Find the man.

[Duquesne]

Against the acrid taste of burning, against the familiar smell of destruction, the captain fortifies his mind and leans into his movement, testing the first step with a roughened dark boot, the clean and cool steel of his sword preceding him into the stairwell. But the tinge of vapor in the air is not familiar, tightens his throat and makes him instinctively bend his knees, lowering himself down as he descends, if only to avoid the fumes curling up along the slanted ceiling above him.

And still, this alien glow eminating up from below, fluctuating and making strange shadows of drifting smoke. The captain halts uncertainly as he watches the floor, seeing familiar and normal smoke sifting from where the chamber above is burning, creeping downward through floor joists and beams, tendrils licking upward but reaching down, always down in response to fuels. But there is mist here that he does not recognize, a vapor haunting the floor as if heavy, drifting. Like a thing alive and spreading slow along the lowest points. Eyes have become somewhat irritated now, enough that he blinks and tears begin to form, so that he sniffs and swallows back the moisture, simultaneously feeling a weight in his lungs. He clears his throat; he foolishly continues downward.

Movement from below draws him to a halt and he watches the vapor separate, curling 'round the strides of someone in haste, a dark figure with coat-skirts sweeping thickly through the dense vapor and gripping the banister, swinging around to the bottom step. But this figure with a shrouded head hesitates there below, having glanced up, having perceived the presence above. Having perceived, therefore, the naked breadth of that sword.

The captain is blinking still, clearing away tears from reddened and irritated eyes, and looks downward along the side of the dark shape below, noticing a satchel slung there across that shoulder. A satchel with a mark on the flap. There is realization between these two, that one comprehends the other's recognition, that the other's recognition is dangerous... so that these men, who should be vacating this low chamber and this mansion entirely--should be doing this, in fact, right now--find themselves going absolutely no where very fast.

Somewhere above, a portion of wall groans and collapses inward with a loud shudder, a vibration trembling through the floor and the walls around them. Some new smoke coils down through loose cracks; ash and dust filter down in hissing streaks. A heartbeat later, the captain launches from off his step and hurls himself downward, landing on his feet in a compensatory crouch in the exact place the shrouded figure once stood, he having been forced back by the threat of the soldier's heavy descent. In recovery, the captain does not waste time, but hurls his strength into the swinging of his sword, a keen tone rising up from its sharp edge as it bites the atmosphere, forcing the dark figure backward with quick, perhaps even fumbling steps--the stone floor is uneven here.

Another swing, this time slithering through coat-cloth and severing threads, and a drop in the floor causes uncertain balance in the dark figure, who drops into a mist of smoke and heavy vapor, with the captain looming. The soldier's sword reverses, gripped hand over fist on that long and leather-clad hilt, point downward in the posture of wounding. With a gutteral cry, he stabs and meets no flesh but heavy folds of coat-cloth--a fact which saves his life, as one single spark would cause a fast and fatal ignition.

By now, both are suffering the accumulating fumes and struggling to breathe, struggling even to contend. But one of them has infinitely better lungs than the other and this captain lurches a step, pinning the long coat-skirts slithering through vapor on the floor, effectively halting the escaping shape to which such cloth is attached. Coughing, the captain swings his sword in a blind and desperate effort, feeling its flat collide with something and vibrations tremble up the steel from the hard and blunt impact. Meeting no more resistance, the captain fumbles in the vapor for a strap, for that satchel, cuts it from off the crumpled and darkclad shape. And though he had been sent to collect both this bag and this man, he makes a judgement on the situation--the one was more important now than the other. He reels away toward the stairs, coughing harshly as he works his way upward, eyes lacriminating wildly now and nostrils burning and lungs searing for air. So that when he emerges in the corridor, the threat of fire-smoke is a relief to him compared to the atmosphere in the chamber below.

He lurches to the floor, gasping in a breath close to the pale stone of it and finding the air he needs to move on, and clutching the satchel to his chest and his sword in his hand, he hastens away from smoke and flames, stumbling through the body-strewn and broken corridor, uncaring of the comrades-in-arms who continue to search the right wing. He knew, understood with a sense of almost maniacal urgency, that he had to leave and be far away as fast as he could make it happen. Coughing, his hobnailed boot-soles track heavily across the entrance hall, this chamber by now haunted still by smoke and dust and flames licking softly at small things. He emerges from the open main-doors just as the first rim of the sun crests the hills, pushing light into the smoke belching dark and ominous from the left wing windows, and there is sunlight to interrupt the cool dawn as a horse's galloping stride carries the captain and his prize out of the courtyard and away from that very elegant and very unfortunate abode, burning openly now in the light of day.

[Duquesne]

This an awkward shape here, a figure of a man down in a drifting sea of grasping vapors, something once-solid that, when exposed to heat, has become a gas. And heat is a palpable force here, an oppression of the worst kind, a debilitating kind of weight strongly characterized by that which kills. A pain torments the back of his head, a pulsating abuse serving to lure him out from some delirious sea--he had been struck, it ought to have been a killing blow and was not.

And as the heir comes out of moments of unconsciousness, a familiar voice inside his head is communicating with great, great urgency: 'get out, get out!' If not for the fact that he lies in a gulf of flammable vapor, then for the knowledge that there are other terrors in this room worth fleeing. So that this is a strong awareness with him as he struggles onto his hands and knees, blindly encountering his cane which he grasps. There is so little air, so little air... and perhaps it is the very limits of these lungs that have protected him thus far, but on that mysterious fortune he cannot depend.

Noise filters into his ears now, some sound which had always been present here and yet is suddenly a blatant cry, a warning singing in such a tone as to communicate wrongness. Here is no fair operatic voice, but a sinister thing bespeaking not only incineration but corrosion. A bubbling and boiling of flesh as it virtually melts... and true memory of this floods his vision in a churning haste of imagery and emotion, tempting bile up into the throat and making him sick with terror--he had seen these things happen. He did not want that death. But that darkness is before him, visible as he looks upward from his knees as he beholds this facility, this chamber of storage, become a thing alive with hostility.

What he sees is this, that one corner of the room has accumulated such heat from the fire in the room above, conducting downward through the very structure of the house so that flammable materials have changed forms and heavy gases float, possessing their own wrong and pale lumination. Yes, this is what he had come upon before... but this is not what alarms him so deeply, for he is watching the valve of a steel cylinder--specially designed specifically for what it holds--relieving the pressure of its contents in a hissing and white spray. Already this substance influences the wall and wooden beams near which it sits, provoking disintegration. Disintegration, the breaking down of supports whose purpose is to hold aloft a floor... the floor of a room very much on fire at this hour.

It was never meant to stay here, never meant to be here in this place for long... but Aithne had come to be its storage and a hundred things he could've done to change this moment flick through his mind. The same mind which is prompting him to move, to reach out and grip the banister as there is now so little real air left here. He represses a heady wave of panic as he remembers a true and fulfilling breath has not been taken in for several minutes, and he all but forgets the normally paralyzing agony of one old-injured knee which suffers under the strain of his actions this early and bitter morning. There was a need to pound up these stairs and to favor the joint was to lose seconds, to face a corrosive and suffocating death on the uneven stone floor below. Somehow the knee supports him as, for these moments, he resembles his former self in manufacturing speed, while below him that whistling only worsens and the heat of fire only increases.

In a burst of fumes and smoke and the darkness of coats, he enters the corridor and finds it dark and blind with blackish smoke, choked even as he is choking, balancing a sense of panic with a calming familiarity of surroundings, so that he is capable of navigating without sight--his eyes too have suffered the biting fumes and smoke, and weep even now. There is a roar as of fire hotly burning, consuming his home with terrifying hunger, and he runs through the nearest set of chamber-doors, crossing a smoke-hazed space and coming up against outer doors like a wave. Fingers fumble with the latch in a span which seems like years to him and then the doors swing outward in opening, releasing him and a billow of escaping smoke into the cool morning air.

'Run!' his instinct screams and he does and will surely pay a price for it, but now is the time to lend this tired body to capacity, so that the flesh remembers what it is to truly exert. Before him, the green expanse of his lawn seems too vast an expanse too cover, too exposed and open and he is aware of some danger of projectiles and therefore a great desire for cover. His trajectory is for a low wall attached to the stables, a garden wall of thick and large stones which had been present even before his grandfather purchased this place long ago... but he is Aware of seconds and distance and a force behind him, and of a certain improbability--he would not reach that wall in time...

(continued)

[Duquesne]

Timber will creak under the weight, its physical ability to sustain the load of three stories of beautiful architect failing. With a low and long groan, the burden of walls and floor will give way, crumbling under the stress of flame and corrosive material. The precise instant this heat and flame descends, the atmosphere inside the left wing is an instant hell.

Ignition is furious, an event of apalling speed and force, so that windows spider-crack and burst outward in a dangerous combat of broken glass, a thousand sharpened edges and facets flashing red as with fire and pale as with reflected sky. Expanding vapor burns as its explodes outward with terrifying heat, the contents of a steel cylinder caught up into this whirlwind of flame and debris, so that the effect is this destruction of walls and floors by force of flame and expansion, but also by corrosion--material substance disintegrates, losing form partially or entirely, eaten away in a sudden potency of reactions.

The noise of this, of a house coming apart, is deafening. A tremendous groaning, low and ominous, alongside a boom of displaced air, and hissing and shrieking of projectiles as if demons had been unleashed by this destruction. And caught in the initial shock, the heir is lifted from off the ground in his flight. There is a moment of weightless suspension in which he is swept forward, and then the impossible force of exploding gas hurls him like a rag doll, a wall of heat churning around him, trembling in a chaos of color and unregulated motion.

And the seconds are surreal, mere heart-beats of time, barely any span at all for flame and debris to expand outward in a unique blast of fire, black roiling smoke, and noise. The memory of a moment will linger with him the rest of his days, a sight as of huge structures of house cartwheeling in the air, shredding the lawn, hurled distances as if weightless. And a rising wall of flames, red and angry and churning. Burning, charring, melting, corroding anything it can. As time seems to catch up with him, a secondary explosion rockets outward and upward with some new violence of shredding noise and white light, like a private dawn yawning over the scene, and thrusts him into the ground with a painful impact. A deadly rain of materials is coming down around him, a storm of ashes and dust and burning debris, and his hands come up instinctively to protect his head, arms bent in a desperate embrace. The earth trembles under him, while a quick burst of air rushes past.

Then there is silence coming, a strange parallel to the ear-shattering tumult of moments previous. But things are breaking and falling, and there is the distinct sound of flames raging in some hungry inferno. Somewhere, glass cracks and falls a distance, shattering. Something groans, breaks free and crashes groundward in a disturbing riot of timber and plaster. And he will lie here, face buried in turf still cool as with night, mortally afraid of moving, afraid of lifting his head, opening eyes. Knowing that he would not recognize what he saw.

(continued)

[Duquesne]

When considering this hour days and weeks from now, the young man will be unable to judge time, unable to say with certainty how long he lay amid this smoking ruin before raising his head or how long he sat slumped after viewing the ruin of his home. The span is indistinct.

Consider that light has moved but little, however, and that when the heir finally stirs, finally loosens his hands and arms from 'round his head and looks up, the deep cool and blueness of morning is still present. Pieces of debris tumble from off him when he moves, splinters of wood and crumbled stone, ash and dust. Something smokes beside him, casting a bitter odor with its smoldering, and he swallows against a throat and mouth choked with a dusty film and some trace presence of blood.

Eyes blink. There is a moment's trouble, finding it difficult to focus this vision of his, and being at the same time presented with some hulking object directly before him, something he cannot quite make out though it lies but a foot or two away. Not until his eyes necessarily tear and some uncomfortable dust is cleared. And he is recognizing marble for its veins of color, its pale look, and some cold sinking occurs in his stomach, so that he shakes as he pushes himself backward and upright, gaining perspective on where the blast deposited him.

Not in the lawn, as he had thought, which is where the shock caught him and picked him up, but in the stableyard... so that a moment's quick math describes a flight of so many feet beyond where he had been. And he can only stare fixedly at this massive column of marble, one of the supports which had nobly equipped the entrance hall, forming the main doorway. One imported wooden door, wide and tall, is still attached to this stone by its great iron hinges. And it had come mere inches from crushing him. The whole lot steams as with heat and scorching.

Possessed of a morbid need, the heir twists himself quickly, pushing with hands and knees and stumbling when gaining his feet because a knee gives out weakly. Barely aware that another marble column is becoming his support, he grips at its rounded surface for balance, working his way forward through smoldering litter and items which strike him as strange, misplaced. A book-end, a kitchen spoon, a burning scrap of carpet. A oddly unmolested cane lying beneath chunks of plaster, a cane which he stoops to grasp and use, desperate for its familiarity. And when he can grip the low stone fence he had once sought as shelter, his breath stills and is gone, and eyes rise along this black and grey column of smoke pushing high.

It is a chilling sight. It is a sight which rends him open, his ribs torn to one side and the other, laying bare the suffering of a mortal heart, an organ that shatters again in a familiar noise of breaking. But the sound is glass, another pane coming loose, breaking on a pavement of ash-strewn stones. His stomach twists in a riot of nausea and he swallows back some bitter taste of blood and ash as he leans to pull himself awkwardly and weakly over the low stone fence, all but collapsing against the other side as he stares in horrified fascination at the ruined skeleton of the left wing, of which there is very little left but jutting and lonely corners, a few low portions of wall burning, and smoking or burning piles of rubble. Flames lick up hotly from among blackened debris, which seems to have veritably melted, disintegrated, the original forms unrecognizable.

He can feel the heat as dim green eyes sift along the wreckage, reaching through smoke to the other wing. A third of its structure is missing, banished to a tangle of collapsed chaos, while the remainder still stands, looking mishapen without the bulk of its body. Flames lick half-heartedly here, eating what things fire can swallow, and the windows are all of them damaged. Diamond-paned things, stained, or broad shapes of glass all elegant, all broken now, half-missing, or entirely absent. And all the things whose dust clings to him like the ash of the dead, all the belongings with such value... incinerated, pulverized, gone.

Wheeling with the magnitude of this loss, as he has felt before now and, by some cruel law of circumstance, will feel again before his days are done, the young man suffers, suffers and grows a little older in his soul. The awareness of all else fades slowly away, pieces of conscious thought whispering and gone. And he bends his head into these shadows, trembling inside clothes of blood and ash and dust, burned by the heat as he has been burned. Soon, the hour would come for thinking; for now, there must be time given to this swallowing sorrow.

[Duquesne]

It was not idle suffering.

The hurt began as a shapeless phantom, haunting the surface of his numb mind, even as smoke from a hundred things burning diffused over Aithne's ground. As the sun rose, it grew, this painful thing, feeding upon the specifics of memories, a thousand words, things read, things heard. A thousand points of information studied over years. Tributaries of thought fed into this growing river, weaving and bending through a professional landscape of secrets and blood. It was a body of pain, hardening into cool-minded calculation. And it drained into a sea of focus.

So that in the end, a stronger thing emerges, straightens up from a field of ruin and grips the opal head of his cane all the tighter. Eyes rise up and show color made dark by the concentration of sensitive pupils and the man will stare mutely over the bitter rape of his world. Within the flames and pall of dark smoke, he could see a face; amid the rush of burning and shifting rubble, he could hear a name.

Edmund Reule. Sinister, driven, the origin of all these things and worse... so much worse. His man took the satchel; his man rode with Obliteration strapped across him. He did not know what he carried.

Soot-smudged, with dust as a second skin, Duquesne works his way through the debris field, resigned to the sight of destructed and familiar things. Acknowledging, setting aside the spearing heat of regret each brutalized possession creates. His coat is no more a thing of blackness, but is trimmed with pale dust and a glittering of pulverized stone, its hems a little whiter than the rest, as they haunt the debris over which he must climb. He felt pain when working his left shoulder, pain in the left arm. An awareness of physical damage creeping in now, even as he stops near an ash and litter-clogged fountain, its stone cracked and leaking water. And here, he knows the seeping heat of blood creeping down this arm, soaking sleeve and skin. Soaking into his back also as some speared object limits the movement of his muscle and the blade of his shoulder. Twisting his head, straining to look, he catches sight of some glistening silver impaling, a thing which cannot be reached and should not be removed. Not yet.

A moment's continued study reveals singed garments, seared by heat and corrosive particles. Gloves are worked with holes, made useless by contact with such hungry material. He peels them away, casts them aside, studies points of painful burns dotting his hands. Already, blood clings to his left hand, paste-like as it blends with dust. Sniffing, he ignores; he moves on. There is a concept of murder whispering in the wake of his coat-skirts, a chilling recalcitrance characterizing the pained movement of him--he would hunt the man. Edmund Reule, worker of iniquity, would die a long, terrible, and highly orchestrated death.

[Carnath-Emory]

"The road out of town, past the Dagger. Miles until you should encounter this row of great, great trees on the right. You shall know them by their leaves, their silvery trunks. There is a gap in their row; note, there, stone monuments half-shrouded in vine with a lane leading between them. Follow it until it is no more.

This is the way to Aithne."


So it is, and so it is in this fashion that they have ridden, she and the Constable: double upon the back of a beast broad enough of shoulder to support it with ease. He is bred of fine stock, this warhorse; his heavy bones are made to carry plate iron, as well as men, and the added weight of Cinnabar Calomel has done little to slow his blistering pace. They have left cool dust in their wake, have left dirt roads churned into chaos, that being what the enormity of glimpsed destruction had provoked in a woman. And this ride ought to be quite pleasant, for its last miles travel a private road that sees little traffic at all, and one flanked with the generous green of heavy oaks besides. There ought rightly to come a very stunning moment in which they reach the crest of some small hill, and are afforded fine view of the valley below, in which the mansion and its holdings are nestled.

Except that what they glimpse is gutted and blackened by flame; is twisted almost beyond recognising at all. They are paused a moment to gaze upon this, paused ... but only that briefly: the Constable will surely not require warning of their sudden return to motion, even jarring as it is, for a fist wheels the beast's head back about, and they are hard across the last half-mile of this journey. Dirt gives way to cobblestone, near the end of it -- or at least it should have, just as the lane opens up onto a courtyard --

Or should have, for what they come upon is nothing like that at all.

When she slows the horse, it is in a moment's care for its flanks, its heavy hooves: there is wreckage enough to make footing uncertain, and she will keep the beast from crippling danger. But neither will she dismount, not quite yet. There is a dagger that must first be delivered to its place at her side; there is a hand that must feel the weight of the schiavona beneath its palm.

There are lips which tremble with such sickened anger that she cannot speak.

[Cinnabar]

It's a long ride, and not a particularly smooth one for the Constable, who is finding that there is more to riding a horse than just sitting still with arms held firm about the swordswoman's waist. It's not something he's had cause to try before - where's the need, he has a perfectly serviceable pair of legs of his own - and he's unconvinced that it's something he's keen to repeat.

As such he's clambering down from the horse's back as soon as it has slowed enough for him to do so, dropping to the ground and stepping away from beast and rider to survey the utter devastation, scorched masonry and splintered timbers still smouldering, scattered across the ground as if the house had been struck with some mighty hammer. Boots crunch on splintered glass and porcelain, the shattered remains of elegant statuary and fine furnishings.

He knows the owner of this place hardly at all, and most of that second-hand, but the loss here is palpable in the air, the destruction of such beauty is an almost tangible hurt. Here a finely-inlaid table, smashed and twisted into firewood; here the neck of some elegant vase, adorned with exquisite patterns in the glaze, the rest of it scattered shards; and over here a broad silver tray, twisted and buckled by heat and impact; the detritus of a life of opulence and comfort, suddenly destroyed. And throughout it all, great chunks of cracked and broken masonry flung far and wide by whatever unspeakable force smashed the mansion asunder.

Eventually he looks up to regard the centre of it all, the mansion itself; part ablaze, part gone, a whole section of it strewn across the landscape for what seems like miles around, and that roiling pillar of smoke seething into the sky, red-lit from beneath and within, sparks swirling up into the morning sky. He cannot look away from it, but speaks loud enough for the swordswoman to hear over the roar and crackle of flames.

"What happened here?"

[Carnath-Emory]

Ariane cannot measure this destruction in terms of shillings, in such simple terms of cost and loss and expense. Nor can she adequately describe it in the Common tongue which she and Calomel share, not with any accuracy, not with any brevity at all. 'n werthfawroca, she might have begun: it is the best term she knows of for what they find shattered upon these ruined cobblestones, for what is caught in splinters through the grass. Fragile things of crystal and cut glass, sturdier things of glossy wood and strangely feral design, so that two very different worlds had found a careful harmony within this place. And there is no sign of that now, this being the extent of the destruction wrought upon Aithne: that there is so very little left at all to explain its worth.

She is slid down from the saddle not long after Calomel, with the reins for one hand, and the schiavona for the other: it is entirely necessary to occupy them both in this moment, lest they find atrocities upon which to spend their hurt. Is begun towards that towering plume of smoke, and very quietly, at first. Here is the courtyard, she might have explained of this stretch of land, which is distinguished from the next only by the colour of its dust. And over there a structure which had housed exotic greenery within its glass walls, and a man had slaved to discover the means by which they might thrive: ah, but now you see what has come of that. And to your right, ser, the library with its heavy drapes and its cunning ladders, and such bookcases as stretched twice the height of a man, and which have surely burned more thoroughly than all the rest --

And that is how it would go: this list of consequences, of injuries; this very great sum of words, and not one of them quite conveying the essence of what she means it to. This being unbearable, the swordswoman says nothing at all on that matter, but instead jerks her chin towards that smoking ruin, turns a cold-eyed glance back towards the Constable.

"How do you reckon it?" asks a woman who has given her lover to a pyre this year, and her sister to such flames, and friend Kerrak to such flames, so that it has been a year for Very Bad Times indeed. "Does some man survive that? Might any of them have? Might even a single person come out from such pizdoi nakryt'sja as this?

"I've no answer for you. This was not the threat I knew of, for this was ... done upon them, this was wrought upon them with, with, surely with purpose. And surely not by the hand that I feared."

These questions, except that she is already started towards that ruin: with a monster's dagger and a warhorse's reins, and a backwards glance which is a summons. Cold and dry-eyed, at that, but mark the ruddy sting to the corners of her eyes, mark the tremour with which the fine jaw clenches.

"I learn more than this, mn? I learn names, and I learn reasons, and then these men, they die very badly for what they've done here. But first ... first, we must find what yet lives."

[Carnath-Emory]

Ariane cannot measure this destruction in terms of shillings, in such simple terms of cost and loss and expense. Nor can she adequately describe it in the Common tongue which she and Calomel share, not with any accuracy, not with any brevity at all. 'n werthfawroca, she might have begun: it is the best term she knows of for what they find shattered upon these ruined cobblestones, for what is caught in splinters through the grass. Fragile things of crystal and cut glass, sturdier things of glossy wood and strangely feral design, so that two very different worlds had found a careful harmony within this place. And there is no sign of that now, this being the extent of the destruction wrought upon Aithne: that there is so very little left at all to explain its worth.

She is slid down from the saddle not long after Calomel, with the reins for one hand, and the schiavona for the other: it is entirely necessary to occupy them both in this moment, lest they find atrocities upon which to spend their hurt. Is begun towards that towering plume of smoke, and very quietly, at first. Here is the courtyard, she might have explained of this stretch of land, which is distinguished from the next only by the colour of its dust. And over there a structure which had housed exotic greenery within its glass walls, and a man had slaved to discover the means by which they might thrive: ah, but now you see what has come of that. And to your right, ser, the library with its heavy drapes and its cunning ladders, and such bookcases as stretched twice the height of a man, and which have surely burned more thoroughly than all the rest --

And that is how it would go: this list of consequences, of injuries; this very great sum of words, and not one of them quite conveying the essence of what she means it to. This being unbearable, the swordswoman says nothing at all on that matter, but instead jerks her chin towards that smoking ruin, turns a cold-eyed glance back towards the Constable.

"How do you reckon it?" asks a woman who has given her lover to a pyre this year, and her sister to such flames, and friend Kerrak to such flames, so that it has been a year for Very Bad Times indeed. "Does some man survive that? Might any of them have? Might even a single person come out from such pizdoi nakryt'sja as this?

These questions, with no answer for his at all, and she is already started towards that ruin: with a monster's dagger and a warhorse's reins, and a backwards glance which is a summons. Cold and dry-eyed, in these first moments, but mark the ruddy sting to the corners of her eyes, mark the tremour with which the fine jaw clenches. Mark most of all the way in which her stride lengthens, hastening with each foot of ground that they cover, and the fine volume of her voice, when first she begins to shout the heir's name.

[Duquesne]

What survives such a landscape of burning. Nothing, if not shielded, could live. And there are a great many things shielded, weirdly protected from the force of this great blast, littered in among the shards and splinters of all else. But these have no life with them, are but objects representing value and memories. They are, despite their worth, expendable.

A tiny figurine lies intact beside a chunk of stone which, upon landing, inflicted cracks in the cobbles and caused a small crater in which it sits. A cup rests on its side, while around it such things are scorched, burning. Remark this, the untouched pages of a book, removed by force from its hardened cover, pages flipping in the breeze caused by sucking flames and early morning atmosphere. Grow nearer this destruction and one should witness some void where the ruins of the left wing meanly jut inside smoke and flame. A blast crater, opening a small concave disc of earth to view.

Who will respond when called? Can there be human lives sustained amid this hell. No one will cry out for help and no sign of activity, no bodies, no limbs, no blood. For all intents and purposes, no one survived, their mortal forms haunting amid the dust and smoke, incinerated.

And yet here we have movement at the far-most end of the right wing, farthest from the blast, farthest from flames and very much still intact. A rope has been flung from the second floor windows of a room and soldiers lower themselves down, stunned, oblivious to the cause of all this. Very much responsible, according to their presence, for the flames lit here, flames which should not have burned, should not have heated something so very flammable. There are four of these and, unaware of newcomers, they call to each other in their gutteral language, as one by one they descend the rope to the ground, in disbelief of the magnitude of a ruin they were surely not expecting. They are undoubtedly foreign, undoubtedly here for no good reason--both the constable and the swordswoman and the ashfiend lurking in shadows will, by their experience, recognize this fact directly.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

There are countless shadows that now stand amongst the ruin as if they had come to inspect the destruction and see if it had truly happened. They laired over the fresh memories of better times; momentoes of family and friends. One of them grew darker than the rest as a pair of crimson fires, well over six feet from the ground, erupted as livid, burning slits. The furnace that held those flames emerged: a tall figure in aged, blackened armor anointed with scars.

He moved in silence despite the metal plate and weapons at his sides. A faded boot crunched against a tiny figurine that grated against the floor before the single step caused the diminutive figure to roll aside. It clapped like a castinet as it bounced and trembled against the ragged scraps of ruin.

A sudden, swift breeze bearing the spectre of whatever fire that had consumed the structure buffets a handful of loose pages against and about him before the torn parchment leaves are caught up in the dance of his tattered black cloak. The burning scent touches against his nostrils while the breeze drifts among the house's gaping holes and scattered belongings as if the entire estate were breathing, or sighing.

He stoops for a moment, the vista of recent drama and death playing out around him and unspooling the tightly wound threads of his memory. Gloved fingers, long and delicate, pluck a metal cup from the ground. He inspects, for a moment, how the drinking portion has been warped as if by a sudden explosive strike. The latent heat within the drinking vessel's metal body quickly retreats, signalling such with a sharp fizzle as of plunging a newly wrought sword into cold water. Left cold, he casts the cup carelessly aside.

As it tumbles down amongst its scattered bric-a-brac bretheren, Ashfiend draws closer to Cinnabar and Ariane. The broad mace head taps a greatly muffled rhythm against his armored hip and occasionally it scratches the worn pouch upon his belt. He offers neither of them comfort nor solace, nor indeed what little he had observed from the vandalized cup.

However, as the echoes of gutteral voices touch his ears he goes quite still. He turns to regard them from a distance, a ruined figure amongst the waste of this estate. Here, he considers, are things that can answer his questions. He makes a quick survey of the lay of shadows about them and notes the position of the sun against this wing that stands apart at a distance.

He spares the constable and the swordswoman a brief glance that holds a silent question before he again strides to the nearest shadows and vanishes. It is the passing of only a few moments, during which he trusts the two will join him soon enough, before he emerges only several strides from the four men seeking to escape.

With two quick gestures he has pulled a long-bladed sword and broad-headed, flanged mace free of his belt. A palpable chill billows about him, leashed by his very presence, while his seething eyes promise pain and death.

"Surrender," the words emerge in a deep rumble that echoes upon itself. "There is no escape."

[Cinnabar]

The swordswoman's question has him thinking, staring into the raging fire at the heart of the left wing, and he shakes his head.

"Not in there. No chance at all." He speaks with certainty, leaving aside that the man had been plunged into a forge's furnace only a short time before, hair still scorched to fine ash, soot and coaldust still marring his skin. A glance to Teron as he approaches, but no greeting beyond that.

"The rest of the building, maybe." He stands where he is for a moment, gaze tearing away from that maelstrom of fire and smoke to sweep along the building, taking in the blown-out windows, the cracked and sagging masonry, then the relatively-intact wing far to the right. His eyes narrow, then widen at the sight of figures clambering down from the upper floor.

"There. Ariane, there!" That is the only cry he gives to alert here for he is already moving away from her, running low, jumping over the lower pieces of debris, dodging around or between the larger chunks of ruined masonry. Something predatory about him, how he circles round to cut off their retreat, slowing as he draws nearer, blade and dagger bared and held ready. And there's the damnable Ashfiend already, though making himself useful for the time being.

"Leave them alive. I want answers." This to the armoured ghoul, then louder to the soldiers: "Stand where you are. Hands away from your weapons, gentlemen."

[Carnath-Emory]

It pauses her ... for a heartbeat's measure. Perhaps for two.

No chance at all.

Were it not for an accident, we should be so similar...

You must not underestimate my ability to respond --
For just the stretch of time necessary to untangle such contradictions, to rediscover certainty, before she is become motion over again. Ashfiend has risen from some ... pocket of shadow, perhaps, some underworld corner, in a means that she cannot grasp and does not need to. There is a glance for that one, a transient thing, for it's the manse which holds her, it is that very gutted wreckage towards which she obstinately strides.

"Then that is where we begin," she is breathing back across her shoulder: to the Constable, to them both; a weapon does not turn aside helping hands without good reason. And it is the man's name upon her lips again, it is the shout of a throat gone dry with ash and dawn and dread. It is the cold, creeping horror of a woman who confronts an outrage, an obscenity, so that at some point she is wheeled about to backstep a pace, is eyeing the pair with something like fury --

Ashfiend's sudden vanishment changes that, and Calomel's cry explains it. A twist of the head follows his gaze, and then there comes some very quick motion indeed: her body is swung easily into the warhorse's saddle, is kicking that beast into heavy motion before she's rightly sat herself. That is how they shall approach those streltsy: with Ashfiend birthed like silent death from the shadows near them; with the Constable cleverly flanking them; with hooves like rolling thunder, for the warhorse was made for moments like these.

Its rider certainly was.

They are heavy across this ruined landscape, and that weight is lending them momentum with each yard of ground that they cover, so that near the end of it all they've reached a blazing pace. Debris is crushed, obstacles are *leapt*: it is a juggernaut which roars towards these unfortunates, heavy and dark and with a rider half-clothed in old iron.

"Two must live!" This terrible shout; the half-formed helm lends it a coldness. "Two will explain themselves." And as for the rest...

Ah. Note the sword already freed of its sheath.

[Duquesne]

From one danger to the next, from the threat of fire and collapse to the threat of capture and death. Let there be no doubt that these swords have come free, that more steel is bared in the misplaced comfort of morning sunshine.

The soldiers are markless. Their armor is a combination of plate, chain, and boiled leather, and shrouded 'round with cloth, a wise merger between styles and all made as dark as it can be, as if they had been birthed by the very darkness through which Ashfiend travelled. But they are mortal things, men as agents of strategic vandalism and intimidation, theft and murder. Training and unity mark their stances now, as they take slow, cautious steps to arrange themselves for conflict, for here they are threatened, they are approached.

When Common words come commandingly into the haze of morning, there is some critical silence after, and mens' eyes fleet in eachothers' directions, as if looking among themselves for a translator. In the end, it is upon one soldier alone that three other sets of gazes cursorily land, and then they are renewing their postures of defense. One draws a step back as this bulk of a horse tromps near, but his eyes are on the swordswoman. He offers a private, gutteral strand of words to the men with him, a murmur of caution.

"No surrender," the inevitable translator says, with a very heavy bend of accent, so that it is clear his comprehension of this Common language is limited but sufficient enough. There is some grim set to his eyes and mouth, hidden here behind the foreign and grave measure of his helm and its cheek-guards, as if he understood that by being able to communicate he was surely slotted for some doom. The looks on the faces of his challengers tell him that much. His eyes flick between Ashfiend and the constable, they being primarily in his line of sight, but his attention briefly strikes on the rider, taking measure before returning to the cold challenge before him.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

That these four men had denied an offer of surrender struck him as not terribly surprising. The destruction that they had wrought, assuming it was indeed them, spoke some of their likely characteristics. It also proved the lie to Teron's offer. There was, indeed, escape.

But it would only be in death.

Although his crimson eyes flicker with unabashed hate, it is the constable who stokes his ire once again. His fingers squeeze the handles of both bared weapons as Cinnabar's audacity falls upon him as a command, an order of one who was expected to be obeyed.

"I care nothing for what you want, constable," Ashfield growls, turning to regard him while careful to keep the intruders within the corner of his gaze. "Neither your office, nor your desires, mean anything to me."

With that he takes a step forward, whirling to face the four darkly garbed and armored men. A heavy boot crushes the delicate remnants of a silvered candleabra with a resonating, metallic shriek while the length of his ruined cloak swirls behind him. His battle-scarred and blackened plate belies the silence of his steps and the deftness of his movements as his wrath for the constable is turned upon the closest enemy - though he is careful not to assail the one who evidently shares a common language.

The broad head of his mace whistles towards his chosen opponent's face, a steel flower of rust, and a bloom of broad, iron flanges that promises death's arrival. At the same time his long-bladed sword, its pronged hilt set aflame with reflected sunlight, darts in from the opposite side, seeking to reave away limbs and drive deep into the abdomen.

Two alive, he considers Ariane's words, as his weapons strove to rend this enemy into pieces. Such a compromise was well worth considering.