WeepingStar/Kismet

For now, I'm just going to put up a few little stories about Kismet, my 'signature character' for Exalted: the Sidereals. Eventually I'll put them all under their own links and stuff, but for the moment, I'm just going to put them all on this page.

He's kind of a slacker.

A Stranger Comes to Gravemark

Fate swept into town like a warm breeze on a cold day.

He came, this man in the tattered straw hat and flowing black shirt garishly printed with a pattern of violet flowers, at a particularly trying time for the town of Gravemark. A killer, some say a Demon in human form, had taken not one, but three of the town’s children, and visited terrible tortures upon them before leaving them dead and mutilated in the town square. The people of Gravemark were hiding, terrified in their homes, and the town’s law, a red-skinned Outcaste Dragon-Blood named Surus Kyn, was at a loss for how to proceed.

But the stranger, he came down the dusty road into Gravemark with a smile on his face and a sword on his back. He said his name was Kismet.

Understandably, the townspeople were suspicious, some would even say paranoid, about this stranger in their midst, this man who had appeared out of the scrubland like a mirage at a time when Gravemark was at it's most vulnerable, it’s most frightened.

At least, they were until they actually talked to him. Because this man, this gangly, almost silly-looking stranger, whose faded blue jeans, sleevelsss shirt of heavy, faded white cotton, and absurdly printed, short-sleevd overshirt were dusty and well-worn, seemed to all to be anything but a threat. Though strangely, few seemed to be able to remember the details of conversations they shared with him, all came away with the feeling that he had come to Gravemark to help, and that soon, everything would be all right.

Even Surus Kyn, Sheriff of Gravemark, could find no fault in the man, who for his part simply sat outside the town’s cantina, on the boardwalk overlooking the town square, and played a timeworn bamboo flute, the cotton-wrapped shape of his sword, the occasional reddish glint of rusted steel poking through, propped up against the wall beside him.

Soon enough, people forgot that he was even there, and life returned to it’s former state of fear-tinged normalcy. Occasionally, someone would drop a few coins at the stranger’s side, without really thinking about it or even noticing what they were doing, and once in a while, he would venture into the cantina and buy himself a drink or a bite to eat.

Until, of course, the night of the fourth killing. Few were awakened by the screams coming from the town square, and of them, fewer still were willing to venture forth from their beds for fear of what they would see.

Those who did, however, were in for a strange and confusing spectacle.

There, in the moonlit square, a hulking creature that might once have been a local farmhand dragged the bound and gagged form of a local teenage girl, a girl well-known to the locals because of the “visions” she claimed to have, ever-closer to the stone fountain that dominated Gravemark’s center.

And then, a shadow sprung from the darkness, and the onlookers slowly found themselves remembering the stranger who had taken up residence in the square some days before, each one as surprised and confused as the monster below by how easily they had forgotten his very presence.

It was over far too quickly, the rusted blade of the stranger’s blade gleaming like polished silver where it had passed through the demon’s neck, severing head from body, before disappearing back into it’s cotton-wrapped scabbard. Within minutes, freed of her bonds, her ordeal and the corpse before them forgotten, the would-be fourth victim of Gravemark’s resident mass murderer and the odd stranger who had saved her life were sitting together on the edge of the fountain in the town square, talking and laughing like old friends.

Only a few days later, no one remembered the incident. No one remembered the monstrous murderer, no one remembered the stranger in the garishly-printed shirt and the straw hat.

And no one remembered the red-haired teenage girl who had gone on with him down the dusty road.