Open Chronicles What Troubles These Night-Haunted Mountains?

[Urdresh the Abhorrent]

A somber figure trekked across the green swell of gently sloping foothills, the slow clicking steps of his steed leaving smoldering welts of rot in the grassy swards as it trod ever on. The beast was a horrific vision: what at first might have been mistaken as a glossy sheen of sweat upon closer inspection would have been revealed to be a malodorous ichor of necrotic gel oozing from the decaying flesh and sinews. Lurid off-white bone protruded at grotesque angles from portions of horseflesh too decomposed to remain even vaguely intact, whole chunks of grey-black meat sloughing off in moldering, fly-riddled globules upon the path.

The horse's rider suffered no such hideous malediction, no swarm of flies nor blistering buboes of decay. He wore a weathered cloak over a frayed, flowing robe, each the deepest hue of black, and beneath a billowing shemagh limned with gently clinking golden baubles strung upon delicate gilded cord, there glared out across the chilly valley the vacant countenance of death. Instead of naked bone, however, this grim visage was comprised of dark iron, concealing whatever face truly lay behind those vacuous, lidless sockets.

The masked rider pulled his shemagh tighter around him as a fell breeze kicked up over the weald, stirring the placid grass fields. In the distance loomed the ominous and oppressive silhouette of the Spine, that unyielding mountainous blade risen up from the tough eastern soil whose crowns were ever capped in white and beneath whose peaks dwarves toiled in their chasmic halls of stone.

The rider paused. With a slow, languid shift of his head, his gaze was drawn to a disturbance in the nearby long grass. There was a crack of rushes being crushed under a clumsy foot, then a gasp, and then silence.

“Come out,” the rider spoke. His accent was strange. Like his headdress and golden trinkets, it denoted him as a man of the far western deserts, but the dialect was difficult to place. His voice itself was at once both disconcerting and strangely melodious; a sibilant hiss saturated with authority, devoid of uncertainty, a serpentine whisper.

A man in a wispy green cloak with a traveling pack tentatively stepped out of the grass. “Sorry, I wasn't spying on you! I was camped out in there, you see. Strange rumors abound in these parts. Pays to take precautions, friend.”

There was a pause in which the silence grew in the traveler's ears into the scream of unseen locusts.

“What rumors have you heard, friend?” The question split the roar of tinnitus like a knife and the traveler nearly jumped in fright. He looked round surreptitiously, as though someone out in the middle of this vast valley may be listening in on their conversation, before he began to rapidly collect his belongings, including a ratty, grass-stained blanket, back into his bag, exiting the long grass at last to stand face to face with the rider.

“Strange ones... They say these roads are haunted, you know. I don't doubt it. From what I've heard there have been battles here. Battles new and old. That leaves behind a lot of foul blood, you know, soaks right into the soil, turns it sour.”

There was another pause. “Yes,” the rider agreed in another sibilant whisper, his gaze wandering languidly back to the road.

“All manner of horrid things have haunted these mountains. The undead roam free, and those... creatures... from the tundra..” The rider's attention snapped firmly back upon the traveler. “Well, this time they're bandying some stories about some screeching wraith wandering the crags and foothills, screaming bloody incantations to the dark powers, rousing who knows what from sleep beneath the mountains. I don't truck with such ill omens, eh? Best to let them pass right by me. Hence, the hiding spot, y'see.” He gestured amiably to the long grass.

The rider looked from the grass to the man without reply. At length, he said, “You had better regain the road swiftly, wanderer. You've lost much of the day to idleness and the sun quits the heavens soon once more.”

The traveler looked up suddenly and sharply, a look of forlorn realization overtaking his doughy features. Indeed, the sun was only just now beginning to crest above the mountain peaks, threatening to soon descend behind them. “Curse me for a fool! I can't lose a day's worth of travel! Ah, but I don't want to risk the wraith of that horrible spirit! I'll just... I'll just keep to the long grass. I've made a nice little camp site behind the rushes, if you care to keep some company tonight?”

But when he looked back at the rider, he was already guiding his steed away. It was only then that he noticed the egregious state of the horse which bore him. He stared for several minutes, mouth agape, at the wretched spectacle as it slowly disappeared from view down the valley road, until he could no longer see the glossy sheen of congealed, gelatinous filth dripping off the creature's jutting bones.

“...by the gods!” he whispered, dipping quietly and meekly back into the grass.

 

[Sathirena]

As the wind of the mountains reigned loud, plucking at tree branches like a lyre of wood. The lurching larches of the bellow and the crooked pines of the above, no cry was more horrific than that of the solemn banshee ghost.
The wind was quick to give way to this poet of wailing, her cry now loudest of all evening noise.
No cricket nor frog would sing louder this night.

Yet the cool of the ghastly soul was felt far before any apparition could be seen. As if a lack of being made itself out of a cloud or mist.
Its imprint in the area was far larger than any ghost of a common soul.
It was immense.
It was powerful.
It was a dragon's soul.

Finally, the apparition made it'self known. A foglike veil upon the wavy grass.
Yet there it was, a crowned woman of a skirt of mist. A form that matched not the soul.
»Who dares approach me, « wailed the spectre as yet another undead husk approached.

 

[Urdresh the Abhorrent]

Horse and rider came to a halt in the shadowy vale haunted by this unearthly specter. The beast, strangely, did not neigh or whinny in fear, indeed exhibited no sign of a reaction at all. At length, slowly and cautiously, the rider dismounted, and as he strode forward to address the spirit the hems of his robes billowed over the withered soil undisturbed by the trudge of marching legs, making him seem to glide upon the mist.

He held a hand up diplomatically, hailing and placating the wraith.

“I am Urdresh, once of the desert kingdoms. Now I come in search of those who seek a balm of vengeance against the Living.”

The masked figure canted his head very slightly to the left. “Who are you, O banshee?”

 

[Sathirena]

The veil upon the elven visage swayed from the cool of the dead.

»Sathirena, I'm no banshee.«
The name was that of the great blue dragon of the north. Things started to fall into place.

»Tell me though, Urdrash of the deserts.«
»Vengeance against the living? Are you so perturbed against the alive of jealousy or revenge?« Moaned the Dragon's soul.

 

[Urdresh the Abhorrent]

"There are many insults levied against me which deserve to be repaid thrice over. I hold no wretched thing upon this world more accountable for my disdain than the temerity of mortals. But who shall sate my wrath when such a reckoning occurs, I sense, does not concern you..."

Urdresh dimly recognized the draconic etymology of the name. His interest in this forlorn creature was mounting swiftly with this new realization, and he skirted deftly around her questions to guide the conversation back toward his schemes and machinations.

"You need expound no further to me, O Mighty One. I could lambaste you with insufferable questions about the misty elven countenance you bear, but it would be pointless. I defer to your obvious power, whatever form it wears." The lich proffered a deep, flattering bow, knowing well how to tickle a dragon's inflated sense of pride.

"The true nature of my sojourn is one of investigation. I seek to verify the rumors of a realm to the east and the north, where the dead walk with impunity, and the living fear to tread."

 

[Sathirena]

She would have almost commented on the insults of the mortals, but the stroke on their person erased that thought for a moment.
The banshee spectre almost gave a satisfied smile as their ego got caressed. Perhaps a dragon's one true weakness, their hubris. She might even entertain the great litch of the ages long past.

However, the banshee spectre turned form and egressed further eastward and downslope, brielfy turning back as to beckon him to follow.
»Hear me, Urdrash. what you seek is no rumour nor the folly of a man's lucid imagination. A very real place exists high above the mountains in Eretejva's southwestmost isle, the eternal city, the Sanctuary.«

The spectre paused briefly.
»I built it, I built it like a slave. Toiling stones up the mountain to be chiselled and carved by many small fleshless hands.«

 

[Urdresh the Abhorrent]

The robed figure glided slowly after the apparition, maintaining a respectful and cautious distance from what he now knew to be the manifestation of a much more powerful being than he had first imagined. He gazed at her intently through his mask, hanging upon the tiniest detail in her words. At length he found himself gazing instinctively eastward, and north, to a realm of icy vales and blood-soaked tundras which, despite his vast longevity, he had never seen with his own eyes. Too late for that, he mused to himself with a macabre flare of irony, for he longer had eyes to speak of.

“Sanctuary...” he repeated with a small, treble note of excitement. Hesitantly, he reached up to the iron mask encasing his features and slowly removed it, unwinding his wispy black shemagh to reveal the grinning visage of a lich's skull. “I have traveled far to witness this place for myself, Sathirena, for the land of my dominion is no longer what it was. Once the western deserts were easy to conquer, for the dissident tribes and kingdoms have long been scattered. The empires of elves and men in Amol-Kalit which I once knew were but a distant memory, a dream. Until recently, it seems...”

He strode perilously close to the waith, conjuring in the palm of his upturned hand the quivering sorcerous likeness of a veritable giant among men, his smoldering features set in the determined grimace of a conqueror. “I am sure you know this creature. A paltry king I can withstand, but an emperor... impossible. Secrecy is my only ally in such a struggle. But, perhaps that may change.”

 

[Sathirena]

The thin ghastly veil of the spectre waved, caring not what way the wind flew. Never truly corporeal.
»There are mages there, great mages and stockpiles of knowledge beyond the comprehension of a mortal's mind.«
The banshee briefly turned to gaze back at Urdresh as he followed. Of course, she knew, she was there. Her eyes narrowed.
»The one you speak of could have succumbed underneath my gelum breath had I the chance and he, not a palace to hide in.« The shadow of the spectre's footprint cooled further and shuddered in rage.
The dragoness still remembered that one battle when the Eternum flew in Amankh's quest to free his deceived people.
»The ones you speak of are a sham standing atop a court of men consisting of snakes in the grass. Such is every kingdom bought by lying to the most vulnerable of people.«

 

[Urdresh the Abhorrent]

Urdresh clenched and unclenched his bony talons with a dry, rattling click. Strips of leather were peeling off the coarse gloves concealing his fleshless hands, cascading into the air like horrid black petals in a fetid summer wind. The lich's entire attire was slowly changing; the illusion which held his undead body bound in the simple black garb of a traveler was dissolving away into mist and shadow, unveiling the thing beneath.

“Through the centuries I have learned from observation what I could have never truly known as a mortal conqueror: that all kingdoms of Men are but built upon flitting sand, whether they be of the great desert or these grassy swards and hills of the east. And that which is founded upon sand will one day become entombed. One need only inquire after the great Abtati Empire to learn this,” This vindictive jab at the ancient elven people was no doubt made in ignorance of the dragon's association with one such being. The lich paid his insult no mind, never realizing it may irk the spirit.

Gradually, as he spoke, Urdresh's sorcerous guise eroded away to reveal a thing of splendor. Brightly gleaming gold mantle and archaic crown, billowing dark robes of rich, thin fabric, copious jewels bedecking amulets, rings and clinking girdle of gilt. But none gleamed more brightly than the spider-strewn talisman of Bel-Ayya which splayed glinting with an eldritch, hideous light over his bare ribcage, or the green jewel set in its golden band upon his left middle digit.

 

[Sathirena]

Quite an extravagant look, one of true might. Sathirena took a moment to intake the new visage, far more befitting to the conquerer back from the dead, with a regal sort of mein. Perhaps he may have more merit to his claims than he originally hinted to.
Impressive indeed. The wraith continued down the path.
»The one under who's binds I am held, who's face I present on my being is a dormant laying conquerer of new. The Eternum's fist and sword, however of the abtati there is a mage, more powerful than any litch I've ever seen. Perhaps you might find an equal in him? However «

»Hear me, if I still had wings I would have flown you to the capital proper, but a ship once a month leaves from a town north of Drawa's columnal rivers to Eretejva...«


The glimmering of the golden hues attended however, the presence of prying eyes. Bandits in the grass? A glimmer of steel or silverine weapons perhaps?

 

[Urdresh the Abhorrent]

Urdresh halted abruptly as he glided after the retreating spirit, given pause by her words. An Abtati wizard of supreme power, a lich just as he was, clinging to the physical world past all fathomable passage of time. A shadow of fear flickered over his normally unemotive countenance, a pallor in the emerald hue of his gaze, a disconcerted twitch of his bony hands. This ancient Abtati sorcerer could not possibly be one of the petty desert mages from the nomadic tribes of today's sand elves, no; to attain such power surely he hailed from the elder age when the Abtati lorded over Amol Kalit.

This meant two things, respectively, almost immediately: the first, that this lich may very well recall certain key details of the past which Urdresh desired forgotten, and the second, he would very likely be Urdresh's superior by many centuries of self-perfection. A sudden aversion washed over him against seeking out this strange realm of the dead, for who could say how many of his own enemies still walked and struggled when he had thought them vanished for millennia?

But he swiftly made measures to conceal these vulnerabilities and fears, and when he spoke next it was with such glib certainty and measured tact that even a discerning conversationalist would have had difficulty ascertaining any fear in the tone of his voice.

“I should love to meet such a knowledgeable contemporary,” he drawled.

On he followed, issuing a tiny, thin laugh at her commentary; the vacant, patronizing trill of a courtier indulging the humors and tangents of a fellow debutante, one from whom a very useful favor can be extracted... in this case, a very, very useful favor indeed. “I would not presume to sully your majesty by clambering upon your back like a miserable parasite, but nor would I be foolish enough to refuse such a kingly offer! Would that we could reverse your ill fortune, O mighty – ”

His words fell short sharply, his gaze snapping out toward the brush. His jaws opened wide, nearly to the point of unhinging like a serpent's, and sucked in with lungless traction a huge rattling, hissing breath, sieving a twisting tendril of black smoke from the air as it passed over his rotten teeth. All the while, one hand was stretched forth, stiletto fingers probing the night with dark magic, sifting through it like the teeth of a comb.

Had he sensed something? Did the living dare to make interlopers of themselves upon this meeting?

 

[Sathirena]

The ghastly wailer would have a comment on this or that detail, however, the presence of the spying did not go unnoticed from the spectre.
Who dare disturb them. another wanderer in the night?
No, a glimmer of metal, was it silverine or cold iron perhaps?

Bandits or brigands, impossible by their words. There was a whisper, perhaps too clear.
„ Seams like the peasants were right, the mountains were haunted, but the screecher is not alone.“

Out of the brush same four men, clad not like scum but geared up as hunters do, not those of game, those of forces dark and those of the beyond.

How well they were equipped was a mystery, it was a group of three, all in wide-brimmed hats and crossbows.

A shot ran through the ghost before she could react. Yowling as her ghastly visage was pierced through the cheek, and seeped ectoplasm.
»Oh these silverine wretches,« the air around cooled rapidly to a chill, the hunters only now mechanically trembled in the cold.