Life Winder

Fresh Starts Lead to Rotten Ends

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Cycle of Flood

4th day of the month of War

51st cycle

The two-week ride back to Giroux was excruciating. His cheek screamed through the slightest of breezes, and the chronic urge to itch at the raw flesh ranged from exhausting to avoid, to damn near insufferable. When he had given in, he clawed at his face like an animal, howling in pain as he embedded finger-wide bands of fresh scars.

He fainted thrice off his horse, and awoke each time to a curtain of dirt along the charred surface of the remaining skin. Filth and mud dried to sharp flakes, cutting away at the lumps of exposed fat to which they clung. Too sore to wipe it away, and with fingers too dirty for it to do much good, he stifled an urge to scream with every bump—an open mouth serving only to exacerbate his condition. Agony his sole companion, he rode on in silent torment toward a home that would no longer recognize him. 

When he awoke earlier that day, he was met with a chorus of laughter and cheers. The barbarians had him set atop a chestnut-colored horse several grades below the one on which he'd arrived. After hitching him (poorly) to its back, they slapped the horse's ass, scurrying him away through the bristling wind with no more than a few days-worth of rations, and a response to his King's first: half-written on a sheet of parchment bound to his bag, the remainder written in blisters along his face. If not for the people of Dirnenbrough—a town wedged between the Edirnen Pass, the blood-belayed border between Giroux and Rashaad—he would have most-certainly perished en route.

And he's wondered each day since which fate were preferable to the other.

He hesitated on the road just ahead of Giroux's eastern gate. He left in the month of Famine, when the number of hours under the warming sun was nearest the number without. He tracked the speed of Solas Major across the sky, and was surprised to discover it reigned only four hours each day, bringing him to the month of War, and displacing the length of his visit to that of several months. Was it possible he was left oblivious that long? Would his King have allowed such a length of absence? Would his return communicate any more than his disappearance already had? Most importantly, was his position worth the risk? After all, he thought as he twisted the well-known proverb, get burned once, shame on you; get burned twice...

"A cloaked figure approaches from the road! Apprehend him! At once!"

A pack of Girouxian patrols spotted the strangely-garbed man and surrounded his horse on all sides. Where fabric and face melted in embrace, red and black patches of his suit had fused with his skin, rendering his appearance near unrecognizable to any who may have known him prior. He was therefore treated as a threat, and thrown from his horse onto open wound.

He was dragged from the scene by his scorched shoulder: dragged along the pressed dirt beyond Giroux's gates; dragged along her cobblestone streets; dragged along the polished stone floors of the King's Keep; and dragged away from what felt to him like the last choice afforded to him for the remainder of his One-forsaken life, directly to the foot of his King's seat in the banquet hall of the royal palace. To the misplaced merriment of the inebriated King, he was delivered just as he had grown tired of his company, amidst dining the stiff patrons of Giroux's elite. Their meal appeared to have just wrapped up, for the table was plastered with stacks of crumb-laden placemats, staged overtop with polished silver candelabras wielding lanky sticks of wax. Recognizing him immediately, The King clambered out of his seat to greet his lost servant:

"You've returned! And in such foul condition! Release him, release him now!" The guards loosened their grip, causing him to plummet to his knees, where he remained looking up upon his master. The King tilted his head, studying the length of his disfigurement. The room went quiet as others joined the examination. The servant's face burned with an invisible blush as he fell under duress of a great many eyes. They pried into the tragedy written across his face as more accosted him by the second. Soon thereafter, pupils surrounded him; floating in ponds of white, they hovered above to heave judgement below.