[PK] Untimely, not Unexpected

[ProcaPro 557]

 

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When Haense still had a home, Branimar had arrived in the cold, sent to join his aunt so they might regain some lost regality long since left in the slog of time. Remnants, in little more than name. How he detested that name. Expectation, want, insistence. He was certainly ready to bite his distaste for it all and rise. He’d begun to study the markets, keen on mastering the material. When he’d met Lorelei, it had been with nervous hesitance. He’d been pushed by his aunt to do so, to make friends and connections. So he did. He sat next to that strange blind girl with the twisted leg and said hello, bile in his smiling throat. Then she’d been kind. Branimar had expected the song and dance of nobility, little daggers and hidden prods to prove oneself in a puzzle of a conversation he’d never been good at grasping. Instead, Lorelei was kind. Bile was replaced with a nervous ease, smiles were more genuine.

 

Every prod for him to woo the girl, every whisper that said he should grab at whatever climb he could, did not push Branimar from his refusal to trap Lorelei in some web. While he sold and bartered and subtly wormed into his surroundings he at least had one genuine thing. From the familiar bite of teeth in his throat to the weary recoveries after, to mindless meetings and trainings, she was his friend. Then Caz came. Then the rest. Branimar fell once, before Haense did, in the stressful cold-war that had been boiling into battle between the before-empire and his home. That had always remained blurry to him. Bandits, he thought, horses. Crossbows and daggers, screaming. He’d awoke barely aware of even who he was in some bed in Alba, disfigured and damaged and hardly able to speak a sentence. She was there. Caz was there. People who saw him as more than a legacy to correct.

 

Time flew. It shifted. Lorelei grew from friend, to closest confidante, to love. Branimar chose joy and forgiveness over the anger and gripes over the loss of Haense, he chose to move on, to build something else, and he did. A keep, with bricks set by his own damaged hands. A family, a future with his wife he wouldn’t impose upon, wouldn’t drain, wouldn’t feel disappointed by. Never disappointed, how could he when they were his? It was a good life, one to be long lived surely, rose-tinted and sunny.

 

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A blur passed by Branimar’s eyes, a life well lived and built, wondering where he had gone wrong. If he even had gone wrong. In the swell of panic and of terror he wondered where his wife was. For a moment he almost wondered if Lorelei had known this was going to happen. But surely not. It wasn’t her fault she’d been trusting, and kind enough to give someone a chance.

 

It all swept away in an instant. The sound of crashing bookshelves and breaking glass echoed in his home, a leg long since stalled on recovery had failed him. Time spent clawing for the mobility he’d had before those damned bandits was for nothing. Claws descended, teeth snapped, Branimar did not scream. He accused, he raged. He knew. The beast had declared him a target, howled out at him, taunted. That was all Branimar needed. There was only one person he’d ever known who hated him enough to kill him, and they couldn’t even dirty their own hands with Branimar’s blood. They couldn’t even take his life themself. It enraged him, more than it scared him- and then the rage was gone.

 

His niece, terrified, was the first to find him being torn asunder, living and fighting hopelessly. His wife, the next as he faded. Then his eldest. He could hear the screaming, even as he was made headless and those precious few seconds of life left in his brain struggled. Then he could hear nothing at all.

 

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[FenHarel 536]

Katerina Enswerp stood in the greenhouse later that evening, crutches leaned against the wall as she watered the roses. A bloodstained book rested on the worktable nearby, open to the second page: "For my dearest Kit. Happy Birthday."

 

She was only seven, but she had seen it. She had taken the book from her father's cold hands, and it had not yet left her sight. She no longer cried, but no matter her grandmother's urging she would not leave the greenhouse.

 

For weeks, Kit tended to her father's plants until her hands ached.

 

Eventually, a bouquet of white roses, violets, and chrysanthemums was left before Branimar's grave.

[lemonke 6014]

Spoiler

I almost got a heart attack 

 

[annanicole__ 2802]

Lorelei Mairi cried out when she learned her daughter and son-in-law were gone. In silence, she lit a single candle, her hands trembling, tears slipping down her cheeks as the flame flickered to life.

 

Ipera Amelya cried out as she watched them tend to the broken bodies of her mother and father. She didn’t understand everything—only that something was terribly, heartbreakingly wrong.

[dev_clark 284]

... She had been the first one on the scene and the first to leave it.

There had been a chance, a single slim chance, to have saved her dear uncle, and Aurelia Ottilie was never even privy to it. How is a blind girl meant to fight something she cannot even see?  Pathetic.

She had stood there, helplessly, listening to the sound of flesh ripping from bone. The sickening crack of Branimar's skull being ripped from his spine would haunt her every night after, and the wails of her dearest aunt would always accompany it. She could not even stop her young cousin from seeing it. Pathetic.

The cruelest and most blessed thing GOD had done for her was stripping her of her sight. Aurelia could only hope that in death, he'd forgive her, for if she could have, she would have done anything to stop this horrific series of events. Pathetic.