Post by Deleted on Jul 24, 2012 21:17:38 GMT -5
Ness walked through the streets of the town and towards the common area. He walked past a man dressed in farmers’ clothes who seemed to favor his left leg more than his right for he walked with a wooden staff to help himself, his mule slowly walking next to him. He continued to walk and would have gone right past the well, had it not been for the calico cat that sat in one of the buckets, staring at him with wide eyes. He began to slowly walk towards the well, careful not to startle the cat, and had an odd feeling someone was watching him. He turned to his right and saw an older man staring back at him. By the look of he man’s clothes he seemed to an upper classman, but if you looked at his shoes that barely had any padding left on the bottom at all, he’d look like no more than a peasant.
Ness pushed aside the uneasy feeling of being watched and reached out for the cat. The man that had been staring at him slightly moved his finger and a winch began to turn on its own, unfurling the rope, and sending the cat and bucket alike into the well. He went to grab the rope but was stopped as a large steel blade slammed down in front of his face. The blade wasn’t as decorative as some of the blades Ness had seen, but it was a fine blade in itself, and for some reason it seemed to call to Ness. He followed the tip of the blade to its hilt and then up the man’s arm and to his face and was met with the face of the man that had been staring at him before. “Excuse me sir, but I need to…”
“Use it,” the man commanded in a hushed yet urgent tone, cutting Ness off. His facial features were very calm but there was a fierceness in his eyes.
“Sir, I need to get that cat out,” Ness replied, a little wary of the man’s stare. The way the man had told him to ‘use it’ whatever ‘it’ was, had scared Ness.
The man seemed to think about Ness’ statement before speaking. “Ya know what? You’re right!” the man said as he pushed Ness into the well. At first, Ness tried to stop his descent by pushing his hands against the walls of the well, but realized how stupid of an idea that was as he continued to fall, the stone scraping the flesh of his hands. He moved his hands away from the walls and pushed them in front of his head, angling his body into a diver’s position. The impact of submerging into the ice-cold water felt like falling into a pile of shredded glass to Ness.
After a few moments of struggling he managed to break the surface and took in a few uneasy breaths. He began to frantically look for the cat, the reason he had been leaning over the well, but could not find the dang thing. He heard a little *meow* and turned to his right, no cat. He heard it again and turned to his left, no cat. He heard it one last time and realized something, if the cat was right next to him, its meow would have been very loud and the echoes would be even louder than there was. He slowly looked up and saw the cat that had ridden in the bucket into the well sitting on the edge of the well looking down at him.
“Cmon man! Use it!” the man that had pushed him in screamed into the well as he rubbed the cat’s head with his hand. The cat rubbed its body against the man as it let out a purr. He stared at the man in stupefied wonder. Why did he keep saying for him to ‘use it?’ What the hell did that mean. The old man let out a grunt and swung his arm around in a circle. Seeming to respond to the man’s movements, the water that Ness was swimming in began to churn and turn, whipping him around every which way as if he was in a whirlpool.
Livian walked with his staff helping him favor his one good leg. He had been leading his mule to the well so that it could take a drink from one of the troughs and found that all of them were occupied. It wasn’t until the man stepped aside from the fourth trough that Livian realized it was his good friend Damien. He watched as Damien slammed a blade down in front of a boy standing next to him and began to wobble over to his friend as fast as he could. “Damien! What the hell are you doing?” Livian demanded as he watched his friend toss the helpless boy into the water.
“I’m making the boy use it,” Damien said after shouting at the boy and then used magic to turn the well water into a raging whirlpool.
“How do you even know he can use it?” Livian demanded as he grabbed his friend’s shoulders and shook him. This always happened. Wherever they went his friend would always claim that he found someone that could ‘use it’ and all the time there seemed to be no magic in their blood at all.
“Because I can feel it,” Damien replied.
“Yeah, and you say that about every man and woman we pass on our journeys. Do you remember what happened to me the last time you tried to figure out if someone could do magic and they had a strong kick?” Livian questioned as he pointed at his right leg where a man had kicked him as hard as he could in an attempt to escape the two of them.
Ness was thrown back and forth, his body scraping against the wall every other second. He reached his bloodied hands out to the stones of the wall, hoping to catch an off-set stone, but his hands slipped every time. In a last desperate attempt to save his life, Ness raised his bloodied hands one last time into the air towards the edge of the well, and the water surged beneath him. The water level began to rise towards the opening and he began to shoot out towards the surface. He shot out of the well, and almost knocked over the two men that had been watching him, along with their cat, and landed on his hands and knees on the dirt coated street. His hands stung and made it hard to keep himself up with them, because of the dirt that got into the cuts. He looked up to see the old man that had pushed him and the man with the mule walking away with their backs turned to him, the cat bumping up and down as it happily walked behind them. “Hey! What the hell? You just through me in a fucking well!” Ness screamed as he tried to stand up.
Damien barely looked over his shoulder at Ness and then turned back to look at Livian. “So Livian, does that prove anything to you?” Damien questioned as he put a hand on his crippled friend’s shoulder.
“That doesn’t prove anything. How do I know you didn’t just use your own magic to get him out of there?” Livian questioned. Damien shook his head as he reached down and plucked a small knife from a sheath strapped to one of his calves. In one swift motion he through the knife behind him and it flew, blade over hilt, headed towards Ness. Ness got up in time to see the knife flying towards him. Time seemed to slow as the blade flipped towards him. He reached up with his left hand and the blade flew into it, his fingers wrapping themselves tightly around the hilt.
“Is that enough proof for you that he has magic?” Damien asked. He could tell Livian was about to argue and cut him off before he could. “Look at his damn hands Livian,” Damien said as the two of them walked back towards Ness. Ness stared at the blade dumbly, did he say magic? He looked to his hands and saw that they were no longer bloodied and the flesh was completely healed. Then he noticed that that was not what the old man had been talking about. There was a dark black tattoo of multiple runes and symbols glowing on his arm, sort of boxed off. The old man stormed over and grabbed Ness’ hand and lifted his wrist towards Livian so that he could see when he meant.
“My God, those are… the scripts of natural magic,” Livan said as he began to trace light, delicate fingers over the tattoo present on Ness’ skin. “Half the magic you and I have to work vigorously to accomplish looks like it would be as easy as breathing for him,” Livian said as he turned to Damien. Ness was still speechless. They said that word again, magic. Did they really think he possessed magic? Well, that would definitely explain why his hands had healed the same time the tattoo appeared.
“Wh… What the hell does any of this mean?” Ness asked when he was finally able to speak.
“It means that you must come with us,” Damien said as he grabbed Ness’ arm and began to walk, dragging Ness behind, Livian limping as he tried to catch up. Ness looked to where the old man’s grip was on him and saw that the tattoo had vanished. The mule walked to their right, but Ness could not find the kitten that had seemed to be traveling with the group. He heard a little poof noise and in a quick second, the cat was on his shoulder. Ness screamed out in fright and both Damien and Livian began to chuckle. “Now that fella is a little bi of magic himself,” Damien began as he scratched the top of the cat’s head. “I found him a few years back. Wasn’t so sure if I was gonna keep him or not, but then I saw what he could do. I don’t know how he does it, but just that he can.”
The rest of their journey together, Damien hadn’t really said a word. The man with the limp, who introduced himself as Livian to Ness, had come over and had talked to him about Damien. “You see… Damien’s been searching for one that could do magic like you can. It’s amazing really. The way your hands healed and the fact that you caught that blade that fast, especially since it was Damien that threw it. I take it, you’ve never really been trained in combat?” Livian asked as they began to walk up an incline.
“No. Well, that is, besides the two years of training that any child that isn’t born and then thrown out on the streets goes through. I’ve never had a knife thrown at my face though.”
“Yeah…He definitely know how to prove a point,” Livian said as he let out a laugh. Damien still led the group, the cat now sitting on his shoulder. Livian had told Ness that the cat’s name was Yivick. Ness was still unbelieveable confused with the events that had transpired in the last half hour, but he figured that if they went through so much attention to find ‘someone like him’ that he might as well see what it was all about. He looked at Livian and realized that for a crippled man, he sure could move.
After another half an hour, they made it to a little hut and Damien threw open the door. Livian and Ness followed behind him. Yicvck, who had been traveling on the shoulder of Damien for the entire walk, now jumped off from his shoulder and took off into the house. Damien walked in and Livian waited for Ness to go in before coming in himself. Ness wondered if he had let Ness go in first for the sake of being nice, or was it because of his limp, or maybe even to keep Ness from leaving? Ness pushed away the thought as he let the inside of the hut. On the outside it had looked like pieces of wood but together to make a place for living, but the inside showed just how much life went on in the hut.
In the main room was a large oak table; small skulls will sunken eyes staring out into nothingness were carved into the wood of the legs that supported the table. Covering every last space that was available on the walls were maps pinned there. The maps didn’t seem to have one specific destination but had green paint in lines, crisscrossing all over the maps. Maps that couldn’t fit on the walls were strew about on the table with the skull engraved legs. Ness looked around more and saw a kitchen off to the right. He noticed that the kitchen also had maps strewn about over the place. The door to the bedroom was closed, but Ness could only guess that it two had maps scattered all over the place.
“Ok, so which one of you guys wants to tell me why the hell I was brought all the way over to this hut? Oh, and why the hell you through me into that well?” Ness questioned as he glared at Damien. As Damien prepared to speak, Livian leaned his staff against the wall and sat down in a chair whose legs, like the legs of the table, were carved with skulls.
“I pushed you into the well to see if you could do magic,” Damien said the words with no emotion, as if Ness was an idiot for not knowing that.
“Ok… And why did you have to find out that I could use magic?” Ness asked. He was still very confused to as why it was so important.
“To understand that, you must first learn some history. About twenty-five years ago there was an amazingly powerful sorcerer by the name of Maeldun. At first he had been a very nice caring man. That was before he had realized the true potential to his abilities. He used his magic to kill rather then heal, to break rather than fix. He reigned over the land killing those he chose for five years, then an order of six mages took a crystal they had infused with magic and then when Maeldun was not fully aware, they used magic to trap him into the crystal. They realized that there was no way to destroy it, but that there was a chance to split it and make it harder for him to come back. So they cracked the stone into six pieces and each mage took a shard and for the past twenty years have been guarding each individual shard. Until recently it has been easy for this order to guard the shards but now there is a group of men going around trying to collect the shards for they want to put the crystal back together and raise Maeldun. They have already collected two shards. Only only four shards remain, only four mages left to protect them.”
As his story came to a stop, Damien turned around quickly towards the door as the sound of footsteps could be heard marching up the stone pathway that led to his house. Livian jumped up and ran towards the door as if his pain was pushed aside by the new sound, a bow magically gripped in his left hand, a knocked arrow held in his right. He ran to the window and quickly jumped out, making no sound as his feet touched the ground. He disappeared into the shrubs and Ness turned his attention back to Damien who was sweating profusely as if he expected the end to come.
“It’s been so many years… I’m getting old… I can’t watch over it anymore. That’s is why I searched for someone like you and why I brought you here when I realized what you were. You must watch over the shard,” Damien said in a rushed tone as he quickly took off his shirt and wiped the sweat that formed on his brow. He quickly unsheathed the sword from his side and raised it into the air above his head. The black tattoos of the runes and symbols that had covered Ness’ hand rose and coated Damien’s body. His chest and back, arms and legs looked as if they were a piece of parchment someone had crammed inky notes onto. Then the symbols began to glow bright and white as Damien slammed the sword down onto the table as hard as he could, the blade breaking off in an explosion of metal splinters.
The shrapnel from the explosion of the blade came inches away from Ness’s face before they froze in mid-air, held by some type of magic force. Ness looked around the room and noticed that one shard amongst the rest of the shattered blade was not a grayish color like that of steel, but was more clear like that of a crystal. Damien grabbed the shard of crystal from the air and then lowered his hand. In response the floating shards of the blade began to shoot back towards the center and reformed into the blade. As Damien walked over to Ness, the sound of footsteps grew louder.
“This is one of the last remaining four shards that keeps Maeldun trapped. Take the shard and guard it with your life. Here is my sword,” Damien said as he handed Ness the sword. “Now hide in this closet until it is safe and please take care of Yivick for me,” Damien said as he opened up the door of the closet and put the cat in it. He placed the crystal shard into Ness’ right hand, forced the boy’s fingers tight around it and shoved him into the closet, closing it before turning to face the door. Ness looked through a little crack where the door and the wall met and watched Damien as the door to the hut flew open. A pain rose in his right hand and he flipped it over unfurling his fingers. He looked just in time to see the shard sink into his skin and disappear. It was gone and with it so was the pain.
“Where is it old man?” one of the men who had burst into the hut asked, disgust present in his voice. He was fairly tall, with large muscles, and looked very menacing and frightening in his black armor and with his black blade, red blood running down the edge of the blade and dripping onto the floor. In the window Ness could see Livian with his bow raised, waiting for Damien to give to ok and then he would fire. Damien noticed Livian but did not give the ok. He slightly shook his head and Livian lowered his bow and then took off, disappearing to an unknown place.
“I do not know what you are asking for,” Damien said. Moments before he had been covered in sweat, but now he seemed ok, as if he accepted what he expected the outcome of the meeting to be.
“The dammed shard! That’s what we’ve come for old man! Where is it?” one of the two men that had come with the guy that spoken first, questioned as he slammed Damien against a wall, his face meeting the wall hard. Damien didn’t respond, didn’t spit the blood that rested in his mouth, didn’t even seem to notice the three of them. That got them really angry and they began to hit him constantly and continued to smash his face against the wall, each time they asked a question his response was the same. Nothing.
And then Damien looked up at him from the ground and whispered one word, "Hidden," then he shouted inaudibly, black tattoos glowing around his body and shooting towards the closet. Then he fell and died. Ness felt something odd inside of him as the magic Damien had released sank into his body like the shard and the two met. Then he passed out.
Ness woke up a few short moments later. "Wha- I thought we killed you," one of the two men standing before him said and Ness instinctively threw up a hand. The man was engulfed in flames and then he turned to the other. He held out his hand and magical hands chocked the life from the man. Both men fell to the floor.
"Damien!" he heard Livian say from before him. "I was certain you would die."
"But Damien did d-" then he looked in the mirror, saw his reflection... or rather, Damien's reflection. What the hell had that old man done. "I even surprise myself sometimes," he said with a feigned laugh. In that moment he had decided not to tell Livian. "Sadly," he said as he opened the closet, "Ness didn't make it out like I thought he would." He knelt down and grabbed the sword, sheathing it and then held the shard up. It had made its way out of his body. "I say this gives us reason to hunt down the other three," he said as he turned away from his dead body and walked out the door, Yivitch appearing on his shoulder.
Ness pushed aside the uneasy feeling of being watched and reached out for the cat. The man that had been staring at him slightly moved his finger and a winch began to turn on its own, unfurling the rope, and sending the cat and bucket alike into the well. He went to grab the rope but was stopped as a large steel blade slammed down in front of his face. The blade wasn’t as decorative as some of the blades Ness had seen, but it was a fine blade in itself, and for some reason it seemed to call to Ness. He followed the tip of the blade to its hilt and then up the man’s arm and to his face and was met with the face of the man that had been staring at him before. “Excuse me sir, but I need to…”
“Use it,” the man commanded in a hushed yet urgent tone, cutting Ness off. His facial features were very calm but there was a fierceness in his eyes.
“Sir, I need to get that cat out,” Ness replied, a little wary of the man’s stare. The way the man had told him to ‘use it’ whatever ‘it’ was, had scared Ness.
The man seemed to think about Ness’ statement before speaking. “Ya know what? You’re right!” the man said as he pushed Ness into the well. At first, Ness tried to stop his descent by pushing his hands against the walls of the well, but realized how stupid of an idea that was as he continued to fall, the stone scraping the flesh of his hands. He moved his hands away from the walls and pushed them in front of his head, angling his body into a diver’s position. The impact of submerging into the ice-cold water felt like falling into a pile of shredded glass to Ness.
After a few moments of struggling he managed to break the surface and took in a few uneasy breaths. He began to frantically look for the cat, the reason he had been leaning over the well, but could not find the dang thing. He heard a little *meow* and turned to his right, no cat. He heard it again and turned to his left, no cat. He heard it one last time and realized something, if the cat was right next to him, its meow would have been very loud and the echoes would be even louder than there was. He slowly looked up and saw the cat that had ridden in the bucket into the well sitting on the edge of the well looking down at him.
“Cmon man! Use it!” the man that had pushed him in screamed into the well as he rubbed the cat’s head with his hand. The cat rubbed its body against the man as it let out a purr. He stared at the man in stupefied wonder. Why did he keep saying for him to ‘use it?’ What the hell did that mean. The old man let out a grunt and swung his arm around in a circle. Seeming to respond to the man’s movements, the water that Ness was swimming in began to churn and turn, whipping him around every which way as if he was in a whirlpool.
Livian walked with his staff helping him favor his one good leg. He had been leading his mule to the well so that it could take a drink from one of the troughs and found that all of them were occupied. It wasn’t until the man stepped aside from the fourth trough that Livian realized it was his good friend Damien. He watched as Damien slammed a blade down in front of a boy standing next to him and began to wobble over to his friend as fast as he could. “Damien! What the hell are you doing?” Livian demanded as he watched his friend toss the helpless boy into the water.
“I’m making the boy use it,” Damien said after shouting at the boy and then used magic to turn the well water into a raging whirlpool.
“How do you even know he can use it?” Livian demanded as he grabbed his friend’s shoulders and shook him. This always happened. Wherever they went his friend would always claim that he found someone that could ‘use it’ and all the time there seemed to be no magic in their blood at all.
“Because I can feel it,” Damien replied.
“Yeah, and you say that about every man and woman we pass on our journeys. Do you remember what happened to me the last time you tried to figure out if someone could do magic and they had a strong kick?” Livian questioned as he pointed at his right leg where a man had kicked him as hard as he could in an attempt to escape the two of them.
Ness was thrown back and forth, his body scraping against the wall every other second. He reached his bloodied hands out to the stones of the wall, hoping to catch an off-set stone, but his hands slipped every time. In a last desperate attempt to save his life, Ness raised his bloodied hands one last time into the air towards the edge of the well, and the water surged beneath him. The water level began to rise towards the opening and he began to shoot out towards the surface. He shot out of the well, and almost knocked over the two men that had been watching him, along with their cat, and landed on his hands and knees on the dirt coated street. His hands stung and made it hard to keep himself up with them, because of the dirt that got into the cuts. He looked up to see the old man that had pushed him and the man with the mule walking away with their backs turned to him, the cat bumping up and down as it happily walked behind them. “Hey! What the hell? You just through me in a fucking well!” Ness screamed as he tried to stand up.
Damien barely looked over his shoulder at Ness and then turned back to look at Livian. “So Livian, does that prove anything to you?” Damien questioned as he put a hand on his crippled friend’s shoulder.
“That doesn’t prove anything. How do I know you didn’t just use your own magic to get him out of there?” Livian questioned. Damien shook his head as he reached down and plucked a small knife from a sheath strapped to one of his calves. In one swift motion he through the knife behind him and it flew, blade over hilt, headed towards Ness. Ness got up in time to see the knife flying towards him. Time seemed to slow as the blade flipped towards him. He reached up with his left hand and the blade flew into it, his fingers wrapping themselves tightly around the hilt.
“Is that enough proof for you that he has magic?” Damien asked. He could tell Livian was about to argue and cut him off before he could. “Look at his damn hands Livian,” Damien said as the two of them walked back towards Ness. Ness stared at the blade dumbly, did he say magic? He looked to his hands and saw that they were no longer bloodied and the flesh was completely healed. Then he noticed that that was not what the old man had been talking about. There was a dark black tattoo of multiple runes and symbols glowing on his arm, sort of boxed off. The old man stormed over and grabbed Ness’ hand and lifted his wrist towards Livian so that he could see when he meant.
“My God, those are… the scripts of natural magic,” Livan said as he began to trace light, delicate fingers over the tattoo present on Ness’ skin. “Half the magic you and I have to work vigorously to accomplish looks like it would be as easy as breathing for him,” Livian said as he turned to Damien. Ness was still speechless. They said that word again, magic. Did they really think he possessed magic? Well, that would definitely explain why his hands had healed the same time the tattoo appeared.
“Wh… What the hell does any of this mean?” Ness asked when he was finally able to speak.
“It means that you must come with us,” Damien said as he grabbed Ness’ arm and began to walk, dragging Ness behind, Livian limping as he tried to catch up. Ness looked to where the old man’s grip was on him and saw that the tattoo had vanished. The mule walked to their right, but Ness could not find the kitten that had seemed to be traveling with the group. He heard a little poof noise and in a quick second, the cat was on his shoulder. Ness screamed out in fright and both Damien and Livian began to chuckle. “Now that fella is a little bi of magic himself,” Damien began as he scratched the top of the cat’s head. “I found him a few years back. Wasn’t so sure if I was gonna keep him or not, but then I saw what he could do. I don’t know how he does it, but just that he can.”
The rest of their journey together, Damien hadn’t really said a word. The man with the limp, who introduced himself as Livian to Ness, had come over and had talked to him about Damien. “You see… Damien’s been searching for one that could do magic like you can. It’s amazing really. The way your hands healed and the fact that you caught that blade that fast, especially since it was Damien that threw it. I take it, you’ve never really been trained in combat?” Livian asked as they began to walk up an incline.
“No. Well, that is, besides the two years of training that any child that isn’t born and then thrown out on the streets goes through. I’ve never had a knife thrown at my face though.”
“Yeah…He definitely know how to prove a point,” Livian said as he let out a laugh. Damien still led the group, the cat now sitting on his shoulder. Livian had told Ness that the cat’s name was Yivick. Ness was still unbelieveable confused with the events that had transpired in the last half hour, but he figured that if they went through so much attention to find ‘someone like him’ that he might as well see what it was all about. He looked at Livian and realized that for a crippled man, he sure could move.
After another half an hour, they made it to a little hut and Damien threw open the door. Livian and Ness followed behind him. Yicvck, who had been traveling on the shoulder of Damien for the entire walk, now jumped off from his shoulder and took off into the house. Damien walked in and Livian waited for Ness to go in before coming in himself. Ness wondered if he had let Ness go in first for the sake of being nice, or was it because of his limp, or maybe even to keep Ness from leaving? Ness pushed away the thought as he let the inside of the hut. On the outside it had looked like pieces of wood but together to make a place for living, but the inside showed just how much life went on in the hut.
In the main room was a large oak table; small skulls will sunken eyes staring out into nothingness were carved into the wood of the legs that supported the table. Covering every last space that was available on the walls were maps pinned there. The maps didn’t seem to have one specific destination but had green paint in lines, crisscrossing all over the maps. Maps that couldn’t fit on the walls were strew about on the table with the skull engraved legs. Ness looked around more and saw a kitchen off to the right. He noticed that the kitchen also had maps strewn about over the place. The door to the bedroom was closed, but Ness could only guess that it two had maps scattered all over the place.
“Ok, so which one of you guys wants to tell me why the hell I was brought all the way over to this hut? Oh, and why the hell you through me into that well?” Ness questioned as he glared at Damien. As Damien prepared to speak, Livian leaned his staff against the wall and sat down in a chair whose legs, like the legs of the table, were carved with skulls.
“I pushed you into the well to see if you could do magic,” Damien said the words with no emotion, as if Ness was an idiot for not knowing that.
“Ok… And why did you have to find out that I could use magic?” Ness asked. He was still very confused to as why it was so important.
“To understand that, you must first learn some history. About twenty-five years ago there was an amazingly powerful sorcerer by the name of Maeldun. At first he had been a very nice caring man. That was before he had realized the true potential to his abilities. He used his magic to kill rather then heal, to break rather than fix. He reigned over the land killing those he chose for five years, then an order of six mages took a crystal they had infused with magic and then when Maeldun was not fully aware, they used magic to trap him into the crystal. They realized that there was no way to destroy it, but that there was a chance to split it and make it harder for him to come back. So they cracked the stone into six pieces and each mage took a shard and for the past twenty years have been guarding each individual shard. Until recently it has been easy for this order to guard the shards but now there is a group of men going around trying to collect the shards for they want to put the crystal back together and raise Maeldun. They have already collected two shards. Only only four shards remain, only four mages left to protect them.”
As his story came to a stop, Damien turned around quickly towards the door as the sound of footsteps could be heard marching up the stone pathway that led to his house. Livian jumped up and ran towards the door as if his pain was pushed aside by the new sound, a bow magically gripped in his left hand, a knocked arrow held in his right. He ran to the window and quickly jumped out, making no sound as his feet touched the ground. He disappeared into the shrubs and Ness turned his attention back to Damien who was sweating profusely as if he expected the end to come.
“It’s been so many years… I’m getting old… I can’t watch over it anymore. That’s is why I searched for someone like you and why I brought you here when I realized what you were. You must watch over the shard,” Damien said in a rushed tone as he quickly took off his shirt and wiped the sweat that formed on his brow. He quickly unsheathed the sword from his side and raised it into the air above his head. The black tattoos of the runes and symbols that had covered Ness’ hand rose and coated Damien’s body. His chest and back, arms and legs looked as if they were a piece of parchment someone had crammed inky notes onto. Then the symbols began to glow bright and white as Damien slammed the sword down onto the table as hard as he could, the blade breaking off in an explosion of metal splinters.
The shrapnel from the explosion of the blade came inches away from Ness’s face before they froze in mid-air, held by some type of magic force. Ness looked around the room and noticed that one shard amongst the rest of the shattered blade was not a grayish color like that of steel, but was more clear like that of a crystal. Damien grabbed the shard of crystal from the air and then lowered his hand. In response the floating shards of the blade began to shoot back towards the center and reformed into the blade. As Damien walked over to Ness, the sound of footsteps grew louder.
“This is one of the last remaining four shards that keeps Maeldun trapped. Take the shard and guard it with your life. Here is my sword,” Damien said as he handed Ness the sword. “Now hide in this closet until it is safe and please take care of Yivick for me,” Damien said as he opened up the door of the closet and put the cat in it. He placed the crystal shard into Ness’ right hand, forced the boy’s fingers tight around it and shoved him into the closet, closing it before turning to face the door. Ness looked through a little crack where the door and the wall met and watched Damien as the door to the hut flew open. A pain rose in his right hand and he flipped it over unfurling his fingers. He looked just in time to see the shard sink into his skin and disappear. It was gone and with it so was the pain.
“Where is it old man?” one of the men who had burst into the hut asked, disgust present in his voice. He was fairly tall, with large muscles, and looked very menacing and frightening in his black armor and with his black blade, red blood running down the edge of the blade and dripping onto the floor. In the window Ness could see Livian with his bow raised, waiting for Damien to give to ok and then he would fire. Damien noticed Livian but did not give the ok. He slightly shook his head and Livian lowered his bow and then took off, disappearing to an unknown place.
“I do not know what you are asking for,” Damien said. Moments before he had been covered in sweat, but now he seemed ok, as if he accepted what he expected the outcome of the meeting to be.
“The dammed shard! That’s what we’ve come for old man! Where is it?” one of the two men that had come with the guy that spoken first, questioned as he slammed Damien against a wall, his face meeting the wall hard. Damien didn’t respond, didn’t spit the blood that rested in his mouth, didn’t even seem to notice the three of them. That got them really angry and they began to hit him constantly and continued to smash his face against the wall, each time they asked a question his response was the same. Nothing.
And then Damien looked up at him from the ground and whispered one word, "Hidden," then he shouted inaudibly, black tattoos glowing around his body and shooting towards the closet. Then he fell and died. Ness felt something odd inside of him as the magic Damien had released sank into his body like the shard and the two met. Then he passed out.
Ness woke up a few short moments later. "Wha- I thought we killed you," one of the two men standing before him said and Ness instinctively threw up a hand. The man was engulfed in flames and then he turned to the other. He held out his hand and magical hands chocked the life from the man. Both men fell to the floor.
"Damien!" he heard Livian say from before him. "I was certain you would die."
"But Damien did d-" then he looked in the mirror, saw his reflection... or rather, Damien's reflection. What the hell had that old man done. "I even surprise myself sometimes," he said with a feigned laugh. In that moment he had decided not to tell Livian. "Sadly," he said as he opened the closet, "Ness didn't make it out like I thought he would." He knelt down and grabbed the sword, sheathing it and then held the shard up. It had made its way out of his body. "I say this gives us reason to hunt down the other three," he said as he turned away from his dead body and walked out the door, Yivitch appearing on his shoulder.
and that kills me