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Trials of Ariana: Blood Beast of the Shale (High Fantasy Kink)

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Trials of Ariana
Blood Beast of the Shale

by Servus Venandi


Copyright © Servus Venandi. You can re-post this work as long as you don't do any of the following: 1) change it, 2) make money with it, 3) lie about who created it, or 4) display it in an illegal manner. I would also appreciate you linking to my DeviantArt page if you choose to post anything of mine elsewhere. Please attribute my work to "Servus Venandi.”

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1.

For Her Eminence, Sovereign Raga Baardsden of the Exalted Republics.

I, Representative Haag Bjornsen, in Her Eminence’s service on behalf of the Exalted House of Commons and High Command Regiment West 9, do humbly submit this abbreviated report and analysis on Incident SF-47.

The so-called Blood Beast was first reported near the Conflagration Zone where the Exalted Republics, Borra Empire, Ethereal Wilds and Shale Forest all share an amorphous border. Word of early sightings first reached our forward outpost in the region by way of hysterical accounts from rural peasants and barbarians, but subsequent investigations soon turned up a series of gruesome scenes. I have included Colonel Demetrius Dahl’s field and post-action reports in the attachments, should you require the horrid details, but the commonalities across all sites are 1) dismemberment and scattered entrails, and 2) a notable lack of victim consumption. This is not to say 100% of every victim was recovered, but the perpetrator seemed motivated by sheer blood lust rather than carnivorous appetite.

Tovus Parns, an eccentric Shale shaman in the hard-hit village of Poindexter, reported to Dahl’s forces on 21 Winterdawn that the beast was unnatural. When asked to elaborate, Parns failed to do so to Dahl’s satisfaction and was consequently taken into custody. Following a few hours of interrogation, the shaman confessed that the extreme violence on display bore hallmarks of Shale magic. The bladedancer Ariana of Dourheim had been hired to address the problem weeks prior, and managed to implicate a rival shaman (one Yanna Blume) in the village of Akton before falling out of contact.

I must pause here, Your Eminence, to mention the extreme distaste with which Colonel Dahl regards the Order of Bladedancers, as well as individuals within that order. He has gone on record many times, referring to them as “witches” and “arcane terrorists.” As recent as last season, he wrote in a formal letter to the House that, if the Exalted Republics were to adopt a single policy from our southern neighbors in Borra, it should be to burn witches in the manner prescribed by the fundamentalist elements of the Malus’rett faith. I note this neither in support nor condemnation of the man’s opinion, but only because it provides context for things to come.

Upon learning of a bladedancer’s involvement, Dahl dispatched his foremost arcane commando unit—Company Ash—to track her down. This proved no small feat, as no one had received any word from or about her since she’d surfaced briefly to ask about Blume. As Blood Beast attacks continued in the meantime, many feared she had been slain on the job.

On 25 Winterdawn, in the village of Akton, Company Ash followed their only lead to Yanna Blume, who scoffed at Parns’s accusations and, perhaps unsurprisingly, accused him in turn.

Reports on what happened thereafter in Akton are largely based on the accounts of captured villagers who survived, but most threads point to Company Ash attempting to arrest Blume. She resisted, first with words and then with magic. When the highly trained Exalted commandos rebuffed this paltry nonsense, the village as a whole turned on them.

It appeared as a classic pitchfork rebellion, dangerous but well within the capabilities of the unit. They had subdued most of the village within the hour, and nearly the entire adult population was chained in a coffle, to be driven by whip to the Exalted outpost for a summary hearing and, most likely, execution.

The Blood Beast appeared at this point, storming out of the forest and slaughtering Company Ash to a man. Chained villagers were likewise helpless against the fiend, and only a handful of children and noncombatants ultimately escaped.

Dahl responded in force a day later, personally taking command, but his large expeditionary team found little more than another abandoned killing ground. With such fresh evidence, however, scouts managed to track the beast’s path through the woods, a path which terminated at the Ghost Falls of the Milyra River. After a bit of treacherous climbing, commandos slipped behind the falls and found an assortment of black candles, a bloodstained summoning circle, and a drugged, barely-conscious female with slit wrists. Reports suggest that a substantial population vacated the cave mere hours before Dahl’s arrival, with only the lone woman left behind.

Troops took her into custody and treated her injuries. When a search of the cave turned up bladedancer weapons and equipment, Dahl surmised that the prisoner was Ariana of Dourheim. He ordered her stripped and bound to a makeshift crucifix at the Exalted riverside camp, reasoning that her involvement in the Blood Beast phenomenon was obvious.


***

(to be continued)
 
SV, I mentioned that I’m into CF primarily for the visuals, to the virtual exclusion of stories. But I can still tell you’re a goddam good writer, and look forward to seeing this Ariana lady naked. ;)
 
SV, I mentioned that I’m into CF primarily for the visuals, to the virtual exclusion of stories. But I can still tell you’re a goddam good writer, and look forward to seeing this Ariana lady naked. ;)

Thanks, I appreciate it. I haven't gone back to verify this, but I think Ariana has been stark naked at some point in every story I've written about her. ;)

SW_ToA_Ritual.jpg
 
Thanks, I appreciate it. I haven't gone back to verify this, but I think Ariana has been stark naked at some point in every story I've written about her. ;)

View attachment 838136

SV, you've gifted Ariana with an exceptional ass

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but those heels are definite violations of the Geneva Conventions. :eeek:

ADC4962B-3823-4DE7-9B1D-F4CEC49719B5.jpeg
 
2.

Dahl has asserted that, even after the prisoner regained consciousness, the threat of arcane assault was too great for interrogation. The bladedancer was gagged with her own underwear, plus a leather belt forced between her teeth and buckled behind her head. Initially, she was allowed to stand with her arms in cruciform, but Dahl soon deemed this too lenient and ordered her ankles pulled up behind the cross and fastened with a length of rope.

Now suspended with her full body weight against her wrists, Lady Ariana began to make, and I quote Col. Dahl, “vigorous attempts at verbal spellcraft, which were forthwith dispatched within the drool-soaked fibers of her own panties. Without a stern application of restraint and proactive muting, she very well might have doomed us all.”

House interviews with some of Dahl’s soldiers, however, paint a different picture. The specifics of these sessions are detailed in the attachments, but the sentiments of the rank and file—including the arcane commandos ordered to crucify and guard the bladedancer—are almost exclusively that Lady Ariana’s vocalizations were nothing more than cries of pain and muffled attempts to plead her case.

Regardless, deployments continued along the river valley for several days in pursuit of the Blood Beast. Dahl states in his main report that he felt a sense of boredom setting in, as he had already convicted Lady Ariana in his mind, and the monster would trouble the region no more with her sorcerous machinations hobbled.

Alas, on 30 Winterdawn, as the first snows of the season fell on the banks of the Milyra, exhausted elements of Company Blue reported a total slaughter of the village Sycamore Hill. Scouts remained in pursuit and feared the creature would follow a southward route to Volis’rin, an ancient Borran city and home to fifty thousand souls.

Dahl’s report describes his actions after receiving this news as “decisive” and “unapologetic devotion to truth.” Also, he further falls back on his personal judgment of Lady Ariana by declaring, “With thousands of lives at stake, even if the evidence exonerated rather than damned her, I would still make her stop this. It’s the least her kind deserve for sending such horrors upon the world.”

There is little elaboration from Dahl beyond these vague justifications. The most notable omission is, perhaps, exactly how he intended to make Lady Ariana do anything, if he truly feared her arcane prowess to an extent that necessitated such merciless restraint.

Once again, it is Dahl’s own forces who fill in the blanks for us. Numerous troops reported in House sessions and written reports that Dahl ordered the bladedancer hoisted up on the bough of a tree by her wrists until her bound feet lingered some six inches from the ground. There, while Lady Ariana begged unintelligibly, Col. Dahl flogged her naked back and buttocks with a stockwhip until she wept. It took twenty-seven strokes.

One commando stated under oath, “You usually start easy. You whip a prisoner in the field because, you know, you need information, and you start easy to give them a chance to talk. That usually works. Couple of lashes, they start singing. Colonel Dahl didn’t start easy. He put everything he had into the first stroke and then didn’t let up. I don’t know what he wanted. With that gag, she couldn’t say anything, and he seemed to.... I don’t want to step out of line here, but he seemed to prefer it that way. He was just hurting her. She let him know he was hurting her, and that made him want to do it even more. It took twenty-seven hard lashes before she broke, though. I’ve only seen a few last that long.”

Dahl contends his flogging of the bladedancer was a “procedural success” that culminated in her cooperation. Dahl’s troops, however, described a scene wherein they believed he was on the verge of killing Lady Ariana, when a messenger corp bearing the flag of Borra rode up to the Exalted camp.

The Borrans explained that it was Duke Harlon Mells of Volis’rin who had first secured the bladedancer’s services, as the Blood Beast had been a nuisance along the border for weeks. Lady Ariana had immediately noted the likelihood of Shale magic, and descriptions of known slaughter sites at the time had led her to suspect a spitewyrm, the twisted offspring of a [usually captive] demon and a dragon. She had disappeared on the job, but reports of an Exalted force with a female captive matching Lady Ariana’s description had compelled Duke Harlon to seek answers.

Your Eminence, I must once again break the narrative to inject a point of fact. Lady Ariana of Dourheim, as you might be aware, is a personal friend to King Allejorn Liandri of the Borra Empire. To call what befell Colonel Dahl and his troops a diplomatic incident is to understate the true gravity of things. An Exalted officer—a colonel who expresses even higher ambitions, no less—was caught in the act of torturing a close personal friend of the Exalted Republics’ greatest political enemy, with the pretenses of that torture being, shall we say, debatable at best.

While presumption of our own righteousness in all things diplomatic is a position not lacking in merit, this House of Commons urges stepping back to consider subsequent events in the light of what those Borran soldiers witnessed—that is, a friend of their king in enemy hands, naked and whipped for the crime of hunting a murderous monster of behalf of the countryfolk. Perhaps the situation is more complicated. Col. Dahl certainly argues that it is, but an atrocity in progress is what the Borran troops perceived when they happened upon Dahl’s encampment.

To the Borrans’ credit, they remained inquisitive but not accusatory. Dahl, by his own admission, was moralistic and obstinate, not even allowing the imperials to question Lady Ariana themselves. Being lightly armed, vastly outnumbered and under peaceful orders, the Borrans were in no position to object, but the messenger delivered a formal information request signed and sealed by Duke Harlon. They left without incident.

***

(to be continued)
 
This is getting better and better. I'm really enjoying the narrative style.

Nothing like a well worded bureaucratic interdepartmental enquiry report most likely written by a board of experts drawn from senior members of the administration to inflame the basest passions and arouse the darkest lusts.

I call this civilisation.
 
3.

Mind you, Your Eminence, this entire exchange with imperial forces has been pieced together from troop accounts. Col. Dahl mentions it only in passing, and he ignores the palpable dismay of the foreign soldiers upon encountering Lady Ariana in such a state.

Nonetheless, Dahl sensed the weight of political disaster settling on his shoulders, and he elected to at last speak with the bladedancer he had been tormenting for days. On his orders, an arcane commando stood behind Lady Ariana with a knife to her throat, prepared to cut at the first hint of spell utterance.

Dahl’s report goes into great detail about the soliloquy he delivered in her presence, not so much speaking to her as expounding upon the fragility of life and the threat posed to it by unchecked sorcery.

Dahl’s troops claim, almost without exception, that Lady Ariana met his eyes the instant she was ungagged and, in a weak voice, declared: “I can kill it.”

Whatever the truth might be, the end result was the accused finally afforded an opportunity to defend herself. She described a nightmarish scenario of rival Shale tribes going to war with soulbound spitewyrms, with Tovus Parns and Yanna Blume as the chief actors. The former lost his spitewyrm early in the conflict—Blume’s beast devoured Parns’s—and Parns saw the arrival of outside help as his only means of continuing the fight.

Lady Ariana did not realize this until after she met with Blume, however, and by then she had already wandered into an arcane trap that saw her overwhelmed, drugged and captured by Shale cultists. Cut off from her magic, she was an unwilling participant as her blood fueled sordid rituals meant to draw the increasingly powerful and ornery spitewyrm through alternate dimensions, allowing Blume to contain it when she didn’t need it, and to deploy it almost anywhere when she did.

Dahl’s report frames all of this as “the witch alleges” and “according to the accused in defiance of existing evidence.” Despite this, however, Dahl for some reason elected to allow Lady Ariana to go after the Blood Beast, on the condition that she would surrender herself to Exalted forces at the job’s completion. Naked, bleeding and suspended by her wrists at the time, the bladedancer understandably agreed.

She spent time recovering under constant guard, but Dahl at least allowed clothing and kept her bound seated in deepening snow at the foot of her cross, rather than hanging from it. Several arcane commandos have testified to the House of Commons that Lady Ariana said very little during this time—mostly “thank you” when receiving food, blankets and medical attention, and occasional yes/no responses to innocuous questions. Dahl maintains this was indicative of a plot, that the bladedancer could leap up and attack at any moment. Those troops who were actually close to her describe, instead, a woman at her wits’ end just trying to hold herself together.

The recuperation ended abruptly when Company Blue sent word of the Blood Beast wreaking havoc within sight of Volis’rin’s walls. Against the caution of his advisors, Dahl mobilized a forced march into Borran territory.

Lady Ariana was given her armor, which had been recovered in the ritual cave, but her sword and other equipment were withheld. Dahl ordered the bladedancer placed on horseback, with her hands bound behind her and a slave’s ballgag in her mouth. It was in this condition that she rode to battle.


4.

Duke Harlon’s garrison, as any intelligence report should indicate, is suited for routine civil patrol but otherwise insubstantial. By the time Dahl’s forces reached the city, the Blood Beast had slaughtered thousands of rural Borrans, many of whom had become undead as a result of Shale magic sparked with bladedancer blood. While the beast continued rampaging through the countryside, a fresh horde of zombies assailed the outer walls of Volis’rin.

All disparate accounts converge on a largely consistent picture of the battle from this point. Dahl’s force emerged from the outer reaches of Shale territory northwest of Volis’rin, as this was the last reported sighting of the Blood Beast by scouts. Company Blue’s forward units rejoined the main force at this time, bringing their number to 948 soldiers, 226 horses, 19 slaves, and 1 roped bladedancer.

After a brief investigation of the carnage at Thileshire, a suburban village known for a generational candy shop, Dahl ordered his army to the top of a hill roughly one-quarter mile from the Volis’rin main gate.

As he describes the situation in his report:

“It was a tactically sound vantage point that immediately drew our eyes to the magical fireworks of the so-called Blood Beast. A literal cloud of blood, complete with black lightning and cyclone wind and shadowy faces screaming inside it. This horror covered a diameter of several hundred feet. I don’t know how much of what we saw was sorcerous fakery and how much was the actual blood of those poor people. I’m not sure I want to know. The results were real enough, in any case. Unfortunately, there was no time to ponder, because our sound vantage point drew a significant portion of the undead horde to our location. They were fresh zombies, quick on their feet, and they were running right at us.”

Dahl contends he ordered Lady Ariana untied and ungagged, and then ceremoniously presented her sword and shield with a rousing, poetic charge to redeem herself, which she accepted with a subservient bow. As is a common theme throughout this reconstruction, Dahl’s troops recalled a different scene—their commander delivering a sanctimonious ultimatum to his wrongly-accused captive, only for her to rip the weapon and shield from his grasp. After a venomous “Go fuck yourself,” she conjured some manner of arcane barrier, and then plunged downhill into the onrushing dead.

According to his troops, Dahl first shouted for her to halt. When Lady Ariana removed the head of one zombie and lopped the arm off another, the colonel’s forces began clanging their weapons and cheering. He was “heartened” by the display, allegedly, and ordered a full charge.

If nothing else, the House of Commons is pleased by how well such a small force acquitted itself against undead foes. Most common infantry are not psychologically equipped for the task, and the best of Dahl’s arcane commandos were lost when Company Ash fell in Akton, but those who remained held the line and never relented. The bladedancer likely would have disentangled herself and moved up without help—it is what bladedancer’s do, after all—but our men and women were impressive.


***

(to be continued)
 
5.

We can’t be sure what happened when Lady Ariana reached the Blood Beast. There are some eyewitness accounts, but most of these are inconsistent ramblings from traumatized civilians. A few Borran soldiers and Volis’rin watchmen were present. While likewise traumatized, they at least possessed enough discipline to observe the situation and deliver marginally less contradictory reports.

Lady Ariana, according to the sum total of reliable accounts, threw herself into the “cloud of blood” described by Dahl. There, in the heart of that arcane storm, she stared down the spitewyrm known as the Blood Beast. It paused and cocked its head, a frighteningly intelligent bit of body language, as if it recognized the bladedancer. Perhaps it did, as her blood had been used to torment it just as surely as it—and its deceased counterpart—had tormented the people of the Conflagration Zone for so many weeks.

One Borran soldier, the closest to the scene, reported hearing Lady Ariana say, “I’m sorry.”

She rushed the monster and vanished in a hurricane of blood and shadows. The arcane thunder that followed was heard for miles, and the fetid breath of death emanating from the epicenter bent trees in half and tore at nearby structures. Anyone still alive ran for the city gates, heedless of the undead still scrambling to break through.

Golden fire and white lightning mixed with the gore and darkness, and a stomach-churning stench like burnt flesh settled across the area. Monstrous screams shredded ears. People as far away as the heart of Volis’rin, citizens still safely tucked behind their ancient walls, fell to their knees in agony, clapping hands to the sides of their heads.

This was the death knell, and the magical storm burned out in one final explosion that rained blood for miles.

At the center of it all, the Blood Beast lay motionless a mere hundred yards from the city walls, gashed from gut to throat and burned all over. Nearby, smeared black and red and still gripping her sword, Ariana of Dourheim sat on her knees and looked not at the dead monster, but up. It was late afternoon. As the blood cloud dissipated, the blue sky returned.

The undead collapsed with the beast’s demise, perhaps denied whatever foul magic had reanimated them in the first place. This had the downside of creating thousands of corpses, and leaving thousands more to grieve such a ghastly and pointless end of life for so many, but at least this final mercy left open the possibility of proper burials.

Col. Dahl’s forces, relieved of needing to fight off the entire zombie horde, pushed ahead and moved up behind the kneeling bladedancer. At the same time, a contingent of several dozen Borran soldiers and watchmen sallied out from the walls and approached Lady Ariana from the opposite direction. They were, to put it mildly, flabbergasted to find Exalted troops on their doorstep.

Both sides agree that Dahl was the first person to speak.

“Submit to binding, bladedancer,” he said. “You won’t be harmed, but I need your testimony about what happened here.”

Reports are mixed as to what happened next.

Dahl and his troops, for once in agreement even if for different reasons, described an angry bladedancer shooting to her feet in a column of fire. She’d lost her shield in the battle, and so she assumed a plow guard with her longsword.

“Attempt to bind me, attempt to touch me, and I will either kill all of you or force you to kill me. Whichever comes first.”

According to Dahl, Borran troops “sensed an opening, rushed in from behind, and anointed themselves the bladedancer’s personal defenders.” In deference to the fact that he was on foreign soil, and wanting to “avoid a diplomatic misunderstanding,” the colonel ordered his forces to fall back. After Duke Harlon refused Dahl’s offer to help with the cleanup, Exalted forces marched back to home territory without Lady Ariana in custody.

According to Volis’rin Guard Captain Phillips, Lady Ariana was distraught and wounded, and she was already “in an expeditious backward retreat from the Exalted formation” when “a handful of concerned men carefully moved up and guided her to safety.”

She was disarmed and bound with leather straps at the wrists and elbows, for some Borran troops, according to Phillips, “had a real fear she would inadvertently harm someone, including herself, in a wrongheaded bid to escape. Corporal Farix eventually convinced her it was over, that the Exalted bastards wouldn’t have her. She calmed down then. I ordered her released, and we got her some food and water while runners carried word to the duke. It wasn’t until later that I heard what happened to her leading up to that magical monster business. If I’d known half that, I’d have never tied her up. Now I’m just grateful she didn’t decapitate me. Can colonels go down for war crimes in the Exalted Republics? I hope so.”

Your Eminence, the House of Commons humbly urges a careful consideration of this tenuous situation. Arx Aurelia, and the bladedancers who run it, claim to be politically neutral. Indeed, while they train some of the most skilled fighters in the world, they maintain nothing like a standing army and harbor no obvious aspirations to change this. That said, those of us with political awareness understand that the bladedancers are an organization. Organizations have agendas whether they wish to or not, and they will inevitably, over time, make decisions that further those agendas. Also, the bladedancers enjoy widespread support across New T’Cora, with their only true public relations problems stemming from the fanatical Malus’rett cult (and let us be honest, the Malus’rett practice equal opportunity persecution against all users of magic).

Thus, the Exalted Republics, by virtue of its military representation through Colonel Demetrius Dahl, has deeply offended one of the most powerful and beloved organizations in the world. The bladedancers might be politically neutral, but individual members within their ranks are by no means politically inert. By kidnapping and torturing one of their own—we can dispute this characterization, but that won’t change the perception—how long will it take to regain good standing with them? What long-term consequences will we reap, political or otherwise, from Dahl’s reckless personal crusade?

By extension, we have deeply and needlessly offended the Borra Empire, with which we have maintained an on-again, off-again state of war for the last fifteen years. Not only did we kidnap and torture a personal friend of the Borran king, but an Exalted force of not-insignificant numbers marched up to the walls of a Borran city, uninvited. Such events compromise our international reputation.

The main thrust of this correspondence, Your Eminence, is two-fold.

1) The House of Commons formally recommends and requests a court martial of Colonel Demetrius Dahl for his actions toward Lady Ariana of Dourheim during the course of Incident SF-47.

2) The House of Commons formally recommends and requests letters of apology, signed by Her Eminence, Sovereign Raga Baardsden of the Exalted Republics, if it pleases her, to be sent without delay to Premier G’nyrn Orinai of the Order of Bladedancers, King Allejorn Liandri of the Borra Empire, and Lady Ariana of Dourheim.

As for the Blood Beast, it is dead insofar as anyone can determine. The corpse was parceled out to a variety of entities wishing to study it. The Shale shaman Yanna Blume remains at large, but Tovus Parns has been in chains since Dahl arrested him. Lady Ariana’s testimony would be beneficial to his prosecution, but her cooperation in this seems unlikely.

In an informal matter, the House of Commons requests that Her Eminence forgo any attempts to extradite or otherwise coerce Lady Ariana. She killed a monster of unimaginable power and horror for us, even after one of our senior military officers tortured her for days, without cause and without any semblance of mercy. She has done enough for us, and we have done enough to her.


Yours in faithful service,

Rep. Haag Bjornsen, Exalted House of Commons


***

(the end)
 
Amazing story.

Peace and justice have been restored.

Now let's move back to the really important matter that this unfortunate incident so regretfully interrupted: the discussion on whether it would be for the good of the Republic to start the procedures for a preliminary discussion about maintaining or changing the colour of the Regulation code's covers.
 
Amazing story.

Peace and justice have been restored.

Now let's move back to the really important matter that this unfortunate incident so regretfully interrupted: the discussion on whether it would be for the good of the Republic to start the procedures for a preliminary discussion about maintaining or changing the colour of the Regulation code's covers.

Thanks. :)

War crimes and abuse of power are well and good, but code cover colors? Careful, you're tearing at the very fabric of civilization with that one.
:flamethrower2::rocket:
 
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