Underneath Vaald,
Present
“It’s like waking up into a terrible, shared nightmare: Tens, hundreds of souls clamor for ‘completion, completion, completion’.
You, too, know what they yearn for. You too, know their hunger. You too, are unwhole. Your body is not your own, you do not see what you wish to see.
All that is left, all that you know: only the Master’s will.”
— Unknown, A Lich’s Memoir
Sudden fatigue washed over the Aqueduct Subjugation Party like one of the many Tidal Surges between Tantas’ Claws.
Moritz was first to be brought low by the ever-increasing fatigue, his mind whirling, sense of balance shot, and a light pain throbbing in his temple. Luisa followed shortly after bumping into the felled Moritz, bouncing off of him with the sound of armor clacking against armor, and sprawling over the floor as if she had been mauled in the head by a club, nauseated and reeling. Only Adira remained standing, clenching her teeth and gripping tightly onto her mace’s handle and shield’s grip.
The whole of terrible, normal gravity burdened upon them, and they felt as if they had been on a forced march for several weeks, rather than a trek for several days. Their lungs strained for air, and hearts beat within their throats.
As if it too were affected by the fatiguing affliction, their lanterns simultaneously snuffed into darkness, whiffing out in a puff of burnt wick and vapor without even the glow of embers to light the cistern. The darkness washed over the party like spilled ink on a parchment, consuming them and bringing confusion. Luisa let out a little yelp, and Moritz cried out for her in concern.
“
I’m fine!” she strained, “
I was just surpr-”
Then came the headache, stronger than any earlier throbbing. It threatened to sunder the fused sections of their skulls and expose their gray matter to the inky air.
The sound of a lantern shattering on the ground followed, then another. The trio groaned in unison, and the sound of metal scraping across the solidified muck on the floor echoed through the cavern as Luisa writhed on the ground and Moritz let out a loud moan of pain, pure pain.
A seemingly eternal moment passed, there was the sound of a spark, and Adira’s lantern burnt anew, conjured back into life by her magic. The suddenness of her action caused Moritz and Luisa to reel away from the light, the force of their migraines amplifying the change in luminosity tenfold.
“
A li’l warning before you do that, Adira! I feel like I’m going blind on top of this gods damned headache!” yelled Moritz. He was about to continue before he caught sight of Adira.
“
My apologies, Moritz,” she said, eyes winced into squinting, expression pained. She remained standing, if not slouched when compared to her normal proud poise. Moritz was awestruck, struggling just to stay on his knees and talk. Luisa, at some point, had fainted.
Adira removed her gauntleted hand from her mace to grip her head, futilely massaging the leather inner glove over her temples, mind reeling over what sorceries were ailing her. “
We’ve made it to one of the cisterns,” she started, “
There’s an exit right above us.” she raised a finger from her temple and pointed upward, lifting her shield and its attached lantern to light up a section in the brickwork, a rectangular metal cover laid over it, and a crude metal ladder stapled into the wall beneath it.
Moritz struggled to give a nod and barely managed one before unceremoniously, he began to vomit, the pain in his head overwhelming his senses; he continued as much until he broke into dry heaves. It took a few moments to control his breathing.
Adira in the meanwhile made a struggling effort to walk to him, making one stride, two strides before she tasted iron and felt warmth and liquid from her nose. She looked to Moritz, then to his wife, and saw blood sluicing from their noses as well.
She chose to ignore it and began to help Moritz from the ground, before strange sounds reached her ears from behind, further down the unexplored reaches of the cistern.
It began as a sigh, a rush of air from taxed lungs. It was wet, labored, and hollow. It was as if something decided to wake up, its first breath of a new day a gurgle of activity.
The sigh was followed by the scratching of claws against stone, in an inhuman, gargantuan stride. Adira could feel the gruesome weight of the stomping gait beneath her feet, rattling the stone with each fearsome step. She looked behind herself, and noticed footsteps imprinted in the ground, footsteps she hadn’t seen previously.
Closer and closer, the creature barreled toward them, closer, the sounds approached with increasing volume. Then, they stopped— Entirely, as if the whole thing hadn’t happened. Moritz held back a pathetic laugh before his face mutated from jest into surprise. Along with the sound, so too did the headache cease to exist, and it felt as if his vigor had also been returning. Adira, feeling the same, looked to him inquisitively; when Moritz gave a look that he was okay, wiping fresh vomit from the side of his lips, she dropped him like a bag of bricks.
“
How unkind of you,” he said, giving off one of his signature grins. The knight rose from his feet before he remembered that Luisa was still on the ground. He knelt once more and ducked down to pick up his wife, an action that ended up saving his life.
There was a chatter of claws against stone again, and a rush of cold, moist air from just behind Moritz coupled with that damned gurgle of a wet sigh once more. Just in front of him, he saw the heel of Adira’s boot’s surge with electricity, the dry crackle of magical plasma turning the oxygen around it into ozone. In a surge of motion, Adira spun around with a kick, pivoting on the axis of her unenergized heel.
A crackle of discharging electricity followed suit, along with a deafening roar of impact and the wrenching of metal violently meeting metal, then the sound of something meatily smacking against the wall and an animalistic, almost human, almost pathetic yelp of pain.
All sound ceased to exist, for a moment, his ears rang loudly from the discharge of electricity and the impact. The world shuddered violently. If Moritz hadn’t already emptied the contents of his stomach, he most certainly would have after that.
When it all calmed down, a second later, Moritz felt motion above him, and the patter of broken brickwork hitting the ground and lightly smacking into his face, then the sound of clamoring footsteps running away. Adira settled back into a combat ready stance, tapping the ground lightly with her sizzling boot.
“
We’re getting the both of you out of here,” Adira said, her face grim and serious, “
Now.”
Without a moment to reply, Moritz was picked off the ground along with Luisa. Thankfully for his pride, the guildsman was only picked up to be placed on his feet. His wife was slung over Adira’s shoulder.
Moritz gave a hesitating glance behind him. The ground was split in places, treacly lantern oil seeping into the cracks and crumbling rock. There was a clear fissure in the wall where that creature had made impact, the originally straight tunnel section giving way into two cleanly stepped slabs and fine dust falling from the ground above.
Adira made her way to the exit and placed Luisa and her shield at the base of the ladder. Deftly making her way up, she pushed on the exit hatch. Lightly at first, then puffing out a breath of exertion.
The ceiling shuddered, imposed upon by the sudden stress of Adira’s pushing. The sound of stones cracking and pavement breaking was dulled out by the dirt, followed by a screech of metal as the hatch heaved open.
Adira hopped off the ladder and motioned for Moritz to get up first, to which he obliged.The Drakenforged then helped Luisa out of the cistern with Moritz’ help, leaving some final words before she closed the hatch, “
Bring Luisa with you if you can’t find help. This message takes priority:
Inform the Temple of the Gnara and the Town Guard, Undead beneath the city. I’ll deal with it as best as I can.”
- – — –— –— –— –——Δ——– —– —– —– — – -
A coldness consumed him, enveloped him,
embraced him. All around was dark grey blurs, boring into his eyes. Not even the damned tinnitus that plagued his older years touched his ears. It was silent, maddeningly silent.
He was sure he was dead, his soul given to Stieg for the long slumber. So why?
Eternity passed. Cold, empty, mind-breaking.
Then noise. A roaring clamor of voices, biting at him, grabbing at him. They all cried for the same thing, simultaneously calling:
“Completion. Completion. Completion.”He held onto that word, made it his own. He too felt the yearning for it, he too felt the need to be complete again.
Again?
He realized then that he too, was incomplete. Something, some time, the very fabric of his being had been sundered. He held onto that feeling of needing to be completed anew, felt it burning from within, threatening to tear itself from out of his grasp. He
needed that feeling, it was the only thing that kept him as himself.
All around, he could feel the
others with him. Sinking, thrashing, becoming lost in this black domain. He swore he would not be like them, swore to himself to stay afloat, swore to make himself whole again.
After all, that’s what
she promised him. Memories and a will that was not his own surged through him. Who was she? Who was he?
He could at least answer one thing:
She was the Master. Her will was his will. By her will, this nightmare will end and he’ll be complete again.
- – — –— –— –— –——Δ——– —– —– —– — – -
Alone in this ancient maw of society, Adira exhaled, leaving behind a puff of vapor as she picked up her shield. The lantern oil gently sloshed inside its glass container as it swayed with Adira’s motion.
Adira turned her eyes toward where she last saw the earlier creature depart toward. Strangely, for the lantern’s burning light, the darkness of the corridor seemed all but tangible, the inky precipice all but ate up her lantern’s light, as if a solid curtain.
She pressed forward, stepping into the curtain to find that it wasn’t solid at all. Further inside, her lantern still worked, as if the curtain were a glamour to turn away all light, screaming to the world that it was no place for creatures that depended on light to see.
Further forward, and Adira stopped.
A yawning abyss stretched out before her, an expanse in the earth torn out from beneath the neat basalt bricks that composed the aqueducts, thousands of measures deep. The even-footed passageway surrendering itself to a stairway of crudely placed steps fashioned from rough-hewn stone, descending further into the pit.
It was coldest, here, in this underdark, as if she had stepped straight out of Tantas’ Palm and onto one of the very tips of its northernmost claw. Frost crept in icy veins across the walls, and an unrelenting shiver assaulted Adira.
Below, the lofty chamber ever so faintly glowed under the light of hundreds of dancing flames, ensconced within green and red glass lanterns.
Adira grimaced, holding fast to her shield; the stench of death lingered strongly, sweet and nauseating to her nostrils. A low, purring hum played ponderously in her ears and at the back of her head, accompanied by a strange swishing sound—like the tinnitus sound of blood vessels pumping their vital humours when one covered their ears.
But other than these unnatural, maddening thrums of sound, nothing else spoke, nothing so much as whispered. The rats, too, ever present earlier in the aqueducts, were entirely absent. Death truly had a hand in this cold place, and not the soft slumber given by Stieg.
Stopping herself short of the steps down, the Drakenforged exhaled in length, a thick plume of vapor exuding from her nostrils and mouth. She took several more breaths and jumped up and down, literally shaking off the frosty grasp of the chilled air.
With no further hints of hesitation, she pressed downward, the sharp echo of her footsteps taking seconds to return to her, giving a grasp of just how titanic the craven wound in the earth had been.
Adira tugged out the conviction in her heart to crush her enemies down below, she finally understood the face of her enemy to be, the menace to the city whose foul sorceries were discovered just three days prior.
Moments more and Adira made her way to the end of the crude stairway, the bottom of the steps evened out into beaten down ochre soil and sparsely laid stones. Adira raised her shield and the lantern with it, pointing it about.
The cavernous expanse was supported by pillars made of the Aqueduct’s bricks, and the abyss itself was large and sparsely lit enough that she felt it hard to glean where the walls and ceiling were.
Ahead were many totems, their forms had been invisible from above, but they were well apparent now that they were before her: cruel, towering structures of cleverly piled bones and skulls rising out of the soil, blackened splatters between them marking where there had once been innards, used for mortar to bind the objects of dark worship.
Unlike the haphazard of architecture in the surroundings, these were well maintained, cared for. Adira reckoned that if the place were better lit when she viewed the room from above, the totems would have been arranged in some symbolic, eye-wrenching pattern, in reverence of the energies the enemy worshiped.
Still left without an enemy, Adira proceeded through the forest of totems until she reached the very center of the room.
Here was a tower unlike the others, rectangular and monolithic in structure and made of smoothly polished slabs of ebony stone. The monolith, as she could see it, was inscripted in an eye-aching and faintly phosphorescent red, the layers of plaster embossing upon the monolith symbols of an ancient, vast, and unknowable nature.
A moment of looking at the horrific thing made the back of Adira’s eyes throb, too long gave her a splitting headache. Even as she looked away and the pain ebbed, she couldn’t help but feel a chillingly cold sweat drip down her brow.
Just being in the presence of the strange monolith caused the Drakesworn to feel edgy and distracted, uncomfortable and unnerved even in the sanctity and calm of her stalwart armor, as if maggots had burrowed into her very flesh and begun crawling around.
Adira unclipped her mace from her belt in a single, swift motion.
- – — –— –— –— –——Δ——– —– —– —– — – -
A Memory
Guild Education Hall, The Order of the Fervent Meridian, Vaald
Eight Years Ago
Adira sat attentively at the front and center of a sparsely populated classroom, her face attentive, inquisitive, youthfully curious. Most seats in her vicinity were empty, and the other students sat toward the center or rear, more bored looking than anything else.
The lecturer, one Master Ferdinand Seppel, violently smacked a meaty palm upon a black box, startling more than one of the less attentive students. Adira could only grin.
“
NECROMANCY!” Seppel’s voice was harsh but passionate, the definitions of stern and commanding, “
The most vile of the cursed sorceries. To step on the blessings of Gnara, to deny Stieg’s slumbering companionship.” There was a pause. One trainee murmured a brief prayer. “
Now, someone tell me. Can just anyone commit the blasphemy of necromancy? Jenner?”
“
Yes!” Jenner snapped into attention at the calling of his name, Seppel raised his eyebrow. “
I mean no, Sir. To turn away from the blessings of the gods requires a severance from their light.” Jenner nervously recited what he remembered from the required reading, “
You swear dark oaths to fight the gods, and only Ashtus, in his humors, will show any mercies for the use of his power to reanimate the dead from their fragments.”
“
Good,” Seppel rasped, he tapped the box once more, rasping a meaty finger on a hinged clasp.
Adira raised her hand, and spoke upon Seppel’s nod, “
Master Seppel, I’m sure we’re eager to know what is in the box?”
“
Ah, Bat’Amira. Your curiosity is noted,” Seppel tapped the clasp once more and unlocked the box. Before he opened it, he fastened a Ward to his shoulder. Some students, Adira included, caught on and produced similar metal wards from their desks.
From inside he produced a skull. Fused into the bone was a metal mask, segmented at the jawbone and divided by cruel ripping teeth. On the mask were etched the symbols and figures of necromancy.
Immediately, the nose of an unwarded student spurted with blood, another began to retch, and yet another broke out into spontaneous prayers and litanies, looking away and quickly fastening their ward. Adira, unprotected but closest to the skull, lightly pinched her nose, a trickle of blood seeping between her thumb and forefinger. Primordial fear prickled the entire class.
“
Necromancy is an encroaching, corruptive darkness… Finish it.” he said.
Seppel looked at Adira expectantly, staring into her eyes, beckoning her to finish his statement.
Adira lost her smile and tried not to shrink away from Seppel’s scrutinizing gaze, “
By stitching together the vestiges of a body past any ability for Gnara to breathe life back into it once more, the sundered fragments are pieced together into a mockery of a living being,” she gulped, finding it hard to speak when under the fearful cursing aura of necromancy, “
Even after the necromancer has died, their very willpower and commands will linger after their death and bounce to the strongest of their servants, turning them into a Lich.”
Seppel smiled and nodded, very much pleased. The skull seemingly twitched and quivered in his hand, active in its undeath. He quickly placed it back in the box, to the relief of all those around. The instructor then looked at another student, “
And the only way to end the shambling curses of undeath?”
His gaze found a young Moritz, the boy grinned and spoke, “
You give ‘em a good smacking?”
“
Technically correct, Schmidt, and?”
Moritz struggled, hesitant, “
You destroy the masks of control, destroy the bindings of steel, and remove the symbols of power.”
Seppel cracked a smile. Moritz was a lazy one at the worst of times, but he had it in him to summon the courage and correct answers when needed.
He was right. For the undead, total purgation was the only answer.
- – — –— –— –— –——Δ——– —– —– —– — – -
Underneath Vaald,
Present
Adira’s mace sparked into life in her grip. Electricity bounced between the flanges, soft wisps of vapor rising from its energetic conversions of oxygen into ozone. Tendrils of lightning crept along the ground beneath her weapon.
She raised Moroa overhead, poised to strike at the cruel artifact in front of her. Blood wet her lips as it trickled down her nose, and her eyes wept for every moment she looked at the monolith. Hairline cracks began to form on the crystalline ward affixed to her pauldron.
One step forward, heel dug in, the other foot sank back to prepare for a powerful swing forward. Her body set itself in motion for the downward smash.
Then the singed smell of burnt flesh reached her nose and she was yanked backwards. Adira snapped her gaze behind her and managed to pull her weapon free from the
thing that grabbed it.
It was huge and armored, covered in sheets of battered and rusted metals, the plates all engraved with the same horrific and terrifying runes of a Necromancer’s hands. It towered above Adira, twice her height and thrice her width.
Strangely, it rasped breaths through its long-dead lungs. The tinnitus-sound of blood rushing was louder than before. Adira held fast to Moroa and braced her Voltaic Shield closer to her body.
“
How rude, for a guest to this honored garden to try to deface it.” the voice was omni-present, harmonious. It was as if a choir sung in unison, boring into the back of Adira’s skull. The creature in front of her moved its hinged metal jaw to the words, but the gruesome
thing was not the only one to talk to talk.
It mocked, its voice strangely different, for a moment, “
Aren’t mortals supposed to disfavor such unwarranted violence?”
The very air around Adira sighed, as if exasperated by her actions. She felt her innards churning within her involuntarily, disgust coursing through her mind. Fear of the abomination lightly prickled at the edges of her mind.
She fought back, humoring the towering Necromantic construct, “
And all the mortals your craven heresies have extinguished to create this? Back to the grave is the only answer, for your filth.”
It laughed, a raspy, hollow, a sickening and off-key chorus, “
The Gods train their pets well. What was it, ‘Respect Life and Honor Death’? A complete farce. I challenge their status quo with this most limitless of possibilities. A means to change their negligent rules, to make the mortal immortal and lead all of existence into true ascendancy.”
Another cackle, this time more lively, but all the more disgusting to Adira’s ears, “
True power. Revenge on the gods using the power of the gods. I could share this power, these gifts of my garden, you only need to beg.”
Adira took her turn now to laugh, she quoted a verse of one of her favorite books “
‘Give any man the power of a god, and you better hope he’s got the wisdom and morals of a god to match.’ Though honestly, I see nothing but pathetic filth playing at being a god. Ashtus would be disappointed at your wasted potential. I’m disappointed that a fellow mortal cursed Life for this measly ‘garden’ ”
“
How very disappointing,” again, that different voice. Again, the air sighed.
Adira adjusted her ward, sparks trickling between her hand and the crystals. Their hue changed and the cracks fused together. She bought herself some extra time to work without suffering the truly gut-wrenching effects of necromantic energy.
In response, the thrumming and hum in the air intensified in volume. All around, the skull totems began to shatter, hundreds and thousands of skulls clattering to the ground, and grotesque forms crawling out of the once neatly stacked mounds.
Their scent caught in Adira’s nose before their visages reached her eyes. The foul, sickeningly sweet stench of things that only took on a human’s form.
Hushed whispers played in her ears, low and clipped, in a language she knew was not that of the living. The veins inside her ears throbbed at the very sound.
Thirty, sixty, perhaps even one-hundred of the abominations surrounded her, in addition to the gargantuan copy of their form at their lead. They were abominations of melded flesh and bone, and grafted steel. Mockeries of the mortal form, created to be as vicious as they were obedient— the perfect soldiers, provided their master was fully willing to step on the graces of Gnara and risk the jealousy of Stieg to facilitate their creation.
Unlike the giant, they were unarmored and barely clothed, with only the additions of engraved steel struts jutting out of their extremities and the hinged metal masks protecting their faces and giving them motivation. Their movements were jerky, shambling, twitchy. A husky moan exuded from behind each of their masks, cold and without life.
Adira’s mace crackled with reinforced vigor, and she narrowed her eyes. They all moved in for the kill at once.
Snapping into motion, Adira swung her shield with a punch, instantly decapitating one of the beasts. She crushed its head underfoot like a child stomping on a bug. The lantern swung off its hook and she punted it into the face of the giant, staggering it backward.
The next three were taken out in a flash of voltaic energy, their arms extended to grab at Adira, to subjugate her and bring her down for a feast. Adira’s Voltaic Fortress zapped them into ashes and ozone.
She barreled forward into another, tackling it down with her shield and smashing its head with her mace. The crunch of metal against metal reverberated through the floor and lightning exploded out from her mace when it hit the ground. Several other ghouls were shocked, the tendrils of electricity arcing into their metal frames.
Adira took this chance and spun on her heel, the other foot tracing a circle in the ground. Several more heads were smashed in the violent pirouette.
Then suddenly, the air parted loudly and Adira looked at the source.
A gargantuan sword impacted against her, clanging into the plates protecting her inner shoulder with a veritable roar of sound. Sparks flew from the friction of the cleave and the inertia carried through Adira’s arm, chattering her teeth, shaking her bones, and knocking Moroa out of her grasp. The mace lifelessly clattered away on the floor.
The Ashtan armor creaked at the joints, and Adira struggled to stay on her feet. She raised her arm to grip onto the crude piece of metal, seeing that it was thick enough to sever a cow in twain.
Adira’s taxed muscles screamed at her in protest, and her gums whitened as she clenched her teeth. With a grunt, she managed to shrug off the crushing blade, using her shield to ensure that it slid from her shoulder without biting beneath her pauldron. The ground beneath fissured with hairline cracks and ochre dust puffed into the air as the impossibly large slab of metal bored into it.
She let out a frustrated bellow at the armored giant and charged, heedless of picking up her weapon in the distance. The Drakenforged barreled through two of the ghouls and reached the behemoth — Its mask seemed to be smiling, reveling at the violence.
By now it had recovered from its crushing swing. With deceptive speed it once again lifted its sword overhead and struck down at the woman, stomping at the same time. “
Stormclad and fleet of foot, I’m untouchable,” she whispered. Pieces of her armor disappeared into nothingness. Her legs and lower arms became unprotected, but she gained much in the way of speed.
Quickly, she sidestepped the giant’s stomp and smashed shield-first into its other leg, tripping it.
A storm of ochre dust billowed into the air. Then all the hairs on Adira’s body stood on end as electricity crackled below the beast. There was a small explosion at its shoulder, violently tossing it from its face and onto its back.
More lightning, a lance of plasma formed at the tip of Adira’s raised fingers. Like a soldier throwing a javelin, she threw the lance of energy at the gargant. It impacted with a loud zap and the sound of fusing metal and blood instantly evaporating into vapor in phreatic explosions. Around the beast, a few more of the ghoulkin exploded under the electric hammerblow. One expedient one had clambered over the beast, and melted into its white-hot armor for its efforts.
Still the beast howled, unfinished. Adira had missed the mask. With a ‘tch’ of dissatisfaction, she tapped the ground with her heel and a lightning zap tossed her mace to her hand magnetically. In the same motion of catching it, she punched off another ghoul’s head.
Adira marched forward, hopping up on top of the beast to stand on its chest, the searing hot metal not affecting her in the least. In protest, it wrapped its fingers around her in an instant, squeezing at the Drakenforged with the intent to crush her like an overripe fruit.
Adira’s eyes glowered a burning, magical crimson as she glared defiantly down at the giant’s mask. A truly terrifying frown carved itself across her lips, and she growled, “
For all that is living, desist”
The beast’s arms exploded in a shower of singed gore; useless, smouldering stumps fell to the side and a raspy sigh exuded from behind its mask. Adira’s mace glowed white hot, the power of a storm wreathing the head as a blinding white glow. She struck down and the beast’s mask and head turned into nothing but ashes. Finally, it ceased to move.
Finally, she hopped off of the dead beast. All the other ghouls seemed hesitant, even reverential. Adira was not going to be the facilitator of the stitched abominations’ completions. She was not prey to be consumed.
There was even a terrified yelp from one of the ghouls, before a clamor of tearing metal reached Adira’s ears. She turned around to hear something…
Someone flee at great speed. Behind her, the giant’s form was crumpling into itself, its flesh boiling into putrescence and a great hollow in its chest and armor making itself evident. Adira frowned again and struck at the monolith.
The strike was strangely metallic, like the clunk of a thin sheet of metal being punched through by an arrowhead. There was a hiss of sound and strange sparks flew out of the gaps between its constituent stonework.
That’s not normal. Adira thought, tilting her head.
She re-equipped the whole of her armor and started to run away, too.
- – — –— –— –— –——Δ——– —– —– —– — – -
The Serene Pools, Vaald,
Present Day
Moritz Schmidt ran through the streets, his face fearful and dried vomit caking his armor. It would have been a bit of a funny sight, had it not been the Lunar Festival, and had it not been for what he was crying: “
THE UNDEAD!!!” he yelled, “
UNDEAD BENEATH VAALD IN THE AQUEDUCTS!”
He reached a strange gathering near Belme and Gnara’s fountain. A short haired Half-Elf, an Asmerakan—there was a tail—so an Iath, two hooded figures of unknown race, and a human in green.
Moritz took a brief moment to catch his breath, mistaking the Half-Elf Druid for one of the local priestesses, “
Gnara… Gnara’s blessings are being blasphemed upon… Right… Haah.” Another moment, he held back from retching, this time from fatigue, “
Right underneath here.”
Strangely, he pointed straight down, “
Me, my wife, and another of our knightly order ran into them. Orders were to retreat and draw attention. When I got to the surface, I realized how close we were to these fountains…! Look, I know how terrifying Necromancy can be, but someone’s got t-”
Fortunately, most people had already left for the main festivities of the Lunar Festival.
The ground beneath the Serene pools shook violently, like a small earthquake were underway. Marble, granite, basalt, and other carefully laid brickwork buckled and suddenly exploded into the air, sending stones high into the sky to plummet into the ground.
An aftershock reverberated through the area, more intense than the last explosion. A pillar of light rose into the sky, followed by an awe-inspiring shockwave of force, knocking Moritz down, and a deafening roar smashed into the eardrums of everyone nearby.
It rained water and fragments of bone in an unreasonable and sudden downpour as the fountain and some of the surrounding pools detonated. Gnara and Belme’s statues barreled into the air before landing on the ground nearby, strangely intact.
Fear grasped at Moritz’s entire body. Were they already attacking? Was there going to be a battle for the city on this day of festivities?
The ground in a fifteen meter radius around the fountains gave way into a substantial crater, rubble and the skulls of mortals sat at the bottom, only a few measures deep.
An emaciated, rotten hand gauntleted by thin metals burst out from below the rubble, and a single ghoul crawled out from beneath. It was singed all across its form, with pieces of its body missing and fetid innards hanging out from its stomach cavity.
Nearby rest a small girl with her father, having been knocked down but not taken out by the explosion. The girl screamed and covered her eyes, crying, blood already rippling out of her nose. Her father seized up in horror, seemingly unable to move, wailing as he began to retch, writing on the ground from the sheer undiluted aura of the ghoul.
It seemed poised to strike, before there was a rush of air and a deep, guttural roar. The ground shook for a third time in a span of moments, dust and chips of stone pavement engulfed the child and parent. As it settled, they beheld a dragonkin, a wyvern wreathed in jet black scales as thick as an adult's arms.
The Wyvern roared again, a fetid liquid spurted gingerly from beneath one of its feet. The beast hopped off, disinterested with the wretched thing it just turned into glop, and made a stride to the crater where it nudged the rubble with its snout.
From within popped Adira from under the now reduced-layer of rocks atop her. She looked better for wear than most mortals would have any right to look. The Drakenforge slouched, a little, visibly weary from the fight she had just gone through. Her lips moved in an unknown whisper, and the majority of her armor shed itself into thin air; she brushed off some dust from her tunic and looked about herself.
For a moment, Adira looked up at the Wyvern and it gazed back, she seemed slack jawed, surprised. With a sigh, she waved it off as if it were a pest rather than a nearly divine creature. Surprisingly, Jouee obliged, plunging into the air with a great flap of its wings.
The familial pair from earlier were lifted from the cursed aura and crawled away with a small yelp of thanks to Adira and to the sky. They looked vacant, their minds already working to forget the sudden terror.
Adira, in the meanwhile, walked up to where the group was, locking eye contact with Moritz as she scratched her cheek, “
I uh… Dealt with the undead.”
Overhead, Jouee the Wyvern circled and performed acrobatics in the sky, seeming to do a curious and impatient sort of aerial dance.
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