Merlin 2 - 7 Dark Agents
Every eternal in strife, where the gods emerge from clouds, the adept immortal accepts fate as a perilous just that must become the hunter of the poison rains. Life ceases and enters the lustrous darkness and creates the infinity that is chaos, screaming that appends to time and overshadows the silence until even the light in the mind vanishes, there the Termagant waits for invocation. In the silent dark the only voice burns the vision of the mind, a legend to the beholder with a heart of virulence, the plan to revoke hate will partake, infested with pain the betrayal will occur and the dark agent will be the sword of evil. With a great audience, echoes become the demonic reality as impostor perils the waking moment, lurking in the shadow absconding darkness with death to dole. The dark agent of reprise with ancient lust, clutching simple carnage staring at a tavern, simple discontent seething from the hellish ether beneath him aching to repatriate desperation and looking for no particular victim tonight.
The Termagant seeks trouble in ample supply, waiting, watching in silent nightmare, he breaks his poring vision into the distance and collects pieces of shadows, putting them into the parcel satchel he carries. With the desire to remember, frantic shaking hands trying to remember or forget annihilation, standing when noticing the lack of control. Stoic stance and walking grace, solid drive and determination in even paces, in even traces in the pit of the moonless summer night, with bag in hand it drops the satchel creation at the back wall of a public house, alongside the doghouse and other loose useless timber. As the locals spend their loose coins on barrels of rotgut or vineyard wines, they sing and sound the tides of their daily wary toils in the soil. They dance upon ground and in moments without a warning sound, as the dark agent leaves sighing with solace resound, the delivery expounds its purpose, an explosion of fierce intensity and brief duration of hell’s fires to the surface, the evening rests as a blast at a garrulous tavern.
The horror of a tempestuous explosion ends with a rising ball of fire, rubble and rough terrain is what the weeping eyes searching through the demised remain find in the dark blue early morn. The morning view of dastard carnage, tiny streams of blood, bone and sinew, and wrath, Merlin stands watch as Ana tries to console the sorrows and dejection equally Nickolas and Troy sift through the scattered ashes and broken and currently smoldering hatch roof. In the blast, the garret where the casks and kegs were, had fallen on a great many a few, but beneath the debris, a survivor struggles to escape. The wrath is whole and complete, not a simple hole in the wall but a scene of aftermath, where a building once stood. The remnants in darkness begin to shake and scatter as gravel rolls down the remaining structure and a body begins to surface.
Nickolas finds the struggling limbs of a sole survivor and proximately sounds to the others in group, “We’ve got a live one here,” he touts as per continue, to pull the lucky victim into the clear of the calm. Troy hastily rushes just before helping him drag the would be decedent, and the survivor crawls into the clear as the last of the stone thrown, covered in dust and caked blood, able to stand in surly will. Troy stands infatuated in slighting disbelief, not only is the man standing accordant, without leaning or yearning to seek a healer, but of sound volition standing above and painted skin beneath the blood of heroes without a single scar. The survivor still coughing though, lungs full of ash, gravel and or turf, he dusts his clothes and shakes the dirt from his dark hair, in contrast complete and utter opposite juxtapose, nearly sharing the same breath, clean to dirty from blonde to black between light to dark.
“What happened, what do you remember?” Troy asked in a quiet and consoling tone. Still dusting himself the survivor coughs once more and speaks with watery eyes and a pallid tone of disbelief.
“I was having too much to drink as I do, and then smoke and fire,” the stranger spoke.
Though the young magic squire Troy stands close with intent, Nickolas looms closer. In opposite quiet as dusk, staring at a man dressed shade to shade the opposite as he, and no sign of injury from a collapsed building razed. The survivor turns to the abruptly close Nickolas and speaks again shortly after noticing Merlin approach from the distance. “It all happened so quickly, first I was standing there and then,” without hesitation, he strikes Nickolas in the throat with the clasp of his hand and punches Troy with the other, and starkly absconds with any further information chased by others into the maze that is the city Utopia.
Merlin stood watch as the young man escapes, in confusion to reckon in pondering luck, he drew a lit smoking pipe from his sleeve, readily alit and cupped in his hand, stoking the fire and drawing the smoldered contents into his stern mouth as his allies rise. Meanwhile the hellish embers beneath Ana’s fingernails began to cool, whichever manifest spell of fire she wished to summon and divulge, had not the opportunity for the swiftly elusive and confrontational unfamiliar person.
Troy holds his nose, “What the blast was that?”
Merlin answered from the distance, “Just that, I suppose.”
“Will you live?” Nickolas asked in a rakish coarse voice of an ailing Troy.
Troy: “Yes, I’ll be well, I imagine…”
Ana approaches for emotional support and besting a witty comment with sarcastic interring inference.
Ana: “My boys always getting in trouble, what did you say to him?”
She asks and waits with her arms crossed in half stance.
Nickolas: “I know what I’ll say when I find him...”
Ana approaches Nickolas, dusts his sleeves and attentively straightens his jib. Merlin ceaselessly approaches them, as Ana helps then with care to Troy’s cracked broken nose, discovering sensitive pride and reluctant preservation. The wizard Merlin stands taller than the day before, with echoing eyes befit a rejuvenated physique free of fray, he looks carefully over everything, not turning his head until he has soaked the scenery and looks once anent to the sky. He looks down again as Nickolas steps to his side.
Merlin: “Did you recognize him?”
Nickolas: “No, should I’ve?”
Merlin: “I thought maybe a name would help us track him; He’s in your family.”
Ana: “What do you mean, ‘family’?
From a distance, they check for wear and worse, she mends the nose of Troy to his begrudging frustration, a maternal touch and a loudly sound of brush underfoot in healing seams of a broken nose with a mending spell, and then a patient grace. A rewarding appreciation the pain magically abolishes as she whips her hand away from his face and gives a simple dusting of her hands where the dried blood of his wound easily brushes to the ground. Nickolas suffers sever frustration, a simple menacing consternation of whimsical confusion he cannot tame nor consume asunder.
Nickolas: “He survived the havoc here…but he looked nothing like me.”
Ana: “He looked like you in opposite reverse.”
Troy: “Like a dark mirror.”
Nickolas looked to Merlin, hoping that it is his time to speak a revealing decisive moment, but there is none. They watch as the sorrowed bring out the dead from the debris of the destroyed pub, a collective memory of the reckless terror none yet incarcerated.
Ana: “Would you remember him, if seen again?”
Troy: “I sure will.”
Nickolas: “Assuredly, I owe him best.”
Merlin: “Good, we may just need his help yet.”
The audible melancholy of the saddened families of victims caterwauling their loses, as flammable libations spill out of a leaking cask and begin a new fire, Ana rushes to the fires and with the tips of her fingers of an outreached hand the flames behest into a quell. The recovery continues for a city in woe, with aloof lumbering and sickeningly morose with yet another destructive malaise to mar the citizen’s spirits as the burdened tend to their wounded and dead.