Executioner- Reign of Blood

by Edwin McRae

  “What flaw?”

  “Karina is the only person I know what can get me out of this bloody fairytale. Now you’re planning to off her.”

  “The druids who summoned me, they can probably send you home.”

  Arix stretched out his arms and spun in a full circle. “Hello? Druids? Be good chaps and come out where we can see you.”

  “They’re in the Garland capital city, idiot.”

  “A place neither of us have seen. We don’t even know if it-”

  “It exists,” interrupted Mark through gritted teeth.

  For a moment Arix looked like he was going to argue. Instead he sighed. “Fine. Maybe it does. How long to get there?”

  “A week from Citadel. Maybe more?”

  “Fuck that and the horse it rode in on! I’ve got a beautiful lady and a successful business to get back to. I’m not traipsing halfway across this virtual landfill to find some druid what may or may not be able to wake me from this shit-eating nightmare.” He strode up to Mark and pointed a finger in his face. “We’ll capture Karina and make her send me home. After that, you can do what you want with the sadistic bitch.”

  Vari shrugged. “Kills two slugs with one boot if you ask me.”

  “Luv you too, darling,” snapped Arix with a sneer.

  Mark gently pushed Arix’s index finger aside with his palm. “Alright then. We help you capture Karina, but only if you help us set things up for the Breaking Dawn ritual.”

  “Set things up? Like how?”

  “We need all three altars together. That means we can’t take her here.”

  “What?!” spat Arix. “I’ve just finished scoping out the best ambush spots! This place is perfect!”

  “No, Arix. Not for us. We need her to take the altar. She’ll be gathering all three of them together, and that’s where we need to strike.”

  Arix shook his head in disbelief. “That’ll mean cutting our way through her entire fucking reiver army.”

  Mark’s many hours of the Murderer’s Dogma FIVR came back to him. Lots of practice in sneaking and killing. “We’ll do it guerilla style. Hit and run, whittle their numbers down until we’re ready to strike at the heart of the camp and capture Karina.”

  “I could find you the best places to hide,” offered Citadel.

  “Shit, hi Sid!” exclaimed Mark with a start. “Sorry, forgot about you for a bit there.”

  “I’ve been resting this past while,” explained Citadel. “All this terrain exploration makes me quite tired. I only heard that last bit about sacrificing an inquisitor to the Vorasii goddesses. I like the sound of it.” He yawned and Mark was struck by the strangeness of the sound. Citadel had neither mouth or lungs for yawning with. It was probably an unconscious behavior, left over from his days of flesh and blood. “I’m off back to sleep. Give me a gentle tap if you need me.”

  “Night, Sid.”

  Arix had a faint smile on his lips. He seemed to be warming to Mark’s idea. “We’ll be grinding as we take the reivers down, leveling for when we hit the main event.”

  “Exactly.” Mark looked to Vari, wondering how she’d react to what he was about to say. “How would you feel about providing potion backup rather than hands-on healing?”

  She put her hands on her hips and fixed him with a dark glare. “You are not leaving me out of this.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her. “What I’m thinking is this. That first waypoint of ours isn’t too far from the reiver camp. You could pop back to Citadel and brew EP and HP potions, then bring them to us at the waypoint. Then you could patch us up for our next raid, and we could take the potions with us so we can fight on for longer each time.”

  “Feels like you just want to keep me out of the fighting.”

  He pressed his palms together. “I promise you, Vari, I’m not. We need your support, your healing and potions, otherwise we’re screwed.” He took a deep breath, trying not to think about how he would feel, the pain and emptiness if he should lose her. “We can die as many times as it takes, but you can only die once. I’m being brutally practical here, but…”

  Vari dropped her hands to her sides and gave a reluctant sigh. “Yes, alright. It makes sense. But I’m coming with you when we take Karina.”

  “Wouldn’t be the same without you,” Mark agreed with a fierce grin. Then he turned to Arix. “Sound like a plan?”

  The executioner looked at him for a long moment, his lips pursed in thought. Too long, thought Mark.

  “I just need a yes or no. Unless you have an alternative you’d like to propose?”

  For a moment Arix looked like he was going to say something. Then he just shook his head and grinned. “While I would love to stick around and see you drain the life out of old Inquisibitch, I have a date with my real life. Count me in up until that point. But don’t worry, I’ll make sure resistance is pretty fucking pathetic by the time you’re ready capture Karina.” Arix raised three fingers and pressed his little finger down with his thumb. “Scouts honor.”

  Mark laughed. “You were a boy scout?”

  “Twenty-third Chingford Scout Group.”

  Mark simply laughed.

  19

  [Vari]

  Arix’s search turned up the secret room. It sat at the back of Solmora’s Chamber, tucked between two more equally tragic renditions of the goddess.

  Vari watched Arix with suspicion as he picked out the most useful items from the assorted miscellanea. There was plenty of gold and silver in the form of statuettes, candlesticks, and trinkets of various shapes and sizes. Had they gathered it all up and sold it in the markets of Credence, she and Mark could have retired to Karajan, bought a vineyard and hired people to tend it for them. They need never lift a finger for the rest of their lives.

  Which got Vari to thinking about Mark’s mortality. Yes, he could come back from the dead, but could he age? What if she grew old and died while he remained forever young? She shuddered at the thought. What in Agrovesh’s teeth had she got herself into? The slippery slope of those thoughts was thankfully cut short by an excited Arix.

  “Oh happy days!” The executioner lifted an ornate ceremonial axe from its perch on the wall.

  “Very pretty,” commented Vari, “but can it actually hurt someone?”

  Arix’s grin broadened as he recited the stats.

  Solmora’s Bite

  +50% to base axe damage.

  +25% attack speed.

  50% chance of inducing a melancholy that reduces the victim’s damage dealt by 25%.

  20% chance of inducing crippling despair that paralyzes the victim for 5 seconds.

  “Despair is the fertile soil from which

  delight may sprout and bloom.”

  - Ishka the Devout

  “And now something for the lady,” Arix continued as he held up a silver-grey cloak.

  Vari took it from him and marveled at the softness and lightness of the wool. The item’s stats came to her of their own accord. She read them out for Mark’s benefit.

  Solmora’s Blessing

  +25% reduction to damage received.

  +1 to Body.

  +3 to Spirit.

  +50% resistance to magical manipulation of the wearer’s Mind.

  “With clarity and purpose we find our way through the mists of despair.”

  - Ishka the Devout

  “No point in casting Terrifying Manifestation on you, then,” joked Mark.

  “Not that you ever would,” hoped Vari.

  “Only on Halloween,” he replied with a smirk.

  “What’s Halloween?”

  “A festival we hold every year in parts of our world. A day for kids to dress up as monsters and threaten to terrorize people if they don’t give them sweets.”

  “Sounds like an extortion racket to me,” said Vari.

  She’d seen plenty of those in Karajan. The reivers had plundered her land so badly that there was precious little remaining for her people. The less scrupulous Kara
ji had formed gangs to control what was left. The irony was that it was the oppressive ganglords that kept the Karaji from rising up to throw off the reiver occupation, not the reiver army. Vari had no doubt that the reivers knew that and fostered it. Inquisitors stalked Karaji, preaching law and order, truth and enlightenment, while turning a blind eye as the strong brutalized and butchered the weak.

  Mark blushed a little. “Yeah, it kind of is when you think about it.”

  “So is Christmas,” added Arix as he handed Mark a pair of black leather gloves. The knuckles were studded with silver skulls. “Ho ho ho.”

  “Thanks, Arix,” said Mark as he slipped the gloves on and read out their stats.

  Solmora’s Caress

  30% reduction in damage to the hands.

  10% reduction to all physical damage.

  10% increased damage dealt with handheld weapons.

  20% chance of inducing crippling despair that paralyzes the victim for 5 seconds.

  (Only effective if the victim’s bare flesh is touched.)

  Chance of crippling despair may be increased by 1% per essence point invested.

  “The kindest touch becomes cruel

  to the unrequited lover.”

  - Ishka the Devout

  “Christmas? Ho ho ho?” Vari sighed. “What are you two talking about now?”

  “Christmas,” explained Arix, “involves a fat man in a red suit what sneaks down your chimney at night and gives presents to your children.”

  That made no sense to Vari, and as a young girl she would’ve been terrified if a fat man had snuck down her chimney at night. And one should never trust a stranger offering presents.

  “What does he want in return?”

  “Nothing.”

  Vari shook her head. “Fat men with gifts never want nothing.”

  “Apparently it’s a reward,” explained Mark, “for being a good kid all year.”

  “But threatening people to give you sweets, that’s not good.”

  Arix and Mark exchanged a bemused look.

  “Yeah,” admitted Mark. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Neither,” agreed Arix. “Being a kid in our world is a bit complicated.”

  “Sounds like it,” concluded Vari. She shot Mark a wicked grin, knowing this would unsettle him. “We’ll be raising our children in Garland, won’t we Mark?”

  Mark turned paler than she’d ever seen him, even in death. “Um, I, yeah, we could-”

  She laughed and patted his arm, putting the poor man out of his misery. “See, I don’t even need to dress like a monster to terrorize you.” As Mark mustered a weak smile in return, Vari turned to Arix. The executioner was rifling through the remaining pile of magic items. They were mostly rings, bracelets, amulets and odd pieces of armor. “Anything else in there?”

  “Not really. The armor is lower grade than what we have already, and these trinkets have just a smattering of elemental resists. Two percent Fire Resistance and shit.”

  “I don’t see the point of jewelry like that,” complained Mark. “Magical items take a lot of effort to forge, so why would you go out of your way to imbue something with a measly two percent Fire Resistance? That wouldn’t even stop you getting sunburnt. Same goes for cursed items. What’s the point?”

  “Well, we both know how quickly an artist and a game designer can churn this shit out,” responded Arix, “so it’s the backstory here what’s paper thin. You’d have to be a right bastard to put time and energy into a cursed item that pisses off some random stranger countless years after you’re dead and gone.”

  Vari noted that Arix was making more of these strange comments about her world, treating it like it was some elaborate set for a play. The items were all props and the people were all characters. She also noted that Mark was countering those comments less and less, like he was beginning to accept the truth of them. Anger flickered inside her. Not at Arix this time. At Mark.

  Her beloved warlock was beginning to pose more questions than he answered. She knew nothing about his world and how it related to her own. She knew nothing about his past before appearing in Garland. She knew only what she’d witnessed since meeting him. She had fallen for Mark the Warlock, but Arix was drawing out more and more of who Mark had been before, and if Vari was going to allow herself to fully love him, she needed to know who he really was first. If she didn’t, she was just being a character in a play, oblivious to the world beyond the edge of the stage.

  Arix plucked a sapphire ring from the pile and tossed it to Vari. She caught it one-handed and held it up to Arix’s aura to get a better look.

  “Pretty,” she remarked.

  Ring of Radiance

  Produces a white light with a radiance equivalent to a burning lantern. The wearer can invoke the radiance effect by uttering “Illuminate” and stop the radiance with an utterance of “Extinguish”. The wearer can strengthen or weaken the radiance through force of will.

  “Illuminate,” said Vari.

  The sapphire began to glow, emitting just enough white light to show up against Arix’s Truelight spell. She willed the gem to grow brighter until it drowned out Arix’s aura and forced Mark and Arix to shield their eyes. Satisfied, she willed the radiance down to an ambient level.

  “Thank you, Arix.”

  “Got something else for you, too,” said the executioner as he drew a dagger from his belt.

  Vari felt a jab of adrenaline in her belly and she gripped her staff more tightly, ready to defend herself. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mark reach for Volcanic Bastard. Arix rolled his eyes, reversed the dagger and offered it to her, handle first.

  “A little trust, come on,” he insisted.

  Vari felt a bit sheepish as she accepted the dagger and read its name and stats.

  Blood of the Lost

  +20% to base dagger damage.

  30% chance of inducing internal hemorrhaging in an organic enemy.

  +30% accuracy when thrown.

  Will return to owner if in line of sight.

  “We might be lost yet our blood

  will always find its way home.”

  - Ishka the Devout

  She nodded, understanding the weapon’s significance. “This was made for the Breaking Dawn ritual, correct?” She passed it to Mark to take a look.

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Ishka the Devout again? Her name’s on the book as well.”

  “A high priestess of some kind,” suggested Vari.

  “Yup. High Priestess of Solmora?”

  Arix shook his head and pointed at the dagger. “I found that behind the Altar of Korlvah. She was probably high priestess of all three.”

  “Makes sense,” said Mark as he passed the dagger back to Vari. “One sacrifice, one priest, one liter of blood per altar.”

  “Do you think it was Ishka who caused the cataclysm?” asked Vari as she cast aside her old dagger and slid the new one in its place.

  “Guess we’ll know more once Mark has finished geeking out over Ishka’s tome,” answered Arix.

  “Oh, and thank you again, Arix,” said Vari. “For the cloak, ring and dagger. You needn’t have been so generous with the salvage.” In fact, she wasn’t sure why he was being so generous all of a sudden. He could’ve made good use of both the Blood of the Lost and the Ring of Radiance, yet he’d only taken the axe for himself.

  “Ho ho ho,” answered the executioner, his polished white teeth gleaming in his aura.

  Vari found a smile tugging at the edges of her own mouth. “If you try to climb down my chimney, Arix, I’ll stab you in the ass with this dagger.”

  Arix’s laughter echoed around the chamber. “Point taken, luv. Literally.” He looked at the remaining loot. “Any reason for taking the rest of this junk? Not like we have vendors we can pawn it off to.”

  “Sid can extract the magic out of items when he melts them down,” answered Mark. “He should be able to take several weak items and turn them into one strong one.”r />
  “Upcycling? Nice.” Arix scooped the rest of the magical items into his backpack and shouldered it. “So we’re headed back to HQ then? Might as well rest up while Karina finds and nabs this Altar of Solmora thingy.”

  Vari bit her lip and tried to read Arix’s body language. It was possible that he was just enthusiastic about their deal, about helping them capture Karina so he could go home. He sounded genuine. He even looked the part. But there was something niggling at Vari. He was being too amenable, treating her like a real person rather than one of those ‘en-pee-sees’ he mentioned on occasion. It felt nice and weird at the same time. She remembered what her inquisitor mentor had told her.

  There was no such thing as unconditional love, no such thing as loyalty. Everyone was selfish, and selfishness was the glue that bound people together. When one person’s selfishness crossed with another person’s selfishness, conflict ensued. Blood was drawn. When one selfish ambition nurtured another selfish ambition then society grew between them. That’s what society was. A horde of selfish people accidentally helping each other to be selfish.

  That same inquisitor had put Vari’s hand in a fire to demonstrate the application of Mend Flesh. Vari learned a valuable spell and the inquisitor got to satiate his sadistic cravings. She supposed that’s what the inquisitor had meant.

  She eyed Arix as he led the way out of the chamber. Yes, that was probably it. They were helping Arix with his selfish desire. He wanted to go home. In return, he was helping them with their selfish desire, to be the saviors of Garland. Was saving Garland really selfish? Vari had to admit that it probably was. It was where she wanted to live happily ever after with Mark in peace and prosperity. She wasn’t saving Garland for the Garlanders. She was saving Garland for herself. The end result was the same. Did it really matter what the reasons were? Vari didn’t think it did.