#its 1.20 am whoops

[silverskye13]

Swordhearted -- Pt 2

You can read part 1 of this AU here TW for graphic depictions of violence, character death

______________________________________________________________

Welsknight hasn’t drawn the sword in two weeks. He counts it as a point of pride. Two weeks of running through the wilderness, surviving on little more than his wits, what is left of his pack and the treasure he found when he escaped the Vault that nearly killed him, and what he can scrounge from the wilderness. He considered, once or twice, returning to a town somewhere. He considered selling the sword and being rid of its curse. He considered drawing it and asking it a lot, a lot, of questions. Like how it knows to look like his dead brother. Like how long it has been stuck inside a sword. Like if it is, was, a person. Like if it is, was, alive.

Welsknight hasn’t drawn the sword in two weeks. He counts it as a point of pride.

There’s probably something going on here about knights and temptation. The sword is probably a demon? Or demonic. Or, like he mentioned before, cursed. He pulled it off a dead body, after all, and the Spirit of the Sword had been pretty upset about that dead body. The Spirit of the Sword had been upset about a lot of things; like being stuck in a Vault, and being threatened with going back in the sword, and cutting through all the malicious undead trying to kill them in the Vault. Welsknight had, admittedly, been a little abrupt when they cut their way free of the place. Seeing the image of his dead brother covered in blood and zombie-bites, holding a broken arm, and smiling up at the sun like it was the first time he’d seen it in years – Welsknight had slammed the sword in its sheath and ran.

Welsknight hasn’t drawn the sword in two weeks. He counts it as a point of pride, and definitely not an object of shame, and avoidance, and fear.

He’s about to break his streak.

Welsknight is running through the woods at a full gallop, stretched out over the neck of his horse, praying to every god and saint and, yes, every demon, that his horse doesn’t trip and break her leg or her neck. It is dark, and the world is a blur of shifting, baffling shades of blue and grey, and behind him, like thunder, the bandits are following. He had hoped they wouldn’t. Most people aren’t stupid enough to run breakneck through the woods on a good, bright day, let alone the middle of the night where visibility becomes the next branch crashing against your face, but they’re doing it. He’s doing it. They had been trailing him for days, ever since they passed at the crossroads and they clocked the treasure he was carrying from the Vault. Never mind that all that treasure amounts to is two swords (one definitely probably cursed, one mundane), a handful of coins older than the Vault Gods themselves, and some tarnished jewelry. It is, at best, a small fortune, and certainly not worth anyone’s life. But when they caught up with him, they had informed him, in no uncertain terms, it would be his life. Welsknight is, admittedly, carrying on him a second small fortune in armor – thus is the life of a knight. It probably has a high resale value, it being half enchanted. In hindsight, the attempted mugging might have more to do with the armor than the treasure, but regardless, he is in the mood to lose his life over neither.

Welsknight’s horse is tiring. He is a good rider in the saddle, and he can tell the beast is done in. He is a lot to carry when he is in full harness, and they have been galloping for far, far too long. Still, he clings to her neck and whispers encouragement. There is a flickering in the dark to his left, one of the bandits drawing up alongside. Welsknight reaches for his sword and thinks about drawing it. He can manage maybe one good lunge, if luck will allow it, and no tree takes his arm off at the shoulder. He is too scared to risk it. He thinks long and hard about reaching for the other sword. The Spirit of the Sword would certainly be a good distraction, if they didn’t just whip right past it and into the dark. Welsknight doesn’t draw the sword. His hand shakes around the hilt, and he thinks about how good it would be to hear his brother’s voice, even coming from someone who isn’t him, and he doesn’t draw the sword.

And then his horse trips in the dark. 

It was only a matter of time. He has that clear, succinct, uninterrupted thought as she stumbles and falls: it was only a matter of time. He loses consciousness, briefly, when he hits the ground, and regains it again before his horse scrambles to her feet. He is a lot slower to rise. He’s wheezing, winded, and there are stars in his eyes that blind him even more than the dark forest does. There is thunder in the ground, and it passes him close, close. Too damn close. Hoofprint-by-his-head close. It is a battle to keep from curling up on the ground and praying he doesn’t get trampled. There’s a chance, a chance, they didn’t see him fall. 

Welsknight stumbles to his feet, and wheezing and sore and sick with adrenaline he runs back the way he came. He doesn’t make it far. Something punches into his knee, hard, and he goes down again screaming. The arrow that hit him isn’t stuck in his leg -- thank gods thank gods -- but where it hit the plate of his grieve something is desperately bruised. Welsknight limps to his feet again, and the thunder of hooves is something that aches in his already swelling joint. One of the beasts leaps out at him from the dark, its rider rolling free of the saddle like an acrobat, and Welsknight barely has time to draw his (mundane, uncursed) sword to catch their blade. They clash twice and then the bandit breaks, circling, pacing. 

A bandit is not a match for a knight.

Four bandits and an archer, however, can kill a knight handily.

Two more of the thugs dismount and barrel forward, while the fourth stays back to grab reins and keep horses from bolting. Welsknight is caught between two swords and an ax, and it's barely a contest. He parries, blocks, limps his way backwards. The ax puts a handy cleft in his sword arm, and Welsknight doesn’t feel it because of the adrenaline, but he knows it's bad. Then a sword dips in like a sewing needle, darning the place where his chestplate parts near his hip, and Welsknight can feel his blood like a river down his leg, and adrenaline turns to panic. There is a tree at his back, and nowhere to run, and his sword arm is getting hard to lift -- and a second well-shot arrow between bandit shoulders hits him square in the chest. There is a brief moment where all the air leaves Welsknight’s lungs and he thinks, once more, with fully-formed crystal clarity: it was only a matter of time. And then, with equal clarity: that’s it. I’m dead. 

Except if he were dead, no one would bother grabbing him by the tabard and throwing him off his feet. A boot lands against the wound in his side, and Welsknight screams.

“Shut up, tin can,” one of the bandits snaps at him with disdain. “Unless you’re in a hurry to quit breathing.”

Welsknight gasps for wasting breath and tries very, very hard to stop screaming. It’s difficult. The boot is a relentless weight on his wounded side, pinning him to the ground, grinding his hip downward. His breath wheezes through battered and winded lungs, impeded by a new dent in his breastplate that won’t let his chest expand all the way. He’s going to die here, he knows, he knows, he’s going to die here. Or they’re going to make him wish he had. There is a brief, heady moment, where Welsknight fervently wishes he’d broken his neck when his horse threw him, and he retracts it almost instantly when the bandit shifts his weight, and the pressure on his side eases. Animal panic gives way to the animal need to live like a tide ebbing, and Welsknight finally, finally, manages to ease his cries into something closer to a grunt and a whimper. 

There are tears running down his face. He couldn’t stop them if he wanted to. He hopes it's too dark to make them out. He always cries when he’s scared. He’s not ashamed of it, not in any way that matters. Still, he would rather not go to the grave while his captors laugh over the crybaby knight who sobbed while they robbed him. He still had pride.

“Alright,” the bandit declares when they’ve caught Welsknight’s rampant horse, and grinds his boot heel down. Welsknight chokes on his next breath, and stars bloom in his eyes, and it takes a force of will to pay attention to what the bandit is saying. “You got a castle or fief you hail from in the next ten leagues, knight? Someone who will pay to take you back?”

Welsknight groans, both because of the pain and because of the question. Someone -- not the bandit pinning him -- reaches down and unbuckles his sword belt. They could at least wait until he’s dead to start pilfering, surely.

“E-err--- errant,” Welsknight manages through grinding teeth as the bandit leans more weight on him. He reaches a gauntleted fist to clasp at the offending boot, and its slick against his fingers from his own blood. At the realization, Welsknight’s head gives a nauseous spin. How much is he bleeding? He can’t tell. “I’m-- I’m-- kn-knight errant.”

“I don’t give two shits about your name,” the bandit snaps, and Welsknight would have laughed, if the comment hadn’t come with another grinding twist from the boot heel. Welsknight gasps, and chokes on air again.

“Hey boss,” someone calls, a breakthrough in Welsknight’s buzzing hearing, “this sword’s silvered.”

“You think this guy’s a monster hunter?” someone else asks, sounding distant and bored, and high overhead. Horseback level, Welsknight thinks headily. The archer, maybe.

“Errant,” Welsknight gasps again desperately. “N-n-no castle. N-no lands. I do-- I do quests. For hire. Like. Hah.” It’s not funny. It’s never funny. But he’s heard the joke in taverns a thousand times. “L-l-like an-- an-- expensive. M-mercenary. With a t-title.”

The bandit above him swears. It’s not the answer he wants to hear.

“Last chance to save your life, tin can,” the bandit leans over him, and the movement against Welsknight’s wounded side is breath-taking. It is such a starburst-white, lightning-strike pain he can feel it run up and down his spine, and briefly wonders if the bandit has found a way to tear him in half just by standing on him. “Who will pay a ransom for you? Wife, brother, parents, rich uncle…”

At the word brother Welsknight’s vision briefly blurs over. Gods, his brother. He should have drawn the sword, just to hear the voice again. Even derisive and scornful, and divorced from any speech patterns that were familiar, it would have been nice. Then a clicking makes it to Welsknight’s ears, the puzzling sound of someone trying to draw a sword from a sheath, and never quite managing to clear the leather. Like a--

“A lock?” one of the bandits spits, outraged. “Who puts a lock on a gods-damned sword?”

Welsknight’s vision focuses past the bandit standing over him, to the ax-weilder standing a few steps away. The bandit who had, apparently, taken his swords. She is holding the cursed blade, trying with no success to open it, which is strange to Welsknight because it had slid open with ease beneath his fingertips. The rust around the scabbard was superficial, and pulled apart with ease.

“ ‘S enchanted,” Welsknight says, desperate enough to lie. Desperate. Desperate enough to tell the truth, even, if it means just a little longer alive. “It-- it-- responds t-to my touch.”

The bandits exchange wary glances. Welsknight counts them again. Four, one holding horses. Somewhere, there’s an archer. One of the horses is in his periphery, that one perhaps.

“I can d-draw it for you.”

“What kind of enchanted blade is it?” The bandit pinning him down asks. He doesn’t grind his boot against Welsknight’s wounded side, but he doesn’t release any pressure. He isn’t a fool. That’s a shame. Welsknight would prefer the bandit be stupid.

“S-silvered,” Welsknight says, not a lie. “For w-werewolves n-- n vampires n things. Locks so it can’t-- can’t be stolen, or t-tarnish. It’s got--” he searches his memory for a low-level enchantment a knight errant might possibly be able to afford, “-- flame. Needs recharged. It’ll still spark. If. If I draw it.”

The bandit narrows his eyes at Welsknight. Finally he leans against his heel and says loudly, emphatically, so Welsknight can hear it over the sound of his own rushing heartbeat and need to faint, “No funny business.”

Welsknight wonders if he’s supposed to laugh. Then the sword’s hilt is down by his hand. He reaches, and tries not to look desperate. He reaches and tries not to look like a liar. His hand shakes. He thinks he might pass out anyway. The blade slips free with a smooth grin of silver.

When Welsknight drew the blade for the first time, Helsknight had been in the middle of screaming at his previous owner. It seemed when the blade was sheathed, it caught him in whatever moment he had last been lost in, frozen in time. So, when the blade pulled free this time, slowly glimmering its moonlight smile up at the bandit pinning Welsknight to the forest floor, Helsknight came back into the world the same way he left it last. He had been standing still, his sword in his hand, staring up at the sky in open-faced relief and mute wonder.

Helsknight came back to the world quietly, a shade who was simply, suddenly, there. The shape of him was hard to see. He wore the dark stained armor of Welsknight’s dead brother, and carried his dark, tempered blade. Only his plume held color, a flickering red that, with no light to catch, was merely a frond-like outline of feather and horsehair in the night. Welsknight only knew he was there because he could smell his brother’s blend of sealing wax and armor polish suddenly light on the night air, and could feel the sudden, radiating anger, like a wight on a tombstone.

The bandit pinning Welsknight to the ground is headless, and his body slumps ingloriously to the side, hardly aware of its parting. The ax-wielder lets out one sucking breath through a hole in her lungs and dies. Then the night is filled with the sound of steel and screaming. The remaining two bandits demand to know what is happening, who is here, and get only cold, bristling silence. An arrow whistles by in the dark and hits something. Welsknight tries to watch, tries to see who is wounded, how and why. He can only place Helsknight in points of darkness just darker than the surrounding trees. Helsknight wields his sword two-handed, like he is used to something longer and heavier, and he meets the steel of the two bandits with the ringing shivers of broken bells. Another deadly whistle sounds, another hit, and Welsknight watches Helsknight stagger. There is a grunt of lost air, and something that could be a shrug, and one of the bandits dies. 

“I’ll carve you to pieces!” The last one declares boldly, breathless and terrified. “I’ll put so many holes in you they’ll make a puzzle out of you in the afterlife! I’ll--!”

Something tears through his throat, and his words are lost in an ugliness of blood that makes Welsknight squeamish just to hear. The Spirit of the Sword, which looks and sounds like Helsknight, Welsknight’s dead brother, laughs bitterly and says, “If only I could be so lucky.”

There is thunder in the ground. The archer is running away. Welsknight takes a deep breath, and another, and realizes the night has gotten so dark because he’s been holding his breath. The relief very nearly steals it from him, and he lies on the cold ground gasping in relief, a hand bunched into a fist against his hip, and he can’t catch his breath. His other hand scrabbles at the dirt, and he thinks, if he can just sit up, he can breathe better. He thinks if he can just drag his back against a tree, he can catch his breath and figure out how badly he’s hurt, and he can, maybe, get the voice of his brother responding to death threats with if only I could be so lucky  out of his head, because his brother is dead. His brother is dead. His brother is--

-- staring down at him. He’s taken the helmet off -- he never liked helmets really, did he? -- and he’s standing over him. Welsknight has to try very, very hard to keep his mind present. He has to remind himself over and over that he hasn’t died, and his dead brother isn’t here to take his soul away. The thing that has his brother’s face but isn’t actually his brother makes it better, and worse, by opening his mouth and speaking.

“What the hell, man?” Helsknight demands, reaching bloody hands down to grab him and drag him against the tree he’s desperately trying to crawl towards. “Five against one? You thought you could take on five against one? Are you literally stupid, or did they invent a new brand of crazy while I was in the sword?”

Welsknight tries to respond, but the jostling to get him against the tree takes his breath away. That, and something is prodding him in the shoulder, and it takes too long to realize that there is an arrow shaft sticking out of Helsknight, and the feathers keep brushing him. There are two arrows in Helsknight, actually. One is in his collar, a very lucky shot that cinched between the breastplate and the gorget. The other is in his back somewhere, the tufts of feathers flickering around every time Helsknight moves.

“S-shot,” Welsknight says helplessly, baffled the Spirit is still moving.

“Stabbed, actually,” Helsknight hums dispassionately, unbuckling Welsknight’s chestplate like he’s done it a thousand times. The minute the buckles are undone, Welsknight takes a breath that's at least two times deeper than all the others, and his focus returns from the odd, overhead place it's been retreating to with a suddenness that feels like waking up. “It doesn’t look terribly deep, but you’re bleeding like a stuck pig.”

“You’re shot,” Welsknight corrected. “Gods -- do you not feel pain?”

Helsknight looks down at himself briefly. “Of course I do. It just stops mattering after a while, doesn’t it?”

“That’s-- that’s your collar,” Welsknight points out, because it seems important. “There’s big veins there. You’ll-- your arm--”

“We’ll worry about you first.”

“And your back--”

Helsknight lets out a heavy sigh that implies being shot twice with arrows really isn’t that big of a deal, and, in spite of his assurances that he can, in fact, feel pain, Welsknight watches him wrap his tabard around his fist, reach up to the arrow in his front, and yank it free. It is not a quick process. Being so close to the act, where Welsknight can hear and, he thinks, almost feel the motion himself, makes him abruptly want to be sick. The arrow is barbed, and doesn’t come out cleanly, and there is a lot of blood. Helsknight removes it soundlessly, his only sign of discomfort the curl of his lip, like he’s been forced to smell something rotten. Then the arrow is gone, and Helsknight tosses it into the dark where it’s lost forever in the leaf litter.

“There, happy?” Helsknight demands. “Now, if you would shut up for two seconds, I can--”

Welsknight doesn’t even know he’s still holding the sword and its sheath, until he’s abruptly clicking it shut. Helsknight disappears just as quickly as he was summoned, gone in a blink, with little fanfare. Welsknight is left gasping in the dark, watching the swaying canopy of leaves far overhead, fervently praying its wind making them twist, and not his reawakening need to pass out on the ground. Welsknight closes his eyes. He sees the thing that isn’t his brother pull an arrow from his chest like it’s nothing, and opens his eyes again. On the forest floor in front of him are bodies, and past them, his horse is waiting with the quiet patience of an animal long bonded to him.

Welsknight closes his eyes again and, with the abruptness of someone falling into a well, drops into sudden sleep.

[jenniferstolzer]

Babylon 5 Rewatch Week 6

So full disclosure I totally forgot to put up this page and have since watched through all episodes in season 1! Whoops! Well, that’s okay, because you all can watch while I struggle to upload my sketches and then you will actually remember what happens and laugh at my terrible jokes. 

To close out Season 1 we have 3 of the best episodes in the whole show.

1.20 Babylon Squared

1.21 Qualaity of Mercy

1.22 Crysalis

I’m not going to lie, I am both happy and sad about finishing season 1 again. I’m very excited to move on to Season 2 though. This is when the show gets its legs. I’m ready to start running! 

Run along with me:

watch eps for free, check out the sites below.

go90 (US only)  watchseries.is (international)

See you in 2259