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“That is what I am, a descendant of Von Castine himself!” She declared without remorse, “Now you have struck a Noble, one of the true Scions to rule both the Empire and Bretonnia. I believe it is custom that when a hand is placed upon a Noble that not only the Peasant suffer, but his people do too.”
Lucian rose even as he was understanding what her words meant. He focused not on the fear that was shaking him but the instinctual moving of his weapon. He did not care if she was impossibly powerful, he was a man of Bretonnia. He needed to cut her down!
The woman, not even thinking that Lucian could move, failed to stop the weapon as it sliced into her corset and slammed against her undead flesh. Upon reflex the woman brought her hand down and backhanded Lucian several feet away in a single stroke.
“Look what you have done!” She shouted with what was a bloody fury within her voice, “Not only did you strike me once, but twice! Now watch in despair.”
Lucian’s mind was buzzing as she said those words. He had taken the full brunt of not only her but the ground afterwords. He heard something break, but was it something like his jaw that took her hand or his skull that took the ground.
In a human motion Lucian raised his hand and touched his skull. A slight dribble was felt on his hands and in an instant he wrapped his hands upon his skull. The fear of death was finally upon him so he could only watch as the woman’s hands waved in the air. Dark magics swam around her with the faces of the many people she had slain in the past.
“Watch in Despair!”
He felt his mind overwhelmed and in a moment he focused clearly upon a line of houses. One of them his own home, the other belonging to his aunts, uncles, and cousins. He watched as a pendulum with a blade at the end of it appeared from the shadows themselves and hung above those huts. Then the shadow came down.
One strike Charles and his family were dead. In the next one two Aunt Kemine and her twin had their families turned into a fine mist of green blood. Then the pendulum came down one final time, Lucian paying witness to the entire hobble that he had lived his entire life in sliced into shavings with a single blow.
He felt the blood fall upon him. Like a rain from a cloudless sky, it was sparse but so noticeable as every drop came upon him. There was the occasional pieces of hail, pieces of bone that were shattered by the attack.
The woman laughed while snapping her fingers. Suddenly all the beasts that had been guarding her threw themselves into the hovels and homes of his distant family.
