What's old is new again

"Yes," growled Macaragor, striving to keep the tension out of that monosyllable. It wasn't that he felt particularly tense; it was merely that his basso voice seemed to perpetually carry it, and loudly. It was the air of tension that matched his high jutting cheekbones, his long sharp battleship of a nose curving pinchedly over his twisting black mustache, and his shadowed slitted eyes. Good, clean, God's honest skies blue eyes, he thought; they were a midnight blue so deep some accused them of being black, were he in the wrong light physically or politically. He sometimes felt it got in his way.

Maybe it was the height more than the fierce, haggard, proud appearance. Maybe it was the voice, eternally seemingly angry and tense, though often it actually was in truth these days. Whatever the reason, people expected him to be a neurotic barbarian when he wasn't. Not more so than others were, anyway.

The Inquisitors of the Holy Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Roman Empire of Byzantium were supposed to be, really, trained to be, indoctrinated to be so deeply that they would continue their destructive rages and self destructive pursuits of That-Which-Must-Not-Be to the last breath in their body… even if their lungs were missing and they had only the time of a guillotine victim's head remaining them. Often, horrifyingly, longer still in maimed or twisted states of harm and decay. Macaragor's danger could be measured not in the scars he had accumulated, as a knight's or a warlord's would be, but in how many he failed to possess and in the rugged human look that remained upon him.

He was whole, hearty, and healthy after twenty years in the Inquisition on the front lines and in the literally and figuratively backstabbing circles of intrigue.

Macaragor had been inducted when he was only a young Crusader of twenty three.

He worked hard in the Service of The Lord God Almighty, and the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and His Majesty the Emperor of The Holy Roman Empire, and of His Holiness and Excellence the Pope- The Pope Benediction Sanctuary Christian III, or Pope Christian III informally. Dealing with, or rather attempting to dispose of and dispense with, black magic and foul technologies left over from the Great Ending of Before was a task that ought to have maimed him by the least by now; certainly that damnable Witch and her confidantes had caused him plenty of harm emotionally and physically by now. Mortia's very existence befouled him and plagued his existence.

After so much seniority in Church and State matters people usually got out of his way, metaphorically and literally, just for that reason. They didn't want to interfere between the pagan powers of Darkness and the stalwart sanctioned killer of the Church. Cowards the lot of them, but it made his job Blessed easier when he didn't have to lift a hand to ensure the Lord's Works would be done. Matters evened out sometimes.

A great deal of his difficulty lay not in his inability to kill the witch and her company- he was certain enough men devoted to His Master could destroy any Power of Darkness, no matter its strength and abilities- but in his inaccessibility to kill them.

Put more plainly, the meter and a half broad and two meter tall man grumbled to himself, she was shielded from him. She was at Court- almost constantly- but somehow, she had entered the confidences of His Holiness the Papal Leader of the Church, and wormed her way into the confidence of the very Emperor by means of gifts and trinkets from the Old World. Macaragor spat, briefly nauseated at the very thought of this, before a word rose unbidden in his mind and almost wrenched his suddenly purpling face into apoplexy.

JENGA.

He never wanted to see that heathen horror of simple distraction and idle abuse of time again, but the Emperor was enthralled with arranging the blocks of wood and the precise timing and planning it took to win. The destructive pleasure of knocking it over without actually doing harm to anything important also appeared to be doing wonders for the Emperor's health, cathartically- further evidence that there was some sort of invisible ink over the Satanic runes and scrawls over those blocks and His Majesty was somehow possessed. But no one would let Macaragor inspect or destroy the wooden carvings and neither of the His Mightiness' of the Empire was clearly going to give their seal to take the favored new toy of the leader of a culture.

And that, the Inquisitor thought as his breathing grew shallow and he felt a blood rage coming on as his wrathful heart blazed with what he was certain was the very Will of God bursting into Righteous Anger, was the very least of the blatant Evils that she and her kind brought to snare the Good into Temptation and to induce new means of harm to others.

He chewed his gauntlet, panting with restraint, and tried to bring more cheerful thoughts to mind before he proved his detractors right about him.

A recent victory on his own part had been getting the Emperor to ban the foul abomination called 'fire's works'; clearly, the exploding, vibrant, destructive things had been born of the Pit and Fire, and the Monstrous Infidels even had the nerve to label it so publicly. Until one of Macaragor's fellows had lost a head to a mistimed and misfired one, the Emperor had been adamant on keeping the pretty things for parties; after seeing the scorched and ruinous remains draped over his parapet and dripping over a screaming Lady of the Realm in her beautiful chiffon, the Emperor had swiftly converted to Macaragor's side, and there had been not a whiff of blasphemous talk such as using the fire works as weapons. Lucky Dolan was even Sainted and Canonized in the same year as a frantic apology by Pope Christian III to the orders he led, and would forever remain remembered as the Patron Saint of Fire-Work Banning.

He'd had to.

The Inquisitors were not the only members of the Church growing tired of a self declared and blatant Witch living in the palace, merely the most outspoken, and a devoted servant of The Lord dying because the Pope wouldn't listen to warnings about his guest's means did not bode well for the current Papal Leader's reign.