Jyn cuffed the Cursed One, then she backed off and let one of her squadmates cuff her in turn. “Now that I’ve been charmed, I am a threat to us all,” was her reasoning. As part of protocol in dealing with charmed squad members, HQ shouldn’t find anything wrong later on when they’d go through the report.
The cuffs had a magic on them that suppressed charm effects, so the man was allowed to talk. Jyn was doing the interrogating, just in case there was some other magic at play that could still reach her squadmates.
They were following a trail out of the forest. Jyn was at the very front, leading the column. The man was trailing behind her, and the rest of the knights were trailing behind him, keeping ample distance. Considering the sheer amount of power his curse had, at least that much precaution was necessary.
“State your name,” Jyn said. The man wasn’t sure if this was some sort of attempt at small talk or part of an interrogation.
“I…don’t know mine,” he answered anyway. He noticed the cuffs warming up as he did.
“Thought as much.” She’d Appraised him a while ago. She couldn’t get more information than Seldi, but she got the basics down. “It is uncommon for reincarnators to be without a name, but it has happened—wait, why am I acting so familiar…”
Her squadmates clenched their teeth. To them, Jyn was as good as gone. Even if they went to kill the man, the charm effect wouldn’t go away. It never would. The splinter of the curse in Jyn would simply cause her to be forever sorrowful that the man had died, no matter what the actual substance of their relationship.
The man sighed. He wasn’t clear on a bunch of things, but it was obvious by the way the knights were acting that they had a long-standing enough problem with the Blessing of the ###### God to the point that they had procedures for dealing with it—and he’d been roped into all of it.
“I just wanna say,” he said. “I don’t wanna make anyone do things that they wouldn’t before any of this magic stuff popped up. It just doesn’t sit right with me—” His cuffs warmed up so much, he thought they’d set alight.
“That’s what they all say,” Jyn interrupted him, “but they all come to love the power that comes with it. You will become a beast very soon, or even just later on. I assure you—they all do.” Her visage twisted into a frown that the man didn’t see, but neither did any of them see his own frown.
It wasn’t sadness. It was anxiety. He really wasn’t that type of guy. Sure, he liked girls, but girls made really good friends. They laughed like angels, and their smiles made the world good. The banter was often nice, too, and hugging them was really nice. It’s just not the same when it’s a fellow guy.
…And now they were telling him that he’d become something that saw none of that. What a Blessing this was.
They reached the end of the trail, and there was a wagon waiting in a rocky clearing, where the forest canopy left a hole to see the sky with. Two other female knights were there. Why there had only been female knights so far, he could only wonder.
The waiting knights noticed the group approaching, nearly jumping down in excitement to meet them. Then they noticed Jyn. She was wearing a frown, and with the man being tugged along behind her, the two waiting knights figured out pretty quickly what was going on. Mostly.
“You bastard!” One of the waiting knights drew her sword, while the other just watched it happen. Unlike Jyn and the others, these knights didn’t have their visors down, so the man had a full view of her anger. They must have really cared for their leader.
“Yalina! No!” Jyn stood in her way.
“Don’t tell me you’re standing up for him!” Yalina cried.
“This is part of protocol! Stand down!”
After the rest of the knights followed and explained the situation, Yalina calmed down. She didn’t stop shooting sour looks at the man, though, at least not until they boarded the wagon and started off towards the nearby town. They kept him separated, chained to a hand rail at the very rear of the wagon. Jyn was the one who keyed the lock.
“Try to make a run for it, and we will shoot you down,” Yalina remarked before taking her place at the driver’s seat. Jyn thought to reprimand her for such a distasteful way of speaking, but she stopped herself from saying anything. It could have been the curse speaking.
Two horses pulled the rickety wagon, wont to shake apart the man’s body, bones, and chief among them, his ass. He’d be an ass himself if he asked for padding to sit on, so he persevered.
The wagon followed a dirt road. His mind wandered between numb and anxious, enough for him to eventually ignore the shake of the wagon.
After a few hours of the same dirt and trees, they cleared the forest. The town was in sight. A wooden stockade completely encircled it, and a handful of sentry towers looked over the horizon. There was a bell tower just beyond the wall, and some sort of stone keep. None of them looked any higher than five stories, but it was plenty for a small town like this.
They went past a few kilometers of crops before they reached the gate of the walled town. Again, even the gate guards were female. He had the urge to ask about it, but it’d probably be better to appear harmless and well-behaved until he could find someone he could actually ask about mundane stuff and not get murderously glared at for it.
The gate guards sent him a few wary glances, but being surrounded by a full squad of knights, and himself being in magical cuffs, they just left it at that and sent the wagon on its way.
The first place they passed was a market, which then gave way to a cluster of wooden homes. There weren’t too many people; this was probably the liveliest the town could get. There were some town watch patrols making the rounds; they each had gambeson, a short spear, and a wicker helmet. He hadn’t seen any other knights along the way.
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They stopped in a wide street, in front of another stockade—the stone keep was watching them from just behind it. The gate wasn’t quite wide enough to accommodate a wagon, so they hopped off. No one offered to help him down.
His captors ushered him up to the gate. Jyn said some official-sounding stuff to the knight sentries up above, and they opened the gate.
Not even five steps through, and he was separated from Jyn.
They tossed him into solitary confinement—the keep’s dungeon.
It was damp. The stone floor and walls were cold. A heavy wooden door kept him penned inside, while a tiny crystal in the ceiling was the only source of light. Unexpectedly, it was pretty bright, almost like sunlight, so his stay wasn’t as depressing as it could be. Maybe it’s some sort of skylight?
A port at the foot of the wooden door opened, and a tray slid through, the port closing behind it.
At least it’s fresh, he thought as he looked at it. Fresh, fluffy bread seemed quite a bit luxurious to serve to someone like him who was in a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ -type of situation. He’d expected something like…stale bread that might break his teeth or something. Oh well. It’s bread.
He ate the nice fluffy stuff with his hands still cuffed together. The cuffs themselves were magical. Why couldn’t they just magic the room itself? The cuffs were rubbing quite a lot against his skin, and he’d really rather have them off.
He was like this until the next morning. The closest he got to a meal variation was “bread with potato,” but the potato actually tasted pretty good, what’s up with that?
There were feet marching down the hallway outside the door. The five wooden bars that kept the door shut were lifted off with dull thuds as the guards set the bars against the floor, and finally, the door creaked open.
On the other side was a man with flowing black robes, a wrinkly face, and no hair to speak of. In one hand was a pen, and in the other, a book.
“Greetings—”
“Holy shit, a man.” He quickly put his hands over his mouth, face pasted red with embarrassment.
T-that wasn’t exactly what the inquisitor expected. He’d been told that the man was open to negotiation. He wasn’t told wrongly, but, something like this…
“First, state—no, choose your name,” the inquisitor continued.
The man remembered that that was still unfinished business. The inquisitor marched in, two knights with full-coverage scarlet armor behind him, and handed him the book.
The man received it, a bit unsure about anything that was going on. But eh. Whatever.
The book turned out to be a book of names. That’s nice and all, but, “Do I get only one name?” the man asked.
The inquisitor raised an eyebrow. “Are you a noble?”
“…No?”
“Then you get one name.”
It’s that kind of thing, huh. He rifled through the pages and noted a bunch that sounded like they’d curse him with some sort of destiny. None of that for him, no way.
He wasn’t feeling especially resolved in this life. More like, his current objective was to get an explanation out of Minimine—by finding a temple to Maximine, hopefully. That was the last thing she’d said, anyway. He was just really miffed that he didn’t know what was going on with everything. He’d want to explore places a bit, and, well, there’s magic, so learning about that would be nice. Of course, that’s all in the pursuit of getting some really juicy context about his current predicament.
If there was anything he knew, it’s that whatever had happened in that last part wasn’t supposed to happen. Once he figured out stuff, he’d wing it from there.
With that in mind, he looked for a neutral-sounding name that aptly described a guy who was just a little bit lost and was just finding his way around. Damn, that sounded like my college life, though. He paused at that thought, wondering what his college life was even like. His memories about it had been reduced to the most basic, summarizing impression: despair.
He stopped his finger over a name: ‘Diego.’ What.
No, surely, that name was associated with a certain kid explorer’s cousin, but that wasn’t the sort of exploration he was thinking about.
His finger stopped over another: ‘Kalender.’
“This one,” he said. It was a gut choice. He had no idea what the name actually meant, and it didn’t really sound neutral at all. Actually, he was pretty sure that that was what an industrial roller pin was called on Earth, but whatever.
“Interesting,” the inquisitor smirked, “for you to choose a Liberator’s name.”
What—whatever. His status updated.
***
Name: Kalender
***
His name flashed as a notification for a split second, then minimized off to oblivion.
“Mister Kalender, I am Inquisitor Djarren Yal. Follow me.”
Kalender felt a bit of danger in following the two-named inquisitor, not helped by the fact that he was being ushered out by the Inquisitor’s two scarlet bodyguards. He couldn’t even see their eyes through their visors, and they were towering over him, so, probably not antagonize the obviously-elite knights.
When he’d got thrown into his cell, he’d barely remembered the path he’d taken going down in the dungeon, and neither did he recognize the path they were taking going up. They were going up by quite a lot, though, and at some point, there was a window. They were maybe two stories up in the air by now. His legs were complaining a bit, but the scarlet knights behind him didn’t let him slow down.
He was led to a room—a courtroom, by the looks of it. It wasn’t that big. There were three benches for people watching, then an elevated podium for the judge. The defendant sort of just stood in a cage between the benches and the podium. There weren’t any furnishings for a jury or witness stands anywhere.
The scarlet knights exuded just a little bit of authoritative pressure. Kalender held a wry smile as he voluntarily showed himself into the defendant’s cage. As soon as the cage was locked, it glowed.
“Hands,” one of the scarlet knights called. “Bring them here.”
Kalender placed his hands near the edge of the cage. The knight grabbed them with a bit of crushing force. It hurt, but nothing was breaking so far. The knight keyed something into his cuffs, and they came off.
“Huh.” He was surprised by the apparent courtesy, but strings of tiny runes inscribed on the inside of the cage glowed red, giving off a tiny amount of heat.
The Inquisitor took his place on the judge’s seat. The scarlet knights took their places on either side of him.
Just a few minutes passed when more armor marched through the court’s door. It was Jyn, in cuffs and without her armor, escorted by one of her squadmates in full-plate.