You call for a celebration. You have returned in triumph, with future members of your following. Your temple can wait, so can the walls. There will be a great feast…complete with sacrifices. Your followers are eager, and within two hours thirteen great pyres are built, with the captives from your raid forced to stand around them. They tremble deliciously, eyes full of terror. Some of them seem on the verge of fainting. You use a modicum of power to keep them awake. You would not want them to miss the…celebrations. Hovering above the central pyre, you watch as your cultists approach their captives, and ask them a question. Will they join the followers of Klx-Dryklfx?
The answers are about half and half. Thirty-one people join your cult. Twenty-nine refuse. For a moment, hope shines in their eyes as no one makes a move towards them. Some of them begin to think that those giant pyres are perhaps for goats. Then you land, and they are quickly bound to the pyres. Some struggle and are beaten into a dazed submission. Most, however, seem dazed by this sudden, unexpected, but completely inevitable turn of events. You look through their thoughts, amazed by their confusion.
Fortunately, it soon subsides and is replaced with pain and horror, as torches are thrown onto the pyres by former friends and family members as dark praises are chanted and voices raised in twisted hymns. The screams match the songs in volume, and evil energies begin to swirl in a vortex. You want to absorb it…to consume it and grow strong, but instead you direct towards a skull of the now burning priest. His screams change, in volume and pitch. They grow louder, rougher, deeper, as flesh peels away from it and the bone writhes.
Striding over, you pluck it off and hold it up. The skull pulses with evil. Literally pulses, the bones warping as the evil presses against it. From the eyes and mouth and every other hole in the skull black fire blasts from it, giving off a choking red smoke which drifts off in the form of various demonic sigils. You smile, but it turns into a frown when you realize there is just a little too much evil in the skull. It’s probably going to explode. You inhale a couple drops, growing stronger, but it is an incredible effort of will not to take more.
Two of those who refused are spared the ritual, and forced to watch. You link their minds with every single one of their friends and family, so that they feel both the impossible agony of the fire and the incredible ecstasy your new followers feel in serving you. As their minds begin to crack under the strain, you push their flesh together, making another brute.
Next, you turn to making something new, a cloak of ash and shadows to hide whoever wears it from sight. It is an exhausting, painful strain for you, but you weave darkness into a fabric and shape it into a cloak which mortal eyes can just barely see. You suspect there may be more powers, but you cannot be certain. This is clumsy work by your standards.
You set it down as your cult returns to their labor, and something attracts your attention to the skull. After a moment, you realize what it is. It’s moved from where you placed it. And it is watching you.
What do you do? And how do you deal with the skull?
Name: Klx-Dryklfx
Time: 1.5 months
Physical Might: 15 (+2 taken from skull, -4 mutation, -9 creating the cloak)
Mental Might: 15 (+ 2 taken from skull, -4 mutation, -8 creating the cloak)
Followers: 13 Boneys, 97 viilagers
Slaves: 1 priest
Servants: 15 wisp wights, 2 brutes
Cults
The Broken
Members: 13 Boneys, 97 villagers
Resources: 1
Power: 8 (3 spent on converting temple(40/50), 3 spent on constructing wall(35/50), 1 spent on worshiping you)
1 magic cloak
1 sapient Evil skull
Author
Topic: The Rise of a Demon (Number of ritual wedding duels: 1) (Read 52450 times)