Chaucer meme

squirrelwrangler:

So @anghraine posted this meme just as I was sitting on my ass waffling about starting to write anything for that timeline I wrote up and I figured, what the heck, as good an excuse as any. Man, this took willpower and editing and it still sucks and I’m trying to cram in too much information, but whatever.

Original story fic bits, in seven parts. (as this is some of the montage sequence of angst)

loosely inspired by A Death in the Family. No actual Batman knowledge required. 😉

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“Give me back my brother, you knave!”

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Gages is a dangerous city for an Imperial spy.  In direct opposition to both Emperor and Primarch, the ruling lord of Gages shelters the followers of the Pure Ones sect, not out of any devotion to that branch of heresy but because while the Pure Ones reject the authority of both secular and ecclesiastical crowns just as they reject the non-spiritual world itself as hopelessly tainted, this refusal to pay homage or taxation does not extend to the Lord of Gages, as the leaders of the Pure Ones remember whose swords and pikes block the valley from Imperial troops.  Elsewhere the Emperor wages what has now been years of intermittent civil war to stamp out the heretics, aided by agents under the secret direction of Lord Rupercht, yet not here at this city in the mountain pass.  As long as the Lord of Gages reaps his tax on the heretics to support his more mercenary motivated rebellion, the Pure Ones have free rein in the city – which means anyone who falls under the suspicion of holding either Imperial sympathies or those supernatural talents the Pure Ones blame on the forest-taint will face the worst of mob cruelty.  Ashar, adopted son of Lord Rupercht, green eyes pre-cognitively reading the twitches and half-startled movements of the frightened woman in this small alley as he pulls the stamped badge of the Imperial bureaucracy from its hidden pocket to try to convince her that he can safely extract her from this cesspit of a city, is both.  Eyes that can read any opponent’s movements in a fight before it is made, a talent that gives the edge needed for a starving boy with too-daring thievery and too-aggressive street brawling to survive until the most fortunate mistake, fail him.  Ashar reads the flash of almost-regret on the blond woman’s face before the blow that bruises the back of his skull and knocks him cold, but he has always been defined by the irony of his too-trusting heart.

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