sunnyshadow (sunnyshadow) wrote in bearandbarnacle, @ 2008-09-19 14:46:00 |
|
|||
Current location: | Wolf Pack Island, Demon Sea |
Current mood: | accomplished |
Entry tags: | jobs, topic, xelpost |
Xellos: Topic: Jobs
Kouma Sensou (War of the Monster's Fall)
He's been lashed--verbally, and with salted rope and with white holy fire--for this one. Which is monstrous unfair, anyway you look at it, ahaha, monstrous, get it? Guard, they said. Not the job of a Priest, really, not even here, where mostly it means seneschal, but they were stretched tight, and he'd by the Eyes guarded! All those beautiful, righteous, golden-shining flying lizards, those overbearing philocidal genocides, trying to ambush his new home at four in the morning... And this after doing a job on the first one whose thoroughness he can admire with his new detachment, but still has no desire to see repeated.
Not in general, and not here. Didn't Zelas-sama save him from what they thought at the time was the despair of an empty world? Had she not opened her home and her power to him, given him new purpose? Had she not even, unusually, merely removed his heart rather than destroying it when she claimed it, and given it into his own keeping to feed on and make a weapon of and stave off the death-of-reason of a mazoku's hunger with, that he might better serve her? Was her home itself not beautiful, alternately tasteful and wild, and well worth the protecting? So, all right, she'd caught him when he wasn't thinking straight, and wouldn't have chosen this for himself, then, if he'd had the brain to understand the offer through the shock of the death of his life. That only meant her skill as a hunter and a trickster was to be respected and emulated and taken, always, as a joyful challenge.
So, he'd guarded. And if the manner of it surprised them all, had taken the General in particular by surprise (to think that the mild little ever-smiling priestlet from the shadows could be so fervent in the defense of a master he'd served for barely a hundred years!), well, that only proved that he wasn't fit to hold his post. Not that it had needed proving. It's all very well to run your troops like the pack they are and count coup when the game is political, and Xellos supposes that General had served well enough in relative peacetime. But all the fronts had been shrinking, infiltrators had been sneaking onto the island--dragons in human form, on his master's fertile soil!--and no one else had seen this ambush coming?
No, no, his predecessor had had to die. For all their sakes. He made it quick, though--nearly as quick a death as he'd given those who meant to perform the massacre rather than be it, who'd meant to paint the ground ether-black and not curl and spasm in the air, bright gold against pure blue, and rain dark ichor and brilliant scales as his pointing finger swept along their formations and stopped their hearts. It took almost all the power he'd then been granted, and left him too limp to do more than smile with the exhausted, empty cheer of the thoroughly revenged when the wolves brought him in front of Zelas-sama to be punished. All those deaths, taken so quickly; how much power could she have harvested from him if he'd had the patience to trick and trap and torture instead?
But it was worth it, even though by the time he recovered from being disciplined it was clear that the dragons left behind had (of course) completely failed to learn anything from the incident, other than not to try him. Something, that. Incompetent-san was no longer around to threaten Zelas-sama with his incredible lack of strategy and inability to gather information, and his detailing of the evidence behind these and certain other opinions earned him the (snarled) chance to 'prove he could do it better.' Besides, he couldn't have drawn it out, he's sure; he'd been firmly taught the impoliteness of playing with his food. Come to think of it, that's a lesson other people around here could stand to learn, ne...
The responses this month have been incredible. <3
(this one originally posted to voices, but fits this prompt, too. vOv)