I. SEMI-CLOSED.

[letterandspirit]

WHO: Marcus Kane and people of personal interest.
WHAT: A slow appraisement of the Inquisition begins the subtle hunt for one mage in particular.
WHEN: The rest of the Emprise du Lion campaign.
WHERE: Emprise du Lion
NOTES: This log is a catch all for specific starters for planned threads, and hence semi-closed, but entirely open for planning! Please let me know if you'd like to meet Kane and we can divine some kind of encounter.

Comments

[apostasia]

A gesture with the hand that bears the shard and he says, "Demos, which you'll not have heard of," a bit dryly. These rifts, they're a problem - but he keeps his voice low, having considered falling silent when that snow fell and deciding that if they'd been heard, then they'd been heard and pretending not to have noticed anything would serve as well if not better.

At first he thinks it isn't pretending, and then -

No, raising his hand; footsteps, the crunch of ice and underbrush. A tilt of his head.

His fingers flex around the hilt of his sword.

[letterandspirit]

Kane drops his attention attentively to the gesturing hand, the green glimmer that it bears, and his brows knit in a moment of consternation, cognitive dissonance. It's true, he hasn't heard of Demos, and all of that warrants further explanation.

But Martel's hand goes up, and Kane has better sense than to ignore it.

Wolves don't attack men. Kane has had enough run ins with the mangy, skinny things that lurk in certain patches of the Free Marches to know this is true. However, he's also been in Emprise du Lion for sometime, and knows that what he knows doesn't always apply. The rivers freeze, and his brothers try to kill him, each other, themselves, and the wolves are very brave.

When the first one comes scrabbling out of the forest brush, Kane is already drawing his blade, swiping one-handed in the same motion, catching the animal across its snout.

[apostasia]

It would be fucking wolves. At least isn't more of those diseased Templars, but - wolves, great, who doesn't want to spend his afternoon killing glorified dogs. Martel would like to spend no part of any afternoon around anything canine, live or otherwise, but the day soldiers get to decide where they go and how they spend their time is the day they've come up with some innovative new way to fight wars. (Most are solved over a table, with a lot of arguing, in the end; maybe, one day, people will start there instead. And then light it on fire and go back to doing things as God or your Maker intended, right in each other's fucking faces.)

--which is all a very long way of saying that Martel kicks a wolf in the teeth and swears at it like it personally shit on his good day, unfair as he was arguably not really having one to ruin. There is a great deal of force in an armored boot, but he follows it with his sword, magic rippling over steel and cutting through bone with more ease than it rightfully should.

They're close to the ice; the pushback sends Martel further than he'd braced for, and he slides without dignity a few feet before rolling, and narrowly coming the better off a wolf that launches itself at him while he's down.

[letterandspirit]

He manages to slay his first rather quickly, the swing of his blade cleaving it between its neck and shoulder, not enough to behead but enough that scarlet blood pumps in an arterial spray on the snow, and it's too busy dying to be of more of a nuisance.

The next gets a mouthful of coat, and drags him down.

Which is very graceful, but he abandons his sword -- something he doesn't do if faced with a foe with opposable thumbs -- to take out a thick-hilted blade. When it comes at him, teeth shining, Kane gives it his arm to worry, teeth tearing into leathers and metals, hard enough to bruise but not to puncture, unless he were to let it worry away.

It's reconsidering its options when he plunges the knife up through where furry neck meets jaw, pushing past dense fur, thick hide, and the vulnerabilities beneath.

He heaves it away from himself, getting to his knees and reaching for his sword, tense against the idea of a fourth sizing up his bent back.