Icarus's blog: "Somantics"

"Was that all?" He still felt hungry. Collecting his blade and wringing his hand against the echo of murder.
Someone should have a knife to their throat by now.
He stepped through the noise and chaos, the battle was pushing back to the chambers and cloisters beneath.
Some resounding energy was coming from the lord's tower.
What was once a feast had become a ration, a frenzy of hopes and what people mistook in their own hearts as valor crashed all around him, but it was nothing. Empty.
The symphony of colors it had once been was now gray and cold. The pulse was now but a whisper.
The haze of battle writhing around him, one would think that the great gilded lord of this hall, in all his repugnant wealth and avarice would serve as a fatted offering, squealing and pleading like a pup with its plump belly proferred to the glittering fangs of the alpha.
"You're a mercenary aren't you? I'll give you anything you want, money! power! A country- just don't hurt me! Let me go! Please!" He shrieked as one of the mercenaries held steel to his throat.
The captain appeared to have not even heard him.
With the most callous flick his sword was drawn and caught the fat balding little man by the cheek, a mere hair from the eye.
"KAAAAAAH!!!! What's wrong with you!? Don't you want money? Don't you want power?" the lord quacked ash he squirmed in pain clasping at his cut face.
The captain took a moment to stare out the window overlooking this man's immense fortress, and even beyond there was the familiar clash, charge, rally, break, fall.
He had never felt so full of emptiness.
So sick with it.
Was this a call from the covenant?
"Bring me the women".
As a pair of mercenaries snapped to and retrieved the daughters, handmaidens and attendants, the captain perused them, as if poking for a particular piece of literature.
He appraised the eldest daughter with an outstretched hand upon her chin, pretty and fair skinned, still full of life and naivety.
Full of those things idleness and a life without want bred.
No scent of a lover, no fear of a great loss. No great nine month burden to hurl herself in front of.
Yet the faint throb of life and fear lay just beneath her pale skin, trembling beneath his fingers.
This one wasn't quite ready yet
But would it be enough for today?

"I'm taking your only pretty daughter- my liege" the captain announced. The wail and shrill gasps were barely contained. "I'm going to strip her, sully her, and fling her to my men to pick over like carrion on a rancorous sow". And there it was, tears and a collective banshee cry.
"Daddy please!"
Like music... only color... only a feast after ten seasons of famine.
It seemed that now only the innocent would do...
His hand was in a convenient place to silence the protest, either over her lips or around her throat, he opted for the latter as she gagged and let out an injured, softened scream cut short.
"Please don't!"
"You're in a position to negotiate? Are you a god now? Have you the power to change fate? Your daughter is to be my whore, a rag doll to use as I see fit, and you think you have anything left to offer?" He turned from the girl, rounded on the lord and kicked him square in the knee at just the wrong spot, crumpling the leg like a dry, dead twig and an almost as visceral crunch.
"She's exactly what we came for!" The captain's face so close he could feel the moisture from tears on his beard.

There was no salvation-flash of memory, no fond recall of wife child and purpose that entered his mind's eye, no familiar sympathy in having lost everything, and taking it from this man.
It was all very far from him now. That last strand of humanity hadn't slipped from a weary paw, it had been thrown.

The lord began to weep, to bellow and moan like a child.
He stood back up over the crippled, sobbing thing he had created.
"Kill them." He declared, satiated and full for the first time in years.
"Kill them all," his body burned with the covenant as he made the order, but what if emptiness clawed again? When would he have another chance, and the resolve?
"Except her-" he pointed to the pretty one, "she is to watch, I don't care if you have to hold her eyes open, bring her to me when this is done".