There was a horrible sense of dread that had grown in her the further away she had traveled, the ball at the base of Roslins stomach twisting and turning and twisting so much that it had felt as though it had come alive. Grown three times its size. Eating her from the inside out. Her gaze darting through her surroundings, taking in the shadows and the way they flickered as they fought the light, of course there had been the sense of regret at leaving the relative protection of her home, her own grandmother probably still lost within the confines of the kitchen as she made their dinner. Heed the warnings, and just do as you're bid. Stay inside and watch the shadows from the window. The veil wore thin here, and there had always been the possibility of disaster on the horizon and blood on the streets. Old vendettas.....as Sanctus had once said in his first sermon to his adoring public. An old blood feud that could never end.
How often had the stories been told, after all? How many times repeated and drawn before her very eyes? Everywhere around her she had seen it. The reminders. Since her childhood, she had wandered the streets of Fortuna only partly understanding the statues and the markings and the etchings and paintings that had been erected all around her. The ugly masses of demonic faces and human rage as swords ran through horrendously twisted and ugly bodies. An old blood feud. A horrid war. That was what it had always been. And still was. A perpetual conflict between demon and human that had raged for millenia, pulling and tearing at the veil - like breaking skin - until it had become so thin that anyone could see right through it.
There had never been peace in Fortuna.
Not in the way that everyone had pretended it to be.
There had always been the eye cast downwards, the constant paranoia of a world living on the precipice of ruin. They had always felt it, the people here. It was why they had their painted icons of the Savior hung above their doors. Why they erected their statues and their churches and followed the sabbath so closely. There had always been the sense of doom souring the air that they breathed. And the gate? Well......
It lingered in the place where every eye could see.
Looming above the thousands of statues and depictions that littered their daily lives, only driving the point home. There would never be peace in Fortuna. The war that had raged in their ancestors would forever burn forward into modern day, and even then, her feet working as quickly as they could to find her way to her father, Roslin could sense it. It's eye focused on her as her steps announced her own presence. The evil always worked best in the deepest of shadows. Twisting and maligning the world around it, bending it to its will....
She hated this world.
Hated how it operated.
Hated everything she had been forced to give up. To give away. To her, her days had forever been like living and breathing underwater, her every limb a heavy weight she had been forced to carry alone for so many years. Perhaps that was what had twisted her grandmother into the husk that she now was....the life that they had been both forced to exist within. Bent and broken. Dark and angry. Roslin hadn't even waited to hear Mam's indignant cry at her escape. Turning the corner, her brisk trot soon became a run, her eyes working quickly instead to take in the dimly lit surroundings to find her way to the corner her father most certainly occupied.
Minutes passed, achingly calm and hollow.
And all she had heard was the sound of her own feet, Roslin's cold gaze ignoring the warm glow coming from the windows and the buildings that she passed. It hadn't taken a genius to notice just how alone she now was. Just how quiet the world became at night. It was the silence that worried her most of all, her mind only just then realizing how many people continued to heed this curfew without hesitation. Would anyone even come if something were to happen? What would she do if it did...? If an attack came as she went for her father?
And him? What of him...? If she found him...what then?
What would so she do to get her father home? There was no way he would acquiesce to her demands. She knew that as well as any member of her own family. There was stubbornness that had always lived within him, and despite how he had felt about Sanctus and their shrinking world of influence, she knew he would continue on in his responsibility...no matter what dangers he knew he would be in. Would their arguing attract attention? How angry would he get? Surely it wouldn't get so bad....she was a woman grown now.
She was not the foolish child she had been years ago.
He would listen to her. He had to.
Or she wouldn't leave.
It was as simple as that.
At first, the sounds had been so far and few between - - sofaint - - that she hadn't entirely understood what they were, lost in her own thoughts as the girl had been. She hadn't needed to consider where she was going, after all, not really, the path as familiar to her as the back of her own hand. Hadn't needed to pay attention. In the end however, it had been the sound of metal clanking against stone that had pulled her from her own thoughts, the sound so abrupt that it entirely caught her off guard. She stilled, her ears pricked, the hairs rising at the back of her neck. In the end, it was inevitable cry and a familiar grunt of pain that caught her, sending a chill down her spine. Her legs found the movement then before she could even stop herself, and it was just as she caught sight of him as she turned a corner that another noise erupted, a gutteral growl so deep and so feral that it caused her blood to run cold.
She hadn't needed to be a demon hunter or a sworn sword to understand what it was.
She hadn't even needed to pick up on the horrid mixture of the scent of death and blood and sulphur to realize what was happening.
It was the blood that she saw spilling across the ground that caused a chill to run up her spine and drive the point home. She followed it with her eyes, for the moment not even realizing that her world had become encircled by enemies. A thick red line right across cobblestone and concrete, dripping and dragging right to the source....
....To the prone body of her father as he lay on the ground, his crisp white uniform stained red with his blood pooling around him. She could only look on blankly as he worked to fight off a creature that pulled and tugged brutally at his arm as he fought and cried. It was horrifying.
Debilitating.
Shocking.
".....Papa!"
The word was out before she could stop it, the sight contorting Roslin's expression into a sick look of pure horror and fear as she began to rush blindly towards the scene. She hadn't even seen the other strangers that lurked around and above them all. The demons in sheeps' clothing. All she had noticed, all that she could think of, was making it to her father's side....of finding a way to fight off the creature even though she knew it would be near impossible.
Even from here she could see that even he couldn't do it, trained as he was.
Every time he gained an inch, kicked it away....there it was again on him.
The twisted creature, all folding skin and hooded eyes, moving and biting him again, scratching and stabbing, its' movements so jerky and twisted they were nearly impossible to understand.
"....No! Stay away!"
The voice of her father as he called out to her, realizing what was happening. "Stay back! Get out of here! Find help! Ughhhhh!" Tugging violently at his arm, she watched as a new streak of red colored her father's white sleeve, the blood flowing freely and his the man's pallor growing deathly pale in response. "Run! GO!"
But she didn't run. She only hesitated, Roslin's steps faltering despite her better sense. The clothing she wore would make it almost impossible to do anything, the weight of her skirts alone enough to slow her down. "Roslin! GET AWAY! RUN!"
And she didn't.
Her eyes only darted madly at that call, noting the lack of movement around them for help. The echoing screeches had begun by then, the calls of her father enough to rouse the bloodlust of others that lurked nearby. There was no running and she knew it. They would be on them both if she even tried. Of course, in the end, all she could do was rush to close the distance between them, her heart pounding so loudly at that point all she could hear was the blood rushing through her veins in turn.
"Ahhh...!"
In moments she was at her father's side. And in miliseconds the girl's racing mind had searched out the dagger he wore at his thigh as he grappled, the girl struggling to pull it free as he fought and kicked in return. The creature hissed and screeched all the while, pulling fiercely at her father as it did. But she tried her best, grabbing a firm hold of her parent as it tried to pull him away. Out the dagger fell, clanking loudly to the ground as they wrestled. And with a blind eye she felt for it until she found its familiar handle, her shaking hand squeezing it so tightly her bones ached in response.
It was one well placed kick to the creature's face that sent it reeling for the second that she needed, her father's foot pulling away just in time for Roslin to get the momentum to close the distance and abruptly dig the dagger into its folded flesh. She hadn't known where exactly she eventually struck, but she knew it was enough to send it screaming backwards in pain, its cry so horrid and inhuman it pierced her very ears. Out the dagger went almost immediately in response. And then in it went again. Out. And in. And out.
And in again, the rush of movement leaving a blind trail of stab wounds and blood as it screamed and screamed and screamed. Whether her father was stumbling away or not she hadn't known yet, but her hands were still holding the dagger tightly as the creature fell to the ground, writhing in its own filth as she stared. Her blue eyes, wild and confused, never left its form, even for a second as she felt her father roughly trying to pull her to her feet.
"....We have to go! Run!"
Half-heard words, the ringing in her ears confusing and muddling her brain through heaving breaths. By then the bellows had begun, the sound of a thousand feet running through the streets. And her legs, like jelly, struggled to find their purchase as she stood. It was her father that began their stumble at an escape. Her father, through all his wounds and pain, that got them running. Where they had planned to go, she hadn't known, but almost immediately they were moving away from the city's center, avoiding the wider streets and opting for the smaller alleys as they ran.
Night had fallen hours ago, bringing with it the eery calm and silence that always inevitably followed. She had never liked it, that feeling. The coldness that it brought. The strange sense of entering a completely different world, a voided echo of the one everyone traversed during the day. Her eyes briefly scanning the outdoors through the cloudy window, she could already see it, the shadows playing in the corners. Twisting and turning like some living thing hidden within. To her, they had always been like the drawings and paintings that she had grown up with, of monsters mutated and ruined by their own corruption, waiting in the wings for their victims to come within reach. She had never known when they would strike, or how.....but then again, wasn't it how the world had always worked in this place? Hadn't her people always lived under that constant threat and shadow....?
It was why, for centuries, they had placed painted icons of the Savior above their doors, after all.
Why they had always carried a small bag of salt and flour to any new home they moved into...their way of warding off the misfortune that constantly lurked around them. The demons that always waited in the wings.
Light and dark.
Sun and moon.
Good and evil.
There had never been one without the other. She understood. It was the way of the world after all, a testing and breaking of sinew and bone into something new.
.....Something different.
His test of the resiliency of mankind....
And something Roslin had never found herself resonating with as the years had worn on.
"He won't be back for another hour or so. There's no point in keeping vigil like that. Come now. Let's go."
And she said nothing.
Only continued peering into the darkness like some mesmerized thing, the light from behind her making it just that much more difficult to see. Her fingers absentmindedly picking at her cuticles, she looked on as the lights from the gaslamps lit the world beyond, casting the majority of the streets into a strange and ethereal glow. It warmed the brick and stone and the concrete that it met. Pooled and collected on the cobblestone street, narrow and broken as it was, reflecting off the puddles nearby. She hadn't liked the idea of her father being called away like this.
She hadn't liked it at all.
He was well beyond the point of being used like some sort of godhand. Older than most of his brethren. So what if the streets of Fortuna had become restless and cold of late? So what if they felt the veil growing thin once again....? At that, she could not help but feel the frown deepening within her, the constant movement of her grandmother behind her like the movement of a ghost, quiet but perceptible all the same. She hadn't liked it either, this situation. But what could they have done?
Argue their point with the center of their world? March down to the gates of the citadel and demand they be let in....?
They would be laughed out of existence.
They would have been ignored.
They had been for years.
If it had been Solemnis......
At that she twisted the ring she wore halfheartedly, turning it and turning it and turning it into oblivion. Their world had been destroyed the day he had died. Destroyed so completely that their world had twisted completely upside down. What could they have done....? What could she have done to change a lick of it, watching as Fortuna had fallen under some strange thrall over the years....?
"They want him dead..."
The words had been spoken so quietly that Roslin herself had not even realized she had spoken them at all, the sound more of a breath than anything.
"They hate him and they want him dead...."
Words that she had spoken a thousand times before, though the dread she had been feeling tonight had been so much more palpable. He can't fight anymore and they know it. They've place him in this position on purpose. They refuse to change it for a reason. This is Sanctus. It is all him.....horrible crooked and twisted little creature as he is. I can't let this happen. I refuse. How long it was before she finally moved she didn't know, but in the end it had been the muscles of her legs that had worked first, Roslin body moving so mechanically that she hadn't really needed to consider where she would go next. Up from the seat she rose, her fingers still hurriedly twisting the ring she wore on her finger as took one last glance out the window at the emptiness beyond. Then, immediately to the door she went without a thought.
Before she knew it, she had turned the lock of the door, moving briskly outside and disappearing as quickly as she could into the cobblestone streets beyond. She hadn't cared that a curfew had been put in place. Didn't care that not a soul wandered the streets she now did. This world disturbed her, the way they existed. Always hiding. Always pretending.... Willing down the overwhelming sense of dread she felt for herself, it was her father she had hurriedly begun to search out instead, making her way towards the corner she knew where she would find him. The corner ofCorso and Via Sacra. Near the statue of the Savior.
She would listen for the siren's call. That would be the warning that danger was coming. But she knew her legs would take her there faster.
And maybe if they did....? Well......
Perhaps.....
Perhaps just maybe she could force her father's hand. Force him out of this foolish world instead.
