Fable - Ask Fear and Loathing in the Land of Barrows

The sealed sage did not move from where he sat upon a bedroll, as still as the tall pines in windless summer on High Cloud Peak.

No stars looked down upon them, occluded by the grey clouds amid the night sky. Snowflakes drifted down from them in small flurries, no hint of winter's wrath in their gentle, silent fall.

"You see copper where you sought gold."

The sage did not open his eyes, though he let out a long breath through the nose. Not quite a sigh. Too methodical.

"The bitter dram of disappointment."

The man's scaled features twitched ever so slightly.

"I-"

Xun tilted his head slightly to one side and became, if possible, even more still - as stone.

Then his eyes snicked open and slitted, yellow opals stared out into the night.

From the darkness came the rattle of metal against metal and the glare of torchlight. A solitary figure emerged into view, wandering from out of the snow. His boots crunched against the snow underfoot. He was girded for war, though not an uncommon sight in these lands, and he wore a sword at his hip.

"Strangers," he called at the edge of their camp. "Can I share your fire?"

The sage stared at the man and murmured so quietly, as if only to himself.

"A wolf does not hunt alone."

A sidelong glance flicked toward the irascible swordsman. Not very demure.

"What is your name, traveler?"

The soldier - for soldier he looked - approached, a congenial smile on his lips, broad and warm as the fire he no doubt yearned to sit beside.

"They call me Iron Gong," he rumbled before plopping down in a heap where Zhi had indicated. "You have any of that stew left?" He pointed eagerly at Zhi's bowl.

"A strong name," rasped Xun.

"Ha! It's on account of my stomach. I could eat three boars, drink two barrels, and still march 10 leagues at break of dawn."

"Eh," Iron shrugged, looking supremely disappointed by the lack of food.

"That's the thing, Swordsman.... I'm not exactly alone."

Iron Gong raised his torch into the air. Suddenly, dozens of lights blazed to life in the night, all around the campsite.

"You've got room for all my friends?" a tremendous, sinister grin lay plastered across the soldier's face.

The rattle of armor could be heard as soldiers shuffled forward in the snow with drawn blades and pointed spears.

Xun bowed his head slightly, regarding his shoes. "Hm."

---

Mount Hoa Qua Monastery
THE TIGER FESTIVAL

Bursts of paints in reds and blues filled the air overhead.

Festival goers danced in the streets, on the stairs, on the shingles of the roofs.

One might never know them starving. One might never know their lives pitiful. This one moment of joy a bonfire in the ashheaps of their mortal spans.

Up the steps, Xunlóng strode, his wrists tightly bound. Bright banners set on bamboo poles at every step snapped in the cold, mountain air.

"Come on then," boomed Gong, looking smug as he mushed his prisoners into the courtyard. His chui mace rested on one shoulder. "Hu Ji awaits."

The sage's features remained impassive, scaled visage betraying little.

"Bared hands and bared fangs."

He had been captured in his sleep.

This was a lesson in the folly of sleeping in an open grave out on the fields. Sure, it aligned your humors correctly with the solstice and allowed you to feel the worms in the corpses around you, but it left you wide open to being man-handled by a bunch of smelly apes and thrown into a small cell.

Beaten. Starved. Bled.

He refused to say his name and they laughed when he referred to the Hundred Ivory Sovereign. This malnourished, sleeping-in-the-dirt peasant, with grimy hair and blackened nails could not be him.

It helped that he didn't turn them inside out the way the stories said he could.

The necromancer did not point out he needed his hands free for such feats. At least when he was starving. You couldn't just summon bones with your facial expression when it kept twitching into a hungry gasp each time your intestines violently growled for sustenance.

At the festival he was kept on the sidelines. His hands bound together behind his back, each finger rigidly kept in place by the metallic contraption reserved for suspected necromancers and other death mages. He could not move, not even to wrench back when the blood of Zhi's victim splattered all over his face.

His tongue flicked out and caught some of the life-water. It made his stomach demand even fiercer.

Ah, if only he was a blood mage or a meat mage, instead he was made of Ivory and his mind was too addled with hunger to try and scour this place for bones nearby.

Eyes flickered to the body carved in half.

Was that a flash of pale?

Sky Rending Tiger | Half-Blade Zhi | Four Sealed Sage

Ah, reckless Half-Blade. If only he could look beyond the cold steel of mortal men, perhaps then he might find the weapon which has so long eluded him.

"A warrior’s heart is as fragile as the petals of a lotus," Xunlóng muttered.

His gaze moved, flicking over the faces in the crowd. Iron Gong was pushing his way through the spectators, as predictable as ever. The soldier’s mind was consumed by the immediacy of the fight, a narrow focus that made him little more than a tool in the grand scheme of things. He, too, had learned nothing of the world beyond his narrow, blood-soaked view.

Beyond him, the Tiger—the one they called Hu Ji—sat upon his throne, a long shadow cast over the festival. The beast's eyes gleamed with hunger, the same hunger that had driven empires to ruin and consumed men. A creature of wild impulse driven by blood and the beat of the heart. Hu Ji believed that the world bent to the will of strength, that power was a simple matter of domination.

"What is fist or sword to Mount Hua? What is shield and spear to the rushing river?"

Something had shifted all of a sudden.

Ivory did not notice it. His attention was arrested by the allure of the shining pale hidden within ruined meat and cut flesh. He licked his lips. If only he could rip into the already decaying meat and yank out the pale, wrap it around his limbs and show all of them what a mistake it was to keep a necromancer hostage.

But his bindings were absolute. Not even a violent struggle that tore his own skin into raw flesh had provided him with the means of escape. Only another indicator of irritation and pain.

He could not be too annoyed by it since it was of his own making.

As transfixed as Ivory was even he could not ignore it when he was roughly yanked up to his feet by the metal bindings keeping his arms locked behind his back. His fingers in stasis in a hand-cage made by artisans hated by mages and beloved by smallfolk.

"Time to earn your feed, pretty boy." The foul-scented monkey growled in his ear to intimidate him. Ivory had no response because all of a sudden his bindings were loosened and removed entirely. He looked around, seeing the arena for the first time, and noticing the man on the throne.

Worshiped.

His liberator? His tormentor? Both?

Ivory did not wait for them to change their minds. He immediately threw himself onto one of the corpses just made by Half-Blade Zhi. Fingers blackened and raw tore into the meat, hasty, afraid they'd yank him away from the body before he could-

Ah.

His skin touched the pale ivory. More valuable than diamonds, worth their weight in gold. He yanked a bone out, a rib-bone, small, pathetic... but prized nonetheless.

While they seemed to be finding a new combatant, Ivory was busy... yanking another bone out, causing a gruesome mess as blood splattered across his arms. His fine robes had been run ragged, grime, but now soaked in the life-blood of the dead.

"Almost, almost..." He muttered feverishly to himself. Where was the greatest bone? The glory of the Pale? It would set him free from this monkey-infested place.

Sky Rending Tiger | Four Sealed Sage

“You next, poet,” grunted one of Iron Gong’s minions and shoved Xunlóng into the circle.

Xun stumbled forward, giving no resistance, head tilted down. They had not even bothered to undo his bonds. He rattled in a breath, then exhaled.

Foggy wisps curled from his nose and mouth, perhaps just from the cold.

Yellow eyes snicked to Ivory, where the man sat wrist deep in a corpse.

Xun’s head cocked to one side with curiosity.

“What treasure lies in a corpse for you to search it so?” the Sage’s words, spoken softly, seemed to carry easily across the distance - as though born by the wind itself.

Around them, soldiers started to jeer with impatience, ravenous for the spectacle.

His head jerked up at the words spoken to him.

Ivory's eyes were manic. Pupils dilated, induced by the high of viscera staining his finger tips and the perfect bone pressing into his palm.

"Bone, the ivory pale." He hissed as he snapped it in half. It was the largest bone a human could possess, the femur, the strongest too. Ivory had to go digging into the man's leg for it, but sometimes you needed to work for the right tool.

"Your face does not belong to a monkey." Ivory growled as he pointed with half the femur at Xun's head. "At least not half of it."

He spit on the ground and the remaining bones in the corpse shuddered.

"Does a skeleton animate your meat, serpent?"

Fists squeezed around the broken femur and bone fragments, loosened from the earlier snap, began to coil around his waist.

“Animate? No.”

Those serpentine eyes regarded Ivory’s every movement.

“They are but scaffolding for meat.”

Xunlóng stood there, still as stone, wondering what the necromancer might do next.

“Strings on which puppets dance.”

He canted his head the other direction and held out bound hands, palms up and flat as if to receive an offering.

“Are we to dance now?”

His eyes flicked to the offered up palms and then back up to the slit eyes of a monkey-serpent. How did an abomination come to be like that?

Disgusting.

"Why would I dance with a serpent?" His fingers twitched and then he jerked violently around. His gaunt and bloody hand lashing out towards the Tiger Warlord in his throne.

During the extended digging for bones, he had shattered numerous smaller bones into fragments. Shrapnel no more than several fingers long. They all reacted at once, sharp, serrated, launching themselves into the direction of Sky Rending Tiger.

A sane man would not have targeted the Lord of the Keep imprisoning them.

He would have recognized that even if he managed to kill his captor, the rest of the masses would fall on him and rip him to shreds.

Ivory was beyond caring. His eyes manic, his teeth stained crimson and blinking in a growl. Not all of the bone darts would fly into the direction of the Tiger either. Maybe if he hadn't been starved and beaten with his arms locked tight until they screamed in agony.

Some of them veered away almost immediately... and bore towards unintended targets nearby.

Four Sealed Sage | Half-Blade Zhi

Xunlóng stood where he was as ossified shrapnel shards zipped through the air like so many angered hornets.

The sage watched, impassive.

“Ah.”