Raleigh Ferghus Eachainn
Lochester
Entering Lochesterian airspace should have felt like coming home, but curiously, it did not. Raleigh told himself it was just a matter of perspective. After all, he'd never seen his homeland like this before; from hundreds of feet up in the sky, eyes squinted half-shut,
fighting for his life against a hungry vampire.
"Untamed beast," he snarled, trying to keep the creature at bay. Far from his neck, further yet from Lyn's.
As they started their descent into a more familiar part of Lochester, the emptiness inside Raleigh started to fill with dread and shame alike. It was as if only now, about to touch down on the very soil he'd been raised to protect, he fully understood why he was here. He didn't return home victorious, lance slick with the blood of his enemies — he came as the guard of a foreign Princess. A traitor.
A vampire had bit his neck not a few minutes prior, and yet the monster was still alive to tell the tale, for Queen's sake. If that alone wasn't proof of how much he'd changed, how far he'd veered from his purpose in life, he didn't know what was.
Frustrated, Raleigh shoved Dimmy a little harder in their tussle. Then they touched down — or, as far as him and the vampire went,
crashed down. They fell from the dragon's back into a heap of limbs and spite, only separating and standing up when ordered to do so. Raleigh practically sprung to his feet, suddenly aware of every single pair of eyes fixed on them. Lochesterians. His countrymen.
Slowly, carefully, Raleigh scanned the faces for ones he recognized. For
his face, above all. Raleigh knew it was unlikely he'd find Alastair there — the man preferred to operate from the shadows, far from the revealing light of day, and would hardly be caught amongst the common guard — but his mind would not be at rest before he'd made sure of it.
Gwen made her way over and Raleigh's focus shifted to her, confused. She was fussing over the blood on his neck.
"Your Highness," he hissed through gritted teeth, throwing wary glances at the people within eyeshot. "It's nothing. You shouldn't—" he cut himself off as she spoke, not wanting to interrupt.
“Please, we're finally here, just pull yourselves together for another hour and I will make it worth your while.”
Another hour. The brevity of it struck him like a fist. Was that truly all it would take? The hope he'd felt earlier threatened to falter, snuffed out by the familiar walls that would soon seal them in. The Princess didn't know Lochester like he did. It wouldn't be as easy as she assumed. The Queen would not let it be so.
But he'd chosen to believe, and believe he would.
“If you'd let me finish, that'd also have stopped the bleeding," he heard the vampire mouth off as a guard stole Gwen's attention.
Raleigh scoffed, eyes narrowing. "If you had tried to finish,
you would be the one bleeding."
“You really need to stop getting yourself hurt around me." At that voice — at
her voice — Raleigh quickly spun around, a desperate explanation already forming.
“It’s becoming a bit of a habit.”
"I swear to you, this time it was not my fault," he said, almost pleading, as he levelled a glare in the vampire's direction. "But I..." his argument fizzled out on its way to his lips, no match for the intensity of Lyn's gaze. "... Understood. I promise to be more careful."
They fell into step behind Gwen, but before they could enter the castle proper, Lyn addressed him once more.
“Once this meeting is finished, speak with me and I can sort you out with a soothing salve.”
Raleigh wanted to protest, to tell Lyn she was too kind, that her precious resources would be wasted on what amounted to little more than a scratch, but he feared he might've come across as ungrateful, when he was anything but. So, instead, he gave her a curt nod, not even noticing his lips curl into a smile. "Thank you."
--
Every whisper felt like a whip against Raleigh's back, and he couldn't fathom
why. Being born a magical human in a land that despised his kind, he was more than used to whispers, knew they were his lot in life for what he was — yet these ones stung regardless. Maybe his time beyond Lochester's borders had done something to him. Changed him. For better or for worse, he could not yet tell.
"Vampires, werewolves, magical humans – what should it matter?!"
A change in Lochester seemed much more difficult a task now that he was here. By the time the Queen stood in front of them and Raleigh fell to one knee out of reflex he didn't remember he had, it felt entirely like a fool's errand. A marriage would change nothing. He felt numb, powerless, barely stiffening at the word 'Sir' attached to his name. It did not belong there. He was no knight.
He stood once the Queen was gone, about to turn to Gwen, when the werewolf started snarling about a bracelet she couldn't remove. Raleigh had half a mind to cut her hand off along with the cursed thing, but then he caught the mumbled conversation between her and the Princess.
A blood relative, nearby.
Raleigh bristled, mind cluttering and clearing all at once, the way one's did just before they found an answer to a riddle. An answer Raleigh had tried so hard to deny, a puzzle he'd purposefully taken apart every time it threatened completion, so as to not tarnish the late King's name. For to not only pardon a wolf, but to
lie with one, was...
They were walking before Raleigh could decide what to make of it all, whether to consider the possibility a blessing or a curse. A marriage would not change Lochester. The appearance of a rightful heir, an immediate change of monarchs, just might.
The mere thought felt like treason.
--
Raleigh sat to Gwen's immediate right, gaze downcast. A poor choice of seats, considering how much he wanted to avoid the Queen's notice. Though Raleigh was aware she neither knew nor cared who he was or what was normal of him, he was irrationally afraid she might be able to read something from his face. A glint of defiance in the eye of a soldier supposed to have none remaining; a spark of hope, where only compliance should dwell.
Even Raleigh himself was doing his best to douse that hope, lest it burn him to death. They had come here to gamble on Gwen's marriage proposal, nothing more. And besides, once this was over, even if peace could be achieved through Gwen's sacrifice, that hardly meant salvation for him. He was, before anything else, a soldier. Perhaps in another world, he could have accompanied Lyn wherever she went after this, repaid his debt to her, kept her safe for all their days to come — not that she seemed to need any
help in that regard.
But in this life, he only knew how to serve a cause. As of now, it was Gwen's; once everything was over, he would find another, appointed to him by the crown. It could not be at Lyn's side. It couldn't even be at Gwen's; there, he'd be little more than a constant source of rumour and doubt, more trouble than he was worth for the new consort.
That was, of course, in the very unlikely scenario he was allowed to keep his head in the first place. The Queen would not pardon him that easily. He'd committed many a crime he would need to accept punishment for; fragging, desertion, defection... heads had rolled for less in Lochester, even when attached to humans. And so, though Raleigh couldn't imagine it was her intent, every time Gwen mentioned him by name, every time she drew attention to him or spoke of what he'd done for her, she dug his grave deeper.
He held his tongue and prepared to be buried.
But when the Queen approached, ready to seal her deal with Gwen and by doing so, seal the fates of not only everyone present, but the world at large, Raleigh found himself almost fidgeting in his seat. Dread had turned into a headache, pounding at his temples. If he did not speak now, he would need to forever hold his peace, living with the burden of having
known and said nothing. His gaze flickered to Gwen, but hers did not falter.
He hadn't been given leave to speak, yet he had to.
The werewolf's shout rattled Raleigh from his dilemma — and from there, things escalated in the blink of an eye. In an instant the promise of budding peace was shattered by the scene Sylvia created — by the
truth she revealed. Raleigh felt a weight roll off his chest. There it was, the whole, ugly truth of it all. It would set them free.
But not without a fight. Raleigh knew as much before the Queen called for her guards, knew she would not give up a shred of power without spilling blood. So when the first wave of guards descended upon them, Raleigh was more than ready, his weapon already drawn. To fight his countrymen felt like the final nail in his coffin, the final affront to his homeland. But they were so close to doing the impossible, so close to changing the world, that it was a cross he was willing to bear.
Besides, he had promised Gwen not to kill.
He leapt forth, spear in both hands, and clashed against the men and women he'd once called comrades. In an instant, the room was filled with the sounds of battle, and every time Raleigh turned, he found one of his
new comrades fighting tooth and nail. Literally, as the case was with a few of them. They were outnumbered, but by no means outmatched.
Then, through the shouts and clatter of metal, Raleigh heard — no,
felt — it. The hum of magic, a static in the air as one prepared to break the very laws of nature. A magical human, one so powerful it made Raleigh shiver on instinct. He thrust his lance backwards — catching an approaching guard in the stomach with its hilt — and looked around, wild as an animal trying to spot a hunter. There, at the back, prowling, looking for an angle to get them all at once. A woman in a dark hood, her hands aglow. Behind her, slightly hunched, an older man was whispering directions in her ear.
A man Raleigh recognized. A man that made every drop of blood in his veins freeze. It was
Alistair, instructing what must've been another one of his experiments — a kindred soul, who Raleigh had no time to feel sympathy for. His eyes trailed along the mage's planned trajectory to where Lyn and the vampire fought, wildly, for their common cause. Lyn, his glowing saviour he'd sworn to protect; Dimmy, his ward and prey alike, whose punishments were not someone else's to dole. Raleigh's heart raced, panic a whirlwind in his chest. They were unaware, backs turned, wearing no proper armour. They wouldn't see it coming.
"Watch out!" he shouted, but his words were drowned out by the crack of thunder. Too late. It was all too late. They wouldn't even know which way to turn, which way to duck, what was coming for them and why.
But he did.
Alistair and the mage were too far for his powers to reach, for him to stir the darkness at their feet. Magic would not help now. But what was a magical human without the magic?
Raleigh hesitated, the word so foreign he hardly dared think it:
a human.
He moved before he realized he'd done so. From birth, he'd been behind his human peers in sheer physical prowess, and he'd had to train much harder than them all to reach the summit forced upon him. But he'd done it; he'd trained, twice,
thrice as hard, and so when he threw himself forth in the magic's trajectory, it was with speed that wouldn't lose to any human.
It all happened in an instant. The magic collided with his chest, reverberating through his armour, tearing a scream from his throat as it sought to burrow through the metal like a physical thing. Lightning made tangible, like a spear, not that unlike his own. Raleigh felt every one of his nerves fighting against the magic that surged through him, felt the remains of his powers trying to shield him for the few seconds it took until everything was over. He couldn't let that happen, needed his powers for something else. Blocking the lightning spear wouldn't be enough if the mage could simply fire another.
With a hand that barely moved from the spasms that broke through, Raleigh reached to touch that spear of lightning, a conduit, to use the one power he was most attuned to. So much so that it required little but an indirect touch and a thought. Wordlessly, with no visible cues, his dark magic surged the opposite direction of the lightning's current, burrowing into the minds of the mage and Alistair, whose hand had rested on her shoulder.
What struck them was pain. Only pain, nothing more, nothing less, as Alistair had once taught him. Excruciating,
maddening, the kind that made you tear at your own skin to break free of it, but hardly lethal on its own. In a few seconds the mage, and more importantly, the man behind her, collapsed.
Not that Raleigh could see it.
The lightning fizzled out. His powers had shielded him, but they hadn't been enough; the spear hadn't reached its intended targets, but it had pierced right through
him. Him, who was already a dead man walking. Him, who owed a debt to the ones that had saved him, able to be repaid only with his life.
How fortunate, then, that nothing of value would be lost.
"I will change the world, or I will die trying."
Though those had been Gwen's words, Raleigh couldn't help but remember them now. Could he say he'd tried? He wanted to. If he died without truly having tried, he couldn't imagine how angry Lyn would be with him. He'd made a promise to her less than an hour ago too, and already, he'd broken it. He truly was a traitor, all the way to the end.
Magic erupted from him in one final burst, darkness and ice blasting the guards around him, left and right. To Raleigh, it felt as if the entire world had frozen, pain and blood and shock and fear alike. He didn't feel himself hitting the floor, didn't notice the spasm of his muscles from the electricity that had ravaged them, didn't smell the blood from the wound in his chest. The pain that had made him howl on initial impact was but a distant memory now.
As the cold subsided, the last drops of Raleigh's magic dissipating, he found himself visited by an almost comforting darkness. He'd forced so many into its embrace through his powers, and now it had come for him in turn. A tired numbness overtook him, the same kind he’d felt in the desert, back when he could have —
should have breathed his last. The world around him was vanishing, darkness taking away all thought. Once he was gone, one less magical human, one less
murderer roaming the lands, would the world change for the better, even if a little? By dying, would he make up for the sin of being born?
Raleigh closed his eyes, and died trying.
