It had been half an hour since he'd cut off communication between the Control Tower and Watch Tower 5's rec room. Despite the top half of the receiver still hanging from the ceiling where he'd left it while the bottom half holding the crystalline horn lay by the foot of his chair, bound captive, the communications between the Control Tower and Watch Tower 5 were still strong as Deacon simply destroyed one of the many receivers strewn about the many floors of the tower.
After stepping onto the top floor of the tower for a breath of fresh air, Deacon leaned on the balustrade, gazing out across the lanes and streets of Dawn's Breath. As he absorbed the view of the kingdom, he couldn't help but draw a breath of the wind hurtling through him, scented with the heavy odor of incense, holy power, yet even through those scents, he could still smell the underlying scents of shit and vomit.
As Deacon's eyes roamed about, the kingdom looked deceptively peaceful from this height.
Gazing down, he could see the street lamps continue to cast their soft glow along the central boulevards, and Azul cathedral bells tolled eleven. Priests flitted between the temples bearing censers in either hand or in front of them, which released sanctified smoke into the night. While files of soldiers marched throughout the streets, plazas, and alleys, performing their duties.
From this height, he could see people stumbling through market lanes and alleys, stumbling like drunken spirits, yet most were simply too sick to manage more than a few paces before collapsing doubled over, retching or dry heaving, their bodies worn down from the regularity of such suffering.
Priests moved in clusters, gathering groups of sickly people together in order to perform blessings onto them that cleansed them of their ailments. However, that relief would be momentary, as after drinking water that came from the wells, their illness would come back, devouring the then weakened holy blessing that sanctified their bodies.
Truly Bonehead was a savant with the way he'd designed and made the poison, not to mention the plan he'd come up with in order to spread it.
Deacon's eyes followed a small group of people shuffling across the plaza below. One man stumbled mid-step on the cobblestones, and the churning one would get when they were falling pushed his already sensitive stomach past its limits, causing him to double over and vomit, then collapse face-first onto the street. And those who moved with the man kept moving.
Whether they hadn't noticed, could not afford to help, or simply didn't care at all about the man's plight, Deacon knew not.
There was only one thing he knew for certain, however:
"In just a few minutes," Deacon murmured to himself, "everything's going to turn to hell."
He said it quietly, but despite that, the words sat heavy in his chest.
It was a sobering thought.
He'd been the one to poison the wells; to pour Bonehead's poisonous concoction into the city's water supply and watch it spread and infect sixty percent of Dawn's Breath's population – soldiers, priests, children – all sickened by his hand.
But, I didn't make the poison…
That thought had become his lifeline these last three days.
He told himself that he was just the courier, the hand that delivered Bonehead's work. That it was Bonehead's mixture, Bonehead's genius, Bonehead's fault. That it was war, a mission, the plan, all of it was bigger than him, and that it was justified.
But standing here and watching yet another soldier below collapse against a wall and start convulsing while a priest tried to drag him upright and attempting to heal him, that lie rang hollow.
"And because I wasn't the one who made the poison, it's just so much easier to pass the blame onto someone else," Deacon muttered as his chalk-stained fingers tightened around the cold stone beneath them. "… to a best friend at that."
A rough, empty laugh clawed its way out of him. "Yeah… what a fucking joke."
Staring into the third-floor window of a building below him, he stared at the grimy window's reflection of him and looked at himself.
He had done worse things before; he'd killed countless people, he'd tortured men, set people alight – and he had no problem with it, truly. People he killed were either due to a head-on confrontation or by an expression of his ninja-like stealth skills. People he'd tortured were those the Academy of Beginnings considered to be criminals, and he thought it would be a valuable skill to learn.
But this… this was different; he was killing people invisibly, from afar, with no showing of honor or skill.
"But, I don't feel disgusted with Bonehead because he fights in this manner. And even now watching this, I still don't." he muttered to himself in confusion, eyes narrowing on the horizon where the faint glow of the Cathedral's flame shimmered through the fog. "No, that's not it…"
"Is it because I'm realizing that I cannot hide behind Bonehead and use him to shield myself from the guilt?"
The thought dug deeper than he wanted it to as he let out an ugly and bitter laugh, "I'm such a disgusting friend," Deacon muttered. "One who uses his friends as shields to avoid feeling guilt even though they've helped him countless times."
And not to mention the lies he was telling them to "protect himself".
What a fucking joke.
He simply stood there for a moment, hands hanging by his sides, gazing at buildings and citizens below before looking upward and seeing the barrage of attacks the massive Outer Walls and barriers were enduring from the Undead Kingdom's army on their doorstep.
Then his eyes settled on the balustrade of stone beneath his hands.
Staring blankly at the rough stone beneath his touch, Deacon felt the rough texture bite into the flesh of his bare hands as he clasped himself tighter around the balustrade. His mind preoccupied, he stared at them blankly still as it struggled with the storm, which had been accruing within it for more than three months.
"Enough," he snarled, pushing himself away from the rail and slapping himself. The impact of both hands striking his face resounded so loudly that the crack rattled off rooftops, causing birds perched on other rooftops to flutter off into the air.
Deacon stood there a moment, breathing heavily, the sting burning through his palms and cheeks.
"No more dicking around," he said to himself, voice flat but steady. "I poisoned these people. Bonehead made the poison, sure, but it doesn't change the fact that I poured it into the wells. That makes it both our fault… but mostly mine, as I am the Party Leader and the executer of the plan."
"And for what I'm going to do next," he said quietly, watching as a trio of gray-skinned civilians below hunched over and vomited in the gutter, "that's on me – entirely."
His boots scraped against the stone bricks as he moved toward the stairwell that descended into the tower. "I'm not going to be controlled by guilt over individuals I don't even know or care about ruling me."
"If anyone stands or gets in my way or the way of my friends and loved ones, then they die. I will no longer entertain this sickly guilt gnawing at my heart for a moment longer," he affirmed to no one but the wind–unaware of the faint twin green glowing orbs of the serpent pendant he wore beneath his armor.
The thud of his boots off the spiral stairs reverberated as he went down, growing dimmer and dimmer on each succeeding step until he hit the third floor, where the air inside the room was heavy with sweat, metal, piss, and fear.
The bound soldier in the chair lifted his head when Deacon stepped onto the Rec Floor; eyes red-rimmed at glassy, mouth hung open, and face running with tears and snot. "A– I– Are you—"
The sentence died in the soldier's throat with a wet gargle.
Deacon's dagger, hidden beneath his right bracer, blurred forward, slicing through the skin and muscle of the soldier in a clean horizontal stroke.
The man's eyes bulged in fright, his hands thrashing helplessly against their bonds as blood gushed out, running down his chest in burning, gurgling streams. His fingers contorted helplessly against the ropes binding them, clawing at the wooden armrest edges they were secured to, as blood ran down from his neck.
Deacon did not even break pace.
Crossing the room, he knelt before the two unconscious figures slumped in the corner – Firwal and Ricen.
Arcing his dagger, he sliced through the ropes and cloth binding their limbs and torsos together.
"Up you go," he growled, lifting both of them effortlessly, tossing one over a shoulder, then the other, like bales of grain, before going down spiral stairs to the ground floor of the Watch Tower.
When he reached the heavy door at the base, he unlatched the iron bolt lock right before kicking it open with his right boot.
Without ceremony, Deacon stepped off onto the threshold and threw Firwal out first. The man thumped onto cobblestones with a groan, rolling onto one side. Ricen followed a half a second after, his body thudding onto the cobblestones beside Firwal and rolling into a small puddle of day-old vomit.
He watched as they both jolted awake – bleary-eyed, cold, hungry, and disoriented.
Behind the semi-closed door, Deacon looked down over them. "Take it as both a thank you and as a warning," he said to them.
"Get the fuck out of here before you die," Deacon said bluntly, seconds before he shut the door and pushed across the iron lock bolt.
The two shivering men stared at the closed door in front of them, trying to wrap their minds around their current situation and how they were nearly naked walking the streets, face to face with the man they saw to be a drunken fool just seconds ago, from what they could remember.
Deacon turned away and made for the slender set of steps concealed by the wall to the left of the room – the way to the cellar below the dungeons.
Down into the pitch-dark cellar, the air grew colder the deeper it was and replaced the odor of sweat and iron by an odor of mildew.
As soon as his boots hit the creaky wooden staircase and encountered the packed cellar floor, Deacon snapped his fingers.
"Ignis."
As the spell escaped his mouth, fire illuminated the closest candle before jumping, wick to wick, across the room. Candle after candle, each one half-melted and affixed to a wall, sprang to life, their tongues of flames driving off the natural darkness and cool of the cellar that stored enough supplies to feed three blocks.
Eventually, as the bright crimson and orange glow spread through the chamber – climbing across the damp stone, into the ribs of the low ceiling, and over the stacked crates pressed against the walls – it revealed what lay at the center of the cellar: a massive, painstakingly drawn hexagonal magic circle with six narrow channels branching outward.
Each of the channels was about two palms wide, leading to six separate tunnels he dug into the base of the cellar's walls. And through those tunnels, they connected directly into six separate sections of the sewer system that traveled beneath Dawn's Breath, and with that, they connected to every magic circle he'd etched onto the walls that he passed by while traversing the sewers to get from place to place in the day.
After tracing the layers of the hexagonal magic circle for what felt like the hundredth time to make sure everything was in order, Deacon stopped just short of its edge, quickly stripping out of the soldier's uniform and pulling on his usual gear before tying the Bandana of the Undead back around his forehead.