Role

Chapter 3

The screaming is loud, Torris thinks to himself. The pain of
seeing his wife in agony is nearly unbearable, things aren't
going well. He shakes his head a small tear falling down his
face and the voices of the midwife and fades into the
background. All he can hear is the screaming, here in the
darkness, the fire seeming far too dim in his dwelling. He
embraces the amulet around his neck, a token of his childhood
and religious fervor he hasn't felt in years. Wondering if
his pleas now to the Gods of Mercy are blasphemous, he
loses focus from the tears in his eyes. Welling up with fear
at the sight of a torrent of blood coming from his wife he
fears for her life and that of his soon-to-be born child.

Suddenly however, the screaming stops, abruptly. They are replaced
with a soft cry of an infant newly born.

'She has passed...', whispered the mid-wife.

Suddenly unholy rage filled Torris, rage he has never felt
in his entire life. Rage at the world, rage at injustice, rage
that his one true love and possession in this world is now gone.
Torris was never a wealthy man, but he worked hard, every day of
his life. He worked far too hard with his hands in the fields,
too hard to go on without that which he loved thanks to the
delivery of this child, a child he did not even truly want save
for his own wife's desires of motherhood. The rage unleashed...

He beat the mid-wife to death with his bare hands, before drinking
enough torch-oil to end his own life.

Here in this place of despair was Vasnant born, born under the watch
of the shadows. The infant suddenly stopped its mewling cries as
dark energies swirled about the corpses of his family. His soul
passed into another realm, to be replaced by something else entirely.
The boy never cried again.