Deadman's March » Places

         

That ungodly quaking threatened to throw them all to the ground, Chevalier bucking and whinnying fearfully as it passed underneath them and sped on, aimed straight for Gaudis. Kryssis held on tighter to Alexa, eyes trained on plumes of dust spraying from the size and speed of the thing alone. She watched in a kind of awe and disgust the worm as it lifted up from the ground and began its dance to kill the Monolith. A more pathetic and vain exercise she had never seen. Every slam of its enormous body against the sandstone marker echoed like crashing waves across the dunes, she could imagine feeling the force of each impact. In a final bid to slay the entity, the worm coiled up around it to crush and constrict in its terrible grip. This.. apparently had the effect of pissing off the Monolith.

It.. took Kryssis a moment to realize what she'd been feeling. The bones in her body ached terribly, her fleshed crawled and her ears felt like they were leaking. She took her fingers to her ear, and they came away sticky with blood. That was when she finally understood what was causing this.. a note so low she'd barely been able to register it. A mournful, beautiful, awful song that culminated in waves. She could almost imagine the cool sea breeze, the spray and the scent in the air.. the warm sand underneath her feet... But she had never been to a beach before. Never seen an ocean. These melted away with Gaudis, dissolving to nothing but grains that could slip between her fingers and cascade down into piles on the ground. Billions among billions. Reduced to oblivion. Meaninglessly erased. She felt a little sick as she watched it. Something about the thought of all those lives just.. swept away without a care or pause.. it made her uneasy. It made her want to retch. She had no ties to that place, and every reason to hate it.. but still, something made her almost mourn those deaths. Almost.

Alexa's crying caught her attention, the girl fell out of Kryssis' arms and hugged the horse's neck as she wept. The Wyvernjack screwed her face in confusion.. it had to have been the Monolith's doing, and she had no idea what it was the girl saw - or thought she saw - that could affect her like that. She also didn't know what to do about it other than let her sob. This was one of those alien moments for Kryssis. She'd seen children cry, and that was it. She even remembered doing it herself when she was very young. They'd always been beaten to make them stifle their tears and the noises of their fear and their pain - her fear and her pain. Whips and bundles of sticks meant to cut, slice and cause sharp stabs of stinging torment rather than brute force which would break bones rather than spirits. Recalling what Alexa had said about the meaning of a hug - but feeling too awkward to do that - she settled for simply laying a hand on the girl's shoulder and gripping just enough to hopefully let her know she was still there. It was all she could do, and it shamed Kryssis she could do no more.

         Eolan had been paying little attention to the scene in front of him from where he sat on the back of the wagon, in the shade of its cover. However, he looked up suddenly from his reading at the sound of a vaguely familiar form of speech. The dialect itself was unknown to him, but might it be...?
He regarded the young woman with a cool stare. "You are Abarran?" he asked, interrupting the altercation between her and Darkus as if wholly unaware of what was taking place.

         The gates of Gaudis were dyed a reddish tint by the setting sun. Two men walked out towards the parked wagons.

"Hey, you!" The older enforcer gestured at Trista "You're the expedition leader for this troupe right?" He waited for a response.

Trista merely nodded while maintaining eye contact with the older man.

"I'm Gians from internal discipline, this here is Ransu Svar. He's your responsibility now." The man continued.

"Trista?" Ransu said without confidence. "That is you isn't it? Remember me I'm Svar from The Captain's squad. We've met before remember?"