Lightstar Family/Xarnelf/Roleplay 24

Encounter in the Night

After a fruitless attempt at gathering information in all of the various taverns throughout the city, Xarnelf decided to retire for the night. Gloomily, he stepped out of The Cheerful Cup and walked slowly back to the barracks with a downcast demeanor. The time was already several hours past sunset, and the young knight had gleaned nothing of use thus far. If he had to listen to another conjecture about the possible severity of this year's oncoming winter storms, he thought he might have to throttle someone.

Pausing for a moment at the side of a building that lay just outside the surrounding torchlight, Xarnelf tried to calm his nerves and relax his clenched fists. He closed his eyes and proceeded to lean back against the wall. The young man started to take a deep, slow breath, allowing the cold air to permeate his entire being. As he was about to exhale, a sudden and sharp blow to his stomach did the job for him, sending him doubling over in surprise and pain.

The Lightstar scion snapped open his eyes with a groan and glanced frantically around for signs of his assailants. He thought he saw a dark form to his left, but before he could focus on it, a smack to the right side of his head sent him reeling. Xarnelf fell off balance to the ground and landed on his back, the wind knocked out of him.

While he lay dazed on the street trying to recover his senses, his vision aswarm with swirling colors and bursting lights, he heard a mocking, almost otherworldly voice recite a phrase from seemingly very far away:

So shall His retribution be dealt upon the heads of those seeking to meddle in affairs that concern them not.
So shall His equilibrium be maintained, for every action must have its corresponding consequence wrought. -Promises XIII:IV

At hearing the word Promises, Xarnelf gasped in open disbelief and forced his body to respond to his brain's commands. The knight rolled backwards diagonally toward the wall and braced against it in an unsteady crouch. Now within the area of light shed from an adjacent torch set above him, he looked up and around to where he thought the ambushers must be.

Unfortunately, he could observe no clear details about the figures, if indeed there were two; all he saw was an indistinguishable, shadowed silhouette with apparently very wide shoulders--abnormally so, it appeared. It did not help matters that his eyesight had not yet fully restored itself to full capacity.

Suddenly, the torches within a twenty-foot radius of the young noble simultaneously extinguished themselves, shrouding the entire section of the street in immediate darkness. Xarnelf tensed his entire body and slowly backstepped while his vision adjusted to the dim starlight; peculiarly, there was no moonlight.

Then the singsong speech returned for a brief time before fading away in haunting echoes:

Firstborn, you have been warned today.
Pursue, and the eldest shall pay.

The torches flared brilliantly back to life and then immediately dimmed back to normal, revealing to the knight a street devoid of persons save himself. His heart thumping and pulse racing, he looked in all directions but saw no trace of anyone. Xarnelf gazed up into the sky, and the moon reappeared from behind a cloudy obstruction.

Shivering all of a sudden as the entire shock of what occurred caught up to him, the young man slumped down to the ground with his back against the wall of the nearest building. He sat dazed for a while before he remembered where he was and sheepishly got up to return to the barracks.

The encounter continuously replayed itself in his head on the way back, and though he tried to make sense out of it as he considered the implications, Xarnelf could draw no solid conclusions; his mind was feeling too higgledy-piggledy.

The young knight decided to sleep on the matter to ease his distressed apperception. Hopefully, the new day would bring him more insight regarding this discombobulated incident.