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A person held down with their arms yanked up behind their back, is excruciating to see, and it would be if that were all that was being done, and if he were only a stranger. But it's not, and he's not. Listening makes you sick, but you remain in place. Hidden. Lurking behind trees and in undergrowth. Using your small size to play the rat, the cat and the fox. All the little things scurrying around in the grey between tents and trees. They said they'd go easy on him if he gave them some satisfaction for their need for revenge, if he showed some pain and fear, and he is crying, his gasps muffled by the soil his face is pressed into, but they have not gone easy. The game is too fun, sadism is as addictive as blood magic.
No templars have come. The abuse has been growing worse by the day. You cannot stand it anymore. You must do something. You must decide.
“Mercy! Please! Please stop! I'm begging you!” rasps the victim, over the sound of laughter and excited barking. He's barely able to speak, but despite this you've never heard him sound so animated, so..normal. It's not the pain that makes him sound like a different person, but the shame. The shame of being used and abused. Of having your inner being and most private parts exposed to ridicule, or worse, lust. Of being considered a cheap object for delivering cheap thrills, worth nothing on its own. Fit for decimation. A toy soon to be flung away. You know all those feelings well, but you never had it in you to wish them upon him.
At the sound of her father's voice, Valeria waves her hands up and down, but the silence you cast on her prevents verbal accidents. Absently, you pull her little cap further down over her ears, the cap you made to dampen noise.
“No mercy for you, monster.” grunts the main villain, the leader of the camp, Waldhere. Violence intensifies till your husband is reduced to exhaustion and no longer able to ease the weight on his shoulders. The pop of joints dislocating is audible over the rest of the malicious cacophony.
Eventually though, the abusers tire, moving away from their half-dead victim in order to drink and eat and recoup their strength. Broken sobbing follows a pained moan, sobbing which is itself followed by jeers. A wave of nausea sends intense heat throughout your entire body, which shakes like you're freezing.
“Why is it whining? Guarantee he was the chantry cart. Everyone had a ride.”
The man who was holding your husband's arms, experiences a fit of conscience. “He's falling apart. Don't go again, you'll kill him, he's already bleeding bad. Might have punctured his gut.”
“Noo, you think? Killing him is the point, fool. But if I can't have fun with the tin whore anymore, then I'm going to impale him with my staff. See what pretty sounds he makes then.”
A stave creaks. And so does a voice.
“Don't. Don't kill me. Please. I have children.”
A moment of silence passes before Waldhere replies. Probably he forgot that his victim is a human being, and not some sort of construct or demon playing along. “Is that so? And how did you get them, you hypocritical slut? Ain't you supposed to be pure and chaste? Those sounds you make, you were never pure. Did randy priestesses do you when you were young, hmm? I know how it goes.”
“I've been taken advantage of my whole life.”
“Boy, I don't care if demons did you every which way, I'm still gonna turn your insides to mush and watch it run out of your ears. You can't make me feel sorry for one of you.”
“Please, have mercy. I've done nothing to you.”
“I know. But you're a templar. You've done something to some mage.” Waldhere sounds irritated and keen to end the conversation. “I don't like this dog yapping. Help me end it, boys.”
“No! Stop! My mother was a mage. A templar raped her. I had no choice but to become one!”
In silence your heart breaks and falls to pieces, shattering on the damp soil. Righteous rage fills the well of your body, making your eyes glow blue-white, if only you could see them. At your chest, your baby conceived in rape, sucks her thumb.
Boots squelch in mud as the men approach their victim, intent on inflicting horror. Mettin utters another desperate sound of fear, but is utterly unable to defend himself. It's now that you choose your side, so long after he chose his. Even after climbing to your feet, they don’t see you.
With a deafening boom to accompany the deafening rage in your heart, lightning, the most powerful kind of war magic, zigzags through the woods, seeming to throw itself out of the complacent trees, striking dogs and fiends in human form and turning them to dust which blows away in the bitter breeze. Electricity's terrible white fingers take only a moment to destroy, leaving nothing but a fading roar behind. Such is the price of revenge.
After the fury of nature, your footsteps are soft on gentle earth. Your daughter cries, made afraid by your doing once again. A problem for later. ‘I have children. I have children. I have children.’ The refrain runs through your mind. Did he know you were close by? Did he say it without tenderness in his heart? You can never put it past someone like him to say what is most convenient. But you also don't care. He said it regardless, bringing forth his fatherhood as a good, a soft thing, a strong thing. A reason to live.
When he recognises your presence, he rolls face down into the mud that has formed beneath him, though it must have cost a lot to heave himself onto his side in order to plead for his life. You assume, initially, that he has passed out. And then you realise he is ashamed, and hiding.
“Messere!” You're not a proper spirit healer, but you know a couple spells thanks to all that reading. If it's true that he's been mortally wounded, you don't think you can do anything about that, but you can make the pain go away. But when you touch him with a hand glowing blue, the magic dissipates. Trying again yields the same result. A single incoherent spark of wry amusement flashes into being inside your breast. Even now, he must be difficult.
“Messere, let me heal you.” Templars are funny. Can't heal them with magic if they will it otherwise.
He says something but you can't understand what. Jostling him is not what you want, but breathing mud is also not healthy. “Let me heal you.” you say, attempting to push him up a bit, trying to be mindful of his dislocated arms.
He doesn't look at you, even when you get close enough to number the tears trembling on his lashes. He doesn't look at his child either.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“There’s nothing to heal.”
That's not what his battered body tells you when you look down at it. It looks like every mage in camp has had their turn offloading rage, hate, frustration and fear upon it. And that is exactly what has happened. The days and nights strung up in camp, the starvation and flogging and beatings and pelting and who knows what else, were not nearly so hard on him as what occurred here. There is something uniquely awful about rape. It is to inflict a living death. To put hell in a beating heart. To murder an immortal spirit. ‘To steal a soul’, that is what the word means.
When the gang dragged him away, into the woods, you knew they intended, ultimately, to torture him to death, away from (possibly) more delicate sensibilities. An act of war. A symbol. Let the enemy fear as we've feared, and suffer as we've suffered. So go the excuses.
“Yes there is. You're badly hurt, and I am going to heal you.”
A voice you're so very used to, emerges broken. “Mageling, how do you not understand?” But he sighs, closes his eyes, and goes limp.
This time he doesn't resist, allowing you, at last, to properly soothe and stitch and bind with gentle magic, your will commanding his wounds to remove themselves from reality, undoing the evil from his body, if not from his heart and mind. You aren't very accomplished, but you hope to make some small difference.
While your mind's eye sweeps over him, searching out hurt, tears stream down his bloodied face, silently. The typical way he cries, you've come to learn. Speaking of his face, you recall that his nose, cheekbone and lips are broken and torn, so you heal them.
It takes a good while, especially as you stop regularly to rest and look around, but when he's sufficiently healed, Mettin takes over keeping watch, sitting on his haunches, shivering slightly. He also forces his arms back into their sockets with hideous clicks. You heal that damage too, resting your hands on his shoulders.
“You can stop now. I'm no longer in danger. I will heal by myself.” he says, twenty minutes later when the blood covering him appears to have come from nowhere. There is no time or place to wash, so he pulls on his clothing and armour, piled here to add to the gruesome display that would have been made of his body.
“Are you okay?” you ask, once he looks as you remember.
He glances at you, extremely briefly. To your horror, the lazy reptilian look has returned, along with the savagely purring voice, blank faced defences slamming down, layer upon layer closing off that vulnerable human being you so briefly glimpsed behind the facade. But the look and the voice, though as evil and psychotic as ever, no longer burn with coiled hostility towards you, as they seemed to do even just a few days ago. Having seen that he is wearing a monstrous mask, you’ve also been forced behind it. The trick no longer works on you.
“A minor beating. A minor forced encounter. It is nothing to a seasoned warrior. But it is why we do not attempt to take on a group of apostates and blood mages alone. It is why we need to rendezvous with the rest of the Order as soon as possible. I cannot be fully effective as a single combatant.” he says, shrugging, with no flinch of agony.
“Well, I'm not totally useless in a fight.”
“I know…I know, my little mage.”