City Streets: The Peasant Guise

[Aldrich Boreas]

" – And heed the words, Brothers and Sisters, skeptics and believers, Children of Lord Hyusin all! The Great Change is coming and the tides turn, and even those degenerates who would scoff away from the predestined will find themselves a fate-woven puppet in the play!"

The crowd was hushed, busied in focus over the hunched over, thin, middle-aged man who demanded and commanded those intently listening ears of humans. His hands waved with every exclamation while spindling, bony fingers caught the moonlight that would make his pale knuckles glow against his dark and tattered garb. His eyes were beady and dark, but to talented eyes, doubtlessly murky and perhaps proclaiming him totally sightless or, at the very least, among the impaired. His wispy, ash colored hair was matted against his withered features, long and laden with the grease of baths missed, but never did he seem inclined to pushing it from his face as any normal person might have – it merely was where it was. It was an accent on his simplicities, the eccentricity that caught attention bursting from the mouth on his otherwise hollow shell like blood from a gaping wound, while all other things were ignorable at best.

A peasant prophet, preacher, and paradigm.

No, he had not been the first of these folk, blithely shouting the praises of Lord Hyusin, a far from household name who, in despite of the handicap of being still relatively unknown, quite clearly had made an impression upon the stranger of Glendenvale's inhabitants. They fit the bill of cultists, true, but blind and brainwashed cult members still lacked enough serious conviction to get the story straight every time..

.. These cultists, to the trained and aged eye of one particularly jaded vampire, were quite different from the norm of mere impressionable mortals.

So there Aldrich stood, gloved hands folded before him as he watched the man who shouted his warnings and discretions from a stage made of a single empty wine barrel. Glacial eyes scrutinized curiously, predatory in their typical nature but seeming softened in the most cut-throat of ways; the savage beast restrained by some shackle that, due to his brash nature and inability to totally respect authorative command, likely came in some strangely placed and unfortunate conscious decision. Why, of course, was the question of the evening.

Why was this prophet here of all places, calling out what he claimed to have seen within his dreams of the Netherworlds and seeming oblivious to the dangers of so blatantly disrupting civil order within Glendenvale's more common streets? Why was Aldrich Boreas standing almost peacefully amidst the humans who listened, listening too in spite of being a wolf within a herd of sheep? Why, why, and what? Who?

The shroud that hooded his face also did well to hide away the briefest flash of sharp fangs as Boreas smiled only to restrain the expression as soon as it had come. Cultists commanding a call to arms not for the Alliance of Silvanus and Glendenvale, and not to Ardentia but to a third force, aimed at disruption and chaos and the hostile takeover in the midst of such confusions? Or at least, so it sounded. Still.. Such a treacherous act to go on undisturbed within crowned borders, truly; the King of mortal men was a foolish human forevermore!