Fable - Ask Urorak Sands Caravan Crossing [Raziel - Kade]

[Fieravene]

Fiera bit back a giggle and blinked bright glowing eyes after the bobbing torch, watching it fade from view before turning to Raziel and taking him by his nearest arm.

"I'm reminded of our rendez-vous in the catacombs of Kru. Hm!" a sound of delight on such nostalgia. Back when they first met one another, before they'd decided that being frenemies with benefies was more their speed.

"Your hair was shorter then."

Fiera made a show of lifting her foot to continue walking, but instead of stepping forward ... she stepped back and tugged the tiefling to follow suit. Without even looking over her shoulder, she continued to march backward, "And you wore a different cologne. Which one was it again?"

Kade Anvar would find the same results on his second go. The tunnel dipped and turned hither tither as he ran, and he soon found himself coming back upon the elf and her companion walking backward toward him.

 

[Kade Anvar]

Hurry up, the tiefling said. Kade scoffed under his breath a little. Man, easy for him to say! Who was the one delving into some eccentric mage's temple of certain doom? Kade, that was who. Now, he didn't know who had the best hundred meter dash out of the three of them, Fiera the Shadow Fiend, Red Man the snappy dresser, or Kade, Ragash's finest pistachio thief, but if it was Kade...then, damn it, maybe they'd made the smart call in having him be the scout.

Just get this over with.

Kade kept walking forward, forward, through this sandblasted and Six-cursed corridor. When again he saw something just at the very edge of his torch's light. Again he stopped. Cautious.

And again it turned out to be Fiera and the tiefling!

Kade tilted his head so far that his chin almost traded places with his forehead. Supreme bewilderment was scribbled all over his expression. That, and frustration.

"Seriously!? Again??" Kade exclaimed, stamping his foot on the floor. "Come on, why do you have to do this to me? Are you two just trying to pass the time until the storm blows over outside? Is that it? Oooo, spook the poor kid from Ragash with our spooky magic, oooo. Cut me some slack, will you?"

Fieravene Raziel

 

[Raziel]

"Ah Kru," he said fondly, reaching up to run his fingers though his own hair. Had it been shorter? He could not even remember.

"Yours was longer," he replied as he stepped back.

He had certainly been slightly more wild in his approach to life. Not that he was a timid man now, but he gone though a phase of almost constant excess.

When he had initiated the dockside riots of Lushan, he had immersed himself in the carnage for two straight weeks. These days he would enjoy just a few days of the fallout of a coup he had masterminded before quietly retiring with some spoils of war.

"Ah from the House of Stiller. Vanilla notes over Amber. I'm afraid I only have quarter of a bottle left so I don't wear it often. My fault," he admitted with a shrug. "The place burned down during an uprising."

Obviously one he had started.

Raziel unfurled his arm from Fiera and turned to Kade with a serious expression on his face.

"Damnit!" he hissed, as if this was all very frustrating. "Maybe a spell of guidance will help us get to the bottom of this."

He placed his hand on Kade's shoulder, muttered some nonsense words and then indicated for him to rush on ahead once more.

 

[Kade Anvar]

A spell of guidance...?

Kade squinted his eyes dubiously, and his bottom lip bunched up to one side of his mouth in likewise doubtful consideration. He didn't feel any different. Was he supposed to feel different? So far as Kade knew, magic was all bright and flashy, colorful, noisy. You could throw a hundred adjectives into that pot and probably eighty of them would be right. So wasn't there supposed to be something noticeably different if Red Man had cast the spell he said he'd cast?

Or was subtle one of those eighty?

Kade lifted a finger. Seemed to think for a few seconds on what he was going to say. Then he wagged that finger and spoke in a somewhat stiff manner, "I'd appreciate it if you led with that next time."

He turned, slowly, half trusting and half doubting this third round down the corridor and the supposed assurance he'd gotten from the tiefling. Fiera hadn't said anything, so...it was probably fine, right? Heh, you know, if it was some camel manure, what the tiefling had done with his spell of guidance, she would've said something. Yeah, she would have said something.

Kade started at a slow walk, then picked up his pace as he yet again set forth down the temple's maze of shadows, spookiness, and surprises from your dark elven and tiefling friends.

Raziel Fieravene

 

[Fieravene]

"When you insist on burning everything eventually you burn the good stuff, too," Fiera remarked, a droll smirk twisted across her lips, implanted there while she watched her fiendish friend send the boy off on a third errant hall run. Well, she was going to break the seal but who was she to spoil Raziel's fun when he was going so very nice about it.

Fiera took up his arm again and once more set off walking backwards.

"Perhaps once we reach Ragash you can lay a splash on for a special night out, hm? Ah, here we go-" after several paces backwards, Fiera felt her heel pass through a fizzling ward of magical energy. Suddenly they were standing back through the very entrance they had begun in, but in a wholly different chamber.

It was supremely dark and even her own darkvision had a difficult time seeking out what lay in wait.

"Spark a light won't you? I need to retrieve my pup-" she pushed in back through the entrance of the tunnel, leaning through the ward only half way and waited.

And waited.
And waited some more.

Then she heard the footsteps and the breathing, and then watched as Kade Anvar's figure seemed to materialize into view through a hallway sharply adjoined at an angle and magic'd to transfer the walker seamlessly into the original corridor.

Fiera reached forward and snatched the boy by the vest, yanking him backward through the ward and into the darkness of the new chamber, "Well done, poppet, you've unlocked the spell for us," the dark elf's broad cheshire grin and glowing red eyes loomed in the darkness before pressing into the cusp of flickering light from his torch.

 

[Raziel]

"When you insist on burning everything eventually you burn the good stuff, too,"

"A very fair point, though I find humans to be quite insistent on rebuilding whenever I leave them alone. They are quite like ants in that regard."

His respect for those that marched to the beat of other people's drums was close to zero. Small minded people tasked with menial work to hold up their betters.

"Hmm," went Raziel as they stepped into a new chamber. She knew things that he did not and this he did not like.

"Worthy of a splash as long as you promise this city can show me a good time," he remarked as they waited.

Raziel turned his thumbnail into his palm, drawing the faintest sliver of blood. As he opened his hand a single flame flickered into being above his palm. He was a creature of shadow, but he had other tricks. He brought a torch to the flame and let it illuminate a small patch of the chamber.

"Well done, poppet, you've unlocked the spell for us,"

"Excellent work," Raziel agreed, handing Kade the torch.

 

[Kade Anvar]

Confusion of a mind-resetting level occurred precisely the moment Kade was yanked by the vest by Fiera. He stood there, dumbfounded, even as she said Well done, poppet and he idly accepted another torch into his free hand from Raziel.

Finally, a single thought got him rebooted into the present: ...What?

How did this happen? Where they following him the whole time? Wait, how could they have been following him if they ended up here first? They were still in the same Temple, right? Kade felt like he'd walked all the way back to Ragash. There was a spell here? One other than the one Fiera and the tiefling were using to play tricks on him? Were they actually playing tricks on him, though? Fiera had a grin that said YES and the tiefling looked like his default state, grin or no grin, was always YES on that matter, so...probably? Was the trick necessary to unlocking the spell? Was he thinking too hard on all of this?

Magic sucked, he concluded. Kade liked working with his hands, his feet, and his wit better than any wiggly-finger nonsense. Thank the Six Fiera and her tiefling friend were here to help Kade navigate through this mess.

"Yay. Go teamwork," Kade said, his delivery comically flat. Then specifically to Raziel, "I guess that spell of guidance did the trick, huh?"

And back to Fiera, "Are you sure the tree is going to be okay without us?"

Fieravene Raziel

 

[Fieravene]

"Ohhmmm," Fiera had left their side now and was walking down a set of steps, the darkness of the chamber before them swallowing her whole, "the better question is, are we going to be okay without the tree?"

Her footsteps echoed weirdly in the black before they stopped entirely.

"The tree will be fine," she insisted with an echoing grunt, "so long as we can wake up the Temple. Otherwise," there came a loud screeching sound of metal against metal, gears grinding in protest of movement, "we're all dead. Come here here, Kade, I need your light. Mind your step..."

Stray too far left or right in the darkness and suddenly there was no longer a place to step.

"Just follow the melodious sound of my voice..."

He would find the dark elf halfway up a stone obelisk clutching onto the rim of what appeared to be a large, polished bowl set on hinges. She'd take one of the torches and carefully light a wick built into the base of the hinge, then turned the entire unit until the fire's light reflected in the bowl and shone a beam out into the dark.

"Now go with Raz and find the next obelisks, light them, and turn their mirrors to catch the beam of the one before it."

 

[Raziel]

"I guess that spell of guidance did the trick, huh?"

"Sarcasm will get you nowhere, have a little imagination," Raziel snapped. He sounded like a child that was upset that its newest toy had ceased to be interesting. It was a close analogy.

"I sure the gnolls are territorially pissing on the tree by now, but that shouldn't do it any harm..." Raziel muttered as he followed Fiera into the darkness.

He was fascinated by the situation and the ancient magic here. He was significantly less enamoured with the fact that Fiera seemed to know exactly what was going on whilst he did not.

"What do you mean by waking up the temple?" he called back. A modicum of impatience snuck into his voice. He offered Kade just a little assistance as they got the second polished bowl in the chain lit up.

It said much about the tiefling that he was more concerned with secrets than the impending danger of whatever traps had been set into motion.

 

[Kade Anvar]

Sarcasm? What? So, what then, the tiefling hadn't cast a spell on him after all? Well how was Kade supposed to know that? He'd been unsure about the whole thing, but he couldn't've been positively doubtful of it. Wait. Wow. So that meant the tiefling and Fiera really had been pulling his shackles, didn't it? Fiera he could see, fair enough a comeuppance for trying to swipe her pistachios back in Annuakat, but what did Kade ever do to the tiefling?

At least the tree was fine. All this would be for nothing if Fiera's wife, whoever she was, was sour because her gift got munched up by dire circumstances.

Otherwise...we're all dead.

"I'm sorry, what?"

There wasn't much time for questions, or else the tree would be the least of their worries because they, yeah, all of them, would be the ones being munched up by dire circumstances. Magic sucked, and so did eccentric mages and their dumb temples. Seriously, who would build such a thing? A temple that needed to be woken up or it had a fit and ate people?

Kade came forward, minding his step and following the sound of Fiera's voice. He discovered that he was, for some reason, tip-toeing, as if he were trying to sneak up on some vendor closing up shop at sundown to swipe a quick snack. Alright. Nerves. Shoo. Just listen to Fiera's voice. It's the song of life itself right now.

There she was. He handed her a torch and she took it.

Go with Raz--hey, his name was Raz. Go with him and find the next obelisks.

"Got it. Easy. Easiest thing I've ever done in my whole life."

They found the next polished bowl with relative ease. Maybe Raz could see in the dark like some races innately could--man, would that be handy for a midnight stroll through Ragash.

"Hey, we make a good team, you and I," Kade said. And then added, "That's not sarcasm, by the way." And then added, "And that wasn't either." And then added, "This could go on for a while, couldn't it?"

Raziel Fieravene

 

[Fieravene]

"What do you mean by waking up the temple?" he called back.

"Nothing to worry about," Fiera carefully jumped down from her current obelisk perch to trot ahead of the boys as they continued to light the others, "just an Elder God of wretched fury and insatiable hunger that got fed up with being trapped inside a temple and took it as his new body instead..."

One after another after another, the obelisks were lit and mirrors shifted into position. The dark elf shifted to a backward stride as she called out adjustments to the mirror alignments, pausing while the two ... rather, while Kade was lost in semantics.

"Truly I am moved by your amiable teamwork," Fiera called after them, "but let's not lose sight of the more pressing issue here..." namely, their lives.

The last obelisk lit, Fi turned on her heel to move steadily down the narrow path between the pillars, striding across slashes of light between walls of shadow. She found herself at the end, standing before a massive, polished brass basin.

"Who wants to do the honors?"

 

[Raziel]

"Hey, we make a good team, you and I," Kade said. And then added, "That's not sarcasm, by the way." And then added, "And that wasn't either." And then added, "This could go on for a while, couldn't it?"

"Yes, we make a fantastic team. Tiefling who finds brass mirror and man that helps turn it. That was sarcasm by the way. Seems it didn't need to go on so long..."

He turned and followed after Fiera through the geometric shapes carved out of the soft beams of light.

The last time he had been in trouble with an insatiable elder god he had feared for his life just as much as this time. This time the risk was only balanced with a reward of not dying.

"Kade you can have the honours," Raziel said. His tail swished out behind him as a sign of his apprehension. "And waking up the temple stops us from being swallowed?"

 

[Kade Anvar]

When you got right down to it, Fiera was a really funny woman. Jokes aplenty from her. Yeah, her humor was as dry as the desert in a drought, but once you got your ear tuned to it she was a font of mirth. And hey, that was something Kade thought was a good occasion to give his shoulders a satisfied dusting—he did have his ears tuned to it, and probably in record time.

An Elder God of wretched fury and insatiable hunger. Oh, classic Fiera!

Raz was being an ornery goat about the whole deal, but hey, Fiera's humor didn't go unappreciated so long as Kade was here. Now, Kade hadn't heard this anywhere really, but if sarcasm was somehow associated with the color red then that sure would've explained a lot about Raz.

Beams of light angled their way through the chamber now, and to Kade they kind of looked like clotheslines. Big, thick, radiant, ethereal clotheslines, but clotheslines nonetheless. And he, in addition to being a newly christened scholar on Fiera's humor, was probably the resident expert on clotheslines. Not only did he help his mother out with the relevant chores (gotta set a good example for Aisha and Tahir!), but his little squalid corner of Ragash was strung about with dozens and dozens of them, and they were supremely flexible tools for a creative mind to use in making a hasty getaway.

Kade could have the honors of the last basin, and Raz was laying on the sarcasm like a baker putting the glaze on a sweetroll.

"Hold on, let me stretch first," Kade said, doing just that, stretching his arms and his legs in various ways. "It's always good to be nice and fluid. But, you know, how fast can some dusty and decrepit Elder God run anyway? If he really does have insatiable hunger, he's probably not running very fast, is he?"

After a light "Ahhhh...," Kade finished and touched his torch to the wick inside the brass basin, lighting it as they had with all the others.

"The things we do for trees and love, huh?" Kade mused as he started to adjust the basin. And to Fiera, "Let me know if I'm doing this right. I wouldn't want to tarnish our perfect record over light-based puzzles and big dumb Temples."

Fieravene Raziel

 

[Fieravene]

"Tut tut," Fiera watched the boy with a steady sense of wariness for their present situation, "mind your tongue lest you choke on your own words, Poppet."

The brass basin, large enough to fit an oversized Amol Kaliti God-Emperor or one amiable but giant minotaur, did not budge beneath Kade's attentions. The wick that he had just set alight, however, did take quite slowly ... the flame growing steadily bigger until it was not a flame at all, but the size of a roaring campfire ... and continued to grow larger still.

Soon it was a raging, infernal fireball that shifted from the natural hues of fiery orange to that of putrid, acidic green.

The ground trembled beneath their feet. Sand, dust, and stone dropped from the chamber's ceiling. A deep rumble resonated from everywhere around them. And in the vein of aphotic elder powers that be slowly rolling over to slap the proverbial snooze button before dozing back off into horrible slumber, everything stilled. The infernal flames died down back to their citrus hue.

Fiera furrowed her brow in annoyance, "Snoozing is not an option, I'm afraid. Let's see..." she looked around, checking that all the obelisk beams were properly arranged to send their light zig-zagging down the line until the last brass reflective basin shot it into the current fire before them. The dark elf stood back a moment, "Hm... it needs more..." and paused behind Kade, "body."

Fiera shoved the boy bodily into the basin and directly into the flames which erupted around him in the brightest, angriest shade of lime green.

 

[Raziel]

Raziel was on edge now. Blood, the source of most of his devious magic, now boiling hot through his veins. His tail was upright behind him, his hands open and ready to catch himself or to pull a blade from his belt.

Everything stilled for a few moments. Just long enough for Fiera to decide to shove Kade into the fires.

It took a great deal to surprise Raziel. He hadn't been given a warning about this place. A fact that he could attribute to either this being an unexpected stop or that Fiera had a hidden agenda. Raziel had no idea if this was going to burn through the life-force of the young man.

He was so surprised that he raised an eyebrow.

"All your friendly elder gods have an appetite for men?" he asked rhetorically. He skipped past that and onto a question that genuinely mattered.

"What am I to do when this thing wakes up?"

 

[Kade Anvar]

"Hey! HEY!!" was all Kade could yell as he fell into the fire. One of the last thoughts before his body touched the flames being a strangely calm and cool one: Oh, this is what it feels like to be stabbed in the back.

The flames, green and bright, were all around him.

And he didn't stop falling. Didn't hit the bottom of the basin.

From his perspective, he just kept falling. Falling. Falling...

Spoiler: Into the Realm of the Elder God

Every sense was torn apart by the raw disintegration of what should not be. Sight melted into sound which exploded into touch which coalesced into smell which dripped into taste. Kade felt as though he were standing still and expanding in all directions at once. His consciousness seemed to have lost its center within its normal place, somewhere behind his eyes inside of his head, and was instead blossoming like the blood from a shattered skull into the expansive and infinite space all around him.

He could see himself from behind himself. Yet this was one of many visions he was now somehow processing in an ever shifting kaleidoscope of impossible sensory overload. He could see a myriad of different perspectives all at once and felt that he was standing on the shores of a thousand different worlds simultaneously.

And then descended into that splintered web of vision a Thing which Kade could not comprehend. That which a mortal mind had not the capacity to perceive in Its fullest. The true awe and horror of basking in the presence of the divine burnt Kade away like the sun crashing into Arethil, and he was incinerated by the sheer magnitude by what he beheld, a Greatness which could not possibly exist in the world he knew and understood.

Then came an implosion of everything.

And Kade was cast out.

...right back out of the flames and back onto the chamber floor.

Kade was screaming at the top of his lungs. He scrambled back on his hands and feet like a young man possessed utterly by the madness of panic and terror. His limbs flailed frantically and he seemed to be sliding backward along the floor, such was his frenetic movement.

"DON'T TOUCH ME! DON'T FUCKING TOUCH ME!"

Consumed by his horror, he was backing up...right toward where the chamber floor ended, and the darkness spelled a fall of indeterminable height.

Fieravene Raziel

 

[Fieravene]

"Well..." Fiera mused as she watched expectantly for several moments. Expectations quickly faltered into disappointment. Disappointment shifted into annoyance. "Oh for Fonzie's sake. You can't have both of them I need one-" and then the flames belched Kade back out and the boy went reeling backwards.

"Oh-" she blinked, her own brows pointedly arched upwards as she watched with wide, round eyes while Kade crabwalked backwards, then quickly switched her attention to Raz, "get the horrified child before he prat-falls to his doom."

The temple began to shiver and shudder and then the basin before Fiera and Raz EXPLODED into a rageful howl of acidic green flames.

"I'll handle grumpy," and she turned back to the flames and began to chant an Eldritch mantra that would boil the minds of mortals and level the realms of men ... if they had the power here that they had in Oblivion.

 

[Raziel]

"DON'T TOUCH ME! DON'T FUCKING TOUCH ME!"

"get the horrified child before he prat-falls to his doom."

"It's never boring around you," Raziel remarked. Fiera told him that she would handle a grumpy elder God and - strangely - that was enough for him to assume the matter would be handled.

The tiefling drew a short knife from his coat. It had no guard and was well balanced for throwing.

"I'm not going to touch you," he assured Kade as he stepped forwards. He lifted the knife menacingly, a grin spreading from ear to ear.

His hand came down as fast as a viper striking. The metallic sound of the knife striking home rang out.

The blade had almost grazed Kade's shin. It had caught the fabric of his clothes and stuck fast in the ground to pin him.

Raziel had no interest in calming the boy, but Fiera had asked him to stop Kade from going over the edge.

"There. Stay there whilst you finish having this break down."

Fieravene Kade Anvar

 

[Kade Anvar]

The little tug of his pants, pinned by the knife and refusing to let him go without a least a modicum of a struggle, made him stop for just a brief second. And the brief second was truly what he needed. Amidst the utter horror and panic, there was the quiet and rational part of his mind which, like a dutiful messenger intruding only as much as need be, told him implicitly: Half of your ass is on the platform and half of your ass isn't. His palms were also reporting that, yeah, we're holding onto the edge of something, buddy.

Kade whipped his head back over his shoulder. Looked down. Oh fuck, oh hot sands, he shouldn't have done that.

Funny enough though, that jolt was powerful enough to effectively cancel out the other jolt—you know, the whole existential horror one. Maybe not completely, to be honest, but enough to remind him that he was back where he belonged. On Arethil, before any smartasses said otherwise.

Panting heavily as he watched Fiera face down the big bowl of green fire, Kade nevertheless called to her, "Why would you do that to me!?"

Fieravene Raziel

 

[Fieravene]

For fun, of course.

She might have said, were she presently not enraptured in the hymns of the horrible ancients. As the dark elf continued to speak, her voice grew ever more present, ever more powerful. It reverberated against the flames before her, making them shudder and quake despite their defiant and terrible fury. The pillars and monoliths quaked, the beams of light tracing between them dimming and winking before the darkness of the temple enveloped it completely.

Everything went dark except for the petulant, infuriated green flames, haloing the stark outline of Fieravene who stood before them arms open.

Kade would not get an answer because moments later the fire EXPLODED for a second time, flames licking out to engulf the elf, and then went out completely. After several moments the overwhelming sense of dread in the chamber lifted, the darkness diminished, the lightbeams returned, and Fieravene was gone.

 

[Raziel]

Silence reigned in the cavern. Some great presence had expanded out through these ancient halls. It had nearly collapsed it all down around them and then vanished back into the void taking the leader of their expedition with them.

Raziel looked down at Kade.

He shrugged.

"Shall we head back to the tree?" he asked casually.

"Oh and don't lose my knife."

 

[Kade Anvar]

Despite being cross with Fiera, feeling as if she had backstabbed him (hey, could have at least asked him first before shoving him into a gaping bowl of eldritch fire), and despite the horror, however much it had dwindled, that still trembled his arms and his legs, Kade nevertheless saw what happened with the big explosion of green fire and his jaw dropped in awful dismay.

"Fiera!" he shouted. Everything else vacated the boy. That resentment, that hurt, that horror. All was gone and in its place solely was alarmed worry for the dark elf who had the grace not to cut off his hands when he outright tried to steal from her. The dark elf who'd bought for him lamb at the Annuakat market.

His face was pale. Eyes huge and brows high.

And the casualness with which Raz spoke to him was shocking.

"What? NO! We have to help her!"

Kade grabbed the knife and pulled it free and stood up. He held it out, as if possession of it disgusted him and oh wouldn't Raz please take it back.

"What kind of friend are you? Worried more about this stupid knife than Fiera? Geez!"

Raziel Fieravene

 

[Raziel]

"What are you going to do?" Raziel asked casually.

He took the knife from the boy. He didn't seem to put the knife away, but it went from in his hand to out of sight in the blink of an eye.

"Shes probably telling off some sleepy minor god right now. Or she's already very dead and we can't do anything about it."

That didn't seem to provide the boy with any comfort. Raziel didn't feel guilt, not even an iota. The boy's distress did, however, irk him.

"Eugh. I could see if could try and trace her," Raziel offered, looking thoroughly irritated at the notion.

 

[Kade Anvar]

"Yeah! Try that! If it helps, I'll wiggle my fingers too!" Kade said.

Anything was better than just leaving her to whatever fate she'd found in those flames. They had to at least try something! Kade didn't think he'd be able to live with himself if he didn't. By the Six, the guilt and the shame would be crushing—he'd never be able to sleep again.

Raziel Fieravene