elfhame | Cult AU

When Colin starts awake, his head hurts. He vaguely remember he was hit on it, but can't remember how. Dried blood has crusted in his hair and on his forehead, but that's the least uncomfortable thing right now. He's slung across a horse and bound to the saddle like cargo. Lifting his head, he blinks a few times and squints, trying to find someone he knows.

He may not see Benedict right away, but anyone could certainly hear him, whining as he is behind the gag in his mouth. He's wriggling fruitlessly around on the back of the first horse in the line, having never fallen unconscious but been subdued and hogtied all the same.

When he sees Colin lift his head, he gives a muffled cry of alarm. Hey Colin: we're being kidnapped.

He knows Athessa is behind them somewhere, but it's too dark to see her.

That's because she's looking down at her hands, bound together with rough rope and attached to the rearmost saddle. The cord creaks when she flexes her hands, trying to find any slack in her bonds, but every time she so much as tugs on the rope, the man on the horse turns to glower at her.

When she does look up, her elfin eyes reflecting the moonlight in eerie green, the man decides that it's impertinence and kicks his horse into a faster walk, forcing Athessa to keep pace or be dragged.

"Look at me again and I'll have that eye out, rabbit. Keep moving!"

He could disrupt everything if his head would stop spinning, but just reaching for a healing spell leads him to a brick wall. The manacles around his wrists have a rune engraved that's stopping him from casting. They're not dead yet, so their future doesn't look very bright. They'll be wanted for information, and Colin has no faith in his ability to hold up under torture.

He hears Bene and meets his gaze; hears whoever it is harassing Athessa and suddenly starts struggling. He has no plan for what to do if he gets to her, but his confused brain is making him try anyway.

Soon they stop before what looks like a fort with a wooden wall surrounding. Several people meet them, start untying the two men from the horses. Another blow against Colin's head does just enough to cause his knees to buckle and his struggle to end. Someone shoves him forward, and he stumbles in the correct direction.

Though treated considerably more gently, Benedict too is removed from the horse and directed toward the groaning wooden door in the fort wall. He struggles and drags his feet, but his captor is stronger and has very little trouble conveying him inside.

In the split second before he and Colin are shoved into a little room, he catches sight of Athessa being dragged away, to another part of the compound.

There's a brief moment, sometime after the strangers strike Colin, in which Athessa tries to leverage the element of surprise on their captors. Since her fighting prowess is in her legs already, and it's only her hands that are bound, she manages to take out one of the men posing as guards, knocking his leg out from under him and bringing a swift kick down onto his throat. Blood flecks spatter his horse and she ducks under it to avoid being grabbed by yet another pair of grasping hands. But it isn't hands that find her, but a swift knee to her chest. It throws her back into the horse's side and she gasps, trying to get back the wind that was knocked out of her, but the man who hit her has the advantage and pulls her up to his level with a fist knotting painfully into her hair.

"This one needs breaking," he says to his compatriots. Athessa spits in his face, and though he sneers in disgust, he doesn't release her. Of course he doesn't. Instead, he back hands her with such force that she collapses at the horse's feet.

"Bind its legs until you get to the thresher. The hounds aren't fit for hare coursing after last night's hunt."

The ropes tighten around her ankles and she rolls onto her back, trying to kick the man, to kick anyone, but they've learned to keep vigilant. The guard keeps hold of her feet and drags her along the ground out of sight.

He glimpses Athessa when they start to drag her in the opposite direction, and he suddenly gets his fight back, throwing himself in her direction and screaming her name against his gag. Between the kicking and screaming, it takes a paralysis spell to bring him to heel, and he goes totally limp and has to be dragged the rest of the way.

No matter how she struggles or spits or fights, the captors glean painfully early that her legs are the problem. Once she's been dragged into the barn, all it takes is two cracks of a hammer, hard enough to fracture (but not splinter) both femurs, and satisfaction is reached.

With her bound hands looped over a hook, Athessa is dragged into a sitting position and left to wait.

Having gone into total shock by this point, Benedict is easily ushered along, though he whimpers something that sounds like Athessa's name as she disappears from view.

She stays conscious for the first leg, but not the second. Her screams are outside of herself, and herself is retreating further and further into darkness.

When an involuntary muscle spasm twitches in her left leg, the sharp pain jolts her awake and she cries out, biting down hard on the gag and struggling against the hook with arms that are already alight with pins and needles from being held upright. How long has she been out? Surely only a few minutes.

She strains, trying to pull herself up with only the strength of her upper body, but she can't. She tries again, and cries out in pain and frustration when her arms begin to shake from the struggle and she drops back onto her rear. The reverberation from her hips to thighs heightens the pain enough that she almost retches, almost blacks out again.

Tears stream down her face and soak into the gag, and the salt stings a split in her lip where one of the men had struck her. Ow.

Inside the wooden fortress is not, as might be expected, the base of operations for a secret militia or a band of thieves and murderers. On the contrary, it is almost unsettlingly normal.

The fortress has been converted into a community, with shops and houses and stables and plots for farming, and other than the armed guards making their rounds and posted at every exit, one might believe that it is simply a refitted old fort housing refugees.

Until, that is, one makes note of the segregation being practiced between the men and women. Or the cavalier use of magic out in the open, or the way that every mage has behind them a servant with bowed and shaven heads and brands on their cheeks. These servants are of both genders, and do not dare to set eyes on anything but the ground beneath their feet.

In the center of the fortress is a structure far better maintained than the rest of it, and adorned with what might be considered religious symbols, but they're not that of the Chantry or any known sect that either Benedict or Colin are familiar with. It is into this building that the men are ushered, and brought before a man in simple, white robes.

"Welcome, my children," he intones, hands held before him as if in prayer. "To your new home." Then, to the guards: "Take them downstairs."

Something along the lines of 'new home, what the fuck' comes from behind Benedict's gag, his face a mask of terror and incredulity as he shakes his head at the guards coming to remove them even further.
He glances frantically to Colin, at least reassured to see that he's still here.

It seems like an eternity that Athessa is left alone, in pain, in the dark. When light finally spills onto the stairway leading down into the cellar, a brief exchange is made between a man's voice-- the one issuing commands at the transport-- and a second softer one, which answers obediently.
The door closes, plunging the room back into darkness safe for a lit candle which draws ever nearer, revealing the thin form of an elf in a light linen shift.
Her eyes are pale and moony, her hair so blonde it's nearly white and her face thin, starved even, but gentle as she kneels beside Athessa and extends one skeletal hand to rest on her thigh.

Immediately, Athessa will perceive that the bone is healing, but the stranger pulls her little hand away before the job can be completed.

"That's all for now," she whispers, in a thin, girlish voice, "but if you're good, my love, the rest will follow."

Perhaps it would've been kinder not to heal her at all, but the cruelty is probably the point, isn't it? Athessa can feel her bones shifting, can feel an agonizing tug on her marrow, and the pain has her crying out against the cloth in her mouth and more tears making tracks in her dirt-and-blood caked face.

She tries to say "please, just let me go," but the gag doesn't let it get any further than her teeth.

The girl's brow knits and she reaches forward to untie the gag, as delicately as if she were folding paper to make a bird.
"You must promise not to scream and carry on," she says softly as she does so, and seems to mean it. "If you do, he'll come back in here."

That feeling of wanting to retch comes back, drawn up from the back of her throat as if tied to the gag with a string, and she has to visibly struggle against it.

"Why," she croaks, and turns her head away to spit out a bitter blend of blood, spit, tears, and dirt. Okay, try again: "Why am I here?"

"Probably just happenstance, dearie," comes the sweet little voice again, and she takes a cloth to begin dabbing at Athessa's face, wiping away the sweat and blood and spit.

"Did you come along with someone else?"

"My friends," she says, flinching away from the girl's hand as it nears her face. Athessa's cheek is throbbing where Alaric's blade had caught her, the wound reopened by being dragged over rough ground earlier. "They took 'em to the fort. What're they...gonna do to 'em?"

She knows what she's gonna do if they've hurt them.

"Oh," gasps the elf, and presses her fingers to her translucently pale cheek, "if they're not here, they've been called for greater things."
She sits back on her heels.

"They will bolster the numbers and spread our greatness. We are lucky to serve them." There's a vague look in her eyes, the way a person looks when they've had too much elfroot, but there's no smell of it on her.
"Our calling is humbler, but no less important."

Athessa stares at the girl for what feels like a really long time.

"The fuck are you talking about?"

She laughs nervously, giving an absent tug on a strand of her light hair.

"We serve them," she repeats, "we serve the masters. You'll learn how. Soon, if you're very good. If you don't try to run."
She's still smiling, but there's nothing behind it.

Hah. "You're funny."

She doesn't sound amused. Her legs are broken, and only partly healed. If she tries to run anywhere she'll just compound the fracture. "Who are these masters?"

"The great and true Divine, Hariolus," she says with shining eyes, "and all those who follow his vision, to spread our holy seed through the world."

"...I don't wanna know what you mean by spreading seed, do I."

The girl just blinks silently at her, still smiling.

Cult AU

the last time they're all together

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Athessa's First Night In Paradise

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On Mages and Their Superiority

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