Saint of the
Sword
Corporeal Forces: 2 Strength: 4 Agility: 4
Ethereal Forces: 4 Intelligence: 6 Precision: 10
Celestial Forces: 3 Will: 6 Perception: 6
Vessel:
Skills: Dodge/3, Emote/3, Fighting/3, Language
(English/3 [native], Spanish/3), Large Weapon/6 (knife*) Move Silently/6,
Ranged Weapon (revolver/6, rifle/6), Riding/3, Tactics/6
*The size of the knife he carries, it's a Large
Weapon
Songs: None
Attunements: Blessed, Scabbard
He was a bad man.
No point in him saying or acting otherwise, he
expects. He took to sin with a glad
heart and a smooth brow; being bad came right easy to
him, and what he didn't know already, he soon learned. Drinking, swearing, killing... yeah, the
killing came the easiest to him. Corpses
had livelier eyes than he did when the guns came out. He never worried about it afterwards,
either. People die all the time. He was just the one who made sure of it for
some of them.
There was just one good deed, in all his life - just
one. She wasn't even what the decent
folk would call decent, but she had done him no harm and was apparently in a
family way, and he took it personal when somebody tried to kill her right in
front of him. So he killed the fool, and
the fools that took offense at that, and finally the fools that took offense at
that. By then he had a bullet or six in the gut and
calling himself a fool for letting her have his horse. Sure, he didn't really have any need for it
after getting gut-shot the first time, but it was the principle of the thing
that mattered.
Apparently so. One good deed. That's all you need - if it's the right deed.
He always thought that Hell was going to be his last
stop, if there was a Hell, so finding out otherwise was a startlement
and no lie. What he was supposed to do in Heaven he couldn't figure; his
usual sins were impossible, impractical or perfectly acceptable behaviors. So he drank a good deal and never got into
any fights, despite all his trying, and waited for the End of the World.
Forty-odd years of this, and she came walking
through the door.
She had taken the horse, gotten away, had her kid -
a good kid, too - and done something with her life before she died, maybe not
rich, but respectable. And she never
forgot the bad man who gave her that chance.
Prayed for him every night, did what she could for people in their own
jams, made a difference. And when she
went to her reward, she marched right up to him and shamed him into crawling
out of the bottle. Because one good deed
may be all you need, but it's a damn small price to pay for going to
Heaven. You have to use your talents to
do what's right.
And if your only talent is killing men, well.
He has restrictions, of course. They have to be bad men. Not inconvenient. Not conflicted. Not confused.
They have to be men who are as bad as he is; men who kill without
remorse, men who have taken to sin with glad hearts and smooth brows. Those men, he can kill. Laurence has promised him that his
restrictions will be honored, and there are times when it is useful indeed for
the Archangel of the Sword to have an agent who can kill like a Malakite
without a ripple from the Symphony. In
between those times... well, there's a lot of pondering going on.
But he's getting to where he needs to go.