#vvulf event

[thevvulf]

@graveshot

Thunk, thunk. And a howl. The smell of fire wafted over the place like hot perfume, choking everything. The blitz of silver threw the wind right out of her words and pinned her into the ground. She cracked her arm into the cannon on the way down.

Tilly howled out of reflex, not pain. There wasn’t any pain. Not a damn scrap of it, even though her gut was bleeding right through her pants and leathers. Her hood was knocked off her head as she hit bottom, her baton whacking her in the face. Her group of seven looked about, dumbfounded, some trough iron visors, and some half dead, until the wailing of the townspeople drew them into alleys, already lit with flames. They scattered, save two that were skulking like zombies.

“Fuck-”

She rolled over, bracing herself against the ground to stand and slam the matchstick into the ground.

She pulled her hood back over her face.

It’s a woman in a fancy getup. Ugly as sin hat. She cracked her botefeux into the iron chasis of the cannon and it sounded like a gong.

“Oi- you think you’re funny, bitch?! I got enough shit for another nineteen shots and a rod to stuff up your cunt. Come on down- I got your knives!”

[reynauld]

“Sadie-”

Count your blessings. One, his heart was beating like a drum. The most alive he’d been in years. Two, he took back alleys and side streets. He ran into no brigands. Three..

Call like this, should you need help. Even if it is to dig graves.

He was thankful he taught her how to whistle like an insect, as the dust settled from another massive explosion. The sound carried down the street. Light watch over her. Light help her. Light help me serve you... Reynauld ran through the burning town. The dead were strung up on rooftops, left in the roads or on the walls. Burned bodies of brigands and townsfolk cast a smell over the entire Hamlet. Burning hair.

He’d be sick if he could spare the anxiety. He couldn’t. 

His feet pounded the cracked pavement, and he ran through the skeletons of buildings. Chirped for her.

She didn’t respond, and the bubble of fear that had been settling in his blood-thick ribs grew.

“Sadie?” he chanced, whispering it into alleys and broken homes. No response. She was... supposed to be here.

By this bridge. He chirped again, and again listened. There were bodies strewn all over this place.

More burning hair. He shivered. A house by the bridge had caved in, and the broken cannon of the brigands sat there, abandoned. The smell grew, coming from the house, and he felt the bubble burst.

“Sadie... Sadie, tell me something else...” he murmured, ramming his shoulder into the fallen debris of the house. It cracked like matchsticks, and he tumbled into an inferno.

“Sadie?! Sarah?!”

Oh Light... 

Reynauld staggered through the smoke and ash, coughing into his helm. His eyes burned. There was a pile of rubble in the room, broken ceiling and supports. He saw a fleck of gold streaking out of it, and all he smelled was blood.

He shrieked like a monster and sunk his plated hands into the burning mass. Threw everything in the way to the rickety ground. The world burned around him like Hell itself. He kept digging. His gloves caught flame. 

She was there, under it all, bent backwards and entombed. Her arm was destroyed, her body, petrified in pain. A low sound started in the back of his throat. He combed the embers out of her hair, and pulled her destroyed body into his arms, hacking the smoke from his lungs. He could hardly see, and his flesh was burning.

“Oh, Light. I have you,” he said, standing. A piece of the roof cracked. Caved, and he ran, throwing himself against a half burnt wall and spilling into an alley. Sadie’s body fell like dead weight.

He pressed his hand to her head. Willed the Light into her.

Nothing. Dead.

She was dead, horribly, and he had no diamonds.

Reynauld scooped her body into his arms, and held it close. It was a trek through the brigands to get back to the Abbey. 

He chirped, loud, twice.

Help.

[openveined]

Damn this curse-- 

One of many swears floating through his mind like white noise. His body is twisted, oversensitive to the commotion, the noise, the chaos. Noise vibrates in antennae, reaches the strange adaptations in his sides, muffled. Distractions. Distractions and not help. 

 The hamlet’s a far cry from the forests he’s used to, but house corners offer cover all the same, alleyways still offer quick routes, firing lanes-- it’s not far from his time in London. 

God what he’d give to be back in London. 

Fire and smoke are thick. He keeps his kerchief over his nose and mouth like his knight told him, water in his flask instead of whiskey or rum. He’s been taking shots at brigands as they flooded the first streets of the sorry place. Been sticking the ones that get too close with his blade and leaving their blood to stain the dirt and stone as he moved on. 

His body is beyond tired, but burning fear keeps him on his feet despite the exhaustion, the wounds, the worry. 

Two chirps. 

They’re a far cry from how they sounded in the abbey, divine and resplendent-- a prelude to a serenade. No, these are fearful, though they belong to the same man. 

His feet have never carried him so fast. 

The sound of his boots ricochets off the buildings as he swings around a corner and through buildings, into the next alley. It makes the silence when he stops feel deafening, even when he knows over the din of the fight it amounts to no more than a drop in the bucket. 

He sees Sadie, limp, mangled and twisted, in Reynauld’s arms. His stomach drops, throat burns. 

“Love--” he drops to come closer. “Reynauld-- what-- is she--? She can’t be...”

@lighttakeyou​

[rapturcus-blog]

He stands with heels planted firmly. He stands among those gathered in the center of the town. He could never say the hamlet offers much of an army, but Isaiah knows it bears the responsibility of a stronghold. 

A responsibility laid on the backs of those here, now. Red soaks the sky and the ground. The canon’s ringing has finally ended. 

Isaiah breathes in slowly, exhales out even more so. Fresh lashes from the night before sting in the open air. Clarity. His wrist stings wear his manacles cut his skin and his hand runs red with blood. It stains his flail where he holds it. 

He’s a testament to their strength. His body a vessel for the Light. This is a challenge to endure, and he intends to do so with every reserve left with him. 

Isaiah can hear the bark of orders and white-hot fear lances his heart. He grins.

What is fear but a key to piety?

[rotweald]

Blood. Gore. Wails and crashes and sounds of horror. The town is under siege. Roule stays hunkered in the crypts-- or at least that has been his intention. 

The scent of blood is what does him in. Sadie had left him extra bread and cheese, and for awhile he had picked at it while trying to stave off the growing hunger in his stomach. 

Bread and cheese does not please his other half nearly as much as the scene they both know lay past the crypt doors. There will be dead on both sides. Roule flicks his tongue across his lips. Sets the bread aside. 

What leaves the crypt is far from human. Wolves’ teeth set in a deer’s skull, spines protruding along its back. It slinks with an inhuman grace among the stones and creeps off into the dark of the alleys. 

Fresh carnage-- too tempting to ignore.

[swaniron]

The good Raunie’s eyes were on him, for once on a singular point of destiny. Boudica, her unrelenting shadow. There were people who just called her “The Nomad”, or the wise woman in this place, and she never corrected any of them. Never once did she give her name as anything but “Madame”. To Boudica?

To Boudica, strong Boudica that feared neither pain nor death, the woman half her size was the only thing that made her truly, truly pale.

Boudica stood at the open door of the transept, and she flinched when that single voice cut through the silence.

“A plan,” she called out, over the hush of the crowd packed into the abbey like rats to ship, “Yes, you do need a plan, Lord von Bok. What shall you do?”

Boudica shrunk into the shadow of the arch. The crows were beginning to caw outside, more today.

[thevvulf]

In the Forest...

Tilly packed the heavy powder down into the barrel of the Pounder while a few of the boys kept the carriage steady. The old girl had a problem staying still on account of old, damaged wheels, but he blamed the last owner’s negligence for the cannon’s lousy shape. 

“It’s not that hard to replace a fucking wheel,” Tilly says, her half a face smarting as she rammed the sponge butt into the ground. 

“Not important,” he says, his bicep steady against an overgrown tree root. He’d been pulling the crystal out of his muscle and chucking it to the dirt, where his drooling dog was making quick work of swallowing everything he was tossing. 

Tilly gave a snort of disbelief. He watched her from the corner of his eye. She’d been blasted by the shit in the farmstead, they all had, and he can’t remember how old the girl was. Fifteen? Something?  Something young enough to be a pain and old enough to be running with a pack of wolves. She used to look boyish, with cropped hair and a leather tunic, and now she looked... full of holes and segmented. Half of her face was grey and decayed, split down and off center line from her nose. It was floating apart from the rest of her. 

He didn’t look much better, but damn if it wasn’t sobering to see his matchmaid in pieces. There was a hole straight through her chest that didn’t bleed, and he could see the cannon through it. The rest of the boys? They have half a brain for anything, anymore, and they look worse than her. Hell knew why she was spared a stupid mind. 

Vvulf spat another crystal at the dog and plucked one of the men up by his scruff.

“Get the bricks, and the rest of you lot. Set the fuckin’ place on fire.”

Tilly laughed, “Hope you find your little knight friend. I’ll fuck his skull with the cannon.”

He could hear the town warning bells beginning to sound, loud and clear. The noise gets a chorus of growls from a hundred men turned monster, in the wood. 

Vvulf threw the man, who was silent as the grave, against the dirt, and he scrambled off.

“Put his head in the Pounder when you cut it off, girl. I want to shoot it straight into the damned house.”

Tilly pulled her mask above her face, but he could see the smile behind it, and the shine in her dead eyes. She snapped her fingers and walked with her botefeux as a staff.

“Yip-yip, let’s go boys,” she yowled, and leaped atop the weapon while the dead men pushed the wheels forward.

[reynauld]

He hisses, a vial of Blood, half finished to his lips. He could feel it pulse through his veins, without mercy and without reprieve. They didn’t need a protector today, they needed a man... a monster that could cut through flesh and bone.

Bring Vvulf’s head. 

Reynauld swallows the rest, and set the helm over his head. They needed him in the square.

And he knew that Vvulf would be there.