Azriel: Doing Unto Others

(Minor artistic liberties taken with spell functionality, don't worry about it.)

# # #

Amethyst was too young, and Abel was gone, so Azriel and Jasper were sent along with their remaining oldest brother to talk to the butcher. The shop smelled overwhelmingly of blood, which seemed to only bother Azriel -- he tried to hide a gag, slipping behind Gabriel and turning his head to see Jasper merely looking around excitedly. She had a sword on her belt that he thought looked too big for her, even though she was tall for her age. He had a viol. This all seemed insane.

Gabriel rang the bell for service and leaned against the counter, waiting, not acknowledging the two of them behind him. Likely he would have preferred to do this alone. Azriel would have been entirely fine with that -- he was missing a session with his language tutor for this -- but Jasper had all but signed herself up, and he knew Gabriel wasn't going to look after her.

The door behind the counter opened and the half-orc butcher stepped out, wiping his hands on a bloody towel. He saw them and froze in place for a second, then turned to bolt back into the back room. Gabriel vaulted easily over the counter to follow him, Jasper right on his tail with Azriel scrambling behind them.

The stench was worse in the back -- it seemed to be a single great room with different work stations spaced out for killing the stock and for processing the meat. A spell made the entire room icy enough that he was able to see his breath, and the shock of cold air made him wheeze even as he was choking again.

Several rows of gutted carcasses hung from hooks on the ceiling acted as partial, makeshift walls, and he lost his siblings for a moment but then caught sight of Jasper's sword flashing under the bright mage lights and thunking into a pig. Movement rippled through the morbid row and Azriel pushed back the ill feeling, pressed his sleeve over his mouth and nose, and circled around to Jasper. She was fighting the butcher's human brother with great wild swings, driving him back as he tried desperately to dodge her and deflect her strikes with a cleaver. He wasn't fighting back at all. He just looked terrified.

“Jasper!” He managed to get it out despite the putrid air. “We're not here to kill anyone!”

She hesitated and looked back at him -- which to Azriel was proof she was too young to be here, because even he knew not to take your eyes off an enemy combatant (even if he'd learned it from adventure novels) -- and he took the opportunity to whip his viol to his shoulder and stare the butcher's brother down as he drew a soft, gentle song out of the strings.

*Sleep, sleep.*

The man dropped, cleaver clattering out of his hand, immediately snoring.

“Gabe told me to take care of him,” Jasper said.

“Yes, well, I'm sure he just meant for you to keep him occupied,” Azriel lied. “Tie him up or something like that. Jasper, these people are our business partners -- we're not here to kill them.”

She looked suspicious of this claim, but before he could defend it there was a scream from another room. Again, Jasper took off straight away, leaving Azriel to chase after her.

They found Gabriel and the butcher in an office -- where the smell was lesser and the cold spell didn't reach -- pinning the butcher against the wall by his throat. The gray-green half-orc's face was turning an unpleasant sort of mauve, and he scrabbled hopelessly at Gabriel's one-handed grip.

“How many fingers do you think a butcher needs, anyway?” Gabriel was asking rhetorically, tapping the flat edge of a cleaver against the man's temple, and as much as this panicked him, his eyes landed on Jasper and widened further. There was blood on her sword from hitting the pig carcass.

Azriel ran through his spells in his head. What would de-escalate the situation? Abel would know how the handle this -- he never would have allowed himself to be put in this situation in the first place. If he used thaumaturgy, maybe, for a moment he could be as intimidating as Abel --

Japer yelled out in pain. He spun to see a third person -- an older man, the namesake of the butcher shop -- sinking a knife into his sister's shoulder. Azriel's gut wrenched and without thinking about it he extended his arm and snapped his fingers, and the old man went up in flames. As he screamed and started to stumble away, a knife flew past Azriel's face and sank into the old man's throat. He gurgled and made it a couple more jolting steps before collapsing to the floor, bleeding onto the smooth white stone.

“That's too bad,” Gabriel remarked.

Azriel looked back to him just as he was drawing the cleaver back out of his belt, and pulling back to bury it into the half-orc's head.

“Gabriel --.” There was no way his older brother would listen to him, but he did stop for a moment.

It gave Jasper a chance to charge past him and snatch the knife away, no doubt mostly succeeding because Gabriel was so surprised (although Azriel had seen Jasper beat him in a arm-wrestling contest once; he'd assumed Gabriel had let her win because he didn't want to play at all, but …).

“Azriel said we're not supposed to kill anyone,” she said reproachfully, tossing the cleaver aside.

Her shoulder was bleeding quite badly. Gabriel looked murderous and still had plenty of knives on his person.

Azriel thought fast and stepped forward, locking eyes on the half-orc. “As you can see, my family has no trouble removing people like you from our system when you become obsolete.”

Jasper came over to stand beside him, crossing her arms, lending her intimidation to his smooth, polite, completely on-the-spot fabricated bullshit.

“I would hope that you realize, now,” he went on, panicking internally, “just how tenuous your place with us is.” He paused. The threat would have more impact coming from someone else. Maybe he could be someone else.

He took one step (thaumaturgy, blacked-out eyes), then another (prestidigitation, a cold gust), then another (darkness, spreading behind him), then another (disguise self, taller, gaunter, sharper curling horns), then another (thaumaturgy, quaking the ground), dragging eerie, discordant shrieks out of his viol until he was only a foot or so away from the half-orc and stopped.

Very softly, he said, “Steal from us again, and we *will* come back.”

# # #

Azriel made it to the other side of the cloud of darkness before his legs gave out. Gabriel kept walking; Jasper caught him before he hit the floor. She was still bleeding, and ecstatic.

“That's the coolest thing you've ever done,” she said, her volume dropping halfway through as he gestured frantically for her to shush, but her excitement not wavering a bit.

“Yes, well,” he said, and had no follow up.

She sat him back on his feet, and he managed to stay there this time -- eyeing her slashed shoulder and quickly playing the sweet, sad tune their nanny had hummed to them to get them to go to sleep. The wound closed up and Jasper glanced down at where it had been.

“Oh, yeah, that.” She shrugged, either brushing it off or just stretching to make sure the shoulder still worked just right, then grinned at him for a second before it dropped abruptly. “Aw, fuck, Gabe's gonna leave us behind.”

She bolted for the door.

Azriel tried to take off after her, but stumbled -- still feeling light-headed and a flutter in his chest that he was fairly sure was a portent of early death. He tried to take a couple of steadying breaths, but the rancid, bloody air only made things worse -- he choked again, dropping to his knees, and coughed and tried to filter it through his sleeve, but it was like the scent was in him now.

His little sister reappeared and scooped him up, princess style, brightly saying, “Sorry, forgot you were being all weird and shit.”

“Oh, no, Jasper, you don't have to --,” he started to protest, but actually, it probably would be easier for her to just carry him. “Well. Has Gabriel already taken the carriage?”

“Oh, yeah, he's gone as fuck,” she said cheerily.

He sighed. “I guess -- it's fine if you carry me just until I catch my breath.”

She grinned at him. She would definitely be carrying him all the way home, whether he liked it or not. He took a deep breath when she stepped out into the cool fresh air and let himself lean into her as his head spun.

Jasper could be extremely hard to dissuade from things she'd really set her mind to.

That was by no means a bad thing.