Complete update

“Why do we keep going?”

The question shattered the silence that reigned for as long as anyone could remember. Blank faces slowly moved towards the unfamiliar sound. The speaker was barely an adult. Dirt and blood covered his face, but his stature gave his age away. The shuffling feet came to a stop as they turned to face the speaker. He lowered his face, feeling shame for being the one who finally broke. His clothing was the same as the others, burned, bloodied, and falling apart. His hair was a singed mess, with half of his head showing signs of new growth. His ribs were visible through the remains of whatever he was wearing during the attack, his face gaunt from attrition, but his eyes, his eyes had a spark, a spark that had left the others after the first day. As the group came to a halt he lifted his head and looked at them. His eyes held a light, one that no member of the group had seen for a long time. The closest shied away from the light. He saw this, and slowly turned and looked each member in the eye. Each took a step back.

“Why do we keep going?”

Silence was still king among the group. A few mouthed words but none were spoken. Heads dropped and more steps were taken away when the boy’s eyes passed them. A small portion met and held his eyes and the light they held. These men stood up straighter, their expressions hardened. They shared the light.

“Why do we keep going?”

“… for life…” one muttered.

“... for the promise…” from the second.

“… for the forgotten…” from the third

“… for revenge…”  said the final speaker.

The other stragglers had left. Of the doomed band only five remained. Silence returned. The boy turned in the direction opposite of the stragglers and began walking. And the four followed.

Tryse twitched his head to the side. A sure sign Whispers was feeding him information. He turned to face Ceecil with a small grin on his face. “They’re on this route, they’ll be here in a few minutes.” They had been positioned on one of the routes the Lord had taken when entering (city). They tried to keep it a secret, but people were seen and the People had taken notice. They had tracked one of the men employed by the Soune and found where the Lord had been staying. It was a brief visit. Their cell had been notified only hours before and given this location. They had been supplied with weapons to bring down the armored carriage he would be traveling in.

Whispers was tracking him from the rooftops. The narrow and winding streets made traveling through the city slow. Tryse and Ceecil were waiting in one of the shops run by the People. Whispers would do something to distract the driver and Tryse would plant the first bomb. Ceecil would place the second charge, and by that time the other teams would be there for the execution.

Tryse was eager. His family had been killed in one of the many purges. The Lord had wiped out entire cities based on rumor, and Tryse had somehow managed to survive. His story was a burning fire within the People. He jumped ranks quickly, eager to get into a place where he could do the most damage. He had found Ceecil dumped in a back alley as a child, left to the elements. He had taken her to the People and they had raised her. Education went right along with subterfuge and weapons training. They became close over the past few years; Tryse had lost a younger sister and Ceecil knew that’s how he saw her.

Growing up with the People Ceecil saw remarkable and evil things. When the Lord’s Soune found a cell he gave them no quarter, and then planted the bodies so everyone could see what became of the opposition. Tryse seemed above it all. No matter how bad the mission was he would always come through, and save his team along the way. After the initial infatuation with him the pettiness of the higher-ups put him back to a cell leader. He had chosen Ceecil and Whispers to go with him. This hadn’t made the leadership popular, but Tryse only spoke of remaining unified.

Ceecil had never seen Whispers before joining with Tryse. She’d heard of him, but even what she heard didn’t make sense. Their first mission was to follow and detain a suspected agent of the Soune. She and Tryse sat by while Whispers was on lookout. During this mission she saw Tryse tilting his head and mouthing words when no one was around. She thought the leaders were right in demoting Tryse, that he’d been shaken too badly too many times and had lost his mind. Tryse led her right to the agent with no problems. They cornered him in an alley away from population and got the information they needed. The agent was scared, constantly asking if they heard the voices. After this Ceecil had some idea of what Whispers could do, and who Tryse had been in communication with.

Tryse put a hand on her shoulder, pulling her back into the moment. “Little sister, we will only have moments. Are you prepared?” She nodded once. He gave her a smile that had warmed the hearts of hundreds, and he was off. Ceecil cracked the window and heard the slow-paced carriage seconds away. The driver was swatting at something that was buzzing around his head, cursing loudly. He didn’t notice a small form slip underneath the harness and leave a small item behind.

The explosion was only seconds behind Tryse. It illuminated the street and showed him diving for cover. Ceecil was running before he got back and placed her charge on the carriage door. It seemed to be made of poor wood, but the first blast wiped the façade away and revealed a durable steel chamber. She placed the bomb on the door and ran back to Tryse as fast as she could.

The explosion didn’t come. Ceecil panicked. Tryse waved her over, yelling something. She looked back in time to see a sickly purple glow coming from inside the carriage. She was tackled to the ground just as the entire carriage was pulsed outward, maintaining it's shape, just in pieces. She saw the Lord cowering on a bench and a being made of the same purple color floating over him. The Lord started yelling something, begging for his life for... Forgiveness? There was a flash. A pile of bones replaced where the Lord had been sitting. There were several more flashes as more bodies became bones. She watched the thing scoop something out of the rubble and float off, the carriage losing whatever power was holding it in place and falling in pieces. Ceecil saw the door, yelled at Tryse, but it was too late. The door landed and the second bomb went off, hurling everything in every direction. She felt two pieces of shrapnel land on Tryse, and he let out a soft moan. The outriders had started to come back, she could feel the hooves of their horses on the pavement. It looked at her right before it disappeared, its' anger burning in her eyes. She tried to move Tryse but he wasn’t responding. She felt his blood on her body before passing out.  

“What in the name of the Lord happened?” The man screaming woke Ceecil, who found herself in a dark room bound to a chair. A flickering torch – No, that’s no torch, that’s one of those lights that doesn’t burn – gave her glimpses of her confines. She was in a corner, tied to a thick wooden chair. There were grooves below her hands, grooves that came from the constant strain and rubbing of rope on wood. The room, cell, was stone. There were no windows. Three men were standing over a body, one that had been badly burned and had limbs missing. You were there. You remember the light, oh Tryse… Ceecil began to lose consciousness when a hand slapped her. She tried to jump out, to run out of this place and back to the streets. The ropes burned into her wrists and ankles, causing more pain.

“Shut that one up. I need answers!” The angry man, the one yelling, the one dressed in a nightgown that was embroidered with a familiar seal. Oh Gods, the son. The one they talk about, who takes people in the night and then never brings them back. Oh Gods… He was flailing. His whole body was flailing. Rolls of fat bounced every direction whenever he threw up his arms or started screaming. He turned at looked at her, his eyes were sunken behind a twisted face. He had no hair but for a small patch below his lower-lip. “What is this urchin doing here?”

“Lord-heir, this is the only witness to what happened. There was another urchin with her, but he was killed by debris from the explosion. She’s young, scared, we need her to calm down so she can tell us what happened.” This man was the complete opposite of the lord-heir. He was in uniform, with his helmet held under his right arm. His left hand wrested on the handle of a pistol clipped into his belt. His hair was cut closely, his face looked scarred. His eyes were prominent, holding his unobtrusive nose between them. They were a light blue, and Ceecil felt she could trust this man. She stopped whimpering and tried to pull her hands up to her chest, but felt the rope burning through her skin instead.

The nice man walked over and knelt beside her, setting his helmet on the ground and resting his hand on her shoulder. “Lass, we need to know what happened. You were the only person alive when we found the carriage. Were you there with others?”

Don’t let them know about Whispers, they’ll kill him. “I… I was with my friend, Tryse. We were hoping to see the carriage after we heard it was coming through our part of town. Right as it reached us there was an explosion… That’s when I saw Tryse... laying on the ground with blood pouring from his eyes-” she couldn’t stop the cry that exploded from her. She tried to pull her hands up again, but this time they made it. Ceecil saw a faint glint off a knife the nice man had just sheathed. His arm came over her shoulders and he was holding her, combing his hand through her hair. The kindness just added to the emotion Ceecil had been hiding and she didn’t stop sobbing until they left her in the room.

______________________________________________________________________________

The Lord-Heir was the first through the door, followed by the region’s Suone, chief intelligence agent, and, after a moment or two, the head of the Lord-Heir’s bodyguard. They all went into the same carriage and when the door closed they were moving. The Lord-Heir was still having one of his fits. The Soune, Milo, attempting to calm him while Josav, the body guard, sat passively.

“Lord-heir, you must regain your senses! That urchin child in there is the only person who knows exactly what happened! If you can hold off for only a few moments so we can figure out what kind of an attack this was we can…” He trailed off as he looked at Josav, who was idly trimming his nails. “Does this not concern you, Josav?”

“No.”

“Then, please, enlighten the lord-heir and I about what you saw.”

He stopped trimming his nails, then looked at both of their faces. The Lord-Heir looked as though he was going to have a mess for one of his many servants to clean after he departed the carriage. The Soune was glaring at him, but within that glare was a cry for help. “It is not my job to question a current investigation, just to protect, so I have nothing to say.”

The Lord-Heir began screaming again. “You stupid bastard, I am your ruler now and I am commanding you to tell me what happened!”

“This concerns the safety of the Lord-heir, please, tell us what you think.” Milo had managed to calm the Lord-heir down with a simple whisper in his ear.

Josav returned to cleaning his nails. “I was one of the first at the blast site. The horses and driver were blown into pieces, what happened in the carriage was much more contained. It was a bomb that killed the horses and driver. This explains our urchins being there. Tryse, the dead one, set off an initial charge, one meant to slow them to a stop while Ceecil, yes, our lovely street rat in holding, was supposed to run under the carriage and set the second charge. Here’s where things get a little fuzzy. We found Ceecil behind a makeshift barrier, not in pieces like the rest of them. Tryse was there too, but his luck had run out as a secondary charge blew the top of the carriage off, killing, no, vaporizing most of the inhabitants. Our magi identified what remains… err, remained. Lord-heir, your brother is missing.”

Josav looked up from his retelling. The Lord-heir was flapping again, and the Soune was, again, trying to calm him down. It’s really inconvenient the Lord had to go and blow himself up while leaving this buffoon as the standing ruler. He finished trimming his nails and put the smaller knife back in one of his pouches. The Lord-heir was breathing normally, and only a small trickle of sweat was coming from his brow. “I need to see the remains.”

“All that is left are piles of bones. There’s nothing more to be seen, Lord-heir.”

His right eye started twitching. Despite this sure-tell of an oncoming rage his voice remained level. “Bring the Magi back and have them show me who the bodies belong to. This deals with the Lineage. We need to assure the people they will have a leader, despite this… atrocity. Josav, after you send the message I want to in charge of this investigation. Do not let me down.”

“They had left, back to Sklosburg. I’ll send a runner to bring them back. We may as well keep the area cordoned-off and find a place to rest for the day. I believe the Lord’s premises are off limits due to the investigation, so let’s find someplace relatively unhostile to spend the day.” The Lord-heir and Soune nodded in agreement. Josav told the carriage driver to take them to the nearest reputable inn.

______________________________________________________________________________

Ceecil was still bound to the chair by her feet. When the men left the light, leaving her in near darkness. She managed to stop crying after reliving the entire event in her head, and finally looked around her cell. She could clearly see the outline of the stone door. It had light coming from the other side. Ceecil quickly looked in hopes to find something she could use to cut through the rope on her ankles. She and the chair were the only things in the room. She started moving her feet back and forth, hoping one would someone slip from the binding. All she managed to do was create more injuries on her ankles. She buried her face in her hands yet again, softly sobbing, recognizing she would never escape this new hell.

A light started coming through her fingers, a light different from the not-torch on the wall. It was purple. It’s the light from before, from when…Tryse… Darkness came to her yet again.

______________________________________________________________________________

After leaving the Soune and Lord-heir to deal with the politics Josav started heading back to question the girl. She was in a tough spot, and he hoped she’d be more willing to cooperate and answer the questions instead of falling into an emotional wreck. She had been holding back, using the sobs as a cover. These urchins ran a tight ship, usually three or four members. Ceecil and the dead boy weren’t the only two running this job, there had to be one more. A spotter. Something to look into after questioning the girl.

He walked into the holding area, and found two piles of bones, similar to the ones in the carriage. Josav drew his pistol and began slowly moving towards the cell holding Ceecil. More bones were neatly piled along the hallway and outside the holding cell. The door was shut. A strange purple glow was radiating from the door itself. He reached for the handle and felt an intense pain. He screamed as he pulled his hand away, cradling it in his arm. He looked at the door again, realizing it was not a door, but a field set up by a magi. He pulled his hand out and saw the skin on the inside of his hand had been burned off. He let out a frustrated grunt. All he could do was wait.

______________________________________________________________________________

She came to panting, screaming, crying, and wanting anything or anybody to make that light stop. It was growing slowly, until it stopped in front of her cell. The door vanished and a puff of dust blew inside the room, coating everything. The thing was here. Ceecil tried to hide behind her arms as the thing approached her. The glow went through her arms, through her eyelids, and into her mind. She gasped, throwing her arms to the side. Her eyes were forced open by some unseen force and she saw the thing that killed so many that night. It looked into her eyes, into her soul, then nothing.

______________________________________________________________________________

Each second felt like an hour. Others came trickling in, none of them had the Sight; they all had to wait without knowing what was happening. A screaming child grabbed all of their attention, coming from the other side of the barrier. Everyone stood up, weapons drawn. A burst of energy threw them all against the wall. As they regained their senses the door dissipated. Josav rushed into the cell. A small pile of burned bones was around the chair, the ankles still bound to it. He stared for a moment, then let out a scream and threw his helmet across the room.

“Everyone get the hell out! Go!” The other people began leaving as fast as they could, leaving Josav running his hands through his hair. The girl was dead. This investigation was dead. The Lord was dead. Soon the country would know, and chaos would reign. He finally sat down in front of the chair, examining it. Magi would find something to lead them to the killer. Something to show the country they knew what was happening, I just need something…