Should we skip MrWillsauce if we don't get a response by the 13th? That should be two weeks, and I'll cynically note that they haven't been active since the 29th of June.
In the meantime, a continuation to the tale of
my last turn (which I really should've written by now):
14th Moonstone, 879Waking came slowly to Arkur. There was a throbbing pain in his head, deep and pulsing, rising from the base of his neck to the lid of his skull, leaving him unable to do much more than groan at the sensation as he began to rise from his sleep. As more of his senses returned to him, he was vaguely aware of a hand pressed against his forehead, keeping him in place as a cup was pressed to his chapped, dry lips.
“Drink,” A voice ordered, firmly. “It will help with the pain.”
Still did Arkur hesitate to drink. He had known those words in the past, and never had they been true. But after some time he allowed his mouth to open, letting whatever concoction was in the cup drip down his throat – it tasted bitter and spicy, burning his throat like molten rock as it slid down and leaving him spluttering from the force of its taste. The throbbing pain in his temples had begun to dissipate, however, and he forced himself to sit upright with a groan.
Arkur found himself face-to-face with a bird-faced creature of black leather and bronze, its curving metal beak inches away from his nose and one gloved hand still resting against his forehead. The opaque, rounded glass eyes set into the bronze of its mask gave it a faintly startled look, as though it had not expected him to rise with such speed. Its glove stank of wet leather and herbs as it moved, trying to push him back against the bed. Arkur tried to lurch back from the creature’s grip in mixed shock and revulsion, but its grip was hard as iron and unrelenting; even a sharp blow to the chest yielded no response or noticeable movement from the towering creature beyond a turn of its head and a throaty hissing sound.
“Ease off, Citoj!” A voice snapped, authoritative and vaguely familiar. Arkur turned his head toward the source, ignoring the twinge of pain that rushed up his neck on doing so. It was the other man from the castle, now without the disguising swathes of fabric across his features. He was a grim-looking young man of perhaps twenty seasons, his face craggy with battle-scarring and blotted by a dark, sprawling tattoo on one side, but there was an earnestness to his manner and words as he warded the creature off with pointed gestures of one hand. He turned toward Arkur, motioning almost apologetically with his free hand. “My apologies for the rude awakening, old friend. My comrade cannot talk as others do – his tongue was torn out years ago by our mutual enemy, and the mask contains a poultice of herbs to aid him in breathing. It is good to see you awake at last.”
“The name’s Aril, Ehhu.” Arkur’s confusion must have shown on his face, for Aril’s features creased in apparent surprise or confusion at his lack of recognition. “Don’t you remember?”
Arkur shook his head, biting back a growl as his temper began to fray. His head was throbbing furiously again, sending red waves of pain pulsing through the inside of his skull. His annoyance rose with each fresh pulse of pain as the man turned his head toward the bird-masked creature and began to speak in a low, hissing language that set his teeth on edge and intensified the pounding hurt in his temples.
"No! I remember scarcely a thought before you and your creature brought me here, and by the Powers, I’ll have an explanation out of you-!”
Aril’s features clouded sharply with sudden anger and hurt at his words, and as he cut himself off mid-sentence, Arkur feared that he had pushed his erstwhile friend and rescuer too far. A sharp stab of dread and fear coiled in his stomach. Then the moment passed as soon as it had come, Aril closing his eyes and letting out a soft, hissing breath that steamed in the cold air.
“I beg your forgiveness, my friend. This place…” He paused again, hesitant, then suddenly turned toward the door, shouldering his axe as he went. “I pray you, walk with me. Once you are ready, you'll have your answers.”
“You remember at least the Blight, I hope?” Aril began, as they stepped out into the empty streets of the hamlet. The wind had picked up in the time since he was last awake, sending cold gusts of air and snow moaning through over the desolate dirt roads. The breeze carried with it the stink of rotting wood and fresh snow. It made Arkur’s skin instinctually crawl, a feeling made worse by the silently looming form of Citoj behind him. The beaked mask the bigger man wore cast jittering, rippling shadows across the timber skeletons of the hamlet’s former houses, each sharp motion an enemy waiting to leap from the dark and tear into them all with twisting claws and jagged black fangs.
At Arkur’s shuddering nod, he continued. “Well, scarcely three years ago the bastards responsible for it came out into the open.”
Aril paused for a moment, carefully stepping around a large bundle of soaked cloth that lay half-buried in the snow. A dozen large stones had been laid on top of it in a large mound, topped with a makeshift marker of lashed-together wood, but the winds and gradual erosion ensured it had begun to bare its contents to the world once again. “People started disappearing, villages razed in the night - half the damn Realm’s now under their heel.”
“We found their seat of power years ago, but it’s a bloody fortress.” Aril’s voice hitched slightly, and his purposeful stride faltered as he continued to speak. “We… we’ve lost a lot of good people trying to get in there.”
“And I…”
Aril nodded once, scarred features grim. “Just over a decade ago, you and three others went missing after setting out to infiltrate one of their fortresses and kill the bastards responsible for all this horror. We thought you were dead – up until a couple weeks ago.”
Almost unconsciously, Arkur’s fingers rose to touch the raised scar at the back of his head. He’d had it almost as long as he could remember. Those words had ignited a spark in his mind, an itchy, fluttering flake of memory that rose up from somewhere deep in the murk that was clouding his mind. He focused on it, trying to seize hold of it and dredge it up through the fog of his memories – and without warning, a burning star of pain burst into the back of his head.
The air was thick with the sickly scent of smoke and burnt meat and wet iron, blending together into a noxious witch’s brew of clashing smells. His fingers were wound around the handle of a sword tight enough to draw blood, adding to that which already covered the blade and the bound leather of its grip; his arms and chest burned with the effort of moving as he ducked beneath an oncoming spear, letting its barbed bronze head strike against the wall behind him before he pirouetted in place and struck in return, sending the soldier’s arm thumping wetly to the stone floor. A second blow to the chest left him staggering out of the battle, screaming for aid, but he scarcely cared – only the thought of escape rang in his mind, overriding all other concerns.He darted past the clumsy, swinging forms of two more guards, pausing to trip one of them as they made a lunge at his neck. Their armoured form went crashing down the steps behind him, swearing and crying out in pain, but he had no time to finish the job. The other one had regained his wits and was swinging for him now, lashing out with a maul large as a full-grown man. It glanced off the side of his head as he forced his burning limbs to move, sending a flash of fire and light through the inside of his skull. He cursed aloud, flailing his sword about half-aimlessly in a graceless attempt to drive back the guard. The blade bit into the guard’s weapon arm, by luck as much as the guard’s recklessness, sending him scrambling backwards and down the steps with the crash of bronze on stone.From somewhere behind him there came a terrible, baying scream. A half-dozen burly men were emerging from one of the fortress’ towers, hands wrapped around long wooden poles with chains mounted upon their ends. Each chain attached to a heavy iron collar locked around the throat of a second figure clad in bronze armour; they thrashed and writhed against their bonds, pulling at their chains like hunting hounds who had caught the scent of blood. He felt the blood run cold in his veins. Even at this distance, he could see the blisters and rot mottling their exposed flesh, while their wild, animalistic demeanour gave their natures away at a glance.As he watched one of the bronze-armoured nightmares broke free of its handlers, head swaying from side to side as it lurched into motion. It was inhumanly fast, even by the standards of the Blight-Born; by the time its handlers could shout out in alarm the thrall was already a dozen meters away, bounding across the grass on all fours. A tiny spark of hope flared in his chest as it rushed to and fro, dodging between the barbed capture-poles and blades of a dozen guards. With luck, it would not smell him before he could pass out of the fortress and escape into the snowy hills and plains beyond. He crept forward toward the great wooden gates, hanging ajar from the latest shipment of flesh, then froze in his tracks as the thrall stopped dead in its motions and wheeled around to fix him with two maddened, bloodshot eyes.The thrall scrambled forth and leapt at him, howling like a wild animal. A boot cracked hard against his skull, staggering him; before he could clear the murk from his head, fingers like iron bars seized him firmly around the throat and locked tightly together, pressing down on his throat as the weight of the thrall’s body pinned him to the ground. It shoved its face against his, bloody foam drizzling from the holes bored into the metal of the bulky mask it wore as it sought to bury its teeth into his flesh – the thing seemed too crazed to even register the heavy iron muzzle bolted into and through the bone of its jaws. Blisters burst and flesh bruised as he kicked desperately against its hulking frame, succeeding only in driving it to let out a muted snarl of fury and ram its armoured skull against his bare head several times. Stars burst in his vision and the inside of his head rang like a bell, almost drowning out the fast, frantic drumbeat of his heart and the terrible burning sensation in his chest.A high, cold voice intruded on the edge of his hearing, shouting commands that sounded impossibly distant. He was vaguely aware of the sounds of a scuffle, the feeling of the hulking thrall being pulled off of him and dragged away by a dozen blurred figures as it bayed with rage. Cold metal fingers closed around his wrists and arms, dragging him none-too-gently across the stone floor and back down the stairs, down into the black hell of the dungeons below the castle – A firm grip on his bare elbow drew him back to the present. He was on his knees in the dirty snow, his legs having buckled beneath him at some point. Aril was beside him, his axe cast aside and his arms looped under Arkur’s, keeping him from toppling over onto his face.
“What the hell were they doing to us there?” Arkur managed to wheeze, grimacing as Citoj reached out to steady him unprompted. There was something wrong about the bigger man that he could not quite place; something displeasing, something outright detestable, something that made the skin of his arm prickle with goose-flesh at the sensation of his leather-clad fingers’ touch. Scarcely had he felt such instinctual loathing for another, and yet when he stared into the rounded glass eyes of Citoj’s masked face, he could specify no point from which the disdain had sprung.
Aril halted for a moment, carefully considering his next words.
“Thralls never break ranks and run, or show the slightest sign of pain. They don’t need feeding or clothing or housing, and when there’s no slaughter to be done, you can just chain ‘em up in a room and leave them ‘til there. Make them wear armor or carry weapons, and they won’t let them go shy of being hacked into chunks fit for a stew. And should even one of their teeth break your skin, nothing shy of the Lady Herself can prevent you from swelling their ranks.” Aril’s expression was bleak as the frozen sky overhead as he motioned to the massive axe he carried, the crudely-made plates of bronze and copper that covered as much of his flesh as possible. “Perfect soldiers, my brother. All they lack is control.”
Arkur started in horror, several threads of memory and suspicion all connecting at once in light of his comrade’s words. The other inmates’ blisters and mortified flesh; the heavy chains used to secure them in their cells and bind them whenever they were brought through the passageways; the savage madness that seemed to break out in the hunched, feral creatures that the guards’ masters kept caged in the corners of their workshops –
“Those people in the cells… the other prisoners-!”
“Aye.” Aril’s voice was level, but the sharp twist to his ragged features belied the disgust he was feeling. “Experiments. Raw materials. Certain mixtures and extracts can weaken the will, render the strongest of men’s minds into malleable clay – and a thrall is no more than a man, driven by dark thirsts and made mighty by the Blight. Defy those holding their chains, and – well.” He gestured with a hand toward the empty hamlet, the rotting timbers of former houses rising from the snow-drowned streets like the bones of some long-dead creature.
Aril scuffed a boot at the exposed dirt, face twisting with some unidentifiable emotion as something poked up amidst the snow and soil – a tiny bone, a miniature humerus, greyish amidst the brown and white of the hamlet’s dirty snow. It was shattered down the centre, revealing the marrowless hollow within. Another, beside it – this one larger, well-chewed, scraped clean of whatever flesh had once been upon it. Scraps of torn cloth lay about them both, stained a deep, rusty brown; half-buried in them was a tiny sailboat, small enough to fit in the palm of even Arkur’s hand. A sudden, convulsive shudder wracked Aril’s body and he kicked snow over them both, shrouding them from sight. When he turned to face Arkur again, he looked far, far older than his youthful features suggested.
“This place used to be our home. Citoj and mine. They gave one of our number shelter, and they did this – a warning to anyone thinking of standing against their tyranny.” His hands curled into fists with the soft creak of metal; beside him, the hulking, beaked giant flexed his leather-gloved fingers in sympathy with his fellow. The old, bone-deep weariness in his eyes faded away in favour of a bright, angry fire, and the determination of a man ready to fight and die for his cause as he turned back to Arkur. “We can’t let this happen again, Ehhu.”
Arkur nodded once, in silent agreement. Whatever objections he had once felt were melting away as snow did before a fire, his fears and suspicions overridden by the memories Aril’s words had triggered. If those bastards in the castle were behind this, if they were weaponizing those Blight-infested monstrosities, he would stand with anyone who was against them. Yet there was one thing, nagging at the edge of his mind –
“You called me Ehhu again.” Arkur’s eyes narrowed slightly as he spoke, quizzically. “Why?”
Aril was silent for a long moment before he closed his eyes and let out a soft, hissing sigh. He placed a hand to the side of his head, grimacing slightly as though recalling the memories pained him. “My apologies. An old friend, now many years gone. You… remind me of him.”
18th Moonstone, 879“Not much further now, my brother,” Aril murmured, gazing down at the squat mead hall standing upon the plains below. Much of the village was silent this late at night, but a few lights still flickered in the dusty windows of the central hall and a few puffs of smoke rose from the chimney.
“This is where your friends are?” Arkur was beside him, leather-clad form half-kneeling, half-lying in the greyish dirt. It was ill-fitting on his spare frame, salvaged and cobbled together from a dozen different bodies in the snow-drowned ruin of the village, but it offered better protection than his prison rags.
“Aye.” Aril nodded his reply, raising a finger to point at the hall. “Down there was where we agreed we’d meet.” He shifted himself upright, gesturing to the gentle slope of the hill before him, leading down to the expansive plains in which the hamlet sat. “Follow me!”
Aril led the group of three’s path down the hill, both hands upon his double-headed axe’s shaft and his watchful eyes kept firmly on the hall. Citoj stumped along at the back, beaked head swaying from side to side as he covered the trio’s rear and flanks. Arkur was between them, chivvied along by the constant push of Cito’s lumbering bulk, his eyes flicking between the shadows of the field and the heavy wooden doors of the hamlet’s hall. There was something in the air, something he could not quite place – something sinister and sickly, lingering at the very edge of his awareness.
Without warning, Aril suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. Arkur almost crashed into the armour of his comrade’s back, sending him stumbling as he fought to regain his balance in the wake of the sudden stop. “What-?”
“By the powers…” Aril’s low murmur was barely audible, but there was no mistaking the horror in it. Arkur shifted himself awkwardly to the side, peering around his brother’s bigger frame, and immediately saw what had drawn the exclamation from the other man.
The field before them was drenched with blood and the visceral remnants of its former inhabitants. Many of the bodies lay in half-shredded pieces, their limbs torn away entirely, or their forms cut completely in half; others were relatively whole, though the broken ruins of their heads (and even then, only when they had them) or their opened throats made it clear they had not gone peacefully. A handful bore the marks of horrific burns, their flesh charred almost to carbon beyond the whitish gleam of bone. Alone among the corpses, these ones bore a further mutilation: a jagged spear of metal driven with great force through each body’s breast, and a set of heavy weights tied by crude rope around their grotesquely mangled throats.
Arkur fought to keep his breathing steady as he took in the horror before him. The scent of blood and rot hit him strong as a hammer-blow, almost enough to physically stagger him. He had seen violence before, had inflicted it on others and felt it inflicted in him in turn – but this wanton butchery was unlike even the horrors his fractured memories of the time beneath the castle had displayed to him. Shards of broken bone peeked up through the dirt and crunched underfoot as the three of men crept through the devastation toward the central mead hall, where a few lights still flickered dully through the dusty windows.
Aril gave a low, dry hiss of breath as he carefully overturned one of the bodies. Beneath it, lying half-buried in the ashen dirt, was a shard of metal bearing an unfamiliar crest: two twisted figures, half-sloth and half-man, against a field of grey.
“The Great Enemy’s work.” Aril’s voice was barely above a dry hiss, eyes snapping back and forth as though he expected a thrall to leap from the shadows and devour them all. His limbs were taut with tension, and his eyes ablaze with righteous fury as he stared toward the hall. “Follow me, quickly! We could not save these men, but we might just avenge them.”
No longer bothering with stealth, the three men scrambled to their feet and rushed toward the mead hall in open anger. Aril reached the door first, raising his axe with a snarl as he sighted the drawn bolts and the smears of blood around the frame. “Down with the door, Citoj!”
Citoj swung his mace over his shoulder; the blow shook the hall, and the heavy oak doors leapt against their bolts and hinges. Noises arose - the murderers within had clearly not been expecting company – dismal cries of surprise and anger echoing dully from within. Up went the mace again and again, joined now by the heavy swings of Aril’s axe; the wood crashed and its frame bounded with each strike, but the excellent workmanship and strength of the doors ensured it was not until the fifth that they fell in splintered ruin.
The besiegers did not hesitate a moment before sprinting in through the debris, weapons raised high and cries of fury echoing from their throats. The inside of the hall mirrored its façade: much of the well-worked furniture lay in wreckage about the room; other parts had been overturned, scattering their contents across the smooth, red-stained stone of the floor. All around lay bodies, some living, others so badly mangled that there was no question of life remaining. Many of the inhabitants were only just rising, snapped into wakefulness by the sound of splintering wood on stone, hands clumsily fumbling for the weapons and shields that lay around them in disorganised piles.
Citoj and Aril fell upon them before they could come close to arising. Bone shattered and blood flew with each stroke of their weapons as the attackers seized upon their foes’ surprise; Arkur trailed awkwardly behind, jabbing with his sword at any foe who tried to scramble away from the rampaging pair. It was a brief, bloody brawl, over almost as soon as it had begun – the savagery of the hall’s inhabitants not even close to a match for the pair’s fury and experience.
Aril turned one of the more intact bodies onto its back, face twisting sharply as he beheld the body’s features. Pallid, blood-streaked and half-ruined as they were, he could nonetheless recognise the face of his contact, friend, and mentor. The old man’s face was locked into a deathly rictus of defiant fury, bloody saliva half-dried on his lips, his eyes fixed in a glare; it looked as though he had bitten off his own tongue rather than yield their secrets to the Great Enemy. There was a knife driven to the hilt through his sable robes into the old flesh beneath, pinning a scrap of crimson-soaked vellum to his chest. Aril knew an execution warrant when he saw one.
Something coiled in his chest, black and angry and hot as molten metal. Whoever had ordered this would suffer for their actions – there would be only a few barely-living scraps left for the plaguespawn once he was done with them. Warm blood slicked his fingers within the gauntlets; he had been clenching his hand around the handle of his axe hard enough to draw blood through the metal. He breathed deep, reaching out to close his mentor’s eyes, then stopped. Something was poking out of his robes. Aril carefully extricated it, bringing the paper up to his eyes – it was a letter, repeatedly folded for ease of concealment and bloodstained at the edges, but otherwise untouched by the violence that had torn through the hall. He brought it to his eyes in haste, and read:
“My brother,When this paper falls into your hands, I will have fallen in pursuit of our freedom. Under what circumstances, I know not, but instincts and intellect alike tell me that our force’s end is certain and soon. It falls to you to continue our endeavour against the Great Enemy’s tyranny, and do what I could not.First, find the loose flag upon this floor. Use whatever means are needed to open the cavity beneath; you will know the right stone by the things that lie beneath. There will be a satchel beneath the stone, marked with the letter V; you will retrieve it and, severing the straps if it be necessary, acquire its contents as they stand: a phial, some crimson stones, and a bound journal. These contents you must take with you when you leave this place, wherever you might be bound. That is but the first step of this service: now for the second. There is a place south of here, where a false-spire meets the sky; you must set out to this place, on foot should circumstance demand it, and reach there before midnight before the New Moon dies. Admit yourself to its deep regions with these items in hand. Here, you must read the book and speak with our Law-Giver, and accept his commands. Then, you will have played your part in this tale, and struck a mighty blow against the tyranny of the Great Enemy. Know that these arrangements are of capital importance, and by neglecting one, fantastic as these may appear, you will have charged your conscience with the shipwreck of our work and the deaths of our people’s hopes.I go to meet my fate.For the Liberation,- V. Uveolbeoco"Aril lowered it, his brow furrowing. The writing was verbose and fanciful to the point of opacity, a marked alteration to the blunt, simple prose his once-colleague had used; he had no doubts as to the grave importance of the message, but the meaning seemed lost among the layers of obfuscation meant to ward off the predatory curiosity of the murderers growing cold around them. He read the message again and again, puzzling over the meaning with a careful eye and a series of mumbled thoughts even as Arkur fidgeted about in discomfort and Citoj kept his disconcerting silence beside the hunched warrior. At last, however, something seemed to seize upon his mind, and he nodded with a sharp jerk of the head toward the southernmost corner of the mead hall.
Just as his lost friend had proclaimed, there was a loose flagstone, its edge slightly proud of the flags around it. He wasted no time in having Citoj lift the offending slab free of the dirt and rock, casting it aside to strike wetly against one of the corpses; there, within a tiny hollow in the dirt, a dusty satchel lay with its bindings undone. Aril lifted it free with almost reverent care, peering in to confirm the contents’ integrity, before nodding abruptly and sweeping the whole thing into his pack before either of his colleagues could snatch any but the barest glance.
“Let us go,” Aril’s solemn voice rang through the empty hall as he turned to face the two. “We will bury these men at sun-rise, then depart to the south. Let us hope my master will be there in time…”
Author
Topic: Museum III, adventure succession game (DF 0.47.05) (Read 403686 times)