\--==Official Submission==-- FROM: General Debinani Rahl RE: Chapter Six - A Personal Confession History Repeats Itself My conscience continues to harass me about keeping a private journal when part of my job as Captain is to publicly chronicle the events that transpire concerning The Society, but what I have witnessed of late is a little too much to let out in the open quite yet. Master Sergeant Myca Vodyanoy, commander of the 1st Warders, Alpha Company, The Black Rose Society...what the hell are you doing here? And Kamir with you? I would like to hear that story. Last night at the old manor pretty much tore it. He's got some of the old Annals. I just wish I knew how he managed to get out of Cove alive. Since this discourse will probably make it into the Annals eventually, I think I should come clean with my previous discrepancies and tell the whole story. Sorry Captain Turon... it has to be told. I didn't join the Society just before Cove, my story omitted the better parts of my life because I was following orders to not let the truth out about what happened at Yew and Vesper towards the end of the Old Society. Well, I'm in charge now, and since the Annals are private I have decided that the members of the Society have a right to know and to understand the events that surround them. I was born into the Society, I'm not entirely sure where I was found or what the conditions were of my birth, but I was raised by the Captain, Tree, and Dawg, the latter two has been Society wizards for over a hundred years. By the time I was five I was using a little nightsight spell Tree had taught me to recover arrows from battlefields, and by the time I was twelve I was providing rear-line healing for the troops. Most mothers of the world would be aghast at my upbringing, but it built character. Myca and Kamir were both in their positions for as long as I can remember. They led the Warders. It was a fact of life for me. For most of my childhood I stayed away from that bunch, for there wasn't a more elite, rough-and-tumble unit in the world, and Dawg had at least some inkling of how to keep a child out of trouble. The entire company, especially the officers, liked having me around. They thought I brought em good luck. Most of the time it was just a tingling feeling I'd get in the back of my neck just before we rode into a trap, or some other such thing. Maybe I have a sort of sixth sense...I don't know. It sure hasn't kept me out of trouble recently. I was sixteen and working full-time with the mages when we marched on Yew. It was quiet. Captain ordered the Warders ahead to check the place out and an hour later when they called in to say they were under attack, he sent the 2nd Roughriders and myself out to help. We circled south around the edge of town and rode in hard to find the town completely empty. We heard the sounds of combat coming from the direction of the Abbey so that's where we went. And that's when my life as I know it went straight to hell. We came around the winery and up to the Abbey. It was a slaughterhouse. About half of the Warders, in my opinion the best warriors among them, were back to back in the middle of the clearing, standing amongst the corpses of about a dozen DarkRychen and several other armed men. The other half of the unit was apparently attempting to kill the rest. And it was a close fight. Myca and his men were trying to fight off their brothers without striking any blows, but the wear was showing. I rode forward to get a look around and try to determine how this had come about when a blow landed on the back of my head and I fell from my horse. I landed and spun upwards, freeing my sword from it's scabbard in time to block a crushing blow from BlackWolf, the Sergeant in charge of the Roughriders. He was wide-eyed, almost as surprised to be attacking me as I was to be defending. As he rained blows down upon me he appeared to be sizing up the situation, trying desperately to find out how to regain control of his body. The rest of the Roughriders had broken off, heading down tot he clearing to help finish off Myca and his lot that had resisted whatever charm was affecting the rest of them. I was tiring swiftly, BlackWolf was a big man and quite skilled with the blade, I was barely staying alive. I saw a hint of resignation cross his eyes. "Do it, boy, " he hollered at me over the crashing of steel and the screams of the other men in battle. I parried his thrust and somehow got inside his defenses and felt the shudder in my arm as my longsword went through his body. Time stopped. The sounds around me became a muted and distant. He looked at my scared and wide-eyed stare and gave a curt, strained nod of approval, and then he died. I had never killed a man before, and the first I sunk my blade into was the same man who had taught me how to use it when I was a boy. I returned to my senses and noticed, although the fighting was still going on, all eyes and thoughts were on me. I saw the Warders, life-long brothers in arms look into each other's eyes, come to an agreement, and then at the same time, Myca, Kamir and the rest of the defenders snapped, roared in rage and frustration, and proceeded to slaughter their kindred to a man. In a matter of minutes only the five Warders who had resisted the enchantment and myself remained. As we were just getting over the shock of what we had just done, the doors to the abbey flew open and what seemed like all of the women and children of Yew came staggering and stumbling out. Strider went over to a child that had fallen to help him up, and the toddler expertly and efficiently ran a dagger through the man's eye and into his brain. The women and children of the town, most of which completely unarmed, crashed like a wave into the four remaining Warders. The tired and bloodied men had no choice but to hide behind their eyes and let their highly-trained bodies to the work of preserving their lives. At this point, I notices a man at the top of the abbey, dressed in robes obviously concentrating on his spell. I charged through the mass of death and into the Abbey, flew up the stairs without losing stride and came out on the rooftops behind the man. A second, armed man was waiting at the door. I can't even remember what I did, but somehow I managed to avoid the blow that would have taken my head. In retrospect, I can't remember much about this man. My entire attention was focused on the wizard causing the deaths of so many innocents, not to mention my brothers. Eventually, the warrior got the better of me and disarmed me, and one of Dawg's old tricks came to my lips and fingers. I paralyzed him, poisoned him, hit him with a lightning bolt, and took out his throat with my belt knife, all in about the same move. I couldn't believe it worked. I can't remember much about this man...except for the tell-tale shield of Order falling to the bloodied ground at his feet. I ran across the balcony and plunged my knife into the spine of the wizard, killing him instantly. Sadly, my encounter with the Knight had taken a moment too long. I looked over the parapet into a scene from a daemon's nightmare, there were four beaten, bruised, cut, and burnt soldiers in the clearing. They were all that were alive. And they were weeping. "Myca!" I hollered down. No response. "SERGEANT!!" I screamed in the roughest tone I could manage. He looked up slowly, painfully slowly. "You have to see this, sir." He disappeared into the Abbey and emerged on the roof. He nudged around the Order shield for a moment with the toe of his boot and came over to examine the wizard. He was so covered in blood and gore he was leaving a trail of it behind him. He leaned over the body and examined it for a moment, then stood with a medallion in is hand. "College of Scribes...Britain..." he said quietly, "Ve've been set up." The Captain arrived a short while later with a hundred horse. He spoke to the Sergeant for a while, at one point both looking and pointing at me. Then we were all escorted to the coast to get cleaned up. When we returned to the Abbey there wasn't a trace of what had happened, only a very weary-looking Tree sitting in the middle of the clearing putting away his supplies. We were ordered to keep things quiet. To this day I don't know if Myca told the Captain about our employer's betrayal. But our employer knew. Word spread quickly, The Black Rose Society, and especially Myca Vodyanoy, was the Butcher of Yew, the man who killed every living man, woman, and child in an entire city while they hid in a monastery. That evening the Captain ordered me to join the Warders as a part of their reinforcements, seems it was a request from the Sergeant. I went and drank with the other four in silence. On the march to Vesper, as word spread, the public became more and more hostile. It was rumored that Blackthorn himself met with the Captain and told him to steer the Society clear of Britain or else face the consequences of an angered public. It seems he thought we had been set up as well. I trained harder than I had ever before in the martial arts, Myca and Kamir were both masters at their art and I learned much, though my magical studies with Dawg and Tree suffered somewhat. I think everyone knows enough about the time Vesper almost exploded into civil war were it not for the three-thousand troops blanketing the streets, but I doubt the stories do our term there credit. We never got a moment of rest in the six months of our service to Lord Kendric. If things started to get quiet with the public, those Prophets of the Avatar would immolate themselves and throw themselves bodily into our lines of pikemen or drown themselves in the well or something else disturbingly and fatally fanatical. It was the Warders, now back to full strength, that managed to assassinate the leaders of the cult and stop the rioting. It was the longest night of my life, but it's unimportant to the telling of my tale. Needless to say we were glad to get the Cove contract and get the hell out of town. The men were in better spirits when we reached Cove a week later, everyone looked forward to smashing some Orc and Troll skulls as opposed to slaying elves and men. My previous discourse on the events at Cove remains accurate, the Society was cut down to a man, however in retrospect some things remain suspicious. Over the course of time, the four men who were at the Abbey became more and more distant, to the point that at Cove, they would walk along the palisades talking quietly among themselves, not allowing anyone else in on their conversations. The morning of the battle, the four of them were up in the mountain, apparently keeping a watch out to sea. I was with Tree and Dawg preparing some Orc-killing spellwork, and the rest of the Warders were patrolling the coast. I had always assumed that because those four were on the rise that they could not have possibly survived the onslaught. I was wrong. I will not begin to debate the motivations or the actions of my old brothers, for they were good men each and every one. Never once I have even considered the fact that they were part of the slaughter, just that somehow, some way, they became what they are and at some point were burnt out of a manor house near Yew some five centuries ago. Theirs is a story I would like to hear. Oddly enough, Valdimar and Cedric weren't with them at the manor last night, and I saw no sign nor heard no mention of them. Perhaps they didn't survive and Myca and Kamir are the only ones. Perhaps they're not even vampires in the mythical sense, but souls that will not rest till the blood is expunged from their hands. I know not. However I do plan to discover their secret, discover their past, and find out what they're hiding, and why. So there it is, my confession of truth. Mayhap my brothers and sisters will see fit to forgive my deception, perhaps not. I was just a young soldier, following the orders of the only man I can call father. And I'm still following them to this day. Make no mistake, the Society has been broken, it was broken five centuries ago, but perhaps I can leave a legacy behind and fulfill the purpose in which we were created.