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Possessed--Part Eighteen

Started by Evie, March 21, 2011, 09:26:12 AM

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Evie

   Part Eighteen—Judgment Day

   May 20, 1133—late night
   Forest clearing, Barony of Caerdraig

   "Are you alone, Walter, or did you leave someone further up the trail?" Sextus asked, his voice casual as he stood beside the reeling baron.  Stefan sat up, recovering from Walter's crotch shot enough to lurch to his feet and stand guard beside the fallen man, for despite the merasha coursing through his system, Walter still posed some potential threat.

   Walter remained stubbornly mute, staring fixedly at the ground, his cunning eyes darting to and fro as if seeking some avenue of escape.  Stefan grabbed him by the hair, forcing his head up to look at Sextus.

   "I asked you a question," Sextus reminded the captive, the pleasant tone of his voice at odds with his hard expression.  Bringing his Deryni powers into play, he ordered, "Answer it!"

   Walter, struggling to fight off the merasha disruption, could not resist the Truth-Say command underlying the words.  "I did not," he heard himself say reluctantly despite his best efforts to remain silent and make the Arilan git guess.

   "Does anyone know where you've gone?" Sextus asked.

   Walter fought even harder against the spell, but he could not fight the compulsion to answer truthfully in his weakened and unshielded condition.  "No."  He gritted his teeth, hoping against all hope that perhaps he'd been wrong all of his life and that there truly was a perdition, and that Sextus would end up there.  If only he could fight this horrific weakness pervading his entire body and think through the pounding in his head, he'd be glad to speed the interfering bastard on his way.  Mere oblivion seemed too good for the likes of him.

   "What happened to the message I sent you?"

   Walter pressed his lips tightly together, but the answer came forth unbidden anyway.  For the first time, he had an inkling of what his controls over Javana must have felt like from her point of view.

   "I...destroyed it."  

   Sextus smiled.  "Good.  So no one will suspect foul play if you don't return by morning's light and your body turns up someplace later, like—oh, perhaps an old mine shaft?  How careless of you, boyo."

   Walter's eyes widened.  He struggled to rise and flee, but Stefan's strong hands roughly shoved him to the ground again.

   Sextus crouched down before him to meet his eyes squarely, just out of reach of Walter's flailing attempts to fight off his tormentors.  "A point of curiosity, brother.  How many rapes and murders have you committed over the years?  From what I've gathered, you seem to have been a very busy man."

   Walter, to his relief, couldn't answer that question, for in truth he had no idea.  More than he'd ever bothered to keep up with was the only thing he could say with any certainty.  "Rot in hell," he managed.

   Sextus nodded, his smile disappearing.  "Oh, I'm certain you will."  He straightened, exchanging a glance with Stefan.  Walter felt Stefan jerk him upright, hoisting him by the arms.  He took a staggering step forward, but Sextus bent to grab him by the ankles, the two men carrying him between them like a sack of turnips towards a nearby patch of inky blackness barely visible against almost equally dark ground.  Walter, after a moment, realized what the darkness was, and began to struggle feebly.

#

   "How much merasha was in that dart?" Stefan asked as the two men hefted Walter's weight the short distance across the clearing to the uncovered mine shaft.

   "Just enough to make Walter's life truly miserable before it ends," Sextus answered, his voice curt as he concentrated on getting close enough to the open pit to toss their burden in without risking himself or Stefan falling in.  "This should be close enough."  He glanced at Stefan who nodded.  They began to swing Walter like a hammock swaying in the close quarters of a ship's hold.  "One...two...three...."  At three, the men released the incapacitated baron, who screamed weakly as his body sailed through the air, plummeting into utter darkness.

#

   May 20
   Caerdraig Castle


   Javana de Branigan sat bolt upright in bed, hearing a scream.  After a moment, she realized that the scream had not been within the castle, but had come from deep inside her mind.  Or, perhaps, it had been in a dream, some dream she had awakened far too quickly to remember.

   Something seemed...different, though.  She listened intently, all senses alert, but could not define what it was at first.  Rising cautiously, she ventured to the window, unshuttering it to peer outside.

   And then the realization hit her.   The controls that Walter had set in her mind, though they were still in place, had altered slightly.  How, she wasn't quite sure yet, but somehow they seemed...looser?

   She turned her thoughts inward, trying to determine the difference, and what might have caused his controls to slip.

#

   May 20   
   Caerdraig, abandoned mine shaft


   Walter regained consciousness, his mind and body shrouded in a miasma of agony.  He could see nothing in the darkness around him, nor could he see any light from above.  He had no idea how deep he was, although he vaguely recalled that this shaft had not been dug out quite as deeply as most, as the vein of ore it had yielded had not produced enough to make further effort worthwhile once the miners had hit bad air.  The poisonous air had long since dissipated, Walter imagined, or he'd not have lived long enough to have revived after his plummet into the pit and his abrupt landing on the rocky ground at the bottom.  It was little short of a miracle he'd survived the fall, though judging from the pains coursing through him, he'd broken hip and leg bones, and perhaps some ribs and an arm as well.  Perhaps he'd landed arse-downward, and the impact of the landing shattering those bones had absorbed enough shock that his skull had failed to crack open upon impact with the hard ground as well.  Not that this was a blessing, as it meant he would simply die more slowly, if not by breathing in poisoned air, then by simple exposure and the shock of his injuries.  He doubted he'd last long enough to die of slow starvation, and as for thirst...well, it was a mine, and water seepage into mines had ever been a problem.  He was a bit surprised he'd awakened on somewhat dry earth rather than dying at the bottom of a well; at least the drainage systems in the pit still worked.  

   And on top of his physical injuries, the damned drums inside his head still tried to split it in two, and his stomach was still in turmoil.  No, he imagined he would die rather quickly.  He just never imagined it would happen this way.

   Walter smiled.  If Sextus Arilan and Stefan de Varnay had thought they could rescue Javana from him in this way, they'd have a surprise coming.  No, he intended to retain his hold on his possession all the way to the grave.

#

   The formally trained part of Javana was fascinated despite itself as she studied what Walter had done to her mind.  She couldn't literally see what he had done, of course, but as she entered into a deep meditative state, she took a complete inventory of the mental changes she could sense within herself.  The controls were deteriorating slightly, though as of yet she didn't understand why.

   She tried to think back to her memories of how to fight off compulsions, but those lessons remained just beyond reach.  There had also been some way, she'd learned, that a trained Deryni could sieve through another person's mind, filtering out another's controls and removing them.  She wondered if it might be possible for her to perform such a procedure on her own mind.  Perhaps there was some way, if only she weren't too foggy-witted to recall it to conscious memory.  Her inability to do so was probably due to Walter's control on her.  It might have weakened, but it was far from gone.

   She continued to take a closer look at the damage Walter had done to her.  One shadowy area made her recoil in horror.  She fell deeper into her trance, studying it even more closely.

   Sweet Jesú, what had he done to her?!   Javana nearly came out of trance in her shock.  This was a problem, one she would have to figure out how to neutralize and quickly, for even as she discovered it, Walter's controls in her mind loosened even more, and now she understood what was happening.  Somehow, somewhere, he was slowly dying, and if she'd correctly interpreted this shadowy trigger she'd just discovered, if he died, she would as well, her mental processes disrupting in an cascade-like sequence of failures from which there'd be no hope of recovery.

   Javana suppressed the panic that threatened to bring her out of trance, allowing her mind to offer up a brief prayer for St. Camber's aid and protection before sinking even deeper, racing against time to disarm the trigger Walter had set before his final release became hers.

#

   May 20, near midnight
   Abandoned mine shaft


   Walter was sure he was hallucinating from the shock and pain.  He had to be; there was no other explanation for what he sensed in the darkness that surrounded him.  A woman's voice whispered in his ear, low and sweet, uttering seductive promises of unimaginable pleasures.  He allowed himself the luxury of listening to her voice, letting him lull away the agony in his body, and after a moment he felt his mind start to clear, giving him the wherewithal to summon up enough energy, despite his injuries, to do a pain-banishing spell.  The effort left him spent, gasping on the ground on which he lay, but the relief was profound.  He sensed nothing further for a few moments, then the voice whispered to him again.

   Walter, my sweet, enjoy me....

   The whisper was only in his mind, but that was fine; obviously it had to be.  Walter was not yet so far gone as to imagine otherwise.  What was harder to explain was the unexpected sensation of gentle hands caressing his body.  Perhaps it was some effect of the shock, trying to lull him into acceptance of his fate by allowing him to sink into more pleasant imaginings.

   Whatever it was, he wouldn't fight it.

   You are mine now.

   Walter surrendered to the bliss that had taken possession of him.

#

   Oh Jesú, deliver me from evil!  Javana Arilan de Branigan felt Walter's soul slowly begin to ebb out of him through the psychic link that still bound them together.  As his control over her weakened even further, a sudden memory of a marginal note in one of the more obscure texts in her studies leaped into her mind, offering up a key to the puzzle she was straining to unlock.

   She probed the shadowy trigger area once more, now more certain she understood the means by which to disarm it.  She tested her theory, and for a heart-stopping moment nothing seemed to happen.  But then the trigger dissolved, her mind translating the event into visual imagery, as if it had evaporated into a gray mist and then dissipated, leaving her free.

#

   May 20/21—Midnight
   Abandoned mine shaft


   The imaginary woman screamed, then settled into her ravaging of Walter with a vengeance.  For ravaging it was now indeed, quite literally, not mere ravishing any longer.  The snap of the first bone awakened him from his near-stupor with a howl as the invisible hands that had caressed him so gently now began to pluck and pull at his body.  He wondered what was happening, and as if some evil genie had deigned to grant him his last dying wish, the black pit began to fill with an unholy light—more like phosphorescent mist—enabling to see the dark temptress looming over him, her face and form just like Javana's had been at her fairest.  No, not Javana after all...now she was Meg...no, she kept changing form, like a roiling fog now, her features dissolving from one familiar face to another, until Walter dimly recognized that he was looking upon the visages of every woman he had ever ravished and discarded.  His eyes widened as he began to stammer pleas of appeal, but it was too late.  The succubus, unwilling to be appeased, turned a feral smile upon him, sharp teeth glittering wolf-like in the eerie light, and began to rip him limb from limb.

#

   Midnight
   Forest clearing, Caerdraig


   Sextus turned wary eyes to Stefan.  Do you hear that? he Mind-Spoke.

   Stefan also felt uneasy, though he couldn't have said exactly why.  His ears detected nothing.  He extended his senses outward, shivering as he encountered...something.  Whatever it was, it was quite close by, and he instinctively recoiled from the sensation of...cold?  No, it was more like evil, perhaps, only in some tangible form.

   Then he thought he heard something—a weak scream, coming up from the mine shaft nearby.  No, he had to have imagined that.  He and Sextus had covered the hole back over earlier in the night, right after they'd thrown Walter in.  They'd hardly had to work at damaging the rotted wood enough to make it look as if Walter had fallen through it; the effort of moving it from its original location and back had done most of that work for them.  They'd simply had to brush over the flattened grasses of its temporary location a few times with broken branches in order to hide the traces of where it had briefly lain.

   Still, he crossed himself and whispered a hasty prayer for forgiveness.  

#

   That gut instinct that had served Sextus well for most of his adult life was now telling him to ward himself and Stefan, and to do so quickly.  He questioned the instinct, knowing that in the unlikely event someone should wander through the clearing at this late hour, the glow of a warded circle would be a dead giveaway that Deryni were camped here so close to the Castle, and there'd surely be questions about their identity once Walter's disappearance became known.  But he followed the instinct anyway, in part because it had become ingrained habit, and because that habit had saved his life on numerous occasions.

   His hands trembling, he reached into his belt pouch, drawing out the ward cubes, charging each with the words of the spell as he hastily set them into their proper positions, until a shimmering dome of protection surrounded the two men.

#

   A dark energy emanated from the pit, roiling turbulently, its shadowy form pitch black against the moonlit darkness of the midnight sky.  A psychic scream of frustration swirled around the dome of light briefly, and then the energy dispersed, evaporating away into nothingness.

   Sextus Arilan, not normally a man given to earnest prayer, prayed fervently as it passed over them, vowing to make his Confession to Denis as soon as the opportunity presented itself.  The two men saw nothing more of the phenomenon once it had dissipated, but they did not emerge from the wards, opting to remain under the magical dome of protection until daybreak.

#

   May 21, early morning
   Caerdraig Castle


   The last remnant of Walter's control over Javana shattered, and in its place she felt a surge of joyous freedom as her mind became fully her own again for the first time in seven years.  Tears of elation coursed down her face.  She must continue to play her role as Walter's Baroness, she realized, for though she realized she must be a widow now, her husband's household would not expect her to know that yet; in fact, they might not even be aware of his death yet themselves.  She would have to wait until they notified her of his loss—indeed, she was quite curious to know what had caused it!—and then she could play the part of the bereaved wife.  No, few here would believe that, although most of Walter's household were unaware of how much his baroness had been a prisoner in her own home.  His dazed widow, then, shocked by the sudden turn of her fortunes, and eager to return to her brother's home and put the years of her unhappy marriage to Walter behind her now that he was gone.  Of course, as baroness she had a duty to remain long enough to ensure a smooth transition of the lands and other holdings to Walter's heir, whoever that might be, since he had no legitimate sons.  But after that, surely there'd be nothing to hold her here anymore.  No, she was truly free, free to go home.

   Home.  Where was home for her now?  Seisyll's house?

   No, she would not allow herself to worry about that right now.  For now, it was enough that she had been delivered from Walter's iron grasp.

   Something passed close by, something dark and foreboding, making the hairs stand on the back of Javana's neck.  She shrank back, extending her senses out cautiously, her fingers worrying at one of her rings—her betrothal ring—in fear.  The momentary premonition of evil passed, and Javana released a breath she hadn't realized she was holding, whispering a prayer of gratitude to God and to St. Camber.
   

Part Nineteen:  http://www.rhemuthcastle.com/index.php?topic=687.0
"In necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas."

--WARNING!!!--
I have a vocabulary in excess of 75,000 words, and I'm not afraid to use it!

Elkhound

Just a little mop-up to finish the story.  Nice job.

Evie

Thank you!  Yes, there's one more chapter following this.   :)
"In necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas."

--WARNING!!!--
I have a vocabulary in excess of 75,000 words, and I'm not afraid to use it!

Jerusha

A very nice touch having an illusion of all the women Walter had wronged play a part in his death.  And to think he tried to take Javana with him!  May his pain continue for eternity.................
From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night...good Lord deliver us!

 -- Old English Litany

AnnieUK

"How many [snip] murders have you committed over the years?"

"More than a hundred, less than a thousand."

Ack!! Fandom confusion again!

Alkari

It was lucky that Javana's training was good enough to overcome the death trigger Walter had set.  Imagine how Sextus and STefan would have felt if, by killing Walter, they had also killed her  :(   

I do hope the succubus enjoyed every last morsel of her meal.   And that the other demons were around to watch her. 

derynifanatic64

I am thrilled that Walter is dead!  But I still think that our dear succubus will spend the next few centuries throwing up.  She is sure to have a sour taste in her mouth for all eternity.
We will never forget the events of 9-11!!  USA!! USA!!

Alkari

Quote from: derynifanatic64 on March 21, 2011, 05:36:35 PM
But I still think that our dear succubus will spend the next few centuries throwing up.  She is sure to have a sour taste in her mouth for all eternity.

You know, somehow I don't even want to THINK about a succubus with a stomach upset, or demanding nice-tasting mouthwashes ...  :D

Shiral

And here I thought Sextus and Stefan were being too easy on Walter by merely busting his buns while he's got a merasha hangover, so to speak.  :D Not to worry.

I hope Javana has a joyous homecoming to Tre Arilan soon.  And that she won't take ANYBODY'S advice on her next husband! OR let herself be bullied into a new marriage too quickly.

She's had enough bad luck in one marriage for about 20 bad ones. Woman needs some adoration of a more wholesome kind.

Melissa
You can have a sound mind in a healthy body--Or you can be a nanonovelist!

Evie

Quote from: Shiral on March 21, 2011, 08:47:49 PM
And here I thought Sextus and Stefan were being too easy on Walter by merely busting his buns while he's got a merasha hangover, so to speak.

Heh.  After all the torments you readers dreamed up for him?  I wouldn't have dared let him off that lightly!   ;D

No, the original plan had been to have him die slowly with his bones broken at the bottom of the mine shaft and the poisonous mine gases slowly suffocating the life out of him, giving him a fair bit of time to think back on his life and what had brought him to that place before he choked out that final breath.  Then Aylmer's death scene came out of left field (one of those "Walter is doing WHAT?!" moments), and I realized it would hardly be fair to have the henchman get a more spectacular death than his master, so the plan got revised slightly.  But Sextus and Stefan had to be able to ensure some way that Walter hadn't told anyone else he was meeting someone, so his death could look like an accident, hence the merasha dart to disrupt his shields and powers so they could safely apprehend and use Truth-Say on him.  Of course, since neither man knew everything Walter had been up to, they had no idea a succubus would come along and put some extra special loving touches on their own plans for him....   :D

The Death-Trigger in Javana's mind was also something that wasn't pre-planned, but as I was writing that chapter, Walter threw that last-ditch weapon at me.  I wasn't all that surprised by the twist, actually, since it's exactly the sort of thing the thrice-bedamned git would do, but it ended up creating a bit more suspense to his death scene than there would have been if I'd simply stuck to Plan A...or even Plan B....
"In necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas."

--WARNING!!!--
I have a vocabulary in excess of 75,000 words, and I'm not afraid to use it!

Alkari

#10
Quote from: Shiral on March 21, 2011, 08:47:49 PM
I hope Javana has a joyous homecoming to Tre Arilan soon.  And that she won't take ANYBODY'S advice on her next husband! OR let herself be bullied into a new marriage too quickly.

She's had enough bad luck in one marriage for about 20 bad ones. Woman needs some adoration of a more wholesome kind.  

Hear, hear!!  Though I don't think Seisyll will dare to even hint at another husband for her for a very,very long time.  Not if he values his own head, that is.  I rather hope that Javana decides to go and stay somewhere a long way away from her family, as I don't see her wanting to stay at Tre Arilan for any length of time: she probably needs to go and stay in a peaceful convent somewhere to recover from the psychological battering she has received.  Arc en Ciel, or perhaps even quietly with the Servants? 


derynifanatic64

Maybe the Navy Seals could've dumped Osama into the pit with Walter and give that succubus a two-course meal.
We will never forget the events of 9-11!!  USA!! USA!!

Evie

Considering the porn stash found in his hideout, he might not have considered that such a bad way to go; however, given that the succubus did the world a favor by ridding it of Walter, a simple Deryni exorcism is probably a kinder fate for her.  ;)
"In necessariis unitas, in non-necessariis libertas, in utrisque caritas."

--WARNING!!!--
I have a vocabulary in excess of 75,000 words, and I'm not afraid to use it!

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