The sky crackles with energy, and potential fills the air like buzzing fireflies. Amongst the dark dirt and grim fog of Thornton, beneath Lord Eagleclaw’s seething, hostile blackstone citadel, up on its cruel, cragged mountain, a stranger stalks the alleys, black fur cloak bundled up around her sharp shoulders, hood obscuring her angled face. She passes the customary screaming matches, bouts of bloody bar combat, and bawdy drinking songs of mercenaries as her shadow-silent form slips into a grimy, dim building, seeks the safety of its basement to shelter from the sluggish rain.
The cellar is nothing like the city of rogues above. It is warm, comforting, the kind of place that would be described as cozy, if not for its fanatical, hot-blooded regulars. “There you are,” their leader says, the firebrand Caius.
The red-bearded, red-hearted revolutionary willingly relinquished command of the cell to their new visitor, convinced it was she who could bring them to victory.
She pulls back her hood and reveals the slender, saluki face of a beautiful, commanding woman. Her features are marble-polished, her bouncy purple hair preternaturally clean and glossy. “Yes,” she says, her voice as powerfully striking as the rest of her. “Your message spoke of news from the south?”
“Yes. Cursed tidings,” Caius replies, slamming the wooden, mapped table with his clenched fist. “Goblins have seized Meadowbrook.”
She knows what that means, immediately. “Eagleclaw will call up his levies…”
“And march out on campaign, beyond our reach! Months of planning — these last few days of intricate preparations — and they’re all wasted. It’s ruined!”
“No,” she says, her raised hand instantly silencing the room’s discontent, turning their mood from despondent to resolved. “The levies must assemble, then march — from Blackburrow, Gorfort, Redfen. We still have time.”
“But the moment even one of those hosts arrives, they will quarter in Castle Thornton, and Eagleclaw will be well beyond our reach.”
“Then we strike tonight. We are assembled, are we not?”
“You cannot-”
“I can. Most pieces are in place. We will execute tonight. Distribute word to the other agents.” Diana is so divinely charismatic that the room believes it beyond a shadow of a doubt when she says, “The Revolution comes tonight.”
As Lord Eagleclaw is being dragged before the chopping block by some very unhappy people, to the south, the sun sets on Meadowbrook. Maynier, the only person who could possibly be trusted with a prisoner of such value, brings the captive priestess her dinner.
The orc, who would never even think about questioning Kara, is feeling just a little annoyed at the fact that this is the second night in a row that the priestess has been treated to the same delicacies that Kara, herself and the other disciples enjoy. Maynier is (again, just a little bit, a tiny bit) confused as to why a prisoner so blatantly disrespectful should be showered in luxuries. She’s even been instructed to bring a skin of wine for Gods’ sake — good wine, sweet wine that the uppity priestess probably won’t even enjoy. Maynier, who considers herself Kara’s second in command, thinks that when it comes down to it, loyalty should be rewarded, disloyalty punished (she does not understand that to Elsa, this forced pampering is its own punishment).
Maynier thinks these things as she pushes into the comfortable, two storey house that the priestess has been imprisoned in. Elsa waits for her before the dining table, firelight from the hearth making her pink hair seem wicked bright. The priestess tilts her head.
“You are very strong, are you not?”
“Flattery will not work on me, filth.”
“Apologies; I’m just slightly confused,” says the priestess, whose tone doesn’t betray at all that she’s been rehearsing this conversation in her head for hours. “Why should the Prophet not want you to carry her heirs?”
Maynier sneers. “What makes you think she does not?”
“She told me as much. She said she would not-” Elsa flushes, “well. She said she would not spill her seed, as she was saving it for the one who would carry her heirs. She then called on the young Lily to relieve her.”
Maynier has no trouble disbelieving this accusation, internally, but just a moment later she thinks about how Kara dotes on Lily, how she brushes her hair and coos in her ear. She has always been jealous of the young woman’s body, which is not a warrior’s form, yet regardless seems to always draw Kara’s eyes. “She must intend that we will both produce heirs.”
“Oh? And which would she favour, do you think?”
Maynier, tired of this, delivers the priestess a vicious backhand that sends her reeling, nursing a stinging red mark. She leaves her to her blasphemies, but the words cannot leave her head — and they rattle around her mind that night, as she seeks sleep, noting that Kara is not in her bed.