The Death Bringers – Part I

So let’s set the stage. Jayde is currently residing in Kurdis, an urban municipality in Midheim, together with some others that share the same fate as her. It’s in the middle of the spring and it’s only a few days before the Gaia Blossom. Kurdis is a small town, with barely a couple of hundred households and mostly shops and workshops. Kurdis is currently full of miners that have temporarily decided to reside there before continuing up into the East Wall to the mines.

Confusion
Jayde sat on the bed greasing her Chain Sword while listening to the sound of the small town. It was noisy, real noisy. Kurdis wasn’t her sort of place, it had too much people travelling through it and it was never really quiet. It was pretty clean for a merchant town, or a town at all in this awful country, but it held no peace whatsoever. During the day the people of Kurdis made sounds at their forges and machines while during the night wolfs’ and animals made sounds all night long. The house they currently resided in was a contrast to the town. Dark and silent on the hill with its neat garden and its high hedge surrounding the house. They even had their own well so they didn’t need to walk to the city square to get water.

Jayde sighed for herself and finally put the sword in its rack in the corner next to her scale mail armour. She studied the armour a while before deciding that it didn’t need polishing today. She turned towards the room and flinched. In the doorway – she hadn’t even heard the door open – stood the same tall man that had first recruited her. He was long and pale, with dark hair framing his skinny face and with dark anticipating eyes. The first time he had seen him, he had thought he was a necromancer, now she knew better. Much better.

“What do you want, Pallor?” she said only slightly bowing her head for him. He was the appointed leader of the Death Bringers, chosen by Death itself. He smiled amused towards her but then turned around to the corridor. “We are going to have a meeting in the basement; we need to discuss what to do now when it is gone,” he said and strode away down the corridor without a sound. She sighed yet again before deciding to follow him. She couldn’t believe that it was finally gone, and either did the others. Pallor was just resolved to keep up the farce until the others finally lost faith. So far the others still believed that Death would return, but Jayde hoped otherwise.

The house was a fine manor and before they arrived in town it had hold the Mayor of this town and his family and staff. After they had killed the Mayor they had made the town believe that ghosts had taken the place and every now and then they had to kill reckless youths trying to prove themselves, just to keep the townsmen in fear for coming close to the place. Once they had sent a Hiresword at the place, but they had had no problem defeating him and then Pallor had made him run naked into the town in the middle of the night yelling for all his lungs before finally collapsing and dying in the Town Square without even the slightest wound on his body.

The Cellar was actually an old wine cellar made out of dark bricks and stone with beams holding the stones in place and keeping up the house. Now most of the kegs had been moved into the foremost corner of the room from the big ground pillar. And instead they had tables set here and there filled with maps, papers and on some there were even tools… for torture. Algor really liked killing people, even more than Pallor did. The lanterns that usually hung on every beam holding up the place were now mainly focused around a long table near a big metallic tube that used to be the steam-engine giving the house its warmth. It was useless now, when the water tank had been stuffed with four dwarfs and all the Mayors children… some of them barely ten years old.

“Are you just going to stand there Livor?” one of the men around the table with the lantern said. He was currently eating – most likely it was a human – and he took a slurp from his silver goblet. Jayde grimaced at the name; she didn’t like it. Both the name and the memory of the children boiling in the tank made her feel sick, even though she had seen bloodbaths. Bloody hell, she had even made bloodbaths! But when it came to kids, especially girls, the memory of the blue haired Areina always emerged. She had abandoned her for what felt like an eternity ago. Left her in the hand of a mystical man, just to save herself. Even so, she had been most likely the only person in the world she really had trusted.

“Shut up, Rigor. I do what I wish, WHEN I wish it and it’s none of your business,” she snapped glaring straight into his catlike eyes. He looked away quickly but said nothing. At least they respected her.
“Take it easy, Livor. Rigor is just anxious about the future, and what awaits us. We are all on edge since Death left us here,” Algor said as he was polishing one strange looking scissors or whatever it was. Rigor looked at her in a weak attempt to seem defiant but looked away quickly again. She was above him after all, she was next to Pallor in Rank and they knew what her area of expertise was.

“Death has not left us,” Pallor said and turned away from the hearth. “I am certain that there is a reason to why he isn’t shadowing us anymore.” Rigor looked up at Pallor with a look full of doubt and fear. Why was he even here?! He was even worse in hiding his emotion than she was! “Maybe he has just decided that we are grown up enough to know what to do ourselves,” Pallor suggested, giving them all a smile that was meant to be comforting but it was simply creepy. Pallor thought himself to be kind and nice but his pale skin and small evil eyes made almost everyone shiver, even Jayde. It felt like looking into pure evil, it almost felt like the depressing feeling of the Nothingness, a vacuum full of… nothing. She shivered again and sat down on a chair next to Algor who looked and shot a perverted smile at her again. She wanted to smack him and tear him to pieces.

“This is why I have planned the next step of our path. This will most likely be the worst thing we’ve ever done before and it will get more attention than ever before. We will most likely be targeted by the whole country!” He shouted out the last part and had risen up both his arms and was squeezing something imaginary between his hands. At that moment he looked like death himself, pure evil. But even so his words made a great impact on all in the room. She could feel the courage swell inside of her and the excitement and bloodlust – oh by the gods she hated that! – and waited in excited silence for him to explain his plan.

“Our target is The Midheim Youth Home, it’s an orphanage only ten days up the East Wall run by an immortal named Lisette, the wife to the immortal Harold. We can almost count on there being at least one other immortal there and about two hundred children. There have been rumours about the children being Natural Strikers ever since the founding of the Orphanage over three hundred years ago,” he took a brief pause to let them think and Jayde suddenly grew cold. Two hundred children… The immortal didn’t even bother her, but the thought of slaughtering hundreds of children made her really cold inside.
“If we kill them all and leave the corpses in blood and then write some messages on the walls with their blood then people is sure to get afraid of our deed…” as he continued Jayde tried to listen, but the only thing she saw was a cute face framed by blue hair…

And that is Death Bringers Part I – Confusion. I think that there will be about two or three more parts before the final end of Jayde. I am eager to hear your opinions, and as always I want to hear the opinion of the former player of this character too.

Best regards,
Herid Fel