Noise, endless, cacaphonius, unavoidable, unstoppable Noise, assails you from all sides. It penetrates your defenses, seeping into your body, and your very self. It drives you to madness, hatred, and pure, unrestrained, unrestricted fury.
The wretched Noise of creation slowly cuts into your psyche. The pure, perfect silence of the void is utterly absent, replaced with this blasphemous symphony of ruination. It overrides all else, and in this attack on your senses, you lose yourself to total, unbridled rage.
You feel yourself enter the Aether, and in your frenzy, you tear it open, and fling yourself through the rift in the fabric of space- time. A thunderclap echoes across the land and upon seeing and feeling, the solid, material affront to all you hold dear, murderous wrath consumes you.
...
You awaken after an indeterminate amount of time. Though the Noise continues to grate on you, you've adjusted, and can now control yourself. You examine your surroundings, you are laying in a jagged, somewhat circular hole embedded in a layer of sediment. A flat expanse of miniscule, bladed organic matter stretches as far as you can sense. Above is an expanse of emptiness, much like the beloved void, but it is filled with sparse collections of moisture and a wide variety of gases, mingling and shifting within and around one another in a harmonious, orderly pattern. Disgusting.
You stretch your semi-corporeal form, and sense a presence behind you. An excited, no, a terrified bipedal organism, clad in dried, hardened skin, shakily wielding a pole tipped with a shimmering, hard substance. It lunges forward and attempts to impale you, but a lightning fast blow with your chain shatters its pole, and a second caves in the bulbous growth at its height. The organism collapses and ceases all movement. You feel somewhat satiated by the crimson liquid covering your chain.
You sense an incorporeal part of the organism drifting into the Aether. A meager expenditure of energy traps it in place, and idle curiosity compels you to consume it. The incorporeal fragment is filled with primal horror as it realizes your intentions, fortunately for it, you see no need to play with your food, and its end is swift. Though it puts up a valiant effort, your will is far superior to its, and you successfully dissolve and absorb it into your consciousness. It tastes a bit tangy.
When a moment has passed, you've absorbed the organism's fragment into yourself, and have gained its knowledge, memories, and most useful, its language. In its language, the fragment you consumed is called a soul. You're standing in a crater in the middle of a grassy field, the sky is sparsely clouded and it has begun to rain. The organism that attempted to slay you was a mortal, a male human with a smattering of orcish ancestry to be more particular. The ople it attempted to impale you with was an iron spear. It was a conscript in the employ of the Urut Empire, a large theocratic monarchy ruled by a dynasty descended from Pohn, the God of Earth, Honor, and Law. In the War Before Time, Pohn led a contingent of deities responsible for defending the arcane deities as they weaved the veil of stars, a job they did well. Pohn was sickeningly devoted to his pitiful creations, and you have no doubt he would've lowered himself to copulating with mere mortals.
The conscript had been tasked with defending a small border fort of twenty-odd individuals, which in turn was constructed to prevent primitive orc incursions into the Urut Empire, a task it had done well until you arrived. Regrettably, you aren't able to garner any specific details of your frenzy from the conscript, as he had been running an errand in a nearby settlement for the captain of the fort at the time. You are, however, able to survey the results.
A crudely built yet sturdy stone wall and chain-and-pulley gate protected a boxlike two-story stone barracks, a small grain storehouse, and barebones smithy of the same material,, which housed, fed, and equipped the twenty-odd conscripts assigned there. After your rampage, a third of the wall is torn apart and flung every which way, the gate has been splintered and broken to pieces, and the rest of the wall seems to be on the verge of collapse.
The top of the barracks has been ripped off and shattered, and the bottom is filled with dents and holes. You notice long, jagged rivulets in the masonry, the work of your chain, no doubt. In contrast, the grain storehouse and smithy are largely untouched. Seventeen broken and mutilated corpses lay strewn about the ruin, along with cracked and heavily damaged metal weaponry. Six large bloody stains demonstrate the fate of the unfortunates you didn't shatter with your chain. You perform a quick scan and detect no residual soul matter, which would've been present if they'd escaped to the Aether.
Upon introspection, you discover that you've absorbed the essence of twenty-four souls, along with the memories they must've held. In them, your form is vague and undefined, seemingly emanating solid rage, slaying the most skilled among them in an instant with your chains, solidifying and growing in power with each end you bring. Most held strong and fought you, you gave them a quick death with a single blow of your chains. A few however, abandoned their fellows to run, these you wrapped in your chains and consumed, slowly and agonizingly digesting the entirety of their existence. Aside from your burning hatred toward reality, you find few things distasteful. Cowardice is one of them.
You gaze at the aftermath of carnage and feel invigorated by the essence of slaughter wafting in the air. You sense that you have power, not much power, but it is more than enough to get yourself started. You have 54 Void Essence, 20 to begin with, and 24 after consuming the souls, at a 1 soul to 1 Void Essence conversion ratio, and 10 from the sheer destruction you've caused.
Void Essence is your bread and butter, it sustains you, makes up your body and consciousness, and is used to hasten the End Of All Things. 1 Void Essence is enough to do something trivial, like smiting an unprotected mortal, 100 Void Essence is enough to do something worthwhile, like smiting several hundred unprotected mortals, and 1,000,000 Void Essence is enough to do something awe-inspiring, like smiting half an entire continent of unprotected mortals.
You have several options, to your east lies the outskirts of the Urut Empire, its few agrarian settlements are populated with hardy frontiersmen, humans and mixed orcs for the most part, though there are a few full orcs that have integrated. To the west lies the orc plains, populated with dozens of nomadic orc tribes, that sustain themselves with the goats they herd, supplemented with occasional raids on the Urut Empire. The vast majority are full orcs, though there are a few part orcs, and even a handful of traitorous humans.
The End is nigh, and you can hardly wait. What do you do?
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Topic: You Are An Aberration Of The Void! (SG) (Read 4117 times)