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Radu Basarab

Radu Basarab

The Scourge
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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.
 
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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
 
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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.

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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
 
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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."
 
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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
 
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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.
 
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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
 
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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."
 
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The faint arch of his broad back had resumed its normality and exposed itself to her, teasing feigned vulnerability. But he could have lain prostrate before her, and she would still find him too dangerous to engage in anything but commerce. This flesh, she knew now, to be a lie, an illusion, molded into whatever purpose suited him.

And so, she followed.

Into the gloom and cold of the tomb.

Into the gleeful geas of amorphous pacts.

Into a tutelage of looted loyalty, stolen from a nixie's amortal life and as ephemeral as shifting winds.

Statues flanked them on either side when they entered through the portal. Half men, half creatures, their chests rippling with muscle, hair long and flowing in sculpted stone, carrying ancient glaives - one of them snapped by Time's jealous hand. But their lower bodies ended in fur and ox-legs. In the shifting dance of light and shadow, spawned from her glowing jewelry and Radu's winking skull, they looked rather like spider's legs, giving an impression of baleful driders. If she hadn't seen them in the daylight, she might have mistaken this for a descent into a necropolis of drow.

But even the twisted drow could not conjure anything nearly as grotesque as Radu, for all their strange alchemy and consorting with daemons.

With a glance behind her to assure Maldragos was close behind, a most singular notion struck her about her morbid host.

"I must wonder. Are you as alone as you seem to be? Or are there others . . . like you?"

Radu Basarab
 
Archanae

The vestibule surrendered them unto corridors that delved deeper into the mausoleum's stone embrace. Radu's measured footfalls echoed through passageways where death had been rendered monument and memorial alike. Here the crypts stood sentinel, their occupants sealed within granite sarcophagi, whilst overhead the walls bristled with funerary niches wherein cremation urns roosted like birds of clay and bronze. The brazier-light danced across these vessels, painting their glazed surfaces with tongues of amber and shadow.

The corridor descended by degrees, each step drawing them further from the world of the quick and closer to dominions that belonged properly to the dead. Yet even here, in this sepulchral gallery, the Scourge moved with proprietary ease, as one who had long since made covenant with the silence that dwelt betwixt the graves.

At the passage's terminus yawned an aperture hewn from the floor itself, a throat of darkness from which ascended no breath save the mineral exhalation of deep earth. Stone steps plunged into that subterranean maw, their edges worn smooth by centuries of funereal processions. Without pause or backward glance, Radu began his descent, trusting his companion would follow where mortal trepidation might otherwise counsel retreat.

The stairway delivered them into a chamber that spoke of purposes both ancient and profane. Granite composed its boundaries, that pitiless stone which yielded neither to time nor entreaty. The ceiling pressed low enough to remind them of earth's weight suspended overhead, yet not so oppressive as to force them into genuflection. Braziers stationed at intervals held court against the darkness, their flames writhing like captive serpents, casting illumination that rendered every surface in stark relief and deeper shadow by turns.

But it was the wall-hangings that commanded attention, those ghastly banners that proclaimed the chamber's true nature. Rectangular stretches of human integument had been flayed with surgical precision from their original vessels and affixed to the stone with iron nails. Upon these parchments of flesh, formulae writhed in languages that predated civilized tongues, inscribed in inks whose provenance was best left unexamined. Mathematical proofs sat adjacent to invocations that bent syntax itself into geometries the mind rejected even as the eye traced their contours.

"Those who surrender themselves to the ruinous powers are a rare breed indeed, and rarer still are those who endure such communion. My own... circumstances were singular in their nature. If others like myself walk this benighted world, our paths have yet to converge."
 
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The weight of the whole earth seemed to press down on her here. An imperceptible burden, but there all the same. It was not merely the sense of thick layers of soil and stone above them, but the very air itself feeling heavy to draw from, stifled and cloyed with unmentionable smells, all coated by the dust of centuries. Archanae forced herself to walk in the midst of this, even if the child within her wanted to scamper off and hide in a dark corner. Maldragos, however, with his bulky clay form, reassuringly large, yielded her the strength to continue.

The lights slithered across the walls, revealing flesh stretched taught like parchment. Such a perverse use of human flesh spoke more to the evil that satiated this place, rather than from any practical use. Her gaze fell upon these arcane taxonomies and strings of glyphs that defied logical understanding, a twitch of revolted confusion betraying her eye. She had read much esoteric lore -- but this proved absolute gibberish to her.

Perhaps this, of all things, remained the most concerning to her, causing her shoulders to hunch up protectively. Her long fingers curled around the main sapphire talisman around her neck, as if it could give her some guidance.

Unknown magic remained among the most dangerous phenomena she could imagine. Only the boundless black sea could rival such horror.
Radu Basarab said:
"Those who surrender themselves to the ruinous powers are a rare breed indeed, and rarer still are those who endure such communion. My own... circumstances were singular in their nature. If others like myself walk this benighted world, our paths have yet to converge."
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Attending to his words, Archanae shook herself out of her disturbed abstraction. She pointedly squared her shoulders and stood as tall as she could in these dark stony bowels.

She attempted to imagine a meeting between Radu and someone else of similar characteristics, but she couldn't. It seemed wrong if the world could accommodate for two such ravenous hungers. More likely than not, such an encounter would end with one devouring the other.

"Our paths can take us many strange places." Her words echoed dully in the room, flung back to her as if in infernal mockery. Indeed, they seemed apt to her own situation as well. "So this is the sanctum of an Undying One?" She approached one of these banners of underworld heraldry, still attempting to unpick its lock of seeming madness. "It boasts quite unique furnishings."

Radu Basarab
 
Archanae
Radu snorted, a sound bereft of genuine amusement. "Permanence has eluded me since my exile from Vel Anir's ancestral halls. What you behold is merely a transient sanctuary, nothing more."

The proclamation escaped him with neither pride nor shame, merely the utterance of fact, delivered as one might observe the weather. What need had he for sentiment regarding domiciles? Stone and timber were ephemeral things, destined to crumble into memory whilst he endured. The dwellings of men rose and fell like autumn leaves, whilst entities of his ilk persisted through the turning of ages.

He pivoted upon his heel, directing that argent scrutiny toward his guest. The motion possessed an unnatural fluidity, as though his form operated according to principles that mocked the limitations imposed upon mortal flesh. His eyes constricted to slits as he catalogued her posture, the rigid spine, the tight grip upon that talisman suspended about her throat. She strangled the bauble with rigid fingers, as if the ornament might deliver her from whatever phantoms plagued her imagination.

The gesture amused him in that cold, distant manner peculiar to those who had long ago surrendered their capacity for genuine mirth. Did the foolish creature truly not comprehend? If her destruction had been his intention, no charm wrought by mortal hands could have forestalled it. Her continued existence was testament only to his disinterest in her annihilation.

"Curious. You profess fascination with my works, yet shrink from them as though confronted by pestilence itself."

The words fell from his lips like stones into a still pool, each syllable rippling outward with accusation. His gaze swept across the macabre tapestry adorning his sanctuary's perimeter, that ghastly upholstery fashioned from the integument of expired souls. The firelight danced across those preserved hides, rendering them luminous, almost translucent, revealing the delicate tracery of vessels that once conveyed vitality through now-absent forms.

"These walls are not adorned with flesh for mere aesthetic consideration. Each membrane serves a purpose you have yet to fathom."


"The dark currents of magic are drawn to sites where mortal anguish has burned itself into the very essence of existence, where suffering has left indelible scars upon reality's fabric."

He gestured toward the assembled relics surrounding them, not merely decorative elements, but instruments of purpose, each fragment imbued with residual anguish. Despair had been rendered into the very atmosphere, woven through unseen dimensions where nightmare and mathematics converged. The air itself possessed weight here, thickness, as though one moved through layers of congealed tar rather than mere vapor.

"It is from these wellsprings of torment that we who practice the necromantic arts draw power—the fuel by which lifeless meat is compelled to shamble and serve once more."

 
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Torment . . . He spoke of it as if it fuelled magical essence, helped to warp and rupture the reality that limited them. Was that truly the source of necromantic power? Or was it merely one wellspring to draw from?

She supposed her own magic might be characterised by a fair amount of suffering. Not that she had ever seen as a necessary implement, merely as a byproduct of the spells she wove, which necessarily involved human spirit and bone like brick and mortar for a mason. Perhaps the next stage of necromantic mastery involved drawing upon pain itself . . . her eye drifted to the macabre tapestries. Unspeakable pain, even. The mind boggled imagining the callous horror inflicted on past souls here.

Sacrifice she could do. But physical torture such as this? It might not be so different from her existing craft, where she separated minds from their original vessels, then entrapped them in new bodies. It could even be argued that her art was a longer and more permanent form of torment. She didn't know. After all, she had never experienced the fate of her victims herself.

She lowered her hand from her sapphire. If she was to open her mind to new practices, she would have to relinquish her reliance on old tricks. Gathering her shawls about her, she tilted her chin downward, pondering, before shooting an upward glance at Radu.

"That is the secret of your power, then? The prolonged torment of others?"

Radu Basarab
 
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Archanae

A slow negation swept across the man's features as he dismissed her query with characteristic certitude. "No, though suffering remains the cornerstone."

Without preamble, his taloned fingers seized one of the macabre tapestries adorning the chamber's walls. The ghastly textile came free with a sound like parchment separating from ancient binding. He spread this abominable canvas across the nearest sarcophagus lid with the reverence of a curator handling precious manuscripts. The preserved dermis gleamed under the crypt's wan illumination, treated with unguents to maintain suppleness while preventing its return to natural contraction. The skin retained its stretched dimensions, forever frozen in the shape of its final torment.

"Necromancy transcends the base savagery of common torturers and deranged butchers. It demands far more refined qualities, an inexhaustible wellspring of ambition, a capacity for hatred that burns eternal, and most crucially, the megalomaniacal conviction that death itself should genuflect before one's will. The supreme arrogance of reshaping mortality's laws into personal instruments; it is solipsistic grandeur incarnate."


One razor-sharp digit descended upon the spread membrane, puncturing its surface with surgical precision. The gesture commanded attention, demanding his pupil witness the intricacies inscribed upon this canvas of human suffering.

"These glyphs were carved into living, breathing wearers, each stroke preserving agony for eternity. The ink itself, faerie bones ground to dust, suspended in dragon's blood, chosen for the metaphysical potency such materials possess."
 
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Solipsism. The affirmation of one's existence, by virtue of one's own mind, to the sacrifice of all other notions. According to some, the only true currency of the world, which was otherwise drowning in a sea of illusion.

This kernel of philosophy churned within her, while she carefully watched Radu drape a sarcophagus in cured skin. Unbridled egotism, the deepest truth of necromancy.

Was that what she believed? She had first-hand experience with the handling of other minds. Had seen them. Shaped them. Even felt them, like resonant quakes on the other side of a granite wall.

But that barrier always remained. Like a window glass thick as a castle wall, she could only ever peer at foreign minds from the other side, influence and alter them to new purpose. Though never truly connecting. Never affirming whether they existed, the same way she knew herself - or at least her own thoughts - to exist.

Much as she doubted this notion of being the centre of the universe, even deemed it an infantile notion, she couldn't deny that she followed some of its tenets. She had decided her mind, her mission, more important than so many others before her. Who was she to sacrifice others for her goals? Who had deemed her more important than anyone else?

Herself. That was the answer. And there was the trap. Like it or not, she too might be called solipsistic in nature, and the words of her accusers would carry more than a grain of truth.

That is, if she failed. But if she succeeded . . . then she could become more than a self-styled artist of ambition. She would become the saviour of all humankind from their fleshly toil. All the misery she had endured and inflicted would have yielded the ultimate prize, not just for herself, but for all. The only prize worth owning.

And even should she fall short of this, she could be the spark that could ignite the fire of progress. True progress. Allowing others to find her work and continue her process.

After this crack and then subsequent resealing of her resolve, while her face exposed little but an inward, hooded gaze of deep consideration, her bare feet restlessly bringing her forward, surveying the claw opening his chosen canvas like a collector at an auction-house, her glance raised to Radu Basarab once more, viewing him with new eyes. His very presence still caused her weak flesh to quiver. Still gripped her in an iron coffin of doubt. Still forbade her from resting within herself by his mere existence.

All the same, he was but one stage, a single rung on a ladder of ascension, a stepping-stone. His power and inhuman conviction might put hers to shame. For now. However, in the future - that glorious tempter of dreams and promise - she would become something more. Something much, much greater. She knew it within the marrow of her bones, deeper and more nascent than any educated pontification or rational thought.

Godhood would seem like a quaint notion by the time she was finished with her work.

Yet, those skins on his wall, mounted like the trophies of a hunter . . . each soul that burned in the cinders of her forge had a name. She knew each one that passed from her fire to her artifice, intimately, like they were her children. Sometimes she even gave them new names, if they forgot their own. It helped her alleviate any sense of guilt from their transformation - she was freeing them from mortality's predictable end - moulding them halfway into a superior existence. Or at least, a more permanent one. Sacrifices, for the sake of experimentation.

Despite her plans, the human side of her smouldered with a question, as much to gauge his worldview as his work, and see how it might compare to her own:

"These skins . , . your living wearers . . . did you know them?"

Radu Basarab
 
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Archanae

Her inquiry sparked considerations within the mana's consciousness, calculations regarding the nature of sentiment and its tenuous grasp upon beings such as himself. The woman's question betrayed a certain tenderness of spirit, a preservation of mortal sympathies that he recognized but could no longer truly comprehend. Did vestiges of such feeling still cling to his own essence like grave-moss to a tombstone? The very notion provoked internal examination.

No. That particular human frailty had been excised from his being long ago, severed as cleanly as a surgeon's blade parts diseased flesh from healthy tissue. Empathy had perished alongside his mortality, abandoned in the ancestral halls he had fled centuries past. Yet contemplation remained, that cold dissection of choices made and paths taken. Even now, granted the impossible gift of retroactive revision, he would orchestrate the same dark symphony. What alternative existed for one born into corporeal betrayal? Should he have accepted the slow putrefaction within his own traitorous flesh, that prison of malformed bone and useless sinew? Better to immolate oneself upon the pyre of terrible ambition than to expire with a pathetic whimper, having endured the mockery of existence his original form had ordained.

"Personal acquaintance? Hardly. They were Anirians, as I once had the misfortune to be. Nothing more than anonymous flesh bearing the same provincial origins. Had these wretches encountered my previous incarnation, that pathetic specimen of twisted bone and atrophied muscle, confined to wheeled contraption like some grotesque parody of mobility, they would have showered me with their provincial contempt. Picture it: the crippled aristocrat, dependent upon servants for the most trivial locomotion, an object of revulsion and mockery for those blessed with functional anatomy. Vel Anir's treatment of its... defective progeny... remains legendarily merciless."
 
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She paid special note to his mention of previous incarnation. So, he too had once felt shackled by the frailty of his flesh and eschewed it for something superior. He too had tasted exile from his people and relished in it. One could almost take pity on such a tale.

But having lived it herself, she knew pity to be the least desired of responses. A fawning emotion for uncomprehending simpletons, who knew not what else to say. Rather, she understood such a plight and could see why it might bring him on a similar path as hers.

She knew little of Vel Anir, except that it was a warring nation, ever expanding the dominion of humans. She could respect their ambition, though their methods remained crude and earthbound, squabbling with neighboring realms on an equal footing.

"I suppose even nobility cannot shelter one from derision in Vel Anir. I have always thought that though they claim to have abandoned the worship of gods, they supplant it with a misplaced faith in their temporary flesh and strength of arms. As single-minded as their study of magic. They see only fit to use it for war - a most narrow application."

At the mention of magic, she honed her attention on Radu's work with his inscribed skin and bedecked sarcophagus, touching a long nail on her chin in contemplation.

Radu Basarab
 
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Archanae
Radu snorted, a sound that echoed through the sepulchral chamber like the last breath of a large, dying animal, then slung the length of flayed human skin over his back. The parchment of mortality draped across his shoulders with the weight of profane purpose, still supple with the preservative oils that kept decay at bay. With methodical precision, he blew out the braziers in the room's corners, each exhalation of his undead lungs extinguishing the flames as surely as death snuffs out life's spark. Darkness descended upon them, absolute and suffocating, rendering the chamber almost pitch black.

Through the Stygian gloom, his pale fingers found their prize: the preserved human skull with the odd symbol etched into its forehead. The bone was yellowed with age, yet the sigil carved into its brow seemed to writhe with barely contained malevolence. He gripped it firmly, feeling the thrumming potential locked within its calcium prison, and gestured for Archanae to follow as he began ascending the staircase leading to the Mausoleum's ground level. Each step groaned beneath their passage, stone worn smooth by centuries of traffic.

"The luxury of nostalgia must yield to the inexorable demands of the present. Such indulgences can wait, the wheel of fate turns, and we must attend to its revolution."

The matter was settled with the finality of a crypt door closing. Once they emerged from the Mausoleum's fetid embrace and found themselves squarely amidst the tombstones adorning the large, remote graveyard, Radu would look up to check if the moon was full. The celestial orb hung pregnant with silver light above them, unmarred by cloud or shadow. Having found it as such, he'd nod, to no one in particular, a gesture of dull satisfaction. Full moon was sometimes necessary for necromantic incantations, something to do with metaphysical weight behind the natural occurrence and the positioning of celestial bodies.

His argent eyes turned to his companion, reflecting the moon's radiance like mirrors of polished mercury.

"Can you divine my intentions with these items? What shall I do, hm?"
 
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