Here's a piece I wrote at work today. It is not a result of a prompt, just a random thing, Wasn't sure if I should post it here since it is longer than a few paragraphs. But here you go.
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Fenris
let a deep sigh escape his lips as he stood in Rhea Hawke's spare bedroom. The bed itself looked comfortable even though the room lacked in furniture: there was a small table with a candle atop it and an old bookshelf, barely holding together, that spread the musky odour of old paper into the room. Heavy curtains decorated the sole window, falling lazily on both sides of the glass, functioning more as shaders than beautifying the room. The carpet had seen a few years too many.
Hawke was not a wealthy woman. Still that small, broken and battered human had let him into her home – one more shard to her collection of shattered things.
He took of his chest armor and pressed the matress a time or two before laying down. Bumpy or not, it was the first real bed he ever had. His memories faded at places, swallowed by a heavy fog that slowly seeped deeper and deeper. There were paths he had known how to tread but now the footprints were lost. Memories he once knew but no more. There was an irony to it – knowing one forgot but not what one forgot. People, once familiar, were now alien. The empty places once inhabited by friends and loves now void.
He had chosen not to dwell on it when he escaped – all the emptiness, fogginess in his mind could make anyone dizzy but him it made nauseated. Familiar people and objects that had once meant a world to him now had nowhere to latch themselves onto. And now, if he saw them, only vague echoes remained, sounding in the empty halls where they once felt at home.
The matress, bumpy and old, was the first real bed he remembered. Ever since his escape he had found it difficult to find a comfortable place to rest. The magister would search the most obvious taverns and inns, forcing him to improvice. He spent his nights awake or in restless sleep in forests, under bridges or in the stables of
well-meaning or unaware people.
But never a real bed. Never a real person. After his escape his social contacts wore only masks in his presence: their eyes only mirrors, never letting light in. Their gaze avoiding his as if, by some reasoning, they assured themselves that helping him was wrong and punishable. Their hearts and minds never stepped into the same room with him.
Rhea was different, never went anywhere without her heart. It twinkled behind her smile, hid in the slight wrinkles around her eyes. But behind that exterior: freckles, pale skin and fiery red hair he had only seen in the dresses of nobility before, was a cracked woman. There was a sadness to her so heavy that it weighed at his feet, pulled at his heart. Her father and sister – pieces that had been snatched away and crushed stung her still, somewhere beneath her cheerful surface. But unlike others, that is where she drew her strength – not revenge but justice, tightly knit into her code of right and wrong.
He closed his eyes even though a bump in the matress pressed into his back. His thoughts flashed back to the cold stone floor the magister offered as his bed. He got used to the manacles on his wrists and ankles, and the constant chills ravaging his body. Like most slaves, he found his life preferrable to death, still offering a diminishing possibility of escape and revenge. But he never got used to the drip which was his constant companion through the lightless nights. Those harmless droplets of water nearly drove him to insanity as the slow, torturous hours passed by. Each drop followed by the next, they had evolved from annoyance to sounding like someone was drilling into his skull.
Eventually his thoughts of freedom waned, being replaced by a single wish of being rid of the sound of walling water droplets.
He wrapped the blanket tighter around himself, feeling strange kind of enjoyment for having one. Sure it was old and used, threads coming loose at places, but it was warmer than anything he had spent his nights atop or under for as long as he could remember. His thoughts ran back to the events of the day briefly. How what had begun as
disgust toward the magical spark in her body, his sword on her throat, pinning her to a wall had ended in an explicable understanding exceeded the amount of reasoning his tired mind was capable of. A small smile caressed his lips just before the world of dreams claimed him, and in that moment a single thought appeared –
he might've found someone to fill those empty places with.
His first, real friend.
Modifié par Jaarlitar, 25 janvier 2011 - 11:56 .
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Serious question though, how many of you would be following Fenris with the exact same background etc. if he were a dwarf?
I loved VtM before Bloodlines came out, and I actually do a bit of Vampire LARP still, the political/social kind, but if they ever made a sequel... *sad sigh* I swear, I would have to fight not to die of happiness. 
