[center] [img] https://img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/551d365b-4c8e-4acd-8cc5-b42a9932d740.jpg[/img]
[color=8B4513][u][b]Lannis Tyrel[/b][/u][/color]
[color=gray][sup]"...and wasn't it you who said I needed peace..."[/sup] [/color] [/center]
[color=Silver] The only survivor. 

The city was full of dead men.  The putrid corpses of friends and neighbors were everywhere.  At first, they had attempted burials, but quickly the need overwhelmed the able, and soon they had to settle for mass funeral pyres outside the city.  Eventually, as the plague continued, even that effort became unsustainable and the bodies of the dead simply lay where they fell.  Lannis was just a young man, a man grown to be sure, but in so many ways a boy still.  His father had died early with the illness, and his mother soon after.  He had had brothers, but through grief or some other affliction, possibly the very same that had taken the others… they had been a part of the last pyre, one that he had lit himself.  Now seemed nothing lived on the city but himself, and the flies.  

At first, he was too frightened to leave his home.  He took the first day as though it were any other since his folks passed.  He woke with the sunrise, milled grain into flour for a few hours until he had worked up an appetite for breakfast. He’d told himself that there would be survivors coming today, and he would have an ample supply of flour to sell them for their bread.  It had been folly, because nobody came.  The next day, he ventured outside and was immediately driven back into his home by what he saw.  The bodies were everywhere.  They lay in the streets, against fence posts or on the stoops of buildings.  Old man Holland looked as though he slept in his hayloft, pitchfork still clasped in his hands, while the famed, drunken Ser Jorn Highwall galloped around town on a frothing mare, his limp body held in place by a thick rope tied around his waist and legs.  

The days came, and the days went, and nobody came.  Silence greeted him in the morning, and silence sang him its deafening lullaby at night, with the buzzing of fly’s wings the only break between, that or the sounds he made while out and about.  A few days ago, he’d even taken to talking to himself, just to remember what it sounded like to hear a voice that wasn’t inside his head.    With each passing day, he grew more adventurous, less concerned with the dead.  A week ago, he broke into the meat shed of the butcher, where the old man was known to hang his salted hams for storage, and seeing as how the old man was dead in his bed, he felt it was ok for him to help himself.  He took a ham, a wheel of cheese he found still rolled up tightly in it’s cloth, and when he returned home, milled himself some flour for bread.  He borrowed books from the Church’s library, though he couldn’t read, he did enjoy looking at the illustrations, imaging just what it had all been about.  Sometimes he pretended he could read, and made the story up as he went, but eventually, he grew bored with the practice, and left the books in a pile.  

It was last night, while he lie away in his bed, under his new blanket he took out of the seamstress’s shop up the road, that he thought about leaving his home.  The kingdom seemed to be dead, nobody has stirred this whole while, that he could see… hell, even the castle was still and quiet. 

“and if the King’s dead, and all the people are dead, then by the King’s law, all lands are passed down through blood or marriage to the last survivor.  Though I don’t know the whole of it, it must mean that now, I am king.. seeing as how someway, it has to all lead back to me, right?”  

Nobody answered to tell him not, so he nodded to himself, affirmed in his own logic, and went to sleep that night dreaming of his new found status as a royal.  The next morning he was up and dressed in a pair of new britches and a tunic of azure and crimson, fashioned in the way of the wealthy merchants.  His boots were one he had found off a man a few streets over, good, quality boots.  “Good enough for a king, eh?”  He chuckled to himself,  and before the house was turned, Lannis found himself sitting on his throne, legs crossed and the royal crown perched upon his dirty brown hair.  

Emptiness forced him to abandon the throne room after only a few mock trials in which he found the mason’s boys guilt of being prats and ordered them beheaded, and he took to exploring the castle.  Sadly, though not unexpectedly, Lannis found the castle in the same condition as was the city.  The dead lay as they had fallen, and inspite of his royal claims, seems that only the flies ruled here.  At length, his search of the castle turned up the dungeons.  

He stood at the top of a dark stairway, looking down into the deep darkness, sure to himself that nobody would be left alive down there.  The darkness was deep, daunting.  Something about the place seemed to make the darkness more frightening, as though by virtue of it being a dungeon, the darkness was possessed with some otherworldly abilities.  The chill it gave him was nonsense, and to prove it to himself, Lannis took down the curved stairwell into the darkness.  

Lannis stopped when he heard the noise, the first unnatural noise he had heard in weeks, at least, the first he hadn’t made himself.  Fears forgotten, concern forgotten, Lannis raced down the remainder of stairs towards the noise.  It wasn’t until he was halfway down a corridor lined with heavy wooden door set with iron bars, that he even though to call out.  When he did, his voice was loud, excited.  

“Is someone there!?”  he called, looking around him, hearing his voice echo on the emptiness of the cells.  This was a terrible place, cold and dark.  How someone could be here, Lannis had no idea.  Alone, with nothing but iron and wood.  It would have driven Lannis mad.  But it didn’t matter to him.  He could only hope that he had heard what he thought he’d heard, a survivor like himself.  

“Please, are you there?”  He called out again. 
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