Legend of the Fallen (part one of ..??)
So this is a little late. or early, as you may say, but anyhow.
In summary, kind of a remix of the Smallville to help me exorcise the thing, concepts/ characters I enjoyed watching (no jimmy thanx). Characters I haven't ever written before but I'm starting to love. Robin Hood -the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Maybe a Guy-like character. A Sheriff? And Robin Hood, darkened. Legend of the Seeker, with it's mythos twisted inside out. And made much much darker. No need to worry if you have/haven't watched the show or have read the Sword of Truth. You'll be just as confused as the rest of them when I'm done with you.
Mage Wars. The Black Death. The Dark Times. Early Christianity. An AU on Biblical Teaching? The sacrilege!
A Confessor. A Traveler. A Seeker. An Heir. A Servant. A Conqueror.
Chloe. Davis. KalClark. Lex. Lionel. Zod. Oliver. Lois. Justin. Eventually. What the hell am I doing?
I remember now.
There were two boys that fell to Earth that day.”
-Tess Mercer - Eternal.
In the blackness of night it came to them; a burning chunk of fire, bright as the Sun. From its ashes arose the fallen.
It was a dark time, and in the sign the people saw their salvation. Fire, who but a god could rise from fire? This traveler was destined to free them. It had been foretold.
The people prostrated themselves in front of he who rose, yet to discover that they were delivering themselves into the very bondage they would seek to escape. Unnoticed in the ashes, the true traveler writhed and slumbered. Awoke.
Many tales that start like this one. There is a beautiful land, marred and torn with darkness. There is a conqueror, the kind that would just as well run a sword through his most loyal soldier’s chest if it would serve his purpose.
There are armies of men who follow. There are bands of broken people who fight. There is a hero, one that is not a hero yet, no matter how he tries. There is a weapon. There is the only one that can tie both parts together.
There is a game with which you do not know the pieces, where the only truth is the one you do not see.
(There is a Legend.)
It begins like this. The Sunset comes before the Sunrise, you have been told, but you cannot know this. It is morning and the sun is blocked by clouds so black it seems not to exist.
It begins like this. The conqueror holds the seven territories. He destroys, he brutalizes, he reshapes.
You do not know how it came to this. But it must end. You know the legends.
But you also know you are a captive, a slave. You do not want to live like this. The Conqueror holds your land the way the spider would hold a web. Open resistance is not met with brute force. It simply ends. You’ve seen the captured fighters stumble back to their fellows, pale arms marred with a single red scar. They profess tales of the conqueror’s good works.
The weaker ones live like sleepwalkers the rest of their lives. The stronger ones die.
There is not exit, no escape. Every way leads back to his grasp. You despair. You must wait. A savior will come. There is one frontier the conqueror has not touched. You must believe that you can fight.
It is the twentieth year of their enslavement, the feast of Samhain, when the conqueror’s soldiers slaughter their way through the last of the seers to the book of Orden.
The book has unimaginable power, the power of life and death, and the powers of the other worlds. The book would give him complete control. As if the people are not already slaves enough.
Lionel tells them the news in castle keep. It will not affect them. Chloe has heard whispers of his plan. He has farmed-stolen--- enough mage magic to conceal their little plot of land. Enough to save his gifted; to have his own complete control.
Not even his heir would see this-plan-of his. He watches them, calm and she knows he has tabulated all the risks in his mind. He will let the rest become slaves. Lionel dismisses them, even Clark and she bites her tongue.
There are people out there, people who need to live. The Traveler needs the book to destroy him. It is her job to aid him in the fight. She is the last Confessor. He is the last chance.
She keeps from breathing in a sigh of relief Clark presses a note in her palm. He always has something planned. Outside. Chloe waits a half hour and goes.
For as long as she could remember there had been Clark. Before her powers, before she’d been anything at all. She’d fallen and he was there, a boy with tousled hair and the bluest eyes, the way the sky only was in her father’s stories.
He’d held out his hand and she’d hadn’t taken it. Her fingers were ugly and raw from where she’d rubbed the skin away. (“Wash.” Her mother had said, eyes on hers, painted nails pressing lightly into her neck.) Later, she sat down on the ground, bandaged hands curled around her knees. He’d smiled and shared a pilfered piece of cornbread.
She’d seen Clark even more after then. After Lionel took her in, gave her a mission. He was unusual for a boy. Literate. Strong. Kind. Secretive. Lionel Luthor had known him, like they’d known her. He ‘collected’ people with gifts.
She never knew the extent of his gift until exactly eight years after she met him. Her fourth mission. He’d been the backup that saved her the first time it went wrong. He’d leapt to the pyre in a single second, redirected attention with flames flaring from his eyes. She knew the Legends of the Traveler. He lit fires with his gaze. He could make you forget every one of your memories. He could make you devoted.
She’d remembered again, eventually. Clark’s powers. The Traveler’s powers. All but one. He could not fly. If he was the traveler, then at least the book could bring him that. And then he could free them all.
She finds Clark outside the castle limits, brooding out into the sky. He does that a lot. Since she had met him he had wanted to protect them all. The book has been taken, he says, as if she doesn’t know. “Lionel isn’t going to send a force to stop it.”
“I think I’m aware of that.”
“But I need you to help me bring it back.” He whispers. “We need to do it alone.”
It is madness, of course, breaking into the most heavily guarded fortress in the third territory.
She can confess two-three at most and it will weaken her. Someone will sound the alarm, they will be pursued, and the patrols have order to shoot intruders on sight.
Perhaps she is the only choice he has to get into the complex keep, to convince a few choice guards that they belong there. She can look into someone’s eyes and see the truth. She can take their will with a touch. She can lose her mind, but luck is with her for now. It is her mission to make the truth known; it is her mission to stop the conqueror. She should do it for either.
But for once Chloe is human. She looks into Clark’s eyes, blue and clear. Completely convinced. Ready to die.
For the first time he trusts her of his own will. A tiny part of her wonders if he would had he any other choice. She pulls her mouth up into a smile, and shifts the quiver of arrows on her back. “So, what are we waiting for?”
You are waiting for me.
I am the Seeker. I stand witness to you. I tell you that which you must believe.
I do not fight with the power of many men. I cannot make you believe in me. I cannot save you. I cannot free you from the one who enslaves you. I can only search for the one who can.
Number 4256 is nineteen when he is assigned to stop the worse criminals of the resistance. They both flee on horseback, twisting into trails and hostile cave nooks meant to slow the patrol down. They don’t look like much, just out of their teens.
He looks like a small mountain, the height and breadth of a farmer’s right hand man. She is petite and blond, a flittering target in a red-stained white dress. The Confessor.
The other soldiers had seen her as pretty and afraid, not all like an evil sorceress. A bit of fluff. He’d seen her in the castle keep. At the sight of her eyes his blood rebelled, froze in his veins at the sight. She’d held the Book of Orden. She took men’s wills. She was unnatural. He was not like the others.
He’d been entrusted with the book. He’d been warned about those trying to take it. Yet, he had expected greedy, grubby villagers. Not a chambermaid taking it among her pots.
“Stop where you stand.” He’d said, and she hadn’t jolted. Unusual. She looked back at him and everyone knew the face of the Confessor. He was not ordered to kill this one.
She’d held her hands up in the air, too close to his neck. He had thrown the knife through one of them. The boy-man pulls her up ahead of him on one of the horses. She wouldn’t be able to ride on her own.
He spurns his horse on and slips into the shadows behind them. No need to rush.
She will be bleeding out soon.
Once we were not enslaved. We warred. We fought. We lived.
Aegus was our first mage. He was a seer, slow and wise, the teacher of forty apprentices. These mages ruled and protected us from those who would conquer us. They chained the powers of the wind and thunder so that they would not destroy our crops. They demanded little more than powerful herbs and ores for their spells.
They were not powerful enough to be quite Gods, yet not vulnerable like us. We trusted their judgment like we trusted the signs in the sky. We forgot they were human.
It came slowly, an alliance between the North and West. An imbalance of power. A challenge. War.
Many nights after the twelfth year of my birth, the sky was scarlet; clouds of mage fire tangling around each other. It was not unexpected or particularly frightening. The jockeying for power was great, and revolution and restructuring might take little over a month when the conflict ended.
Only a month turned to another and another… Neither side would accept defeat, at last. I began to see myself as a man and the fighting was still bloody. I would not even leave the house to check the crops that had been destroyed from firestorms.
Rumors grew of whispers, magical tools that zapped all life from around them. Towns were destroyed; tests or warnings did not matter. The forces on both sides were depleting and they were down to their last hand. They intended to destroy each other and all of us. But they were traditionalists.
The only night the fighting ebbed, Samhain, was too sacred even for them to battle. Perhaps they called to the spirits, made peace with themselves. We did not.
Our last night was not dark, solemn. The smoky air was visible under the bonfires, filled with laughter and the heady scent of mead. Men and women, young and old, tangled together and danced self destructively close to the flames.
I drank for the first time then, under an elm, feeling the dead leaves between my fingers, the solidity of it giving me strength. We were going to die. It was a clear night and I saw a chunk of burning star racing toward the ground, probably to fall on the great palace. I laughed, half dizzied by wine and misery because it would not matter.
If only I had known.
“Take them down!” a thick voice calls out and all Chloe can think is that of course they’re not going to die. She’s with Clark. He always saves them. But Clark is afraid.
Chloe can feel the sweat from his face trickling against her neck, the clench of his fingers on the leather. This. She’s never touched so much in her life. Maybe she should close her eyes and let herself feel it while she can. This is the only time she’ll feel anything remotely like this.
He doesn’t even notice. The muscles of his arms ripple under his skin.
The patrollers are close. They’re not loud, clumsy like the others before, but he knows somehow. The horse’s hooves dance as he yanks a hard right. A green tipped arrow shatters on the rock of the cave wall next to her shoulder.
They are too close. There’s no time for intricacy now. Closer they will have a clear shot.
He just pulls hard on the reigns and the horse runs. Another arrow. Another. Another. The last pushes him forward in the saddle, hitting right between his shoulder blades. He gasps and the horse twists, running headlong into a different tunnel.
“Clark!” She doesn’t care that the others can hear her scream.
Why is he hurt? He shouldn’t be hurt.
There are green lines moving around his face. Some kind of poison.
“Clark!”
“Keep going.” he chokes.
She clenches her hands and pulls herself low in the saddle, crushed as he slumps. She’s going to get them out.
The Great Battle ended as quickly as it had started, with a sigh instead of silence. The whispers vanished. Perhaps no one had the guts to use them. There were no more mage fires. Perhaps the mages had ended it all amongst themselves through pity for their subjects. None of us quite believed that and it didn’t matter.
Contamination spread across the countryside like a plague, the illness they’d brought upon us through their greed and sin. More than once I crouched along a bedside, applying a weak herb poultice to sores, gashed and bleeding open, spreading. People were carted out, and you could barely walk out to the land without smelling death in the air.
I needed to understand and I did. We were still dying, only more slowly. Crops we had planted turned to dust under our fingers and we found ourselves hunting the starving rats running through our granaries if we wanted to keep our strength up. In times where a crust of bread meant more than your life, you didn’t have much to lose.
He appeared at the center of it all; clean of the blood under his feet. He had come from the stars. Walls of rock crumbled under his hands, fire shot from his eyes, and he heard every one of our wails.
He was not a man, not a god, something between these things. He pricked a drop of blood from his finger, pressed it under the skin of the sick and many of them awoke again. They knelt.
Zod. The name had sounded like freedom to us.
He would rule us, he said. We bowed before him. We obeyed him and we lived again. Unquestioning obedience was a small thing to give a savior.
Chloe has to save them now. She can do things she sets her mind to. She’d organized her first weapons raid at seventeen from a map and brazen luck. Schematics, plans, strategies. Those are the things she knows. She doesn’t know where they are.
She cannot feel her right hand and the reins are slipping from her grasp. She loosens the fingers with effort, feeling them move block like, spilling wetness on her palm. Her head lightens and she grips again, straps sliding back too far and pulling at the bot. The mare pushes her head forward, trying to through off the bit.
She races off through the narrow tunnel and if Chloe doesn’t make her stop they all will be crushed against a jagged rock. “Shhh.” She tries to pitch her voice soothingly to the scared animal.
“Woah.. "
The mare only goes faster , scrabbling her hooves against the dusty cave floors. Each kick of the mare’s legs rattles at her ribcage and Clark’s arms are almost limp, barely strong enough to hold on.
The bends of the tunnel twist past her eyes like a maze, the roof getting closer. The soldiers won’t be following them into this part. They’ve pretty much taken care of the job for them.
It’s dangerous and unstable. The slightest cry could bury them all.
Please, Chloe thinks. She doesn’t remember any of the gods she’s supposed to pray to, that’s the irony. She loosens her grip a little more. Bad idea.
The mare jolts back, sending them both careening off her back in the opposite direction.
Clark falls, halfway rolling on the stone. And she falls not much further away, feeling eye watering pain melt away the dizziness. She crawls to him and pulls the green tipped arrow out hopefully before he can feel the pain.
He gasps and when she throws it a ways away the black lines start to pull away from his skin. She doesn’t dare yell this time, but he just nods. If he can stand up and let her pull him up…
There’s grayish light, and there’s a way to the other side from here. Every time she tries he shrugs her hands away. His voice is breathless and cracking.
“The book.” She tugs it out of the pack at her waist and his eyes and hands fall on it eagerly. He breathes in and closes his eyes and she expects to see him engulfed in yellow light. Whole again.
A minute, two, a third. He makes runes clumsily with fingers, the ones he’s been taught painstakingly over and over again. Something is very wrong, and he looks as if he wants to yell out, if he had the strength. The book falls from his fingers stained.
“This is not working.” His voice, un-solid, gives way to a gurgle. There’s so much blood.
“You will take it.” Chloe knows that the battle is lost hen, not because of the blood but the look in his face. He’d been told that it was his destiny. He’d been groomed to be the Traveler. This had broken him.
She pleads, doesn’t bring herself to touch him, to hold his hand. He’d known about her antipathy to touch ever since she had confessed for the first time. She might never be able to reach out again.
“I’m not going to leave you here to die, okay? That’s not just how it works. We’ll make our stand here. They might not even follow.”
“They’ll have troops at the other side of the cave. You have to take this away from them. Get over the border.” Less than half a mile.
“There’s a small army after us. I won’t just leave you as fresh meat for them. That’s not what friends do.” Clark was her friend before she was his. But he was making her do something that no one was ever supposed to do. “You’ll die!”
“If that is my destiny.” His eyes are sparking red again and she knows that she will use his vision to loosen the rock of the caves, burying himself and the soldiers too.
“At least try!”
“It is your duty to leave. I cannot use the book to defend myself.” He spins the pages in front of her, face a mask. “At the true Seeker’s touch the book will come to life. I have been taught. I am ready. It is not me. If you do not go we will have no chance at all.”
“I don’t care if you’re not the Traveler. You’re my friend. You can’t expect me to leave you like this.” She can hear the clomp of hooves in the pathway to the left, two tunnels away. “I cannot do that to someone I... care about.” She blurts out, sick at heart because it does not matter in the least.
“You know this is bigger than both of us.” He murmurs. “You know that. You will find him.”
He pushes the book back into the pack and draws the strap weakly. “All the time I’ve known you; I’ve been a friend. As a friend, I’m asking you now. Will you do this for me?”
She looks at him, eyes watering and she knows her decision has been made from the start. He smiles, really. “You will need this, now.”
She winces as the cool metal clamp of is bracelet fastens over her wrist. She feels nothing, no strange warmth from the alien artifact. It will get her past the barrier. Lionel had tried to impress the Kawachee Bond’s importance onto Clark. If it bound the Confessor’s power to the Traveler, it would be enough to bring his full power to life permanently.
It would be enough to stop the Conqueror one day. She will need it when she finds him. The power will be his, Clark says.
Clark pushes the path open with fumbling hands to let her through the black tunnel; drags himself up to block the front of it.
“Tell him Clark Kent believes. Tell him it is on him now.”
Clark turns to the mouth of the cave, eyes starting to spark to life. Her eyes sting her and she knows that she will carry the image until the day she sees the Traveler slide his blade into the conqueror’s chest.
Time passed and we watched those same sick die once again, never to wake. We knew of the Gods resurrecting the dead, and never had they died again, coughing blood thick as tar.
He ruled us, founded a palace glistening like cold crystal. Magicks were outlawed outside of his fortress, but over it dark clouds swirled. Our unease stirred when we heard tales of the mages being herded together like cattle and turned into strange, unnatural beings.
His army grew by the day. Our world became an alien place, dominated by rain and ice and darkness. I almost did not remember when it was bright. All the magic was his now.
It was his and Lugh protect the child who was born with that gift. None of us understood how he knew. My brother was taken within the day of his birth. We still waited. We still wanted to believe.
Aegus returned to us one day, pale and gaunt and empty eyed. There were deep marks in his skin-in his neck, in his heart, in his side, holes like those of thin needles that had never closed up. He did not speak and could barely hold a pen to write.
He said the sky had sent us a conqueror and a savior. Perhaps he appreciated the irony of that. A traveler destined to destroy the conqueror with the use of a power older than our earth. A traveler not of our earth. A boy, even now, living in the third of the territories.
We thought they were the rantings of a man driven mad by guilt.
But the conqueror heard. The conqueror heard everything. The traveler was a boy, a young boy, under five human years of age. Just like a human boy.
The massacre began.
As the years passed no one even knew what the conqueror looked like. We still knew the fear of that night.
“You can go no further, Confessor.” the captain says.
Chloe can hear the crackling of the barrier’s flames and feel the agonizing burn on her skin. The bracelet is not protecting her. She closes her eyes, holds her hand ahead of her and remembers the certainty in Clark’s voice.
It is about faith. The bracelet parts the flames, aches, and somehow she stumbles through. They follow her and she runs, trips, and gathers her filthy white dress at the knees.
She must find him, but first she must get away. On the other side there’s a thick fog obscuring half of the trees. What had she expected, a mage to come stepping out of the foliage to rescue her? She falls in a scratching bush, and her hand catches her, gathers stones, feels disattached. She blinks, at the sight, red, bloated, changing.
She cannot go much farther. They can see no better than she so maybe they will think she got further on. Maybe they’ll just race on by. She crouches, hunkers behind the log, seeing the warm drip drip of the blood in her fist.
She does not hear the sound of horses as they go. She hears what must be the captain’s voice, the man who ran his blade through her.
“It was created especially, for this. It will freeze your body. You can feel it - it’s your hand, now. Then it will be your arm, if we wait an hour you will never move again. That will not please the master.”
She hugs against the back of the trunk. It is dishonor not to die on your feet. She knows she cannot let herself die.
The captain provides no bargains, no coaxing. Unlike the soldiers, he was called to this. He likes the hunt. Maybe he knows where she is already. She pulls one of the arrows into her palm, but both of her hands cannot string the bow.
She thinks of seeing through the mist and thrusting it out just at his neck. His men will scatter. Only she can not even grasp anymore. She must… One miscalculation and she reveals herself. He is distracting her so that his men…
She hears a twig snap and pushes her whole body forward, jerking her bloody right hand to a soldier’s throat. Listen to me. Listen to me. Her mind explodes with white hot nothingness, and pushes out until she sees his eyes blacken. Protect me.
He is a big man, strong enough to hold a double handed broadsword in one fist, and his will isn’t with the conqueror. He wants to go home. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It is my wish. Please. He lunges and a ringing fills her ears.
The cost takes her and her will flows through him. It leaves her weak, empty, like a shell. She falls to the ground, hand freezing so that she cannot catch herself.
Of course, she has been a foolish girl. The men are trying to kill her. Her hand is red.
She is all that’s left- panic, instinct. She needs to run and she does, in an unsteady, loping gait, seeing them blur ahead of her. She won’t get out without being sliced in half and she shrinks back.
“Leave them alone. You do not want to do this.” The voice is unfamiliar. There’s a man, his shadow not quite Clark’s height, a satchel in his hand between her and the rest of them.
She’s dangerous, the captain says. The stranger pauses.
“There are seven of you against one man and one of her. It looks like she’s the one in danger to me.”
“She is a traitor, a black sorceress.” She’s hurt people. She doesn’t want to die.
Chloe looks into the cloudy face and there’s not a spell in the world that she could use. She wants to run. He looks back, really looks back and his eyes are like someone she knew once. You’re going to be alright.
For a moment it all stops. She is…
“You will leave now.” the captain tells him and he barely turns his head. “No.” he says.
“Kill that one too.” The stranger lifts his dagger barely fast enough to catch the blade racing to his chest.
Chloe hears the sound of skin and bone and sinew, not metal. He hunkers down and pushes ahead so she can slide though the opening he leaves. She must leaves them behind, if she can. She bites into her upper lip and tries to feel the pain. She cannot sleep now.
The sword cracks and slides against her confessed soldier’s armor, and the whir of his blade slows as he parries and slides it through someone’s chest. He falls.
Someone is breathing close and she sees no one in the fog. She throws herself forward, her frozen hand catching on skin. The captain, almost a boy, angelic face and a scarring blade.
The sounds of the fight scream out at her, breaking her concentration. She does not have her full power but she must use it. She tightens her wet fingers, tries to close them over his throat. His thicker hand catches hers, crushes it, but she won’t let go.
“I may take you to him now. You might be dead.” The captain’s voice whispers and she catches hold of his eyes. Listen to me. It is my wish. There is not a hint of black and his face is vaguely amused.
“You cannot do it again, can you witch?” She doesn’t see him at all.
She hears her mother’s voice; feels her painted nails on her skin. Not again. Not again. She cannot breathe.
“My Lord only needed to acquire a Confessor.”
Chloe cannot go away inside like when she was a little girl. This won’t happen again. He pulls her like an unstrung puppet and the poison is acting fast. He’ll haul her to her feet, to the castle, to the chaos and darkness.
Her will is her own. It won’t be taken away again.
She cannot see him. Her body feels like lead but somehow her working hand twitches, moves, gropes for the arrow. She’s never killed anyone before.
Davis Bloome looks at the woman and sees something trapped behind green eyes. There’s blood dripping down her hand and she’s breathing shallowly like everything is shutting down. Nightblind probably.
Her eyes latch onto his, and he cannot tear his away. Bright green, warm, so very scared. Those are not the eyes of a black sorceress. A strange protective pain begins to gnaw at the pit of his stomach.
There’s a soldier, dressed just the same as the others, fighting like a madman to put himself between them. There are four men against him still. If he falls she’s defenseless.
“She has bewitched him.” The blonde man says, weirdly focused pupils staring into his face. Davis has heard that same phrase dozens of times. It was a very common excuse for everything that went wrong in the Upper County. If a man’s family starved because he was too cruel or busy with drink; it was a bad spell.
No, he says, and that is his death warrant. One of the soldiers lunges for him at the order.
Davis winces and tries to keep up. His knives were meant to cut herbs, not parry with swords. He’s not a warrior, but he knows enough to stay alive. He doesn’t want to kill anybody.
His calming tone works none and the man seems vaguely annoyed that he is not lunging at his comrade.
“Why won’t you die?!” He makes a heavy overhand swing and Davis has to jump back to avoid getting chopped in half.
His knives couldn’t have blocked that. It stops and starts and continues and the others fall beside them but they still fight.
“Why are you so desperate to kill her?” Davis finally grinds out, holding onto the hilt uncomfortably close to his neck.
“She destroyed my brother.” The man says matter of factly. “Orders.”
“You’re the one that’s trying to kill him.”
“He’s better dead than what he is now!”
Davis sees the man’s pupils are black. He fights like a machine, uncaring for death or injury. For a moment he pauses and the soldier’s blade is cutting at his neck. “Be grateful she will not get the chance to do the same to you.”
Davis feels a rush of wetness and his head lightening, and sees her face as she attempts to crawl back on her hands and knees from the blonde man, hands groping in the mud.
“I won’t go back.” She says, and it is a child’s voice. Her throat hitches in panic and the sound comes out smothered.
His eyes burn. Davis doesn’t see, only knows that somewhere between bleeding and that, his free knife has buried its way into the soldier’s belly, somehow past chains and links of armor.
He can smell the blood, feel it flow sluggish and black over metal and the hilt of his knife. Something inside him awakens at the sight. It is as if he cannot tear his eyes away.
You. The man gasps, opens his lips and black covers his gums.
It is only then that she screams.
Davis pulls the blade away from the armor and it flies straight and true, embedding itself in the blonde attacker’s side. He falls with a befuddled roar, hands loosening.
Davis does not know he crossed the space, but he has. Her eyes do not change, as if she hasn’t noticed. They are unfocused, and either panic or the poison has started to take complete hold. Her hand throws itself up, the arrowhead in her fingers pressing against his jaw.
“You’re going to be alright. You know me.” He whispers.
He reaches out a hand and touches her chin, waits for the slightest reaction. Her face is small and pale and his hands massive in comparison. He realizes how threatening this might appear before she looks back. Her eyes lock onto his face and her lips move, trying to get word out. They cannot quite make it and he sees the panic in her eyes again.
“You’re going to be alright. My Name is Davis Bloome. I’m a healer.” He repeats, keeping eye contact. It almost sounds as if he’s dealt with this before. A lie. If simple hornwort is enough to bleed it out. He scrambles in the man’s pouch for a knife.
“He cut you with this.” Nightblind, sure enough. He lowers her hand, and a broken arrow falls out of her bone white fingers. He sees the dull mark right through the palm, already turning plum colored. The man had cut straight through so the poison would cause the maximum pain.
“Bastard.” He could be imagining it, but her eyes narrow just a fraction.
She licks her lips, dry and tries again. “Chl---oe.” She whispers. “Okay-Chloe, this will hurt. Stay with me okay? We’ll take care of you.” He keeps his eyes on hers, somehow, trying to calm her. Not trying to control her.
His larger hands keep her still, and she can feel a painful sizzle in her palm when he smears something across it. Nothing she has not felt before. Once. He leans forward, slipping an arm around her waist, like those gentlemen she’d seen in the village square. People don’t touch her.
Her head slams against his shoulder, weighed down with emptiness. Time passes in a strange blur and all of her feels so heavy that she can’t bat an eyelash, sift her throat and it starts pressing in on her lungs.
It’s the poison, he says, very softly. It will pass. If he had not she would have collapsed. It ebbs by increments, hours, time.
He’s like her. There is blood dripping from his neck, smeared all over his throat. He’d saved her.
She musters the will to twitch two fingers. He releases a breath. It takes a hell of a lot more will to lift her hand all the way to his neck to show him what she can’t quite say. He’s bleeding, too.
“I’m not the only one who needs help.” she almost says, hand catching and pressing to keep it from flowing out. “I am a dangerous witch. He told you. Why did you find me? Why didn’t you go on?”
His blood is spreading all over her hand and it is as if he doesn’t notice. Her hand is on fire where she’s touched him, burning hundreds of times more painfully than with the cure.
He is a stranger, doesn’t know what she can do. “You were hard to miss.” His mouth tilts up, hardly subtle. “This may sound crazy. I felt like… I knew you somehow.”
Somewhere inside her hurts, aches. She wants to pull the look in his eyes, that trust, into herself.
“Why are they following you?” he asks. “You saw what I did to him. What the conqueror would do with me…”
She can feel it burn to life and she is afraid. Unconsciously her hand opens against his neck. She won’t confess him. She won’t hurt him. “I know somewhere you can find shelter.” He says, and she doesn’t hear a word of it. She has officially taken leave of her senses.
She extricates herself from his grip, clenches the broken arrow in her fingers. His eyes hold her too much, swallow her up, see things that have no right to be seen.
“I must go now.” Chloe says, pulls herself up and scrambles away still, tearing at her white sleeve and pressing it into his hand. Vaguely she sees seven bodies littered around them. “You can see they are all dead.”
He feels sick as he realizes that it is him she is afraid of now.
She feels sick as she realizes she will not see him again. Absurd because she won’t ever see him again. “You’re not even healed yet. I’ll take you.” He says, but she knows that with blood loss like that he will not be able to follow. He will wake later, and he will forget.
She won’t have hurt him.
“The roads are dangerous.” He murmurs, wincing, looking up at her. He is starting to realize.
“If I’m the least bit like I was today, it’ll be dangerous for them. Thank you. Don’t follow me.” This is her voice, the Confessor’s voice. He should calm now.
Chloe's wrist burns like a pulsing thing. When he presses the white cloth hard into his neck, his eyes are already closing. So still, like death.
She readjusts his hand, pulls her fingers back too soon. Cold.
“I have to find someone.” Chloe says, stumbling, less forceful than before. He doesn’t hear her.
Endnotes (not the seriousfic kind, alas):
1) Of course they meet again. In a time frame that no decent self-respecting writer would use. It's mythos.
2) You will get more background on the mage war and how the seeker became...the seeker. The general gist of it was the mage (nuclear) wars lead to the Black Death, the Dark Ages, etc. This Conqueror steps in, offers to make it stop for a price and the people pay it. And yes, Zod has a variation of the Darken Rahl blood thing. But he thinks it's to much of a trouble to kill kittens. but he will go all Herod on you, so watch out.
2) Who is this Seeker?
He's not like the Seeker from LOTS/the Books. He's meant to find the Traveler. And guide him. You know who the Seeker is. You do. Come on. You tell me.
3) What's with the Chloe freak out?
Well, it was meant to, in it's way illustrated the changes brought by confessing someone. In Chloe's case, she has tremendous mommy issues. Her mother was a Confessor as well, and that bears some resemblance to the Moira SV plotline. So instead of the Terry Goodkind rape fixation, you get mindrape.
Chloe's loss of will after confessing means that most of her, the Chloe/Confessor/hardass part goes into anyone she confesses for a time.
That leaves behind her more childish persona until she 'recovers'. So that explains, partially, but not totally, why she had a clingy side with Davis at first and her other side, when she recoups, has runrun syndrome.
4) If you didn't know already, Davis, good guy, herb gatherer and village witch doctor also *fell to earth*. And he did not pass out from blood loss. And you ask if he's the Traveler.... well....
5) Clark is more or Less KalClark here. He's been groomed to be the perfect Traveler and he can't take not being that. Hence, going out with a bang. And bossing Chloe into a guilt complex she may carry like a monkey on her back.
Spoilers: Next installment/chapter/whatever a character someone has been waiting for (and taught me to fangirl) will make his resuscitating debut. Davis will understand a little more about what he is by getting monumentally ill, we meet this Seeker, and Chloe and Davis....sleep together?
Comments. Questions. ehs? Much loved. AND NEEDED! TO SURVIVE.
I'm writing a buge episode script for Among Us. Have pity.
In summary, kind of a remix of the Smallville to help me exorcise the thing, concepts/ characters I enjoyed watching (no jimmy thanx). Characters I haven't ever written before but I'm starting to love. Robin Hood -the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Maybe a Guy-like character. A Sheriff? And Robin Hood, darkened. Legend of the Seeker, with it's mythos twisted inside out. And made much much darker. No need to worry if you have/haven't watched the show or have read the Sword of Truth. You'll be just as confused as the rest of them when I'm done with you.
Mage Wars. The Black Death. The Dark Times. Early Christianity. An AU on Biblical Teaching? The sacrilege!
A Confessor. A Traveler. A Seeker. An Heir. A Servant. A Conqueror.
Chloe. Davis. KalClark. Lex. Lionel. Zod. Oliver. Lois. Justin. Eventually. What the hell am I doing?
I remember now.
There were two boys that fell to Earth that day.”
-Tess Mercer - Eternal.
In the blackness of night it came to them; a burning chunk of fire, bright as the Sun. From its ashes arose the fallen.
It was a dark time, and in the sign the people saw their salvation. Fire, who but a god could rise from fire? This traveler was destined to free them. It had been foretold.
The people prostrated themselves in front of he who rose, yet to discover that they were delivering themselves into the very bondage they would seek to escape. Unnoticed in the ashes, the true traveler writhed and slumbered. Awoke.
Many tales that start like this one. There is a beautiful land, marred and torn with darkness. There is a conqueror, the kind that would just as well run a sword through his most loyal soldier’s chest if it would serve his purpose.
There are armies of men who follow. There are bands of broken people who fight. There is a hero, one that is not a hero yet, no matter how he tries. There is a weapon. There is the only one that can tie both parts together.
There is a game with which you do not know the pieces, where the only truth is the one you do not see.
(There is a Legend.)
It begins like this. The Sunset comes before the Sunrise, you have been told, but you cannot know this. It is morning and the sun is blocked by clouds so black it seems not to exist.
It begins like this. The conqueror holds the seven territories. He destroys, he brutalizes, he reshapes.
You do not know how it came to this. But it must end. You know the legends.
But you also know you are a captive, a slave. You do not want to live like this. The Conqueror holds your land the way the spider would hold a web. Open resistance is not met with brute force. It simply ends. You’ve seen the captured fighters stumble back to their fellows, pale arms marred with a single red scar. They profess tales of the conqueror’s good works.
The weaker ones live like sleepwalkers the rest of their lives. The stronger ones die.
There is not exit, no escape. Every way leads back to his grasp. You despair. You must wait. A savior will come. There is one frontier the conqueror has not touched. You must believe that you can fight.
It is the twentieth year of their enslavement, the feast of Samhain, when the conqueror’s soldiers slaughter their way through the last of the seers to the book of Orden.
The book has unimaginable power, the power of life and death, and the powers of the other worlds. The book would give him complete control. As if the people are not already slaves enough.
Lionel tells them the news in castle keep. It will not affect them. Chloe has heard whispers of his plan. He has farmed-stolen--- enough mage magic to conceal their little plot of land. Enough to save his gifted; to have his own complete control.
Not even his heir would see this-plan-of his. He watches them, calm and she knows he has tabulated all the risks in his mind. He will let the rest become slaves. Lionel dismisses them, even Clark and she bites her tongue.
There are people out there, people who need to live. The Traveler needs the book to destroy him. It is her job to aid him in the fight. She is the last Confessor. He is the last chance.
She keeps from breathing in a sigh of relief Clark presses a note in her palm. He always has something planned. Outside. Chloe waits a half hour and goes.
For as long as she could remember there had been Clark. Before her powers, before she’d been anything at all. She’d fallen and he was there, a boy with tousled hair and the bluest eyes, the way the sky only was in her father’s stories.
He’d held out his hand and she’d hadn’t taken it. Her fingers were ugly and raw from where she’d rubbed the skin away. (“Wash.” Her mother had said, eyes on hers, painted nails pressing lightly into her neck.) Later, she sat down on the ground, bandaged hands curled around her knees. He’d smiled and shared a pilfered piece of cornbread.
She’d seen Clark even more after then. After Lionel took her in, gave her a mission. He was unusual for a boy. Literate. Strong. Kind. Secretive. Lionel Luthor had known him, like they’d known her. He ‘collected’ people with gifts.
She never knew the extent of his gift until exactly eight years after she met him. Her fourth mission. He’d been the backup that saved her the first time it went wrong. He’d leapt to the pyre in a single second, redirected attention with flames flaring from his eyes. She knew the Legends of the Traveler. He lit fires with his gaze. He could make you forget every one of your memories. He could make you devoted.
She’d remembered again, eventually. Clark’s powers. The Traveler’s powers. All but one. He could not fly. If he was the traveler, then at least the book could bring him that. And then he could free them all.
She finds Clark outside the castle limits, brooding out into the sky. He does that a lot. Since she had met him he had wanted to protect them all. The book has been taken, he says, as if she doesn’t know. “Lionel isn’t going to send a force to stop it.”
“I think I’m aware of that.”
“But I need you to help me bring it back.” He whispers. “We need to do it alone.”
It is madness, of course, breaking into the most heavily guarded fortress in the third territory.
She can confess two-three at most and it will weaken her. Someone will sound the alarm, they will be pursued, and the patrols have order to shoot intruders on sight.
Perhaps she is the only choice he has to get into the complex keep, to convince a few choice guards that they belong there. She can look into someone’s eyes and see the truth. She can take their will with a touch. She can lose her mind, but luck is with her for now. It is her mission to make the truth known; it is her mission to stop the conqueror. She should do it for either.
But for once Chloe is human. She looks into Clark’s eyes, blue and clear. Completely convinced. Ready to die.
For the first time he trusts her of his own will. A tiny part of her wonders if he would had he any other choice. She pulls her mouth up into a smile, and shifts the quiver of arrows on her back. “So, what are we waiting for?”
You are waiting for me.
I am the Seeker. I stand witness to you. I tell you that which you must believe.
I do not fight with the power of many men. I cannot make you believe in me. I cannot save you. I cannot free you from the one who enslaves you. I can only search for the one who can.
Number 4256 is nineteen when he is assigned to stop the worse criminals of the resistance. They both flee on horseback, twisting into trails and hostile cave nooks meant to slow the patrol down. They don’t look like much, just out of their teens.
He looks like a small mountain, the height and breadth of a farmer’s right hand man. She is petite and blond, a flittering target in a red-stained white dress. The Confessor.
The other soldiers had seen her as pretty and afraid, not all like an evil sorceress. A bit of fluff. He’d seen her in the castle keep. At the sight of her eyes his blood rebelled, froze in his veins at the sight. She’d held the Book of Orden. She took men’s wills. She was unnatural. He was not like the others.
He’d been entrusted with the book. He’d been warned about those trying to take it. Yet, he had expected greedy, grubby villagers. Not a chambermaid taking it among her pots.
“Stop where you stand.” He’d said, and she hadn’t jolted. Unusual. She looked back at him and everyone knew the face of the Confessor. He was not ordered to kill this one.
She’d held her hands up in the air, too close to his neck. He had thrown the knife through one of them. The boy-man pulls her up ahead of him on one of the horses. She wouldn’t be able to ride on her own.
He spurns his horse on and slips into the shadows behind them. No need to rush.
She will be bleeding out soon.
Once we were not enslaved. We warred. We fought. We lived.
Aegus was our first mage. He was a seer, slow and wise, the teacher of forty apprentices. These mages ruled and protected us from those who would conquer us. They chained the powers of the wind and thunder so that they would not destroy our crops. They demanded little more than powerful herbs and ores for their spells.
They were not powerful enough to be quite Gods, yet not vulnerable like us. We trusted their judgment like we trusted the signs in the sky. We forgot they were human.
It came slowly, an alliance between the North and West. An imbalance of power. A challenge. War.
Many nights after the twelfth year of my birth, the sky was scarlet; clouds of mage fire tangling around each other. It was not unexpected or particularly frightening. The jockeying for power was great, and revolution and restructuring might take little over a month when the conflict ended.
Only a month turned to another and another… Neither side would accept defeat, at last. I began to see myself as a man and the fighting was still bloody. I would not even leave the house to check the crops that had been destroyed from firestorms.
Rumors grew of whispers, magical tools that zapped all life from around them. Towns were destroyed; tests or warnings did not matter. The forces on both sides were depleting and they were down to their last hand. They intended to destroy each other and all of us. But they were traditionalists.
The only night the fighting ebbed, Samhain, was too sacred even for them to battle. Perhaps they called to the spirits, made peace with themselves. We did not.
Our last night was not dark, solemn. The smoky air was visible under the bonfires, filled with laughter and the heady scent of mead. Men and women, young and old, tangled together and danced self destructively close to the flames.
I drank for the first time then, under an elm, feeling the dead leaves between my fingers, the solidity of it giving me strength. We were going to die. It was a clear night and I saw a chunk of burning star racing toward the ground, probably to fall on the great palace. I laughed, half dizzied by wine and misery because it would not matter.
If only I had known.
“Take them down!” a thick voice calls out and all Chloe can think is that of course they’re not going to die. She’s with Clark. He always saves them. But Clark is afraid.
Chloe can feel the sweat from his face trickling against her neck, the clench of his fingers on the leather. This. She’s never touched so much in her life. Maybe she should close her eyes and let herself feel it while she can. This is the only time she’ll feel anything remotely like this.
He doesn’t even notice. The muscles of his arms ripple under his skin.
The patrollers are close. They’re not loud, clumsy like the others before, but he knows somehow. The horse’s hooves dance as he yanks a hard right. A green tipped arrow shatters on the rock of the cave wall next to her shoulder.
They are too close. There’s no time for intricacy now. Closer they will have a clear shot.
He just pulls hard on the reigns and the horse runs. Another arrow. Another. Another. The last pushes him forward in the saddle, hitting right between his shoulder blades. He gasps and the horse twists, running headlong into a different tunnel.
“Clark!” She doesn’t care that the others can hear her scream.
Why is he hurt? He shouldn’t be hurt.
There are green lines moving around his face. Some kind of poison.
“Clark!”
“Keep going.” he chokes.
She clenches her hands and pulls herself low in the saddle, crushed as he slumps. She’s going to get them out.
The Great Battle ended as quickly as it had started, with a sigh instead of silence. The whispers vanished. Perhaps no one had the guts to use them. There were no more mage fires. Perhaps the mages had ended it all amongst themselves through pity for their subjects. None of us quite believed that and it didn’t matter.
Contamination spread across the countryside like a plague, the illness they’d brought upon us through their greed and sin. More than once I crouched along a bedside, applying a weak herb poultice to sores, gashed and bleeding open, spreading. People were carted out, and you could barely walk out to the land without smelling death in the air.
I needed to understand and I did. We were still dying, only more slowly. Crops we had planted turned to dust under our fingers and we found ourselves hunting the starving rats running through our granaries if we wanted to keep our strength up. In times where a crust of bread meant more than your life, you didn’t have much to lose.
He appeared at the center of it all; clean of the blood under his feet. He had come from the stars. Walls of rock crumbled under his hands, fire shot from his eyes, and he heard every one of our wails.
He was not a man, not a god, something between these things. He pricked a drop of blood from his finger, pressed it under the skin of the sick and many of them awoke again. They knelt.
Zod. The name had sounded like freedom to us.
He would rule us, he said. We bowed before him. We obeyed him and we lived again. Unquestioning obedience was a small thing to give a savior.
Chloe has to save them now. She can do things she sets her mind to. She’d organized her first weapons raid at seventeen from a map and brazen luck. Schematics, plans, strategies. Those are the things she knows. She doesn’t know where they are.
She cannot feel her right hand and the reins are slipping from her grasp. She loosens the fingers with effort, feeling them move block like, spilling wetness on her palm. Her head lightens and she grips again, straps sliding back too far and pulling at the bot. The mare pushes her head forward, trying to through off the bit.
She races off through the narrow tunnel and if Chloe doesn’t make her stop they all will be crushed against a jagged rock. “Shhh.” She tries to pitch her voice soothingly to the scared animal.
“Woah.. "
The mare only goes faster , scrabbling her hooves against the dusty cave floors. Each kick of the mare’s legs rattles at her ribcage and Clark’s arms are almost limp, barely strong enough to hold on.
The bends of the tunnel twist past her eyes like a maze, the roof getting closer. The soldiers won’t be following them into this part. They’ve pretty much taken care of the job for them.
It’s dangerous and unstable. The slightest cry could bury them all.
Please, Chloe thinks. She doesn’t remember any of the gods she’s supposed to pray to, that’s the irony. She loosens her grip a little more. Bad idea.
The mare jolts back, sending them both careening off her back in the opposite direction.
Clark falls, halfway rolling on the stone. And she falls not much further away, feeling eye watering pain melt away the dizziness. She crawls to him and pulls the green tipped arrow out hopefully before he can feel the pain.
He gasps and when she throws it a ways away the black lines start to pull away from his skin. She doesn’t dare yell this time, but he just nods. If he can stand up and let her pull him up…
There’s grayish light, and there’s a way to the other side from here. Every time she tries he shrugs her hands away. His voice is breathless and cracking.
“The book.” She tugs it out of the pack at her waist and his eyes and hands fall on it eagerly. He breathes in and closes his eyes and she expects to see him engulfed in yellow light. Whole again.
A minute, two, a third. He makes runes clumsily with fingers, the ones he’s been taught painstakingly over and over again. Something is very wrong, and he looks as if he wants to yell out, if he had the strength. The book falls from his fingers stained.
“This is not working.” His voice, un-solid, gives way to a gurgle. There’s so much blood.
“You will take it.” Chloe knows that the battle is lost hen, not because of the blood but the look in his face. He’d been told that it was his destiny. He’d been groomed to be the Traveler. This had broken him.
She pleads, doesn’t bring herself to touch him, to hold his hand. He’d known about her antipathy to touch ever since she had confessed for the first time. She might never be able to reach out again.
“I’m not going to leave you here to die, okay? That’s not just how it works. We’ll make our stand here. They might not even follow.”
“They’ll have troops at the other side of the cave. You have to take this away from them. Get over the border.” Less than half a mile.
“There’s a small army after us. I won’t just leave you as fresh meat for them. That’s not what friends do.” Clark was her friend before she was his. But he was making her do something that no one was ever supposed to do. “You’ll die!”
“If that is my destiny.” His eyes are sparking red again and she knows that she will use his vision to loosen the rock of the caves, burying himself and the soldiers too.
“At least try!”
“It is your duty to leave. I cannot use the book to defend myself.” He spins the pages in front of her, face a mask. “At the true Seeker’s touch the book will come to life. I have been taught. I am ready. It is not me. If you do not go we will have no chance at all.”
“I don’t care if you’re not the Traveler. You’re my friend. You can’t expect me to leave you like this.” She can hear the clomp of hooves in the pathway to the left, two tunnels away. “I cannot do that to someone I... care about.” She blurts out, sick at heart because it does not matter in the least.
“You know this is bigger than both of us.” He murmurs. “You know that. You will find him.”
He pushes the book back into the pack and draws the strap weakly. “All the time I’ve known you; I’ve been a friend. As a friend, I’m asking you now. Will you do this for me?”
She looks at him, eyes watering and she knows her decision has been made from the start. He smiles, really. “You will need this, now.”
She winces as the cool metal clamp of is bracelet fastens over her wrist. She feels nothing, no strange warmth from the alien artifact. It will get her past the barrier. Lionel had tried to impress the Kawachee Bond’s importance onto Clark. If it bound the Confessor’s power to the Traveler, it would be enough to bring his full power to life permanently.
It would be enough to stop the Conqueror one day. She will need it when she finds him. The power will be his, Clark says.
Clark pushes the path open with fumbling hands to let her through the black tunnel; drags himself up to block the front of it.
“Tell him Clark Kent believes. Tell him it is on him now.”
Clark turns to the mouth of the cave, eyes starting to spark to life. Her eyes sting her and she knows that she will carry the image until the day she sees the Traveler slide his blade into the conqueror’s chest.
Time passed and we watched those same sick die once again, never to wake. We knew of the Gods resurrecting the dead, and never had they died again, coughing blood thick as tar.
He ruled us, founded a palace glistening like cold crystal. Magicks were outlawed outside of his fortress, but over it dark clouds swirled. Our unease stirred when we heard tales of the mages being herded together like cattle and turned into strange, unnatural beings.
His army grew by the day. Our world became an alien place, dominated by rain and ice and darkness. I almost did not remember when it was bright. All the magic was his now.
It was his and Lugh protect the child who was born with that gift. None of us understood how he knew. My brother was taken within the day of his birth. We still waited. We still wanted to believe.
Aegus returned to us one day, pale and gaunt and empty eyed. There were deep marks in his skin-in his neck, in his heart, in his side, holes like those of thin needles that had never closed up. He did not speak and could barely hold a pen to write.
He said the sky had sent us a conqueror and a savior. Perhaps he appreciated the irony of that. A traveler destined to destroy the conqueror with the use of a power older than our earth. A traveler not of our earth. A boy, even now, living in the third of the territories.
We thought they were the rantings of a man driven mad by guilt.
But the conqueror heard. The conqueror heard everything. The traveler was a boy, a young boy, under five human years of age. Just like a human boy.
The massacre began.
As the years passed no one even knew what the conqueror looked like. We still knew the fear of that night.
“You can go no further, Confessor.” the captain says.
Chloe can hear the crackling of the barrier’s flames and feel the agonizing burn on her skin. The bracelet is not protecting her. She closes her eyes, holds her hand ahead of her and remembers the certainty in Clark’s voice.
It is about faith. The bracelet parts the flames, aches, and somehow she stumbles through. They follow her and she runs, trips, and gathers her filthy white dress at the knees.
She must find him, but first she must get away. On the other side there’s a thick fog obscuring half of the trees. What had she expected, a mage to come stepping out of the foliage to rescue her? She falls in a scratching bush, and her hand catches her, gathers stones, feels disattached. She blinks, at the sight, red, bloated, changing.
She cannot go much farther. They can see no better than she so maybe they will think she got further on. Maybe they’ll just race on by. She crouches, hunkers behind the log, seeing the warm drip drip of the blood in her fist.
She does not hear the sound of horses as they go. She hears what must be the captain’s voice, the man who ran his blade through her.
“It was created especially, for this. It will freeze your body. You can feel it - it’s your hand, now. Then it will be your arm, if we wait an hour you will never move again. That will not please the master.”
She hugs against the back of the trunk. It is dishonor not to die on your feet. She knows she cannot let herself die.
The captain provides no bargains, no coaxing. Unlike the soldiers, he was called to this. He likes the hunt. Maybe he knows where she is already. She pulls one of the arrows into her palm, but both of her hands cannot string the bow.
She thinks of seeing through the mist and thrusting it out just at his neck. His men will scatter. Only she can not even grasp anymore. She must… One miscalculation and she reveals herself. He is distracting her so that his men…
She hears a twig snap and pushes her whole body forward, jerking her bloody right hand to a soldier’s throat. Listen to me. Listen to me. Her mind explodes with white hot nothingness, and pushes out until she sees his eyes blacken. Protect me.
He is a big man, strong enough to hold a double handed broadsword in one fist, and his will isn’t with the conqueror. He wants to go home. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It is my wish. Please. He lunges and a ringing fills her ears.
The cost takes her and her will flows through him. It leaves her weak, empty, like a shell. She falls to the ground, hand freezing so that she cannot catch herself.
Of course, she has been a foolish girl. The men are trying to kill her. Her hand is red.
She is all that’s left- panic, instinct. She needs to run and she does, in an unsteady, loping gait, seeing them blur ahead of her. She won’t get out without being sliced in half and she shrinks back.
“Leave them alone. You do not want to do this.” The voice is unfamiliar. There’s a man, his shadow not quite Clark’s height, a satchel in his hand between her and the rest of them.
She’s dangerous, the captain says. The stranger pauses.
“There are seven of you against one man and one of her. It looks like she’s the one in danger to me.”
“She is a traitor, a black sorceress.” She’s hurt people. She doesn’t want to die.
Chloe looks into the cloudy face and there’s not a spell in the world that she could use. She wants to run. He looks back, really looks back and his eyes are like someone she knew once. You’re going to be alright.
For a moment it all stops. She is…
“You will leave now.” the captain tells him and he barely turns his head. “No.” he says.
“Kill that one too.” The stranger lifts his dagger barely fast enough to catch the blade racing to his chest.
Chloe hears the sound of skin and bone and sinew, not metal. He hunkers down and pushes ahead so she can slide though the opening he leaves. She must leaves them behind, if she can. She bites into her upper lip and tries to feel the pain. She cannot sleep now.
The sword cracks and slides against her confessed soldier’s armor, and the whir of his blade slows as he parries and slides it through someone’s chest. He falls.
Someone is breathing close and she sees no one in the fog. She throws herself forward, her frozen hand catching on skin. The captain, almost a boy, angelic face and a scarring blade.
The sounds of the fight scream out at her, breaking her concentration. She does not have her full power but she must use it. She tightens her wet fingers, tries to close them over his throat. His thicker hand catches hers, crushes it, but she won’t let go.
“I may take you to him now. You might be dead.” The captain’s voice whispers and she catches hold of his eyes. Listen to me. It is my wish. There is not a hint of black and his face is vaguely amused.
“You cannot do it again, can you witch?” She doesn’t see him at all.
She hears her mother’s voice; feels her painted nails on her skin. Not again. Not again. She cannot breathe.
“My Lord only needed to acquire a Confessor.”
Chloe cannot go away inside like when she was a little girl. This won’t happen again. He pulls her like an unstrung puppet and the poison is acting fast. He’ll haul her to her feet, to the castle, to the chaos and darkness.
Her will is her own. It won’t be taken away again.
She cannot see him. Her body feels like lead but somehow her working hand twitches, moves, gropes for the arrow. She’s never killed anyone before.
Davis Bloome looks at the woman and sees something trapped behind green eyes. There’s blood dripping down her hand and she’s breathing shallowly like everything is shutting down. Nightblind probably.
Her eyes latch onto his, and he cannot tear his away. Bright green, warm, so very scared. Those are not the eyes of a black sorceress. A strange protective pain begins to gnaw at the pit of his stomach.
There’s a soldier, dressed just the same as the others, fighting like a madman to put himself between them. There are four men against him still. If he falls she’s defenseless.
“She has bewitched him.” The blonde man says, weirdly focused pupils staring into his face. Davis has heard that same phrase dozens of times. It was a very common excuse for everything that went wrong in the Upper County. If a man’s family starved because he was too cruel or busy with drink; it was a bad spell.
No, he says, and that is his death warrant. One of the soldiers lunges for him at the order.
Davis winces and tries to keep up. His knives were meant to cut herbs, not parry with swords. He’s not a warrior, but he knows enough to stay alive. He doesn’t want to kill anybody.
His calming tone works none and the man seems vaguely annoyed that he is not lunging at his comrade.
“Why won’t you die?!” He makes a heavy overhand swing and Davis has to jump back to avoid getting chopped in half.
His knives couldn’t have blocked that. It stops and starts and continues and the others fall beside them but they still fight.
“Why are you so desperate to kill her?” Davis finally grinds out, holding onto the hilt uncomfortably close to his neck.
“She destroyed my brother.” The man says matter of factly. “Orders.”
“You’re the one that’s trying to kill him.”
“He’s better dead than what he is now!”
Davis sees the man’s pupils are black. He fights like a machine, uncaring for death or injury. For a moment he pauses and the soldier’s blade is cutting at his neck. “Be grateful she will not get the chance to do the same to you.”
Davis feels a rush of wetness and his head lightening, and sees her face as she attempts to crawl back on her hands and knees from the blonde man, hands groping in the mud.
“I won’t go back.” She says, and it is a child’s voice. Her throat hitches in panic and the sound comes out smothered.
His eyes burn. Davis doesn’t see, only knows that somewhere between bleeding and that, his free knife has buried its way into the soldier’s belly, somehow past chains and links of armor.
He can smell the blood, feel it flow sluggish and black over metal and the hilt of his knife. Something inside him awakens at the sight. It is as if he cannot tear his eyes away.
You. The man gasps, opens his lips and black covers his gums.
It is only then that she screams.
Davis pulls the blade away from the armor and it flies straight and true, embedding itself in the blonde attacker’s side. He falls with a befuddled roar, hands loosening.
Davis does not know he crossed the space, but he has. Her eyes do not change, as if she hasn’t noticed. They are unfocused, and either panic or the poison has started to take complete hold. Her hand throws itself up, the arrowhead in her fingers pressing against his jaw.
“You’re going to be alright. You know me.” He whispers.
He reaches out a hand and touches her chin, waits for the slightest reaction. Her face is small and pale and his hands massive in comparison. He realizes how threatening this might appear before she looks back. Her eyes lock onto his face and her lips move, trying to get word out. They cannot quite make it and he sees the panic in her eyes again.
“You’re going to be alright. My Name is Davis Bloome. I’m a healer.” He repeats, keeping eye contact. It almost sounds as if he’s dealt with this before. A lie. If simple hornwort is enough to bleed it out. He scrambles in the man’s pouch for a knife.
“He cut you with this.” Nightblind, sure enough. He lowers her hand, and a broken arrow falls out of her bone white fingers. He sees the dull mark right through the palm, already turning plum colored. The man had cut straight through so the poison would cause the maximum pain.
“Bastard.” He could be imagining it, but her eyes narrow just a fraction.
She licks her lips, dry and tries again. “Chl---oe.” She whispers. “Okay-Chloe, this will hurt. Stay with me okay? We’ll take care of you.” He keeps his eyes on hers, somehow, trying to calm her. Not trying to control her.
His larger hands keep her still, and she can feel a painful sizzle in her palm when he smears something across it. Nothing she has not felt before. Once. He leans forward, slipping an arm around her waist, like those gentlemen she’d seen in the village square. People don’t touch her.
Her head slams against his shoulder, weighed down with emptiness. Time passes in a strange blur and all of her feels so heavy that she can’t bat an eyelash, sift her throat and it starts pressing in on her lungs.
It’s the poison, he says, very softly. It will pass. If he had not she would have collapsed. It ebbs by increments, hours, time.
He’s like her. There is blood dripping from his neck, smeared all over his throat. He’d saved her.
She musters the will to twitch two fingers. He releases a breath. It takes a hell of a lot more will to lift her hand all the way to his neck to show him what she can’t quite say. He’s bleeding, too.
“I’m not the only one who needs help.” she almost says, hand catching and pressing to keep it from flowing out. “I am a dangerous witch. He told you. Why did you find me? Why didn’t you go on?”
His blood is spreading all over her hand and it is as if he doesn’t notice. Her hand is on fire where she’s touched him, burning hundreds of times more painfully than with the cure.
He is a stranger, doesn’t know what she can do. “You were hard to miss.” His mouth tilts up, hardly subtle. “This may sound crazy. I felt like… I knew you somehow.”
Somewhere inside her hurts, aches. She wants to pull the look in his eyes, that trust, into herself.
“Why are they following you?” he asks. “You saw what I did to him. What the conqueror would do with me…”
She can feel it burn to life and she is afraid. Unconsciously her hand opens against his neck. She won’t confess him. She won’t hurt him. “I know somewhere you can find shelter.” He says, and she doesn’t hear a word of it. She has officially taken leave of her senses.
She extricates herself from his grip, clenches the broken arrow in her fingers. His eyes hold her too much, swallow her up, see things that have no right to be seen.
“I must go now.” Chloe says, pulls herself up and scrambles away still, tearing at her white sleeve and pressing it into his hand. Vaguely she sees seven bodies littered around them. “You can see they are all dead.”
He feels sick as he realizes that it is him she is afraid of now.
She feels sick as she realizes she will not see him again. Absurd because she won’t ever see him again. “You’re not even healed yet. I’ll take you.” He says, but she knows that with blood loss like that he will not be able to follow. He will wake later, and he will forget.
She won’t have hurt him.
“The roads are dangerous.” He murmurs, wincing, looking up at her. He is starting to realize.
“If I’m the least bit like I was today, it’ll be dangerous for them. Thank you. Don’t follow me.” This is her voice, the Confessor’s voice. He should calm now.
Chloe's wrist burns like a pulsing thing. When he presses the white cloth hard into his neck, his eyes are already closing. So still, like death.
She readjusts his hand, pulls her fingers back too soon. Cold.
“I have to find someone.” Chloe says, stumbling, less forceful than before. He doesn’t hear her.
Endnotes (not the seriousfic kind, alas):
1) Of course they meet again. In a time frame that no decent self-respecting writer would use. It's mythos.
2) You will get more background on the mage war and how the seeker became...the seeker. The general gist of it was the mage (nuclear) wars lead to the Black Death, the Dark Ages, etc. This Conqueror steps in, offers to make it stop for a price and the people pay it. And yes, Zod has a variation of the Darken Rahl blood thing. But he thinks it's to much of a trouble to kill kittens. but he will go all Herod on you, so watch out.
2) Who is this Seeker?
He's not like the Seeker from LOTS/the Books. He's meant to find the Traveler. And guide him. You know who the Seeker is. You do. Come on. You tell me.
3) What's with the Chloe freak out?
Well, it was meant to, in it's way illustrated the changes brought by confessing someone. In Chloe's case, she has tremendous mommy issues. Her mother was a Confessor as well, and that bears some resemblance to the Moira SV plotline. So instead of the Terry Goodkind rape fixation, you get mindrape.
Chloe's loss of will after confessing means that most of her, the Chloe/Confessor/hardass part goes into anyone she confesses for a time.
That leaves behind her more childish persona until she 'recovers'. So that explains, partially, but not totally, why she had a clingy side with Davis at first and her other side, when she recoups, has runrun syndrome.
4) If you didn't know already, Davis, good guy, herb gatherer and village witch doctor also *fell to earth*. And he did not pass out from blood loss. And you ask if he's the Traveler.... well....
5) Clark is more or Less KalClark here. He's been groomed to be the perfect Traveler and he can't take not being that. Hence, going out with a bang. And bossing Chloe into a guilt complex she may carry like a monkey on her back.
Spoilers: Next installment/chapter/whatever a character someone has been waiting for (and taught me to fangirl) will make his resuscitating debut. Davis will understand a little more about what he is by getting monumentally ill, we meet this Seeker, and Chloe and Davis....sleep together?
Comments. Questions. ehs? Much loved. AND NEEDED! TO SURVIVE.
I'm writing a buge episode script for Among Us. Have pity.