Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-25038310-20160303163426/@comment-5583506-20160309184607

Katla slowly opened her eyes. Her sight was all blurry and her body felt as if she had received a massage with a sledgehammer. Grey skies loomed over her head and clouds slowly rolled over the landscapes. Smoke was rising in the distance. She couldn't move however. She felt completely shattered. Broken and battered as if someone had given her a really good thrashing. Her body felt heavy and immobile. Blood was running down into her eyes, causing her to see red.

Yet somehow she was able to see the shade of a man standing over her. Just as equally bloodied as she was. He was dressed in a full plate armor, his helmet covering his face entirely.

Katla glared up at him in a mix of respect and hatred. "Am... I defeated?" she coughed with a booming voice, blood pouring out of her mouth and between her teeth due to the many stabbings she had received to her lungs.

The unknown knight stroke a hand over his claymore, magical sparks running from his fingers. The blade of the sword started to glow.

''A battlemage... ''she reflected.

He then raised the claymore over her broken body, almost collapsing under the weight of the sword. He apparently was in a worse condition than she was. He was dying, yet he had enough energy in him to put his strength to the test just to finish her off once and for all.

With one brutal thrust, putting all his weight behind the blow, the sword penetrated her chest and pierced her heart. She roared out in pain, her entire body writhing in agony. Far too much movement left in her than she had anticipated of herself. But still she did not die. As she was growling out in pain, a fierce gauntlet of the knight struck a blow to her skull, causing her senses to momentarily become numb and dazed.

He then grabbed a hold of her throat, lifting her face up close enough to his own, so that she could stare into his eyes. Her ferocious gaze met his own. His eyes were calm, collected and stern. His emotions a mix of rage, but also sympathy. She hated him... she wanted nothing more than to destroy this man... this human... Yet at the same time she feared him. She feared him when she shouldn't. She was the monster here, yet she cowered for him. A mere human. He had bested her where the rest of his kin had failed.

"Listen to me, monster", he said in a commanding voice that was full of authority. "You are defeated. Your armies have scattered and lies broken upon the field. Your kingdom in ashes. Your reign of terror and destruction is over. You brought it upon yourself, beast. You brought it upon yourself by attacking mankind."

She scoffed at him. "You are weak..." she wheezed. "I will destroy you all..."

He drove his claymore deeper into her heart, causing her to twitch and snarl. "No", he replied. "It is you who is weak, Katla. You regarded yourself as invincible due to your misplaced hatred for my kind. Monsters are supposed to triumph over mankind, lest they cannot truly be called monsters. But it took one human being to prove you wrong, beast."

She just stared at him in contempt. Though she respected the man for being able to defeat her, she would never admit his kind as the victors. She gazed around herself. The forests were burned, scorched beyond recognition into ashes. Dead draugr were strew across the landscapes, over hills and floating down the streams. This man had gone through them all, just to get to her... For one single purpose...

He grabbed hold of her again and brought her face frightenly close to his own. She could almost feel his strained breath upon her mouth. "You", he said and spat blood. "You are nothing. You hear me? You are nothing."

I could just bite his head off, but I am too weak to even open my jaws...

"I came all this way, beast. I traveled to this very location to halt your progress and to prove you wrong. Where you once thought of mankind as weak and misguided, I just proved our greatness this day. I obliterated your armies. I defeated you single-handedly. I embody the very ideals that no man nor woman are fit to be your subjects of amusement, monster. I just paid you kind for all the villages you burnt to the ground. All the innocent people you slaughtered. Every man, woman, and child you have devoured. All the destruction you have brought upon this world like none of your kin ever have before. Yet still..."

His gauntlet slammed the hilt of the claymore further into her chest, causing her to shout out in agony, her scream echoing across the mountain tops.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">"YOU ARE NOTHING!" he said furiously.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">He then coughed and collapsed onto one knee before her, apparently too weak to carry on.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">"You... are dying as well... aren't you?" she wheezed. For some strange reason she didn't find it amusing, like she normally would have. Another weak, little, metal-clad human trying to test his might and prove his worth against Katla the Black. For some reason she found it... almost tragic. To think that this man she held in such high esteem. The only man who had gotten this far, to earn her respect and fear for him, was now dying before her eyes.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">"I... I am..." he coughed, his hands shaking from the loss of energy. One of her teeth had managed to lodge itself into his armpit, puncturing his left lung. "Yet I want you to remember this, monster. I want you to think of your misplaced hatred for mankind and then remember the one man who beat you, where you thought no one else would. I brought you to the ground and broke your body against the mountainside."

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Some blood poured out from beneath the rusty full helmet he wore. "And this is how it ends", he said. "For you", she said. "I can't die. Remember? Would take more than just a mere mortal with a claymore to finish that job. I will be reborn, and continue to show your kind my full wrath." <p style="font-weight:normal;">He looked up at her, his eyes as cold as death. He pulled something from his belt. It looked like some sort of soul gem. She had seen things like it before. Those fools who had worshipped her in ages past usually carried on magical trinkets of its like.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">"Then consider this your punishment", he threatened. "Consider it your shame, but also your redemption. I didn't defeat you because I hate you like you hate us. I defeated you so that I could show just what you are fighting against. And what you are fighting against is pointless. Why fill your heart with hatred and anguish, when you have yet to witness the aspects of beauty that mankind can bring?"

<p style="font-weight:normal;">She scoffed at his remark even though it pained her. "Beauty?" she said mockingly. "You are delirious. You are all weak and the Gods made a mistake placing you here. You should have known your place, as servants of my kind."

<p style="font-weight:normal;">"And yet here we are", said the knight. "The rest of your kind are slain and have been reduced into their undead slumber. Slain because they couldn't adapt into a world where our two races could thrive in peace and prosperity. But you don't have to go the same way, Katla. I am offering you a chance of redemption. To see things from our perspective. To see that we are not we vermin you mistake us for."

<p style="font-weight:normal;">"Lies", she mocked at laughed cruelly at the battlemage. "You will all die."

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Yet the man would not sway for her words, and that's what made him even more frightening in her eyes. "I am sorry that you house so much hatred in your heart, Katla. It must pain you very much to have nothing else but contempt in your body. No love nor friendship. No sympathy or concept of morale and ethics. No judgement over what's right and wrong. I give you this chance to reconsider. You will live on where I cannot. You will be reborn as my own kind. That will be your punishment..."

<p style="font-weight:normal;">With a quick jab, he pulled the claymore out of her chest and instead shoved the soul gem deep into the gaping wound where her heart was. She flinched and cried out as he did so.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">He then sank to his other knee and seemed to have used the last of his energy to perform this final action. "... and your salvation..." he said with a sigh.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">And so the battlemage died. She didn't even know his name, yet he was still awe-inspiring in the way that she would never forget him. Nor what he had said. She just had trouble learning to accept what it was he had asked of her. In truth she didn't know exactly what it was that the soul gem inside her heart was meant to accomplish.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Just another faulty device of mankind's pathetic creativity, she thought with a shrug.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">That was until she felt something change within her. She did not know what it was, but she felt her very... form change. Change into one of the creatures she had spent an eternity to loathe. And so the battlemage had his victory...

<p style="font-weight:normal;">

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Katla woke up with a groan next to her fellow companions, rubbing her sellion hard. Strange dream it had indeed been, but she was glad it was over. She did not get much from it anyhow. Just strange flashes of a man in armor.

<p style="font-weight:normal;">Presumably my killer...

<p style="font-weight:normal;">