"The Last Savoie" | Louis PK

[Chimeraof1999 1187]

The Fiend Lord sat in silence, inside his empty tomb that was supposed to represent his Balkanite death with snow and ash yet it remained empty.

 

The Undead sat, emotion unprepared to reenter his forgotten and tainted soul as he placed the missive onto the table before him. He sat backward, and shook his head.

"You did wonders, served your purpose in Light and defeated me without problems. You were a good first student, Louis. . . I know the Barrowlord and Funnybone will be upset your gone, yet you did good."

The Undead sat in silence now, but this time, the silence was interrupted with soft rememberences, not once was there hatred within that silence.

[Roza 109]

 

Francisca stood beneath the shade of an old tree, her dress white, a veil tucked gently behind her shoulders. The wind tugged at its lace like a whisper, like someone trying to say “don’t forget.” In her hands, a single white lily. Fresh. Fragrant. Fragile. "For you", she murmured, voice catching like thread in thorns.

 

She remembered their childhood - their adventures. The world felt dimmer without him in it. Even that they grew apart. Growing older. She invited him for her wedding. He won't come to the wedding. She knelt, pressing the lily into the soil. where the sun warmed the stone, where it might bloom again someday.

 

"You were the first to call me brave," she whispered. “Now I have to try and be it without you.” Her eyes gazed over to the person she will marry, him playing guitar, also broken of the news that got sent to them. 

 

And as the breeze shifted, catching her veil and lifting it softly like an old memory… she smiled. Only just. “I’ll never forget you. Not in one lifetime. Not in five.”

 

Then she rose, steps slow but steady. The world would keep turning. She would walk with it. In white. In grief. In grace, over to her almost-husband. 

 

"One day, we will dance - again."

[Radzig 747]

                                                

 

                                                                 John sat beside a man who would be dead by sundown.

He hadn’t spoken much that night. Louis had done most of it, between sips of bitter stew and glances toward the hearth. There was something plain in him, almost worn out, and John had let himself forget, for a moment, what the name de Savoie was supposed to mean.

He was fifteen. Old enough to hold a sword. Young enough to feel it afterward. He hadn’t touched Louis, not directly, but the silence, the timing, the stillness of his hands, it was his, too. Duty had always been clear when spoken aloud, easier when it came from other men’s mouths. But alone, in the quiet, it turned vague.

Slippery.

 

The Lowlands lay sodden in the wake of the storm. Water crept into the low banks, leaving behind a skin of mud and broken reeds. The paths beyond the alleged Wickwald were drowned, horses reluctant to pass, wheels sunk to their rims. Rain still clung to branches, falling in slow, uneven drops, and the wind carried the smell of wet wood and churned soil. Smoke rose from a distant holding, thin and pale against the sky. Nothing moved but water and wind, occasionally John. The land had taken its beating, and now it waited—watchful, slow to forget. 

 

[DankuzMemuz 60]

Traskaath had met Louis on pure chance, the Valah meeting the 'ame in the streets of Numendil as the latter spoke to a creature. Louis asked about making a plant immortal, but such was impossible- to the sapling druii's knowledge. Nevertheless, as the passing of him was heard the 'ame planted a new seed in one of the many gardens and it bloomed beautifully with grace, for death was never easy. 

 

"Birth, life and death. Such is the Cycle, Louis. Hileia ehiere." Traskaath uttered, offering a prayer of gentle passing into the next life.

Edited April 22, 2025 by DankuzMemuz

[M1919 2298]

On 4/20/2025 at 6:37 PM, Heartesy said:

 

 

"Tell me."

 

  Reveal hidden contents

@M1919

 

 

 

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[ x ]

 

 

 

Dragomir lingered in the temple grounds, where snow drifted like ash across the old flagstones—soft, silent, and devoid of grace. He sat alone with the steel and the whetstone, working a blade he hadn’t drawn in weeks.

 

But it wasn’t about the weapon.

It was about the rhythm.

The hush inside the rasp of stone on metal.

Something to bleed thought into. Something to do while grief pressed in around the edges.

 

The blade itself was useless. He’d known it from the first strike—off-balance, hairline fractures in the tang, brittle as bone in winter—a mistake left too long on the rack.

 

A waste. The word came again, low and final, like a bell buried in snow.

It was what the night had been. What the gathering had become. 

What the confrontation left him with.

 

The fury was long gone, burned up in the moment and scattered in the silence that followed. What remained was not peace. Peace would have been mercy.

 

This was the aftermath.

Still, cold, and unkind.

 

The memories were fresh, yet shrouded in a veil of emotion and choked with the fabric of woeful pity that made him forget some of the details. They weren’t courteous, he remembered that. They had no reason to be, because their knights sat around and did nothing. The commander did not gawk beyond his lie of repercussion that he swore would fall. The insults had missed him and landed on the still-warm corpse instead.

 

Dragomir hadn’t answered most of it. The taunts, the sneers, the sharpened jabs meant to goad—they passed through him like wind through ruin because grief had already taken him elsewhere. It had its claws in him even then, turning his thoughts toward vengeance, while something else sank its fangs into him and demanded that he look toward the woman Louis had loved. 

 

She needed a sword. Louis’ sword.

That was his purpose, even if he felt himself give way to some of the provocation.

 

He remembered the priest. The words returned with fragments: the sly smile, the twisting tone, the performer’s cruelty wrapped in piety. Beneath the vestments, just another lean-mouthed jackal gnawing on the dead to feel nourished. He spoke so few words, and yet it was he who had the weapon. It had been the shepherd who seemed reluctant to return something. That one spoke too casually, as if he had never faced the strangling silence. He hadn’t felt the loss of someone whose name still hung in his throat like an unfinished prayer. 

 

He was a hypocrite, like Dragomir. Maybe that was why the Norn laughed. 

He’d laughed throughout it all—a rough, hollow thing. 

Laughter as a weapon. 

Laughter as a wound. 

It hadn’t been rage in the chortle, but regret. 

 

He’d now sat there in his armor and silence, a man carved out of anger and built again with scars, and still he had wept. Not where most could see, no—but it had come all the same. When no one else watched, when the fire was low, the names of the dead were always louder than his heartbeat.

 

He was not always a kind man; he never had been.

Brave, yes. Loyal, in ways that broke and yet remade him.

Hate has always been easier. Easier to grip. Easier to swing.

 

And yet even that had cracked just as stone does when the frost gets deep enough. The fury had drained from him hours ago, bled dry by the blade now chipped and thin from a whetstone that stuck to his palm so much that it made the calluses drool.

 

Now, only calm remained—heavy and unnatural, like the false quiet that follows a scream. 

Dragomir was the one who screamed.

He screamed when he sharpened the blade.

He screamed when he had delivered Louis’ head the night before.

He screamed when he broke into meetings to quietly ask if something had been done.

He had, even if his voice did not carry outside the room. And that was why it was quiet.

 

At some point, the sword had fallen to the floor, and the palms of that scarlet-haired man slapped against the sides of his skull and his eyes. This emotion was a first for him. Raw and hateful in its way.

 

Dawn was bleeding through the sky, pale and weak, a ghost of morning.

Snow fell again, light and aimless.

The stave church creaked in the wind, its bones murmuring.

 

The fire was almost out, no more than embers beneath grey ash. Still warm, but fading.

 

Just like his brother’s soul.