels to sprout in. Small communities defying Kyriel’s rule, self ruling villages with pirates taking on the seas — the commercial shipping routes any empire depended on, even though the angel had enough landmass to be an elephant as much as it was a whale by now.
It was Kai, though, who believed in the importance of commerce. It was him who’d pushed for the creation of a fleet, for the establishment of a market-fucking-economy in Kyriel’s lands. For commerce made humans prosperous, it multiplied those resources the Fallens didn’t care for. Food, commodities and spices, the things people needed to survive — and eventually even the luxuries Kyriel’s Court could buy, the things that suddenly made humans valuable to their undeads overlords. The things that made them worth something more than being mere chattel, than being mere meat producing machines awaiting to be devoured. It gave them dignity, it gave them power, and it allowed Kai leverage to push for those reforms he’d slowly managed to nibble at Kyriel thorough the centuries: healthcare, education, rule of law, and safe and sound housing for all.
For he might not be able to help the human lands anymore, but that didn’t mean he had given up. He might no longer be able to help his people, but if Kyriel forced him to be his prince — then all the humans enslaved in the fucker’s lands had become his charges. He’d pushed, and lobbied, and argued to exhaustion, even when Kyriel had made him bleed for it — for Kai had his ear, for better or for worse, and the angel was open to reason after all. He respected intelligence, wanted his pupil to be clever — and so he’d listened, brick by brink, drop-by-fucking-drop, until Kai had slowly managed to turn the people subject to Kyriel’s rule into fucking citizens, not slaves. Had made them merchants, sailors, farmers and builders — roles that were worthy of respect, that were of use.
Which was why the rebels, taking on the seas and sinking Kyriel’s merchant fleet, were a problem no matter how much Kai sympathised with their cause.
The boy stood, slowly straightening as his white wings stretched behind his back. The tower, a flimsy wooden and stone structure the pirates had erected as a makeshift sentinel, now occupied by his forces, creaked under him with the approaching storm. The Fallen that liaised with the army, the fool Kyriel had made lieutenant for this mission now, wisely keeping her mouth shut as Kai looked out towards the gathering clouds.
He could see the ships in the distance, the pirate vessels the rebels had sought refuge on. The main fleet, surrounded by dinghies — the poor man’s straws that had collected the civilians, the women and children and the men who’d resided on the mainland. The people that the rebels had evacuated the moment Kai’s forces had approached on the horizon, all of them en masse — for everyone knew the fate of those that fought against Kyriel’s empire, the worse than death destiny that awaited if caught. The one way ticket to the belly of the Tower, to Kyriel’s labs or to be flayed on a cross — if one wasn’t devoured by the army already on the way, if their assault didn’t leave spilled guts and broken bones before their bodies could be put to use. The angel demanding not only the men, women and children to be sent to the meat grinding machine at the heart of his empire, but also all their relatives to the sixth relation at least—
Kai didn’t blame the rebels for fleeing, even if in dinghies. He too would have picked the storm, rather than facing that fate.
The boy frowned, looking at the boats as they slowly got away.
You could blast them into nothingness, whispered the immortal, low, at the back of his head. You have a clean shot.
That he had, Kai thought. He could fly out, easily outspeed the storm — make sure every single dinghy would burn, that there would be no more rebels going after his ships.
Or he could send the Fallens out instead, command them to follow and watch them all sink.
The boy’s eyes flashed, silver and immortal, turning towards the battalion Kyriel had forced him to take with him for this mission south. The Fallens and beasts who’d slowed him down for weeks, the hungry and useless things — the creatures assembled at the bottom of the rebel tower and on the beach below him. His own fleet anchored on the shore, the slim and fast commercial vessels Kyriel had made him seize from the commercial navy of the Italic region down south — the free men, citizens of Kyriel’s lands, that nervously manned them. The men who would sink in the storm as well, together with the Fallens Kai could command to their deaths, if they were out there once it broke.
It wasn’t worth their lives, even if he wanted nothing more but to spite his captor but breaking his slaves. It wasn’t worth the punishment, the questioning that would surely follow — why he’d squandered resources, why there were so many casualties under his command.
The angel was many things, but not a fool.
“I’ll take them out myself,” Kai sighed, finally, the wind blowing against his face. He stepped towards the window, ready to jump out. “Keep the sails at the ready. I’ll follow the dinghies and try to hold the storm at bay. I’ll stay high, where they might not see me. Once they regroup and collect, I’ll send the location towards all those that might have survived, so that you might put them in cages.”
“Very well, my prince.”
“I don’t want any of the sailors harassed. Eat the local prisoners, if you must.” For there had been some left behind, some that the rebels hadn’t managed to evacuate on time before Kai had jumped out from the skies. The injured, those too old or too remote to move—
“Yes, my prince.”
There was some grim satisfaction, Kai thought, on seeing himself so obeyed. Some grim satisfaction indeed, when the Fallens had for so long hated and despised him in equal measure — not that now they drowned exactly in love for him, but respect and fear were better than the alternative. For, after all, Kyriel’s leash had allowed him to defend himself, to make himself feared — Kai having snapped too many of his subordinates’ necks for any of them to dare to question his authority now.
He knew, yet, that his lieutenant would report to Kyriel on his conduct during the mission as much as Kai would. That this mission was a test to his obedience, his resolve.
Get me the rebels. And get them alive.
Kai was going to try his very best to do that, with the least possible loss of human lives.
Those of his own people, that was.
“Should I notify his Majesty that you are going out, my Prince?”
Hadn’t he known better, Kai might have through the question from the Fallen could have come from a place of concern. For, after all, the Empire greatest weapon was about to throw himself into a storm, into enemy territory, against rebels who knew what it meant to make an angel bleed.
But he knew better. Could feel the tugging of his leash.
“He knows where to find me,” he snarled, short. The runes on his back pulsed, the collar tight around his throat. “Stay out of my way, and do your job.”
Then he was out. Letting the storm, his choices, swallow him up as the winds did with the waves down below. His power cracking in the clouds, matching the fury of his heart, that of the sky.
Kai and Kyriel Masterlist | Whumpuary 2025
Wanted to draw Kai in armour looking down the tower with silver eyes and bloodied wings in the shadow, but it was waaay beyond my skill level and so you get only a not so whumpy snippet this time :')
Taglist:
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@forthetaintedsorrow-whump @luminouswhump @watermelons-dont-grow-on-trees @fraugustends
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