4 Vienice Aramon

Trigger warning: minor gore and death

_Vienice Aramon_

"Vienice, my love..." his mother called to him sweetly. He felt the soft stroke of her hand on his cheek. He heard birds outside. Was it springtime already? Winter had been so long... sometimes the season felt like it would never end.

"Vienice..." He heard her call again, but when he opened his eyes, she was not there. Perhaps she was calling him over for breakfast with Anne, his older sister.

Vienice got up from his bed and made his way to the kitchen. He had his own bedroom, though he used to share with his sister when they were younger. Anne was a kind girl but it was clear to him that she didn't like him. He figured it was the 5 year age gap that separated them. He rounded the hallway and walked into the kitchen. "Mother?" he called out.

She revealed herself, and approached him with a smile. "Vienice," She said happily, coming to hold his face in her hands. "My lovely, lovely boy."

The boy mustered up a smile in response, unsure what to say. His mother kept smiling at him- in fact, it grew in size- almost painfully so. "My live boy... the solution to my life. My savior... my boy.. MY boy..." her smile was fading now- melting even.

His violet eyes widened at his mother's behavior and tried to pull away from her when her grip got tighter and started to hurt him. No matter how hard he tried to pull away however, her grip was tight on his face and it felt like she was going to pop his head off.

"Vienice my boy..." Her voice seemed to slow, deepen almost as her nails dug into the sides of his head. He started to struggle, to push against her in attempts to get away. "Vienice... Vienice..." She repeated his name over and over, her voice shaking in that slow deepened tone. He felt his usually slow heartbeat stir in his chest, starting to beat faster as he pushed against her and attempted to rip her hands from his head.

"Mother, let go of me!" he yelled at her now, afraid to hurt her in his attempts to gain freedom.

"Vienice!" She screamed back at him, black liquid falling from her melting mouth. The same happened to her eyes, nose and ears. It was as if her head was a pot of sludge with leaking holes. "Vienice you are the most shameful thing!" She screeched at him. "You are a monster! A devils boy! You bring shame to this family!" Her words were sporadic and she was stumbling over them as if she had so much to say that she wanted to say it all at the same time.

She sputtered and then did what he thought was choking before more black liquid fell from her, flooding from her mouth. Her grip on his head loosened and he found himself ripping away from her, his eyes heavyset, afraid to look away from the scene. "Your sister is dead because of you! A wrong deal made with the devil! It is all your fault that there are more rumors of me! Your fault that your father commits adultery! You are a curse! A bane upon this family! You are a bastard in every eye that ever blinks. The devils son!"

Vienice was breathing heavily now, his hands curling into tight fists and then uncurling again. She had said these things to him before, it was not uncommon for her to switch from a loving mother to a cruel one. But for some reason, he couldn't control his temper. He couldn't stop himself from being hurt- from being angry. The boy rarely got angry- but he had never been this mad before.

He went to attack her but as soon as he did, everything went black. For a moment, everything was black and motionless- silent with nothing. He tried to wave a hand in front of his face but there was nothing. He wasn't even sure he could feel his hand. A thought came to him now. Was this death? A void of nothing? His answer came too soon. This place did not stay black for too long.

The next thing he saw was red. It was only red for a long moment, but soon his senses came to him. Violet eyes gazed up at a red sky, the clouds an even darker red, why the moon was a pale red- a pink color. He had never seen such a thing. Looking down, his breath caught in his throat.

The buildings of his village were burning. Not all of course, but there were quite a few. Snow was falling from the sky, but not enough to cover the scene that was laid out before him. He'd never seen so much red before. Bodies littered the ground, surrounded him- practically covered every bit of grass, dirt, and rock like a putrid, rotting blanket. He'd never before seen blood run along, nearly like a slow river. So much death was unknown to him but... somehow familiar.

The wind was unbearably still, leaving the smell to sit stale in the air. The smell of death- but something described so foul, was not so. It did not bother him. In fact, he found himself disgusted with the way he enjoyed it. The place was desolate. A red wasteland of death. Not a creature made a sound. It was as if any life itself was either dead or fearful of what was the cause of all this.

The cause.

Vienice looked around for any sign of the one responsible for this massacre. But there was no one. Not a living soul in sight. Slowly, Vienice looked down at his hands. Violet eyes widened in realization. Red. He was red too. Covered in it. It was on his hands and arms, his face and his clothes. It looked as if the boy had swam in the stuff.

A panic built up in him now. What had he done? What happened? Why could he not remember any of this? He tried to scream but the sound jolted his body and he found his eyes opening.

He sat up and looked around the dark room quickly, eyes never staying in one place for too long. He was sweaty and dirty, was the first thing he realized. Quickly he looked down at his hands and to his relief, instead of blood, there was just dirt. His fast breathing took a second to calm down and once it had he swallowed, cringing at how dry his throat was.

Along with the dirt, cuffs accompanied his hands, joined together by chains that connected into the wall. He finally took the time to take in his surroundings. The room was stuffy and damp, a musty smell that he did not appreciate. His eyes surveyed the grey stone walls before they came across a door with iron bars. He was imprisoned, it seemed.

Vienice went over his memories in his head but everything seemed jumbled and fuzzy. It took him a moment to come to a realization as to what had happened to him. Vienice knew he was different than others and that was why they hadn't liked him back at home. All his life the people around him gave him a struggle. His own mother was quite a big number of those said struggles.

What he'd done came flooding back to him now, and his dirt covered hands found themselves covering his face. He didn't sleep often, and when he did he always had nightmares- like the one he just had. He hadn't meant to sleep this time, but he figured it would pass the time since it was looking like he might be there for a while. This seemed to have been a mistake because on top of not knowing the current hour of the day, his head was also messed up from the sleep. Truth was, Vienice didn't need sleep. At least- he didn't think he did. He'd gone at least an entire month without sleep before and had felt fine.

When he did sleep, it was usually to pass time. Unfortunately for him however, it usually ended up with him waking up from a nightmare. It had always been like this since he was a child. Countless nights he'd spent staring at his ceiling until morning. For a while, he would read books but he could not see in the pitch black of his room so he would need a candle. His mother hadn't liked the midnight use of said candle and wasn't fond of the idea of him not sleeping. She didn't much like to listen to anything Vienice had to say.

The usual for him was occurring now; another reason he didn't like sleeping often. The nightmares and bodily shock of his body sleeping usually made his head a hazy mess when he woke. For the longest moment, it seemed Vienice couldn't remember what had happened, but soon it was clear.

From the barred window on the farthest wall, there was daylight out. He couldn't tell if it was just cloudy or if it perhaps was dawn or dusk out. But that hardly mattered did it? He deserved to rot in here for what he had done. His head sank further into his chained hands at the memories that became clearer to him now.

An entire town... decimated. Turned into dust. All of that suffering at his hands. The memories of the bodies came back clearer to him than they had been in the dream. He wanted to cry, to beg for forgiveness from a god if there even was one. For if there were a god, surely they would have stopped something like this from happening. He took a deep breath, shaking his head. How was what he had done even possible? How could anyone in their right mind have done something like that?

He clenched his teeth hard, his jaw pulling tight. Irritated with himself, Vienice threw his head back into one of the cold stone walls, bashing hard. Pain lit up his senses but he angrily accepted it. In fact, he did it again- and even a third time. His breathing was a little ragged as he growled to himself and bashed a fourth time, grunting at the impact. If the pain wasn't an indicator, the wet feeling going down his neck assured him that he was bleeding now.

He deserved it. He deserved more than this. More punishment than a head bashing. A memory hit him that made him instinctively touch his neck, feeling along it, around it- up and down trying to justify the memory he had. Surly it was wrong- perhaps another nightmare of his. The memory made no sense- something like that just wasn't right.

The memory that came to him, the punishment of the law that found him. A soldier- no- an executioner. He'd been sentenced to death for his crimes. It wasn't fair, he'd thought, that his punishment was so simple and clean. Torture, that was what he deserved. Instead the law only wanted his head. He hadn't even been scared as they marched him to the block. He'd willingly bent to his knees and rested his head there, accepting the more than deserved fate.

When the sword had swung it had hurt greatly- a blinding pain that had sent his senses spiraling. He did indeed have his vision for a couple moments until everything had gone black. His hand's traced along the line that circled his neck . A faint scar that did indeed raise off the skin a tad. He wanted to see it but there were no mirrors in here so he was at a loss. How was he alive? Surely they would not have bothered to sew his head back on- not that something like that would have worked anyway... so how? They mustn't have thrown his body out either, because he was back in his cell. The same cell they had held him in for three days before they had sentenced him to death for his crimes.

Except he hadn't died. It was a cruel irony. Or perhaps better called a coincidence in this case. The criminal who deserves worse than death didn't die when ordered to do so by the law. In any case, it was no doubt laughable to some. But Vienice wasn't laughing- in fact he couldn't remember the last time he had laughed. Was his life really so terrible that he didn't laugh? He nearly snorted at that thought. Clearly his life was bad enough to destroy an entire town... even his own family.

Despite remembering the aftermath of his crime, he didn't remember doing it. It was all a faint mass of screams and red flashes. It was a confusing memory in total- especially now that he had woken up from a less than restful sleep. Vienice wasn't sure he wanted to dig around in his own memories, but it was best for him to remember what he could for now. Despite his desire for punishment, he really didn't want to stay in this room, doing nothing. That in itself was almost like a pardon.

He thought about the events leading up to his execution. The guards escorting him to the block, the sight of the long and sharp sword, and the pain he felt when it had come down upon him. Then everything was lost to him. Black and nothing. Had he died? From what he could tell, those who explained what happened didn't know either. He thought now, about what they had said happened after. He knew nothing of it and rightly so. When he had... woke, from whatever a headless man does, he had first been neurotic. However, when he had calmed himself, a guard had explained to him what had transpired.

Supposedly, and according to two others who had explained to him what had happened, a ghastly sight had unfolded right then and there seconds after his head had left his body and rolled to the ground. A red mist- or perhaps a cloud- had left his head and the base of his neck, where the flesh and bone was exposed. This fog- or whatever it was, had wisped around for just a moment, as if blindly looking for the missing parts of the body, and once contacted, his body had started to move on its own.

Normally someone walking away from the execution block would have been stopped- but that was when said person had their head. Everyone was in too much shock to stop a headless man from getting up and retrieving his own head- which is what happened next. The guards had said that he just stood up, walked to his head which had bounced and rolled a bit away from the block, and picked it up like it was nothing. Then he just put his head back on- just placed it back on its body like putting two parts back together.

You would have thought that such a thing would have at least needed a good sew, or perhaps some sort of sticking substance to hold it on- but nothing of the sort was applied to keep his head on. That same misty red fog wisped around a little more, he'd been told by someone that it was a little like a dance, and it just reattached itself. Just like that. It had healed over in a haunting kind of scar, and that was that. He fell to his knees and then completely to the ground like a fainted man. And through all of this, Vienice couldn't remember a single bit of it.

His hands ran over the scar one last time, before he dropped them down to his lap and sighed. He wanted to try and remember what had happened back at home but he was interrupted by the sound of keys in a lock. He watched the guard in front of him open up the iron door and step inside the cell. He was dressed in heavy armor, but many furs and leathers hung off of him and accompanied that armor, telling Vienice that they were likely still far north. Examining the armor and the markings it had he assumed they were in the capital. Winters-veil. The capital of Iceariyan and only a couple miles from his home- or what was left of it. It had never really felt like a home to him anyway.

"Oi," a gruff voice said to him now.

Vienice allowed his eyes to meet the person talking to him. This man must have been doing his job here for a long time. He held himself in a way that he was confident- but not in an arrogant kind of way. He held himself in a manner that Vienice could tell the man was accustomed to his job. This was a comfortable routine for him. He held the kind of confidence that came with an unchanging routine- comfort. "I thought yer little red-arse was dead them three days you were out." The man said to him now. He noticed when the man talked, the grey hairs that were starting to sprout from his neatly trimmed beard. It was then easier to spot the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Forty perhaps? Maybe the man was in his mid forties.

"Three days?" Vienice asked now, narrowing his eyes in confusion. He'd slept for three days?

"Ye, slept for a good three days, and I heard you hadn't slept a single other time save for those other three days that we thought you were dead for then too!" The man said as he approached him, but kept his distance. Vienice analyzed the man's body language. He was scared of him, perhaps at least a little nervous. That was reasonable seeming as he killed an entire town of people and survived an execution to boot.

"I did not know I slept for so long after the execution..."

"Yew did indeed. Haven't had a bite to eat this entire time either. Been nearly a month. If an execution can't end ya, and starvation means nothing to ya, then yer little arse probably ain't meant to be dead." The guard explained with a hint of disgust that he tried to hide. Vienice was always good at reading people. Perhaps it came with being a freak, unable to die.

"Not even sleep deprivation can bring yew down, aye." The man had an accent unknown to here, which seemed a little strange since it was obvious to him that he had worked here for so long. Plus he seemed almost friendly so all of this was causing him some confusion.

"Who are you?" He found himself asking a bit reluctantly.

The man shook his head. "Your escort. Now get your red devil arse up off the floor and stand over there so I can unlock yer chains from the wall. I gotta walk ye like a pup to yer date with the court."

He did as told and moved to the far wall, away from the lock which connected his chains to the wall. Vienice was rather strong, he wondered if he could break chains of these sorts. Probably not. He'd never tried to break a metal. "Court?" He asked, rather surprised that they still wanted to give him a trial after all of this.

"Well, we can't starve ya and apparently we can't cut yer head off so now ye get a proper trial like everyone else. Count yerself lucky. But not too lucky. Im betting whatever it is they give ya will be worse than a little neck ache."

Vienice sighed. "I can only hope they do."

The guard nodded in approval and walked him out of the room, down the cold and desolate hallway.