A Duel to the Death

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Gorth
Posts: 581
Joined: Sat Nov 13, 2021 11:53 am
Location: Michigan

A Duel to the Death

Post by Gorth »

So I'm sure this isn't the best room for this, but there's so many I didn't feel like harming my brain over figuring it out. So if there's a better place, I'm sure the staff will move it, or something. Anyway:
So Elrond, Valestrah and Maya decided to have a little spar, but to the death instead of to first blood, like normal. We did so, and I decided to write it into a little short story.
Note that the following is a page out of Maya's journal, as written by her.

Thoughts/tips/anything else are appreciated. Note also that I have no experience with using weapons in real life, at least in an atempt to harm or protect, so some of this is most certainly unrealistic.

=====

Valestrah and I stood shoulder to shoulder, Elrond about ten feet in front of us across the ring. The rapier came from over my shoulder with a soft, practiced hiss of metal on leather, my dagger soon joining the sound. My eyes were locked on Elrond, crouched slightly, ready for this duel. A duel to the death.
Elrond and I fought nearly daily, but we always when to first blood. This was different. Us two girls against him, someone was going to die. And then my landed on two things. Number one, I wasn’t focused on the fight to come, the first lesson we learned in the Warrior’s Guild. And two, it wasn’t going to be me who died. That gritty determination sang through my bones, my muscles tightening and my eyes lifting to meet Elrond’s. He looked relaxed, as if we were duelling normally.
Before I could continue the thoughts, he started moving, circling towards my left, away from Valestrah. He recognized I was the greater threat. Valestrah could stab just fine, but she needed stealth and surprise to be affective, and she didn’t have that here. But what she had was me. I skipped forward a step, sending my rapier down towards his ribs on the right side. As he moved to block, I changed my grip slightly, angling the blade towards his stomach. He managed to roll backward under the point, coming up to his feet with a flourish of his dagger, trying to confuse me. I turned slightly to let the dagger move past my chest and used the opening to sink my rapier point just below his arm. It wasn’t deep, but it got him off of me, turning just in time to duck a slash from Valestrah, who had made her way up behind him. As he came up yet again, I slung my leg at him, though he was able to jump over it.
He used my distraction to circle away from us, Valestrah’s fist full of dirt missing his face by inches. Valestrah thought she could capitalize, I think, so she took two steps forward and thrust her rapier at his back as he turned. He was ready for this, though, turning and crouching, coming up with his wrist wrapped around Valestrah’s. He didn’t leave it at that, though. He pulled his arm back, sending the rapier clattering to the ground and at the same time, pulling @Valestrah forward, close enough for his Stiletto to sinks right through her other hand. I growled under my breath, sending a stab that forced him to tumble backward to dodge, allowing Valestrah to quickly scamper backward and regain her footing.
I whirled on Elrond, taking a step forward and hooking his left leg with my own, thrusting my hips forward and placing the elbow of my dagger arm into his side to ease him to the ground, hard. Without Valestrah to help me for the moment, he was able to scramble back up, avoiding my next attack, though his balance was ruined for the time being, so the exercise wasn’t totally futile. It was also at this point that he seemed to realize I wasn’t fracking around, and he switched the Stiletto for his rapier, making it much more difficult for us to get in on him.
We continued for quite some time, him sneaking in hits on us for our small mistakes, us steadily closing around him and knocking him to the ground, him just barely managing to get away and continue the chase. It was fun, exhilarating, a good workout. But eventually, he managed to get me down, and used the opportunity to sink his rapier into Valestrah’s stomach. The wound was deep, very close to fatal, and it changed the course of the whole fight. It made me angry to see Valestrah hurt like that, I don’t know why. But, for some reason that made me focus less on Valestrah, and more on dealing with the enemy. Yes, Elrond was the enemy at that point.
Only about twenty seconds later, though it felt like ten minutes of back and forth, Valestrah slipped behind him and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him to the ground with the strength a woman only has when she’s gravely injured and fighting to the death. And so, he went down, and I was on top of him, my dagger sinking into the middle of his back in a spray of blood, my hand automatically giving it that little extra twist to make it hurt just a bit more. I’m tiny, less than a hundred pounds, so it wasn’t to terribly hard for the pain to give him enough strength to roll me off and get to his back, though he wasn’t quite able to stand yet as Valestrah had risen to her feet, keeping him at bay as I climbed to my feet and stood over him.
Looking down into the eyes of a man you’ve beaten is an amazing experience. You get to see them register that you’ve beaten them, they you’re going to kill them...that your face is the last one they’ll see. Elrond didn’t have that look. He was certain he was going to come back, maybe he didn’t even expect me to sink my rapier through his chest. But I did, all the way through, to the floor of the ring, simply and quickly. And I stood there, blade still imbedded in him as I watched the life fade from his eyes.
Placing a boot on his chest to pull out my blade with a sickening sound, I took a step back, and then it hit me...I’d just killed Elrond. A fellow human, someone who I’d shared memories with, talked about some of the most embarrassing things with, he’d called me his sister yesterday. But what bothered me was not that I’d killed him, it was that I didn’t care.
Putting it that way makes me sound like a fracking monster, and that’s kind of how I felt at the time. I didn’t care because I expected him to walk back in the ring, reclaim his armor and weapons and give me one of those warm hugs he has. But I’d still stabbed him through the chest, stared him in the eye as he died.
I dropped my rapier, turning to regard Valestrah as she quietly looked down at Elrond and said, “Well, that happened.”
I simply nodded to her. I didn’t know what else to say. Elrond came back soon after, and everything was fine. I ended up going over to the beach and relaxing near the ocean so I could think about it, and my view has not changed. I’m calmer about it now, and though I don’t feel great about not caring that I killed him, I’m at least now able to live with it, and writing all of this down has certainly helped.
:undm_scales_key: :shagerd:
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Taliaferro
Posts: 85
Joined: Sun Nov 28, 2021 5:47 pm

Re: A Duel to the Death

Post by Taliaferro »

This is really quite good! It's well paced and exciting and a bit dark, with a bit of humor that captures the morbid absurdity of what a world with Undying in it would really be like, for some people.

Keep this sort of thing coming!

That goes for the rest of you, too!
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