Charybdis Looms

Islands on a Sea of Blood

Nilena frowned as she watched the mob approach the small caravan on the road ahead of them.  The indurlaan had espied them first, a few paces ahead of her on the winding road that was leading them to their destination.

As such mobs were, they were a dirty, tattered lot, survivors most likely from the most recent clashes along Dynastic borders with the dying kingdoms of the land.  Merchant caravans had been the target of such mobs with increasing frequency in the last few moons as the land continued to convulse in mortal agony.

"Are you going to let them attack the merchants without lifting a finger, paladin?"  The indurlaan threw a hard look at her with its reptilian eyes.

"I thought you took an oath to protect the weak and innocent."

Nilena's face tightened at the jibe.

"I don't need you to remind me of my oaths, snake."  She rasped. 

She hesitated for good reason.  No knight worth the training would rush into a situation without understanding it first.  If she was to rush forward without assessing the enemy's strength, she could find herself overwhelmed.  And the indurlaan wouldn't be the one getting raped repeatedly and beaten if it got captured.  Nilena's eyes almost immediately pulled off her reptilian guide and back to the caravan where the merchant guard were preparing their weapons.

"Before I rush in, blade raised, let us see if we'll be protecting the weak and the innocent.  Or the merchant's cargo."

Sure enough, the guard, a handful of rough looking fellows with well worn weapons and battered armor, took one look at the mob and saw they were numbered five or six to one and wisely stepped out of the way.

The merchants, however, had other ideas.  She watched with narrowing eyes as a pair of them, thin, desperate looking men themselves, hopped off the lead wagon, swords in hand as they began shouting at the mob.  Which, at first, ignored them as they scrambled over the heavily laden wagons, pulling aside tarps and pushing less valuable items onto the ground in a search for food and other precious commodities.

That quickly changed, however, when one of the merchants cut down the nearest mob member with a wild swing of his sword.

"Fool."  She hissed, reaching over her waist to loosen her sword in its sheath with a tug even as the mob turned with a shout towards the two merchants.

"You should've just let them take what they wanted!"  Then she was kicking her dragon into motion with a stab of her toes.

Hissing like steam escaping a boiling kettle, the chunky ground dragon took off with surprising speed, its rolling gait covering an astonishing amount of ground in a short period of time.  Not that any amount of speed would save the merchant who struck first.  Even as Nilena's eyes fell onto him, he was being literally torn apart by the angry mob, his arms, legs and head swiftly being separated from his torso.

That left his comrade uneasily holding his sword and staring at a mob covered in the blood of his colleague.

Nilena's sword cleared its sheath with a hiss of steel against leather.  'I hate this part.'  She thought darkly.  Then she was past the merchant and into the mob, her sword swinging down in quick, practiced strokes.

In eerie echo on snowy Charybdis, the Ice Born mob had struck.  The first had their bodies tumbled back down the approach's incline, cut nearly in two by Donal's massive axe.  Yet there were more, always more scrambling up to replace them, their faces lean and haunted, eyes dark and desperate.

The next got the big axe crown first, Donal using it like a spear, thrusting it two handed into the man's chest.  Hitting the thin body like a battering ram, the blow knocked the man off his feet and sent him tumbling back into a handful of his comrades, the lot of them tangling limbs and falling down the slope.