#grabs you by the cheeks and makes you read this fake CYOA about a tabletop character i dont even play

[thatsadorbsyo]

Kyros - The King’s Bow

(cw: mentions of gore, putrescence, violence, and death of people and animals.)

Five weeks prior to the battle at the Duchy of Glenvale.

A murky drizzle coats the forest of the Hunter’s Glory in a dim light, even in mid-afternoon. The menagerie of creatures that dwell here are unnaturally quiet in this atypical gloom, but for once these beasts of sport are not Kyros’s quarry. Brother Guidry is still out here, somewhere, with nothing but a holy bow and a prayer to protect him from unforeseen dangers. Valorous fucking fool that he is.

The signs of woodland corruption grow thicker as Kyros travels deeper into the creeping rain. The Keepers’ scouts had warned him of the violent changes to the landscape, but he was ill-prepared for what he would face as he searches for his temple brother:

A tree with its bark melting away in a great claw swipe, leaving a rotten blackness in three gaping slashes that steam wherever raindrops patter into them. The wispy smoke burns his fingertips with a heat that cannot be borne from fire.

The carcass of a stag, bleeding out into the underbrush in a slush of viscera. Its wounds spread in round, cankerous arcs as its flesh is eaten by the acid that puddles against its bones. Its milky eyes stare up at him, frozen with long-passed horror.

Soft vegetation cored out in a scar across the landscape, burned straight through by an unstoppable blight. The now-empty passage of some great beast, its magnitude intimated by the blank space it leaves behind for Kyros to walk through.

Fresh pools of acid still line the path, collecting in the deep pawprints of a fleeing tiger. Thick enough to choke, the air in his chest betrays him. His next breath trembles, a shaking leaf on the dying trees. Is it for fear or from effort? The hunter tightens his grip on a spear held in both hands, making the wood creak against the silence of the forest. Where is Guidry?

Soon enough, he gets his answer. A body lies fallen across the path up ahead, bearing the colors of the Huntsman’s priests. Guidry, the champion Kyros seeks. Is he hurt? Off to the left, a murmur of voices can be heard through the blighted thicket. The snapping of twigs under passing feet. Who could that be?

And where is the fearsome beast that ravaged the Hunter’s Glory? Dare he speak the word that sits on his tongue? To suggest that a dragon stalks the forest would be nothing short of blasphemy. The god of the hunt himself, Cudorix, is said to have shot the last wyrm from the sky at the beginning of the age.

Something must be done. Kyros grits his teeth and...

1. ...continues his search for acid-spewing monster. It has to be taken down. 2. ...sprints up to the body. Guidry could still be alive. 3. ...turns into the thicket to investigate the voices. Whoever they are, they’re going to get hurt out here.

---

The air prickles his lungs with every pounding footfall as Kyros charges up the path. Tension spirals, clenching his grey knuckles to pure white when he bears down on his weapon. His steel gut is braced for what he will find, but his tender heart doesn’t want to believe it. Not yet.

His sprint slows to a jog as he approaches the body, and then to the halted stuttering of fearful backpedalling when the scene comes into horrible focus: Though his armor retains the shape he held in life, Guidry himself has been reduced to a pool of gelatinous, half-dissolved fat and tissue oozing from the space beneath his bronze breastplate. The mark of the Huntsman, a bow encircled by a halo of stars, sits brazen and untouched on his chest, while under the dome of metal his body seeps out from his clothes to taint the soil.

Kyros turns his head with a grimace, averting his gaze from this nauseous perversion. He’s seen all that he needs to see. The King’s Bow, the most holy relic of his faithful patron’s house, is missing from the shapeless corpse. He can return with neither the body of his brother nor his Baroness’s artifact.

In short, he’ll go back to Naffor as a fucking failure. Again.

Focus. There must be something he can do to make this right. He can still do some good for Brother Guidry, even in this piteous state of dissolution. Kyros swallows an aborted whimper and bends down close to the fallen hunter to...

1. ...rip the still-intact breastplate from the body’s muck. He can’t return empty-handed, and in lieu of remains, this may give someone closure. 2. ...say a prayer of rest for the slain priest. Denied a proper burial, Guidry will find his grave on the forest floor, amid the remains of both predators and prey.

---

The armor tears away from Guidry’s body with a sickening suck, like dislodging a boot from thick mud. The pain is immediate: a foreign burn in his palm, a searing sensation that should not be, not on someone like him. Kyros snarls with a furious curl of his lips, weathering the pain, and plants his foot in the dirt to yank the etched breastplate free.

Victory finds him panting in the tainted air with his paltry prize, hands singed and lungs screaming. The armor is difficult to hold. Kyros trembles with the phantoms of countless needles bearing down into his fingers, into the fleshy pad of his palm, through his calluses, into the cracks of his knuckles. He can’t breathe. The acrid taint, it’s coming from Guidry. It’s coming from the forest all around him, from the wounded grove opening like a canker to the rain-dark sky.

Somewhere, a rumbling roar echoes through the forest, vibrating with fear and agony. Kyros can’t see the panther, but it sounds close. Close enough to make his heart leap in his seizing chest, a lodged brick.

Panic makes him toss his head like a wounded bull, searching for something -- anything -- on which to anchor his focus. The scythe sweep of his horns cuts the air audibly with every feverish whip. Woosh, woosh...

1. ...woosh, this way. The susurrus of cracked branches where a wounded tiger escaped through the underbrush. 2. ...woosh, that way. Voices in the thicket, someone still oblivious to the danger, or perhaps too stupid to care.

---

His attention latches onto the dissonant murmuring, and with pinpoint focus, Kyros forces his way through the vines and brambles of the thicket. The underbrush is thicker here, relatively untouched by the vile secretions that eat away at other parts of the forest. With every step, his breath comes cleaner and the voices grow louder.

The thorns that rip at his clothes are nothing compared to the hellish acid he leaves behind. They dig grooves into his leathers and etch scarlet lines across his cheeks, but Kyros barely feels it. A familiar sting, mundane. He can take it, but his endurance isn’t without a cost. Something stirs in him that’s better left to sleep.

The insensate hunter stumbles into a clearing to find a small cluster of bodies huddled around an object of apparent intrigue. Its radiance glows through the dim curtain of their muddy cloaks.

“It’s made o’ wood, yeah? Should be as ruined as the rest, by all rights,” observes a stout figure. “Don’t trust it. Prob'ly cursed or some odd thing.”

“You’re not new enough to be that measure of a twit.” Disdain cuts through the leaves cleaner than the blight. “Of course it’s pristine, it’s holy.”

“Quiet,” hisses a third voice. The lanky thief turns to regard Kyros’s careless gait as he approaches the trio with a spear clutched in one hand and a breastplate dripping with congealed viscera in the other.

The hunter towers over them, a full head above even the tallest of the three bandits. Framed by his horns and clad in dark leather, Kyros cuts an intimidating figure in the unpredictable gloom of the Hunter’s Glory, even when his face isn’t wracked by a fury that threatens to crack his composure. The slumbering thing in his belly sits poised to burst through its thin veneer at any provocation and twist him into a meaner, larger beast. All it would take is a little more pain. A little more outrage. Come on, he wants to do it anyway. He’d like that. Come on.

His skin itches with the primal burn of impending transformation. It’s so close, he can taste the flood of excitement under his tongue.

Kyros...

1. ...calls out to the thieves. They can still be reasoned with, and he is still capable of reason. 2. ...gives himself to the rage. Criminals are naught but prey for the Huntsman’s hounds.

---

“My name is Brother Kyros of Saints,” he announces himself as though reading a royal decree, voice booming in the drizzle. The speaking of it reminds him who he is and why he’s here, snuffing out the rebellious fire in his core. Kyros holds up the stained breastplate like a badge of station, showing them the mark of Cudorix emblazoned on its dome. “I care not for you, I come only for the bow.”

The sight of him is magnetic enough to stun, halting their retreat for a few precious heartbeats. It’s time enough for him to cross the distance, clustering the four of them together in the center of the cramped clearing. Perfect targets, too focused on the scramble of limbs and shouting of obscenities to notice what approaches them through the trees.

“Go tell it to a nun’s quim,” spits out the halfling as he draws a handaxe from his belt, stepping between Kyros and the half-elf who struggles to notch a mundane arrow to the glowing bow in his hands. The third figure, still veiled by his cloak, is the only one who sees the unstoppable gait of the tiger barreling through the underbrush just moments before it’s upon them. One fucking surprise after the other. Nobody ever said thievery was predictable work, did they?

The white and black bolt crashes through a wall of brambles, oblivious to how thorns catch and pull at its sagging fur to reveal the muscle working below. A whole shoulder of bare pink fibers is exposed as its pelt peels away to drag like a bloody curtain, eaten alive by the acid that stays wicked to its fur. The tiger is mad with pain, all sense abandoned for the roiling throes of fearful misery. Claws and teeth are bared for anything that blocks its blind retreat, and it sprints in a furious dash toward the scuffle.

There’s no time to think. All Kyros can do is...

1. ...chase the bandits out of the thicket. His objective is singular, and this hasn’t changed. To return without that bow is dishonorable. 2. ...release the pitiful creature from its agony. His spear is swift, and his aim is true. To allow it to live like this is unthinkable.

---

There was never another choice, was there? Kyros’s mission was laid upon him by Cudorix’s faithful followers, but his duty to uphold the dignity of the Hunter’s Glory is a divine directive from the Huntsman himself, held above all others.

Or maybe it isn’t that lofty. Perhaps he’s just a scared man with nothing but a spear in his grasp, being charged down with murderous intent by a grotesque panther. The hunter drops everything but his weapon and digs his feet into the squishing mud, lunging forward with the point of his spear at the same moment that the deranged beast pounces.

The arrowhead pierces its skin, sinking far too easily into the meat under its shoulder as momentum carries the tiger carcass up the shaft nearly to Kyros’s knuckles. His whole body quakes with the force of impact, bones and muscles bearing down with every ounce of his considerable might to force the shuddering weapon in his hands into compliance. Do not splinter. Do not break. He wills it to be so, just as Cudorix would see it done by all His champions. His form is perfect, valiant and brave, but there is no one here to see it. Guidry is dead. The bandits have left with their prize, leaving the foolish hunter, the acolyte, to save their hides without a breath of thanks.

If Kyros would take a blessing of gratitude, let it be from the tiger that quivers on his shaft in its final moments. Its loping charge slows to a feeble stop mere inches from his face, a snarling muzzle close enough to kiss his flared grey nostrils. He feels the heat of its last breath, smells the stink of its delirium on the air vented between its fangs right before it stills. A dead weight, mad eyes open to the sky with an empty black gloss.

Suddenly, all is quiet, and Kyros is alone with nothing but his messy kill and the metal shell of a man who won’t be coming home. The only sound is his cracking breath, hiccuping with impotent terror as the weight of the moment crashes into him at considerable delay. Kyros drops his spear, and with it sinks the ruined trophy to the boot-tread earth. His hiccups gain mass, rolling into heaves and sobs -- and why shouldn’t he cry? Everything went to shit so godsdamn quick.

A hunter trembles on the edge of a bloody thicket, pawing at his face with his forearm until he is composed enough to retrieve his things from the mud. It’s a long hike back to Naffor, and he returns with heavier burdens than those his arms will carry.