IC Timeline: Near the IC start of Breytast Vindar, overlapping Beauty in the Breakdown and preceding Hold Your Peace
The morning was rank with the smell of blood.
Behind him, just barely within reach of his gaze, he could see the silhouette of the tree where last they'd stopped to rest. It was ugly and dead and as they discovered infested with a hundred termites for every leaf once clinging to its branches. It stood tall and proud just the same. Lions could only hope to die with such everlasting dignity.
After the battle a night prior there had been dozens of their bodies all around him, their eyes, throats, and chests gouged. The wind blew in such a way to give the least mangled the illusion of breath. Some did rise as if from the dead and gave a final, gasping groan that had Niklas since trying to avoid standing too near to them. Some mocked him for it, jeering when he passed by. One had lied down and kept still until he was close, then jumped up and babbled nonsense at him. He was grateful Captain Kondo was nothing but patient with his missteps.
"The dead will do that," Kondo had informed him. As lions, neither were well versed on the matter of gasses building up within a corpse's tissue, nor the escaped air at times moving past the vocal chords. The captain explained it the only reasonable way he knew how. "Their souls are leaving their bodies."
"Then why don't all of them do it?" Niklas had wondered.
"Most seep through the eyes. The ones who breathe out theirs ascend to become Gods."
How did Kondo know this? And if it were true, would the freshly minted Gods come to enact revenge? Niklas knew better than to voice candid doubt, but he did express concern for a deity's wrath. Kondo had an answer for this too. "They don't remember the lives before. My great-grandfather once killed a Goddess, and when she returned, she didn't recognize his face, even as he killed her again. If they did no mortal would damn you for making them a God." Niklas wasn't sure he believed any of it.
He learned that with Kondo's vikings any female willing to succumb to the whims of reavers would be enslaved instead of slaughtered. The cubs were sometimes spared too, if their temperament was tractable enough. But just as often the reavers would claim to safeguard them in exchange for an exceptionally obedient mother's time, then slay the youngster anyway when they were done, leaving the lionesses in an disconsolate state of grief or consumed by an implacable wrath. Niklas had witnessed one of them fight three reavers in the aftermath of her only daughter's murder. Aside from her, there wasn't a defiant one in the lot. If there had been, the bravery had been beaten out of them without his audience.
"We're going too far," he said. His throat ached for water, but it felt good to hear something reasonable, even if he'd been the one to say it.
The one-eyed reaver leading him stopped, inhaled, and turned to those behind him. His wild dog thrall had her nose pressed to the wet ground, her burnt orange coat hanging from protruding ribs, her fur dappled by flakes of white and brittle enough Niklas could see patches of flea-bitten skin beneath. "What do you think? Are we close?" her master demanded. She bowed her muzzle to him in confirmation.
Stone walls surrounded them both left and right, their weathered sides jagged and crumbling. On the ground between, fragments and dust from severed bits of rock remained undisturbed preceding his birth and likely long before that. The path was becoming less a straight line, eventually winding enough that he couldn't see around it. Each corner they turned led them to another. They were traipsing through the dead pride's escape routed.
The one-eyed reaver found himself utterly delighted when he realized it too. "Lot of good this road did them," he remarked, chortling.
"Not much," Niklas agreed. He felt no merriment for having known it. The world was always cruel to someone, yet there was a distinctly uncivilized viciousness to what they'd done. Kondo seemed to revel in waylaying the most downtrodden prides he could find. Equally so in scouring the lands for the most reclusive, as this one had been. Niklas couldn't understand why his new captain favored the sight of their blood over those with more to offer. They had females, but Kondo didn't partake, too duty bound to the wife he never spoke of when he was away and rarely spoke to when he wasn't.
They wouldn't have much in the way of offerings for the Warlord when all was said and done, just a body count and renewed hubris for a group of brutes already with plenty to spare. A waste of time, resources, and lives, Niklas thought.
Uss D'mzil's bird, whose name he was curtly informed was Dira, had flown to them and relayed news Breytast Vindar was upon them, decreed by the collective of priestesses. Most made for home after that, including the captain.
As for Niklas, he was here, searching for the only escaped survivor of the pride they'd ransacked. The one-eyed reaver's dogs found him hiding by the stream and attacked before their master reached them. Only the mangy orange one lived and the lion that managed to kill the others had long limped away.
"I won't stop you," Kondo told Niklas just before they left, "but I'm not going to stay out here just to seek revenge for some ******** thralls. If he kept them in the borders to start with they'd still be alive to kiss his a**." He spoke louder, to all of them. "Anyone who wants to go, go, but we won't be back to look for you."
Niklas hadn't anticipated anyone joining the search but him. Several other reavers did step forward, however, out of respect for One-Eye or because they too sought to avoid the... festivities same as him. The others abandoned them along the way, though. One by one, they thought better of the journey and retreated for home. Some claimed to be scouting ahead, never to return. Their dwindling numbers appeared to hold no sway over One-Eye's flagrant drive meet this thrallslayer face-to-face.
"What are you going to do with this lion when you find him?" Niklas inquried.
"Tear him limb from limb. Kondo doesn't keep thralls, except that one his wife mates with behind his back. For all his bitching, he has no idea how hard it is to break them in like this." One-Eye reared his head back in an unnecessary nod toward the only creature he could be referring to. Niklas looked to her just the same. Underfed, overworked, and under ceaseless attacks by parasites, the wild dog looked a day from death and a year prepared for it.
"He probably takes his wife's thrall too," One-Eye prattled on. "That's why he keeps away from the captives. After having the both of them in his den, he can't work his —"
"What's her name, your thrall?" Niklas queried, sorely lacking the aptitude it took to seamlessly change the subject, but willing to risk the jarring and obvious transition if the ends justified the means. Slovenly dog and lion both looked at him strangely, to no surprise.
"What's your name?" the one-eyed reaver asked. His thrall pulled her head back like a turtle so that it nestled snug between her bony shoulders. She didn't say a word, nor look up. "She doesn't have a name," her master said, his pride sufficiently swollen, perhaps even justified. "Hard to break them like that, but wild dogs are the greatest thralls you'll ever have." He added, "If you can get more than one."
"Why more than one?"
"They're more loyal than lions. Nothing more loyal than a wild dog to it's pack. One misbehaves, you beat another to death and have them watch. They'll keep in line after that." Something in his inflection betrayed firsthand experience. "You could —"
The wild dog made a bellowing, gutted noise that the rigid walls deflected back to them. She immediately began pacing in hasty strides that became stumbling; stumbling became falling, and there on the ground she stayed. Her frantic wails and tremulous body Niklas found himself deaf and blind to. He could only gawk at the grisly scene before him.
From the left a vengeful rain had fallen, most of the stones shattering on the ground around them. One, large enough that only a lion's bulk could move it, empowered by distance and dragged down by whatever force kept them earthbound, struck One-Eye in his head and neck, fatally wounding either or both. Niklas had just enough time to glimpse the gruesome details of the reaver's undoing before he fled to the right wall and pressed himself against it. The rocks continued to fall, their aim too precise to be the work of the nature.
"Move!" Niklas shouted. The thrall didn't heed his warning and the deathblow came shortly thereafter. He was left alone, grimacing, a rage unlike any before it boiling his blood and throttling his heart so it was hard to draw breath. Somehow he still managed to shout. "I'm going to kill you, lion! Do you hear me? I'll kill you for this!"
Above him, standing on high, Niklas saw the lion collapse into a heap of fur more red than blue.
He couldn't hear Dastell snorting. "Not if I die first, b*****d."