An unpleasant sight

“I fail to recognize the need for me to see this,” Allura remarked to Sebastien, rather pointedly, as she lowered the spyglass through which she’d looked down at the destroyed village which they were now in view of.

From where he standing a few feet away from the Enchantress, Sebastien could do little but nod his head in recognition of what she’d just said. It had taken them a couple of hours to reach a point from which they could see the source of the billowing pillar of smoke that had risen up towards the sky, during which it had begun to scatter and die down somewhat. It had eventually disappeared altogether, but they had pressed on in that direction nonetheless, and once they’d gotten there, they’d been greeted by the ghastly sight of the whole thing having been put alight, so that there was now not a single house that remained unscathed by the flames.

Worse still however, Sebastien noticed even before he’d taken the spyglass from Allura to get a better look at the carnage a short distance away from them, was that some of the village’s inhabitants had been stacked into a pile of corpses that dominated the open ground that laid at the centre of it.

“I don’t understand it,” Sebastien’s admission came after he’d peered through the spyglass at the pile of badly damaged corpses down below, his mind reeling at how what he was seeing clashed with everything that he’d been told about the dwellers of the southern highlanders and their ways, “the destruction is…”

“Utterly appalling,” Allura cut in, her tone of voice being such that it caused Sebastien to feel quite disgusted at himself for his previous desire to gauge her callousness. If nothing else, it had caused him to make them travel closer to the people who were responsible for the massacre that they were now surveying the bloody results of.

“Yes,” Sebastien agreed with her as she stood with the blood having disappeared from her face and William sat silent and motionless on the coach box behind them, their reactions to what they were being confronted with conveying to him that he was the only one among the trio to have seen anything quite like it before.

Allura’s unsettlingly powerful charm, which had reasserted itself after their brief stop a few hours earlier, was now gone, and in its wake had come Sebastien’s first opportunity to truly take in the flawless shape and proportions of the features of her face as he threw her a thoughtful glance and tried hard to come up with something more to say, though words failed him at the moment.

Relief from his fruitless attempts to find something fitting to say was offered to Sebastien in the shape of a figure coming out from behind the smouldering ruins of one of the houses and quickly moving in the direction of the pile of bodies, side-stepping a few corpses that had curiously enough been left to lie on their own out on the fringes of the village square.

Already curious as to who the person down there might, Sebastien was already bringing the spyglass back up to look through it as first one, then two more figures materialized from amongst the ruins, both of them following after the first person with weapons drawn.

While Sebastien looked on, the number of people moving about down on the square grew to number a total of five, with the first one standing out from amongst the other four by how he was dressed, his simple grey trousers and heavy wool jersey clashing with how they were clad, though he too was armed, clutching a sword in his right hand while his left one was used to wipe away a few strands of his long, blonde hair from his face as he stood turned towards the four men coming at him.

Glancing over at the four similarly attired men, Sebastien quickly noted that they were all armed and wearing thick leather jerkins with metal reinforcements in crucial places, conical helmets that left their faces exposed, and large, round shields, though the fourth was a bit unusual in that he had neither sword nor shield and was instead clutching his right arm, as though trying to stop a wound from bleeding.

What truly intrigued Sebastien about the men though was the realization that the sleeves of the coarse shirts that they wore underneath their leather jerkins was of the same colour and pattern as those worn by Redonian soldiers.