08-01-2010, 10:03 AM
Mad Woman
One Woman's Path to Fel Sworn
One Woman's Path to Fel Sworn
"Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[left]Part One
No Love Lost[/left]
By all accounts, Marianna's time spent with Eric Bendhotter was both tragically common and easily avoidable. After all, there is little variation to the play that is young love; no matter the actor, setting or scene the script will always follow a common trend. And yet variations do occur, however rare. For good or ill, these divergences of romance can play such odd games with the endings of love.
Marianna caught Eric Bendhotter on a busy day in autumn. He was a handsome face snatched from the shifting crowds of the Alterac market, a mop of dark black hair painted upon a pastel white face perched atop a lean body. His features were blurred by the shifting throng, cheeks rounded and jaw softened until he took on an almost morbidly wealthy air, the fat of opulence dangling upon a handsome bust. The girl's breath caught for a moment before she pushed her way through the crowd, a dervish of black silks and furs as she chased the face.
Even at the age of thirteen Marianna had a man's build; shoulders wide and evenly set with eyes of coals set in a block furnace face. She preened herself between thrusts, fingers curling through the black ringlets that billowed up and tumbled down around her pale face. She ground her teeth quietly –an ugly habit picked up from her father's tutelage- and bellied up to the curb.
The crowd eddied about the curb, offering the two children a moment alone. The trick of the throng left Eric's opulent visage emaciated. Yet even with the shadows of his cheekbones and the softness of his eyes there was a certain debonair quality to the boy, of a wounded past and quiet brooding. His fine clothes were tattered and kept together with bits of twine and prayers. His hair was gelled with spit and his smile had yellow holes drilled through. When their gaze met she saw the whites of his eyes were a mottled red, a fungal infection that would ravage him in time. Yet all she saw a handsome boy one year her senior, a tired soul who needed the love Marianna knew only she could offer.
She introduced herself to him and they chatted for a time upon the curb, he leaned against the wooden wall of the market place and she tucked atop a wooden crate. They made an odd pair, she in her fine furs and he in his tattered rags. Yet when they parted two hours later she left with a smile and he with an address.
+-------------------+
The House of Bisen lurked in the shadow of Alterac's capital buildings, a cookie-cutter palace of stone and timber with a grimly ostentatious face. Additions had been added over the years, each patriarch of the Bisen Family doing their part to sate their own ego. There was a solarium and a greenhouse, four balconies and five bedrooms. And in the center of it all was the courtyard, a small square of dirt and snow cluttered with decaying crates and a stone statue of a family progenitor, its body worn through with cold cracks and wrapped in a layer of thick frost.
It was to this house that Little Marianna was delivered, a bloodied and battered mess.
It took three hours before the doctor could rouse the girl and get her to tell them what happened. The story came in fitful bursts, choked from between swollen lips and teary eyes. She told the house physician about her date, how they met in a quiet little inn by the Northren gate. How Eric had asked to walk her home afterwards and how she blushed and said yes. She told them how he had taken her down a dark alley with promises of reaching her home quicker. She shivered her way through how he had pushed her to the stone and dug his knee into her stomach until the breath blew out of her. She spoke of boots and sneers and blood, of how his heels dug into her scalp and breast until the only sound she could make were hoarse gurgles. She told them about how he yelled for her money and how she finally, between racked sobs, pushed her fattened purse forward. And with one final gasp she told them how he had left her to bleed in the snow, a quiet black bundle in a shadowy alley.
Marianna recovered quickly enough. The family's physician, with his mastery of the Light, worked wonders upon her broken lip and bruised ribs. By the third day she was fit and strong once more, with only the faintest pallor to her chest where the ribs had suffered the worst. Yet her heart could not heal so quickly. As the days went by young Marianna fell further into despondency. Her fencing coach struck her when her grip faltered. The magus of the house singed her when she mumbled the incantations. Even her father's current lady, an austere woman ten years his younger, sneered at the smudged powder upon the girl's cheek and the redness of her eyes. She mourned the silly things that she felt she had lost. She cried over her lost innocence, over her broken heart and empty soul. In this twisted state she blamed herself for his betrayal, blamed herself for her ugliness and how he had left her. It was in this presence of mind that her father found her, curled up in the study trying to scratch out her misery into poetic prose.
Marianna's father was a tall, dark man with an angular jaw and a vile smile. A childhood of silent brooding had left his skin pale and pock-marked, flesh tightened around his lips and sunken around his eyes. Those brown eyes, eyes that smoldered as he wound a hand around her collar and dragged her from the couch and onto the floor, dropping her at his feet like a load of filth.
"Get up."
"Father…I…!" She sucked a mouthful of air between her teeth, choking back as sob as she dragged herself to her knees before the man.
"Shut up you miserable girl!" There was bile in that voice, a venom that dripped out with every word. He watched her for a moment, face twisted into a hideous scowl. It was a few tense seconds before his hand cracked against her cheek, driving her back down to the floor.
"Have all my lessons been all but fluff in your ear? Or have you just thought your elder's wisdom not worth your attention?" He spat as he watched his daughter squirm beneath him.
"I neve-!"
"What have I told you? What have I said all these years!?†His boney fingers curled through her dark locks, yanking her gaze upwards to his. "There is no one to blame for this but yourself."
He let go of her hair, dropping her back down to the earth. He began to pace, moving about the study with hands clasped behind his back. Every word he punctuated with a nod of the head, speaking so quickly that soon his head bobbed and swam as he worked his way from corner to corner. "The Bisen Family has survived the centuries because we have always known that we must put ourselves first. Ourselves, daughter. There is no one in this world more important, more intelligent, more driven and dedicated than a member of the Bisen Family."
Marianna sat there mutely, eyes streaked with tears as she watched her father. Yet she listened, eyes smoldering quietly through the tears.
"To love another is to open yourself to the trappings of the human condition. To associate with society in any way other than a master would a slave is to become just another wretched soul of society.†He turned upon her. In the dull evening light he looked like a wraith, his gaunt features cutting shadows across his pale face.
"Love only power. Lust only after wealth. Ask only of fear from others and expect nothing less. Only then, my daughter, will you know the true pleasure that pure power can bring. Anything else…Love, friendship, relationships…They are hollow pleasures, empty of the ecstasy of pure strength.â€Â
"Avoid them daughter, and your eyes will be left unclouded and the road to dominance will be left illuminated before you.â€Â
Marianna rose silently after this. She dragged her sleeve along her nose, whipping the spit and tears from her cheek. She hiccupped softly before turning to her father. She watched him for a few quiet moments.
"You have no more use for love…†Her father stepped forward, kneeling before the girl. He took her face into his hands, calloused flesh grating against her skin. She winced gently yet could not turn her gaze away from those dark eyes. "You never needed it to begin with. Opening yourself to another puts you in their power…And our family is in nobody's power.â€Â
"Yes Father…" And Marianna smiled, bearing rows and rows of tombstone whites. "I promise…This will never happen again."
+-------------------+
On the seventh day of winter the Alterac Guard found a young boy laid out in an alleyway, his body crushed and quietly oozing into the snow. Any evidence had been wiped clean by the night's snowfall, buried under a clean sheen of white. All they could find were the causes of his mortality, of the way he was beaten and kicked and struck and left to bleed out into the cold night air.
They left it as an unsolved crime, just another orphan boy caught up by a mugger and left to bleed. Just another poor boy who made a mistake by turning down the wrong side-street and who caught the wrong type of person.