05-Mar-2001
Title: The Wyrd
Author: Dan
Archive: GW Addiction
Pairings: Not tellin'
Warnings: Some yech, AU, OC, violence, yadda yadda
Timeline: In between the series and EW but it's an AU so I am beyond the timeline!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Rating: PG-13? No worse than Gladiator, really.
Disclaimer: Not mine, Don't sue.
Charmiane sighed deeply as she thought about her Empress's words. If Elsinore believed that there was no other way, then there was no other way. The waves rolled to kiss her feet and then danced away. It was as if the waves were playing an elaborate game of 'Mother, May I' for all of eternity. She laughed at her own silliness before standing up to brush the sand from her brigga. If the Empress said she was needed, there was nothing more to it. Her own selfish desire to see her home again humiliated her. Easy for her to say that now when she was home, and in the bosom of her family. Just the thought of her brother and his sweet wife made her smile. Home was the most wondrous word in the human vocabulary.
She trudged along the shoreline, puzzling slightly at a tendril of smoke that wound its way up the valley. It was too early in the day for the fires to be lit. Too warm for there to be any need for them. Charmiane started to jog. A cold knot of fear worked its way into her stomach and stayed there. When the screams of the dying reached her ears, she ran.
Her castle was being overrun. She stared down the valley at her shattered keep. Its walls were blasted, smoke poured from the windows, and her men were dying on its ramparts. Charmiane's fingers tighten around her sword handle until her knuckles went white. Her scream echoing through the valley was the only warning the invaders got before they began dying.
Heedless of her lack of armor she threw herself among them. She jumped from the outcropping that separated the fort from the sea, and sliced the first hordling neatly in half. She lifted her sword and parried the downward stroke of its partner before cutting. Seizing the fallen demon's pike, she threw it with deadly accuracy through the next. Without turning, she slammed her sword backwards, disemboweling the demon behind her. The hordlings backed away from her, gibbering in fear and confusion. She dipped two fingers in a pool of blood and traced the sign of her clan upon her forehead and cheeks. "Come, little ones." She whispered hoarsely, "Come dance with me."
"Kill her! She is only one weak human woman!" The unfortunate bastard shortly choked out his last breath with six inches of the blade Charmiane had thrown buried in its neck.
Her men were still alive, fighting in patches back to back with precision born of desperation. She found them in small clusters. They followed her as she hunted down the demons foolish enough to attack her home.
The late morning light gleamed in her soot-streaked hair, making her a beacon to those who desperately needed something to have faith in. She did not even have to look at her enemy to kill them. She struck home, again and again, without ever looking to the right or to the left. Charmiane's blade—that huge double-handed war blade—ran with blood. The red streams highlighted the runes etched into its length. Runes that called the goddess of war to lend her strength to her warrior.
"You," One of the hordes stepped before her of its own volition. "You are the rumored lioness, aren't you?"
Charmiane lifted her gaze to rest upon its deformed face. Her eyes were as cool as distant glaciers. "I kill all my enemies."
She rewarded its bravery with a quick death by decapitation.
The hordlings fell before her, either dying on her blade or fleeing before she reached them. To them she appeared as an avenging goddess, her visage terrible to behold: blackened by the smoke and marked with blood. Her surviving men held their collective breath as she stalked down the ramparts towards them.
Charmiane locked eyes with her men and raised her sword. She gave them only one command. "Kill them. Kill them all."
Her men, believing her to be Kali-Nua's avatar, stood behind her, lifted their blades to shine in the dull morning light, and--believing that they could not die--did as she commanded.
The low flames still sputter in odd places around her ruined keep. The handful of men who had managed to survive formed a ring around their mistress. They held a captive demon by it's horribly deformed wings. Charmiane's lieutenant forced it to kneel before the blood smeared Warlord. The demon cowered before her, only seeing the runes painted upon her face in the blood of its brothers. Runes of the avenging goddess Kali-Nua.
Charmiane's hands rhythmically clenched and unclenched as she stared blindly into the flames. "Who ordered this?"
The captive flinched away from her, its eyes rolling in their sockets as it desperately tried to find some way to escape.
"WHO DID THIS?!" She shrieked. Her voice took the tone and cadence of the banshee's curse. "TELL ME WHO ORDERED THIS?"
"Riogh... Riogh, the Empress' steward gave us entry!" Its dying words ended in a liquid burble. Charmiane nodded to the lieutenant, who had buried his blade in the demon's thick neck.
"He will pay." Charmiane used her blood to seal the pact. "I swear that he will pay for this."
Relena pressed her palms against her eyes. This child, this horribly misled child, invoked deep feelings of protectiveness and something akin to loyalty. It was as if once, long ago, she had failed this child. She considered Mariemeia from the corner of her eye. Perhaps she had failed this girl, and everyone like her, if the young Khushrenada so reverently believed that what she was doing was right and that war was necessary.
Once again, deep in her heart, something stirred at the word war, at its proximity. Something deep within her remembered very well the horrors of war with a deep intimacy that she could not understand. She shivered slightly, frustrated with her own helplessness.
"Are you cold, Relena?" The delicate girl smiled up at the long legged sixteen-year-old. The Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs shook her head.
"No, Mariemeia. Just remembering something out of dream."
"A dream? Will you tell it to me?" Relena did not understand why the girl could look up at her with such trust, and yet be the embodiment of everything the diplomat tried to avoid.
"It was the type of dream that as soon as you try to give it voice it vanishes."
"Hm. Rather like the notion of peace: it is a dream that can only be whispered because anything louder makes it fly away." Mariemeia stared out the window as if she was seeing something from long ago. She turned, and held her hand out to the blonde diplomat. "Come, Relena. We have a Christmas celebration to attend."
End Part 4
(:./dan/wyrd4)
