RP:Pandora's Caedan

Part of the To Haunt A Hero Arc

Summary: Lionel learns the fate of Caedan Navarre, a fellow Catalian with ample history in Hollow. His madness compels him to "free" her at once, but to do so is to invite calamity upon his fractured life. For this girl, this psychic and seer, harbors a hatred for her once-prince that will not be quenched.

Frostmaw Tavern

Lionel slides the stone between his fingers. To the patrons of the tavern, he looks utterly mad; a well-clad knight with an aura of familiarity flinging his hand around like a drunken fool. There is no stone, after all. His hallucinatory dead friend couldn't have handed him a thing. He sits there for hours, but none dare disturb him; he pays well for his ale, after all, and he carries an incredible sword. He snaps out of his total delirium when he overhears two large men make mention of a crazy woman in a cell in Rynvale whilst betting one-another all sorts of things neither one of them owns amidst a bawdy game of arm-wrestling. The woman's name is Caedan Navarre. Lionel knows that name. The man is not who he once was. His fragile mental state has given birth to an extreme variation of the come-what-may charge-head-first personality he's fabled for. Whatever the reason he's hallucinated Griff, it's all symptomatic of a broken man's desire to fight evil at any cost. Perhaps his soul is crying out to right all the wrongs of his past. Caedan is a former citizen of Catal itself; he's known the name for so long. Younger sister to Jack and Quinton; he's never met her, per se, but for the briefest of times, when Lionel and Quinton became one through Halycanos' strange, distorted ambitions, he did encounter her. "She was always unhinged," he says to himself, drawing the attention of nearby patrons who snort at the irony of it. "She was unhinged because of me. She was unhinged because I couldn't protect Catal, because I couldn't prevent Halycanos from his spell, because I couldn't make Hollow free of wickedness." He doesn't notice half the bar is staring. He rises from his seat, collects Hellfire, and bolts out into the night. In the stinging cold, as he gathers his horse from her stable, he speaks one last line. "I have to free her."

Rynvale Jail

Caedan | The jail is quiet, locked down and secured for the night. The night guard has traded with the day shift in staggered shifts to avoid reproducing patterns that savvy prisoners might recognize and use to their advantage. Dinner has been delivered, and a lone guard walks the center aisle between cells, checking on each prisoner before returning to his post near the first set of security doors. There, he chats with another guardsman behind a second set of security doors.

Lionel | The guardsmen discuss all manner of things. Surprisingly, they’re well-versed in the goings-on of the realm, and one of them – a man from as far away as the so-called Demon Archipelago – has so much to say about his young daughter, who has only just taken her first steps. All told, neither of these men are bad news. Hence the damn shame of it when a lone figure descends from the rafters, thin and taut, slitting the first man’s throat and spinning his corpse in circles to distract the second man long enough to thrust his knife deep inside his belly. A great spray of blood spirals about and deposits all over the doors and into nearby cells as well as the slit man’s body goes limp and collapses. Prisoners bellow and scream, banging on the bars. The murderous intruder glares, scanning the surroundings. Two more shadows drop down from above; now, in better light, it can be seen that two are male, one is female; one male is human, as is the female, but one man is a towering orc. "He was supposed to be here," the orc thunders in disapproval, banging a steely fist into nearby bars and crushing an unruly prisoner's six small fingers. To the sound of squealing, the orc thunders some more; "he was supposed to be here."

Caedan senses a disturbance. It’s not the usual kind, the kind that visits her in the dark, in the maddening quiet, the nothingness that surrounds her. It’s a … commotion. There have been commotions before. Some, she has started herself. This commotion is different. It seems tinged with … possibility. With competence. The psychic fluidly stands from the corner of her cell that she’s been haunting and stalks to toward the door. A single hand emerges from behind the bars on her door, slender fingers wrapping around the cool steel as she waits and listens.

Lionel | “Well I dinnae what to tell ye,” the human intruder calls back, wiping blood from his knife with his bare hand. “Sometimes, when people says they’s gonna be somewhere, they dinnae go there, and that’s just criminal, but ‘tis what ‘tis.” The orc continues roaring. The prisoners continue shouting. Mixed in with the frenzy are a few discernible sentences – requests to be let free, requests to be left alone, at least one insistence that a sheep is all someone wants at a time like this. The woman cants her head in a certain direction and follows her intuition. “He never said he was coming, Brenn, you fool,” she snaps quietly, approaching Caedan’s cell, her eyes curious at the sight of someone so calm. But she doesn’t say a word to the psychic; instead, she merely watches. Some meters behind, the orc pounds into the bars of a cell with such might, they bend considerably; the woman within, a drow, steps back too late and the orc leaps through, breaking in and grabbing her by the throat. “Where is he?” The beast asks. “Where is Lionel?” The drow can’t possibly answer even if she knew; she’s held too tightly. Brenn winces as the orc pulls tighter, but they’re all three of them interrupted when a man, dressed in ebony mail with cloth-of-gold trimming and wielding a sword so large, so fierce, so pulsing with waves of flame that it can only be Hellfire, appears seemingly out of nowhere, as if generating next to them. It should be noted that the woman of the group remains very close to Caedan, and her back is now turned, neck exposed.

Caedan listens, scrutinizing, studying speech patterns, trying to ascertain if this is something that is happening outside her head, or in it. A woman approaches and the psychic narrows her eyes in the dim light that comes with her. In truth, she’s hardly recognizable, a dark swath of hair so matted that it conceals her features, eyes too dark to be the semi-lucid blue they once were. Caedan’s grip on the bars tightens, pale knuckles turning a sickly green from her grasp. The woman turns and Caedan eases a hand through the bars, fingers snaking forward to the woman’s exposed neck before a presence, a force seemingly stops her. She can hear the sword crackle, but she can feel who wields it. Her hand withdraws back into the cell and there is an ominous quiet there once more.

Lionel takes a single calculated step forward, gripping Hellfire’s faded iron hilt with arms outstretched, keeping the tremendous blade’s tip pointed westward, away from the opposition. He angles his left leg so that it bends at the knee some inches ahead of a rigidly-locked right leg, scanning the area. The orc drops the drow, who gasps for air she only barely locates, collapsing to the floor of her cell. Both men move forth, the orc with a great bone club and Brennan with his beloved knife. The woman, unaware of her recent brush with death, crosses her arms; but her hand was so swift with the fetching of a poisoned dart from her belt, which she now obscures behind outstretched fingertips. Lionel does not move, but he does speak. “You will leave.” Brenn bursts into a fit of laughter, twists his body into a dance, spins forth swinging his knife as he ducks beneath Hellfire like it were a balancing beam, and falls lifeless to the ground when the sword’s fire shifts from the steel like a restless spirit and envelops him in a blaze of agony. Lionel remains still.

Caedan can hear words, words that bend into sentences that surely mean something to their recipients; but for her, it is just noise, a few semi-familiar sounds within a cacophony of voices, all screaming for attention. She’s been in and out of the minds of her cellmates for years now, learning them, knowing them as intimately as one can without ever coming face to face. But now there are so many more minds, so many more voices. And then there is one less. She tilts her head.

Lionel cocks a brow as the orc chooses to cease his assault, holding the bone club at the ready like some kind of bat. “That’s right,” the Catalian mocks openly. “Now be a big boy and scoot on out of here.” He flashes a quick look at the woman, whose tussles of curly bleached blonde hair stretch so comically low to the floor that he can’t help a chortle. “And take Miss Curl Up n’ Dye with you, if you would.” Whatever any one of them would have said or done next, they’re all interrupted when a cockney male accent shouts from up the stairs, brimming with confidence. “Mehster Lionel, then, I know you’re down there. Ye should know you’re surrounded. There are five of us – hell, fifteen! – ‘cause we tracked those three scoundrels, who said they was coming after ye. So that makes us the lucky winners, then, don’t it?” Lionel rolls his eyes, swings his sword as if it was a common house rapier, and sends a burst of flame around him like a hot shield. As his gaze shifts to the stairs, the blonde woman’s dart is thrown; he hears the whir, but a second too late. It strikes true between shoulder greaves and he screams. Now he sees her – behind the woman, hardly recognizable even if he’d ever known the face. But there’s something patently odd about her. There’s something so very Caedan.

Caedan shifts her attention past Lionel to the staircase, listening to the voice, the threats it spews. She pushes, just a bit, trying to discern if the man is lying — but she still isn’t entirely convinced this is really happening outside her head. And then, all at once, there are a series of events. The woman manages to throw her dart; it hits; Lionel screams; the cacophony within the jail grows as does the occupants’ collective desperation. The jailers have modified Caedan’s cell so that they never have to come within arm’s reach of the cell to keep her alive within it. the woman, unfortunately, is not aware of these modifications. Her neck is snapped before she can revel in her victory. Again, the psychic listens, head canting to an awkward angle, fingers twitching at her sides.

Lionel feels surer of it now. That woman, that slender disheveled tangle of psychotic frustration, is Caedan Navarre. With a renewed sense of purpose, he bolts toward her cell, even as poison drips into his bloodstream. Lionel is, after all, no ordinary man; he is a man who can vanquish conscious response to physical pain, to a degree. He cannot, however, vanquish his own psychological demons. All around him, the faces of the despairing occupants shift in his mind’s eye and become Catalians who have perished when the homeland was torn asunder. He knows these faces, he knows the familiar curves of his people’s noses, arches of their temples. Suddenly the dart is felt and he screams for a second time. Behind him, the orc is stupidly moving in for a blow, but he’s stopped dead in his tracks by a crossbow bolt. A crossbow bolt...? Then surely the cockney fellow up above has let his patience run thin and there are enemies behind him even now, seconds away from the kill. Lionel has little time and perhaps even less sense – he swings Hellfire through the bars as far from Caedan as possible, the unnatural blade cleaving them fresh through. “I’m setting you free,” he says.

Caedan steps back a fraction of a second before Lionel swings his famed sword, slicing cleanly through warded bars. She reaches out to touch one of the mangled bars, sizzling from the effects of Hellfire. She sears her fingertips and pulls her hand away. Probably real, she concludes. She shifts her transient attention back to Lionel when he speaks, but his words don’t appear to register. She regards him silently, without movement, without effort to leave the confines of what was her cell, even though freedom has now been granted. She stares emotionlessly at the great warrior before taking a single step backward.

Lionel visibly twitches. It isn’t from the dart. It isn’t from his latest freak-out hallucination. It isn’t even from the line of mercurial bastards coming up behind him intent on killing or maiming him for whoever it is that’s bought their violent affections, not really. No, the twitch is all for Caedan, whose decision not to run posthaste may have cost them both their lives. “I don’t have time to spell it out,” he says with some struggle, tilting his head to register what’s going on in the distance. To his surprise, the injured drow woman has taken down one of the attackers in a frenzied leap, stolen his dagger, and is stabbing repeatedly. That’s one down. But four more of them, mixed races, mixed genders, mixed weaponry, mixed just-about-everything, are glaring hard, and the one with the crossbow is reloading. “I reckon maybe you an’ me got off on the wrong foot,” the cockney lad muses, all cheeks and no backbone. “Might be I’ll let you live long enough to bring you to – eh? What’s with the girl? Why’s she look that way?” Lionel arches Hellfire forward defensively. “Might be ‘cause she sees a man as ugly as you,” he suggests. “Caedan! You’re Caedan, right?” He’s frantic in his half-whisper. Mr. Cockney stares, puzzled. “Run! Now! Leave this place! You’re free!”

Caedan has nothing to offer Lionel, no words, no glimmers of recognition — this, even though she knows exactly who he is, the exiled prince of her homeland. She can see those that haunt him as though they haunt her, too, but without the venom, without the weight of guilt that the Catalan bears. She flicks a quick glance toward the crossbow-wielding man when he references her, and it’s a dark stare, flat, void of emotion one way or the other before she refocuses on Lionel as he tries to coax her into … running away? Like he’s done? After a moment, she daintily holds her hand out of him, evidently asking for his assistance in slipping through the bars. But as soon as he’s presumably extended his own hand to help her, she’s a wild woman, twisting around him, raining down blows with atrophied muscles against metal armor. It’s not highly effective. She needs a weapon, something sharp to fit between the plates of armor. She needs to stay away from his weapon, the heat from which she can already feel arching toward her, trying to parry her attack without explicit instruction from its wielder to do so.

Lionel | Wiggles is a proud man. In school, they used to tease him about his height, so he’d make them squeal. They used to tease him about his name, too – nobody wants to grow up ‘Humphrey’ – so he devised an even more absurd name and bit the ears off of all those who mimicked it. Now Wiggles is amused; he readies his crossbow and keeps it firmly affixed on the raving madwoman as she beats into his bounty, his illustrious Lionel, hero of the long-ago, fabled dark knight, fallen prince of some far-off land of who-cares-what. Caedan, that’s what Lionel had called her. Caedan. She’s kind of pretty in her own primeval way, Wiggles thinks; aye, Wiggles should like to take her out and treat her right. He can hear Lionel coughing and realizes he’s coughing up a spot of blood, and he finds that just darling. He waves a hand at one of his lackeys to finish off the drow prisoner who’s become such a hassle, and the lackey nods, and goes for the kill. “This is so fitting, I almost don’t want it to end,” Wiggles says, all cockney-like as ever. He notes that Lionel doesn’t appear to be resisting at all. He notes that Hellfire is practically dangling from his grasp. He notes that the sword will soon be his, and fancies that all the tales of its spirit-within are probably just tales, after all. He’s about to say something poignant, something that will be quoted for ages to come, when the sound of hooves storming down the stairway and the screams of his backup men floods his ears. He turns slowly and his eyes bulge in horror as an armored Venturil mare bursts down the hall, crushing him beneath her frenzied pace. Wiggles is just a puddle now.

Caedan does not relent. Things are happening behind her, behind Lionel, but she’s hellbent on hurting him, of doing something to him, to making him pay for inhabiting her brother, maybe killing him in the process; she isn’t quite sure. But she hadn’t felt Quinton’s presence in a very long time. It’s a loss felt more severely than Jack Navarre’s, older pragmatist brother. This is her brother with heart, with faith in a humanity that deserved none of it, and he’s missing. She beats at Lionel’s chest and tries to pry apart the pieces of armor herself. But she is malnourished and weak and makes little headway. She’s laboring, sucking in deep breaths of oxygen as she tries to bring the knight down herself, as though she were in some kind of jailhouse gladiator bout. A horse appears in the jail and Caedan pauses. Maybe this is in her head. In which case Lionel would not be feeling any of this, in which case he would be impervious to pain, as he is fabled to be in actual reality. She shoves at his chest one last time, muttering under her breath and stalks back to her cell to wait out the hallucination.

Lionel lays on his back, finally thinking to pull out that damnable dart. He’s got a cracked rib; Caedan’s malnourished hits punched through the lining of his armor and did a bit more damage than she might have suspected. He thrusts himself up into the air, bringing Hellfire ahead of him; Alexiaisis, his mare, stands there in all her glory, absurd against the backdrop of a Rynvale jail, neighing softly as if in want of a meal. Prisoners behind their bars have all seemed to become as disillusioned with events as Caedan herself; the drow, it should be said, is still quite alive. A couple of stragglers from the assault, survivors of Alexia’s incredulous display, nearly trip on their way up the stairs, fleeing posthaste. Lionel nods to the drow woman, who nods back. “I’m letting some of these chumps go,” she comments, pilfering the key from one of the dead guards. “Your princess doesn’t seem interested in a rescue, Shining Armor. Maybe you should leave her be.” Lionel bites his lip, hard. He turns to Caedan, who seems like she’s in another world. “Caedan,” he says softly. “Hate me. Kill me. It matters little. But you don’t belong here. Soon, the authorities will return. This is your chance to be anywhere else at all.”

Caedan shudders at the mention of her name. It is how her brother spoke it so long ago — a hint of pleading, but evenly, infused with rehearsed calm. She closes her eyes and wills Lionel to vanish. When she opens them again, he is still there. The hallucination is tenacious. It is tenacious and she is exhausted. Despite the night’s entertainment, she nearly wills it to go away. But it doesn’t. Lionel remains. His armored horse remains. The deadline looms, the offer of freedom counts down with it. She’s sure it is a trick, some cruel invention of her mind. But her mind always cedes to time. And it has not ceded this scenario. “I don’t believe you,” she speaks at last, her voice little more than a barely coherent rasp. What exactly she doesn’t believe to be true regarding Lionel’s quiet recitation of a few gentle facts is not entirely certain. “You should be dead. Too many times.” She emerges again from her cell, but not to attack the warrior. She isn’t entirely sure what to do with herself. She’s a mess, wheezing for breath, gaunt, but her gaze is sharp, her words sharper. “You are not going to get rid of them by doing good. It’s not how it works. You will never know peace. Your sins have been too great.”

Lionel stands there, aimlessly, his blue eyes watering. Caedan is surrounded by ghosts. He sees them everywhere – the faces of the Catalians, true, but also the faces of his dead wife Alexiaisis, and Valaria and her child, and so many more. He sees Griff, too, and ponders at the peculiarity of it. Surely, Griff is alive. Well, no matter. He’s seeing things and he’s seeing them because Caedan Navarre just struck home. Lionel can’t remember a time anyone has said anything so valid. He nearly falls, but the drow woman catches him, observing him with a curious, cautious countenance. He waves a hand at her, allowing her to go about freeing her friends, and he almost falls again. Without words, he drops gold by Caedan’s side, and some clothing, too. Then at last he says, “I know.”

Caedan observes Lionel silently, which is a modest step above murderously. She stares at the accumulation of things around her, sidestepping something that comes too close to her space. She shows no interest in the things he offers her, choosing instead to watch his face, the way he tries to reconcile helping her with the atrocities he’s committed, or avoided. He staggers and she briefly sees the face of her brother there. She squeezes her eyes closed and shakes her head. When she opens her eyes, it is just Lionel, wounded, struggling. She steps past him to one of the bodies on the floor and she slides two knives free — one from a proper sheath, and one from a fleshy one. “Killing you only sets you free. You must live with the pain as we all do.” She curls a lip at him. “For now.” Without further comment, she moves past his horse and disappears into the darkness.

Caedan exited to the east.