Ronan grins and gestures victoriously, catching the sight of the queen engaged with another soul. A youthful, common lass, brown of hair and donned in an olive kirtle. The commoner properly curtsies to her queen, lowering her head as if unworthy. But Meliora waves her off, seeing herself not above those who are deemed ‘common.’ Exuberantly, the commoner embraces Meliora, who happily accepts her gesture.
“It’s been
soooo
long, Lady Meliora!” the commoner exclaims before pulling off the queen. She then scratches the side of her face, nervously laughing before admitting, “…Guess I should be callin’ you
‘Your Grace’
now, huh?”
“Not at all,” Meliora humbly dismisses. “It’s good to see you again, Aislin.”
“Likewise!”
The eyes of the commoner Aislin then dart for the garb of the queen’s guard, Daevarro, drawn to by its curious nature. Her face lifts to him.
“And who have we got here?” Aislin pries, greeting Daevarro with a warm, inviting smile.
Despite clearly paying much of his mind to his queen’s environment, Daevarro is not of ill-manners. After all, the young lass is acquainted with Queen Meliora. Daevarro, for the moment, withdraws from his duty, fixing upon Aislin with a stern, yet distracted, stare.
“My name is Daevarro,” with a bow of his head, the protector of the queen introduces himself. He lifts himself back up, retaining his distance. “It’s a pleasure, ma’am.”
“Please, I’m nothin’ fancy. Just ‘Aislin’ works fine!”
Daevarro halfheartedly nods in response, immediately casting himself back into the throes of his duties. In the aftermath, conversation fires up between Meliora and Aislin. But the young lass is as mischievous as she is perceptive, observing the uptight bodily structure of Daevarro. Not a word, not even a syllable, of their conversation could penetrate his iron-clad loyalty to his duties. Strangely enough, however, despite his lack of focus on her, Daevarro can just see as Aislin’s face kinks with a coy smirk.
“Sir Daevarro, if I might ask you a question,” noting Daevarro’s lack of interest, Aislin suddenly begins with a hint of wickedness rolling off her tongue, “are you currently…seeing anyone?”
Like water seeping through the cracks, her words seem to work through Daevarro’s earnest nature. A torrent of water then follows, completely disarming him. His jaw breaks as he registers her question. Cold sweat rushes down his entirety. The typically cloistered Daevarro then snaps directly at Aislin, fixing upon the energetic girl’s face with widened eyes and a felled guard.
“Aislin!” Meliora, clearly shocked by her friend’s absurd question, quickly utters.
But Aislin is clearly in her own version of Utopia. She bursts out into laughter, continuing until her sides spilt from her torso.
“Oh, I’m only kiddin’!” Aislin confesses as her laughter steadily ceases, wiping away the weeping of mirth from her pale blue eyes.
It’s clear that only she could appreciate, in her opinion, her ‘well-timed comedy.’ Despite her loud, repetitive laughter ringing inside of their great helms, the Loyal Knights serve their queen dogmatically. Their massive, hulking steel scuta held closely to their breasts; deathly steel draped along their hip. Motivated by their peerless servitude, Daevarro’s expression relaxes. A nigh-instant shift to the world around his queen draws his mind’s eye. However, his queen observes him as a turtle withdrawing into its shell. His reaction defensive, anxious; he simply wants not a thing to do with it. Meliora breathes a sigh of deepness before her passion tempts her back in, conjuring further discussion between her and her dear friend Aislin. As she continues, the Loyal Knights are left on high alert. The healthy gray of Daevarro’s hand secures the grip of his outlandish blade as his eyes punctures the body of the crowd. A chaotic, indescribable maelstrom of faces—untold in number—washes over his eyes.
Many appear as unworthy to gaze upon their exalted queen, some simply chomped at the bit to even get a hair closer to her. Regardless, staring into the horde quickly becomes disorienting. Thousands of faces suddenly become one massive, featureless blur. Daevarro frustratedly grits his teeth and blinks heavily as if a man without his glasses attempting to read, trying to reconstitute his focus. But it didn’t help, his exhaustion encumbering him like the darkened bags under his eyes. He copes and endures it to the best of his ability, damning himself for his poor condition during this most pivotal of days.
Up above the bustling rafters and buzzing cobblestone streets, where the birds fly, tempered adamas glistens like diamonds in the frigid sunlight. The narrow, sharpened adamas of a bolt trains upon the distant figure of one dazzling soul in the crowd below. It lies deathly still upon a bed of yew wood; a prod in steady, confident hands. High upon the rooftops of Governanti, two figures sit, crouched behind the safety of a nobleman’s decorated roof garden. The pantile rooftops and the cobblestone streets blend into each other, but they aren’t enough to bemuse the experienced eye of the man behind the crossbow.
The crossbowman breathes. He breathes. He breathes. The heavy, rhythmic sound of his preparation, of his focus, burns heatedly into the cloth wrapped around his face.
She
becomes the only thing he can see, for his brain ignores everything else just like his nose. This height and angle are perfect, for it reduces the loyal steel around her completely meaningless. She stands there, flapping her gums to some worthless human. She is blissfully unaware, completely oblivious, to him and his intentions, like the hand of a god of death looming ominously above. One tap of his finger and another soul is culled to Utopia.
A flush of self-gratification rushes down his skin like an ecstatic chill, wielding the absolute and unopposable power of a god. He barely manages to contain his sheer laughter at the situation in hand. However, he retains control of himself and his aim, despite a rather haughty grin cracking along his concentrated expression.
“Caerus,” suddenly and quietly hisses a sleek voice from the crossbowman’s right, breaking his concentration.
A hand then abruptly outstretches ahead of the crossbowman identified as Caerus and forces his crossbow down. A momentary struggle for power ensues, filling the surrounding air with a flurry of grunts and groans. However, Caerus fails, having the quarrel pinned into the ground. Caerus’s visage contorts to that of a mad dog, glaring forward upon the individual with a menacing grimace.
“What do you think you’re doing!?” Caerus demands bombastically as if torn from a dream, gripping the collar of the tunic of the one who stopped him. “I had her!”
“We mustn’t go through with this,” negatively shaking his head, the other individual refutes solemnly. “We can’t kill Her Majesty!”
“Don’t be a fool! She’s just another one of Raphael’s banners that must be torn down. If we kill her, we strike at the heart of Raphael himself!”
Caerus turns to his right, noting that his perfect opportunity has passed. The distant wonder and ecstasy of the mortal world begins to soften; the fading lifespan of Caerus’s plan. The kill no longer akin to child’s play, for the queen’s legs grow active once more. She begins to move beyond the commoner Aislin, who curtsies once more as to display deepest respect to the queen who saved her life. Meliora departs with a genuine smile upon her face, careful to conceal the earnest intent of her travels upon this winter’s day: to seek those affiliated in the deplorable rumours, such as the would-be assassin Caerus.
From the grand view of the rooftops, the unarmed Caerus watches his prey move away from his crossbow’s range. Mercilessly, he glares at the young man who stopped him.
“Tch!” Caerus irefully clicks his tongue, then fixes a gaze on the crowd. Indeed, he knows well of who resides in the crowd. Entombed in walls of ecstatic flesh are individuals of a particular stripe—a triad of bodies, who disguise themselves as normal, average Governantians. But some of them, yes, those some bleed the blood of noble houses. Evidently, they scoff at the common trash and voluminously curse their fates for this temporary incarceration. One of them, arms athwart, directs daggers at the sky, but in a very specific location. Indeed, his luxurious home which towers high above this low-class neighborhood. But especially does his eyes stab into its roof garden, the very same place where the would-be assassin was to make the money shot.
“What the hell is he doing?” With an impatient tap of his index finger upon his bicep, the up-gazing nobleman seethes discreetly, nigh of tearing hair from root. “Make the damned shot already, Caerus!”
“These Kórakas, I swear,” begins another infuriated nobleman, turning his head up to the very same sight. “Lord Dias was mistaken to raise them to the peerage.”
The impatient nobleman had enough of this. He can no longer wait for Caerus to make the move. The words of his father then seize him:
“If you require proper action, you’d best commit it yourself. Trust not a soul but your own.”
They spiral maddeningly throughout his being, coursing through him like the blood rushing to his brain. His hand fastens tautly upon an object concealed beneath the thick wool of his cloak. It chatters nervously like steel clinking against steel; a dagger of last resort.
The nobleman's upper lip furls into his mouth, unveiling the unnatural perfection of his teeth which begin to become like one. His quivering breath bristles out from between his bared teeth. Indeed, his desires and intention stagnant in a pool of his fears, poisoning any hope or opportunity in him to make a move.
The last of the incognito nobles—a female Solasúian—takes heed of her companion’s ill intentions, placing her hand over his hand before decrying, “…Lord Eleius, you can’t!”
The crowd, so transfixed by the mere sight of their revered queen, pays not a mind to this shout as it invades the soundscape. Her voice echoes out into the nothingness. Her words mute to the crowd’s ears…as well as Eleius’s. Indignation and grief well up in his eyes, cascading down his cheek. These emotions obscure his view upon Queen Meliora, beclouding her picturesque image. An unidentifiable world; the blurred lines begin to intersect. They cross over and into each other like by the work of a seamstress, threading a new world.
A capital bathed in scarlet red. A young man, no older than his early twenties, intently patrols the streets like an inquisitor. At his feet lies cold the corpses of the slaughtered, those of who he curses and loathes. He is the law in this hell on earth, piercing the breast of another soul wrought with sin. Blood trickles freshly from his sword like the frightful tears streaming from the limp faces of the dead; the crimson-tainted tears of Eleius, of his lover, of his own son. The quickening pace of Eleius’s heart pounds like thunder, flooding his entirety with all manner of foolhardy intentions. An outburst of adrenaline and cortisol suddenly overwhelms that pool of his fears, coloring its murky blue depths a wrathful shade of red.
Eleius, a slave now to his traumas, abruptly breaks from his unnerved stance and bolts forward. He cuts down any worthless and irrelevant creature in his path, ruthlessly shoving aside even children if it meant getting to
him.
The image of
him
burns upon Eleius’s enlarged pupils; the gaping hole in Eleius’s soul that
he
carved open. From the spot Eleius left, his two companions are abandoned with visages thieved of air. Though one then indifferently shrugs and forsakes this futile effort, the female Solasúian frantically gives chase. Eleius is mistaken. He is foolish. He—nay,
they
—stand not a shadow of a chance against Her Majesty’s own company of Loyal Knights; the chosen of the royal court.
“
FATHER!
” hysterically cries the female Solasúian named Cleite, the detested bastard of the once-proud nobleman. “Father, you can’t!”
But it matters not how loudly or heartily she yells. She realizes now that she must travel down the path of violence, hesitantly unsheathing the steel that she hardly understood. Eleius’s actions bleeds the air dry of its euphoria, for it exhausts in reaction to his berserk mindset. Horrified gasps and slews of verbal attacks expend outwardly, warranting the attention of the Loyal Knights. The dozen knights halt in unison and cast a singular gaze backwards as if to investigate. Eleius observes as they begin to face the crowd, further hastening his furious charge. If he just got a little closer, maybe—
just maybe!
—he can strike
him
before meeting their sword.
Like a mad bull, Eleius bursts through the last layer of worthless people, catching the knights before their heads even make the full rotation. Eleius takes full advantage of the unusual angle of his approach, acknowledging the limited peripheral vision of the Loyal Knights and their great helms. The massive arrangement of sound booming from the crowd like an assault upon their eardrums, weakening their usually instantaneous reaction.
Eleius grins with iniquitous glee, confident of his approach. But it seems his confidence is but conceit, for as he closes in on the knights—so close that he can see his twisted elation reflect from the knights’ armour—the unexpected ensues. In a single clean, unfailing motion—like that of turning one page to the next—a knight’s spear greets Eleius in a deathly whisper. The nobleman sharply exhales. His nerves shiver at the feel of the spear’s head burrowing into his chest cavity. The energy transferred in the exchange sends Eleius in reverse, crashing hard upon the cobblestone below.
Eleius lays upon his back in stunned silence, gazing with question upon the ambiguous figure who will claim his life. A pitiless, glowing cerulean sight pierces the black veil beneath the knight’s helmet; a judge without judgment. The Loyal Knights are to look as the same entity; meaning that all must wear and wield in uniform. Yet this one is different, wielding a spear crystalline like forged of sacred adamas. It is a partisan on an extreme scale, some might even call it closer to a ‘sword-spear’ as its head resembles the cross-guard and blade of a longsword.
Eleius’s fleeing life pools coldly around him, witnessing his demise…strangely without pain. Indeed, even as the knight with the unusual spear dislodges it from his body, the dying nobleman did not suffer. Perhaps there is merit to those frivolous stories of adamas after all—that its hallowed stroke is merciful and loving like a benevolent father. Or perhaps it is simply because he lays now upon the step of death’s door. As the heat of his anger escapes him like his fleeting life, Eleius’s senses return to him. He no longer sees the image of the Bastard King, but instead bears witness to something remarkable: his target herself rushing to his aid.
“No!” a single utterance reaches Eleius’s ear from what seemed like a mile away; faint, yet warm, compassionate, sincere.
Meliora breaks free from the protective grasp of Daevarro, her protector, and rushes to Eleius’s side. Falling to her knees, Meliora urgently tears from the sleeve of her impeccable, immaculate dress. She then vigorously applies pressure to the wound in order to stop the bleeding, utilizing the torn cloth as makeshift gauze. A very distinct, ethereal iridescence, like a brilliant aurora, then evolves over her eyes’ own natural light, a sight which seems to enable her to thoroughly, quickly examine his chest. She can see all his internal structures, unraveling the layers of his skin and muscle. Easily, she discovers a truth, an alarming truth, about the condition of his being. Though stricken with panic, she retains her composure and commits herself to saving Eleius’s life. Though he initially attempted to block his queen from forsaking her protective circle, Daevarro knows well the heart that pounds in her chest. He bolts to his queen’s side with swift alertness, unleashing the exquisite, silvery metal of his blade.
“Protect Her Majesty!” the top of Daevarro’s lungs resounds with authority as his form adapts to an inside right stance.
From the crowd, dishearteningly witnessing the attack upon her father, another attack suddenly surges out. Cleite, the mongrel daughter of the dying lord, fraught with rage, seeks revenge. Yet Daevarro, prepared for hell or high water, intercepts her charge. Blinded, Cleite viciously attacks Daevarro with a flurry with slashes. She bombards Daevarro with belligerence, a house of wide-open windows to his trained eye. Her face, shrunken with fury, torrents with tears, an expression of her vengeful anguish.
Daevarro, as he weaves expertly around her series of mindless swings, is taken aback, perhaps seeing a reflection of his past self in her. Nevertheless, Daevarro then steps to the side of a brash lunge and takes a measured strike at Cleite’s wrist, disarming the tool of vengeance from her hand. He wrestles her to the ground and restrains her, preventing her from taking any further action.
But then Daevarro beholds his surroundings, where a chaos of noise quickly swallows him and all things whole. Blood let loose into the air; his fellow protectors confronted by the citizens they are sworn to protect. Sheer anarchy consumes the street, as secret enemies grow foolishly emboldened by the bravery of the nobleman and his daughter. They blast out from the crowd, engaging in a brazen, riotous attack. The crowd instantly scatters in the ensuing pandemonium, inundating the atmosphere with blood-chilling screams and the heartache of children. The child Ronan himself—who watched the dream-like scene from his window-seat—runs and hides, exposed to a nightmare his young mind simply couldn’t fathom.
A black-steel drape encircles the queen; the Loyal Knights who adapt effortlessly. Daevarro lays a grievous eye upon his dear queen, who has allowed her frustration of the situation whole to bleed through her composed visage. She grimaces as she steadfastly performs chest compressions upon the breathless Eleius. The sickening crack of ribs sporadically pops into the nearby air as Meliora’s blood-soaked hands push deep into his chest. She continues endlessly, for she had become desperate to save him. Pushing and pushing and pushing…’til suddenly she hears only her own breathing.
She stops. Silent—the world turned silent. It turned dishearteningly silent. She surveys. Still—the world became still. It became terrifyingly still. On her knees, at her knees, at her left, at her right, is the stolen life of others, seeping between the cobblestone.
