REYN
"I think you've said exactly enough."
The words hung in the air like smoke from a poorly ventilated fireplace. Reyn stood very still, her hand resting on Good Deeds' hilt, as several pieces of information rearranged themselves in her mind with the grinding reluctance of an old mill.
The merchants who weren't really playing cards. The inn that was too neat. The locals who were skittish. The innkeeper who was too formal. The complete absence of actual Crimson Hand presence in a town supposedly under their control.
"Oh," she said aloud, with the tone of someone discovering they'd been sitting on their spectacles while searching for them. "You are the Crimson Hand."
The smiling man's expression shifted to something more genuine, though no less unpleasant. "Finally figured it out, did you? I started to believe the sayings about Bormecians being dumb brutes."
"Old habit from our raiding days," Reyn said, still processing. "Apparently we're not very good at recognizing obvious criminals. The inn is yours. This whole inn is your base."
"Base sounds so military," the smiling man said, rising from his chair with theatrical languor. His three companions followed suit, hands moving to weapon hilts with practiced ease. "We prefer 'regional headquarters.' More legit."
The common room had developed that special quality of space about to host violence. Civilians scrambled for exits like roaches when someone lights a lamp. The innkeeper pressed himself against the wall, wringing his hands.
"Please," he whimpered, "they made us..."
"Shut it, Norris," one of the Hand said without looking. "You're paid well enough."
That casual cruelty sparked something in Reyn's chest. These weren't warriors who fought for purpose or honor. They were parasites, feeding on fear and calling it strength. The familiar tension began building at the base of her skull, warm and insistent. She allowed the Rage to build, pulling in a fraction of it to sharpen her tone.
"I was looking for you," she said as if she was saying she was looking for milk. "To talk about your operations, threatening temples and raiding caravans and all that. Though I must admit I feel quite stupid now. The not-really-playing cards should have been obvious."
"Talk?" The smiling man drew his sword with ease, Reyn noted. "I don't think you came here to talk."
"No, I did. But you're drawing steel, so I suppose we're past that politeness."
The first attacker came from her left, apparently believing surprise mattered more than skill. Reyn, her senses sharpened by the small amount of Rage, stepped into his rush, caught his wrist, and redirected his momentum straight into the fireplace. He hit the burning logs with a crash and a scream, scattering embers across the floor.
"Four at the table," she mused, blocking a sword strike with a chair she'd grabbed. The wood splintered. She drove the broken remains into her attacker's face, feeling his nose crunch. "How many upstairs?"
"Enough," the smiling man said.
As if on cue, footsteps thundered overhead. Boots on stairs. Weapons being drawn. The evening was about to become significantly more crowded. Reyn couldn't help but smile. It had been a while since a decent brawl.
A big one charged her, probably thinking size mattered in close quarters. He was half right. Size did matter, but not the way he thought. Reyn pivoted, caught his belt and collar, and used his own momentum to introduce him to the wall. The wall, being mostly plaster and thin wood, lost the argument dramatically. He crashed through into the kitchen amid a symphony of breaking pottery and culinary profanity.
"Should we take this outside?" Reyn suggested, not drawing Good Deeds yet. These weren't worth her blade. Not yet. Besides, a greatsword indoors wasn't always an advantage.
"Too late for that, Bormecian."
More Crimson Hand poured down the stairs. Eight, ten, a dozen. They moved with coordination that spoke of training, filtering into the room to surround her. Someone had a crossbow.
The Rage whispered sweet promises in her skull. It was her own thoughts, of course, but she realized she didn't control how much she was taking in. Let me in. Let me handle this. It'll go faster.
"Venn," Reyn called, not taking her eyes off the approaching circle, "might want to find cover."
She heard her companion scramble behind overturned furniture. Good. One less thing to worry about.
The crossbowman raised his weapon, aiming past Reyn toward where Venn had taken shelter. The bolt would punch through the table like paper. The message was clear: surrender or watch your friend die.
That was the line.
"Fine," Reyn said quietly, and reached over her shoulder.
Good Deeds rang as it cleared the sheath, the sound cutting through the chaos like a bell calling faithful to prayer. The blade caught firelight and threw it back.
The last clear thought she had before the Rage flooded in was simple: Keep the innocents safe.
Then the world narrowed to its component parts. Threats. Obstacles. Targets. The Rage didn't cloud her mind so much as focus it to a terrible point. Everything unnecessary fell away. Morality, mercy, hesitation, doubt. All excess weight jettisoned.
What remained was purpose given violent form.
The crossbowman died first. Good Deeds took his arm at the elbow before he could fire. The limb spun away, still clutching the weapon. He had time to look surprised before the return stroke opened his throat in a red smile.
Someone screamed. Didn't matter who.
Three came at her together, trying to use numbers. The Rage found this amusing. She flowed between their strikes like water between stones, Good Deeds painting arcs in the air. The first lost his leg at the knee and collapsed, trying to understand why the floor was suddenly so close. The second caught the pommel in his temple with a crack like splitting wood. The third managed to score a line across her ribs before she grabbed his throat and introduced his head to the bar top. Repeatedly.
Blood now. On her hands, her face, her blade. The copper taste filled her mouth though she hadn't bitten her tongue. The Rage loved blood. It meant progress.
More came. They always came. The smiling man shouted orders that meant nothing. Form ranks? Against her? The Rage laughed with her throat.
She kicked a table into two of them, followed before they could recover. Good Deeds punched through the wood and the man behind it with equal ease. The other tried to run. Tried. The thrown dagger caught him between the shoulders and he pitched forward, adding another obstacle to the increasingly cluttered floor.
The stairs. They were trying to retreat up the stairs. Bottleneck themselves in narrow spaces.
The Rage approved. Easier to corner prey.
She moved toward them, humming something. A Bormecian war song, maybe. Or a lullaby. Hard to tell the difference when filtered through violence.
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Behind her, someone whimpered. Not a threat. Ignore.
Ahead, frightened faces above sharp steel. Threats. Priority.
Good Deeds led the way up, hungry for more work. She tried to control the Rage, as she'd learned. But it had already taken her.
VENN
Venn had trained with a quarterstaff for exactly six weeks before leaving the Temple. Six weeks of practice in the safety of the training yard, where the biggest danger was splinters and Acolyte Marcus's tendency to swing too wide.
This was not the training yard.
When the wall exploded inward and a man crashed through in a shower of plaster and cursing that made her blush, Venn's training fled like a startled cat. She pressed against the corner, quarterstaff clutched in white knuckles, as chaos consumed The River's Rest.
Through the jagged hole, she caught glimpses of Reyn fighting. No, fighting was the wrong word. Fighting implied struggle, effort, the possibility of failure. This wasn't any of those. Through the settling dust, she saw her companion moving through attackers like a force of nature.
Reyn looked different. Dark veins stood out against her skin like ink beneath parchment. Her movements had gained a terrible economy, each gesture ending in someone's pain. When she'd drawn Good Deeds, the sound had made Venn's teeth ache.
This is what a Bormecian is, Venn thought, equally frightened as she was intrigued.
The man who'd been thrown through the wall groaned and tried to rise from the ruins of what had been a perfectly serviceable stove. The cook, a woman built like someone had stacked several other women together, hit him with a pot. He stopped trying to rise.
"Out! Everyone out!" Venn shouted, gesturing toward the kitchen's back exit.
The cook didn't need encouragement. She grabbed two serving girls and fled, still clutching her weaponized cookware. Other civilians followed, streaming toward supposed safety.
Venn moved to follow when two figures filled the doorway. Crimson Hand members, swords already drawn, grins forming.
"Well, well," one said. He had the kind of mustache that even a mother wouldn't love. "The little healer wants to play warrior."
"I don't suppose you'd let me pass?" Venn said with the kind of innocence she'd learned might give her a pass with some of the Elders back at the temple.
"After what your monster of a friend is doing? Don't think so." The mustached one stepped forward. "Nothing personal. Well, kinda personal."
Venn swung her quarterstaff in what she hoped looked like a threatening manner. From their expressions, it looked more like someone trying to swat a somewhat high cobweb, and failing.
They separated, moving to flank her. Proper tactics against a reach weapon. Venn's so-called training screamed at her to maintain distance, control spacing, use her staff's length. Bash everything and everyone nearing her personal space.
Her training hadn't covered what to do when shaking too hard to see straight.
The first attack came from the left. She barely got her staff up in time, the impact jarring her arms. The second man moved in while she was off-balance.
Panic did what training couldn't. The words came without thought, gesture following instinct. She grabbed a handful of flour from the broken barrel beside her and threw it while speaking the Sleep incantation.
The cloud billowed out, white and shimmering with faint magic. Not proper spell components, not correct form, but magic was sometimes forgiving of improvisation. The components were mainly for visuals, and sometimes direction of the spell, anyway.
The mustached man walked straight into it, inhaling deeply for what would have been a mocking laugh. Instead, he got lungs full of enchanted flour with purple glitter. His eyes rolled back as the makeshift sleep spell hit him like a sledgehammer made of drowsiness. He toppled backward, snoring before he hit the ground.
"What did you..." his partner started.
Venn hit him with her quarterstaff while he was distracted. The crack of wood on skull was deeply satisfying, which Venn found disturbing. He dropped beside his sleeping companion, though his unconsciousness was more traditional.
"I did it," she breathed. "I actually did it!"
A crash from the common room reminded her the evening wasn't close to over. She heard Reyn's voice, humming something that might have been cheerful if not for the screams punctuating it.
The storage room door hung open. Maybe she could circle around, help somehow. Venn ducked inside, navigating between barrels and crates in the dim light.
Footsteps behind her. Fast. She'd missed one.
"Clever little thing," a voice said. "Clever don't stop steel."
She knocked over barrels as she ran, anything to slow pursuit. A thrown knife whistled past her ear. Another thunked into a crate by her head.
The small shield spell came easier this time, panic a wonderful motivator. The shimmer of protection flickered to life just as another knife struck, bouncing off with a sound like a finger flicking glass.
"Magic," her pursuer spat. "Bloody magic."
Venn burst through another door and found herself back in the common room, though calling it that now seemed optimistic. It looked more like an abattoir that had hosted a furniture fight.
Bodies lay scattered with the randomness of dropped toys. Some moved, clutching various parts that bent in new directions. Others had passed beyond movement's concerns. Blood painted the floor in abstract patterns that would have been artistic if not for their background.
And Reyn...
Her friend stood at the base of the stairs, Good Deeds dripping. Her eyes were holes in the world, black from edge to edge. Dark veins pulsed beneath her skin like parasitic worms. She moved up the stairs with inevitability, still humming.
Someone tried to hold the high ground. Reyn caught their descending sword in her bare hand, ignoring the blood that welled between her fingers. She yanked them off balance and Good Deeds punched up through their belly, lifting them off their feet before she flung them aside.
Another came tumbling down the stairs in several grotesque pieces.
"Helea preserve us," Venn whispered. This isn't her, is it?
Her pursuer from the storage room took one look at the scene and decided that hundreds of cuts was preferable to Reyn. He dove through a window in a shower of glass and splinters.
Upstairs, something heavy hit something structural. The ceiling shook. Dust rained down.
Venn helped a wounded civilian crawl toward the door, trying not to look at where his arm bent wrong. Others were fleeing or surrendering, throwing down weapons and falling to their knees.
But the sounds from above continued. Crashes. Screams. That terrible humming.
"Reyn," she called, though she doubted the Bormecian could hear anything beyond the violent rampage. "Reyn, that's enough!"
It must be that Rage she's mentioned. Venn looked around trying to find... anything. Why didn't she mention how to stop it?!
A body flew over the upstairs railing, landing with a sound like a sack of wet flour dropped from height. It twitched once and went still.
Venn prayed to Helea, to any god listening, that when Reyn came back down those stairs, she'd remember which ones were friends.
The humming stopped.
The silence was worse.
JAREK
Jarek had joined the Crimson Hand for three solid reasons: steady pay, indoor work, and minimal heavy lifting. Highway robbery in all weather? Not for him. Shaking down merchants in the rain? He'd pass. But sitting in a comfortable inn, looking menacing while counting protection money? That was the life.
Rivier had been the cushiest posting possible. The town was already cowed, the inn was theirs, and the most excitement they'd had in three months was when Drunk Morris fell down the stairs. All they had to do was report when travellers passed by, and provide food and shelter to the fieldmen.
He was in his room cataloging the week's take when the trouble started. Thumps and crashes from below, but that wasn't unusual. The boys got rowdy. Deren especially liked to start fights with locals who looked at him wrong.
"Probably another farmer who didn't bow low enough," Jarek muttered, making another tick in his ledger. Forty silver from the baker, thirty from the...
The ceiling shook. Dust sifted down onto his neat columns of figures.
More sounds. Breaking wood. Breaking... was that screaming?
Marcus burst through his door without knocking, face white as fresh parchment. "ARM UP! WE'RE UNDER ATTACK!"
"By who?" Jarek set down his quill carefully. No need to smudge the books. "The town guard? All three of them?"
"A demon! A Bormecian demon with a sword like a gods-damned door!"
"Don't be dramatic." Jarek stood, straightening his jerkin. "Bormecians don't come this way. It's probably just Deren picking fights again."
"Deren's dead! She put him through the fireplace!"
That got Jarek's attention. Deren was big as a house and twice as mean. He strapped on his sword belt, suddenly wishing he'd kept up with maintenance training. When was the last time he'd sharpened the steel?
He stepped into the hallway just in time to see Sven go flying past. Not running. Flying. Actual air between him and the floor flying. The big man hit the far wall with a crunch that suggested several important and vital things had broken.
Jarek looked toward the stairs.
A woman ascended. No, that was too gentle a word. She rose like smoke from a burning building, inevitable and choking. Blood painted her face in patterns that might have been artistic if he'd been insane enough to appreciate them. Her sword dripped steady red, leaving a trail on the steps.
Her eyes...
People's eyes didn't do that. Couldn't do that. Black from edge to edge like someone had poured night into her skull.
He had seen a Bormecian Rage once before. He hadn't seen this.
"Form up!" someone shouted. Sounded like Kristof. Always trying to be professional. "Rush her together! She's just one woman!"
That's no woman, Jarek thought, trying to move his eyes from the massive, muscular being approaching.
Six of them in the hallway. Seven counting Jarek. Good odds against anything human.
She smiled.
They charged because what else could they do? Run? Where? The window was three stories up and the stairs were... occupied.
She caught the first attacker's sword between her palms, ignoring physics and common sense. The blade shattered like winter ice. She grabbed a piece and opened his throat with his own weapon, then used his falling body as a springboard to reach the next man.
Her insane greatsword carved through leather and flesh with equal disdain. An arm flew past Jarek's head, still clutching a sword.
"The window!" someone screamed. "THE WINDOW!"
Yes. The window. Three stories onto cobblestones suddenly seemed the better option than whatever this was.
They scrambled over each other in panic. Professional killers reduced to rabbits fleeing a wolf. Pol reached the window first, hands on the sill.
The door to Jarek's room exploded outward, kicked off its hinges with impossible force. It caught Pol in the back, driving him through the window in a tangle of wood and regrettable physics.
Four left. Three. Kristof tried to make a stand, shouting something about honor. She walked through his defense like it was smoke, grabbed his head, and introduced it to her knee. The sound was wet.
Two left. Morris dove through Pol's exit, screaming prayers to gods he'd never believed in.
One left.
Jarek. Just Jarek and the demon in the hallway.
He turned to follow Morris, self-preservation finally overcoming frozen terror.
She was there. Right there. Close enough to smell the copper-death scent of her.
How? The hallway was twenty feet long. She'd been at the other end. Nobody moved that fast. Not even a Bormecian Barbarian, for all the myths and tales that existed.
"Going somewhere?" Her voice was sharp and heavy. Still human in shape but not in feel. Like a sword trying to speak.
He saw Good Deeds rising. Pommel, not blade. Small mercy from someone who'd shown none.
His last coherent thought as darkness rushed up to claim him was the same refrain that had haunted him all evening:
Should've stayed a bak—
[BLACK]
Did the multiple POV's work?
