Ketas Indigovaulted looked up from his book at the low groan from Kosoth. The dwarf had passed out soon after the bite, some element of his biology reacting violently to the infection burning through his blood. Even with his freshly-enhanced strength, it had been quite the effort to drag him upstairs, contending with his awkwardly-slumped gait and the dead weight of his body and armour. There had, thankfully, been something of a makeshift table up there already, rendering it easier for him to remove the dwarf’s armour and observe the changes rushing through him.
Much of the initial blistering had subsided and the bite itself had sealed over completely with scar tissue and skin, though a few yellowish blisters bulged here and there amidst a reddened section of skin. Though his body displayed little in the way of further increased muscular growth, the dwarf would now be far harder to wound; out of curiosity, he had pushed the edge of his axe firmly into the bare skin of Kosoth’s arm, only to see that the blade had done little more than bruise the skin.
The dwarf stirred slightly, and then much more violently. His eyes snapped open, teeth bared in an expression of sudden murderous fury as he sat bolt upright. One hand flashed out to seize Ketas by the throat and mouth, fingers curling into a tight grip, then slackened as swiftly as it had begun. Recognition sparked in the dwarf’s eyes, and his hand fell back against the wood of the table.
Ketas turned about in his seat, seizing a small cup from a table to his right. He pressed it to Kosoth’s lips, letting the murky liquid within slosh slightly about as the dwarf’s face screwed up in some instinctual distaste, teeth pressing against one another to try and stop the foul concoction from entering his mouth.
“Drink this,” Ketas growled, pressing the cup slightly harder against Kosoth’s tightly-clenched teeth. The cup creaked gently under his grip, forcing him to loosen his hold slightly – he was not quite used to his newly-gained physical power, as the shattered flinders of ceramic off in the corner could attest to. “It will help.”
There was an instant of hesitation, the dwarf’s brain ticking over as it processed his words, before his jaw unclenched. Ketas wasted no time in pouring the entirety of the medicine down his ally’s throat, stepping back slightly as the ghoul coughed furiously; he knew from bitter experience that it burned like molten magma going down, though the effects that the Sacred Flax had described made it well worth it. It would require regular administration, with probable compensation for whatever effects his new physiology might have, but the result would – assuming all went well – be a nigh-unstoppable tool to further the goals of the true Abyssal Cult.
“Get up and get armoured. We’re going northwards.”
The two adventurers would travel for days, first through the fields and erratically-sloped hillocks of The Oracular Hill, and then through the densely-packed trees and broad, lush grasslands of The Jungle of Harvesters. Though their afflictions rendered them tireless and neither showed any sign of complaint at the length of their travels, it was slow going – at Ketas’ urging, the two were travelling by night alone, to avoid wandering traders and the packs of animals roaming the region.
Where the trees and wild animals failed to impede their progress, the hamlets and forts that made their home in The Couple-Steppes of Pondering and the forest took their place; on the rare occasions that the two were left with no choice but to travel through them, carnage was always the result.
The townspeople of the region, if nothing else, were bold, Ketas could not help but muse. It took courage – more courage, perhaps, than intelligence – to try and fight the living dead with no more than ornamental knives and the occasional proper weapon. None of them had so much as scratched either man’s flesh, let alone their armour, admittedly, but he supposed it was the effort that counted.
About the only good thing about the travel was the opportunities it provided them. Several of the plants critical to Kosoth’s ‘medicine’ were in great supply in the fields, allowing him to gather more than enough for the rest of their travels. Furthermore, the wandering packs and groupings of predatory wild animals had all proven useful for keeping their skills sharp in their long trek across from Inchtwisted, on the occasions they deigned to try and take them.
Ketas pushed those thoughts out of his mind. The two were almost at their destination – from his perch high in the trees, he could see the vague shape of jutting finger of smoothed stone, arising from the depression in the hills around him. There had been rumours, for a long time, of a ruined dwarven fortress lying in the far north-west of the world; though it had been many decades since the rumours began, he was confident that the ruins would not have been plundered of what he sought.
The approach would be difficult, nonetheless. Vast, indistinct shapes moved around the fortress and its borders, occasionally pausing to perch atop the hills or to quarrel with one another. The air carried with it the scent of rot and brimstone, even at such a distance. It was hardly difficult to tell that the fortress’s fall had been a violent, even diabolical one. With no option but to move down the slopes, they would have to be wary indeed lest they bring unlooked-for attention upon them.
The dwarf and the human advanced toward their goal with as light a foot as was possible, almost clinging to the shadows of the trees and crawling across the dirt where there was no such cover. More than once they were forced to freeze in place as one of the gargantuan creatures came too close for comfort, and one of them – a towering blob of rapidly-shifting ash and cinders, half-warm to the touch – they were forced to slay upon it discovering the two, sending ash scattering across the grasses before them.
Little sooner than they had struck down the ashen blob, a loud cry split the night. From high above, unnatural hatred blazing in its eyes, one of the gargantuan creatures swooped towards the two, wickedly-sharp talons flashing and a strange, smoky gas belching from its beak. Kosoth’s mace sounded heavily upon the kinglet-like beast’s head, followed by a strike to the neck from Ketas’ massive axe, showering the two in vile-tasting blood and hard little chunks of bone.
The demon made no delay in replying, one massive, taloned foot curling into a fist-like ball before it dived towards Ketas. The human made to move, recognising the danger, but his unnatural condition slowed him as much as it sustained and enhanced him. Ketas managed two steps before the foot filled his vision, striking with enough force to send him sailing backwards through the air, accompanied by a sickly, wet snap as his spine and head turned to an unnatural angle.
In moments, the husk regained his feet and rushed full-force against the beast. The two men fought in silence, neither uttering so much as a grunt of pain even as the beast crushed Ketas’ arm into a ruin between its beak, or as the force of its blocked blows sent them staggering and flying about the clearing; the demon more than compensated with its shrieks and cawing cries, accompanied by the crash of splintering wood as the three blundered about the forest.
The demon put up a magnificent fight, and more than once, it crossed the minds of the two that even their preternatural resilience might fail against the savagery and aggression of the bird-like fiend. It kicked and clawed at the two undead adventurers, hurled them through the air like rag-dolls when they blocked or were struck; it took to the skies, cawing for aid from its brethren, before its damaged wings failed it and sent it crashing back down to earth. Yet it was foredoomed, and it went down with Ketas slashing furiously at its head and torso with the blind savagery of an enraged berserker, bleeding from a thousand cuts and lacerations across its massive frame.
No sooner than it lay dead, however, the two were thrust into a second confrontation – the avian fiend’s twin had heard the commotion, and though it had arrived too late to aid its ally, it was more than willing to settle for revenge. For a second time, the forest filled with the shrieks and caws of the kinglet monster, the snap of shattering bone and the scent of hot, fresh blood. Its massive beak crushed Ketas’ hand into a ruin of flesh and bone, shaking the husk about like a child’s toy as the man sought to regain his axe and strike back. Luck, more than anything, allowed the two victory, as one of the spikes of Kosoth’s morningstar tore deep into the head of the demon and felled the evil creature.
Ketas idly looked down toward the demon’s corpse. He had heard only tales of the monsters, before today. Their strength, it would seem, had been grossly exaggerated, if a simple surgeon with an axe could slay them.
There were, thankfully, no further interruptions to their approach. The field around the tower was thick with debris – rusting iron and steel tools and bars lay in all directions, accompanied by rotting food and the occasional piece of dwarven viscera. Dozens of barrels and bins were strewn about here and there, broken open or otherwise left to spill their content across the dirt.
Ketas paused in his tracks and stowed his axe, lightless eyes scanning across the smooth stone of the tower for hand-holds in the rock. Kosoth busied himself with picking through the debris for anything of use, pausing every now and then to secrete something of particular value away in his backpack. A steel axe and helm, untouched by decay despite the years, a number of shields forged of various metals – and a single pair of blocky steel greaves, forged and studded with the once-lost metal.
Newly armed and armoured, the duo swiftly made their way inside the tower, and then into the fortress itself.
Kosoth could not help but note that its architecture was rather strange – the vast, empty rooms and corridors of unsmoothed stone stood beside crowded workshops and statue-line meeting halls, the forging area clogged with stone and detritus, the veins of ore-rich rock riddling the walls; all of it stood in stark contrast to the fortress he had lived much of his life in, and to the brief few years he had spent in Ironwards. Master Ketas was behaving oddly, searching through the bins and wreckage with an almost-possessed fervour; for a few seconds, Kosoth wondered what might be driving him to such fervent actions, before dismissing the thought as irrelevant, trailing after the human as he went stalking through the silent halls.
Passing into one of the few rooms yet unexplored, Ketas beheld a rather curious sight: the floor of the room seemed to simply drop off into some kind of carefully-carved pit, bordered by a quartet of statues and smooth pillars. Peering over the edge revealed little more than ink-black darkness and the occasional shadowy mass of what might have been a body, or a statue; proceeding down the ramps revealed a dozen tarnished, ancient chains, still secured to the ground by heavy metal pegs - it seemed as though this had been some kind of prison, though whatever it had once contained here had certainly long since fled.
If it
had indeed been a prison at all. The presence of a further series of holes in such a precise pattern, arranged in such a manner to imply an artist’s work, suggested it to be something else entirely – perhaps some kind of strange temple, as the heathen religions so common to the fringes of the world favoured. It was a suspicion that only grew as he proceeded down the stairs beyond, hollow eyes roaming across the smooth stone walls in search of some engraving that might provide further evidence for whatever this construction’s purpose was; much of its construction and layout seemed to imply nothing short of it being some grand architectural fancy as opposed to a functional temple, going by the lack of even the most basic adornments and the great, empty rooms of smoothed, blank stone.
The stairs before them continued to drive ever deeper into the earth below, running ruler-straight into the depths of the fortress. Vast, demonic corpses clogged the stairwell and barred the way ahead, bone and rotting flesh crunching underfoot as they entered the very deepest reaches of the fortress. With the cause of the fortress’s fate clear, and no way to access the supernatural ore that lay beyond, the two were left with no choice but to turn back.
The ashen ground stretched far across the plains, radiating out from the deep depression in the land ahead. Other ashes, carried on the wind, swirled around Ketas’ ankles and settled upon his travelling cloak as he and Kosoth walked closer to the shallow pit in the lands ahead of them.
Ketas had heard rumours of this place among the acolytes of The Abyssal Cult, spoken so long ago that it felt like a lifetime. A charcoal pit in the corruption-soaked regions of north-eastern Orid Xem; a place where the grasses and dirt rendered lifeless by wildfires created by the powerful demon lord said to dwell within. If it could be convinced to serve them –
Their approach was halted in its tracks by a thunderous roar, and a tongue of fire broad as a dwarf was long. A massive, four-horned head mounted atop a long, swaying neck arose from the blackness of the pit, weak sunlight glinting off the massive steel helm that guarded the demon’s head. Its eyes locked onto the pair of them, and though he knew it to be no more than some trick of the mind, Ketas could swear that he saw its features light up with some semblance of murderous intelligence.
Its massive jaws yawned open, and words issued forth.
Little in the way of further words were needed. The two undead sprinted across the field toward their target, shields raised to block the worst of the fire. The metal swiftly heated to a dull, glowing red under the fire of the demon, searing the skin of Ketas’ arm. The beast whipped its armoured head towards him as he drew closer, teeth meeting the empty air above his head with a hollow snap. The answering swing of his axe, Goden Ashro, sent teeth flying in all directions as the steel struck hard against the demon’s mouth.
The demon roared in fury at the wound, kicking at Kosoth with a leg thick as a tree-trunk as the dwarf closed in to strike. It missed by a matter of inches, providing an opening for Ketas to drive his axe into the exposed neck of the massive demon; foul-smelling blood poured from the cut, spraying in all directions as it pulled away from him. Despite the blow he had dealt it, it barely seemed to acknowledge him in favour of sending another earth-shaking kick towards Kosoth, forcing the ghoulish dwarf to spin out of the way as the hulking demon lashed out in all directions with its head and legs alike.
Ketas was just a second too slow. One of the charcoal brute’s massive legs slammed full-force against his lower arm, sending him spinning through the air like a rag doll; it was pure luck and unnatural resilience that prevented the arm from being torn away entirely, instead crumpling into a ruin of torn flesh and broken bone. The human skidded backwards across the ground for several meters, kicking up a smoky cloud of ashes that settled into a grimy patina on his robes. Kosoth’s reaction was immediate – letting out as close to a cry of fury as the ghoulish dwarf could muster, he rushed forward and struck hard with his mace against the massive demon’s helmed head from behind. The morningstar rebounded from the metal with a harsh clang, accompanied by the snap of breaking bone as the spikes of the weapon tore into what little flesh was exposed.
Once again, the demon reacted with impressive speed, massive legs kicking out with incredible force and horns rushing toward him. Kosoth managed to raise his shield against the first blow, the force bending the metal to a horrendous degree and sending him staggering backwards from the weight of the impact. It did nothing against the
second strike that thundered into his arm. Kosoth went sailing backwards as Ketas made to close the distance, the splintered wreckage of his upper arm spraying pus and blood about as he skidded along the dirt.
Ketas’ eyes narrowed to slits as Kosoth retreated. Both of them were wounded, albeit not fatally, while the demon lord seemed almost completely unphased by the cuts and broken bones it had sustained.
As the monster whipped its great head towards him once again, he shifted his weight into a side-step; its jaws clipped the air above his head with an outraged, wet-sounding snap. A stream of fire singed the edges of his robes as he ran past the demon and onto its flank, jumping onto the exposed side of its skinless form, fingers scrabbling to find hand-holds in the creature’s exposed bones and heated, lined muscle.
The creature seemed to recognise what he was doing; it bucked and thrashed furiously, bending its neck to an angle no natural creature should have been able to reach, trying to swat him off its back with horn and head alike. As its head drew close for another strike, face splitting into a diabolical leer of murderous intention, Ketas threw his entire body into a wild slash with his steel battle-axe, aiming for the hulking demon’s face.
The demon shrieked in rage as the blow connected. Clear, vile fluid poured down the curving blade of Goden Ashro as the axe cut across both of the charcoal brute’s eyes. Its newly-blinded head flailed back and forth, shaking Ketas from its back to land heavily on the ground below. The demon’s skinless head twitched this way and that, seemingly adjusting to the loss of its eyes with incredible speed – it had only been seconds since the wound was sustained, yet already it was angling its head towards Kosoth, sucking in air to fuel another immense blast of flames.
Scrambling back to his feet, Ketas rushed to deliver another strike against the demon’s trailing leg, letting the steel of Goden Ashro bite deep enough to touch bone. The leg gave a single, terrible spasm as the nerves within were severed, leaving the demon stagging as Kosoth’s morningstar tore another series of bloody furrows into its opposite. The great demon was weakening, now, as blood loss began to take its toll; its strikes grew slower and more ponderous, while Kosoth and Ketas darted in and out of its range, tearing fresh gashes into the legs of the gigantic brute with every blow. One blow even severed a foot entirely, sending the giant crashing to the ashen soil amidst another gout of ichor.
At last, the inevitable occurred. The demon slowed almost to a halt; its massive legs bent, then buckled entirely, folding beneath its collapsing body as the giant half-gracefully fell to the ground, armour letting out a hollow booming noise as its head and chest struck hard against the ground. A few sparks and embers flew from its throat as it loosed one final, defiant roar. And then it was all over, the beast’s eyes flickering one last time and then going dark as the last remnants of life drained free of its body.
Outside of a tiny hamlet, hidden by the trees, two men stood waiting under a bruised, blackened sky. At first, one might wonder what they were doing out here, standing silent and still atop a hill on such a dark, rainy night. As one drew closer, one might notice the strange charms that adorned their clothing and armour, and the unnatural light pulsing from within their hollow, dark eyes. The reason for their strange action would become terribly clear, for what few moments the finder had left among the living, and then be lost once again.
Amidst smears of ash and the ritually-scattered bones, Ketas sat cross-legged, deep in a meditative trance. Not a single muscle or hair so much as moved; even the unnatural glow of his hollow eyes had faded to dim embers within the shadows of his hood, so deep into his communion with the gods was he.
Ketas did not speak, but he felt words leave him, nonetheless.
“What would you have me do?”
There was no reply. The scrutiny of the Lord of All was upon him, beating down like the rain around him. The judgement of his god was almost palpable; it was as though a single, vast eye had fixed him in place with its gaze, picking him apart down to the bone and inspecting every single part for any sign of failure or disrespect.
He did not dare to move so much as a muscle. Were he to fail this silent test, there could be only one answer. The animating force of his body would be withdrawn faster than he could comprehend. He had seen it in the past – failed acolytes that had petitioned to join the ranks of the faithful, black lies upon their tongue and treachery in their hearts. In the instant of their induction, the Lord of All had showed them all the price of such lies; their skeletons still lay within their alcoves, a warning to all that might try to trick a god.
“Listen to my words.”
The voice of the Lord of All was almost blinding in its intensity, searing away every other thought and doubt.
“You ask of me what I wish you to do. Have you learned so little?”
Ketas reeled under the force of his Lord’s disapproval.
“I… I have become distracted, my Lord. I allowed material vices to weaken me.”
“No. You have grown strong, by these actions. It is why I chose you. It is why I choose you now.”
“My- my Lord?”
“You are a surgeon.” The word was akin to a mark of approval. Ketas almost trembled. It was a profession that ran counter to the very nature of the Lord of All – to receive such praise was unheard of. “You have always known of my actions. Of my tools. Of my creed. You already know what you must do.”
“Yes.” Ketas felt something strange well within his chest. It was a cold, gripping feeling; it robbed him of any thought beyond itself, and wound its strangling fingers around his throat. It was fear. He was being called to do the Lord’s work, and he was afraid of failure. “You wish me to spread your gifts.”
“The Lady of Life works to thwart me at every turn. Her thieves work to steal what is rightfully mine from my domain. They must be punished. I leave this task in your hands, my loyal servant. You have the tool to execute this sacred duty at hand – use it well. Go, now, and do my will.”
Ketas stood enraptured. Before such purity of purpose, he had no doubts. It was already a certainty – there was nothing to do now but to bring it about. It was the will of his god, spoken from His mouth, that he spread the gift lurking within his partner’s body to these mortals. The half-remembered fear was chased away by the light of His will.
“I shall not fail, my Lord!” Ketas cried aloud as much as he thought, undead voice as close to life as it had ever been.
The Lord of All’s gaze turned away from him. No longer pinned in place by the incredible might of his god’s scrutiny, the path before him was as clear as day.
There was a gentle creak of leather and metal as Kosoth turned his head towards Ketas. The gift was reacting with the concoction used to keep him under control; though his skills with a weapon were as sharp as ever, his ability to speak and act independently decayed by the day – only when presented with new prey, and the opportunity to spread his curse, did he seem to display some facsimile of life again, chasing after the living with all the rabid aggression of a mad dog.
No matter. He would have fulfilled his purpose soon enough.
Ketas arose to his feet, allowing the bone charms and ash to fall and flake away from his form. The lights of the hamlet’s mead hall shone weakly in the distance, accompanied by the glow he had come to associate with the living’s blood – tiny, warm smears of blood-red light, slumped upon the floor, or upright and facing others. Dozens of them.
Beneath his leather hood, the remnants of Ketas’ pallid lips pulled into a malevolent grin.
Later histories would record that the first settlement to truly fall to the Obin Blight was the tiny hamlet of Platewheats, which lay within the slopes where The Dunes of Glistening met The Oracular Hill. Kosoth Salvesank the Kindled Worshipper of Sitting crept into the hamlet under cover of night and ran amok amidst the wooden huts and houses, spreading his poison to all that lived and striking down those that offered any sign of resistance. By morning’s light, every human who had once populated the hamlet was dead, or reduced to blood-crazed ghouls wandering the streets in a dark facsimile of life.
In the eyes of some the attack was an experiment of sorts – a hypothesis borne out by the death, rather than infection, of several of the hamlet’s citizens, and the tremendous gap in time between the later ravages of the plague upon the north-west and this initial stroke. To others, it was merely an isolated incident born of the need to travel through the closely-packed settlements of the north.
Far to the south, weeks on from this first blow, there would come the attacks that earned the plague its name. Each night, beginning with the hamlet of Itnibudzu, a settlement would come under attack in the dead of night. On the rare occasions that one lived long enough to speak of what had happened, the tale was always the same – a dwarf clad in armour stained with old blood would come creeping in the night to open the doors of each house and infect the sleepers within with the disease running through his body, and to raise those long ago slain by violence or simple age as mindless thralls to its will.
As the tales began to spread, it became rare for a door to be left un-barricaded at night, and rarer still for a town to lack armed guards willing to patrol the streets each night with whatever they had at hand. It made little difference. Soon, there were reports of Blighted Thralls clad in armour and wielding weapons wandering the empty shells of former hamlets, bearing the signs of the New Disease’s sores and blisters upon their flesh and mindlessly seeking to destroy the living; freshly-attacked hamlets were found with their houses’ doors broken into kindling and the inhabitants turned or dragged off to be devoured elsewhere.
The infection began to spread north soon after Omon Obin was struck – whole towns became depopulated of the living within nights or even hours, leaving only the living dead in their wake. Yet for all of Kosoth’s efforts to spread his infection to all that lived, survivors began to appear, more and more frequently; refugees who had fled when his attacks began and guardsmen who had managed to escape the horde of living dead trailing behind them when it became clear that to stand would be to die.
Below, excerpted from the notes of
Admonitions Against the Abyssal Cult by Scaglia Pagetributes, is one such survivor's testimony.
“I thought something was off from the start. The bandits don’t come this far out – not enough loot or blood for those greedy bastards to bother. Well, we went to take a look at it. It was a dwarf. Slumped ‘gainst a tree, dead as I’d ever seen. He was armoured, and armoured well: well-forged iron, decorated with bone and metal charms – even steel, by the gods,
steel. When I got a closer look…” (Here, a shudder wracked his frame, and the man pulled his furs slightly tighter around himself.) “He looked sick, but not in any way I’ve ever seen. There was more open sores and blisters than there was a face – lips looked like they’d rotten off under the beard. Mudi didn’t care. ‘Dead men don’t bite,’ said he, as he went to pry th’ steel from that carcass. ‘Nor does gold stink!’”
[The soldier took a deep, shuddering breath, and continued:]
“It hit us so fast. It turned on its heels and shot straight at us like a loosed arrow. Bit Mudi right through the throat, deep enough to touch bone. It – he… it was so fast. One moment he was on the ground, choking, clutching at his throat, and the next he was upright and trying to tear us apart. Kikrost, Vispol, Kiros – those of us it didn’t bite it broke with its morningstar.”
[Here, he fell silent for a few moments, and I spoke the following before he resumed].
“I’m… sorry to hear that, sir.”
“I don’t know why it left me alone. It- it kicked me in the chest, sent me onto my back – broke my ribs with that single stroke - then stopped.” A shiver ran through his body. “It… it seemed like it – like it –”
[The soldier cut himself off, shuddering violently as a haunted look came over his pallid face. He paused a moment to take a long, deep draught from the flask he wore at his side. Once the soldier had recomposed himself, he continued where he had left off.]
“There was another of them. It was like one of them old monsters, the kind you’d hear about from survivors o’ Nêcikalnis’ worst battles. Neck and arm twisted around ‘til the bones tore out through the skin, scars from head to toe, wounds everywhere – face looked like someone’d taken a forge-hot knife to it. We thought it was another o’ them living corpses you find out in the Tundra. I saw him give a little motion of his hand, and they got back up and started walking. Kikrost. Vispol. Kiros. They all stood back up like nothing’d happened to them. Filed off into the dark toward the hamlet, docile as a pack o’ tame dogs. I could hear screaming, a’fore I passed out.
“I don’t know what the hell they were. I don’t know why they let me live, not with what they did to everyone else. But I do know one thing – they’re still out there, and I dread the day those monsters come crawling out into the light again.”
(Across two pages, near the end of the notes Scaglia Pagetributes appears to have drawn an impression of the two villains, seemingly based on the testimony of other surviving eye-witnesses and second-hand descriptions.)
Left: Kosoth Salvesank the Kindled Worshipper of Sitting. Right: Ketas Indigovaulted the Kind.
OOC: I probably should’ve written and posted this a long while ago, but (as usual) IRL and a general lack of motivation got in the way.
My official submission(s) are the one-tonne steel helmet (and steel breastplate) of Handbane the Legendary Slayer of Bugs. I will admit, with the benefit of hindsight, I should've boosted Handbane's skills before actually fighting her - I didn't know she was actually weaker than most non-unique demons in most combat skills, making my defeat of her feel a little hollow. As always, credit for the art in this post goes to Outcast Games and its artists; I tend to base my Museum characters off of them both gameplay and writing-wise to various extents, and for that I cannot salute them enough.
Author
Topic: Museum III, adventure succession game (DF 0.47.05) (Read 473620 times)