PRIDE BEFORE A FALL | Closed.

[limier]

WHO: Lakshmi + Coupe, Kitty, Gwenaelle, Helena, Iorveth, Marcoulf, Merrill, Solas.
WHAT: Fade cannonball
WHEN: You can't make me date you
WHERE: The Free Marches
NOTES: OOC Post, Discussion plurk.

This is routine.

A rift, high above the ruins of the Hammer’s Edge Bridge. It cuts into the sky, green and pulsing as a wound to spit out spirits like misery. This is routine — but the position is precarious, so near to a cliff ledge. Watch your footing, a fall promises only sharp rocks and water below.

The task is straightforward: Close the tear, or provide a diversion for the Rifters doing so. Keep yourself alive, and keep your hand to the task, no matter how it aches. When respite comes, it’s a matter of seconds: The Rift stabilizes, and,

And Lakshmi breaks from the group. Moving fast (too considered for the pace, every demon dodged, never a misstep on the odd root or rock) as she sprints for the edge. Maybe you tried to grab her, stop her, stop someone else from grabbing her.

She launches herself legs out, flatly determined in her aim —

Maybe it’s only that like it or not, she’s going through that rift. Maybe it’s that there’s no good reason not to join her. Maybe it’s that everyone else is jumping too.

Routine, right?

 

Comments

cw: bloody battle descriptions ??

[shri]

[ She isn't sure what place this is - for surely it is nothing she knows in detail. These are not her men, as the battle churns around her, these aren't the war cries she knows. These are the bullets, swords and men that had fought. Even the horses are not right, as she snags one by the reigns, it's rider struck down. Wasting no time in mounting it.

But the screaming is the same. The chaos is the same. The hopelessness is the same. She has never been on this battlefield before, but she has been on it a thousand times. Expects almost, that the damn leaders will be drunk, should she find them. To that, the outcome seems a surity, as it had those long days in the heat. She shouldn't enjoy it, as she goes forward, but there is a point there - like a cut on the roof of her mouth she presses against: she has never made sense to herself expect on battlefields. When her purpose is just one thing. Because she is not a diplomat, she is not a wife, or a mother, or even a daughter. She is one purpose, to drive forward to the edge of this field that should not be. She is the sword in her hand, she is the holy words in her lips that praise Goddess Kali, born of Mother Goddess Durga's brow, and she forgets everything else to that, as she had that day. That hopes, maybe as the words form, she will not be trapped in this battle as she was that day. She will not fall to the foolishness of those around her.

Enough that the air about her ripples, no longer stays, she no longer stays, because through our understanding, Manu, we find out divinity, our true purpose, and put all aside, and as she draws her sword, lifts up her shield, her arms spread out many-fold. Until there are four sets, all told, and each of the eight arms wields a weapon, sword, mace, trident, spear, bow and arrow, her hair flung half wild and free from below a great helm of gold. The war cry tears through her throat in a ease of familiarity. Har, Har, Mahadev! Her many arms strikeout, sending them flinging back. Cutting down spirits, whether they were for or against, this was not her battlefield, after all. No Redcoats or Maratha soldiers. But she moves to the patterns of carnage that are so gluttonously familiar. What it felt like to be on a battlefield for day after day. The unending thrall of it.

The pure white of her clothes, the heavy leather of her armour is blood-soaked and soon with the expectation of each blow as she reigns it down. In that haze, she almost doesn't recognise Ioverth. Blinking darkly lined eyes down at him like she might want to cut him down too, in front of her, every weapon poised to strike. But if she stops, it's only in the recognising of someone trapped as surely as she is, in this dreadful, unending battle when hope is long left. Her mouth opens, the delicate chain that runs from nose to ear, striking against her cheek as her head tilts.

The battle loud and cacophonous around them. ]

माझ्याबरोबर चल

[ Mājhyābarōbara cala. Come with me. The words don't come out in English, or Trade as they called it here, but deep and cutting out in Marathi, guttural in the back of her throat against the screams of the dying. But the nearest hand is offered with a sheer expectation. Her inner palm painted with one red dot, the back of her hand in a lotus, offering it to him, freely. ]