Chapter Text
This was not...exactly how Vazahr, great-granddaughter of Vezoden and Champion of the Strife Emperor, had imagined that she'd find her god.
Breathing heavily and rorschached with blood, Vazahr stared down at a tiny gnome. With glasses. Who was currently wiping off his glasses in an irritated manner, and glaring back at her.
"Well?" he snapped, sliding his glasses back on. "Where's your respect? Put your weapon down and sit."
Vazahr dropped her warhammer with a thunk and rather dazedly made her way to the sofa at the far side of the room. She watched in utter confusion as the gnome reached down and resurrected the human splattered on the wooden floorboards, and as he muttered quietly to the gasping lad, reassuring him. The young man, still covered in the viscera of his previous demise, left shakily with the help of a nervous tiefling.
"it's Vazahr, isn't it?"
Vazahr snapped back at attention, and tumbled into a bow at the feet of her lord. "My lord," she rasped. "Yes, it is I. I searched for you for many years. I tore out hearts in your name. Fear is my ally. I-"
"Yes, yes," said the gnome irritatedly. "I know the words. But you have terrible timing, coming in on the day before I go to court, and braining one of my top associates." He turned to pour a cup of steaming tea, and he sipped at the brew for a few moments. Vazahr was frozen in place, in confusion. This was her Emperor? This velvet-suited gnome, a well-heeled lawyer in the outskirts of Emon? With organized files and books and a delicately glazed ceramic tea set? After all her mother had drilled into her, after all the siblings she'd bested and even killed, to be the Champion of the Strife Emperor, baptized in blood-
"Disorder and rebellion are to be punished severely," said the gnome, having sipped his tea and who was now pouring another cup. "And you have brought disorder into my firm. Tell me, Vazahr-" and with that, he turned slowly, and stared over the rim of his spectacles at her, and a bright red gleam passed through his eyes and seemed to echo like a bloody shadow behind the gnome. "-how should you be punished?"
"My lord!" Vazahr prostrated herself, trembling. Shit. Shit FUCK shit. This was the Strife Emperor. And she had failed him. How, she did not know, but FUCK.
"You killed my best associate, who was supposed to make all my arguments tomorrow. With his work we would have brought fear and awe into that courtroom, and we would have triumphed, we would have had VICTORY." The room, despite its many windows, grew dark as an ash-filled cave. The gnome seemed to grow until he had wings. Vazahr, who had not known true fear since she was six, trembled.
For a long, held moment, all was brimstone and tension. But Vazahr was Champion for a reason. She forced her head up to stare at her god. "My lord," she gasped, and her voice to her sounded reedy and thin. "My lord! To kill is life’s greatest pleasure, and perfecting the art of slaughter is life’s greatest pursuit. I follow your commandments! I killed that human for the pleasure."
And the gnome laughed.
"Fool," he said, with the grating of chains on chains. "There are so many ways of slaughter. To merely take it as the act of physical killing is to ignore all other potential pleasures. Undo your enemies with your words! Watch as they disintegrate with the weight of your arguments. Dismantle their empires one corporation at a time, and bankrupt all their coffers." Bane glowered over Vazahr, bloodlust seeping through his speech. "Win your case."
As quickly as he'd unleashed them, the shadows retreated. And suddenly instead of Bane, the Strife Emperor, it was Benedict the gnome, lawyer and aspiring Attorney General. Benedict set down his tea cup and clapped his hands. A tabaxi and a dragonborn appeared silently. "Clara, Desmond, please take care of our guest. I need to speak with Fred and go over our notes." And with that, Bane (Benedict??) disappeared into a different office.