Fable - Ask Following the trail of bones

[Radu Basarab]

The Mortis Engine drifted forward with the patience of centuries, its trajectory as inevitable as rot. Beneath its bulk, a vast sarcophagus wrought entirely of bone, yellowed and lovingly assembled into something that might have been beautiful were it not so profoundly wrong, a congregation of spectral arms churned at the empty air. They were translucent things, half-glimpsed, their fingers splayed wide as if grasping for purchase against the veil between worlds. And somehow, impossibly, they found it.

Radu stood at the engine's heart, one hand resting upon the pillar of calcium that rose from its center like a monument to his labor. The bone was cold beneath his palm, and yet it thrummed with something that was not quite life, a resonance, perhaps, or a memory of the marrow it had once housed. He did not need to guide the vessel. It knew the way.

The boneyard unfurled before him, vast and terrible in its abundance. Here lay the preserved architecture of extinction: skeletons heaped and scattered across the flatland in configurations that suggested violence, or worship, or perhaps both. Small things and large things and things of such enormity that the mind recoiled from their implications. What manner of beast had worn that ribcage, each bone thick as a man's torso? What world had permitted such a skull, horned and hollow-eyed, to exist?

Radu knew, but he suspected no one else did.

Hills rose at the boneyard's edges like the hunched shoulders of mourners, throwing their shadows long and dark across the pale earth. Nothing grew here save for the occasional tree, leafless and arthritic, its branches clawing skyward in mute supplication, and the mushrooms. They clustered in the eye sockets of the ancient dead and between the ridges of fossilized spines, their flesh luminescent with a sickly phosphorescence that seemed to pulse with its own slow heartbeat.

The mist lay thick upon the ground, fetid and clinging, wrapping itself around the greater skeletons with something approaching tenderness. Mock clouds for monuments that needed no sky. Radu breathed it in and tasted age, tasted the faint sweetness of preservation, tasted the silence that had settled here like sediment.

Upon the massive skulls,those ambiguous remnants whose origins defied classification, carrion birds had gathered. They were wrong, these creatures. Feathers patchy and iridescent where they should not be, beaks curved at angles that spoke of mutation, of adaptation to a world that had grown strange. Their eyes, wet and knowing, tracked the Mortis Engine's passage.

But they did not approach.

The Mortis Engine continued its inexorable advance, and the boneyard received it in silence, and Radu stood among the relics of the vanished world and felt something that might have been contentment.

 

[Lazarus Jeager]

It had been something of a wonder of this world, at least that was the case in the eyes of the cursed being that had started his journey to the Ixmus graveyard, a long journey that would take him several moons to complete. It had taken a while longer still for him to find the hills that signaled his proximity to the destination he sought, the lone individual cresting such a hill in a matter of hours. The anticipation was enough to keep his thin frame going, despite the soreness in his muscles from the travel, the fatigue in his chest as his lungs swallowed more air than they knew what to do with.

the shadow of his visage would cascade over the peak of the hills as he crested them, a shadow that imposed a figure of robes and not much more, perhaps a walking stick, perhaps a staff, the length of the shadows cast form him and their strange bending making it impossible to be sure. Amber eyes swept the expanse before him, bright with an energy of excitement and nervousness as they fell upon the goal he had sought after, what he had heard was likely one of the oldest graves in human history. As he began his descent of the hills he would marvel at the sheer size and scope of some of the bones and other remains as he inched closer, mesmerized by the enormity of it all. There were a handful of skeletons that made sense to him, from beasts to monsters and the like, though the bigger and more grotesque they became the less he recognized, only able to theorize what might have once been of the ivory.

Standing in thick robes of black, the only thing that shone on him would be the gold trim of the threading in said robes, that and the white of the skull adorning his head in stark contrast to his dark attire. The skull of a deer, antlers still attached, adorned the head of this would be interloper, fashioned in such a way that it would mask the upper half of his face. The pale skin that peeked out from under said skull held thin lips mouthing silent words, a wealth of ebony hair falling down his back blending in with the fabrics as he moved, only ever truly separate when a gust of wind would carry the locks from his back momentarily. He was adorned with little in the ways of travel gear, looking more like he had been plucked from the world and dropped here, rather than someone who had been travelling for several days in succession. His movements would stop once he got to the bottom of the hill, the reason two fold. the first was that he knew of the rumors of bandits making temporary homes here, something he didn't want to verify with his own eyes if he could help it. the second, and more important reason was that he could hear the sound of something in the distance, something larger than himself and lumbering. While it sounded slow from what he could tell, Lazarus was not of the mind to find out unless it was something he could get away with unscathed. There was a sense of something darker lurking deeper within the graveyard, but the energy of death and stillness was almost overbearing, it made it difficult for him to tell one thing form another, and as he continued on slowly, keeping to the larger frames of the deceased, his skin would crawl thinking what he might find here that roused amongst the bones.

 

[Archanae]

Spoiler: Music

Bones and carrion eaters. As far as the eye could see. Here was a physical manifestation of one, unalienable truth of the universe: the dead vastly outnumbered the living.

Her hand tightened on an exposed ribcage; a macabre railing of support on this strange vessel, bare feet planted on the very edge of the massive bone cradle, staring down at the landscape prostrating itself below them. What manner of underworld had they sailed into now, by the winds of necromancy and the waters of damned souls? And where might this invisible river lead to?

Questions such as these occupied Archanae, but she knew better than to ask. Her current host maintained a perculiar silence - one that did not broker interruption. A warped sort of serenity, drinking in the graveyard quiet and the gentle, creaking death tolls of his bone-hulled ship. Now that she had had the chance to study Radu Basarab and the Mortis Engine at length, she could make some conclusions.

The central column, the yellowed skull and the bell formed the core of its power. It was what allowed it to drift ever onward, without the steering of its captain. The souls it drew in, twisted by dark magic, remembered echoes of their former lives. Such was the nature of bodiless spirits, yearning for their days of flesh. Somehow, this engine gathered them together, forming them into a single locus of dark desire, and channeled them into drawing their shared and cumbersome corpus to their place of remembrance. It might feel as if their vessel plunged ever further to the abyss, but it would be more accurate to say that it was pulled by a maelstrom of appropriated wants, seeking to unite with its other mangled parts.

Another realisation, and perhaps even more disturbing, had struck her about Radu. He was no mere necromancer who had managed to cheat Death at every turn, like some card player in a gambling den having scores upon scores of good luck. Luck ran out, and eventually, even the best player must needs surrender to the house. But Radu was something different. Every probing spell she had employed below her breath and below his scrutiny turned strangely inconclusive. Not quite undead, not quite mortal. A god? Impossible. But he did appear more like a force of nature rather than one who could claim personhood. An entity set outside the rules that bound everyone else. In this strange voyage, he appeared more like a weir to the continual flow of souls, his true nature as elusive to sight as the hidden river they sailed. Forces of dark magic cascaded down his shoulders and past his engine like he was some barrier swerving its shape, bending its trajectory -- altered just enough to bring them here.

Her eye caught movement, different from the slow drudge of spectral arms. A small skull far below them glided through the boneyard, steadily passing by its larger, inert cousins. Soon, her vision could confirm a wink of gold threads and dark, flowing robes and satchels, drifting below this moving skull like burdensome appendages.

A wanderer in the graveyard. Could one imagine a living denizen in this place? Hardly. More like as not, this could be some ancient sentry or guardian to this place.

Archanae tapped the sapphire in her medallion and whispered to it:

"Maldragos. Awaken."

In response, a clay figure stirred. Its scarred surface cracked and rumbled, inevitably crunching and flattening bone as the golem sidled up to his mistress.

 

[Radu Basarab]

Archanae

Radu did not turn. He had no need of such pedestrian gestures. Through channels carved into the fabric of perception itself, he remained aware of Archanae as completely as if she stood reflected in his eyes. The shift of her attention, the subtle tension that had crept into her bearing: he felt these things the way the commonfolk felt a change in weather.

"You have sensed it as well," he said, and his voice carried easily across the engine's bones. "We are not alone. But spare yourself the concern, this place draws practitioners of the dark arts as surely as death draws flies. They come seeking its secrets, hungry to sup from its peculiar wisdom." A pause, laden with certainty. "They will not trouble us."

His gaze remained fixed upon the mist-shrouded distance, dissecting the bone-ridden landscape with the patience of a scholar parsing sacred text. Nothing escaped him. Not the scatter of deformed insects that traversed the lifeless soil on too many legs, their carapaces gleaming with an oily iridescence. Not the way certain shadows pooled in the hollows of ancient ribcages, darker than absence alone could account for. The boneyard had cultivated an ecosystem entirely its own, a mockery of nature's cycles, or perhaps a refinement of them. Its denizens existed in the liminal spaces between states of being, neither truly living nor truly dead, but something altogether other. Something that persisted.

At the periphery of his vision, movement coalesced.

Three figures. They drifted rather than walked, legless and weightless, their forms suspended no more than three feet above the corrupted earth. Shrouds clung to them, the sickly green of old copper, of funeral vestments left too long in lightless crypts, and through the tattered fabric, their bodies showed desiccated and translucent, like parchment held before a flame. They were drawn toward the Mortis Engine with the slow inevitability of moths circling a lantern, their approach less predatory than supplicant. They recognised, perhaps, some kinship in its construction. Some shared grammar of unlife.

Radu observed their congregation without concern.

"This land is ripe with feral undead," he said, and there was something approaching satisfaction in his tone, the quiet pleasure of a craftsman surveying raw materials. "Should we establish a camp here, we could enlist them into our service. They hunger for purpose, these masterless things. We would be doing them a kindness."

The spectral creatures circled closer, and the mist parted around them like curtains drawn aside for royalty, and Radu watched their obeisance with something approaching interest.

 

[Archanae]

Radu's voice elicited a small nod from Archanae. She stepped away from the edge, releasing the jutting ribcage.

"A kindness indeed. What raw element does not secretly yearn to be engineered into beautiful complexity?" An invocation followed this pronouncement, with a swirling gesture of her hand, ending in her fingers crooked and bent in complex patterns. Azure orbs burned through her eyes, fuelling an intricate sigil incinerating the air, before lashing out in a phosphorent chain, shackling one of the spectres. It let out a cry that seemed to reverberate not through the wind, but through some skein of spirits, translating into the mortal realm with a dreadfully twisted sound of agony. "Even these stringless puppets seek a guiding hand."

Archanae yanked in this chain, burning and sparking around her hands like iron fresh from the forge receiving hammer blows.

Radu Basarab
Lazarus Jeager
Caspian Reneux

 

[Lazarus Jeager]

As an observer of cruelty and despair, the knowledge of the practice and the experience enough to understand what was happening before his eyes, the skull clad individual couldn't help but feel a small pity for the entities being shackled. He understood that it would be more for the benefit of the master than the subjugated, but they without purpose often wander aimlessly in search of just such a position.

Creeping ever closer, Lazarus made his way between bones, watching with a studious eye at the movements, examining the magic's used and the method of usage as best he could from his place within a ribcage, taking shelter under the ivory. Normally there wouldn't be as much concern for approaching people, but given the location and who it happened to garner interest from, he'd hold off on making direct contact for the moment. The more obvious reason was the individual manning the structure they stood upon, clearly something more than human, but what exactly it was left him unsure if the trip was all for naught. Making no effort to hide himself, the robed man opted to keep a safe distance from the other two, though he wouldn't be outside of eye sight. Following them until their either stopped or addressed him directly, Lazarus would keep a comfortable leash, a show of neutrality he hoped wouldn't be looked upon untowardly.

 

[Radu Basarab]

Lazarus Jeager
Archanae

The Mortis Engine shuddered at Radu's command, a gesture, nothing more, a flick of fingers encased in that dark integument that was neither armor nor flesh but something altogether more profound, a carapace. The spectral limbs beneath the bone cradle grew still, their ceaseless rowing through the aether suspended, holding the vessel aloft like a corpse upon still waters.

He stood at the precipice of the Engine's prow, and for a moment, he was aware of himself as the wraiths must see him: a silhouette carved from absence, the red wound of the dying sun haloed behind his skull like a consecration. His cloak, though cloak was a word too mundane for the thing that clung to his shoulders, stirred with intent. It did not unfurl so much as remember that it could also be wings, and in remembering, became them. The membrane stretched, dark as the inside of a closed eye, and cast its shadow across the blighted earth below.

Radu stepped from the edge and did not fall.

The descent was a glide, silent and inevitable, the air parting for him as though it, too, understood what he was and what courtesies were owed. His feet, those terrible, talon-curved things that had long ago forgotten the shape of anything human, found purchase in the dead soil, sinking into the ash and sterile dust with a sound like old parchment tearing.

He did not turn. There was no need.

"A fledgling necromancer," he said, his voice carrying neither question nor particular interest. "I know you are here."

The words were not a greeting. They were an anatomization, the verbal equivalent of pinning a specimen to a board.

Around him, the wraiths gathered. They came seeping from the spaces between moments, their forms suggestions of grief wrapped in translucent shrouds that rippled through states of being, now corporeal enough to catch the wan light, now fading to mere impressions of anguish. They reached for him with fingers like winter branches, their moans the sound of memories being slowly unmade. They wanted something from him. They always wanted.

Radu raised his hands.

The gesture was not violent. It carried no threat. And yet the spirits stilled as though struck, their keening silenced mid-note, their desperate fingers frozen in attitudes of supplication.

 

[Archanae]

Alas, Archanae had no wings of her own. The fall was substantial. But she could borrow the flight of another.

The floating spectre she had shackled still writhed against her chain. A pulse of white energy went through it, stilling the creature, like one might handle a phantom horse. Then she stepped off the precipice, hanging by this ethereal chain and creature, both slowly lowering her to the ground. Shortly after Radu's descent, she followed, her brass anklets clinking and her bare feet touching the unhallowed earth.

As soon as she touched ground, the chain evaporated in motes of light. The creature sought back to its flock, hovering over Radu. Archanae's burning blue eyes dimmed back to their natural cinnamon hue, observing this man shrouded by skull and robe.

*Crash.* a heavy impact and a cloud of grit and dust exploded outward from Maldragos' fall. Unlike the more graceful descent of these two necromantic puppeteers, the clay golem had simply leapt and landed, testing its hard mettle against the unyielding earth. The golem rose, its hard skin audibly crackling from movement, unbroken.

 

[Lazarus Jeager]

There it was, the acknowledgement that meant he could no longer simply flit about them like a persistent gnat, and as such he would take a moment to compose himself before venturing from the safety that was his shelter among the bones. Inching ever closer, Lazarus would stop himself a handful of feet from the two other individuals, and one hulking mass that had landed less than gracefully after the two of them. From this distance his own amber eyes might be visible beneath the shadow of the skull, the clinking of small silver laced trinkets heard somewhere under the robes he seemed to be hiding within. A small bow to the two of them was all he would afford himself, too swift of a motion could be considered a threat, something he was not, yet the caution in his actions spelled out his nature.

"Greetings if I may be so bold as to offer them, though it would appear I am woefully mundane compared to the two of you it would seem. It would appear that we are like minded in wanting to venture to this place, I only hope we can continue to traverse in peace, to take in what this land has to offer together perhaps?"

While he spoke more towards the entity that resembled the things his mother would ramble on about in his youth, his eyes would shift to give attention to the woman who had come with it. It was hard for him to put into words the sensation he got when looking at what the wraiths gathered around, it was more than just a crawling of the skin. It felt as if the ancient magics in his cursed form were responding to whatever made up this being before him, the unseen markings across his body resonating in some way or another that made him uneasy for a number of reasons. Despite all this Lazarus would stand before the two of them, offering a neutrality if nothing else, a small smile playing across his lips. The edges of the markings were just peaking out from under the opening of the robes round his neck, something he made no real effort to hide, but a keen eye would notice them, and he had to assume that whatever was before him might even be able to sense the cursed energy layered on his form.

 

[Archanae]

Spoiler: Music

In comparison to Radu's alien form, Archanae resembled a wandering hermit, dressed in shawls and the remains of a robe bleached to a sandy colour from wind and rain, matching her intricate brass jewelry that covered her ears, neck, arms, waist and legs. The sapphire around her neck and in her belt glowed like an extra set of vertically spaced eyes, and cryptic markings ran in golden spirals and cirles on her onyx skin, weird and esoteric like the ones barely visible on Lazarus. All these accessories crowded her thin form, striking a perculiar contrast between lowly rags and regal ornamentation. Her proud stance seemed to favour her jewelry rather than her clothing; chin lifted, one foot set before the other like she was standing on a tightrope, an arm crossing her own mid-section with a shawl, near bringing to mind a senator facing a court, rather than an odd ascetic infiltrating a massive boneyard.

A new glow of curiousity suffused Archanae's eye. Tilting her head, she sized up the robed form of this fellow journeyman. She didn't take his humble words at face value; a smokescreen, no doubt. Only a fool would underestimate those unknown to them.

"If you had been of mundane stock, I doubt you'd ever find yourself here," Archanae said, voice breathy and husky, with a tinge of exotic melody, like some resonant woodwind instrument. The Nazrani accent was rarely heard this far from the isles of Aina o Ka La. "Traverse together in peace, you say? Speak plainly then. Who are you?"

Radu Basarab
Lazarus Jeager

 

[Radu Basarab]

Lazarus Jeager
Archanae

Radu lifted his gaze to the sky, that bruised and lidless expanse, and then swept it across the blighted terrain. The wraiths pressed closer, their numbers swelling with each passing moment, yet he paid them no more mind than a man pays the dust upon his boots. They were tools, after all. Their hunger was his hunger. Their patience, his to command.

His eyes, pale as tarnished silver and split by pupils narrow as knife wounds, moved with the cold deliberation of a serpent surveying a nest of mice. There was no urgency in that gaze. No fear. Only the quiet arithmetic of absolute surety that bordered on madness.

He turned to Archanae.

His hand rose, that great and terrible appendage, more claw than palm, sheathed in plates of chitin that gleamed like wet stone in the dim light, and came to rest upon her shoulder. The weight of it alone might have buckled a lesser creature. Radu understood this. He understood, too, the treacherous strength that coiled within every sinew of his form, eager and indifferent to consequence. Each finger he placed with the care of a man handling blown glass. Each small pressure was measured, calculated, held ruthlessly in check. To forget himself, even for an instant, would be to feel bone splinter beneath his grip like dry kindling.

He squeezed, gently. A reassurance. The gesture cost him more effort than any violence ever had.

"You are wrong to assume we came merely to traverse this land," he said. The skin at the corners of his mouth drew tight, a grimace, subtle and fleeting, as though the words themselves carried a taste he found distasteful in their inadequacy.


"I come with intent to conquer. Here shall I raise my stronghold. Here shall I set the roots of my power deep into the wounded earth." The wraiths stirred at his words, restless with something that might have been anticipation. "And from this place, I shall reach forth to twist the remainder of the world unto my pleasure."

 

[Lazarus Jeager]

It was clear that his façade made little difference in front of this woman, it would appear humility was not something to flash in the face of these two, though for the time being he would keep at least a few of his cards close to his chest. Eyeing the being beside her as it moved, Lazarus held himself still, listening to the two of them and mulling over how best to navigate the situation at hand.

"I see, well given what I've seen thus far I can only imagine the kind of place you might transform this land into. If you wish for me to speak plainly I will, my name is Lazarus, I am a wandering Occultist. I may not be able to accomplish feats as fantastical as someone of your caliber but I am a practiced necromancer, not unlike yourselves. Curses are my other specialty, but I tend to dabble in a variety of other, lesser known, or long forgotten magics that most might view as forbidden." As he spoke he would raise both arms, retrieving from the long sleeves of his robe a string of trinkets bound in silvers and gold, all wrapped into some kind of symbol from one culture or another. The fingers that held the trinkets would reveal more of the cursed writing scrawled across his form, thin fingers that indicated the man beneath the robes was anything but muscular. Returning the trinkets to his person, Lazarus gave a more formal bow, the smile ever present on his lips as he looked between the two of them.

"I would be lying if I said I wasn't curious about what it is you're looking to build here in this graveyard, bountiful with the souls and energy of the dead. There are things lost to time that might still be among us in this place, my intent originally was to come and study of it what I could, possibly collect a new pet or two along the way, souls being what they are. Now I am left wondering if there is more I could be learning, and from who..." He left the question open to the pair of them, not wanting to appear desperate or like he was trying to benefit from them one-sidedly, instead it was more a question of if they would permit him to be among them, more so looking to the authority of the being who looked to accomplish such a feat.

Radu Basarab
Archanae

 

[Archanae]

While they had stood close before — less than an inch apart, even — they had never touched one another. Not until now. Archanae might as well have transformed into clay, turning even more immobile than her golem.

The massive claw crawled on her shoulder like a giant crab, with a texture that seemed indecisive between the chitineous carapace of such a crustacean or the sleek, rough skin of a shark, callous and smooth all at once, faintly moist with rippling and versatile flesh. Both brought to mind her worst nightmares emerging from the bottom of the sea. She could feel the surface of her frail skin near crumbling below its weight, as one might crunch paper; the restrained power behind this appendage moving with the utmost delicacy.

For every second this contact remained, exponential revulsion and anxiety fought a heated battle, bubbling up through her sternum like acid mixing with sulphur, burning her from within. She wanted to squirm and wriggle herself free from that inhuman grip. Her flesh screamed for a hasty retreat, as if it knew the danger hovering above it.

Archanae closed her eyes and started muttering a prayer in the Narra tongue. Not that she hoped for any help from the gods of her people; merely it helped her to meditate, concentrate and calm down her agitated nerves. The words flowed through her with that elastic memory of childhood, easily ingrained and able to be sung without conscious thought.

Maldragos lumbered up next to them, but Archanae raised her hand and made a quick, negating gesture. The golem stood at rest near her, dull cavities for eyes still turned in her direction.

Resisting the urge to extricate herself, she focused instead on parsing Lazarus' speech. It struck her as almost ironic how other practicioners were attracted to this abomination, like mosquitos hovering around a generous bloodsack, smelling the promise of sustenance.

Only they would have to avoid being crushed by their prize.

Radu Basarab
Lazarus Jeager

 

[Radu Basarab]

Lazarus Jeager
Archanae

Radu considered the man before him. His stare was leaden, incurious, the gaze of one who has long since catalogued every variation of mortal ambition and found them all wanting. Whatever arcane threads this stranger plucked at, Radu had wound them about his own fingers in ages past, had learned their tensions and tolerances in ways that would curdle the man's understanding.

He gestured with his unburdened hand, a languid unfurling of clawed digits.

The wraiths answered. Their forms began to lose cohesion, features sliding away like wax held too near a flame. What remained was neither vapor nor fluid but something caught shamefully between states, a substance the colour of verdigris and rot, luminous with a sick and fitful glow. It rose from where the spirits had stood, converging, compressing, until it hung before Radu as a sphere no larger than a ripe apple.

His mouth opened.

The motion did not stop where a man's would. His jaws continued their descent, unmooring from their sockets with a sound like knuckles cracking in an empty room, crack, the hinges of his skull surrendering to geometries that belonged to older, hungrier things. The sphere drifted toward that waiting maw, and Radu received it the way a serpent receives prey: without haste, without ceremony. His throat distended as the mass traveled downward, the column of his neck swelling grotesquely before subsiding.

For a moment he was monstrous even by his own considerable standard.

His jaws found their purchase once more. Snap. Click.

He burped. The sound was almost mundane.

"The desolation you see unfurled before us," he said, his voice carrying no particular weight, "was wrought by the hands of my patrons. Such is the measure of their power."

He allowed a pause, letting the silence carry what words could not.

"It is fitting, then, that I, their herald, should raise a fortress here. A monument to the ruinous forces that granted me this existence." His gaze swept across the field of bones, the dust, the absence of anything that might once have hoped. "And the dead shall be its builders. Their willingness, or lack thereof, not considered."

One clawed hand rose, indicating the horizon where vast and jagged ridges clawed at the pallid sky. They ringed the clearing like the teeth of some buried leviathan, and through them wound but a single path, narrow, treacherous, fit only for the desperate or the foolish.

"The land itself shall serve as my bulwark. None will march against me here without cost, and should they try, every step of their approach shall be bought in blood." He turned, then, looked at Archanae, and something that was not quite a smile disturbed the lower portion of his face. "Do you not agree?"

 

[Archanae]

Spoiler: Music

Every moment Archanae spent in the proximity of Radu Basarab might cause her flesh to rebel with terror, but it expanded her mind beyond any measure.

She didn't need to open her eyes to imagine the carnage of an army ambitious enough to invade this desolate place. Even more so after a fortress would be raised after Radu's design. Innovative in its cruelty, no doubt, in ways only a truly foreign mind could engender such defences.

The bleak corpsescape belied its deeper truth, she realised that now; worse even than fractured bones that might puncture through boots like caltrops, toxic fumes that might seep in with each belaboured breath to poison the lungs, or roving bands of flesh-eaters that might pounce on the unwary traveler. This was where elements came to die. Where nature expired and yielded its domain to the dark ones. A vortex that sucked in souls before they could escape to the ether, crushing them and transforming them into faces of its underlying evil.

What hope could even the greatest phalanx of spears and shields have against such inhumanity? What chance did clerics and sages stand, beseeching the aid of gods -- the very same deities that had allowed this to stand, like a grand discard pile of their greatest failures? The gods were useless. As ineffectual as magistrates in the lawless Cerak'At Thul, or the 'guards' that only protected the vaults of their masters, while slave owners and smugglers and pirates ran rampant.

Not even the worldly forces of the arcane could stand against this. What good would fire, frost or lightning do, in a place where they would sputter, melt and warp into bent versions of themselves? What mage could hope to succeed if his mind shriveled and putrified before he could utter so much as a word?

No. Against this, no human forces could succeed. Not any amount of steel, faith or current magic could save them against that which bypassed all shields to corrupt the soul.

The only redeeming factor that her kind had, their only chance, remained this: knowledge. Knowledge of the ruinous powers -- true knowledge -- the sort that plunged into the darkness and remained intact. That was their only hope.

And only she was positioned to gain this. Whatever it might be, whether her own unique mark of magic or Radu's influence, her mind remained intact and sane. Her flesh; unspoilt and uncorrupted. For now. Only she could harvest the required lore from this place and live to tell the tale.

Her eyes opened with monumental effort. Her long nail touched the central sapphire in her medallion, and it sparked with a weak, flickering glow, like a candle held by a shaking hand in blowing wind. The same glow reflected in her eyes. The arcane sight bestowed upon her only confirmed what she already knew about this place. Lips parted; words summoned; as difficult as conjuring any major arcana.

"No. None will tread these lands without cost." Her voice turned raw, as if the poisonous winds punished her throat for speaking. But yet, she spoke: "But remember, mighty herald. There are those who are willing to pay the price. Any price. A fortress will attract besiegers, as inevitably as a secret draws in seekers."

Her weakly glowing gaze fell on Lazarus then. A question? A pledge, or pleading? It was difficult to tell exactly what she sought from him. Perhaps she didn't know yet herself, plans yet amorphous and unformed. But there was potential there, no doubt.

Radu Basarab
Lazarus Jeager

 

[Lazarus Jeager]

The sight before him would have any normal man running and screaming, the utterly inhuman nature of the consumption happening before him should at the very least put a strain on his psyche, yet Lazarus stood with that same smile, if anything it would widen just a bit more, teeth just visible as he stared on. Where most would see a monster beyond comprehension, a devil or demon or some other grotesque being that corrupted the very land with its existence, the necromancer saw opportunity. This being spoke of it's patrons, he could only imagine what deity or otherwise powerful entity bestowed upon him this form and it's various powers.

Memories would dance in his minds eyes, the stories his mother spoke about, of things much greater and how, to commune with them was to trespass into the domain of the gods, however dark and malcontent they might be. His own being was tainted by old beings, though they couldn't hold a candle to the types of things that created, or perhaps reconstructed, the being that stood before him. Amber eyes swept from him to the woman who he had to believe was following this 'herald'. Lazarus thought for maybe a moment he caught the sight of discomfort, but he couldn't be sure, but it was evident that they have been travelling together for a time given the nature of their familiarity. Meeting her gaze for a moment, his own looked on with intrigue, a myriad of questions of how she had found herself in company with a being like that swimming behind amber hues as he listened on. If this place was to become a monument, it would be better for him if there was some sort of attachment to it. As such he would turn his attention back to the greater of the two beings before him, stepping closer now, close enough to be within arms reach, his very life in jeopardy if the act of standing before him was seen as disrespectful.

"I have no doubts that you will raise a monument worthy of those who have bestowed upon you the existence you now have. Though it will be magnificent, it will take time, and time is something I happen to have in abundance. I offer my time and my skills in service to you, if only to be able to witness what you erect here in this land. If you have want or need of my expertise in curses they are yours to use, along with the experience I have in any other practices. If there is some other idea of how I might be of use to you simply utter it and I shall become what you need of me, I only wish to be able to witness what will become a defining moment in the history of this continent, perhaps the entire world. there is knowledge in observation, I wish to be of service and observe, if that is not grand enough a desire then I only ask you allow me to take my leave of this place with my life, so that I might continue on." As he spoke Lazarus would reach up to remove the adornment masking his face, holding it to his side, both a sign of respect and to show the honesty in his words. Black hair fell to about his face and shoulders, his pale skin a stark contrast as amber eyes dared to meet those of the entity before him. Under the mask was a man who looked thin in comparison to the chitinous person before him, but his eyes held just as his smile did, if there was fear in him it dared not show itself in this moment.

Radu Basarab
Archanae

 

[Radu Basarab]

Lazarus Jeager
Archanae

"Let them come." Radu's voice carried the weight of certainty, each syllable unhurried. "More flesh for the grinder. My war machine shall require fuel, and I cannot hope to cultivate true power upon the labor of the undead alone. Those who trespass upon my domain will be afforded a choice: serve me in the warmth of their mortality, or refuse and serve me regardless, in the cold that follows. Either way, I am accommodated."

These words he offered to Archanae, and there was something approaching relish in their delivery.

When he turned his attention to Lazarus, that spark of vigor guttered and died. The stranger was not his to instruct. Not his to shepherd. Whether the man prospered or perished held precisely as much interest for Radu as the fate of any single grain of sand upon a vast and indifferent shore.

"Do as you will," he said. The words fell flat, perfunctory. "Your death would profit me nothing. Therefore you need not trouble yourself with fear on that account; a curious position, I admit, but there it is."

Radu raised his hand and brought his fingers together.

The snap was small. The answer was not.

Atop the Mortis Engine, the great brass bell shuddered into voice, a tone deep and brazen that seemed to reach into the marrow and pull. The sound rolled outward, and in its wake came something else: a tremor of force that spread across the barren ground, unseen but felt, radiating from where Radu stood like the first ripple born of a stone cast into black water.

He shifted his weight. Looked down.

Beneath their feet, the earth had begun to fracture. Fissures threaded through the hardpan, forking and multiplying, and from somewhere below came a sound like the settling of old bones in an older grave.

"They are coming," Radu said. His tone suggested neither alarm nor anticipation, merely observation, the way one might note an approaching storm. "Remain calm. Mind your footing."

He did not trouble himself to explain further. The cracking soil and the faint percussion rising from beneath it spoke plainly enough for those with wit to listen. Whatever slumbered below had heard the bell's summons, and now it stirred, clawing its way upward through the fractured clay to answer its master's call.

 

[Archanae]

Archanae certainly minded her footing. Even stepping back, as the earth before her erupted in claws from massive, bony wrists that wriggled and burrowed through the soil like giant worms.

Impossible skeletal figures emerged, both in size and proportion. Creatures that had no right existing in this world, and in any other place, would collapse below their own weight and the laws of nature.

Her mouth fell open silently, witnessing with awe what the pure essence of necromancy could perform. They seemed not so much creatures as animated structures, carrying aloft an edifice just as corrupt and unnatural as the Mortis Engine.

"Magnificent," Archanae breathed.

Radu Basarab
Lazarus Jeager