You Are What You Eat, They Say [Shy]

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[[Trigger Warning: Cannibalism. Will update as stuff happens.]]

Living in the forests of Nova had really taken its toll on Ghaur. In the past several years, he had lost most of his wealth during his wanderings and now had to resort to less than savory forms of feeding himself. This particular night, he found himself stalking the main square of the third district, eying the corpses that swung from the gallows. He himself was relatively unnoticeable, as far as half-orks went. Unlike many, who were hulking walls of muscle and aggression, Ghaur was of average height and barely coined the term 'toned'. So sticking to the more shadowy parts of the square while he waited for the late night traffic to disperse was not a terribly draining task.

It wasn't until well past midnight that Ghaur was comfortable enough to approach the gallows. He emerged from his spot near a rather pathetic looking house, checking each way before moving out into the square. The moon was only half full, enough to see by, yet not enough to make him super conspicuous. The gallows loomed before him, having two corpses for him to pick from. One looked like a normal human man, hanged for whatever heinous crime he had committed. The other might have once been an elf woman, though the body had bloated and disguised any distinguishing feature.

Carefully, he took a breath in, almost afraid to make any sound. Then he climbed the gallows with soft steps, bringing him up close to his next meal. The corpse's face was black and swollen. It was like staring at a giant tick. A patch of brown hair sprouted almost comically from the top of the head. It wasn't the head he was interest in, though. Mostly, he wanted the limbs, heart, lungs and liver. And maybe the pectoral muscles, if he had enough time for it. The question right now, though, was how to get the body down and away before he got caught.

Taking a final look about the square to ensure he was alone, Ghaur pulled his broad axe from his belt. With a flash of his arm, the blade collided with the rope holding the poor fool up, cutting through it on the second swing. The body tumbled to the platform with a rumble, limp as a fish. Ghaur's paranoia got the better of him, forcing him to glance around the square for the third time to ensure that he was, in fact, alone. No, still clear. He quickly bent, putting his axe away as he did so, to scoop up the body. And without further ado, the half-ork pussyfooted out of there and into one of the back alleys.

Within a few minutes of twisting and turning down little streets, he found a suitable place to begin butchering the body. It was a small, dimly lit space between two run-down houses that barely qualified as an alley, if he were honest. It wouldn't really matter, except for the smell. He was sure that someone had thrown their waste down it. His stomach churned at the thought. But where else was he to go? People didn't like cannibals in his experience and the last thing he wanted was to get in trouble with the authorities. With a grumble, he entered the small space and set to work.

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Séanait always enjoyed a good ambush. You worked out your prey's likely habits and way of thinking, prepared the trap and then sprang it on them. A stakeout was not the same thing, and she was beginning to grow bored with the whole ordeal. It was all lurking in windows and trying to stay out of sight while still watching the square, with a potentially lethal fight at the end of it. She wasn't adverse to a lethal fight, but she preferred to be able to kill as a first resort and not as a last resort. She was going to have to arrest the corpse stealer. 

Damn necromancers.

Never a big fan of magic, Séanait had been disgusted to hear the theories about why someone was stealing corpses from the gibbet. Stories about mages playing with the bodies of the dead or consuming flesh or blood to fuel their perverse magics outraged her on a level she hadn't even known had existed. The dead should be left in their halls of earth and stone to live on as they had in life, not reanimated into mindless servants or eaten by raving lunatics. Placing the heads of enemy soldiers on stakes was completely different, she told herself.

As day turned into night, Séanait and the rest of the guardsmen kept watch, taking turns to survey the square. There were five of them: Séanait, Simon, Frederick, Geoffrey and Victor. She was the most experienced of the patrol, with the others being green recruits under her provisional command. Hopefully she'd manage to pull this assignment off and get her position written in stone. She had no wish to be a private soldier once again, not after having been an officer. 

It was well after midnight when Victor called out softly, "Shy, there's someone down at the gibbet."

Séanait carefully moved through the dark room to stare down at the square. There was barely enough light to make out the figure approaching the hung criminals, let alone make any sort of identification, but as the figure surveyed the hanging figures, she knew it must be their target. With a barely audible whisper and half seen hand signals, Séanait ordered her men downstairs as the figure raised an axe. To the credit of the guardsmen, they hardly made a sound as they descended the stairs of the house and exited through the back door.

She emerged from the alley just as the figure picked up the body and began to move away with some haste. He wasn't running, so he probably hadn't seen them, but he wasn't exactly hanging around to be found. Séanait took off after him, admonishing her men to keep quiet. They tramped after the figure as quietly as they could, Séanait out a good way in front. She'd explained it to them before hand. She was better at this sort of thing, so she'd keep the target in sight if they had to follow him. The others were to hold back and merely keep her in sight. She'd let them know if they needed to run.

Clad in only an aketon, with soft soled shoes and a face blackened with soot, Séanait would be hard to hear and harder to see if she chose to duck into an alleyway or the shadow of a doorway. Those precautions didn't matter, though, because the man never looked back as he made off with the corpse.

When the man came to a stop between two houses and began to work on the body, Séanait crept back to her men. She'd expected to have to trail the man back to some kind of lair, but the man was cutting up the body in the middle of a foul smelling alley. It didn't seem like what she imagined necromancy or blood magic would be like. It was more like some of the more prosaic ideas that had been floated by her team, those of a madman or a cannibal. She hoped it was a cannibal. Cannibals could probably be reasoned with. Madmen, not so much.

Sending Victor and Simon around to one side of the alley, Séanait unslung her bow and found a war arrow by touch. She notched the arrow and, deciding that Victor and Simon must be in position, moved into the centre of the alley, bow aimed at the shadowy figure butchering the corpse. At the other end of the alley, she could see Victor peering down at her and, on seeing her, he and Simon promptly moved out and blocked the way out with their spears. Frederick and Geoffrey moved up beside her and blocked off the rest of the alley on her side. 

Heart pounding, as it always did, Séanait prepared to bend her bow and feather the corpse stealer the moment he looked like using magic as she called out in a cold, clear voice with all the command she could muster.

"Novan Guards! Drop the knife and keep your hands where I can see them!"

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Having already gone to work on the body, Ghaur’s sense of hearing was hardly clear over the sound of a blade cutting through flesh. It was grizzly work, not something he particularly enjoyed in and of itself, but something that could be rewarding if handled in the correct way. What he was doing had nothing to do with any sort of magic he may have wanted to cast. No, this was simply a butchering of meat for consumption, which he would have preferred not be in a filthy alley.

The guts were the nastiest part of the job, in his opinion. Bowels, when full of half-digested food, tended to tear when pulled with any sort of pressure, especially after they’d had a chance to fill with necrotic gasses. The bladder could also be troublesome, but the corpse had clearly not retained any significant amount of urine, which made the removal all the easier. Both the intestines and bladder were set aside amongst the filth and rubbish, discarded for whatever starving creature was hungry enough to take them.

Next, he peeled the skin back from the abdominal incision, separating it from the fat and muscle beneath. Skin, he found, was bitter and not at all pleasant to eat. He wanted to really nutritious stuff because chances were, he was going to be interrupted at one point or another. The authorities had nearly caught him the past two times he had taken a body and it wasn't something he was eager to repeat.

He had just sliced off a sizeable chuck of flank and placed it between misshapen teeth to chew when the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Maybe he was being paranoid, but suddenly the alley didn’t feel as empty as he had first thought it was. Still chewing, Ghaur looked up, peering into the darkness. A small, patchy cat was prowling near the other entrance, lured by the smell of flesh. The half-ork eased a little, hissing at the feline between bloodied incisors.

As the cat took flight, it was replaced by two looming figures. They were too large to be children and the posture was all wrong for a local of the district. Ghaur made to run, spitting out the flesh, but was stopped by a commanding voice behind him. He whirled, head snapping about to glance at his only other escape route. He’d gotten sloppy and now he was trapped like a rat in a cage. “Gods be damned,” he muttered lowly.

Seeing no other option, Ghaur dropped the small knife he had been holding, raising his hands over his head, fingers spread to signify that he wasn’t armed. “It seems I’ve been caught red-handed,” he called back to the woman who was obviously in charge. “If you’ll excuse the pun.” Under the shadows of the surrounding houses, it was difficult to make out his face. This also meant he could only make out the silhouettes of the guards who now had him cornered.

“I swear, he was already dead before I got to him,” he called, slowly rising from his crouched position. It was evident that he was poorly dressed for the colder weather and he visibly shook where he stood. “If you don’t believe me, just look at the noose around him. Not my work, obviously. Would the world really cry over the absence of his rotting corpse?" It did occur to him that that moment probably wasn't the best time to be trying to justify himself but it seemed rude not to.

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Séanait hadn't heard the phrase "red handed" before, but she understood it's meaning from the context. The fact that the corpse stealer was cracking jokes annoyed her for some reason. It felt as though he wasn't taking them seriously which, to her way of thinking, meant that he didn't consider them a threat, despite all the steel pointed at him. Briefly, Séanait considered putting an arrow in the man's leg to teach him some respect, but then they would have to get in close to bandage the leg and possibly support him on the way back to the cells. That could open up opportunities if the man was a mage, and so she discarded the idea.

The thief began to justify his crime, and Séanait found herself rolling her eyes. The man seemed to think that talking would absolve him of any guilty actions. She knew that type. Condescending and generally to clever for their own good, they'd stab you in the back the moment you looked away or let your guard down. That was the whole point of talking at you, after all; to engage you on some level, whether it was to make you angry or to make you think they weren't a threat. She therefore ignored his jokes and justifications and drew her bow back to half draw.

"Get face down on the ground and put your hands behind your back."

Then, nodding at Victor and Simon, she said, "Bind him. Hemp and iron, I think."

Hemp and iron, referring to using both rope and chains to bind a prisoner, was the usual method of binding mages, or suspected mages. Hemp could be burnt off without causing too much harm or loosened with nature magic, but iron was harder to melt without harming yourself but could be shattered more easily by metal related magics. The two combined were generally considered good enough until proper restraints could be located.

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It seemed the guardswoman was not at all amused by him or his words. That was fine, he could work with stone cold efficiency. Everyone was ‘human’ at the end of the day. He even considered allowing her to arrest him until she said ‘hemp and iron’. Hemp, he could have dealt with. Iron would require primal magic that he just did not have the energy to use. His fingers twitched as minor electrical currents began firing along the metal discs beneath his skin.

Glancing at the two men that were approaching him, Ghaur dropped to one knee, his mind ticking over as he formulated a plan. Primal magic was way out of the question, so he’d have to resort to the finicky elvish magic his father had taught oh so long ago. There was no way he was going to be able to overpower two guards on pure physical strength alone.

Lowering himself flat on the ground amongst the trash, Ghaur cringed at whatever foul smelling gunk he was laying in as his hands come to his lower back. “As you say,” he muttered, waiting for the first man to approach him. If he could just time this right, then he’d be able to hopefully lose the guards in the maze of less than desirable accommodation.

“I don’t suppose you’d let me keep the body, would you? I did go through all the effort of gutting him, and you’ve already caught me. It really would be a waste.” His head was turned towards the woman, eying her bow. That could be a problem, but it was already too late to factor that in. As soon as a hand touched him, Ghaur sprang into action. His hand snapped up, electricity cracking loudly in the night air. The alleyway was lit in eerie blue-white for a split second until he touched the first man. He was packing enough electricity to stun.

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Standard procedure for arresting a dangerous suspect, mage or otherwise, was for the first man to gently press the tip of his spear into the small of the arestee's back before the second man attempted to bind the hands. Naturally, this being a green lot of guards who were feeling sickened by the stench of the alley and the sight of the half butchered body, procedure didn't get followed.

Séanait was just about to chip Victor over this, when the criminal asked if he could keep the body. She was distracted for a second, eyes flicking to the man's face, and then she knew it was too late. Victor bent to tie the man's arms just as the corpse thief went into action. He sprang up, lightening crackling around his hand as he pressed it to Victor's body. The was a short scream as the guardsman's limbs flailed, and then he fell bonelessly to the ground.

Simon hesistated and started to move in, as did Frederick and Geoffrey, but Séanait was quicker than either of them. Used to violence and sudden death, she made a snap decision, bent her bow and loosed her arrow. She could have killed the mage, true, but if he'd killed Victor, as it seemed he had, then he deserved to hang. An arrow through the heart would simply be too quick. And so, instead of aiming for the obvious target of the man's chest, she let her arrow fly at his right calf.

It was a difficult shot for most. The light was incertain, the shadows flickering, and the man was moving too boot, but Séanait was not most people. She'd always had uncanny accuracy and at this range she'd never yet missed. The arrow, a yard long shaft of ash the thickness of a finger topped with a hardened broadhead, flew through the air towards its target as Séanait prepared to drop her bow and draw her langseax.

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Ghaur hauled himself to his feet using the guard’s momentum, slipping once in some unspeakable filth before twisting around to face the other guard standing in his way. Electricity still crackled along his fingertips, red fractal scarring making its way up his skin. He charged the other man, hand raised to make another strike.

He got two steps before excruciating pain shot through his calf, muscles and tendon bowing before the might of an arrow he could only swear was made for a boar twice his size. The half-ork gasped audibly, collapsing under his own weight as searing hot agony shot up his leg as surely as the blood streamed from his wound. The electricity died as Ghaur’s grunts rose, hands clutching where the arrow exited through the other side of his limb.

“Zepon’s balls!” he swore, preferring to growl out his words rather than whimper like a pitiful dog. The angle in which he had fallen left him slumped awkwardly against the side of the alley, his wounded leg stretched out behind him. He didn’t even want to know what kind of damage that woman had just inflicted. He didn’t even want to know if she were going to just drag him off to the dungeons like this or not. He just wanted to stop hurting.

“Alright,” he breathed, holding one of his hands up. “I can’t… I can’t run like this.” The way he hissed belied his agony. It hurt even more than when he’d had the scars carved into his face during his coming of age ceremony. He’d never been shot with an arrow before. At least that was something. “Please, just stop the pain.” His voice had finally broken under the strain of his tensed body.

[Deleted]

The arrow seemed to have a calming effect on the corpse-thief. The eerie, shimmering blue light that had illuminated the man's fingertips winked out as he stumbled and fell awkwardly to the ground. Séanait, langseax in hand, halted her rush towards the man and looked down at him without pity or remorse. She sheathed her weapon and borrowed a spear off Frederick, advancing towards the man until the point of the spear was pressed lightly into his chest.

She ignored the man's plea and upraised hand and stared daggers at him, never moving her eyes for an instant as she asked how Victor was. Simon checked him and found that Victor was alive and breathing well, although he had a couple of burn marks on him. Séanait nodded to herself and ordered Geoffrey to go fetch a horse. She wasn't about to carry the bastard all the way back, and he wouldn't be able to walk on his own, not with his hands bound.

As Geoffrey went to fetch a horse, Séanait pressed the point of her borrowed spear into the thief until it drew blood. She smiled at him with the wolfish grin a fight always left her with.

"I could stop the pain, aye, but I don't think they'd like it if I brought back a corpse, so you're going to live a little longer, I think."

Indicating their prisoner with her head, Séanait gave orders for Simon to break off the arrow shaft on either side of the wound and for Frederick to bind their prisoner's hands. She didn't trust the sorcerous mongrel one inch, arrow through the leg or no.