MERCURIAL ( paul atreides.. )

009. The Massacre of a Vow..

There were no stars out to bare witness to their demise that night, for astral flickers, he believed, only shone over moments worthy of songs, of a few verses scribbled between the pages of a pocket-sized stack of papers left somewhere in the ashes of the fires which scorched his left hand and cut his beard an inch shorter. It was a small price Gurney Halleck paid if he had to compare it with the public executions, to the valiant deaths in battle or even to the unfortunate but certain terrors the prisons the Baron took would endure. He thought about his luck often, even before he knew he could call it that. 

He iterated the names of the colleagues he saw dying, any face he could properly distinguish in the midst of all the chaos which unfolded as a background noise. His tone was just a single note over the chant of his mind that he was a traitor, with each step he took from a field already scorched into a graveyard of lives blown into the wind, between wrecks of metal, fallen shells of sky Gods who never flew again.

His head's shake was immediate and desperate to tremor silence into both bridges of noise humming, ringing in his ears. Halleck needed to concentrate on finding a still functional Fremen kit if he hoped to take the city path and run for the mountain pass, wait out the height of this attack which within minutes had silenced the whole might of House Atreides to nothing but that buzz he too heard in his head. He'd help anyone in his path with him, he promised himself, but then again, no act of candor would have silenced the guilty impossibility of not being able to go look for Paul, or for his liege, right there and then. Death was in the air he breathed and sorrow in the one he exhaled. 

"This is Mercury Yaranes." A familiar voice appeared out through the darkness of a room boiled by what desolation burned outside. Distorted, yet as clear as the daylight reflected into Caladan's great ocean, Halleck heard from the open ground communications the voice he felt himself selfish to be glad to hear. A second ago, he was dwelling in the only certainty that perhaps Mercury, by not being there with them, would live on; she'd raise that Ehyan fleet he has heard so much about from Leto and Paul and build her house on the ruins of the Harkonnen empire of wealth. But she was here -he only knew 'why' and that already made the 'how' lose all importance-, granting him the benefit of knowing he wasn't alone, while, in exquisite malignance, gifted him the cruelty of knowing there was more he could lose still. 

"Requesting landing clearance." Halleck could not understand the nuances in her voice, nor properly understand why she sounded like she had cried before opening her communication system for a broadcast. All he could be trusting to was the fact that he had to walk the distance, find away to tell her that she needed to turn around, and that he'll walk through this Hell to find her out there. "Does anyone copy?" 

He took a single step forward and a hand clasped his right shoulder. The tug back betrayed the presence of a blade behind him. That, in itself, already made it clear that a Harkonnen had caught up with his slip into the shadows. Unlucky bastard, the owner of the hand trying to stop him from getting to one of the people he had sworn an oath to protect. 

Gurney Halleck had never wanted the responsibility of weapon master, not because he had no patience to teach young Paul's curious mindset some discipline -some scarce tangencies the young master had with music would beg to differ anyhow- or because he wasn't a skilled swordsman and an even deadlier soldier. It has always been a matter of where is duty laid. 

Turning around had already set the board for a battle in which Gurney had the advantage of walking into weaponless. A fighter with reasons to stay alive but no means to taps into the human potential of raw power, a segment of the mind which unlocks the key to morbid creativity. For Halleck, it manifested in a masochism without hesitation as his right hand clasped the sword of the Harkonnen and yanked it out, even if his palm, unguarded by armors or shields paid the price in a thin line of blood; he called that an anchoring sting and ignored it completely, taking its color as the distraction he needed to press his left hand behind the enemy's head.