The narration channel (lightly tailored) from a game with our dear @Gnosego in which my character, Gwendolyn “The Fly” of Rownia convinces an uppity knight with a mob, Sir Leszek, that she’s not an evil witch out to ruin the village of Szymbark and is in fact a Green Mage here to kill their monster . . . but uses her spooky Mesmerizing Gaze during their duel of wits.
Quincy, please forgive me for removing the second spaces after all of your periods and messing up some of your prose.
—:—
Gwen lifts her face to meet Sir Leszek’s eyes from below the brim of her grand hat. She holds the gaze placidly for a beat, as the knight stands transfixed by her stare, his will not his own!
Then Gwen lowers her eyes again, as if nothing had happened, and speaks dismissively.
“I think there is hardly more to discuss, sir. Tonight, I will enact the ceremony to free Danuta from her curse, and then the manticore will plague us no more.” She says.
“Nothing more to discuss? She’s just done it to me! I tried to speak, but her eyes, her piercing eyes stopped me!” Sir Leszek shouts.
His squire moves to the front of the confused mob, “Are you okay, sir!? Has she taken your mind!?”
“Enough of this farce! If he can’t win with the truth, he’ll pretend I’m some low witch anyway!” Gwen says.
“Look, people: This is who has stirred you into a such a frenzy! A man who won’t admit when he’s wrong! When he’s lost! When his foolishness has about sentenced a village to death!”
She makes a dismissive gesture toward the knight.
“Leave me to my work! I promise I won’t tarry when I’m done!” She says.
“To think that you had me doubting myself. For a moment, you nearly fooled me. But I was right about you. You are a monster.” Sir Leszek says.
He draws his sword.
“And I won’t let you bring ruin to this village.” He says, speaking directly to Gwen, his voice cold and quiet.
His squire draws his sword as well, and the mob parts and steps away from the scene, abandoning Sir Leszek.
(I won the Duel of Wits with 1/8 BoA to Leszek’s -1/9 BoA—The mob wouldn’t run me out of town and he’d have to admit I wasn’t an evil witch out to ruin Szymbark. He does that later, though.)
The knight stands in the harsh light failure, head bowed, hand tightening and untightening on the hilt of his sword. His squire watches his knight carefully, looking for any signal.
Words of power fill the air and Gwen throws a spell out to Leszek’s sword, which leaps against his breast plate and sticks, blade per bend across his chest.
The squire lunges for the incanting sorceress!
“Krasny! Spear!” Gwen cries out, and faintly hears the sound of Krasny’s boots scurrying away. He doesn’t come back with her spear.
(Never A Moment of Peace is such a good trait.)
She utters the first syllables of another spell, and sparks fill the air between her fingers, but the squire bears down on the sorceress unabated, closing in on her, desperate, focused. Gwen struggles to hold the incantation, nearly tumbling backward as she scrambles away from his sword.
Gwen drops the spell and tries to block the boy’s arm at the elbow, but his sword rises up in a flash to cut across Gwen’s belly, catching on her arming doublet. Then the sword flourishes around to strike down, drawing a red line across her hip, and opening the gambeson.
The squire threatens with the point and tries to compass to the left to expose the sorceress’s flank, but Gwen light steps back in his line, keeping her stance low and arms in.
The squire looks to end this quickly and shoots in with his shoulder, but Gwen twists to the side and lets him stumble past.
Meanwhile, Leszek grabs his sword by both ends and tries to free it from his chest plate. He struggles and struggles, but the force of the binding is too strong! Frustrated, he charges toward the sorceress empty-handed.
(With a sword for a very inconvenient hood ornament.)
Gwen hurries down the hill toward Szymbark town, away from both the squire and the knight. The squire catches himself before tumbling and finds his bearings, while Sir Leszek catches her at the switchback up the hill.
Forced to fight, Gwen turns and tries to resume her stance, but Sir Leszek shoots to the side of her injured leg, exposing her flank as his squire tried before.
“Fuck!” Gwen exclaims, stumbling. “Avast!”
The knight does not go avast. He charges and knocks her off her feet, just as his squire had tried to.
“Someone! Romuald! Help me!” She shouts.
Looking out into the afternoon, she sees the crowd. A snap-shot of uncertain faces, panicked faces, angry faces. From up the hill, she can see Rommy on the other side of the crowd, trying to push his way through.
“Rom—y-you’ll regret this, knight!” Gwen shouts, as the knight falls on her in a grapple, his sword still bound across his breastplate. She locks her arms with Leszek’s, holding him off with all her might, but the knight puts a hand in the crook of her elbow and her arm collapses. He pins it against her chest.
The squire arrives and looks on with assurance as his master reaches his other hand for the dagger on his belt, but as soon as he does, Gwen lifts her uninjured leg and kicks the knight off her. She’s able to scramble away from him a pace. He follows, dagger drawn now, and she continues to crawl away, to the edge of the switchback.
Gwen looks up and sees Sir Leszek lift the dagger in both hands…
(Spent persona for a complication instead of taking a traumatic knife wound.)
… and she rolls off the path, to where the hill slopes steeply. Suddenly she’s in freefall. She hits a rock in the hill, and again, hard, and keeps rolling, through the shrubbery, against a fence that tears away her arming doublet. She hits the fence that bounds mayor Piotr’s estate. Dazed, confused, she can only run! Romuald runs after her a moment later.
-:-
Gwen stops at the edge of Danuta’s abandoned house, panting. She leans against the faded whitewash and wipes spit from her mouth with, what? Her nice shirt is all tattered. She looks down at herself and only sees her scuffed up padded chausses. No aketon.
“Look at me,” she laughs.
And then she becomes aware of the faint spell in the corner of her mind and fucking loses it. She laughs uproariously, cackling, wheezing, it pains her so with the cracked ribs, and she slumps against the wall, unable to stand.
“I’m a fucking idiot.”
She waves her hand.
Somewhere in the mayor’s house a sword clatters to the ground off a breastplate.
