Private Tales Dinner's served

A private roleplay only for those invited by the first writer
Radu Basarab

Radu Basarab

The Scourge
Member
Seriously Likeable I
Messages
16
Character Biography
Link
Archanae

Ten minutes remained before the appointed hour when fate would reveal whether the girl possessed sufficient cunning to preserve her wretched existence. The snow-haired predator had taken his repose atop a lichen-encrusted monument, one of countless markers that erupted from the cemetery's corrupted earth like broken teeth from diseased gums. Scarcely twenty paces separated him from the mausoleum's threshold, that edifice of carved stone and shadow where their covenant had been struck.

Above this necropolis, the moon hung gravid and terrible, a silver eye peering through the ragged shroud of clouds that sought unsuccessfully to veil its scrutiny. A miasma had descended upon the burial ground, dense as curdled cream, transforming the landscape into an ocean of spectral vapor. Such obscurement would have rendered any mortal observer effectively blind, trapped within walls of their own limited perception. Yet Radu's argent gaze burned through the brume as starlight through gossamer, piercing the veil with preternatural acuity.

Nothing escaped his vigil. He catalogued each skittering passage of vermin through the ossuary grounds, rats pursuing their furtive errands among the graves, serpents threading between toppled headstones in search of warm-blooded prey. His attention registered the industrious procession of carrion beetles, their chitinous forms navigating the marble surfaces with purposeful determination. Most notably, corpulent arachnids traversed the memorial stones, their numerous eyes gleaming like drops of mercury, their chelicerae twitching with predatory anticipation.

One such specimen, emboldened by hunger or stupidity, attempted to scale the pale man's person. Before the creature could achieve purchase upon his thigh, Radu's hand struck with viperine swiftness, plucking the arachnid from its ill-chosen path. Without ceremony or hesitation, he conveyed the writhing thing to his maw. The symphony of destruction that followed, a trio of visceral crunches, heralded the spider's transformation from living creature to masticated pulp beneath those terrible, angular teeth.

The morsel descended his throat, a paltry offering to the gnawing emptiness that commanded his attention. Hunger clawed at him from within, a familiar torment that would soon demand proper satisfaction.
 
  • Cthuloo
Reactions: Archanae

Under the baleful eye of the moon, Archanae walked as if in a procession, holding a scintillating flask aloft. The cold argent rays caught its shifting, turquiose glow, mixing its light into a pale and aberrant alchemy. Motes of light darted to and fro below the glass, as if seeking escape. From a distance, it would twist and shimmer like a small, deep-sea eel.
The Flask.png

Behind her, a different servant to Scrael lumbered: a clay golem, its left side charred black like dead coals in a fireplace, its right side twisted and knitted into clay that imitated sinew and muscle, roughly shaped and carrying petrified drips, as if drawn too early from the furnace. It towered behind her, hauling along a wide clay jug fit to carry a small human, stoppered by a curious, blue cork.

Finding a fey creature within the span of the day was no simple task. Such magical entities were mischevious and shifty by nature. But she had caught one. One of a primordial nature, bound by the element of water, a shapechanger as evasive and slippery as water from a stream.

How did one shackle water itself? Something that could morph and transform by its own whim?

By presenting oneself as bait. Ensnare its soul, then bottle its essence.

The graveyard miasma enveloped her, but the hard-angled shape of the necropolis gave her direction. Her stolen light guided her past graves and broken earth, though it pestered her mind with incessant questions.

Where are we going? Why? Why are you bringing me here? What have I done to you, human? You have split me in twain most cruelly. I am broken. What more can be done?

"Be silent," Archanae spat, her eye gleaming with unrestrained avarice. "I have further use of you."

Use . . . use . . . you seek to use me . . .

The psychic voice paused when her bare foot found a step, allowing her ascension to the top of the necropolis. The clay creature rumbled and cracked behind her, matching her stride.

I sense . . . terrible evil . . . no, no . . . not him!

That caused Archanae to blink, even as she walked to her midnight meeting.

"You know of this one, then?" An amused scoff escaped her. "I should think so. You are kindred souls, after all. Predators both. It is about time someone preyed on you, bane of fishermen and swimmers."

The light coiled in the flask, attempting to find some shelter within its glass prison.

You can still . . . run . . . flee . . . nothing but doom awaits us both here . . .

The mad chitters of the imprisoned nixie grated her. Pinpricks of irritation crept up her chest and neck, prickling the skin below her cheeks, causing her discomfort even before her encounter. She did not need this now.

"You are mistaken, water spirit. For you, this is the end. For me, this is a beginning."

And with that, Archanae climbed the final step of the necropolis, coming before the intended recipient of her offering. Languid, and no less terrible than he had been in the darkness of the tomb. Mistress and enslaved golem came before him, each carrying a vessel of their own.

Radu Basarab
 
  • Yay
Reactions: Vaezhasar Drakspae
Archanae

The moment her silhouette materialized at the periphery of the sepulchral grounds, the ancient one abandoned his perch with fluid immediacy. He unfolded from his seated vigil like some terrible origami of flesh and metal, achieving his full height in a motion that spoke of inhuman grace. His luminescent regard had already fixed upon her halted form where she stood before the weathered steps ascending to the mausoleum's portal.

Through the pallid shroud of mist he glided, his passage leaving no wake in that ethereal sea, no whisper of movement to betray his approach. Silence clung to him as naturally as darkness embraces the void. Those mercurial eyes surveyed his prize, twin vessels cradled respectively by mistress and construct, their contents promising sustenance long denied.

"A Nixie..." he muttered, the words emerging as though drawn from some deep well of recognition. His assessment continued with the precision of a vivisectionist identifying peculiarities in a specimen. "How deliciously perverse. You've violated its very essence, haven't you? Bound it, mutilated its nature, reduced an elemental spirit to nothing more than bottled sustenance. Such exquisite cruelty merits acknowledgment. Consider yourself flattered, child. I rarely dispense praise."

Then came a transformation both repugnant and mesmerizing. His jaws parted, and from that cavern emerged an appendage that belonged more to nightmare than nature, a serpentine length of glistening muscle that traced the contours of his obsidian lips with obscene thoroughness. The organ left a trail of viscous moisture in its wake before retreating to its lair.

"My hunger has become volcanic, molten iron searing through an empty guy. Reconstitute your prisoner, that I might properly consume what you've so ingeniously procured."

The command resonated with barely leashed desperation, the admission of his torment lending urgency to his demand. Here stood not merely a predator, but one whose appetites had been denied past the point of comfortable endurance.

1000020311.gif
 
Last edited:
Archanae was human. And she was terrifyingly reminded of that fact, when the black, wet coil of his tongue emerged from elongated jaws.

She knelt and looked away, forcing her nerves to be still. Focusing on the task. Cradling the flask and allowing her eyes to feast on its intricate ornamentation, she kept her gaze from him. Filigree gold encirled the bulbous glass of the flask, beautiful enough to take her mind from the charnel mass of muscle and steel looming above.

A whisper left her parted lips. Her fingertip ignited with a blue spark, sputtering and burning like a Liadain sparkler, and she branded the stone with a similarly sparkling rune. Once finished, she upturned her hand, allowing the crackling glow from her finger to suffuse the veins below her skin, and jerked up her palm in a forceful fashion, fingers cradling an invisible weight.

The tortured flagstones moaned and struggled to follow suit. They broke and shot up, curved into a primitive and jagged basin, unleashing a horrible racket, stretching unnaturally.

"Do'lav ka sowa," she uttered, in words more natural to her accent. Her Nazrani command ended on a downward tilt of her fingers. The golem uncorked its massive jug and, just before it could pour, she specified: "ci na bezeni." The dumb, lumbering thing did as bid, filling the basin with murky water that roiled with sift of some kind.

With a final flourish, Archanae rose, hand twirling above the basin, fingers shifting according to some unseen design, bending the water like the stones before.

The waters took on form, congealing, solidifying . . . sprouting a leg here, an arm there, a head with a flowing mane of hair there . . . until the waters finally achieved symmetry, yielding a perfect set of naked arms and legs, a long torso and a head buried in the bottom of the basin.

There . . . I am preserved . . . yes . . . reunite me with my body . . . we can . . . we can defeat him together . . .

Archanae ignored its lies. The flask raised in her hand, and her long nails pincered its cork. But before she released the turquiose spirit, she sought Radu's gaze.

"I imagine you prefer your prey animated. Once I open this, anima will breathe through it again. No doubt, it will seek escape." A smirk unsheathed from her mouth, though her nose still crinkled in distaste, oppressed by the thick miasma of Radu's sepulchral breath. "You must be swift, herald. Even with a damaged mind, it will be as slippery as an eel." The smirk remained, defiant against the aspect of hungry death pushing against her shivering, blood-coursing body. Even standing near him felt like a gradient corruption, like how toxic oils might taint pure fresh water. In spite of this, a single, bared shoulder of hers shrugged with non-chalance. "Unless, of course, you'd rather feast on easy prey tonight -- helpless and unconscious . . ."

Radu Basarab
 
Last edited:
Archanae

Radu's attention contracted to a singular point of focus, the vessel clutched within her grasp. Those argentate orbs, already luminous in their unnatural splendor, now blazed with an intensity that transformed them into twin beacons of predatory fixation. A grotesque metamorphosis overtook his visage as the ocular spheres receded into their cranial hollows, creating chasms of shadow that rendered his pallid features into something more ossuary than flesh.

His physiognomy had become a death mask animated by unholy appetite.

Those ebon lips drew back in a rictus of anticipation, revealing the bloodless gums beneath, pale as cave-dwelling worms that had never known sunlight's kiss. The grinding of his teeth produced a sound like millstones crushing bone, each angular fang sliding against its neighbor in a disquieting symphony.

Every fiber of his being had oriented toward the moment of consumption, a compass needle drawn inexorably toward its magnetic north. The hunger had stripped away whatever veneer of civility he might have worn, leaving only the ugliest of truths.

"Release it at once. Whether it resists me or not, shall prove immaterial."
 
  • Yay
Reactions: Archanae
With his bidding, Archanae pulled the cork on her potion. Immediately, it seemed the glowing essence sought to taste the air, reaching out from the glass neck. But a swift and graceful motion of her hand tilted it down to the sprawled and lifeless body, pouring what seemed part liquid, part air, tendrils of turquiose mist coiling around the stream.

She angled the liquid near the head. It crept like some amorphous critter seeking its home, through the nostils, ears and mouth of the limp body, before causing those eyes to glow like small lanterns, even behind closed lids.

A stir rippled through the body, like a breeze on the still surface of a lake.

A twitch issued from a leg. A faint curling of muscles tensed.

And then, the nixie sprung like a cork from an opened bottle, transforming into a leather-winged hide, its metamorphosis competing with its rapid movement for speed. It sought to take to the skies, to lift itself from this unholy basin, to be free, free! Back into embrace of the night and the welcoming arms of Mother Nature, far, far away from this necromantic duo.

Radu Basarab
 
  • Yay
Reactions: Radu Basarab
Archanae
As the nixie attempted its ascension from the aqueous prison, seeking escape through vertical flight, the osseous artifact that had served as Archanae's temporary companion revealed its true purpose. The skull rose from behind its temporary keeper with deliberate menace, tilting forward in preparation for what would follow. From those hollow sockets where sight once dwelt erupted twin columns of necromantic force, streams of that same green malevolence that had earlier wreathed the bone in spectral fire.

The blast struck with unerring precision, catching the fae creature at the center of its mass. The impact drove the nixie earthward with tremendous violence, pressing its form against the dark soil until it lay prostrate among the grave-dirt, pinned beneath invisible talons of arcane force.

The ancient one extended a single digit toward the fallen spirit, his gesture carrying the weight of centuries spent perfecting such dark artistry. From his throat emerged a word that seemed less spoken than excavated from some primeval lexicon of destruction:

"Putrefy!"

The invocation's effect manifested with horrifying immediacy. The nixie's form began its dissolution, writhing in the throes of enforced decomposition. Layer by layer, its corporeal vessel surrendered to entropy, first the translucent dermis sloughing away like melting wax, followed by the adipose tissues beneath. Musculature unraveled from bone in ribbons of liquefied protein while sinew and cartilage dissolved into constituent humors.

This grotesque baptism of dissolution rose skyward in a spiral of organic matter rendered fluid. Radu's mandible descended with reptilian dislocation, unhinging to create an aperture of impossible dimensions. The flesh of his cheeks stretched taut as parchment, transforming his maw into a funnel of consumption. Into this abyss poured the nixie's essence, a river of stolen vitality cascading down that terrible gullet.

The feeding continued until nothing remained save architectural testament to what had been, a framework of calcified bone held together by stubborn ligaments, collapsed upon the cemetery earth like the discarded marionette of some cruel puppeteer.
 
  • Scared
Reactions: Archanae

Archanae watched, too entranced by the horror to turn away from it.

As the nixie's wailing screams and disentigrating form faded into nothing but raw sustenance, memories tugged at her mind. Memories of a childhood nearly forgotten, but for a few momentous fragments.

Once, she had watched a constrictor snake slowly consuming a monkey. She remembered the bulbous, coiled rope of its shimmering and spotted skin, growing and sliding around the quivering creature, the monkey's fingers helplessly twitching below slow, choking death. She had watched and watched, squatting near them, chin resting in her palms, hypnotised by that torpid dance of mortality taking place before her eyes. One part merciless and cruelly unhurried in its consumption, the other helpless and weak. It seemed to her some unnamed rule of nature presented itself then. With the vague dimness of knowledge that childhood bestowed, she had sensed that she had to affliate herself with this process, understand it, learn from it - as all things living were bound by it and eventually trapped like that monkey.

Now, her eyes gained that distant look that had once gripped them two decades ago. Distant, yet keenly aware, pondering, the soul of academia without all its rules and discipline. And just as she had sensed the importance of her childhood memory, locking it into a dark cellar of her mind, so too did she commit this moment to memory.

Much as when she had been in the grips of adolescence, she did not yet know what she would need this for, but found it prudent nonetheless to study the Undying One. How his flesh deformed to suit inhuman gluttony. How the skull pinned his victim with magic, like some dutiful custodian. And how he seemed to strip everything but useless bones from the fae.

After this macabre display, a final schussing issued from her now empty flask, as Archanae closed it. She held it close to her chest, gaze carefully resting on Radu, wondering quietly what the future might hold.

"Flesh has been given." Her fingers drummed faintly on the glass in her hands. "May its crop yield a great harvest for the mind."

Eyes subtly shifted from that of a hypnotised spectator to an awaiting customer.

Radu Basarab
 
Last edited:
Archanae

Satiation brought with it a return to anatomical propriety. Radu's distended jaw ascended through a series of wet, cartilaginous clicks until it resumed its natural position, though nothing about the creature could truly be deemed natural. He drew the back of one pallid hand across his mouth in a gesture that might have seemed fastidious, were it not for the lingering traces of dissolution that gleamed upon his flesh like unholy chrism.

"Adequate sustenance, if barely. You've earned your continued existence, consider it a privilege," emerged his pronouncement, devoid of gratitude yet acknowledging the adequacy of the offering.

His attention shifted to the suspended relic, that calcified implement still hovering in the cemetery's fetid atmosphere. A languid gesture from his fingers commanded its return, and the skull hurtled through space with arrow-like velocity. His hand intercepted it with practiced ease, fingers closing around the bone with such authority that the spectral flames extinguished instantly, as though his very touch negated their otherworldly combustion.

"My word, once given, becomes an immutable law. You shall witness the tapestry of my craft. Whether such revelations stoke the flames of your ambition or leave you appalled remains entirely your own to resolve."

The declaration carried an undertone of sardonic amusement, as though the concept of honor among monsters struck him as particularly entertaining. Yet beneath the irony lay something more unsettling, the implication that his word, once given, possessed a binding quality that transcended mere social contract.

Without further ceremony, he pivoted on his heel, presenting her with the expanse of his back, a gesture that spoke either of supreme confidence or calculated dismissal. His ascent of the mausoleum's time-worn steps commenced with measured deliberation and the weathered stone seemed to recognize Radu as a creature of authority, accepting his weight without protest as he approached that singular portal into realms best left unexplored.

"Follow me."
 
Last edited:
  • Yay
Reactions: Archanae
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back