Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-25828117-20191211213915/@comment-5543592-20191213184910

The Bruma Campaigns
The Bruma Campaign

Magnus walked out of his tent, breath frosting the air. He had his coat buttoned up to the collar, jaw set as the air chilled him to the bone. There was no sound at all on nights like this, everything silenced by the snowfall and wind. His men regularly dug trenches to, snow piled feet high around the extent of the camp, between tents, and even then it still came up to his knees. He looked down the slopes of the Jerall mountains, trying to spot their enemy, but couldn’t see anything through the dark, much less the storm. The camp of his army spread below him, the tents of the Legion forming neat rows in the mountainside. A tent for every five men, twenty tents across, fifty deep. A neat rectangle of a thousand tents, five thousand men, give or take. There had been recent casualties, given the weather.

He crossed his arms over his chest, took a deep breath. Damn, was it cold. Any other commander would’ve balked at this posting, tried to get his Legion reassigned elsewhere, somewhere he could count on his men to fight instead of freeze. Any other commander but him. Magnus had asked for Bruma. When word came down that the Legions would be mobilizing, Magnus had said that it was Bruma he wanted. To put down this insurrection once and for all, to prove his skill as commander.

Leading men in winter was one of the hardest things imaginable. A commander couldn’t rely on his supplies, couldn’t rely on his men, and to an extent couldn’t even rely on himself. Success was far from guaranteed, even for the most practiced, experienced leaders. What it came down to, more than tactical skill, more than planning, was decision making. Knowing the key moments, what direction to lean. It was leaping at opportunities when they presented themselves, never hesitating over a risk. It was all about taking risks. The winter was probably going to kill you anyway, there was no point delaying it. The potential benefits outweighed those risks.

There was a light appeared to his right, a faint orange circle, like a single eye leering out of the darkness, and then Scaldor emerged, stepping directly out of the snowback. He wiped off his jacket, smoothed back his hair. Despite the freezing temperatures, he hadn’t changed what he wore. Always the jacket of an Imperial Navy officer, worn over a dress shirt and military trousers, with boots to match.

“Any luck?” Magnus asked, glancing over for only a moment.

Scaldor flicked ash from the end of his smoke and nodded. “Aquilarios is down there, the fuckin’ idiot. Thinks yer on the other side of the mountain, so he’s put ‘imself in the pass.”

Magnus snorted. “Wanted to make a choke point.” He shook his head, an amused smile finding its way onto his face. Magnus rarely smiled. “We can come down behind him in the morning, before the sun rises, and push him up against the gap.”

Scaldor grinned, “Heheh, fuckin’ imagine it. Cunt’ll be thinking he’s got ye, right up until he sees those Aubeic banners comin’ down the mountainside.”

Magnus nodded. He watched the camp for a moment longer. The snow fell almost carefully. In the dark, the flakes caught the starlight as the drifted down, seeming almost to dance. Magnus had the barest appreciation for such things, but he admired this.

“Do another loop of the camp.” Magnus instructed Scaldor. “Report back anything you notice.”

Scaldor bowed, arm thumped across his chest in a salute. “Yes, Champion.”

He skulked off into the dark and Magnus stepped back into his tent. A heating enchantment kept the interior toasty, the fur-ling the heat trapped in. His desk was to his right, his bed to his left, map table and other important documents spread out directly in front of him. He crossed to chest, which held his spare clothing, intent on getting a hat, when he noticed someone sitting in his chair, legs kicked up on his desktop.

Magnus turned towards them slowly, making sure he wasn’t seeing things in the dark, but there truly was someone there. A short, wiry man with patchy facial hair. He wore two swords, proudly swinging from his hips.

“General.” The man saluted, popping up from behind the desk, and sauntering around the side of it.

Magnus looked left to right, looking for a hole or gap in the tent’s side. It had one entrance and exit and Magnus had been standing in front of it. “How did you get in here?”

“That’s not important.” The man dismissed Magnus’ concerns with a wave of his hand. The short on his right hip was suddenly in his hand, and he pointed it at Magnus’ neck. The General leaned back, away from it.

“Why don’t we talk?” He motioned with the point of sword for Magnus to sit down on top of the chest. Magnus obliged, backing up and sitting down, watching him with an unwavering stare.

“Who hired you?” Magnus asked.

The man laughed, sitting down on Magnus’ bed, sword remaining in his hand. He held it lazily, as if it was burdensome, but Magnus had seen how fast he’d moved, and didn’t doubt this man could kill him in an instant. “Who do you think?”

“Aquilarios.”

“The very same. You’ve given him quite the fright. The Night-Terror himself, sent to hunt him down. He paid a fortune for me and then sent me in the wrong direction. He thinks you’re still in Bruma. Clever, climbing the mountains to get behind him. Takes the right kind of stuff.”

“You’re here to kill me.” Magnus guessed, clasping his hands behind his back, sitting up straight atop the chest.

“That’s how these things normally go, isn’t it? You’re a threat to someone, they hire me to kill you,” he waved the sword as he talked, as though it were a conversation piece, “and repeat. It's tiresome, but it pays for the soup.”

“The soup.”

“Figure of speech. I wanted to talk to you first.” The assassin said. “The name is Kismet and I sense we’re alike. Great minds think it, after all. I’ve always been fascinated by the gears that turn these sorts of things. Kings, generals, emperors. They’re made of similar stuff, a desire to change the world.”

“I’ve no desire to change the world.” Magnus said.

“No? Then, uh, what’s all this about?” He waved the sword about at the tent, the flap that led out to the army beyond.

Magnus frowned at him. “It’s about stability. About holding things together, even as they come apart. Look at how things are unraveling for the empire, something that was a keeper of peace for centuries. Change isn’t what the world needs.” Magnus shook his head firmly, as implacable as a rock. “Alternating hegemons of power, wars for factional control. These sort of things breed chaos. What the world is for order to be put back to how it should be. It’s about restoring the world, not changing it.”

Kismet stared at him, wild eyes regarding Magnus with surprise. Slowly, a smile spread onto his face.

“That’s beautiful,” he leaned towards Magnus, “but wrong.”

He stood up, shoving the sword back into its sheath. “Because none of this matters,” gestured now with an empty hand, “this war, the battles you fight, who sits on which throne. Because four hundred years ago somebody won the last war they’d ever need to win. And they’re in charge now. Every little thing we do hops to their tune. We’re on strings. You, me, the elf outside who’s listening to our conversation. Entirely predestined.”

“What on Nirn are you talking about?”

“None of this matters!” Kismet held his arms wide out. “It’s over, in fact, it’s been ended for some time now. A single man manipulated the universe in his favor, and continues to do so right now.”

Magnus surged to his feet from the top of the chest, releasing the spell he’d charged up behind his back. Kismet’s swords were drawn before he’d even stood completely, but at the same time they were driven towards Magnus’ chest, his armor appeared. The blades scraped off the sides of the Daedric plate and Kismet jumped back, holding them ready as a dozen Penitus Oculatus guards cut their way into the tent from different directions, as Scaldor came rushing in through the flap behind him.

Magnus held his hand out to his side, summoning his claymore. The blademaster only smiled.

He moved faster than Magnus could track. Six guards were on him in an instant, swords drawn, and Kismet became a whirlwind. He caught three swords with a single weapon of his own, and killed two men with the returning strike. He used their falling bodies as a barrier to keep away the rest, moved in the direction of the two farthest. They were dead in the next moment too. The blademaster kicked something, sent it flying at the brazier, and then the light in the tent went out. There was only the sound of metal on metal, haggard screams as someone was cut to pieces.

Magnus slowly backed out of the tent, sword held at the ready, as the action continued inside. He could see flashes through the gaps. Kismet surrounded by four bodyguards, and then him cutting them to pieces. One seemed to land a blow on his back, but then he turned at the last moment to deflect it with the hilt of his longsword--the soldiers’ own sword bounced back into his face and cut it off clean off, like it had been fileted from the chin up.

Kismet came out of the tent’s entrance, a Legionnaire impaled on the end of his longsword. He opened the man’s stomach and then reached a finger in to yank the intestines out. They came spilling out into the snow, steaming, and the corpse fell a top them. Blood splattered him from head to toe, but Magnus did not see a wound on him.

He stepped towards Magnus and the General took his stance, prepared for the coming fight.

Kismet opened his mouth to speak and then paused. He glanced to the side, “Missing one…”

Scaldor came out of the darkened tent entrance, swinging a fist at the back of Kismet’s head. He missed, the blademaster turning aside, and the longsword was buried up to its hilt in his stomach.

It might’ve been a needle for all the reaction Scaldor showed. He grabbed Kismet by his beard and yanked him forward into a headbutt that broke the blademaster’s nose with a crack. Kismet pulled back, shoving Scaldor off the end of the sword, and then moved faster than Scaldor could react to. He sliced the Altmer across the chest, the blade biting down to the ribs, hard enough to stagger him. Scaldor fell off balance and Kismet followed up with a cut across the face, planted his feet, pivoted, dragged the blade across Scaldor’s stomach. The swords worked in unison with each other, one delivering a blow immediately after the first had drawn back. Scaldor doubled over, and Kismet sunk the shortsword between Scaldor’s ribs, twisted it until he heard the bones crack. He pulled it free, and Scaldor feel down onto a single knee, panting.

“Fucking cunt…”

Kismet slashed him twice more across the chest, each stroke carving chunks out of the Altmer.

He laid the edge of the blade against Scaldor’s neck. He forced the Altmer to look up and frowned down at him. “How are you not dead?”

Scaldor’s chest flexed as he wheezed out a laugh and shrugged. “Barely… a scratch.”

Magnus attacked Kismet from behind, swinging the claymore at the blademaster’s head, and Kismet ducked underneath, crouching low and twisting. The longsword left Scaldor’s neck to sweep the General’s feet out from beneath him.

Scaldor and Kismet were level now and in the moment of opportunity Scaldor seized Kismet’s head in both hands and sunk his teeth into the blademaster’s eye.

Kismet shrieked something like a kicked dog, driving his sword short into Scaldor’s stomach over and over, but Scaldor was locked in now and held fast, only letting go once he’d felt something pop. He fell back into the snow, bleeding profusely.

Kismet pushed himself away, crawling backwards, wiping at the blood as it came down his face.

Magnus stood back up, towering over Kismet. In his armor he was halfway to seven feet.

Kismet got up too, slowly, watching Magnus wearily with the one eye he could see out of. The other was bright red, gradually swelling up to the size of a tangerine. He returned his swords to his sheaths, saying nothing. Then he backed into the snow bank and was gone.

Magnus stood there for a while longer, catching his breath until he was sure Kismet had truly gone, and then dismissed his armor and weapon, going to Scaldor’s side. His bodyguard looked something like a piece of discarded meat, fought over by dogs, and then dropped into a blender. Scaldor’s clothes were in tatters, blood-soaked, his torso a mix of slash and stab wounds. In places, Magnus could see bone, even organs beneath.

“Are you going to die?” Magnus asked, looking Scaldor up and down with some concern. He’d seen him wounded before, but never this badly.

The Altmer only laughed, a wheezing, pathetic sound. “Nah. Go get the healer… I’ll hold out ‘till then.”

Magnus nodded, immediately heading off.

“Wait!”

The General forze mid-stride and turned back.

Scaldor pointed at something in the snow. “Hand me that.” It was his smoke,knocked from his mouth in the fight. Magnus picked it up, wiped the snow off, and put it in Scaldor’s bloody hand.

“Thanks.” The Altmer grinned, sticking it between his lips. Smoke billowed out his nostrils and he sighed, relaxed. Magnus judged by the red, slushy quality of the snow around him that there was more blood outside his body than in. “Fuckin’ great, now go get the healer.”