Duel:Gilwen v Karstaas

Location: Frostmaw Bank
Duelists: Gilwen (Team Hildegarde) vs Karstaas (Team Balgruuf, NPCed by Grailan)
Judges: Jesen, Pilar, and Shishi
Stakes: If Gilwen wins, she finds Brynjar, Balgruuf's deformed son, who has been hidden in the bank vaults to manage his father's treasury. Brynjar is rescued and pleads Hildegarde to spare his father's life. If Grailan wins, Brynjar is not discovered (dies?), and Balgruuf's embarrassment, by hiding his deformed son, costs him his life as there is no one left to plea for mercy on his behalf. 

Frostmaw Bank

The hulking beast of black marble that was the completed bank of Frostmaw, adorned with sculptures, gargoyles, and other statues that depicted a variety of creatures and races, had long since been bereft of the two dragons that opened and closed the mighty doors; they had been gone ever since Hildegarde's 'death', though their absence had been expected since Satoshi's vacancy of the throne. Thus the rune-carved doors had been propped open to be perpetually ajar, thus to allow the continued exits and entries of various citizens and bankers. But the place wasn't unguarded, and was neither simple nor without its secrets. Within, among the lines of Frost Giant guardians and through mazes of corridors, were many treasures and hidden shames of Frostmaw's elite. Even Balgruuf had a secret there. It was that secret that was the reason that Karstaas was sent there. Karstaas was better known as the "Headsman", and that was made apparent by the mighty Frost Giant's attire. His head was covered with a long black cloth that only had two eyeholes from which black-iris'd eyes blazed from within. A single shoulder was covered with one steel pauldron, and from his waist downward was covered with the armored leggings of steel platemail, forged to particularly fit his enormous Giant stature. Both hands held, near the neck and butt of the hilt of a large, long headsman's axe; it was the sort that was specifically made to be wielded to behead people, and required two hands to wield. His was made proportional to Frost Giant. With slow, almost reverently predatory steps, Karstaas headed toward those open doors, with the intention of striding within.

Gilwen’s presence in Frostmaw was one of selfish reconnaissance, born from a need to find her brethren, either alive or dead, and mark their position for future extraction; she had adopted the form of a white owl, and had taken to the skies. As the elven leader ended her mission, and began the trek back to relative safety, the Frost Giant Karstaas’s entrance into the bank drew her attention and she deviated from her destination to roost on the high awning of the bank. She sat still and silent for a few minutes, taking in the whatever noise resonated from within the building, to gauge the level of threat before going through the swift and seamless motions of returning to her elven form once more. The typical leathers she wore, enchanted to shift with her, offered little protection against weapons, but they provided silence and agility that other armor simply did not. A few seconds later, and then the elf dropped from the awning and into a small snowbank just left of the door before scrambling out and following Karstaas, though minutes after, into the bank with reckless abandon. If she had meant to be stealthy about it, Gilwen’s error was made the moment the breached the threshold; she was out in the open, with no cover to hide behind.

The knowledge that he was being followed was made apparent to Karstaas by the entrance of the elf in breaching the bank's entry with reckless abandon and the swiftness exemplified by neediness and desperation. As such, the sight that greeted Gilwen was the Frost Giant turning across the lobby proper, in order to shift his stance so that the hooded headsman faced the elf with the space of the room between them. He made no sound, and no expression was visible beneath that black cloth, only glittering black eyes that held cold, calculating lack of empathy in their gaze; he felt nothing for Gilwen, Hildegarde's campaign, or the lives that were affected thereof, and no sympathy would be offered from the executioner for their plight and quest. It was coin that drove Karstaas, and inspired him into action. One of the tables beside him was hooked beneath the surface of it by the large palm of the giant, and it was given a hefty lift and push, which flung the furniture like a rag across the distance between himself and the elven scout. It was aimed to smash against her. But Karstaas was not idle afterward; he followed behind the table with large, powerful strides that propelled his muscled body in its wake, and both hands hefted up the giant beheading-axe, whereupon, once within reach of Gilwen, it'd come crashing down in a plummeting arc meant to cleave her -and the table- in two.

Gilwen's vambraces typically looked like nothing more than corded, severely faded leather that was wound around her forearms from wrists to elbow. However, the moment Karstaas reached for the table, the corded material pulsed with life anew, and immediately began unraveling, and growing into thick, sentient vines that wriggled in the air around the druid. The moment that table was flung toward her, those vines lashed out to intercept the projectile, and rerouted to meet the swing of the axe. Of course, a wooden object verses a sharpened axe means the table is cleaved in two, along with the tendrils of vines that held it. But, that immediate buffer time, regardless of how small, allowed Gilwen to dodge to the right just in time to avoid meeting the same fate as the furniture. The elf wasted no time in scrambling away from the Giant, wanting to place as much distance between herself and Karstaas as possible; there was no way she’d be able to take on a Giant, so attacking from a distances was where her game sat. Despite the trimming her foliage took, the ensorcelled vines began to regrow the length it had lost, and this time, sprouted sharp and threatening thorns, while the severed bits sprang to life and pierced the tiling of the floor to wriggle back into the ground and away from danger. The vines that still encircled her arms reached and lashed out like a dozen whips, striking at Karstaas’s face in hopes to blind the Giant.

The sound of the axe crashing through vine and table was a deafening crack that sent splinters and shards of wood flying in an eager explosion of debris that thereafter showered the towering and muscled form of Karstaas, cascading down mostly-exposed muscles. The axehead's blade dug into the floor deep, and the initial tug of the executioner yielded no progress in pulling the weapon free. The hooded head turned quickly to spy Gilwen but was immediately lashed with whip after whip of vines, which sliced up the headsman's hood and face, which let the bottom half of the black cloth fall away. It revealed everything from the nose downward; his jaw was missing. An iron bar met at both ends, holding in the tongue, but otherwise, it was a contraption of flesh, sinew, and bone. The axe tugged free, and with a step forward and push of his back leg -and a snap of his arm forward sent the axe horizontally flung at Gilwen. It rotated over and over like some sort of frisbee or saw, though was deadly with the gleam of the sharpened blade that glinted in the light of the lobby as it sought to bifurcate Gilwen at the hips.

Gilwen hadn’t stopped moving the moment she had dodged the first swing of the axe; she continued to stretch the distance between herself and Karstaas until the lobby provided no further retreat, and all the while her vines were lashing at the giant. However, the moment the thorny appendages snagged the executioner’s hood, splitting the material enough to show the missing jaw and the iron work in its stead, the elf’s attention faltered, briefly so, but enough to cause her to stumble into a chair she had meant to avoid just as the axe was flung toward her. A sense of panic overwhelmed her, and where a cool head might have told her to duck, to flatten herself against the floor, she instead tried to scramble over the table, and there lie her error; while she wasn’t chopped in two at the waist, the axe did connect with her hips, though the handle smashed into her and threw her against the teller’s desk. Movement immediately thereafter was impossible, dazed and battered as she was, but those vines that had wriggled below the floor of the bank sprung forth in that moment, climbing the pillars, stretching across the tiled floors from each corner of the bank in thin wisps of foliage that offered no immediate threat. However, behind the teller’s desk, a large pod sprouted, and within seconds grew into a mammoth sized vensus fly trap that leaned over the desk to protect the elf while she regained a sense of self, while also threatening the unarmed giant with long, sharp teeth that did not promise flexibility unlike its smaller kin. Gilwen was not able to attack in return this time.

The Frost Giant's eyes narrowed from behind those eyeholes of the black hood that covered now only the top of his head, the bottom since sliced off and in tatters upon the bank's floor. They scrutinized the fly trap with only the hefty, heavy rumble from within the depths of his mighty chest, bare except for the thick leather strap that ran across it to the opposite hip and held the mighty steel pauldron on his shoulder. A quick scan of his surroundings did not yield the location of his beheading axe, so the giant was, for the moment, unarmed as he sized up this giant venus fly trap. Rather than attack it headlong, however, the executioner had a different plan; he pushed into motion along the length of the room in a sprint on powerful legs in long strides. The male, amidst his run, grasped mighty hold of a banker's table along his path in order to bring it in toward his chest, a hand firmly on either long-side of the furniture. His foot planted and his body twisted to sprint directly at the plant. The table, then, was used like a wedge; with a hefty grunt and expulsion of breath through his nostrils, one end of the table was shoved against those bottom teeth, the other at the top teeth, to force and keep ajar the maw of the dangerous plant. With this manner, the executioner leapt his massive body to land heavily on the other side of the teller's desk. Unarmed, he sent punch after punch toward the frail, thin body of the elf, meaning to pulverize her bones to dust.

Gilwen struggled with her injury dealt by the blow of the axe, and while there was no blood and no gaping wound that needed repair, her hip joint had been shattered by the blow, her pelvis fractured, and internal bleeding. With no time to heal herself, a simple prayer to Lauria was whispered while the Giant sized up her Venus fly trap, and with a healer’s touch, the pain she suffered was deadened immediately by the manipulation of the nerves affected by the blow and subsequent damage. There was no way for the elf to stand, let alone evacuate her temporary sanctuary, before Karstaas’s moved. So, the foliage that had taken over the bank moved her instead; with graceless precision, the creeping ivy shot forward and snagged the elf by the waist, curling around her svelte figure to drag her mercilessly away the moment the executioner leapt over the teller desk to rain down those deadly blows. Thankfully, the sentient plant life was able to extract the druid before a single punch could be landed, and she was hauled to the furthest corner of the room, though still well within danger. During the extraction, the vines that had climbed the pillars that kept aloft the bank’s roof had grown expotentially larger, and the moment Gilwen was hauled into the corner, the plants worked in tandem: the ivy-like vines that removed her from immediate threat curled over and around her in a protective, but small dome, while the vines around the pillars shot toward the open door to root outside, and in the moment after, those pillars were ripped down to bring the bank’s roof crashing down atop them both.

The fury of the executioner was too much to realize that Gilwen had slipped away; his fists rained down with deafening cracks again and again against the side of the teller's counter that Gilwen previously hid behind. It splintered, cracked, and faced further abuse by every bone-crunching strike from the Frost Giant. Shards of wood and debris flew all around him, pelting his muscled arms and rippling chest. That is, until there was a heave. A heave and a quake of the earth. It was enough to snap Karstaas from his frenzy, in order to look straight up; the bank's roof collapsed -were they buried beneath tons of stone? Dust filled the air, concealing everything.

Gilwen wins.

When the dust finally settled, the state of the bank was clear: those who had not cleared the lobby, and retreated deeper into the bank, when the brawl began were trapped beneath the ruined roof along with Karstaas and Gilwen. After a few minutes, the stillness within the destruction was disturbed by the sentient foliage under the druid's command, and slowly, the strengthened vines worked to pull away the debris that had fallen over the cocoon Gilwen had tucked herself into so that the elf could find freedom, to observe the wreckage she had wrought, and to ensure Karstaas was either dead, buried, or incapacitated. Still battered and broken, Gilwen required the help of the creeping hedera and an elf-sized piece of timber to hobble around and over the fallen bits of roof. She wasn’t trying to leave the scene, but delve deeper into the building to ensure that innocents weren’t trapped, or worst; while the lobby was the only area of the bank destroyed, Gilwen had no immediate knowledge of that. And a good thing she searched to bank, because trapped within the vaults, she found not only a few innocent employees, but also Brynjar, the deformed son of Balgruuf. With a bit of persuasion, and after name dropping Hildegarde, Brynjar agreed to help Gilwen back to camp, if only to speak with the silver dragon.