The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

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Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » April 10th, 2022, 6:03 pm

They sat by the hearth, sipping wine in the company of the man’s fine purple drapery and the vacant stare of the decorative mask on the wall. Aemilia needed resources to further her research, but she couldn’t afford them. Malik was supportive in his way, always with kindness granted at arm’s length. He rarely asked anything, and everything she told him was volunteered. Every time he welcomed her, he prohibited her from nothing, but he had always been lukewarm. She had studied his face for so long that she knew the pattern of his beard and the irregularities in his eyebrows. He never let her know him.

She told him about her studies of the Afflicted and her concerns over who might involve themselves in them if she were to share them. He told her that if she wanted others to take part, that was up to her but that his company could provide what was necessary for her. “There are some things no one can be asked to subject themselves to,” she answered with a wary smile. Malik’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he asked, “Indeed?” Her demeanor shifted, and her lips drew into a bolder smile. “That concerns you?” she asked, pausing only for a moment before adding, “I’ve never witnessed concern on you before.”

She tapped her finger thoughtfully on her glass as she studied him, but his eyes had already lost their tension and he was smiling again. “It doesn’t concern me,” he reassured her. “I thought I saw that color on you,” she lamented, and her smile had softened. She told him that the people of her homeland had a word for him and that it was something that many of them hoped to become in hopeless times. “Oh?” he’d asked with polite half-interest. “To see someone like that concerned might make some of them lose hope. To me, it makes it all seem so much more attainable,” she explained thoughtfully. She spoke the foreign word. He recognized the dialect.

Later that evening, he casually mentioned, “Your home, Kaduraas.” Her smile waned for a second before renewing. “Yes,” she answered, “It has a kinder climate than Prodai, I have heard.” “Hmm…” he offered, not sounding any more enthusiastic than her on the subject. Preferring to dissuade him from it, she continued, “It is also more barren. That is why the people envy those who appear so ‘untouchable.’ We are each touched by it.” She kept her eyes on his for what most would consider an uncomfortable length of time. “More than just barren, from what I’ve heard,” he retorted with a somber grimace, “Scorched.”

The word fell cruelly into the space between them. Her head tilted back slightly, but her eyes kept on his, narrowing. “Does that concern you?” she asked as her index finger invisibly traced shapes along the base of her wine glass. Her lips had pressed into a frown. His words were crueller still without ever carrying the intonation of ill intention. “Hmm… no,” he answered. It was worse than hatred. It was indifference. He was cold, but she needed him. He told her she could meet him the next day for help in securing the resources she’d need for her research of the Afflicted, and she did.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » April 20th, 2022, 2:20 pm

With bare feet, the blonde led Aemilia through the laboratory and spoke of her work. She had arrived in the First Province a couple seasons ago, she had shared. Her freckled, fair skin and flaxen hair made it easy for her blend in with many of those originally from the Eastern Baronies, but the doctor could tell her apart from the rest. They spoke on it casually, and then Aemilia gestured to the Mae’s feet to say, “You have not changed your ways.” Most others from the West had assimilated completely. They wore the same clothes, smelled of the same perfumes, and even altered their dialects to sound the same as they spoke. Mae didn’t.

“Forgive me if I seem blunt or curt,” said the blonde. Aemilia hadn’t expected it. With an inquisitive stare, the doctor answered, “I didn’t think you did.” The walk through the laboratory had been a kindness. Mae had even extended an open invitation for the doctor to use all the herbs she needed to support the wellness of her patients. So Aemilia was surprised that the blonde had suggested she came off as anything short of friendly. Nonetheless, the woman replied, “I’ve been told I am like talking to a smooth wall at times.” Aemilia frowned at the cruelty in that and immediately told her, “That’s unkind.” Mae nodded, standing by the nearby firebricks to try to soak the warmth of the furnace into her toes. The coldness of the world could still surprise the doctor.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » April 20th, 2022, 6:48 pm

There was nowhere to hide, so they dug holes into the sand and took cover in what the soldiers called foxholes. Aemilia didn’t know what a fox was at the time and wouldn’t see her first one until she first stepped foot in the First Province almost two decades later. She kept quiet in the foxhole back then though, holding her breath while the rust colored sand all around her surged up into the surrounding ash-filled air as each mortar bomb landed. The sky was so heavy with sound that while Aemilia’s eyes were kept so tightly shut, each new explosion brought the reassurance of her continued life. She thought it’d grow quiet only when she was already dead.

A grizzled scream of, “Take cover! Find some cover!” tore through the disorienting chaos. Someone else leapt into the foxhole she had hidden in, and she didn’t open her eyes to look at them. It could be nice to die with a stranger, she’d thought, just so they wouldn’t have to do it alone. It could have even been the enemy, and it wouldn’t have mattered at that point. She was already curled up against the chest of a dismembered corpse. A couple of stray limbs lay outside of the foxhole. Someone once told her that lightning never struck in the same place twice. Maybe that worked for mortars too. They were all under relentless fire, and it was the most deafening storm, thundering down on them like a scorned god. They disobeyed so they could live.

“Get up!” the stranger screamed at her. She couldn’t, and she couldn’t communicate it either. “Move, move, move!” he was shouting, and others were shouting too. She just couldn’t. His fingers curled around her arm and her hip. She was wrenched up and thrown from the foxhole, into the open and out of the landing of the mortar that lit up her hiding place with fire and the thick scent of burning flesh. She could taste the metal. In the open, the aggressors had spotted her and the others. The vehement screams of the warlocks lit up the sky and the incoming soldiers, drawing attention away from Aemilia so she could dive into another foxhole. She tried to lift her head once, and the same voice as before shouted, “Stay down!” So she did.

She could have died there a hundred times or more. The sand, ash, and smoke in the air made it impossible to see more than a few meters ahead at any point, but she could still see the colors. The orange of fire and the ethereal glow of purple, blue, green, yellow, and red. The voices surrounded her like a violent chorus. She could have died there at any moment, but she lived. Others died, and there had been no sense in it. She found them when the battle had ended, pieces all strewn across the sand. Some of them lived long enough to be found, but if they hadn’t been beyond saving, the stoic survivors chose not to save them. It was never the collective of them that chose to save her either. It was just him, and he was all she needed to learn how to save herself.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » April 20th, 2022, 8:35 pm

They were called the Ashwalkers, the blonde told the doctor. Repeated visits to their lair, as she called it, revealed that the Ashwalkers only showed unyielding hostility. The doctor asked why they should not be allowed the isolation they so clearly wanted. The blonde was electric. She was unapologetically her own, and it was intoxicating to the doctor, who knew so many who had withered away until they were only husks, clinging still for dear life. Mae evolved second by second. She didn’t appear to hold onto anything. In that, she seemed free and without fear. It’s why this particular subject made Aemilia dig so deeply into her. The blonde wouldn’t flinch. She never did. “But do you not think that they could perhaps be dangerous?” Mae asked earnestly.

Aemilia stared intensely at the blonde, intent on the scrupulous study of her as she answered, “Of course they are dangerous. Are you not also? To be dangerous isn’t the problem. Motives and morals should be the concern. Those can’t be learned through war. War is a solution only in that it destroys everyone you are uncertain of until you are left with no potential dangers beyond yourself. In that, you become the problem.” She was surprised to have made the blonde second guess herself at all. They were in a workshop, and the sound of their heated discussion may have drawn Malik to them. He looked between the pair, and Aemilia told him they’d been discussing war.

Mae spoke in reflection of Aemilia’s own warning, but Malik wasn’t persuaded by either her or Aemilia’s doubts for a second. His certainty was so unwavering, Aemilia worried he’d seen the cards to be dealt. He immediately countered that the ones they called Ashwalkers had brought hostility to the First Province since the time of their arrival, leading aggressive strikes against two Consortium towers and the ruins of Riverside, capturing the old monastery, and forcing pirates into slavery. It seemed reassurance enough for the blonde, and Aemilia admitted that it might change things and that they could have gone too far. The company that the doctor kept were assured in that an unforgivable boundary had been crossed. It’s what made their actions against the Ashwalkers forgivable.

Except, for Aemilia, there was no harsh boundary. Every line was blurred. In the Murderfields, while death rained down on the poor souls of Kaduraas, the people bled together. Those who had previously been strangers meant something to one another because, together, they were the last stand of humanity against all of Hel’s forces. The people bled together, and they were one single entity for it. They were the final light in the darkness. What act by that light could not be forgiven if it might have kept it burning? She remembered the suffering survivors, the ones who had been injured and the ones who had never been struck at all, and they were each a casualty nevertheless.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » May 7th, 2022, 6:04 pm

“Tell me it was a moment of cowardice, not a lack of reaction time,” said Aemilia.

The late Cornelia believed in order. Although Drusus saw each of his patients as equals, Cornelia was disturbed by her husband’s willingness to administer the medications she had developed to civilians just the same as he did to citizens. The caste system of the Venerated Republic’s theocracy put her heart at ease. She knew who should be trusted and supported and who should be doubted and left to their place in the world. Her husband couldn’t grasp it the way she did, but he agreed that they should give their ward a Decusian name. It would be something for the child to strive to become and something to bind her to the doctor who had taken her under his wing. Aemilia Drusilla seemed to be a respectable choice.

Cornelia would have hated him, Aemilia thought as she followed Brogan to the riverbank. It seemed to the doctor that wherever anyone had come from and whatever they had done made no difference to him. He would feed them and comfort them. His aid wasn’t without its failings, however, and Aemilia had taken one instance to heart. As he dipped his toes into the water, she glared at him. Her anger was never for him. It was for herself. It was humiliating to have been the fool to have placed their trust in a stranger. He’d locked the gate behind her, and his associates launched their attack. She couldn’t escape, and she might have died in that trap. He said he hadn’t known of their true nature, but her life could have been taken that easily. That was her fault.

So instead of trying to hold the man’s head underwater until he stopped struggling against her, she kept her distance and asked him about what he explained mattered most to him. Keeping the balance. “The balance is all,” Brogan explained. Aemilia felt even more foolish for not comprehending his meaning. “If the balance is everything, then why should you have to exhaust yourself to do anything about it? Let it be,” she told him. Everything surely came to an equilibrium with time, she thought. Brogan laughed at the notion, countering that he kept others alive so that they could do good because he felt the darkness ordinarily outweighed the light.

“Your balance is a resistance to death. You support the people who can work together to do good. It’s not really a balance,” she told him. He laughed again and dismissed the thought. He told her that it didn’t matter what it was called in the end. She knew he was right about that. Even in the moments she found herself frustrated with him, she could see the intentions behind what Cornelia would have called disorder. He always meant well, and the name changed nothing of it in the end. Whatever hope Brogan followed, he inspired her to try to carve out some change in the world of Eden. Left alone, it could only self destruct.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » May 11th, 2022, 11:50 pm

Within the crumbling sandstone ruins, Aemilia had taken cover under what part of the roof hadn’t already caved in. Dirty water pooled in the pits of the broken floor around her. Thunder rumbled overhead, and rain was pouring into the otherwise abandoned home, spilling out through whatever cracks it could find passage through. She built a ship out of what sodden sand she found in her hiding place. A distant floorboard creaked, and Aemilia’s eyes pinned on Krasimir as entered the room. He was smiling at her. All at once, she knew she was safe again.

Krasimir crouched down beside her, pinching a stray piece of sandstone smaller than the tip of his thumb between his fingers. He gave her ship a rubble captain. He was the only one she wasn’t humiliated to dream in front of. He always encouraged her. He read her stories, and he taught her to write her own. It had been Krasimir who had saved her from the Murderfields, and to the chagrin of his allies, he had given her refuge where he found his own. Her life had been fraught with endless fear and uncertainty, and this one soul, a stranger to her then, had stood between death and herself. He had been enough, and enough is what the orphan dreamt to be.

She didn’t know then how inadequate he’d found himself. She couldn’t have comprehended all he’d give to be more than any man should be. Without him, she would have died. It was fitting then that she would watch the life slowly fade from him. It might have been a harsh balance to be kept in the world. As their allies realized what he had become, they sought distance. She dutifully drew him back in wherever she was able. None would surrender him or stop him themselves. “Corvus oculum corvi non eruit,” they would say. She remembered those faces among them that had stared at him in abject horror. One of the wisest women among them once told Aemilia to be careful or he’d get her killed too. In those early years, she had believed her life was his to spend.

So many years later, when Aemilia found herself in a dimly lit apartment in the First Province, her fingers traced the painstakingly neat stitches that inscribed the numerals MLVII on a tattered cloth. She remembered him and his rictus smile. He had become a chilling shadow of himself. His flesh had warped across his cheek, where a caustic substance tried to melt it from the muscle and the bone. His eyes were sunken and dull. They hadn’t been that way when she first met him. Even then, she remembered how kind his brown eyes had been in the beginning. She remembered how she’d never slept more soundly than when she knew he was in the next room in the beginning.

The ending was a cruel justice. Whatever happiness Aemilia had known before had splintered into a chilling life debt to a man who sacrificed every piece of himself that she once loved for power. She remembered that judgement was long overdue by the time it tore through their allies. She had hidden in the shadows of the ruins, and she had struck out at a woman she’d called her friend to try to spare a stranger. Aemilia almost died for it, and when she woke, it was to the Venerated Legion. They’d lead her to Drusus and Cornelia. They had saved her from the blasphemous, wretched, and beloved creatures she’d hidden among.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » May 11th, 2022, 11:54 pm

Beneath the ruined cathedral, the Ashwalkers had made the hallowed labyrinth a sanctuary of their own. Their vibrant blue and gold guidons were strewn across the cold, dark walls. They had breathed life and new purpose into something taken for granted and forgotten there in the dark by all but those among their own numbers. Their electricity lingered in the air, reinvigorating the forlorn doctor as she descended into the mages’ domain with the other intruders. There was so much beauty there in that once forsaken place.

They were after the hidden knowledge contained within the library, the others had told the doctor. They could save the other survivors with it and establish safety there or elsewhere when the time came that they could no longer push back the forces against them, the others said. They had never given them the chance to explain themselves or to attempt diplomacy, the others said. This was the only way, the others said, and Aemilia sympathized. There was no compassion for those they found where they went.

The Ashwalkers’ dignified bodies lay in bloodied disarray as the intruders tore from them all they could. Aemilia watched the faces of those left barely breathing so intently because each of their defeats felt as though it could have been her own. As she knelt to feel the thready pulse of a fallen woman, the others pressed forward and out of sight. Her rich flesh faded before the doctor, and a deathly pallor took hold. The pulse became fainter, slowing. Aemilia didn’t have the means to save her. She wept for her, and she did it as quietly as she could.

Later, the intruders found what they’d come for within the Ashwalkers’ coveted library. The doctor reflected on the wickedness she’d participated in that day and what it had won. She reflected far longer on what it had lost. She distanced herself from those intruders she knew as allies, and she found herself in the Ashwalkers’ chapel. The mysterious mages had recently lit the prayer candles at the feet of the statue of Decus. The doctor searched the marble face as her heart went on aching. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Its solemn stare showed her no compassion. She knew she could never have deserved it.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » May 23rd, 2022, 11:15 pm

An unnatural fog had overwhelmed the catacombs of the monastery. The fog captured the light of the doctor’s lantern and held it immediately around the glass itself. Aemilia eventually gave up on it and took to blindly swinging her sword at the many spectral hands that grasped for her limbs in the disorienting darkness. Her dulling blade scraped uselessly at the stone walls. Her sure-footed pair of companions fared better, having previously memorized the maze lined with the skeletal remains of those who came before them.

“This,” said Ashi, “Is Anslem’s hall.” Aemilia stared ahead at the only thing she could see. The unnatural glow of energy fields illuminated the bodies surging forward. Then the darkness swallowed Aemilia whole. Swarmed by the ghostly figures of Templars and apothecaries, she was beaten down. A dirty blade sank into her flesh, and a pair of hands found her throat. She couldn’t breathe, and she fell beyond the darkness of the crypt and into a numb void as she lost consciousness. Mae stood over the doctor as she came to, sensibly remarking that it was time for the trio to make their exit. Aemilia’s breath rattled as she moved, and she could hear it carrying down the hall.

“If I die down here, get my body out, okay? I don’t want to be one of them,” she’d asked of the blonde.

There was a large crack overhead, and dust began to fall. In the darkness, the doctor couldn’t have known what provoked it. She dropped to the trembling floor, bringing her hands away from her wounds to try to spare her skull as stone began to collapse all around them. The ground shook more violently, and Aemilia’s eyes squeezed shut as her wheezing grew shallow. The passage was beginning to close, Ashi warned, and the trio hurried through the darkness as best as they could while the world tried to come down on top of them.

It was Ashi who helped her back to the hospital of Fort Praesidium and treated her wounds. In those hours, Aemilia believed she began to see her companion for who she was. Ashi was a halcyon woman, petite with the dark features that might have been expected of a Prodean. Others were drawn to her, and the doctor understood why. Her soft spoken reassurances lulled Aemilia into an unexpected peace on the bloodied sheets. Eden rumbled still as Ashi changed the linens, but the doctor couldn’t be shaken there with her. When she slept, peace remained.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » October 7th, 2022, 1:01 pm

The air was hot and humid, fleshy walls heaving with life as the doctor followed Malik over a trail of bruises into what appeared very much to be the belly of a beast. He knew every turn, and he silenced the eyeless ones’ shrill screams with all the efficiency of a soldier specially suited to face those unnatural horrors they found there. His blade tore through the monstrosities that the local refugees called nightclaws. It even bled what corpulent, vile abominations they had called the broodmothers. When the evils lay dead, the walls shuddered still with unnatural activity.

Resting her own burdensome sword aside, Aemilia took a scalpel to the disturbingly humanoid corpses, and what she found within them unsettled her more than the way her knees still sank into the wetness of contused flesh at the cavern’s floor. Their organs were reminiscent of men’s. Their blood was strikingly similar to that of her patients. When she had descended into those depths after Malik, she had believed they would face the Ill, but there, she’d found twisted, cursed men. They had become something foul.

Their expressions contorted in anger like men’s, brows furrowed over eyeless, sallow flesh and lips drawn into thin bitter lines until they spread wide around furious screams. The physician had known so many faces like theirs before; faces of men she had believed were made cruel by their circumstances. As one of the bodies lay dissected before her, she found herself staring for far too long at where the creature’s eyes would have been.

She imagined Krasimir’s brown eyes staring vacantly back up at her, and she couldn’t bear to look away until Malik spoke to draw her back from her trance. Her heart sank as she looked up, and it ached inside of her, begging her to return to the daydream. She pushed it down and pressed back up to her feet. There was nothing to go back to. He was gone, and she’d silently remind herself of it at least a hundred times before the dull ache in her heart had been reduced to numbness.

As Aemilia withdrew from the bowels of Hel with the man, she wondered if the Ill hadn’t been mankind all along.
Last edited by Domna on October 7th, 2022, 1:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Domna
Posts: 36
Character: Aemilia Drusilla

Re: The Legacy of Aemilia Drusilla

Post by Domna » October 7th, 2022, 1:04 pm

Aemilia had followed Malik farther than the caves, and she fought alongside him and a patchwork army of refugees from Fort Praesidium at the Withering Maw. Zealous men spilled their blood and descended into the pits to sacrifice their very souls to raise old gods, Ill, or some mutated version of themselves born of similar dark works that had created the eyeless ones themselves. The wild life fought back against the peculiar collection of soldiers that had volunteered themselves to try to contain the enraged growth of ferocious vines bursting from the earth. A particularly cruel withering bloom chased them amidst the buzzing, spore-filled air of the Maw. In all the chaos and confusion, there was little time to consider what their enemy was, but when the long fought battle was won and the withering bloom lay defeated, its essence spilled from it and manifested as infused particulate.

She knew at once that it was what remained of the sacrifices. The dust of the men who had created another beast that the rest would call the Ill. Whatever was left of their souls lingered there in their creation, and Aemilia wondered then if there was was any piece of them that had escaped that fate. It made her feel sick to imagine how many men must have died as monsters or have died to create them.

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