A/N-- Hey check out the doodle! I got bored and decided to do a little sketch of Hench! Hope you guys enjoy!
Everyone stopped immediately, taking in the awful sight of corpses. Everywhere. They littered the ground for hundreds of feet. The smell... oh gods, the smell. Judging by the rot and by the number of vultures picking at the remains, these people had been dead for a while... left to bake in the sun.
Azabela was the first to speak. "What is this?" Her voice was a whisper, a reflection of the horror she felt.
Hench took off first, pulling out her warhammer and taking off through the sea of the dead. Sorella quickly climbed back into the wagon, trembling as she took her seat. Iris and the huntress drew their weapons as well, following after Iris's guardian. The women didn't suspect that the attackers would still be here, yet it was always better to be safe than sorry.
After a few minutes, none of them found any signs of anyone alive.
"This is unspeakable," Hench said as they gathered. "Who could have done this? And why?"
Azabela placed her bow back on her back. "I can look around the area. Might be able to find some tracks somewhere."
"Do that," Hench agreed quickly. "Be careful. Don't pick any fight you can't win and don't get caught. Iris and I will look around, see if we can't find anything. Come back within a couple hours if you don't find anything. Come get us to go with you if you do. We don't need to separate. Getting too far from each other is begging for trouble."
"Understood."
The huntress stalked away, searching the ground with precision. In the meantime, both the guardian and her trainee picked through the bodies. Iris looked over them for a long minute. In her times as Rogue Captain, she'd done a lot of scouting missions. By extension, she was good at pinpointing details.
Iris and Hench both spread out a little bit, surveying the carnage.
It only took the girl a little bit to find something very weird about the corpses. Among them were a vast assortment of people: there were old men and women, middle-aged men and women, even young adults and young children. What struck Iris funny was that there were no girl-children among the dead... only boy-children. There were no young women here either. Iris looked around at some of the young-adult men and noticed several were still wearing bonds of marriage around their necks.
So where were their wives?
Iris looked over at her mentor, who didn't seem to have come to any revelation. "Hey! Need you!" the rogue called.
A minute later, the guardian walked over to stand by Iris's side. "Find something?"
"A lack of something, actually," Iris explained, "Look around. There are no young girls among the dead. The only women here are older."
Now, Hench looked around, finding that her recruit's words were indeed true. She hadn't caught it before Iris said something, but now it was all her mentor could see. But why? Neither of them seemed to be able to crack the code. They stood there for a minute, just looking at the remnants left of the place.
"What a tragedy," Iris finally whispered, her face paling. "You'd think war was still upon us."
Iris felt a hand on her shoulder. Hench seemed to notice that the rogue looked sick, because she offered a squeeze of comfort. The guardian's brows were knitted in obvious concern for Iris as her grip lingered on her shoulder. The touch seemed to steady Iris. She drew strength from Hench's presence and took a deep breath in.
"You alright?" came Rhalla's accented voice.
"I will be," Iris said with a twitch of her mouth. "What are we going to do? We can't leave Sorella and Azabela here, that's for sure."
"There's a village near here, a little to the southwest. We'll take them there," Hench said after a moment of thought, "And then we need to report this to Master Dyran. Lets look around for a few minutes more." Hench paused, and then spoke a little quieter, "We should burn the bodies, too." Iris's mentor pulled her grasp away now and began moving toward the houses. Iris followed suit.
Quite a few doors had been busted in, which made it easier for the two to search the homes. They all looked pretty much the same: ransacked, looted of valuables, and tainted with blood and still bodies. Both Iris and Hench were completely silent as they did their walk-through, not able to form the correct words for their thoughts.
In the midst of the wreckage, there was a house. The door was damaged... but still locked tight. Hench twisted the handle for a few minutes for good measure. No give.
"This house isn't open," she told Iris. Instead of kicking it in, she knocked on the wood's surface. Neither of them expected an answer, but both of them hoped for one regardless.
"You coming back for more, huh? Didn't get enough the first time! You get the hell away from my house --I have nothing for you! I may not be able to get all of you but you best believe I'll sure as all hell get the first one that comes through that door!" A male voice permeated loudly from inside the house. The words startled the guardian and her trainee, but Hench steeled herself and spoke back.
"Be at ease," she called through the door. "I am Rhalla. I am out here with my companion, Iris. We are Remorda Guardians. We are not your enemies --we are here to help. We were not aware there was anyone left alive here."
"Prove it," the man's voice seemed to break, as if in relief. "Prove that you're not here to kill me an' my family."
"To live. To die. To protect those who I love... and those who deserve it. By this vow, I am bound to my duty as guardian. By this oath, I shall fight for our future. As an order, we will thrive together. As an order, we protect the innocent. To this order, I will give my soul, my strength, my best intentions. And to me, they will give eternal peace." Hench's words were reverent as she spoke aloud the joining oath of a Remorda Guardian.
There was silence... and then shuffling. The lock clicked open from the other side, and the door opened little by little until it revealed a little girl. The child ran away on sight of Hench, now showing a man sitting at the far side of the room. He was sickly and pale, with bloody wrappings tied around his belly. At his side was a woman who tended him and held him. And at his other side, was a bloody gardening pitchfork.
"My gods," Hench said, "Iris, go get Sorella. Quickly. He needs a medic."
Iris ran off at the command, leaving the guardian alone with his family.
Tears welled up in the man's eyes at the sight of the black-clad woman, who now approached him and his wife, who couldn't help but also sob at the presence of relief. "Oh, thank the gods. Thank the gods." She whispered, and then motioned to the girl, "Come here, Lily. Help is here, Lily. You don't have to be scared anymore."
The child ran over to her mother and curled into her arms.
"I can't," the man said with a strained voice. "I'm in pain and I can't talk well, I'm sorry."
"Shh," Hench instructed, kneeling in front of the family. "We have a healer with us. She'll take care of you and then we'll talk."
He nodded, but mouthed a thank you anyways.
Iris came in a few minutes later, Sorella rushing a few feet behind her. The old woman had been nothing short of terrified walking through the outside of the village, but she never ignored a cry for help. Azabela's grandmother carried a satchel slung over her shoulder, full of supplies. Originally, it was a pouch to be sold, but this purpose would do just fine.
The man's wife and child moved away from him as Sorella approached and quickly began undoing the old bandages. When they fell to the floor in a scarlet heap, everyone witnessed the severity of the wound. His stomach had a deep, now-festered gash right in the middle. Sorella didn't make any sound of surprise, in order to provide the family comfort.
"I'm going to need you to lay down, okay?" she told the man before looking to his wife. "Do you have any clean water?"
The woman rushed off without a word, coming in less than a minute later with a pail full of water. She set it by Sorella, who began her work. It took Azabela's grandmother a long while to fully treat the wound. Iris watched as she'd cleaned it and rubbed various salves over what had to be an infection. After the last set of concoctions, Iris noticed the man winced a lot less at the healer's touch. Peculiar earthy aromas filled the house as she worked. Last, she delicately stitched the wound, closing the gash and then wrapping her in fresh bandages.
"I've put Blairflower salve and Eldian wildbark seed-poultice on your would. It should clear the infection. I've given you crushed Mintwreath unguent for the pain, along with Havers' ointment," she told him as she pulled two smaller pouches from her pack. "The orange pouch has Frynx herb in it. Take it for five days, once a day. It'll keep the fever steady and keep the nausea at bay. The yellow has leaves of hazelgrass; you should have enough to take it twice a day every day until the wound heals. Certainly take this... it will help cure the sickness the infection has caused." Sorella rummaged again through her bag, pulling out one hempen tube and a single glass container full of a strange-looking, green balm. "Here is some extra Mintwreath and extra Havers' ointment. Clean the wound gently with water every night and rub both of these over it."
Azabela, who had come in at some point during the healing process, wrote her grandmother's instructions down on some parchment and handed it to the man's wife. On cue, the guy removed one bit of medicine from each pouch and popped them both in his mouth. After a moment of chewing and swallowing, he looked to Sorella Havers with wide, water-brimmed eyes.
"Thank you," he whispered and looked to them all. "Thank you all."
Sorella waved it away. "It was no problem. Get plenty of rest, and you should be fine."
Finally, he sat up, one hand rested gently on the newly-wrapped wound. "My name is Arden." He told them, "This is Cathaline, my wife. And this is Lily, our daughter. I suppose you all have questions about what happened here."
Hench nodded. "We do." Her voice softened, "Do you know who's responsible for this?"
"Not exactly," Arden answered with a grunt. "I figure it had to do with our harvest this year. We got a nasty infestation of beetles in our rye and our grain, so a lot of it died. The rye and grain is how we feed ourselves. We had to keep what we had... meaning, we couldn't pay the land tax imposed by whoever the hell he is. I dunno; I'm just a farmer."
Hench waited.
Arden continued. "They came in a little over a week ago, soldiers demanding their share to our mayor. O' course, we couldn't pay up. So then... they demanded his daughter as compensation. Old lad said no... an' he was cut down on the spot. An' then, all hell broke loose. They started attacking innocents, an' rounding up all the girls. That's when I grabbed my daughter an' wife and was trying to get them to safety." The villager looked down at his belly, "Got in a fight on the way into the house, as you can figure. Killed the man with my pitchfork. We made it in by the skin of our teeth and have been holed up ever since. Good thing I invested on those fancy locks last year, or we'd been dead with the rest o' them."
"Take heart, it is all over now. We're going to take you to the next village over with us so you and your family might find peace and community in this nightmare. We'll burn your friends and neighbors honorably. This, I swear. Where's the body of the man you killed?" Hench asked. "Might be able to find some evidence of who sent them."
"I'm pretty sure they hauled up their dead," Arden said. "But I did manage to rip something off the fellow I killed, in case I was dead by the time someone finally came." Now, the villager pulled a shred of cloth from his pocket. "Has some sort of symbol on it. Might be useful. I hope to gods it is. The bleeders need to pay for what they've done."
Hench took the tattered red cloth from him and eyed the design for a long moment. An extremely dark look passed over her face. The undiluted emotion present in the guardian's eyes almost frightened Iris. She'd never seen such anger in anyone.
Hench nodded a thank you to the man and then stood, showing the cloth to Azabela.
The huntress's eyes widened considerably and an odd understanding passed through the archer and Hench. "Rhalla... is that..."
"Start preparing the bodies and the wagon for travel," the mighty woman said through clenched teeth. "We'll bring them with us. We have to hurry. I have to get back to the sanctuary immediately."
Everyone started preparations as soon as the order was given. Hench looked over to Arden.
"I assure you, they'll pay for what they have done."
Those words came out as a growl.
A/N -- Hey, thanks for the read! Don't forget to let me know what you think in the comment section below! Hope you enjoyed the chapter and the painting!