Open - Wyborn?

[Corsair]

Argeau's hooves made muted impressions of motion against the grass, a cinereal dust mote set against a heaving savanna of baked weeds that drew breath from horizon to horizon like an ocean of ochre wasteland. The land sloped up and down, consistent at least in its irregularities, gulfing the sun-tinted crests of hills with disenchanting valleys that seemed broken up in some strange, fundamental way.

The valley was set alight beneath the philistine jealousy of an angry, feverish sun, perched like a hot coin between the meagre lines of ashen clouds, and was littered with tumbled, coloured marble effygies raised once by some forgotten people without name or history. Each idolated some sort of animal, from crouching, gorgeous tigers and panthers to majestically raised elephants and squat-faced orangutans, most so dessicated by time they were little more than the shapeless ideas of things.

Bearing the wind on his shoulders and the pearly grey mane of his steed sat a tall, fair man, clad in a flowing dress of ringmail and segmented plate armouring that shifted from earthen pinnacles of the colour spectrum with a watery, shimmering quality. He was robed over and around in white cloth traced red and black with a decidedly religious motif based seemingly around patterns of three. His face was tanned bronze and tatooed and his eyes were blue and deep-set in his skull, smouldering with volcanic calm. Alabastar locks of hair spilled about his ears and neck without plan or design. There was a princely air about him, from the ornateness of his armour and the cool coronet of stirling steel on his forehead.

Thinking back on it, he wasn't sure how he had gotten here - only that he had dreamt of this place. His dreams were his road, as always. Lost in a network of leather straps and buckles hung an immense sword of curious white steel scabbarded in black leather, slapping against his armoured thighs and modestly quilloned around the hilt to be a deadly piece of artwork. A broadshield of the same colour-shifting steel (although shifted towards colour-spectrums drawn from the sky as oppoed to the earth) was slung over his opposing shoulder, a glinting carapace.

He kicked Argeau around in a trot, calming himself. The sun was a hot paw on the back of his neck as he made his way between the effygies, the ivory edge of his blade half draw from sheath. In frame it was built around the traditional and fearsome zweinhander horse-killing/pike-killing blade of scandinavian footsoldier, although downsized to be less cumbersome. The titan weapon seemed to hang from his side like the mast of a broken ship. His name was Jason mir Corsair, of Westendre, veteran of the Three Empires War and finally refugied to dreaming wanderer.

OoC: Depending on who wants in, this could extend to a free-for-all or series of duels - because I want Wyborn.

[Wyborn]

Well....I do have other posts to make, but yes, I accept and will post immediately thereafter.

Where do I recognize your name from?

[Corsair]

OoC:...the depths of your immortal soul?

EDIT - also I knew the prospect of a battle on horseback would be too attractive to pass up. Twilight Princess anyone?

[Wyborn]

How long had it been? It didn't matter. Today there would be blood.

There was a snort that caught Jason's attention, and he wheeled his charger around to face the source of the noise. What he saw there did not surprise him, but something in it disturbed him, a tickle at the base of his skull.

His opponent was a knight, he could not be anything else, all steel plate and mail beneath it, redder than blood with a shimmering cape of golden satin trailing from his shoulders. His armor was all curves and angles, specially forged to turn a blade, not heavy but hard and strong, with spikes rising up at the joints, culminating in a helm designed with the face of some demon, the slat out of which he peered barely visible to any onlooker and his crown topped with two massive, twisting horns.

The gauntleted right hand clutched a lance so long it bordered on ridiculous, and in his left he bore a shield emblazoned with some dancing fiend of the pit, chained at the feet and beset on every side by men in armor of red and gold, the same sigil showing briefly on his cape as it fluttered in the wind. Beneath his cape he had a sword strapped to his back, and at his hip he had a mace, and between his thighs was the largest horse that Jason had ever seen, a charger that looked ready to haul the mountains themselves on its back, its fur the color of onyx and its eyes wide and golden.

Something in the way the knight sat was wrong, though, or in the way he was simply there, without having actually entered the field, or maybe the way his helm contrasted with his crest, but something about him was wrong, and this made Jason uneasy.

And then it had begun. The knight in red lowered his lance and spurred his horse, whose hooves struck the stony earth like thunder as it barreled towards Jason, foam flying from its mouth. The crimson knight never made a sound, never cried out in the name of his home or his lord...and somehow, that silence was the worst of all of it.

OoC: Let's dance. -OoC

[Corsair]

OoC: He? ...or She? Reminds me of a certain someone's sister.

The hooves thundered across the weed-choked expanse tearing up earth and grass and ripping loose pebble from the disturbed soil in mottled clots. The lance pointed towards the wanderer, its point glinting against the baked sunlight in a brazen statement of its own lethality. Breath hiss between Jason's teeth and his entire body relaxed into coils up and down his frame, his heartbeat steadied, his vision wavered and then steeled, and with a single knicker Argeau kicked into a trot, and then a run, and then a full out charge across the savanna.

His hips rose and fell with the violence of his steed's charge but all the while he kept himself as disciplined as stone and the glint of his nameless enemy's lance never left the raging depths of his eyes. As both riders shut the gulf between them at a velocity reserved only for the twisted wreckage of chariot and vehicle collision, the wanderer shouldered his massive broadshield against the knight's gnashed lancepoint and barked a shrill "Hya!" to Argeau. The horse veered of course with a cooly calculated slightness and with the wrench and bang of metal on metal the point and edge of the nameless warrior's weapon crashed against and sheared off Jason's shield. Even as sparks still lit upon the air however, Corsair's white two-handed sword was raised gripped from the hilt to a dull-forged section of steel between the forte and rain-guard. White-knuckled and using the weapon's sheer lenght as its own spear, he stabbed down with the point using both hands, managing to catch the side of the knight's helm to little avail, ringing out across the battlefield.

Both horses thundered away from each other, Argeau veering again towards its enemy, foaming at the mouth, teeth gnashed in battle-rage and starkly white against the smoke of its pelt, even as the hazing alabastar white of Corsair's blade smashed through the ornate marble of a bear effygy, blasting it apart into a thousand pieces and heaving its carved skull off into the grass.

The red knight's steed rose up against the crest of a hill, his standard bellowing out against the yawn of open, ochred sky, and as Argeau drew bead Corsair whipped up from his saddle an immense bow of knotted yew like the knuckled fingers of a twisted forest god, knocking arrow after arrow of the same ivory metal, loosing the shafts to the wind with the speed of a machine.

The air whistled with violence as the heads crashed against throat-guard, chest, eye-slit, ringing off vitals and seeking the cracks and slits that would allow for a kill or at the least the loosing of hot blood into open air.

OoC: Have at thee.

[Wyborn]

OoC: Before I post again, exactly what degree of realism are we going for here? -OoC

Edit: And I don't get the he/she thing, though my brother pointed out this may be an Escaflowne reference. Explain?

[Corsair]

OoC: Wyborn's sister. As for realism, nothing involving walking on suns, but let's give them credit for being fictional, shall me? Magic and abilities and ****, but a brutality rooted in realism.

[Scripture]

Walking on suns? Do I detect a jab at that Wyborn and Erdawn fight between Reala/Richter and Terror?

[Corsair]

OoC: It'd take a special kind of stupid not to figure out what's going on here.

[Wyborn]

The great shield came up, arrows rebounding and breaking against the image of the chained demon, and the knight in the crimson armor paid no great heed to the arrow that was stuck in his shoulder, or the one that had managed to pierce the armor covering his neck. The first had pierced flesh, and as a rain of arrows fell on his shield he broke it, leavingi n the head, but the one in the neck of his armor he simply reached up and wrenched out.

The lance came up again, the horse made a screaming sound like it was being chased through Hell, and the thuner of its footsteps rang out again as the red knight charged. Blows from arrows rained on his shield, striking his helmet above the eyes when he looked over it, and would have struck the lance from his hand if this was even remotely possible. That his horse was not struck was a miracle, but one could not tell, as the foam at its mouth was pinked and stringy with blood.

The bow was lowered, and Jason's massive sword was revealed to the air, shining in the sunlight as the red knight bore down on him. In another moment he would be able to turn the blow of the lance, and from there...

The thunder struck, the lance crashed against Jason's shield, and he pushed against it to turn the blow - but when he pushed, he met no resistance, and his arm extended too far, and he nearly lost his balance when he saw that the lance spun away, that the red knight had let go of it only a moment before, and now the spiked mace was clenched in that crimson-gloved right hand, it was coming up too quickly and his sword was not moving fast enough.

The world smashed into his face.

The head of the mace drove into the meat of his face, smashing his teeth and cheeks, driving the entirety of his visage inward with the sickening sound of raw meat being beaten with a tenderizing hammer. He felt himself flip over backwards off of his horse, and when he hit th ground it was on his stomach. He could hear hooves falling like bombs all around him. He was blind - not permanently, his eyes had not been hurt, but his nose was a ruinous mess on his face and its shattering had left him unable to see for a few moments. He groped for his sword as he heard his nemesis' charger wheel and stop, and searched more frantically as he heard the armored form hit the ground - why in all of the Hells had he dropped it!?

He heard Argeu make a sound, as close as a horse could come to a roar, and felt the massive body move between him and his enemy and then rear up on its hind legs, ready to strike and kill. The hooves struck the ground with enough force to kill another horse, and the sound of rapid armored steps told Jason his enemy had stepped to the side, his vision was a field of blood but he could see shadows, he saw Argeu cantering to move backward too slowly, the knight's sword was raised, poised, it thrust into the horse's flank.

Jason's hand found his sword and his rage took the form of a scream.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Argeau let out a scream of dumb, idiot pain - the animal pain of a wounded beast, hot and frenzied, feverish and instinctive. Through the muck of gore sluiced across his eyes he saw his steed buck and gallop from the struck wound and as he wiped blood from his eyes (and as his vision cleared from the pain of brutalised face) he let out his own scream of rage.

His knuckles went white on the pommel of his massive sword and he hefted it with one muscled arm to his side. The form of the red knight turned to him, mace and demon shield poised and directed away from the wounded, perhaps dying horse, waiting for him, and he payed his adversary no dissapointment. His legs pumped with a rage-rythm of calculated velocity, his arms wheeling through the air with a deliberate slowness, bringing the blade around.

The red knight faced him calmly, and when the neige white of steel crashed at him he met it with the symbolic ensign on his shield, and the metals flashed and reverberated as he brought the mace around to dash out Corsair's brains.

But where the knight held the advantage of sword and shield, his adversaire chevalier held his own system of defense in offense in his curiously large sword. Slipping hands from the grip to the base of the blade, he flexed the weapon like a pole and sharply deflected the mace-blow, striking out again with the heavy tip, meeting shield, and this time catching the mace high above the heads of the warriors at the hilt. Corsair shoved forward with all his weight, dislodging the entwined weapons and jerked his arms back and forth, whipping the hilt down and around and into the side of the knight's heavy helm with a ringing wham, turning it to one side and staggering the armoured warrior.

There is more to a sword than its blade, such was the education of the sacred Sword Lords of Caprica, and was as apparent in the zweinhander weapon model as in everything else. Working with his assaulting momentum, he bounced the hilt from the knight's helm and retaliated again with the heavy blade, this time slamming the point edge into the gorget, slipping an inch above the shield's rim and delivering a solid blow through the armour to the throat, bruising the trachea and jugular vein beneath with the force of it. He wheeled the hilt around again, slamming it into the gut-mail of the nameless, demonic knight and backpedaling his hulking frame away from him in a brutish parody of balance.

Corsair roared, so that the hallways of his throat shook with the might of it and spit flew from his lips and veins stood out from his neck, and he swung the blade up and downwards in a lethal arc that melted into a heavy javelin thrust using the base of the blade as a support, the weighed tip puncturing the leg armour of his enemy above the knee-cap and slammed the tip deep into the meat beneath with a hazy gout of blood. He slid the blade free and brought it up again as the knight stumbled backwards and fell to a single leg in an explosion of pain that was light and soundless fury behind his eyes, unable to cradle the wound for his encumbered hands and more staggered for the it. The ethereal white metal of Corsair's weapon rose into the air like the crescent moon, hanging with the pause of an execution.

At that moment however, the knight's monstrous creature of a horse blew and neighed, crashing towards the enraged swordsman as he sought to kill its master. Corsair turned the blade aside in mid-strike but was pushed back, the dark mass of his enemy's stallion raising on its hindlegs and kicking outwards with hooves that could crush stone. He screamed again in bitterness, falling against the weight of its assault. His hip buckled against one of the marble staues - he couldn't make out of what - and he tumbled back from it to the grass. He caught blurred motion from the periphery of his vision - heard hooves like thunder against the earth, caught Argeau kicking out at the beast's side, whinnying in bloodied rage, the froth at its lips darkened to a pinkish-red, swinging its neck and actually taking a bite of flesh from its nemesis's heaving flank and shaking its mane to its wounded neighings. The horse came for Corsair anyway, rearing up, and he brought abought the bow as he rolled aside - given that second of reprieve - feeling more than hearing the stone statue explode under the weight of its hooves. It turned to him again, blood and torn flesh flapping from its side, and cauught an eyeful of his enemy as Corsair fired an arrow to its eyesocket from something like point blank range. The wet pop of the orb and peeling of flesh around it was drowned out by the whistle of the weighed tip, but it punctuated itself by the mist of red and the rabid screams and noises of the dark stallion as it thrashed and recoiled and bucked from the statue, throwing itself away, blind and mad and hurt despite its many disciplines.

Corsair hefted the massive blade upwards from the dirt, his breath hot in his chest, throwing it over one shoulder and sliding his other hand up the shaft of the blade. Across from him, the red knight, steadying himself, a mute testament of rage and carnage in himself. Argeau had limped away and become quiet, still neighing, dizzied. The swordsman's blue eyes smouldered, blood and sweat caking his face, and there seemed an immensity to the distance between both warriors in that moment, and in that pause, like the silence before a terrible storm.

[Wyborn]

There was a moment where the two warriors faced each other, while Argeu stood gasping for ragged breath and the black charger kept screaming its horse's scream. Jason expected the red knight to attack, knew he would attack, but for a long moment there was nothing - and when there was movement, it was not towards him.

The black horse stopped running, but it reared where it stood, inconsolable and in a state of agony that few men would have been allowed to endure for even a moment. Its hooves struck the ground again and again, crushing what little grass there was and driving the dirt up all around it, and his cries had become wet and hoarse, choked and drowning. The animal was dying, and its was dying in pain and fury at its unknown hurts.

The red knight's hand touched the horse's side, and it was still. Its whole body shook with the effort of containing its screams, Jason could see its flanks quivering and twitching where Argeu had bitten it, and he marveled at what kind of mastery it could have taken to teach a horse this kind of obedience. For a moment, it was still. For a moment, it held in its pain, but only for the moment that it took the red knight to drop his mace, standing on the horse's blind side, and draw his sword. That moment, and nothing more, as he stepped back, hefting the thing in both of his hands as the horse inhaled for another scream.

The sword came down on the charger's neck. When it hit the ground, it knew no more pain, and did not shudder as it died.

There was a moment of silence as the knight knelt, wiping his sword clean on the grass before sheathing it on his back. Another moment as he knelt, picking up his mace and bringing his shield out again, and one last one as he cast a long look at Jason, then at Argeu, and at Jason again. He jerked his head at Jason's horse, the motion seeming unnatural from that demonic helm, and waited.

OoC: I will post about his injuries and so forth, and attack you, next post. -OoC

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Corsair's gaze had long left his enemy's. For a moment, there extended that understanding, and he walked someftly from his place of killing to another, one that was in a way just as sacred.

Argeau lay on his side, eyes staring madly upwards, and in the depths of those unplundered orbs there seethed an instinctive fear, that fear which holds all sentient beings, that fear of the great and final mystery and its engulfing, saccharine darkness. The steed's breaths came fast, hot, hysterical, and the swordsman brushed a single, mailed hand across its flank, and slowly, very slowly, the breathing slowed.

For a long while both of them were simply there - Argeau lay on his side, breathing, fearing, and Corsair at one knee above him, resting with him, facing this fear with him - something so distinctive as the terminal line between night and day, a concept unfathomable in its stark and overbearing simplicity. From his belt he pulled the steel sliver of a curved, sharp knife, and both rider and horse seemed to reflect on it. It flashed once, to the artery of the throat, and to one more being was revealed that sweetly dark secret.

Corsair stood from Argeau's cadavre, his body coloured with the animal's own blood, stepping from the knowledge of that final terror, and turned in the field to his enemy. He hefted the blade again. Today one more would learn the truths of that secret. and there was amusement in that duality - the instinctive pursuit of knowledge and the instinctive urge to repel it, such a hypocrital drive to the sentient circuitry of thinking.

But now there would be little thinking. Corsair slid back into stance.