Roen

As he strangled the human male, Roen reflected on an unpleasant truth. Perhaps Irene had been right. The man kicked in the Outsider’s grip, struggling against the one hand Roen had wrapped around his throat. A tightening of the fist ended all struggle with the muted wet crackle of ruined vertebrae. Disgusted, he cast the corpse aside, dashing its head open against a support beam. The airship was sickening to him, now. Even through his helmet, he could smell the sick and sweet smell of fear, and the copper tang of blood, leaking from broken skin. There was purity in the smell - purity and purpose. And though he had been made for such things, the truth was not a welcome one. Monster, she said. And he was. They had attacked him, of course. Bold, brazen, bound by duty or the promise of money, it made no difference why, only that they did. He let them come, keeping himself juxtaposed between their righteous fury and the cowering beauty behind him. And when their swords fell on him and broke, one bending unnaturally and the other shattering outright, Roen took the closest first by the throat and brought him close, to see his eyes behind the backlit lense of his helm. He had a perverse grace when he moved, the Outsider, but it was a sickening, alien thing. One could admire a snake’s lethality, but one could never be deceived into finding it beautiful, let alone worthy of emulation. It terrified them, he knew. He saw it in their faces, both the one he was throttling and the other who was turning, abandoning his fellow in pursuit of reinforcements. He saw his face: pale, astonished. He recognized their fear. After throwing aside one corpse, Roen went after the other. Leaving beloved behind with a lurching start, the Outsider pounded the deck after the fleeing man in a sudden sprint that made the entire corridor shake with the weight of his impacting tread. The man looked over his shoulder and screamed, stumbling over himself and crashing to the floor. Transhuman dread. The sight of him was one thing: taller and broader in his warplate than a man could ever be, armoured like a demigod. The singularity of purpose was self-evident: to wage war and kill anything that did not destroy him first. To look upon him in his war regalia was to know terror was imminent. His appearance alone had the capacity to cow many with fear. But to see him move. Apparently that was the real thing. Nothing human-shaped should be so fast, so lithe, so powerful, especially not anything approaching two meters tall and carrying more armour than several normal men could lift. It froze the guard, stuck him to the ground, caused his mind to lock up and made him lose control over their bladder and bowel. Something huge and warlike gave pause: something huge and warlike and moving with the speed and lethality of a reptile, that was when he knew that gods moved among men, and that there existed a scale of strength and speed beyond anything mortal, and that he was about to die. And he did die. He died no slower than it took to give voice to the deed aloud. Cannoning into the guard, Roen bludgeoned the man’s face with a sharp crack of his gauntleted fist with an underslung blow. Hammered to the floor, the guard stiffened where he landed and went into sickening convulsions, his limbs and head beating the deck in irregular rhythms, the side of his head and most of his face a ruin of pulped meat and broken bone. The fiend left him there to thrash and turned back to Gabriela, who had started weeping again, though out of despair or abject terror, Roen could not say. He gathered her unto him and his blood speckled armour, adjusted his cloak around her shoulders, and moved on with her trailing behind him, refusing to look at the bodies her lord and master left in his wake. The same scene repeated itself again, not too long after the last guard left the command deck on an errand. Roen left him slumped, his body twisted at an odd angle on the ground, much akin to a ragdoll’s repose after being discarded for the last time. This had been a bloodier affair committed by a spiteful fiend, and it left the golden dragon and most of his gauntlets and breastplate spattered with quickly drying blood. But not Gabriela, no, never her. Only made to observe, that one, and never partake in the bloodletting. They stood at the threshold now, both captive and captor, but it was the latter that moved to open the door. With surprising care and shocking daintiness, the Outsider grabbed the handle and rattled the mechanism, but stopped when he realized he was smearing blood all over it. Locked, he thought, his mind still riding the rush and high of bloodletting. He tensed, as if preparing to tear the door down, before his gorget crackled to life with the click of the speakers coming on line. Turning his hand over and rapping his knuckles on the door, the fiend called out from beyond the threshold. “Hello?” He said, deceptively urbane. “Permission to enter?” Again he knocked, harder this time with his gauntlets. The ship yawed slightly, prompting the Outsider to grimace and shift, the servos in his knee and ankle joints purring as they compensated. Reaching behind him, he kept Gabriela on her feet, lest she succumb to the shifting in the corridor. He smeared blood all over her and the cloak she wore as a shawl. "I would like to lodge a complaint with the captain." He said, his gorget speakers doing very little to dampen the honeyed quality of his tone.

I pushed aside the twin distractions of my bleeding temple and Gabriela’s cries, focusing on the infinitesimal psychic manipulation inside her body. Sweat trickles down my spine, adding to my irritated lack of focus. These miniscule applications of psychic manipulation don’t come naturally to me. My talents lay along more violent paths. I threaded my sixth sense through her thoughts of helpless wrath, pushing past surface rage and deeper pain, past all emotion and memory, seeking the inner workings of her brain. And… there: the strands of bioelectrical force that linked consciousness to muscle. Thousands of them, tying the brain to the rest of her body. It would have been easy to sever them with a blunt push of thought. Instead, I massaged them closed with unseen fingers. A pressure here, a release there.. Roen withdrew his hands from Gabriela, his dark, dark eyes lingering on her nudity in ways that went quite beyond the base and impractical. He was admiring her the way an artist might appreciate his work, judging it with the criticism only a creator ever knew. This was an imperfect healing. Flawed, indecisive and lacking, it did not restore Gabriela to full wholeness, but neither did he leave her in a state of ugly blemishes and true agonies. He left her with an ache between her legs and along the narrow passage of her sex, that she would not forget the violence and necessity of his affections and love. He left her body tender and weak, to remind her of her limits and respect the frailties of her condition. And he left the bruises on her throat, the surests signs among many that he had claim over her. Exhaling a long, drawn out breath from his nose, superfluous considering it was never necessary that he breathe, Roen turned away from beloved and pulled himself from the ruin of both her and the mattress beneath. Ignoring her proud cries and her torn and pretty dress on the floor, the fiend plucked his gauntlets from the ground and donned them, filling the silence with the sound of clicking seals and the purr of knuckle servos coming back to life. He worked his fingers inside, then went back to the mattress with his harsh, heavy tread. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t stirred save to grab the sheets beneath her in a grip of death. Would that he could sympathize, but no. She had brought this upon herself. With a perished son and hopeless future between them, he should have wept alongside beloved, but didn't. He had no more tears left to shed. Instead, he unbound her arms and pulled her from the bed. Naked, bloody and dripping, she was made to stand before him. “Stop crying.” He said, his voice firm but not unkind. There was no need for cruelty, not now at least. She was beloved, and he had no wish to hurt her more than necessary. With the black ribbon between his articulated armoured fingers, Roen took her limp and aching arm and started binding it with his dormant weapon. Glinting with muted malice, the bloody gems along the ribbon - a piece of fabric that grew in spite of sense to accommodate the function it was being utilized for - sparkled in the light, possessed of a preternatural glow as if they were drinking heavily on the suffering it was surrounded by. It was a terrible tool, the dread-fiend’s weapon, and perhaps delighted being used even so mundanely. Its jewels dug uncomfortably into Gabriela’s skin, perhaps more cruelly than gravity could account for. He fixed the sling over her shoulder and around her neck with warm scratches of his armour, adjusting the length of the ribbon and the knot that bound it together until her arm hung suspended and immobile. When he was done, this, too, was admired, before he glanced up to look at her flushed, weeping face. Rimmed by red and smudged with coal, she looked as distraught and exhausted as he had ever seen her, though that did not detract from her beauty. He reached out, and whether she wished it or not, he grabbed her from beneath the chin and pulled her up to the tips of her toes to meet his mouth. Kissing her, kissing her full, plump but trembling lips, Roen lingered on this stolen affection for several long moments. Oh, but he could have her again, he thought. But his ambition could not wait, not even for her. He released her mouth with a cruel, suckling release of lips, stroked the reddened swells of her mouth with a swipe of his black-and-gold thumb, then let her go. “I like you best like this.” He confessed quietly, unabashed by her nudity. The hand that caught her face prior moved downward, teasing the sloping curve of her breast and lifting it on fingertips that glinted gold. He let it drop, watching its weight settle, then teased her small, pink nipple with a swipe. There was temptation to bend, to take it between his lips and give it a firm pull with his mouth and make her writhe, as she had writhed before. He smiled at the idea, though he resisted it. “But for the sake of modesty..,” he trailed off. Reaching beneath the clasps of his pauldrons, Roen unhooked his long, sweeping cape from the catches in his arm. Long, black and trimmed with gold, the garment lay heavy in his hands as he gathered it up and straightened it out. He draped it over her, wrapped it twice-again around her slender, trembling body, and took her good hand to grab the edge of it, lest the pull of gravity find it coming undone and slipping off her pale and beautiful shoulders. It was warm around her, warm and heavy and smelling deeply of him, that heady aroma of peat and spice, fire and brimstone and subtle citrus. Wherever he had wandered, wherever he had roamed between now and the incident at the nightclub, he had done so in this armour and beneath this cape for it had drank him heavily into its fabric. Smoothing his gauntlets across her shoulders, adjusting the fabric the way a father might fix a beautiful daughter’s appearance, Roen nodded and, at last, let her go. She was ready to leave, but not him. Not yet. Taking a step back and unhitching the helmet from the magnetic seal on his hip, Roen gave one last, lingering look at Gabriela, took one long, considering regard at the last piece of his armour, then closed his eyes and slipped it over his head. Without his helmet, his armour was an imposing piece of equipment. Broad, bulky, granting him a size and weight he could not accomplish so unadorned, it was a regal thing of black and gold, and self-evident in brutality. Donning his helmet elevated the armour from bleak ornamentation to nightmarish reality. Roen was consumed, swallowed whole by war regalia. Subtle machinations in his gorget locked the article in place, and after a brief pause, the lenses on his visor, two narrow slits of thrice-hardened glass set in the face in mockery of eyes, began to glow a deep and ruddy red. Subtle servos near his throat purred as he turned his head, leveling the weight of those simulacrum eyes down at her. Then he spoke, and it was just as terrible as his appearance. Distorted through the vocalizer built into his collar, his voice, though modulated, came out as a static-laden rumble. It was beautiful still, forever crisp and articulated, but his words were made sterile by the age of modernity. Such was the pace he paid to wage war on equal footing with the planet, this revenant of infernal majesty. “You will stay behind me, and not interfere. You will observe, but I will punish you for your every outburst.” His helmet tilted, added the weight of character to his threat. The horns that crowned him like macabre laurels glinted, their tips sharp in the light. Then he was backing away, withdrawing, inviting her to follow as he turned towards the door. It opened with a wave of his gauntleted hand and a grind of metal over protesting rails. Once upon a time, Roen eschewed the reckless use of power, calling it vulgar displays. Now, though.. It hung over him like a mantle, a shroud. Intangible but present. He seemed wrath incarnate. Then he was in the hallway, sure she was right behind him. They walked together for a time, his armoured boots ringing loudly on the deck plating, her bare feet padding softly behind him. A galoer and his charge, so disparate it was almost horrifying: the young girl, the brutish monster. They walked but he led, eidetic memory taking them along the central, spinal thoroughfare that would take them to the bridge. And in that time of walking, there existed only silence between them, harsh and pregnant after the violence and passions endured a short while ago, punctuating by the heavy tread of his armour and the quiet snarls it made with his every step. Then, no sooner did the silence seem to settle for good, the two were accosted by a pair of guards. Plain men, bereft of armour but carrying long blades at their sides. Provincials, if Roen had to guess. He felt no curiousity to do so. Rather, he stopped and raised an arm to halt Gabriela, then turned and looked down at her. While the guards were calling for them, asking them questions the Outsider did not bother to record, he leaned towards his tortured beloved. "Tell them to stand down, or I will kill them." He said, his mellifluous voice rendered cold by the mechanical quality of his collar's speakers. He wasn't watching them, but he did not need his eyes to see the pair regarding them, their blood spicing with rising adrenaline and piqued with consternation and outrage. Even from this distance, he could smell their rising ire and trepidation. But he was waiting for Gabriela, for her words of appeasement and negation. He had no power here to command these men, but she, she could ensure this was a bloodless transition of power..

Sent.

I'm having some issues concerning my account. Trying to view the sight on mobile is telling me I am banned, but not when I connect to WiFi or through other means.

My dearest friend, if you don’t mind, I’d like to join you by your side. Where we could gaze into the stars, and sit together, now and forever.

At first, the Outsider thought her slowness a sign of fear, the way a woodland creature might employ guile to escape the notice and attention of a predator. But no, no such flattery. It was only weakness. With her foot still cut open on glass, Isabella walked across the room with his ruby-gaze lingering on her, unblinking in serpentine regard. She was limping. At first, it was hard to reconcile her with the pain she must have surely been in. She had been a vampyre for as long as they had known one another. He himself had tested the limits of her endurance, timeless night after timeless night, and knew her threshold of pain as only an intimate tormentor ever could. This, though.. He exhaled, his head turning to follow her where she roamed to the dresser. The helmet in his hands was a light burden of heaviness, compared to the weight of his indecisions concerning his pretty beloved. She was the moon to a sea of spite, her waxing and waning pulling and pushing his will this way and that like a buoy in a storm. Once, the paradox had given him a sort-of thrill. Now, he hated the hold she possessed over him. Control is knowing what we have and what we want. Power is having something someone else wants but cannot have. The old philosophy came unbidden. He had control, but the reins of power had ever been in her unkind hands. Not for the first time, he thought to murder his beloved. Coldly, dispassionately, without regret or shame. She threatened to unmake him with her very weakness, to push him into compassion when this world needed steel and fury. Something warm and small and kind thought to go to her again, but pragmatism silenced that voice with a vicious throttle. That path lay insanity; to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. To go to her with vindicta, though. To kill her for all that she had done and yet still planned to do. He could be free from her, free of this torment and this insanity, free to prosecute a war that so desperately needed to be waged. But, no. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror, after procuring a small bottle of pills from her dresser. Even from here, he could smell the odious scent of chemicals when she worked the cover off. She was such a handsome woman, it had to be said. Even stricken by sleeplessness, abuse and distress, it ever had to be said she was attractive. To be beautiful was to be almost dead, and no one lived that truth better than Gabriela. And was she singing? He couldn’t be sure. There was a musical cant to what she was saying, his mind impulsively putting a meter to her words. He had such a fondness for music, the Outsider. He closed his eyes briefly, while she took in a mouthful of her medicine. A better man might have been alarmed by the flagrant self-medication, but he was neither better nor a man, and so kept his peace. Her self-destruction was beyond his purview, so long as it wasn’t uniquely and promptly terminal. He simply watched her, silent and judgemental, his preternatural stare ever once wavering away from this bit of haunting theater. Then, because she had smiled, so did he. Wiping anger from his sensual mouth and twisting his lips into the facade of charm, the Outsider shook his head slowly from side to side in soft, quiet negation. Gabriela the Philosopher. Would that they had the time or energy to debate so complicated a subject as love and the breaking of it. She spoke with a certainty that would put artists and poets to shame, had they heard it. But the fiend had his own ideas concerning love, and perhaps that is what set the pair apart the most. If she had asked, he might have said she was confusing love for trust, which was never the same once broken. But she didn’t ask and so he never said that love, true love, was unbreakable. Perhaps she would one day realize he lived the very truth of that sentiment. “You look like you could use a rest. You look like you’d be better dead.” “Is that a dirge for me, sweet girl?” He asked, smiling stil. She only shrugged and limped away to crawl back into the bed he woke her from, her back turned to him. He knew when he was being dismissed, but he took no umbrage. He wondered, had she killed herself with that last handful of pills? She didn’t seem suicidal, but then again, rare were those who did. Setting his helmet on his hip and magnetically sealing it there, Roen moved over to Gabriela’s bedside. A return to their starting positions, he thought, of this dance macabre. He looked her over, from heel to head and back again. “It sounded like a dirge..,” he said quietly, speaking to the sleeping and uncaring. He had achieved nothing of note, visiting her. They had gone nowhere, accomplished nothing. He imagined her waking later and attributing this confrontation to little more than a violent hallucination, and couldn’t help but chuckle in dark amusement at the absurd honesty of the expectation. Eyes stilling at the flat of her injured, bleeding foot, Roen curled his fingers and reached with his senses for the shards of glass still embedded in her meat. With a tug, he jerked them out with a thought and sent them skittering across the floor with the rest. Her blood was red again. Just red. He drew the tip of a metal finger across the bottom of her foot, wetting it on vitae and bringing it up to his mouth. The copper salt-tang of the proudest blood, but nothing of the abyss, nothing esoteric. Just her, just his girl. He licked his lips and lowered his hand, brushing her naked shoulder with the back of his metal gauntlet. She didn’t stir. She only slept, bleeding and bleeding and ruining the perfect cream of her bedsheets. No, he didn’t think she would die, not from an overdose. He saw abdominal cramping in her future, and a morning she might wish she never lived to see, but not death. She only wanted to escape him, him and this confrontation, and he couldn’t say he blamed her for the sentiment, despite hating her for it. No such luck. Roen reached for his hair and unfastened the ribbon that held back the tide. Shiny black and glittering red with gemstones, he twined it deftly between his gauntleted fingers and bent for beloved while she slept. Cruelly, with the expectation of future savagery, the fiend rolled Gabriela onto her belly and lashed her hands together behind her back, binding her arms and wrists together with inconsiderate tightness. “I wanted to take you home to the Black City.” He said quietly, speaking to nothing and no one. “To the tallest room in the highest tower, where you could watch the world burn and a new one rise from the ashes. But I see now that will never work. You would find a way to escape from there, from me. So, I will keep you in my shadow, and always by my side, whether you wish it or not.” He was tracing his fingers across her dress, plucking the thin fabric between pinches of metal and tugging, pulling and ripping. Though she bled and though she slept, it did not stop him from stripping beloved of the trappings of prestige and power. He made a ruin of her dress, just as he had made a ruin of their lives, and did not stop until she was bare and brazen before him. What a terrible and startling contrast between them now, he in war regalia and she as pale and beautiful as the loveliest moon. He dragged a black and gold finger down the curve of her back, just to see the supple skin dimple and the fine hairs stand up. Down and down and down, he stroked her the way a man might would a cat, until he reached the curve of her bottom. This he held in the palm of a large hand and indelicately squeezed, again just to see the dimpling and impression he left behind. “First, you..,” he murmured. “Then, mm, you’ll see what else I take.”

#patiastands