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qm-vox · 5 years

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Sigilverse Fanfic - In It To The Death

The completely unasked-for continuation of What You Think Of Death, this time without pay or prompting, and still set in @periakman‘s Sigilverse. Go poke her page, find out what it’s all about! I can vouch for Warlocks of the Sigil and Heroes of the Sigil as fun and unusual reads.

As before, we have content warnings for violence, suicide, and child abuse, as well as a certain amount of imprisonment. Do as thou wilt.

Vellkill Island, Grevelt. Early Autumn

“Tell me what you think of death,” Deirdre ordered. Monika spat a thin line of blood into the dirt of the training yard and shook her head; the older warlock beckoned another soldier into the ring, bringing it to four on one. Her teenage apprentice squeezed the handle of the dulled practice knife in her hand and lowered her stance. “They will hurt you, kid. Last chance.”

“Eat me,” Monika growled.

Deirdre shrugged. “Have it your way. En garde!”

The first soldier in caught a stomp to the side of his knee that shattered it with a grisly snap; Monika turned with the motion, clocking him upside the temple with the hilt of her knife. The teen whirled, seizing her victim’s falling body and using him to catch a pair of slashes directed at where her torso had just been; the man’s fellow soldiers recoiled.

Their mistake. Monika threw her shield at one, forcing the soldier to drop her knife and catch the man, and faked a lunge at the other. He fell for it, moving to meet her; the teen faded past him, slipping through his peripheral vision. The dull edge of her knife touched his throat (”Kill” she muttered in a quick, low voice), before she turned and kicked him in the small of the back, sending him sprawling.

At the sidelines, Deirdre’s eyebrows raised beneath her red hair. “Good!” she called out, even as her apprentice ducked. Her attacker now was a friend she’s made here at Fort Vellkill, a greyshade named Sasha, but you couldn’t tell from the way Monika took them out. The teenager locked their arm and brought them down into a vicious knee that broke the soldier’s nose and sent blood spraying all over the dust.

“I yield!” the last soldier said quickly, still holding her friend. Monika nodded, breathing hard, and sat down in a heap.

Ysabelle, the Fort’s healer, ran over from the sidelines with the look of pure malice they generally reserved for any and all times Deirdre was in their presence. Their assistants brought stretchers to haul the wounded away.

“You know I’m just going to keep asking you,” Deirdre said after a moment, but she got up and brought a canteen of water over to her apprentice. Monika doused her frizzy hair with it, then took small sips. “I can always throw more soldiers at you.”

Monika swallowed a gulp of water. “Sounds like child abuse to me.”

“No shit. Would you like an award for that amazing discovery, you impertinent ass?” Deirdre paused briefly, then switched topics. “You gonna be okay with Sasha?”

The canteen was passed back. Monika swallowed hard, took a deep breath to get air back in her lungs, and nodded. “We talked, awhile ago. They know how it is. I’ll check on them after we’re done for the day. If this is a day when we’re done?”

Deirdre snorted. “I’d ask where you found the nerve but I damn well know where. Let’s -”

“Deirdre!” the unmistakable voice of the island’s master called out, thick with outrage. “What in the rippling Void are you doing to my men?”

“Run,” Deirdre muttered, and Monika got up and ran.

In the nearly six months that she’d been on Vellkill, Monika had come to know the infirmary intimately. It was state-of-the-art, as these things go; spacious, well-stocked, in possession of a pair of warlocks with healing affinities and trained staff besides. Though the island rarely had to deal with military attack or mass monster incursions, it was prepared for them.

These days what it mostly dealt with was her and Deirdre and the latter’s idea of training exercises. Monika winced as she passed the guy whose knee she’d broken - he’d be in here for the better part of a month. Ysabelle’s main power was to speed up natural healing, essentially passively, and the Fort’s other healer was away getting some license or other renewed and wouldn’t be back until spring at the earliest.

“I hope you’re proud of yourself,” Ysabelle snapped, the moment Monika crossed into the threshold. The teenager caught a bundle of medical supplies. “Go dress Sasha’s nose. You and that Master of yours are a plague on honest people.”

“I didn’t choose this!” Monika protested.

“She says, knowing damn well she could have just answered Deirdre’s stupid question,” Ysabelle mocked. Monika let out an exasperated sigh and went to go treat her friend.

|She’s stressed.| Sasha signed; the greyshade was mute, and had been since birth. |That was a good hit.|

“You coulda slipped it,” Monika chided, as she got to work. “You haven’t been keeping up on your practice. That’ll get you killed.”

|By what?| Sasha asked; the look on their face made Monika laugh so hard she had to stop what she was doing. |Things don’t happen to Fort Vellkill. We happen to things. Deirdre, mostly, happens to things.|

Monika sighed and got back to work. “Yeah, I bet. We still haven’t worked on unlocking my affinity. It’s been months, but I haven’t exactly brought it up to her either...”

The greyshade soldier tilted their head at their younger friend and signed a question. |Why not? You bring up other stuff, like when you wanted to learn rappelling.|

Sasha drew back, gingerly touching their nose to check it while their younger friend sighed and looked away. Monika seemed to sigh a lot any time she wasn’t around Deirdre. The young warlock’s master got her blood up like nothing else, and Sasha wasn’t the only once concerned about that. It was, what, Midsummer that Monika’d lost her temper during a sparring exercise and fucked Otoya up bad enough that she’d been sent home with a medical discharge? The kid had been torn up about it for weeks. Now she just looked out the window instead of at the people she’d so recently maimed.

Monika looked back over at her friend. “I guess because she said we can only do one at a time. I keep telling myself she’ll stop this part when I’m ready, but what if it’s another test of...of...my nerve? My judgement? Am I overthinking this?”

|You could talk to Lee| Sasha pointed out.

“I could -”

Shouting, through the window. Deirdre’s voice, her usually flat and dead inflection colored by a hate only rarely heard from her: “You cannot give orders to me about my apprentice! I have absolute authority over her education and if you think for one fucking second -”

The master of the Fort cut her off, his own voice a deep bass roar: “You forget yourself, Silencer! I own you and all that you have, are, and could be. If I tell you to drown that brat you will.”

Monika rushed to the window, Sasha close on her heels. Deirdre had her employer’s head by the hair, her dagger - glowing a dull cherry red, like forge-metal - pressing into his throat. All around them, soldiers leveled crossbows.

“If she so much as scratches me, throw her bitch from a window,” the man snarled.

“You can’t play this game with me forever,” Deirdre warned, her voice back to its low, lifeless tone. “You lay a hand on my apprentice and I will cut that hand off. You speak her name and I’ll rip the tongue from your mouth, and before I do it I’ll call the dogs in so they can hold you down for me. Are we clear?”

“Stand down,” the island’s master ordered. “My threats move faster than yours, Silencer.”

A heartbeat. Two.

Dierdre let go of her superior officer, who immediately backhanded her hard enough to put the pale warlock into the dirt. His men started forward, only to be halted by a sharp gesture.

“From whom do you take your orders?” the island’s master demanded.

(Up above, Monika’s fists clenched hard enough that her nails cut her palms, drawing blood.)

Deirdre drew in a shaky breath and picked herself up. She sheathed her knife before standing at attention with a sharp salute. “Colonel Jared Ashe, sir.”

“Good,” the Colonel spat. “Tame your cur. Dismissed.”

Monika took off running for the stairs back down. She didn’t stop long enough to catch Sasha’s hurried |Wait!|.

Or the greyshade’s resigned |Goodbye then.|

Deirdre’s furious bellow of “to your quarters!” had shocked Monika enough that the apprentice obeyed without even a token argument, running like a little girl from her mother’s wrath. Hours later, with the sun setting, she was still up with a mixture of anger and worry, trying and failing to focus on her book. She hadn’t touched her fiction in months (admittedly in part because she’d read and re-read it to death); the book on the bed in front of her concerned locksmithing and lock-breaking, not that it was doing her much good, both because the door was unlocked and because she’d read page fifteen six times now.

A knock at the door, and then Lee’s voice: “May I come in?”

Monika smiled to herself. Deirdre did the same thing but she always made such a big deal out of it. At first Monika had thought her master was trying to impress her with how tolerant and accepting of the teen’s need for space she was being, but lately the apprentice had come to the conclusion that the person Deirdre was trying to convince of that was, well. Deirdre.

“Yeah, it’s open.” Monika sat up and closed her book while Lee slid in and closed the door behind him. Deirdre’s factotum looked as sharp as ever, though on base he’d traded his traditional suits for a sharply pressed uniform. You could shave with the creases.

“You are not in trouble. You’ve done nothing wrong,” Lee began. “Deirdre wanted me to assure you of that earlier but I...needed to be certain she was okay in her own company, before I left her side.”

“That man had no right,” Monika whispered.

Lee nodded. “But the situation is more complex than that, to the great misfortune and sorrow of many. And there are those who would say your master has no right to treat you as she does.”

“I picked her.”

“No. She picked you.” Lee crossed the room in slow steps and put a hand on Monika’s shoulder. “I have been asked to reiterate the offer Deirdre made when you landed on this shore. Do you wish to leave?”

The apprentice laughed, a bitter sort of laugh that sounded all too much like her master’s to Lee’s ears. “Don’t insult me, alright? If I wasn’t going to leave when she told me point-blank that she picked me up as a human sacrifice, I’m not gonna leave now. I’m in it to the death, Lee. You hear me? To the death.”

Lee closed his eyes and sighed. “You have no idea what that means,” he murmured. “But so be it. You are summoned to Deirdre’s quarters to begin your magical training. Sasha and I will take over your physical training regimen. I will not lie, it will be greatly reduced. I believe you discussed this with your master before?” Monika nodded. “Then attend to her, quickly.”

The apprentice stood, shook Lee’s hand, and then left as quickly as possible. She still wasn’t certain of her own technical rank, but no one seemed to expect her to salute and she wasn’t about to start until someone told her the rules. Lee would close her door behind him. He always did.

Deirdre’s quarters were in the highest room of the tallest tower, because of course they were. They weren’t used to meet or instruct Monika a whole lot, in part because no one wanted to deal with the amount of stairs they entailed. Still, the apprentice felt almost lighthearted when she ascended to the top floor and found the door open. She’d been looking forward to this for awhile.

Her master was more of a wreck than usual. Deirdre had cloaked herself in metal again, the full rusty regalia she favored out in the field, and her eyes were bloodshot from crying. Monika stopped at the door with her hands folded behind her back.

She’d long since given up on trying to comfort her master in moments like these.

“Lee told you it’s time, then,” Deirdre croaked. “There’s a couple of options, and surprisingly enough it’s not between bad and bad. Just annoying and frustrating. Option one is I take control and burn you through this. Now, that could be nothin’, or it could be an instant eternity of searing fucking agony that will scar you for life. Based on your ball, I’m leaning more towards nothing, but the risk is always there. Or you can try and breach on your own, which takes longer but has no risk. You can come in, by the way.”

Monika stepped fully into the room and pulled the door shut behind her. “Why offer to take control here when you wouldn’t for my combat training?”

“This is just to open the door, kid. Training with your affinity can only happen once we’ve got an idea of what it is.”

Ah. Monika nodded and drifted over towards the window. She could see the spot down below where earlier, Deirdre had -

“I’m not entertaining other conversation topics, kid.”

“Fuck you too,” Monika said in a light tone. “Why didn’t you kill him? How is it that you just hate everyone all the time without trying but you can’t stand up to that piece of -”

Deirdre appeared behind her apprentice. Monika hadn’t heard or felt her move

“It is the business of the dead to hate the living,” Deirdre murmured in her apprentice’s ear. “And I am not having this conversation tonight. What’s it gonna be?”

Monika thought it over a while longer, and then turned to meet her master’s dead green gaze. “Burn me through it.”

Deirdre nodded and slid away from her apprentice. “Never did lack for guts. Step into the center of the room. Safest for us both, all things considered.”

Monika did as instructed, clasping her hands in front of herself. She shifted uncertainly in place. Deirdre’d never actually used the tattoo before. Was there a warning? A build-up? She tapped a foot and her mind was slip-zip-slip-sliding, grease on grease on rubber, look closely, look closely, watch it bend, watch it flip!

When did the floor become the ceiling?

Wait. Monika was falling.

“Ah fuck,” was the last thing Monika heard from her master before her head hit the edge of Deirdre’s bed and she blacked out.

#peri akman #sigilverse #Warlocks of the Sigil #heroes of the sigil #fanfic #violence #suicide #abuse

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thebibliomancer · 7 years

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100 Days of Comics! 051/100: Scion #6 (2000)

We start the second fifty days with another CrossGen comic from the mystery box, part of their Sigilverse.

Sigils weren’t just a thing for Solus. Apparently there were a bunch of books based around these sigils giving you powers. Giselle, from that last Solus issue, even starred in her own book, called Mystic.

At this point in the CrossGen line, they were not bankrupt yet. But also, the origin of the sigils had not been fully explained. In fact, this issue of Scion had two pages devoted to fanmail that were just speculating about the meaning and working of the sigils.

It’s a proven writing tactic. You set up a mystery that people can get behind and they’ll be more invested in a property. Mystery arcs have a long and proud history in serialized fiction. Why, just look at Gravity Falls! Or the initial Hobgoblin arc in Spider-Man, before it changed writers three times and trotted out a reveal that satisfied nobody just to wrap things up.

Anyway, Scion. In a dubiously technologic King Arthurian fantasy type land, Prince Ethan of the Heron Dynasty was graced with a sigil which gave him power. And then he accidentally a war by scarring Prince Bron of the Raven Dynasty during ritual combat.

Whoops.

Some shenanigans happened. Ethan surrendered himself to the Ravens, was freed by a woman named Ashleigh who wanted Ethan to join her cause of freedom for the genetically-created “Lesser Races” (fantasy, why you do this?), Ethan tried to return home to prevent a war, discovered the landing site for the invasion fleet, met some cool underwater people, and finally reunited with his family.

And with Ethan’s knowledge, the Herons can make a surprise attack on the encamped Raven army.

WITH THEIR COOL RIDING DRAGONS WITH DIGITAL TACTICAL HOLOGRAMS! And... lightsabers? Those blades are definitely glowing red and blue for the Ravens and Herons respectively.

This is mainly an issue long fight scene so the actual plot details of things happening are scant. Did I mention the rad dragons?

Prince Bron crosses paths with Ethan’s brother Prince Artor (a Man-At-Arms looking dude). Bron was hoping to fight Ethan to ‘thank’ him for the scar but Artor will do.

They have a very short fight over a two-page spread and dang Prince Artor loses. And Bron slits his throat.

This riles Ethan up something fierce and he beats Bron to the ground and prepares to kill him when Raven Prince Kort interrupts with RIDING DRAGON and spirits Bron away, telling him that the battle is lost and the troops are fleeing.

Ethan’s murder lust hasn’t been filled so he attempts to shank one of those ‘lesser race’ orc looking fellows but Ashleigh stops him and then disappears into the smoke.

As the Heron army praises Ethan for a victory with minimal losses to their side and Princess Ylena tries to tell Ethan it wasn’t his fault, Ethan wordlessly clutches his brother’s dead body.

So kind of thin on the plot but I get the sense that it was needed to build up to something else.

And this book got 43 issues before it got cancelled due to CrossGen’s bankruptcy. And, hey, that’s more issues than some new books put out under the big two of Marvel and DC get.

Also apparently, the final issue of the book ends with Ethan being caught in the epicenter of a nuclear explosion and surviving! Which, dang.

And overall, I can get behind something with that kind of ridiculousness, riding dragons, lightsaber swords, and the princess of the evil kingdom wanting to free the orc/goblin/whatever.

Apparently, in later issues the ‘lesser races’ (sigh) get to establish their own free nation. So yeah, lot to like here.

Weird additional note, for a while CrossGen owned MegaCon.

Additional weird additional note, when CrossGen went bankrupt, Disney acquired their IP. A couple of the CrossGen series were rebooted and published under Marvel, including a four-issue revamp of Mystic written by G. Willow Wilson.

No such luck for Scion though. So by the tethercat principle, Prince Ethan is constantly surviving a nuclear blast. There are probably worse ways to while away eternity?

#100 Days of Comics!#Scion #CrossGen Comics #i'm weirdly fascinated by CrossGen #I had never heard of them before this 100 Days of Comic thing #which might be a sign of why they didn't last #that's a shame #some of their IP seems cool #and Disney owns it but isn't doing much with it #due to low interest in the revamps they did do

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