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Perambulans in tenebris

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In Kingdom's Fall: Fantasy RP where the Dark Lord has won → 4 yrs ago Forum: Advanced Interest Checks
I'll put my interest down for this. I'm considering delving into the religious side of things across one or several of the kingdoms, likely with a character such as a church prelate or militant order magister (or both!). I'm also pondering some ties to the Darkwatch, given their "inquisitorial" slant and the fact that in fantasy settings religion and magic tend to be associated with each other, though I personally prefer the idea of the former stemming from the latter and not vice versa (people creating a religious doctrine to make sense of supernatural and enigmatic forces, as they do of the natural world, feels like a more interesting concept than magic being clearly sourced from some divine being). The Darkwatch being corrupt could be a hook for some shady politicking and theological skirmishes, either in Daigon's favour or otherwise.
In Into Perdition's Jaws → 4 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
Outskirts of Kerovnia
GES transport crash site
Status: Nominal

Fracture. In a matter of moments, the even sensation of motorized flight had given way to a chaos of pulsing lights, shuddering of yielding metal, dancing kaleidoscopic haloes of heat and a flotsam of sounds carried by the river of roaring wind. Through her thermosensitive faceted eyes, Zsresrinn saw the evenly orange-red form of their craft's pilot emerge into sight, then erupt into a blinding flash. The sight was bizarre and grotesque at once, large parts of the mangled body flaring up with unnatural heat even as its extremities began to cool in deathly patches. There was something mesmerizing in the sight of a body blasted by directed energy, but it was not that by now familiar, even trite, spectacle that occupied her thoughts. Ambush sprang into her mind, more as instinct than an articulate word. So much for the Gnosis Eaters' reputation. Sudden attacks and skirmishes were not outside the norm on Chalgheol. A dozen times the Carnazir and their allies had unexpectedly struck at columns and convoys she had been trudging along with, and a dozen times she had clung to her ground in jungles and ruined streets, hammering them down as they came. As for how many times the Leaguers had tried that, she had stopped counting long ago.

The Sect, however, and by extension this mission, were supposed to be different. How exactly, she had never been told in detail, though a single look at the sophisticated control systems in the cockpit, contrasted with her memories of battered and patched-up hardware among Zrovreni and Dolsilvec alike, spoke volumes. All the same, what she understood well enough was that the unknowns should only begin once they were on-site. A disruption now meant the Sect had either failed at the secrecy that was supposed to have always been its staple, or else that its vaunted neutrality was really just for show. Being caught in the middle of it, she did not like the idea of either.

No time to think about that now. Warnings flashed, and she felt the ground grow closer. Armour plates spreading about the circumference of her body, Zsresrinn folded in her limbs, gathering on herself like a living spherical cocoon.

Impact.

Jolted out from the wrecked cabin, she rolled across the forested ground, tearing down shrubs and flattening fungal growths as she went. Her armour followed her movements like a set of legs, shifting and adjusting to bear the brunt of the collisions, until she finally came to a stop against a massive, craggy old trunk. She cautiously probed about her innards with nervous tendrils. The evzredigor core within her was almost crystalline in its semi-material fragility, and as she felt around it a sudden fear of deepening any damage caused the by the impact made her hesitate. No need. Everything was in place, shielded by the many layers of flesh and chitin veined with its thin, cool roots. Only once she was satisfied of this did she scan her own body proper, pushing herself up onto her hindlegs as she did. Some muscular strains, some ruptured minor vessels. Nothing permanent-

"- GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE -"

Just as well.

She felt the arcing energy shots cut through the sky before she heard them, distant currents of superheated air rippling and crashing against her feelers. Off in the distance, shapes were moving, closing in. Maybe humanoid; certainly too many. The questions of who they were or why they had staged the attack did not occur to her - the enemy, that was enough to know for the moment. Rearing herself up, Zsresrinn raised a pair of overlapping carapace plates beneath her eyes, exposing the flesh beneath. The grey mass twisted and rippled, shaping itself into an extruding rectangular barrel of fibrous, bark-like matter. Inhale, track, fire. The spineblaster spat its sharp-tipped projectile with a wheezing pop, like a whale exhaling after a deep dive. It was unlikely to hit anything at that distance, but a warning shot to slow the assailants in their tracks was the best she could do now.

"If you can hear me, get into cover!"

Zsresrinn half-spun about, turning a set of eyes away from the treeline and back towards the wreckage of the aircraft. Her team - her fellow agents in this, at any rate - was already dispersing. She caught a glimpse of the Nova operative's massive heat signature heading off, followed by the muted, fading traces of one of the 'hangers. The one who had spoken, the power-armoured human, was digging in at the impact site. She snapped her mandibles. The broken hull was unlikely to survive a bombardment like the one that was being aimed at them.

"Move out," she half-rasped, half-chittered through a secondary vocalizer, carefully modulating her breath to match the alien vertebrate speech rhythm, "Unsafe here. Better regroup."

Without waiting for a response, she set off into the thick of the jungle, crawling over the undergrowth in long, measured steps. Comms were down, probably jammed; there was no telling where most of the group had ended up; the enemy heavily controlled the area; choosing any single direction to follow was a matter of blind luck as much as anything else...

But it was the best she had now, and it would have to do.
In Into Perdition's Jaws → 4 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
In Empire of the Dead → 4 yrs ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay
An excellent post! I just have to give some compliments to your writing too, friend.

While I'm here I'll give everyone an update on my own status too. I have a post well underway and Lauder's in there with Razzak making his first appearance too. I thought we were getting close to finished and just had some dialogue left to iron out, but it might be a bit longer yet because I think I'll be making some heavy revisions to bring my depiction of things more in line with your worldbuilding. I'll have to make the weather nastier, all the ghouls more inhuman, and everything just that much more unnatural and grotesque or it just won't fit in with the theme.


Thankee!

Don't feel like you need to change too much on my account. After all, Comiriom is a dumping ground for the older and more decayed ghouls, so it would stand to reason that those in most other places would appear less grisly and more humanlike in contrast, being still less degenerated from their original forms. As for the weather, that could easily be explained by it being closer to Necron and the emanations of Eagoth's power.

Leria is a wide land, and I don't think it would be a problem if people added their own atmospheric touches to different corners of it.
In Empire of the Dead → 4 yrs ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay
Comiriom, Charnel Citadel


The day was grim, heavy and damp like a shallow burial. A grey sky hung low over the earth, as though the heavens had been drained of their depth and colour and replaced by an indistinct void of impenetrable fog and faded clouds. Everything overhead seemed to meld together into a dim haze, faintly luminescent, yet not so strongly that one could have guessed that a sun still shone somewhere above it. The land had been smothered by a funereal shroud, and so it seemed to have always been, for years and decades. Every day here was the same choking grey mist, every day was eternal dusk with no dawn. All that broke this dreary monotony were the abyssal starless nights that plunged the world into even deeper darkness, and the coming and going of rain, though of late the sky had been weeping more and more often.

So it was that day. Large, murky drops hammered down mercilessly, dissolving the loose earth into a morass of clinging mud. The road was paved, but its flagstones had been knocked loose long ago, chipped away by time, cracked and worn out and never replaced. The muck flooded the many crevices, large and small, oozed onto the stones’ surface, making it viscous and slippery, splattered over the feet and legs of those who trod on them. Gaping puddles churned with every step, sending up splashes of filthy water to meet the falling rain.

The caravan did not seem concerned. It trudged ahead, oblivious to the scorn of the elements, its many feet stumbling among the battered flagstones, but never falling. Most of the figures that marched in its files made no effort to even cover their heads from the downpour, and if there had been anyone nearby to see them, it would have been clear why. The half-bare skulls mottled with rags of rotting skin, the purulent blotches of bare flesh, the verminous sores and missing eyes betrayed them as belonging to the ranks of the living dead. Nuisance, cold and illness were no more known to them than the vital breath and pulse of blood, nor was fatigue, for they forged wordlessly ahead under the burdens of chests and caskets without a word or a faltering in their step. Some were even bound like mules to the procession’s wagons, filled with reeking draped mounds.

Those were few, however, for the place of beasts of burden was allotted to even ghastlier beings. Neither quite human nor horse, the things that pulled the heaviest loads were a cacophony in the flesh, agglutinated forms of mankind forced, crushed even, into moulds between the bestial and the fiendish. They had limbs that were like mangled arms and legs knitted together at the very bone, leather and dried skin holding its putrid flesh and sinews tied, ending in hooves that were knee-bones flattened with chisels. Their flanks were ribcages drawn open, bloody pulp and decomposing entrails visible through their gaps, strewn in apparently haphazard order yet painstakingly sewn together at the seams. Their heads were vile masks fashioned with hands, stomachs, teeth, dull and witless eyes staring out of them at the most unlikely and unsettling angles. Ghoulish attendants led them with weathered cords and chains, as though they could hardly see where they were dragging their charges and their own carcasses.

The convoy crawled between flat, empty expanses of desolate land, following the winding road like a sluggish barge floating down a grey river. Here and there, a skeletal tree stood in the rank wastes, but there was no other sign that anything had ever been alive there, that it had not always been a land of the dead. At length, however, after what might have been days of unceasing, tireless travel, traces of motion began to break through the fog and rain at their sides.

Dark shapes crept about in the murk, some almost level with the soil, others striding high as if on stilts. As their numbers thickened the further the caravan went, it became clear why. Throngs of ghouls toiled in swampy fields, dragging about tilling tools or pulling ploughs in mobs, and each of them was mangled and deformed in some way. Some had no legs, or indeed anything below their torsos that was not a ragged wound, and clawed at the mud to pull themselves forward, rakes tied to what remained of their spine. Others had no arms, and they shuffled ahead of ploughs like bound beasts. Others yet had their limbs replaced by wooden poles tied to or driven through exsanguinated stumps, and stirred the ground by clumsily dragging them in lines.

Yet these hellish crowds thinned as the convoy advanced further yet, and a new terror came into sight. It could as yet hardly be seen through the rain and mist, but the terminus of the road began to rise on the horizon, a phantom slowly gaining shape as it emerged from the earth. Now its beheaded towers loomed high, no parapets or standards to crown them, like ancient rotten teeth; now its eviscerated walls coalesced from the surrounding grey, the wounds they had borne from the conquest of the shambling hordes no more healed than those of its unliving masters; now its once-magnificent estates unveiled their squalor as their bareness shone through their still imposing size.

Comiriom, the dead city, awaited the yield of another graveyard to sate its endless hunger.

The caravan passed through the collapsed gates, its hinges rusted and empty, the mighty statues flanking it corroded and faceless. There were no guardians to bar its way, for who would enter those walls expecting anything other than ruin? Within, a silent animation haunted the streets, like a vicious parody of the life that had once flourished in them. Mutilated ghouls hurried about, hefting bodies barely recognisable as human with their broken hands and gnarled arms. More of the revolting beasts pulled carts of corpses, barrels and, sometimes, large clay amphors. Now and again, hulking shapes would shamble by - grotesque things with animalistic postures, loping on arms that had once been whole torsos like apes or toads.

In silence, without heeding the chaos of forms that surrounded it, the cortege made its way through plazas and courtyards, all barren and despoiled, yet perhaps even busier than they had been when the city truly lived, towards the towering bulk of a crumbling edifice. One of its walls had been torn down outright, and the ghouls passed directly into the hall within. It was a husk as barren as its exterior, its whole impressive size emptied of anything but dust and its high ceilings, once frescoed, black with dripping mould. A great circular pit had been roughly dug in its center after uprooting the paved floor, and a cloud of flies to rival the ones covering the sky buzzed above it, drawn by the vile stench of decaying meat. More ghouls idled about it, oblivious to the bloated insects touching down on them and nibbling at their exposed gashes.

Acting as of one mind, the caravan-bearers began to discharge their trove directly onto the ground. Caskets were loosely stacked as unwieldy dead claws would allow. The flesh-beasts were turned about, not without effort as their bloated forms slammed into one another in graceless motion, and the contents of their wagons - more and more bodies, already mouldering, many but a confused head of bones with some tatters clinging to it - were crudely shoved down.

No sooner had the bearers finished unloading their bounty and begun to amble their way out of the hall than the expectant ghouls finally stirred from their posts and converged onto the disorderly mounds. With mindless diligence, work was joined. The undead sifted through the macabre wealth, shoving the corpses to various sides in masses distinguished by their state of corruption. Those that were little more than a slimy mass, of which there were a great many, were hurled into the pit, where they fell with a splattering sound that gave a sinister hint of how deep the well of liquescent decay must truly have been. Loose bones were flensed, limbs were assembled together like oats after a harvest.

Although it seemed there was nothing in the grisly piles but filth and ancient gore, it was a wholly inadvertent motion that revealed otherwise. An ungainly shove by one of the ghouls pushed a decomposed skull to the ground, opening a gap in one of the heaps, and something fell alongside it, clattering lightly and glistening with a flash of light that cut through the dank penumbra. The ghoul stooped down and picked something off the ground, and when it rose, the light rose with it. A soft amber glow radiated from its hand, though there was no such luminescence about that could have been reflected. Transfixed in its simple mind, the ghoul stood and stared, incapable of tearing its eyes away from its strange find.

“What is that you have there?”

A dry, rasping voice from a darkened corner broke through the shuffling and squelching, and a tall, lanky figure emerged into the center of the hall. Its body was, though not much better preserved than those of the ghouls, for the most part intact, save for patches of skin eaten away by rot, and covered in old ragged robes. Some strands of faded overgrown hair even remained dangling from the top of its head. The revenant crossed over the chamber in a few long strides and snatched the ghoul’s find away from its clutch, bringing it close to his own crusty eyes.

It was a rare thing indeed, even among once opulent walls. A slender golden chain held a tear-shaped precious pendant, a thing of exquisite craft whose likes had rarely been seen in Leria since the Necromancer’s conquest. Yet it was not the pendant itself that immediately sprang to the eye, but the large amber gemstone in its center. It was unmistakable that it shone with an inner light of its own, one that could have no natural source; and as the revenant held it, he could feel, more as a thought than a sensation in his dead skin, perhaps, but feel nonetheless, that a warmth and a strength resided within it. It was difficult to describe, or even name, what manner of might that was, but it was certain that it was potent, and that, like a snake tightly coiled on itself, it awaited release after who knew who many centuries of entombment.

Without so much as another word to the ghoul, who, deprived of its distraction, returned to its task as though nothing had happened, the revenant jolted back, tearing away his gaze from the jewel with an effort, and, thrusting it into the cover of its robes by some half-living intuition, hurried through the breach in the wall and out into the street. With the same long, half-striding and half-scurrying steps, he made his way among the monstrous throngs of Comiriom. Once, without so much as looking who the horrors around him at that moment were, he barked out “Where is the master?”, and a few withered hands were raised to point the way. Weaving among the lumbering crowds, he made his way to what had once been a barracks, and now stood as little more than a dilapidated shell, with a gate awning like a toothless mouth.

Inside, it was dim and grimy, but eerily silent. Few dared approach the hideous Harvester of Flesh if they were not driven by some pressing errand, and for a moment the revenant hesitated, nightmarish visions of his master’s ire at being distracted from his work coursing before him. But the thought of rewards and a better post than watching over that dreary chamber - perhaps he would even be sent to Necron itself! - rose over them, and he dove into the shadows. Winding and dirty corridors brought him past hallways and courtyards, and at last into a large room in one of the building’s wings.

There, in the unsteady light of a handful of torches, a gigantic figure stood hunched over a table against the far wall. The table itself was one such that many men could have sat around it at once, yet even it seemed dwarfish before the colossus. His skin was stretched tight over his fantastically large body, so much so that underneath its unnatural construction could be seen. The strands of flesh were not laid over the bones, whatever horrors those might have been, but tied and woven among themselves like cords in ropes, giving the nauseous impression of knotted worms writhing below the giant’s hide whenever he moved. At his left hand, a pair of ghouls had just hauled in a cart of dismembered limbs from a side entryway that gave on a courtyard, and the behemoth fingers, each almost as thick as a forearm, were carefully feeling the ones on top.

The revenant hesitantly scraped a bony foot against the floor, and, heavily, the monster turned about to look at him. The mouthless, noseless face could betray no feeling, but there was a menacing glint in the arid eyes when Ghural spoke in an inhumanly deep voice issuing from somewhere in his throat.

“Yes? What is it, maggot?”

Beckoned by an immense hand, the revenant edged closer. Even greed was now hardly enough to bring him forward, but it was too late to draw back.

“I have found this in the latest haul, master.” He held up the jewel, and under its unexpected glow Ghural’s enfleshed sockets twitched, trying to wince with absent lids. “There is a power inside - an enchantment, no doubt. The Great Necromancer will want to-”

A cavernous growl interrupted him. The hand came forward, and he surrendered his prize with just a twinge of regret. As long as he held it, he felt as though he could bargain as he better pleased, though being in the Harvester’s presence had strongly dampened that.

“An enchantment, you say,” Ghural rumbled, raising the pendant closer to his eyes, but still quite far away. “Who else has seen it?”

“No one but the ghouls.”

The glint in the desiccated eyes grew into a wicked flare, though it was no doing of the jewel’s light.

“And the Great Necromancer will not see it either.”

The giant hand darted forth again, far quicker than it would have seemed possible, and in a single motion closed around the revenant’s head in an iron grip, crushing his skull to paste with incredible strength. As the decapitated body collapsed, Ghural motioned to the ghouls, and they impassively began to pull it apart and stick its pieces into the cart. In a few moments, all that remained of it save a bloody stain was gone, its remains indistinguishable among scores of others. The Harvester returned his gaze to the jewel, though still avoiding looking into the gem in its center directly.

No, the Great Necromancer need not know. Whatever uses he would draw from this bauble were beyond Ghural’s imagination, little versed in matters of incantation, but what was clear enough to him was that not much would come of it for him. But if he could get this to someone, living or dead, who both knew its value and would trade evenly for it; if it could earn him a prize from the far mainland, of rare salves, devised by minds who cared still for living flesh, that could be turned to incredible works of reconstitution; then… Who would say that his works would not in time surpass those of Eagoth himself, in their many forms and their magnitude? Yes, the Necromancer Lord would do well to be wary of what he could accomplish with such a bargaining bit in his hands. He would need to act fast, and in secrecy.

And for such things, he knew, the Whisperer was the best recourse.
In Empire of the Dead → 4 yrs ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay
All the Revenants Major probably have custom-made Dead Sea warforms made specifically for them to bind to. Do we have an takers on that front?


Ghural would absolutely have one as an additional dumping ground for rotten charnel.

On another note, expect a post from me tomorrow.
In Into Perdition's Jaws (Lost Behind Enemy Lines - SciFi/Action/Suspense) → 4 yrs ago Forum: Casual Interest Checks
I'd be lying if I said I don't adore the roster of outlandish aliens here (fungoids and invertebrates hit some of my soft spots), and the thought-out political and occult background is certainly a plus. I'll be keeping an eye or a few on this.
In Empire of the Dead → 4 yrs ago Forum: Advanced Roleplay
In Empire of the Dead - a spooky Nation Roleplay in time for Halloween → 4 yrs ago Forum: Advanced Interest Checks
In Empire of the Dead - a spooky Nation Roleplay in time for Halloween → 4 yrs ago Forum: Advanced Interest Checks
Necron sounds intriguing, I'd be interested in hearing more about meatworking and what it can do. Is it a sort of ghoulish surgery, binding corpses into a shape that can be reanimated, or can it also achieve more outlandish crafts such as Frankenstein-esque body constructs?
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