Atlantic Roleplay Community Boards

[Raedyn]

---

(Warning: A bit bloody... discretion advised.)

“Lord Raedyn… I need your help.”

A gravelly voice came from beneath a shadowy mask, “Come, come in.”

The stone building was tall and dark. A dank hallway faced them as they entered, extending the length of the building, with doors going off of either side. Gregory followed the Raedyn down the hallway, watching his careful movements.

Raedyn wore red and black, looking like something out of a macabre novel. His face was covered with a blackened tribal mask, made of some sort of material that didn’t reflect the light, but rather seemed to absorb it.

Raedyn stopped at a door on the right and pushed it open, motioning for Gregory to enter.

Inside, a stone table lay in the center of the room, with shelves lining the walls. Scissors, thread, axes, saws, and an assortment of knives lay upon the shelves, all gleaming with their state of perfect repair.

“Take a seat.” Raedyn’s voice came from behind him as the metal door shut with a loud clanging noise.

Gregory awkwardly hoisted himself up on to the edge of the table, sitting with his hands at his sides.

“What is wrong with you?” Raedyn’s masked head swung so that he was facing Gregory as he reached up for a red box upon one of the high shelves.

“I don’t know, but I’ve been vomiting for the last eight days, and I feel incredibly weak.”

“I know just the thing…” Raedyn pulled the box down and set it upon the table next to Gregory, standing there with a hand over it for a moment. His stillness made him look statuesque, before it was broken by him turning to the only other door in the room and disappearing in to what looked like a storeroom.

Gregory looked down at the box, reading the inscription upon it.

“Maelousic…” he murmered, his eyes drawn to every detail of the box as his hand slid closer to it.

The door opened and Raedyn emerged, a vial in his hand with a sickly green substance sloshing around inside of it. He extended the vial toward Gregory.

“Take this.”

“What is it?”

“Do you not trust me?” Raedyn’s gravelly voice had a bit of a bite to it as he spoke.

“Uh… of course,” Gregory said, taking the vial and quickly drinking the contents. The taste was bitter, but bearable. He handed the empty vial back to Raedyn.

Raedyn dropped the vial, and it hit the stone floor, shattering. He paid it no mind as his eyes, dark and beady through the slits in the mask, rested upon Gregory.

Gregory smiled awkwardly, adjusting himself on the table. He looked at the door, and noticed that it seemed to be moving, shifting. He swung his head around, looking at the shelves. Everything seemed to be swimming in his vision, and his eyelids began to feel heavy. He had barely uttered a whimpering cry for help before he collapsed backwards on to the table, his head hanging limply off the edge.

“Mm… perfect.”

Raedyn took the box and placed it on a table along the wall, and turned to Gregory. He roughly grabbed the man’s arm and pulled him around, making his limp form lay lengthwise on the table. Only his feet hung off now, at awkward angles that normally wouldn’t be allowed.

Raedyn took the man’s arms and laid them along his sides, and began unlacing his fancy shirt. He undid it until the man’s chest was exposed, and turned to the red box.

He lifted the lid, exposing the set of pristine instruments inside. Tidily sat a set of medical instruments, including two scalpels with handles made of bone. They were fashioned in to the shape of two snakes intertwining about a single staff, and at the end of the handle two batlike wings protruded outward.

Raedyn’s hand trembled ever so slightly as his fingers wrapped delicately around the handle of one of the scalpels. He drew it from it’s special slot and held it up to his eyes, watching the scarce light gleam from the sharpened edge of the blade. He lingered there for a moment, tilting his head as if listening to something, before turning to Gregory.

“It’s time to cure you. You are a very sick man, I will make it better.”

Raedyn’s hand came carefully down to the man’s chest, placing the sharpened edge of the blade gently on his skin. With a precise incision down the center of his chest, a line of blood formed. The blood did not stain the blade, however, which seemed to somehow keep itself clean.

Raedyn made a small little noise of pleasure under the mask as the blood pooled on his chest and then ran off toward his neck. He turned and placed the scalpel back in to the box, drawing out another, larger blade with a similarly fashioned handle. He returned to the incision and drove deeper.

“Very good, very good.”

He went to the box again and placed the still clean scalpel in its’ place. He closed the lid, caressing it fondly before turning to one of the other shelves that lined the wall and pulling down a gleaming silver tool. It had two plates, attached to arms that in turn met at some sort of hand crank. It looked like something you would use to mill flower, but Raedyn had other plans.

He turned to Gregory and rammed the plates in to the incision, and then began cranking the handle. The plates began separating as he cranked, and the crunch of bone could be heard as the incision was widened. Gregory’s red heart was seen after a moment, beating weakly within his chest.

“Perfect…”

Raedyn let go of the crank and retrieved a pair of scissors from the red, bloodwood and bone box in which is scalpels had rested. The scissors were similarly fashioned, with bone handles and pristine blades. He reached in and snipped the arteries leading to the heart until it quit beating. He returned the scissors to the box.

Taking a gloved hand, he wrapped his fingers around the heart and brought it up out of the cavity of the man’s chest. He turned to a glass bowl that was lying nearby, freshly packed snow inside of it. He placed the heart in the bowl and packed the snow up over it as the blood began to turn the snow crimson.

Raedyn carefully removed the crank from the man’s chest and cleaned it, replacing it on the shelf.

He returned to the bloodwood box and retrieved a spool of thread and a bone needle. He slowly and meticulously sewed Gregory’s chest back up, adjusting his damaged bone structure so that it didn’t look quite so awful as it did before.

Raedyn packed his tools up at last and laced Gregory’s shirt back up. A small sigh could be heard beneath his mask as he turned his eyes toward Gregory’s quickly paling face.

“No more sickness, Gregory. I’ve fixed you.”

Gregory’s body was deposited in a burlap sack and slung over the back of a pack animal, at which point Raedyn paid an unknowing peasant to deliver the package to Gregory’s home in Eastern Britain.

The burlap sack would rest unknown, for Gregory did not have family, or friends. A recluse and a criminal, he contributed nothing to society and so was expendable. It would be days before the sack began to smell of rotting flesh, and the ravens and vultures began to flock, and the children would tell their parents. Only then would the authorities notice something amiss. A dead man with his heart removed and the incision sewn up with a doctor's precision.

A successful operation.

[Raedyn]

---

Raedyn stepped out in to the cold, night air in to the dense forest that surrounded the Remedium. The Remedium had been built in haste, a place for the sick to become well, for the ill to be cured. He felt a little flutter of excitement in his stomach when he thought about managing a hospital again. He did so miss it.

Gripping his black quarter staff, he turned his head left and right. The moonshadows danced with the swaying of the sparse leaves, and reflected brightly off of the snow covering the ground. His dully gleaming mask kept his face safe from the chill of the gentle breeze.

He turned to Beleraphon, who he had waiting for him. She trotted up to him leisurely and kneeled down, so that he could climb upon her unsaddled back without issue. She was a good mare, and had served Raedyn well for many years.

To the graveyard…

The command was not spoken, but rather thought. After so many years with the beast, Raedyn had formed a sort of mental connection with her. He sometimes accompanied his commands with motions or gestures, but rarely did she need more signal than a willful thought.

The wind was colder as they galloped through the trees, weaving between them as if the forest weren’t overgrown with brambles and other troublesome weeds. Raedyn gently gripped a bit of Beleraphon’s mane in either hand, just to keep from falling off. She didn’t seem to mind.

In the distance, the graveyard lay cool and silent in a pool of silvery light. The trees did not dare grow too close to the wicked place, and Raedyn was thankful for that. He didn’t like working in the shadows. A doctor always liked a well lighted work space.

They rounded the gate and were in the graveyard in no time, and Raedyn could hear the distant howls of wicked spirits, roaming just out of his line of sight. They didn’t concern him. A groan emanated from a nearby crypt, and Raedyn clicked his tongue impatiently. Once upon a time, the dead did not so eagerly rise from their grave.

Raedyn approached the neat rows of headstones, squinting his dark eyes and peering through the narrow slits in his mask. The names were all different, aside from where families had managed to get plots adjacent to one another. But the names weren’t important to him, he was paying attention to the date of their death. He needed a fresh corpse, and he intended to find one.

Finally, he found a headstone marked with a date fairly recent, and carefully dismounted Beleraphon.

Keep the undead busy.

Beleraphon trotted off in the direction of the howls and groans, and not long after she faded from sight, Raedyn could hear the distant sounds of the undead abominations being felled by her sharp hooves and her fiery breath. He smiled to himself under the mask.

“Marcus Elton, it is your lucky day,” Raedyn mumbled, looking around slowly. Nearby, a shovel rested on the ground, forgotten by the undertaker. No doubt, they did not linger here for long if they could avoid it, and made no fuss about neatness. He crossed the small distance and leaned to pick up the shovel in one hand, his staff in the other, and returned to the headstone.

Raedyn thrust his staff in to the ground, and despite the dirt being hard from the cold, it settled in nicely. It wouldn’t go anywhere for the time being. He hefted the shovel with both hands, thrusting it in to the fresh mound of Marcus Elton’s grave, the soft dirt moving easily aside for him.

The moon moved slowly across the sky as he dug deeper, waiting for that resistance that would mark the pine box in which Marcus would be encapsulated. But it did not come for some time, not until Raedyn was nearly deep to his head in the hole he had dug.

His breathing was steady and careful, and he showed no signs of fatigue by the time the shovel hit the top of the pine box. He scraped the dirt to the sides and slammed the shovel down again, splintering the wood.

Beleraphon, come.

He heard her hoofbeats within a few seconds, and was clearing the splintered wood from the hole as she arrived, her eyes glinting red in the darkness. Raedyn planted his feet awkwardly on either side of the corpse’s waist, looking down at his donor.

Marcus Elton was not terribly tall, though not short. His skin was pale, and a terrible gash in his neck looked like it was laughing, blackened with dried blood. His hair was completely shaved from his head, and his eyelids were peacefully closed. He looked like he was about twenty five years old when he died. Perfect.

Raedyn reached down and slipped his gloved hands under each of Marcus’ arms, hoisting him up. He was heavy, but Raedyn was strong enough to lift him up on to the flat ground above the hole, shoving him awkwardly up on to the flat land next to Beleraphon. He climbed up out of the hole after the corpse, dusting off his clothes as he straightened. He leaned down again, lifting Marcus and throwing him over Beleraphon’s back, where his head jostled at awkward angles, and Beleraphon danced a bit with the burden.

“Aah, what a wonderful night,” Raedyn mused, dusting his hands off as he looked about at the swaying treetops in the moonlight. He turned to Beleraphon and she kneeled, allowing him to climb up on to her back, the corpse in front of him. She rose to her hooves and began trotting leisurely toward the gate of the graveyard, and Raedyn couldn’t help but hum a little tune as they were once again in the protective shadows of the forest.

The best part about subjects that were already dead, Raedyn mused, was that he didn’t have to deal with their incessant screaming as he took their various useful parts from them. Some would be surprised how much of the human body had medicinal and alchemical purposes… surprised indeed…