Jocasta sat up suddenly as she realized Beren was awake. Her hand unconsciously drifted to her stomach and she yanked them away guiltily. Once she had reached Iskura she had gone directly to the Mayor to deliver the letter. That worthy had been grateful for word from his southern counterpart, grateful enough to pay them, allow them to stay in his manor and to send for a physician. The doctor, an unbelievably ancient man with thick horn rimmed glasses had examined Beren for nearly a half an hour, poking and prodding at him without finding any fault beyond ‘exhaustion’. Exhaustion he told her, could be easily cured with bed rest and a bland diet, and was beneath the notice of so esteemed a personage as himself. With Beren in bed Jocasta had retired to clean herself up. It was only then that she had found it. The glyph appeared like a tattoo circling her belly button and dropping down over both hips in a series of sinuous lines and arcane symbols. She hadn’t had time to decode it as yet, but its meaning was plain. She was bound to the demonic entity that she had accidently summoned. It had power over her and could reach into the world through her. It might even have its claws in her soul. The thought made her shiver. Nothing she had ever heard about bargains with demons ended with ‘and then she lived happily ever after.’ Perhaps if she had been brave like Beren, or smart enough to flee before the thing attacked, things might be different.
“We… we managed to get away,” Jocasta told him, somewhat unnecessarily. “I was able to use the sarong to get us out of there, even though I admit it was a bit of a longshot.” None of that was technically untrue, though she felt a knot form in the pit of her stomach as she said it.
“Your wounds weren’t as bad as they seemed, I was able to use a healing charm to fix the worst of it, and the mayor was kind enough to provide us with a doctor, he gave you a potion which took care of the rest,” she told him. The potion had been a simple tonic and about as magical as a shovelful of dirt, but there seemed no reason to stress that at this juncture.
“He says you will be ok, so long as you rest,” she finished in a rush.
The sorceress trembled visibly as the door ground open. Beyond the portal was a large chamber that all but dripped with greenery. Its human origins were clear, in the center stood a column carved with strange mythological scenes which showed men in archaic armor speaking with strange creatures with many arms. In early panels they traded and exchanged knowledge, but as the column rose the panels became increasingly violent. Bas-relief axes split strange heads, and many armed figures used odd wavy knives to strike down their opponents. A stair wound four times around the tapering monolith before reaching its point, from which shone a jewel of clear silver moonlight. If the frieze told a coherent story, it was lost in the odd vegetation that obscured nearly every inch of stonework. Pale green moss grew on the column, across the floor of the chamber grew trees with soft purple leaves with opalescent bark. Fruits hung from their branches, deep black but oily looking and reflective. The soft buzz of unfamiliar insects polluted the night. The trees grew so thickly and the ropey intestine like vines which linked them hung in such profusion, that the walls of the chamber were all but invisible, save for the arabesque windows through which the light of the nearly full moon shone. Around these stone wrought openings the vegetation glowed with more than moonlight, seeming to pulse and throb with an internal phosphorescence which faded a few feet beyond the reach of the light.
“What magic is this,” Amal breathed as he stepped across the threshold. Sythemis stood frozen beneath the door arch, her mouth slightly agog. The first sign of true shock she had thus far shown.
“Come on woman, it was you who told me we must hurry,” Amal hissed. His words seemed to snap her back to reality and she stepped through in his wake, her face filled with an eager hunger that any man would die to see on the face of a courtesan. They moved across the moss, brushing passed the strange foliage. Each touch seemed to puff perfume into the air, an odd scent like cinnamon on the verge of burning, or the desert before a storm.
It came out of the trees without so much as a whisper of air to precede it. A vast black shape that arched through the air in eerie silence. It struck Sythemis and sent her crashing into the undergrowth with a flash of claws and a spray of blood. It landed and rounded on Amal, quick as a serpent. It was a vast black catlike beast, with membraneous flesh stretched between its forepaws and its mid section. Its face was a mass of scar tissue where six eyes had been gouged or burned with hot irons. Its four nostrils projected far forward like the snout of a vole and then quivered and flexed with fine hairs. Blind it might be, but it could clearly sense its surroundings by more than natural means. The thing was the size of a small bear for all the lethal stealth with which it moved. Blood dripped from its forepaws as it opened its mouth, revealing four rows of needle sharp teeth, none of which quite aligned with the others. Letting out a soundless roar that Amal felt in his stomach, it launched itself towards the thief, its jaw hyperextending.
I slowly let up on the emotional baffle I was holding on the Thunder Warrior. It's mind was not human in the conventional sense, even less so than an astartes although I was yet to encounter those particular servants of the Emperor. The rage and confusion of the Thunder Warrior was understandable, if monstrous and dangerous, the psychic backwash however was less so. In the Thunder Warriors mind I saw the Emperor. Not the Emperor as the god I had always thought of him as but as a man, a mighty man certainly, but no more divine I was. It was a shocking revelation to be sure, but not one I had time to unpack right at that moment. Those few moments of contact would have profound repercussions for my own belief and my relationship with the Ordos, but that remained in the future.
"Let's go," Hadrian said and lead the way out of the strange chamber. I briefly considered trying to free the archaic ecclesiarch but dismissed the notion. I felt like I was in enough spiritual peril as it was. No doubt if we prevailed the Ordos would take care of the rest. We ascended via sloping ramps, steps apparently not being part of the xenos architectural style. Almost at once we came across bodies. Most were our men, some pierced through by impossibly sharp bayonets, one unfortunate was severed neatly in half from crown to crotch, apparently having materialized half inside a wall. I could feel the psychic tug of what was going on above, a queasy sort of discomfort as someone picked at the edges of the Immaterium. The greenish veins of the structure were beginning to take on a purplish undertone which made my skin crawl.
"There is someone..." I began, sensing a presence ahead of us, but before anyone could act a PDF trooper leaped from cover and aimed his lasgun at us. He froze in place at the sight of the Thunder Warrior, his lip quivering and his finger frozen on the trigger.
"He is with us," Hadrian called, though whether he was addressing the guardsman or the superhuman I wasn't sure.
"Sir," the PDF trooper replied, he attempted to sling his rifle but made a mess of it, giving up and going for a patrol carry.
"Follow and provide rearguard," Hadrian directed, grabbing the man by the jacket and shoving him back past the Thunder Warrior and myself. We found a half dozen more troopers as we climbed, four of them Imperial guard who had been in the last stages of bludgeoning on of the metal men to scrap when we had arised. The sergeant, a grizzled man with a cigar between his teeth and a glowing augmented eye turned to watch us approach.
"Emperor's balls, what the frak is that?" he demanded when the Thunder Warrior strode into view. The golden armored warrior drew himself up, somehow becoming even more intimidating.
"I am Lucius Raj," the creature rumbled as though declaring he were the tide.
"Good to know," the sergeant replied in an offhanded tone, though I could see that the tip of his cigar was quivering.
Jocasta's mouth worked in mute shock for a moment as she stared at Beren's bleeding body. Her hands trembled in shock as she quivered between the desire to reach for a weapon and the desire to try to do something for Beren. He had seemed so invincible, her mind couldn't quite reconcile the fact that he now lay broken on the floor.
"Well?" the Outsider prompted, tapping its oddly sharp fingernails impatiently.
"Yes! Yes! Save him!" Jocasta blurted, finally managing to scramble down and press her hand to the wound, blood seeping between her fingers with alarming rapidity.
"My help isn't free mortal," the Outsider cautioned, "I will extract a price."
"Whatever," Jocasta snapped, "I'll do whatever it is, just save him!"
The demon thing reached out and touched Jocasta on the stomach. A sickly white light blasted out from its fingertips and Jocasta felt a searing pain burning in her chest as though liquid fire were being pumped into it. She staggered back, choking back bile. Light poured from her eyes, and mouth, it shone from beneath her fingernails. Somehow the light was poluting, like swimming through slime.
"Now, use your puny mortal magic," the outsider instructed.
"H..how, I don't know any healing magic," she protested. The Outsider scoffed.
"You have no need of your petty incantations, simply will it to be done, if your will is strong enough you will accomplish it. If not, I have no need of you as my servant." Trying not to think of what 'my servant' might mean. Jocasta placed both hands on Beren and shouted, pouring all her fear and terror into the scream. To her utter amazement, the wounds knitted closed. Not all at once, but over several nauseating seconds, even the spilled blood seemed to be attempting to flow back into Beren's veins before the congealing tissue blocked its ingress. Beren took a shuddering breath but didn't open his eyes. The creature chuckled.
"It is a shame to part you so soon, but you will return with me to my realm. A foolish bargain mortal," the creature laughed. Jocasta gripped Beren with one hand and her sarong with the other.
"You think your puny mortal arts are a match for me?" it scoffed. Jocasta grinned bloodlessly, then forced the last ounce of demonic magic into the sarong and she and Beren vanished in a cloud of slightly sulforus smoke.
_____
It was cold when Jocasta came to. Beren was laying atop her, still unconcious, though she could feel his heart beating against her. Beyond his hair she could see a star field, which was a good sign because she had only a vauge hope of reaching the surface when she had overcharged her sarong.
"Not as much fun when you land in my lap," she complained, straining to shove Beren off her. Eventually she managed to shift him and sit up. She was in a snow bank beside a road. In the distant lights glittered from beyond a pallisade and she could smell woodsmoke on the air. Someone let out a startled shout and a horse neighed. Jocasta turned her head to see an old man with a one horse cart filled with firewood.
"Where in the Evergod's Grace did you come from?" he demanded querellously, a long white beard bristling. He had a wrinkled face with a bulbous nose and a battered blue hat with a broad brim. Jocasta touched her stomach which still burned.
"You know, I can't really remember the name of the town," she admitted.
"Is your friend ok?" the old man asked as his eyes shifted to Beren and narrowing in concern.
"I don't really know," Jocasta said, standing up and trying to drag Beren to his feet. He gave a pained grown.
"You are just a font of information," the old man said as he climbed down and came over to them. He hoisted Beren up and peeled back on of his eyelids.
"Well we better get him inside before he freezes to death," the old man opined, and helped Jocasta drag him to the cart. Sweating and heaving they managed to get Beren into an uncomfortable position in the back of the wagon.
"Welcome to Iskura," the old man said as he got back on the bench of the wagon. Jocasta climbed up beside him and sagged exhausted against the chair. The old man clucked and snapped his reigns and the old draft horse began to clatter over the icy road towards the gate.
I think I am down to one current RP partner, so I am entertaining picking up another RP!
Please DM me if you are interested. And don't feel constrained to my plots- I am happy to consider more than what I have listed here. If you have a burning desire for a story you haven't found an appropriate partner for, but think I could be a good fit, let me know! The most important thing to me really is communication and someone who will stick around past the first few posts.
The Lead In - Eleanor and Mal are racing to reach Emmaline having learned that the enemy is planning to murder her at home.
The ring at the door bell surprised Emmaline. There were few callers out here and fewer still at this late hour. She snapped her fingers and the wooden spoon which had been stirring the cookie dough, quite independent from her input, quivered and stopped, then toppled to hit the metal rim of the bowl with a soft thump. There were lights out on the driveway, a pair of cars. A soft knot of worry that Eleanor had been hurt coalesced in her stomach. The doorbell rang again and she walked across to foyer and opened the heavy wooden door, wiping dust from her hands to her apron. A stern looking man in a cheap suit stood in the doorway. He smelled of bleach and cologne.
“Dr Stern,” he began, a trifle hesitantly, perhaps surprised that the woman he had come to find was stained with drywall cement and had her hair pulled up behind a bandana with the words ‘something wicked’ written across it.
“Ja,” she responded, attempting to look around outside. It was dark and the rain was already coming down, but she saw other men out there, similarly dressed, white teeth and rolexes glinting.
“Dr Emma Stern?” he repeated. Emmaline narrowed her eyes slightly, beginning to grow agitated.
“Yes,” she responded again. Something was wrong, but these didn’t seem like police or anyone from the Group.
“Emma Stern,” the man repeated, a self satisfied grin flashing across his face, ugly and cruel. There were others out there, many others, she realized, spreading out in a wide half circle around the door.
“Thrice I name you and bound!” he declared. And she felt the surge of will as he reached out to seize her arm.
Eleanor felt the psychic death scream as Mal gunned the Lexus onto the gravel roadway, fish tailing wildly to keep control at over sixty miles an hour in the driving rain. It hit her deep in the gut, doubling her up in a wail of grief and loss. They were too late. It was over.
“It dosen’t mean…” Mal began, risking a glance from the road at her that nearly put them into an oak tree. He heaved at the wheel keeping them on all four wheels more by luck than skill, ripping away a vast section of the hanging spanish moss that hung from the trees. Before she could reply another death scream sounded. Then another.
“What the..” Mal began, not as attuned to the entropic feedback as Eleanor was but still able to sense something. They bumped up over the slide ridge and looked down into the hollow to the house. They could see two parked SUVs lights painting the front of the house, a figure in the doorway lit by the merry hearthlight. The lights sucked out and the air fluoresced with green white corposant. Eleanor felt a terrible draw of entropy pulling at every atom of her body, energy rushed in towards the house like a giant drawing its breath, like the tide rushing away at full slack. The lights shattered in showers of explosive sparks that hung in the air like fireflies and the roof exploded upwards with a shattering report. A pillar of white gold fire rose thirty feet into the air, the concussion of its creation blowing the walls of the mansion apart like thistle in a hurricane. The force of it literally picked up both SUVs and hurled them away like childrens toys. Two more death screams, so close and loud that Eleanor could taste the sheer terror of them.
“Stop!” she screamed at Mal, who was too transfixed to have responded with anything other than a slackening in his suicidal acceleration. There was no time to explain Eleanor grabbed the hand brake and yanked hard. The Lexus slewed sideways and turned over, spinning once in the air before slamming into the side of a tree. The airbags blew, screaming open with the horrible scent of burning superglue and hammering both of them back into their seats. The entropic detonation came a heart beat later. Everything within a hundred meters of the house died. Birds were struck from the sky, worms died in the earth, bacteria burst their cell walls and expired, every tree and plant withered and crumbled to ash in an instant. All that death sucked in towards the house like a backdraft snuffing a fire. The sound of it shattered the crazed windows of the lexus with its sheer volume. Eleanor’s pistol cracked, sounding tinny and attenuated. The airbag deflated as the bullet punctured it and she pulled her way free by sheer force of will, falling out of the car and onto the muddy road side, pulling herself towards the house on all fours. Pieces of masonry and broken ceiling tiles rained down all around her . Something struck the side of the Lexus and bounced to a stop a few feet from her. It was a human hand severed at the wrist, three fingers burning like candles. The rolex watch on the wrist whired as the hands spun crazily backwards as the very rules of reality were ripped apart.
The light was incredible.
Emmaline stood atop the pillar of flame, her clothing burned away, her nude form shining with the luminous power she was channeling. Nothing in the universe produced as much raw chaos as the destruction of a human mind, and a practitioner, as all thirteen men down there certainly were, were an order of magnitude more potent. Emmaline had snuffed out five minds in the space of a few heart beats, main lining the raw chaos like a light filament that suddenly surged with a billion volts. She blazed with a radiance that would have shamed a magnesium flare, every detail of her burning itself into Eleanor’s mind, even from a quarter of a mile away. It was terrible to behold that light. It was more than physical, more than mystical, they very stuff of creation ripped asunder and forced into the world. It was the ruinous brilliance of primordial magic and chaos, the horrible illumination that men of old had tried to hold back with the black sabbats of the Magna Mater. It was the soul shattering terror which had torn the name of Ishtar from the throats of Mesopetamian farmers, the incredible destruction which had piled the stones in temples to Shiva and Kali-ma in the Indus Valley. It was the atomic annihilation which had burned shadows into the stone at Hiroshima. It was the racial memory of shepherds who had imagined the first words of creation from the lips of their vengeful God. Let. There. Be. Light. Three of the surviving men died instantly, their minds simply abraded away by what they were seeing. Eleanor could feel their terror and their horror, feel the shape of Emmaline’s blazing form burning their retinas, seared into their minds even as the flesh of their faces ran slick and their optic nerves blazed like guttering candle wicks. Her sanity shivered on the edge of the rushing storm of entropy.
“What the fuck…” Mal breathed. It saved Eleanor’s life, the voice pulling her soul from the blazing existential inferno to look at him. She could see nothing but his shape, black and gray and glittering with visual purple, over layed with the searing image of Emmaline, reflected by that light in his own eyes. She forced herself to turn back. Explosions rippled around the sorceress as hydrogen atoms split from their oxygen partners, only to explosively recombine a moment later. Everything was burning, rock and bone blazed with gorgeous metallic color that seemed drab and boring compared to Emmaline. Another man died, the psychic scream this time more like a sigh of relief. Somehow the man before Emmaline stood his ground, surrounded by a quarter mile of utter blasted ruin. Both of his arms were raised as he screamed a chant that was inaudible over the cacophonous booms and the keening scream of the light itself. He was sucking in power from his surviving coven members, a lethal amount if their lifetimes hadn’t already been measured in moments. With awful majesty, the transfigured form of Emmaline looked down at the chanting man, the first motion it had made since it lifted onto its pillar of witchfire. In the days to come Eleanor and Mal would dispute what happened next. To Eleanor it sounded only like a pure and terrible note of sound, like the chime of some great bell that spoke of the doom of the world and the entropic death of the universe. Mal had a simpler and less poetic recollection. A simple and unadorned word in Emmaline’s voice, audible clearly across a quarter mile of shattered broken hell. Burn. And burn they did. The four surviving practitioners ignited like propane flames, their bodies blasting appart like hammer struck glass. The leader stood a moment longer, screaming desperately. Tongues of white flame burst from his eyes, ears and nostrils. He turned to run, staggering blindly down the track towards the road, flame dripping from his body, gravel beneath his feet cracking and fusing in puddles of glass. It wasn’t his willpower of magical defenses that kept him moving. Eleanor could feel the agony in his mind, the abandonment and defeat of a man who thought himself righteous abandoned in his hour of need, the fire that reached every fiber of his being. Emmaline was keeping him alive as he burned. Perhaps not keeping him alive, but attenating his death, stretching it out infinitely in a desperate attempt to step down the incredible power she had drawn in so that she could stand against so many. The burning man staggered away screaming. The pillar of flame guttered and vanished, dropping Emmaline’s body to the ground. Reality itself screamed in protest at what had been done to it.
Lead out - Emmaline has created a death vortex by drawing way too much power. We have to cross it somehow to save her.
I stared in shock as the gold armored figure ripped into the scarabs, sending metal flying in all directions. Screaming with rage the armored warrior charged across the room and grabbed the tomb spyder by one of its forelegs. He drew back a vast metal fist and drove it into the side of the creature. It drew back its hand and struck again and again, dishing in plates with the sound like a pneumatic hammer on hull platting. With a roar of victory he plunged his fist through its armor and grabbed a hold of its inards, ripping out a handfull of sparking green cables. The spyder spasmed wildly and then collapsed to the floor. The warrior grabbed the things head in both hands and wrenched violently. The head came free in an explosion of green fire that flickered and arced across the armor. For a few seconds I could see the giant's skeleton through the armor. The green light died and the giant stepped clear, smoke coiling up from his golden armor.
"Holy Throne," I breathed in shock. My mind was screaming 'astartes'. I had never seen one in the flesh, but they were a frequent enough subject of sculpture and painting that I could tell this wasn't one of the Emperor's Chosen. It swiviled its head to look at me and I backed up rapidly, my guts clenching. The monster took a step towards me, flexing its fingers.
"We are servants of the Emperor!" Hadrian shouted. The brute paused, head swiviling to Hadrian. I got the impression it was surveying the Imperial iconography on his equipment. I probed at him with my mind, shoving all the images of the Emperor I could think of at the thing.
shylarah
Naril
SphincterSphinx
ctrlsaltdel
Level_5
op2024
wanderingwolf
Jb
Snowdrops
PrinceAlexus