Broken Steel (Steelshod 61)
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I think people tend to put trigger warnings in front of content like this. So, yeah. Be warned! This episode is not for the faint of heart.
When they reach the Svardic camp, their wounds are seen to by a Cassaline medico
Soon there is confidence that neither Unferth, nor Hubert, nor Leona are in danger of immediate death.
And so all three of them, plus Cyril, are brought before Taerbjornsen and a few of his closest advisors.
Leona is, of course, stripped of her armor and weapons
Hubert is stripped of his robes
And the mail shirt he wears hidden beneath his robes
And his alchemical bandolier
And the poisoned needles he keeps in the sleeves of his robes
And the lockpick he keeps hidden in the lining of his robes
And… you get the idea.
Hubert and Leona are stripped down to their undergarments and forcibly seated in simple wooden chairs.
Taerbjornsen looks them over, unimpressed.
Just a fat old man and a well-built farmgirl.
He tells Cyril to get answers out of them…
Defenses, numbers, strategies. Weaknesses, names, everything.
Cyril looks Hubert and Leona over, opts to start with Hubert.
He approaches the old monk, knife in hand, asks him to identify himself.
Hubert meets Cyril’s eyes, with a twinkle that seems entirely out of place.
“Hello!” Hubert says warmly, in flowing Loranette. “They call me Brother Hubert, friend. And who are you?”
Cyril is slightly surprised to hear his mother tongue.
He gives a mocking bow. “Cyril Thibault DuChamps, at your service.”
“And what the devil are you doing here with these folks, Monsieur DuChamps?” Hubert replies.
Some of Taerbjornsen’s advisors seem uncomfortable with them speaking in Loranette, but Unferth and Taerbjornsen are fluent, so they listen along just fine.
“That would by my own business, Brother Hubert,” Cyril says. “After all, you are here to answer our questions, not the other way around.”
“Quite, quite,” Hubert says.
He winks at Cyril and hums a little tune as the Loranette approaches him.
Cyril feels a momentary flutter in the pit of his stomach, as if he just swallowed something distasteful.
He ignores it, unable to recognize the signs of a malocchio… an evil eye.
Cyril shows Hubert the knife up close, explains he will be forced to use it if Hubert does not tell them everything Taerbjornsen wishes to know.
Hubert nods sagely.
Cyril tests the edge, opening a thin, stinging cut across Hubert’s arm.
Hubert shivers. “Oh dear, stop, stop!” he groans.
Cyril pauses, expectantly.
“Beg pardon, Cyril… I can call you Cyril, can’t I? Just a forewarning.”
Hubert affects an almost embarrassed expression.
“I once knew a woman that gained immense gratification from even rather horrific amounts of pain. Unsettling, in a sense, but it was also… beautiful. I’ve tried, I’ve truly tried, and it just hasn’t worked for me.”
Cyril and the Svards look at the strange old man in quizzical disgust as he rambles on.
“I just tell you this so you know, Cyril. If I manage to achieve that rather unique road to climax, do forgive me.
“I know that’s not why you’ll be hurting me, so I feel it would almost be a sort of liberty taken with you… you’re not consenting to a carnal encounter with me, of course.
“So please just be patient. I assure you that I’ll try my best to answer all of your questions once I’ve finished.”
Cyril is almost speechless.
“Strange words from a Torathi priest,” is all he can think to say.
Hubert just grins at him. “And who said I was a Torathi priest, exactly?”
Cyril has no clever retort to this, falling momentarily silent.
“Well then!” Hubert says. “Where were you? Torturing me, yes?”
“Not if you tell us what we ask,” Cyril says.
“Oh, I don’t know much, Cyril. Just a silly old man, after all.”
Annoyed, Cyril slashes Hubert again.
Hubert shivers, takes a deep breath.
Cyril asks another question, about the number of Serpentes and their composition.
Hubert just grins at him.
Cyril is growing impatient.
He widens the incision on Hubert’s arm
Slices deep, leveraging the thin, razor sharp blade beneath Hubert’s skin
Hubert keeps breathing in irregular, panting breaths, not unlike someone in the throes of ecstasy.
Cyril still finds it incredibly off-putting, but he labors on.
Leona, meanwhile, has begun screaming at Cyril to stop.
Cyril calmly tells her that if she answers the questions instead, he will happily do so.
Problem is, Leona doesn’t know the answer.
She’s utterly ignorant of the defenses, tactics, numbers…
She does her job. She fights alongside her friends, and that’s all she’s ever needed to know.
Cyril can work with this.
He’s opened up Hubert’s arm and begun strumming his tendons, eliciting pained gasps from the old monk that he can’t play off as sexual pleasure
He presses Leona on the one thing she knows: The people of Steelshod.
She tells them names, styles… it’s relatively inconsequential in the scheme of things, but it’s still something.
Cyril presses her to tell them more about Aleksandr and Yorrin… what are their weaknesses?
How can they be manipulated, driven to fear or anger or recklessness?
And finally, Hubert breaks
He declares that he will speak, if Cyril eases up on the pain.
Cyril does so, taking a small step back.
Hubert’s blood has run down his arm into a pool on the ground,
The old man grimaces, flexing his blood-soaked hand.
Hubert shifts his eyes to Taerbjornsen, and when he speaks he uses the Svardic tongue, not Loranette or Middish, and all ears in the tent hear his words.
He speaks of Aleksandr and Yorrin
Of the demons, sorcerers, and monsters they have vanquished
Of the star-steel sword Aleksandr carries, that slew an ancient god of the Thaumati.
Of Yorrin and his ability to pass through walls, slay his foes unseen, and walk away unharmed.
“Weaknesses?” Hubert says, laughing. “You are not so lucky.
“They have come for you, and now there is nothing on God’s green earth that will keep them from you.”
At times, Hubert’s Svardic seems to falter, and he chokes his way past unfamiliar Svardic words.
Many in the tent feel a growing sense of dread, and unease
Cyril included.
Suddenly Taerbjornsen rises from his huge seat.
“Unferth, silence him,” he commands.
The bersark prompty muffles Hubert’s face with one huge hand.
“Everyone, calm yourselves. Bring me the High Priest,” Taerbjornsen growls.
One of Hakon’s pupils, High Priest Jerk, arrives shortly.
He immediately senses the cloud of Vlari Blood Magic Hubert has cast over the room, instilling in them a sense of fear and dread.
He dips his hands in Hubert’s blood and paints Cyril and the other advisors with a dab of it, speaking a Vlari incantation as he does.
“Watch him,” Taerbjornsen commands the priest.
Jerk nods, and keeps a vigil over Hubert as Unferth removes his hand.
Hubert shrugs meekly.
“Can’t blame a chap for trying, can you?” he asks with a sheepish grin.
Unferth clocks Hubert across the face.
He’s done watching Cyril work.
He draws his own knife and goes to Leona.
“She spoke to end your pain,” he says to Hubert.
He slices across her shoulder, and Hubert narrows his eyes.
“I think you will speak to end hers.”
Unferth begins cutting up the Spatalian woman
And Hubert’s bravado and schemes fall apart as easily as that.
But still, he doesn’t give them what they want.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he says softly.
“Is okay, Hubey,” Leona says through gritted teeth. “Not your fault.”
She looks at Unferth. “You,” she hisses.
“I will kill you, bear man.”
“Good,” Unferth says. “Embrace your animal nature. Let’s continue.”
Unferth cuts her again, and again.
Finally culminating in him slicing off most of her left ear.
Leona screams in pain and unleashes a string of Spatalian curses.
Cyril, for his part, finds this all rather uncomfortable.
Torturing the monk is bad enough, but disfiguring a woman doesn’t sit well with him at all.
Boy, he really won’t like what comes next.
Unferth observes that Hubert may be laboring under the mistaken idea that only Leona’s body is at risk.
He asks Taerbjornsen if he can take the woman back to his tent, to use her and prepare her for a much more invasive interrogation tomorrow.
Taerbjornsen nods, waving them on.
The Jarl has watched everything impassive, even as some of his other advisors excused themselves.
Clearly Taerbjornsen takes no joy in the torture, and equally clearly he is not especially bothered.
He is just… empty. Emotionless. When Unferth drags Leona away, Taerbjornsen stands.
He goes to leave… dismisses everyone, tells Cyril to secure Hubert to the chair, and posts two bersarks outside the tent.
“Cyril,” Hubert says, a pleading tone leaking into his voice.
Cyril pauses, looks back.
“What… what is he doing to her? Unferth?”
Cyril frowns. “I am quite certain I do not want to know, mon ami,” he says.
He doesn’t wait for Hubert’s reply, instead just walking out of the tent.
Unferth takes Leona to his own tent.
First, he rapes her.
While it happens, she struggles against him.
He encourages her to fight harder.
Leona manages to draw his knife, stabs him with it.
He ignores the blade sticking out of his side, pins her hands down.
Continues to encourage her to struggle, to fight.
He smears his blood across her face.
He growls in her ear, bites her shoulder
The longer it goes, the longer a feeling of nameless, formless rage and fear and pain consumes Leona.
She fights harder and harder, and the more she fights, the more vigorously Unferth fights back.
Everything Unferth does has the sociopathic dual qualities that define him
Animalistic, primal, vicious… normally driven by rage and lust and passion and emotion.
But he does it all emotionlessly.
It’s like he’s going through the rote steps of being a beast of insatiable hungers, but he could be as reserved and calm as a monk if he chose to be.
Soulless.
By the time he’s finished, Leona is a shivering, shaking, wreck.
She feels violated at a far deeper level than just her physical body.
He drags her back to the tent, lashes her to the chair across from Hubert
Her clothes are shredded, blood-soaked rags
Hubert says her name, softly, horrified.
And she barely seems to notice.
“Enjoy your night together,” Unferth tells Hubert.
“I doubt you’ll have another.”
Eugh. That was something alright. I need a shower.
Well, that’s where we’ll stop for now. Maybe tomorrow will look up! Or not. Who knows.
It probably goes without saying, but the actual reality at the table for a lot of this was… hmm… less in-character than we usually do, let’s say. We summarized a lot of the stuff at the end there, because we all agreed it made sense that it would happen, but none of us really wanted to dwell on it too much.
Well, I mean, Leona’s gonna have to dwell on it for a little while. But hopefully you get the idea.
It was around here that my players realized some stuff, though! u/bayardofthetrails realized Cyril just wasn’t evil enough, and probably wasn’t gonna stay a bad guy forever in this kind of company.
And u/ihaveaterribleplan realized that he wasn’t gonna be able to enjoy playing Unferth for too much longer. Ironically, of all three of us, he’s the one that usually dislikes playing evil characters! He just took it as a challenge in this case, and, well, challenge completed, I guess.
Edit: Next!
Posted Jun 26, 2017, 12:08 AM UTC · edited