Connor Quinn, "The Blood"
By Warsman 2 Comments
"Is there are point to any of this?"
"At what point does repetition become reality?"
It started like a normal evening, with glass being smashed in his face.
From that point-on, Connor Quinn exploded into a tempest of fists and headbutts, elbowing for good measure. Each thunderous crack came at the expense of someone else's bloodied nose, broken cheekbone, or ruptured muscle. It happened over a span of twenty minutes, and everyone had the fight thoroughly whipped out of them. Luckily few had to be carted away to the hospital for whatever reason, but a fair share remained in the pub, ice on their wounds. Good old Shackleford's.
Of course, what spurred this quick and decisive bout wasn't an excess of drink, but rather a lack of one.
The taxation on alcoholic beverages was going up again, as per the request of mothers who thought they knew better than anyone else. There was another car crash, both of them totaled, with the man on the receiving end getting a tombstone rather than a stretcher. The man who was driving drunk was in a catatonic state of regret and melancholy. Connor knew both of them, as he often knew everyone in town. Ryan Kingsley, he left out of Shackleford's just with a little buzz. He knew how to handle his beer. Must have had some more in his car, where his wife couldn't find it.
She was already looking for excuses to divorce him and move back in with her mother, this just sealed the deal.
Connor set his half-empty bottle on the counter. He couldn't get drunk anymore, his friends and acquaintances were falling apart. He leaned over to the old man himself, Toddy Shackleford.
"Ya get that paper I ask'd ye fer?"
"Aye, straight from Ily-noisy, can't get anyting else 'bout 'em,"
Connor greedily snatched the newspaper from Toddy, ripping it apart until he got to the story about a growing political movement he had a growing curiosity about.
"What kinda name is 'Warsman' anyway? Sounds like a street punk,"
"Heard 'is real name is Johann,"
"German boy, huh?"
He eagerly absorbed the information about the Neomarch before crumpling the whole thing and tossing it in the trash. Swigging down the rest of his ale, he tipped Toddy and bounced out. His intent was to catch a flight to Chicago somehow. He would be damned if he couldn't get a decent drink anymore.
"Memories can be a broken record, or just broken."
The Middle Ages were a nightmare for the British Isles. Ireland, Connor's homeland, was besieged on the regular by Vikings. Dublin itself was taken twice within two years, once by Strongbow and his Norman warriors and again by Ruaidrà when he united a massive army to retake it a year later.
Connor was amongst this force, but it would not be the beginning of his strange story.
It started nearly 300 years prior, when he was a young man undergoing his rite of passage in order to become an adult. The Quinn family held charge over the burial sites of their kingdom, now long bereft of lordship. On this particular evening, the spirits were restless. He was to subdue one of the howling phantoms and bring it to eternal rest using the rituals of his clan. However, he accidentally ensnared something far more powerful.
The malevolent spirit proved too strong for Connor to keep dominion over, even when his family came to assist him in banishing the creature. It took the shape of a distant and nefarious demon, revealing itself to be a long-deceased demigod worshiped in the Old World. It had seen its chance to reemerge into prominence, and killed the Quinn family in an attempt to increase its own physical presence on Earth once more.
Before that could happen, Connor did the unthinkable and desecrated the graves of the dead, bringing their ethereal wrath upon the demigod and murdering it in kind. Yet the spirits he had been sent there to calm were instead enraged by his very existence, and cursed him to never die and share in the peaceful sleep of his clan.
For nearly 1800 years, Connor Quinn has endured this curse - if not having become a bit less stable about it. He had once hoped to quietly slip into his dreams and never leave, but life handed him something truly remarkable after all this time.
And all he had to do was fight for his humanity.
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