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 a complex 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."

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