Harken and Heed [Fortune Prompt]

Immoral tasks were always done in the dark.

At this time of night, the guards outside of Faline’s palace did their duty with a tired eye and cider on their breath. Divos’ medal shown like a dim promise under the oil lamps, leaving the guard to wave him by without a backwards glance. Still he kept the hood up, his heart beating somewhere behind his rib cage as the words of Fortune swept through him: Destroy what is irreplaceable.

A man who worked in the dregs of government knew intimately what to destroy. Like a hundred times before, Divos walked the carpeted hallways, found the old corner he carved for himself when he was sent to Faline at the tender age of twenty-nine, no longer bright eyed to the innocent world, a hunger in his gut to make himself irreplaceable.

How horribly fitting he would be destroying what he worked so hard to achieve... but he would do so in a way to make his country proud.

Divos took down stacks and stacks of paperwork with gloved fingers, each whispered piece of paper a sorry echo of his normal life. He knew these documents, worked on many of them himself. Tracing his signature, Divos swallowed any pity he had, and stepped back. He drew his swords with a murmur.

------

Important tasks were always done in the dark.

Shepard found the deep pitch of night the easiest time to work in Faline. He clipped inside with a curt salute thrown in his direction from guards still drunk on the autumn festivities (He did not regard them cruelly, their laziness—it was a horrible time to be alert in Faline, even if he knew they would make trouble for him later) and found himself envious of their position. For Captain Wolfe, his work was never done, but it could be worked on in peace.

His cane matched the rhythm of his languid pulse as Shepard made his way through the crystalline palace. Idly, he wondered if his brother would urge him away from working so hard—but that wound still seemed too raw, something he wished not to poke at.

At this time of night, Faline’s governmental halls were empty. There was once a man who would work alongside him in the dark, bent like a question mark over a too-small desk with a too-big stack of paperwork. Such a constant presence like a lamp, or a piece of furniture, but Shepard had not seen him for a year. (He did not miss him, but perhaps it was nice not to work alone.)

A scrape of a chair. A step of a shoe. Captain Wolfe did not buy his rank, he earned it—and so he drew his blade, approaching a corner where someone wore a thick robe and a light underneath it. That corner… it was where the ambassador worked, with a small note to never be disturbed. The stature of the robed figure could have been him, but—

The stranger stepped back from a large stack of paperwork, hood falling back. No, that was not Divos—Divos was a pale man of indistinct appearance. This man had hypnotizing eyes, lines in his skin glowing in the dark, and swords pierced his throat.

Shepard had no time to put the pieces together before the swords slipped from the man’s throat and sliced into the paperwork, parchment turning to ash. The man had not noticed him, and so Shepard took a step forward, hand steady on his blade.

Only one man knew that corner of the palace so intimately as to begrudge a stranger’s intrusion. When the man looked up from his work, Shepard recognized Divos Incantates, the last man he expected to be ruining the government in the dark.

Shepard was a man of action. Divos was a man of paperwork and taxes. Shepard lowered his blade a quarter inch, a question on his lips he never got to ask.

Those horrible swords flew straight for him, and Shepard parried with the years of military experience. His rapier glowed where he parried the blades, red-hot to their blinding, magical force. Divos took off like a shot, and as Shepard played a horrible dance with the powers of his co-worker, he had to wonder when everything had gone so wrong.

As soon as the blades found him, they retreated, streaking like a comet back to their owner. Shepard let the sword fall from his nerveless fingers, breathing hard.

He was alone, and it was not so comforting as it once was.

------

It did not matter where he was, Divos always returned home.

Home could be nine miles or nine days away—in certain circumstances, Divos always came home. With bleeding soles and parched throat, his estate grounds would rear under his feet and the foyer would breathe in the scent of old pages and lacquered wood.

He collapsed just past the front door, hands stained with ash, a rattling laugh tearing to pieces in his throat. “I did it,” he said, soaking his fingers in the ruins of his work. “Ye gods, listen to me: I did what you asked, now remove them!” Those stained fingers wrapped into the handles of the swords in his throat. “Fortune, divine conquest, take from me what was ill given.” He closed his eyes, and pulled.

The house laughed at his efforts. He collapsed forward, supplication to the god he begged from on his pale lips. “This would help me,” he whispered into the dark. “It was a promise—I destroyed Faline’s crumbling infrastructure with these accursed things so I would be free of it!” Ash rained from his shoulders as his nails clawed rivets into the carpet. “I beseech you to let me go.”

The bones of the house rattled in their lullaby, a cacophony of sound. Fortune laughed, the God’s hot breath on the back of his neck. He dared not look up, not until boots entered his vision and he was forced see his fathers holding the three swords aloft, their faces in shadow.

“No,” they spoke, and plunged the blades back in his throat.