gormlessthing

[gormlessthing]

Do Not Bring Him Water, Caitlin Scarano

[gormlessthing]

to carry your grief on my back would be an honor by judas h.

[gormlessthing]

[ plotting call for the old man ]

[gormlessthing]

Swan Feast, Natalie Eilbert

[gormlessthing]

[ There won't be much in the way of NSFW material involving Gorm, given the man is demisexual on his best, most brazen days, but for what it's worth: he's a service top. ]

[gormlessthing]

In the sweet and solemn silence Of a church upon the hill, In the deep'ning blue of evening When the air is cool, and still, You'll find him there a-sleeping, There in the gentle dark, A church inside a church inside His hale and holy heart!

Say ay, our king is gentle! Say ay, our king is kind, Say ay, there goes our king Where'er graces we will find.

In the crushing, crashing clamor Of a bloody battlefield, In the deepn'ing red of evening, When the air is filled with steel, You'll find him there a-roaring, His sword a grieving arc, His eyes alive with wrath inside His hale and holy heart!

Say ay, our king is righteous, Say ay, our king is kind, Say ay, there goes our king Where'er vict'ry we will find!

-"A hymn for Good King Gelhast"

[gormlessthing]

"...odd crew, this latest. But I imagine we'll do alright." @sunmad @hawksblooded @fishermcn

[gormlessthing]

Gorm watches the way she steps back - the tension in the shoulders, the steel-eyed apprehension ahead of a perceived attack. She understands being hunted; she believes him to be a hunter. Indeed, old prejudices did give a hungry yawn in his ribcage, and anger older than that burst, brief and blooming, in the pit of his stomach.

But they fade quickly, subsumed by the quiet shame they ever existed in the first place, and he speaks to none of it.

"Quite the contrary - I imagine I would be well and gutted, had you not stepped in," he says. "That was a masterful bit of flame, I should say. Intensely controlled. You struck the creature itself and only the creature itself, and left me unscathed."

He sighs, and glances at the burning thing, then back at her.

"You've nothing to fear from me, pyromancer," he continues. "I have found Thorolund's ideals on heresy to be stifling and petty, and I am the more concerned with preserving the lives the gods gave us than I am policing them."

He goes to extend his hand, remembers she has burned her own, and instead bows his head politely.

"Gorm, the Witchfinder," he says. "At your service."

Her fingers curl into her palm. Chaos leaps and licks and melts into the ground again. The heat dances in her eyes, cries for its many sisters, for whatever lies in ashes in her soul to reignite and join it. But she stands firm, her pale robes stirring gently from the blast, and watches the creature cook inside the trap of its own singed flesh.

The second this danger was dealt with, she readied herself for the next. Miriam, flowering out of her clerical robes, draws back from the man nearby, waits for another blow. She's seen how pyromancers are dealt with in this day and age, and hers is no novice's fireplay. Though as she tenses, her marble pale face frozen in guarded anticipation, there comes no cry of heresy, no condemnation. Only the offer of aid.

Miriam of Carim folds her hands protectively, burn to burn. "It's nothing," she says, though with a gentleness that contradicts her rigid spine. "I've no use for soothing, and I'm no magician. Are you well, has it harmed you?"

[gormlessthing]

The boy was too damn earnest for his or Gorm's good, and what might have been further protest died on the latter's tongue, dissolved instead into a wordless little grumble in response.

Truth in failure - true enough, and twice as valuable when understood by the young. Had Gorm better grasped that ideal in his younger days, there might be less blood on his hands. He shook his head to clear the thought. Focus.

It wasn't necessarily a matter of strength - Gorm had never wanted for such - but rather utilizing that strength in a measured fashion, for which he had little practice. The greatsword was not a weapon for a moderate man; lifting it wasn't so bad, but swinging it with any amount of force required total commitment to the strike, a sort of furious sincerity toward the idea of obliterating whatever happened to be on the far edge of the arc.

A bow, on the other hand, required one to moderate one's strength, to guide and hold it in place while taking aim. It demanded a delicate touch Gorm hadn't used in years now, and it was giving him trouble. Moderation, as far as he had been concerned for much of his life, was something that happened to other people.

Still: silence. The boy mentioned silence. Lose track of the noise, the irritation, the worry. Focus on your breath, on tensing just enough, so that the bow holds steady and the arrow stilled. Take in a breath, pull back just enough. Just enough. Just enough. Then...

It wasn't a perfect shot, but it was a better one: the arrow sank into the target's high edge with enough force to tilt the thing over, but it did, in fact, connect.

"There," Gorm muttered. "Good enough, at least. Might have hit an orc or a goblin, even, if they were standing very still and were especially well-fed."

He turned to face Faramir with the air of a man about to enact revenge.

"Right, then, poet, enough silence, time for sincerity," he said. "Let's get that sword up and in the air, eh?"

Faramir regarded him quietly, pale eyes thoughtful beneath the sweep of his creased brow. The wind, which had toyed all morning with the high grasses of the riverbank, had softened, as if the world itself waited to hear the sound of the bowstring. Gorm stood hulking and uncertain, the arrow wavering at full draw – an iron shard poised between mockery and grace.

“You must think me silly for asking you to bend a bow,” Faramir said, his voice gentled. “But there is a kind of truth one finds only in failing, my friend.”

In the light of the afternoon sun, half-swallowed by grey cloud, Faramir looked almost spectral as he reached to adjust Gorm’s thick fingers. The years of Gondor sat upon him not like armour but like mourning garb, elegant and grave.

The arrow sprang, clattered against the far tree, and fell with no ceremony to the underbrush below. Faramir did not laugh, nor did his eyes so much as narrow. He watched its path as though it were a star struck from the dome of heaven and now lost in the muck.

“I do not teach you to strike the mark,” he said at last. “Only to know the bow by weight, by shape, by the way it resists and yields.”

He turned then, walking slowly back towards where their cloaks lay, swept together in a careless heap. Golden reeds parted for him like curtains, his boots stirring little sound.

“The sword teaches one to speak through force. The bow, through silence. And I – ” He paused, a ghost against the light. “I have been made of too much silence, and so I envy your clarity. Try again, Gorm. For my sake, if not for yours.

A breath, a flicker of wryness tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“And if that does not tempt you,” he added, softer now, almost playful. “Know this – I shall make a noble fool of myself by attempting to wield your almighty sword. If nothing else, the sight of it swinging me may reward you with laughter.”

[gormlessthing]

The older man gave the younger a considered stare through that bright blue eye.

It is a complex question: certainly witchfinding of any description has never been the sort of occupation that invites or inspires camaraderie, nor is Gorm overly fond of others' company these darkened days. But truth be told, there were orcs in the forest. Truth be told, he was an old man. Truth be told, had the two not found one another, they might both have been dead in the ambush.

Truth be told, it was never just one ambush.

A lot of truth amid a lot of telling, then - and very little argument left in his mind. Traveling together would be safer than traveling alone. Besides, Gorm, muttered his conscience, you could stand to talk to someone other than yourself for a while, aye? For a given value of "talk," anyway - this fellow seems entirely content to do so at length, at least. Eloquence must come with nobility, Gorm assumed, or perhaps captaincy. He'd never had much of either, himself.

It's not quite a smile that curled at the edges of Gorm's bearded jaw, if only because the muscles required for the task seem to have been long disused, but it was something approaching an amicable expression, and that would have to do. Perhaps the accompanying nod - a short, sharp motion typical of a military grunt of some description - would serve to paper over perceived social ineptitude.

"It is a pleasure and honor to meet you, captain," he ventures. "If you and your men will have my company, I will gladly share yours - I do not like my chances if I am attacked on my own, and besides, I could stand to travel with others for a while. I pray you will excuse my manners - it has been some time since I have had to call upon them, and I fear they may have rusted a little."

⪼ @gormlessthing // cont.

Shaped by sorrow and silence, Faramir listened to the warrior’s words with the attentiveness one gives an old book – tattered, well-kept, and all the more valuable for the scuffs along its spine. Gorm, as he gave his name, wiped his blade in a kind of brutal liturgy. It was no noble heirloom, that weapon, only service made steel. Like the man, it had likely never been retired, never been honoured.

Faramir found himself smiling, faintly, when Gorm called him a poet. His gaze strayed to the darkening treetops, as if searching for a suitable place to tuck away the compliment.

“A poet,” he echoed softly, the word leaving his lips in surprise and rare pleasure. His eyes – deep and grey as storm-fed rivers – met Gorm’s single, steady one. There was no shyness in his manner, only solemn gratitude.

“Faramir,” he offered, and took the outstretched hand. “Son of Denethor. Captain of the Rangers of Ithilien.”

Their clasp was brief, but firm. Faramir felt the tremor there – the faint, lingering echo of spent fury. It reminded him of the warhorses after battle, froth-flanked, steaming and shaking, eyes wide and rolling with the knowledge of what they had survived. He did not judge it. The best men always trembled afterwards.

“And you do yourself no disservice, Gorm of the iron cloth. Witchfinder, sword-priest, keeper of whatever brittle peace remains to men like us.”

His hand fell back to his side and he turned toward the remnants of the orc patrol. Corpses lay strewn and still, their black blood already clotting in the leaf litter, but he was not looking at them. He was seeing beyond them, into the uncertain dusk and the shape of things yet to come.

“I remain upright and breathing thanks to your impeccable timing,” he murmured, his tone lightened though still burdened with thought. “You are welcome among us, if your road winds that way. My men will not mind the steel, nor the silence. They are made of the same.”

[gormlessthing]

“Get down, old man!” snaps his daughter, dragging him by the scruff back behind the upturned table. He bristles at that - old man? When did he become an old man? - but the consternation disappears amid the staccato hiss of burning barbs slamming into the wood in front of him. 

“You can’t stay there like that, father,” Ava hisses. 

“I know bloody well where I can stay and where I can’t,” Gorm, formerly Gormless, currently gormless by all accounts, retorts. “I’ve got armor on, don’t I?”

A chuckling snarl warns them that the mephit on the other side of the table has ventured closer, perhaps to try and mantle their brittle cover. Gorm stops trying to haul his greatsword up with just the one good hand and glances over at his daughter. She’s crouched, preparing to lunge, a knife in each hand. 

Did he teach her how to use knives? Did she remember from before? He can’t think in the haze of the fight. She looks an awful lot more prepared for this than he was, however. The zealotry of the young - something to prove, he supposes. 

“That thing is faster than it ought to be,” Ava mutters, moving closer to Gorm as the mephit begins to flap around one side of the table. 

“Some natural talent in that summoner, probably gave it more in the ritual than strictly necessary,” Gorm says. He lets go of the greatsword and, as best he can with one working hand, splays out his fingers, stretching a red cord between them. “Keep it busy, won’t you?”

“Right,” Ava says. For all her grumbling at him, she knows when to follow an order - and just as the mephit whips around the table, preparing another volley of heated barbs from its whipping tail, she lunges. The knives won’t do much. They’re pilfered iron from a town watchman who was never prepared for anything like a devil summoning - not enough silver to do more than annoy the mephit, which has foregone its barbed tail for eagerly swiping at Ava with its claws. Gorm’s greatsword has silver through it, which would have made a better tool, but Ava’s not lifting that, and with one arm half-broken, neither is he. 

Prayers, then. It’s a muttered burst of fervent prayer, something between a plea and a compliment, that filters past Gorm’s lips; it’s almost lost amid the din of the shrieking mephit and Ava’s taunts. But it catches - the cord around his fingers gleams briefly, and then a column of reddish-gold flame bursts into existence above the mephit and falls. 

The creature’s too busy trying to tear into Ava to notice until it’s too late - the flames roll over, radiant gold, and the thing disappears in a screeching swirl of ashen smoke.

Ava slumps back against the table, dropping a knife to quickly clasp at a shallow gash along her shoulder. Gorm drags himself into view from the other side of it. There’s not enough left in him for a healing prayer - he’d need to rest first, lest he risk burning out his brain trying to focus on the magic. 

“What’s this…about old man, anyhow,” he grumbles, in the tense silence that always follows a desperate scrap. 

“You’ve got gray hairs and you move like a lethargic mule,” Ava mutters, glancing up at him. “You’re soon for the cloister, and no mistake.”

“Like hell I am,” Gorm replies, pulling himself fully to his feet with a grunt. “The only time they’ll settle me in a church is when they bury me behind one.”

“I’m going to bury you behind one if you scare me like that again.”

“Have to catch me first. I’m spry for an old man,” Gorm says, more evenly. “Come on, that poor bastard’s still trembling in his bedroom. Got to get him out of here and sanctify the place.”

“Your arm’s broken,” Ava protests.

“And something else will be along shortly to finish the job if we don’t get to it, Ava,” the priest says. “I’ll find someplace to lie down right after we’re done, I promise, alright? Please bring our amateur magician out here.”

She stands still for a moment, staring quietly at him. He stares back, trying not to tremble from the brilliant pain shooting up and down his right side. 

“You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” she says. “I mean, we aren’t–”

“That’s not how we operate,” Gorm says. “The man made a mistake, and we fixed the mistake, and I don’t suspect he’s especially interested in doing it again. I just need both of you for the sanctification. Once we’re done with that, we leave him be.”

Gorm finds himself proud of the look of relief that crosses Ava’s face. He keeps finding himself relieved, in so many small ways, that she wasn’t in the Witchfinders’ care long enough to learn the way he did. He still has to fight his instincts, when he’s not paying attention - the urge to simply solve a problem with faith and iron and no questions asked. Ava’s better than him, with less blood on her hands. 

He means to keep it that way, as best as he can manage. 

She moves to fetch the man from his bedroom while Gorm gets to work with some spare cord from his pocket to create a holy symbol. The ritual takes a full hour, but it’s enough - the wretched smoke and scent of ash clinging to the rafters and walls dissipates.

Gelhast listens, right enough. 

The makeshift magus - young man, name of Argus, came from a city and meant to learn hedge magic in his off-hours - thanks them profusely, and sheepishly. Gorm gives him a short and stern lecture on how to study magic safely, and then he and Ava depart after she fusses around his arm for a few minutes. 

She’s a good healer. Better healer than she is a fighter, even, and Gorm finds himself relieved about that, too. The pain fades enough for him to get back to their campsite without groaning too much.

“That was too close for comfort,” his daughter says, walking beside him on the path back to their camp. 

“Oh, I don’t know, the sling fits well enough,” Gorm says. “Besides, we lived.” There’s a beat, and he looks over at Ava, and then: “We all lived.”

“Yes, we did,” she concludes, giving him a smile. “Not bad, old man.”

[gormlessthing]

logistics.

Gorm stands at nearly 6 foot 7 inches tall, broadshouldered and barrel chested. His left eye has been badly injured, and he keeps it covered with an eyepatch. He tends to keep otherwise unkempt graying hair in a thick ponytail, and maintains a chinstrap beard with no moustache (he hates trying to eat with a moustache.) He is between 50 and 60 years old during most stories.

Gorm carries his greatsword - a thick-bladed, double-edged straight-sword meant equally for crushing and cutting - his traveling gear, and a book dedicated to Vale, the Accidental God of Heroism, at all times. This book serves as a medium for a limited range of spellcasting, including healing magic and the occasional burst of righteous, holy flame.

history.

He wasn't always called "Gorm," of course - the man that came to be known as "Gorm" was first adopted into the Witchfinder order after a failed attempt to save a village in the woodlands. One of the village's stewards attempted to summon magical counsel ahead of a brutal winter, and were rewarded with a devilish incursion as a result.

The boy - too young to remember his own name, and with no alive who could say as much - was the only one left.

The Witchfinders found him to be kind and earnest, eager to earn his keep and fall in with the mission that saved his life. He quickly acclimated to the organization's tenets: belief in the god of Order, Good King Gelhast, and that divine order included natural order, and therefore should be respected and preserved where possible.

His eventual name stemmed from a nickname appointed to the boy by the head inquisitor, Witchfinder Captain Harven. The inquisitor was not a kind man by any standard, and found little use for endearing himself to some perishing little whelp likely to get killed during his apprenticeship anyway.

"Gormless little thing," Harven always called him. Kinder souls around the camp tried to adapt the name into something more, well, name-like: Gorm.

---

Gorm was a big lad - first for his age, and then in general. Where he evidently lacked in his ability to understand complex magical principles - necessary for meeting witchery with equal might - he proved a capable swordsman and possessed of a certain amount of common sense that served him well when his comrades delved into more esoteric disciplines.

Eventually, he took over for Captain Harven after the latter's mind began to fail him. As inquisitor, it was often said Gorm lacked the taste for blood that characterized his predecessor - but he stuck to the work as a necessary step of the mission, which was to ensure no one else ever suffered the way he had in his youth. (He often has nightmares about the things he did with knives - all in the hopes of drawing what he thought must have been sincere confessions out of broken, dying people.)

However, Gorm's faith began to fracture as the Witchfinders' campaigns, helmed by Inquisitor Superior Aurelius, became even more brutal and unforgiving. After Aurelius brazenly kidnapped and tortured a noblewoman for the crime of spurning his affections, Gorm saw the organization for what it was: a heaving, misguided engine of oppression and violence. He rescued the noblewoman, losing his eye in the process, and stole away with her and his apprentice, Ava.

In the years after, Gorm elected to continue his mission of witchfinding, only it wasn't about finding people and killing them without so much as a thought, nor lashing them to his faith and fervor. (Gorm has since become a follower of Vale, the Accidental God of Heroism.) Instead, Gorm seeks out magical disasters and disruptions, and aims to save who he can.

Gods save souls, he tells himself often. Gorm saves people.

[gormlessthing]

[ short starter for @sunmad ]

The witchfinder stares down at the macabre pyre made of the charging creature, then over at the otherwise waifish thing from which the flames emerged.

Classic witchery: she appeared for all the world to be harmless and quickly proved to be the most dangerous thing between the three of them - the lunging, wolf-like thing that came after them and the barrel-chested, broad-built bastard that attempted to intervene.

Still: the look on her face is one of mild pain and fright, as though the spell harmed her to cast it, and she had done so in their defense in the first place.

"Right," he says. "You alright there, magician? May I see your hands? I've a touch of soothing for them, if they're burnt."

[gormlessthing]

[ short starter for @saltuary ]

A life of hauling around a greatsword has left Gorm with little of the dexterity needed to properly aim a bow. This doesn't seem to have dissuaded the younger Faramir from trying to teach him, which has left the former party thoroughly embarrassed by the array of misfired arrows sprouting from the ground around the target.

"There is a reason my tutors shoved a greatsword in my hands," Gorm mutters, his hands trembling with the effort of keeping another arrow steady as he takes aim. At least he doesn't have to worry about closing one eye.

"This feels right silly, poet, I have to say."

[gormlessthing]

[ like for a short starter. i'm working on - not a carrd, exactly, because i am very bad at those, but a primer for Gorm's history and primary verse. ]

[gormlessthing]

fracture. (drabble)

Faith, Gorm the Witchfinder has found, does not shatter. Not at first. In fact, should a person's faith remain solid, the most brutal assaults only prompt the most resolute belief. After all, the old creed says: if the Good King did not stand behind me, would his foes so stridently approach?

Faith doesn't shatter - it fractures, a bit at a time. Cracks will lurch and twist and snarl their way into tangled starbursts along the surface; eventually, they will reach deeper. Only when the foundation is truly rotted through, held together more by pressure than anything resembling sincerity, will a decisive strike smash the whole affair apart.

It has, in Gorm's experience, happened to lots of people: little cracks, little fissures in the fervor, little moments of doubt that begin to reverberate in the quiet bedroom dark where prayers had been. He wasn't the first man to abandon the Witchfinders proper. He was, perhaps, the first man to abscond with the name itself - and the mission, modified as it was. But there had plenty of them before him who simply left: gentle souls with bloody hands all a-tremble, whose desperate prayers of surety had become pleas for absolution.

He wondered what their first moment of doubt had been. He knew his own: a young man, younger even than Gorm at the time, thanking him for the fire, thanking him for the end, bright-eyed and screaming straight through.

---

It was, perhaps, the young inquisitor's fifth proper excursion since he graduated from neophyte to apprentice. Neophytes in the Witchfinder order were largely appointed simple tasks - heating knives, cleaning wounds, fetching tools. Apprentices had swords and axes shoved in their hands to support veteran hunters in the field. Gorm, big lad that he was, was given a greatsword by the quartermaster, with only the briefest instructions on how to use it. He quicky proved capable with the weapon, and thus his inclusion on these expeditions became more frequent.

This latest investigation brought the Witchfinders to Volk's End, a village on the easternmost coast of the country. Prior to their arrival, their understanding was that a scholar arrived by hurried boat some weeks prior, and had taken to sharing arcana with the local fisherfolk and their children. Fisherfolk were an agricultural pillar in that part of the country - they could not be corrupted by outsiders.

It was meant to be a simple arrest: find the scholar in question, bring him to the Hellguard, the Witchfinders' northern garrison. The group - a captain named Harven, a corporal named Mortimer, and three apprentices, including Gorm - were prepared for a fight if the scholar resisted.

They were not prepared for the man to have entrenched himself so bloody firmly.

---

The sin proved deep. It hadn't taken long for the scholar's lessons - treatises on the nature of the world, foul heresy on the birth of gods - to catch proverbial fire, especially not in a beleagured place like this, where you were either staving off pirates or vicious wildlife or both. The investigation culminated in a brief and bloody melee in the center of Volk's End, killing one of the apprentices, the scholar in question, and six villagers.

Gorm was responsible for two of those. He remembers standing on the cloudy beach the morning after, still trying to calm the quiver in his arms, telling himself it was the ache of using the sword and not the taste of blood in his mouth. He remembers the salty chill sweeping in from over the sea, the way gray light poured and coiled and tangled its way through stormclouds burgeoning on the horizon.

He remembers, more than anything, the men and women tied up on the pyres, most of them staring hatefully at the remaining Witchfinders as the latter went about the almost rote business of setting heretics on fire.

There were eight such heretics, all told - conspirators who were discovered with copies of the scholar's teachings in their quarters. Seven of them were doing their best to remain stoic, no doubt thinking of themselves as martyrs. Gorm remembers that thought catching in his skull the way detritus in a pipe might catch on a grate. He cannot remember why.

But the last of them was a young man, no more than sixteen, whose bravery had all but failed him. As the Witchfinders worked, the young man begged and pleaded and prayed, trying to assure anyone who would listen that he learned his lesson, could he please come down, could he please come down, his mother will miss him, his sisters still need him, he made a mistake.

Gorm remembers meeting the young man's eyes. He remembers the moment, clear and sharp, that the boy realized he would burn with his comrades, as the first crackling embers began to catch at the pyre's base. He remembers thinking: now, now he'll show the same defiance as all the others. Now he'll prove himself a heretic. Now he'll reveal that there is no faith left in his heart.

The thoughts felt sour, cruel. Then they disappeared as the young man, the fire licking at his clothes, stretched a pained, grateful smile across his face, half-obscured by the smoke. He trained his hazy stare directly at Gorm, and he choked out:

"Thank you for saving my soul, Witchfinder."

The gratitude dissolved shortly into screaming prayers, attestations of faith, promises of rightful behavior in the afterlife, all shredded by pain, all scarred by smoke, right up until the fire silenced the boy at last.

It had been sincere. Even as the world went up in flames, the boy's faith, only temporarily dissuaded, had been sincere, and his last earthly act had been to thank a group of stern-faced zealots for burning him alive.

Gorm remembers standing transfixed as the first fracture ran along his faith, and the foundation began to tremble.

If he was wrong about the boy, what else had he been wrong about?

What had he just done?

[gormlessthing]

❛ he was a captain that men would follow , even under the shadow of the black wings . ❜

⪼ SALTUARY – an independent , private , selective and headcanon-based interpretation of FARAMIR from TOLKIEN’S LEGENDARIUM as loved by Puffin . ©