7th Malachite, 899Frigiddungeon had truly earned its name, Gasin Crewcanyons mused, as he completed his third circuit of the tower that night. Though the tower’s stone and the more temperate climate provided some protection from the night’s chill, the cold seemed to cling to the very stones. The chill would have kept him up, even if his thoughts were not ablaze after the day’s events. The fog that drifted over the network of trenches and depressions before him only made it worse, deepening the chill and turning every shadow to a flicking, monstrous shape.
Gasin breathed deeply, but the breath caught in his throat as he saw something looming in the mists.
A slender, hunched shape, its neck twisted to an unnatural angle, and a curved crescent of wood gripped in its fingers. And around it – others, their shapes indistinct, but all visibly humanoid and armoured.
He drew his sword in an instant, the blade solid and reassuring in his hands. It did not help the sweat suddenly running down his brow, or the sudden crawling of his skin. He strode forward into the mists, eyes snapping left and right. In every shadow he saw the first of them reflected, a silent figure gazing at the inquisitor from a hundred different perches.
“Show yourself!” He snarled into the fog, raising his blade in readiness for battle. He swung left and right at the shadowy figures, but his blade met nothing but air; he slammed his fists into them when they loomed near, but met nothing but loamy soil. “Come forth and face me, or return to the Sunless Realm once again!”
Yet there was no answer.
His hand faintly ached from how hard he was gripping the sword, and he seized upon it to try and ground himself. She was not here. She was dead. They all were. This was no more than a shadow play, a trick of the moonlight and the fogs.
He bit his lip hard enough to split it, blinking away the ghostly after-images to reveal the trench he now stood in, cloak speckled with mud and dirt. He forced himself to turn and retreat back toward the tower at a near-run, clearing the steps two at a time as he strode back up to the very top. There, at least, there was no fog – merely blank, cold stone, a murky view of the surrounding towers, and the ever-present chill.
Gasin twisted uncomfortably, resisting the urge to scratch at the numb, tugging sensation between his ribs. The knife had gone deeper than he thought, and his flesh healed slowly. Sometimes it felt as though the blade was still lodged there, and that sensation was always accompanied by phantom pains lancing up the base of his spine, or otherwise twisting his gut. It would take time to heal properly; longer now, after the strains of the past week.
Gasin momentarily looked over his shoulder toward the sleeping forms of his comrades on the floors below, closing his eyes and letting out a deep, shaky breath as he returned his gaze to the darkness. It turned his stomach that he had to deceive them as he did. But he had no choice in this matter, and the sight before him was a bitter reminder of him. Days behind the Sage, and now his master had demanded a meeting.
A flicker of light amid the shadows. An ethereal wisp of bluish energy flickered in the air, drifting forward until it was almost directly before him. rapidly resolving into the form of a woman. Tall. Gaunt. Pallid as a risen corpse. Almost against his will, Gasin knelt before her as she drew to a halt before him.
“My liege.” He said, bowing fractionally.
“You have failed to capture him, then.” The woman’s voice was cold enough that the air itself seemed to freeze. A few flakes of snow began to drift about the two of them.
“No.” Gasin’s features twitched sharply. “To fail implies there was a possibility of capturing him to begin with.”
“You failed, and now you waste time on a wild chase. On deceiving your tools, rather than putting them to use.”
“I –”
“You disappoint me.” As if to signify her displeasure, frost crackled across the ground and crept up the leather of his boots. He resisted the urge to shudder. “You have spent nigh upon a decade hunting and murdering His children with such masterful skill, and now you are outwitted by a single, decrepit old man. I did not save your life to be rewarded with incompetence, Gasin Crewcanyons. You are meant to
aid us, not further complicate our plans.”
Gasin could not help the bitter, scornful laugh that clawed its way out of his raw throat at that. He’d had no life left to save, not by the time she arrived to take possession of him.
The nightmare had begun almost two years ago, and he had found himself unable to wake from it. It should have been easy – a purge of the Blighted, locked within a hamlet’s mead hall, crippled and starving from a lack of sustenance. Simple. Routine. But there had been more to that place than expected, and he had been careless. One strong hit to the chest from a thrall’s war hammer was all it took to bring him down. He had laid there in the dirt, choking on the breath the thrall’s hammer had knocked out of his lungs, unable to do anything but watch as the men and women he had led into that diseased hell were set upon by the horde. The screams haunted him still, as did the taste of blood in his mouth, its touch against his skin.
And then they had come for him.
For weeks they had kept him prisoner, shackled in a filthy cage like a beast. They had cursed him in mind and body, reducing him to a living death.
Justice, they had called it,
Justice for the murdered! Those creatures forced him to feel the death of every living soul he had freed from the horror of the Blight; to feel their terror, their despair, and their pain both old and new. His flesh had turned cold, to be coaxed back through dark practices. Time and time again, the cycle had repeated.
And all the while, the gods and masters he had faithfully served for so long did nothing.
Instead, the woman before him had come to him as though from a dream. He remembered their first encounter still – her, bizarre and ethereal; a phantom like the one standing before him now, towering over the bones and filth strewn across the floor of that gods-forsaken hall. He had thought he had lost his mind in that moment, that the tortures of the sorcerers had finally driven him wholly over the edge into madness. The High Priestess of the Abyssal Cult, come to bargain for the life of a thrall-killer to serve her own purposes.
As if sensing his distraction, the High Priestess paused and walked closer to him, drifting across the foggy ground until she was only inches away from his face. Her mere presence seemed to cool the freezing air further, until every breath stung his nose and throat from within. His skin crawled with gooseflesh, and it was only by a great effort and pure stubbornness that he kept himself from shivering at the cold creeping into his bones.
“Perhaps,” She whispered, a note of menace creeping into her voice. “These failures are intentional? Perhaps you still find your service… distasteful?”
The High Priestess raised a thin, almost skeletal hand toward his face, drawing it across his cheek in a mocking parody of affection. His skin crawled at the sudden, freezing cold that accompanied her touch, but he did not draw away. He dared not.
“Your service can end at a word, Gasin Crewcanyons. There is no doubt you would be welcome back in Platewheats. I can always recruit another to fill your place – less capable, perhaps, but more willing.”
Gasin’s jaw twitched sharply as he clenched his teeth together, biting back the rising, venomous tide of terror bubbling up in his chest at the High Priestess’s words.
“That- that will not be necessary… Elder.” He ground out, forcing his voice to remain calmer than he felt. “This is a temporary setback, nothing more!”
The High Priestess’s head turned toward him, her cold black eyes narrowing to reptilian slits. At last, however, she gestured for him to continue.
“Firstly, your enemies are one less. Kosoth Heatlions is dead, and his work put to the torch.”
“Heatlions was a fool. A pawn who sought knowledge above his station, and fled in the face of revelation. There was no need to kill him.”
“Secondly, our quarry’s trail has been easy to follow.” He forced himself to swallow down the hot, harsh words burning in the back of his throat. The High Priestess was displeased as it was, and speaking out of turn would only compound her anger toward him. “The Sage has covered few of his tracks. It is only a matter of time until he is in your hand, even if he has slipped the net for now.”
The Priestess did not speak, but nor did she move to cut him off.
“Thirdly,” He hesitated a moment, trying to moisten his increasingly dry throat before continuing to speak. “Thirdly, my… my companions –”
“Enough.”
She paused, cocking her head to the side. The sound of snow gusting around the graveyard was the only sound in the silence.
“And where…” The High Priestess intoned, her voice taking on a tight, restrained tone. “Would the Sage’s path happen to be taking him?”
“Northwards.” He could not help the element of bitter spite leaking into his voice. Deep down, some part of him wanted this mad quest of his to fail. “Beyond the Realm. Beyond the tundra. Beyond the deepfolk’s old kingdoms, even.”
The High Priestess’s breath hissed between her teeth. She growled something in a language he could not understand, then turned away from him entirely as though struggling to compose herself. Fear stabbed at his chest for a moment, fear that he had pushed too far and would suffer the Priestess’s wrath, but it faded as she slowly turned toward him again.
“I must consult with our Lord again.” She sighed. For a few seconds, her translucent features faded away entirely to leave nothing but a shadowy impression of her against the wall. “We will need aid, if our quarry slips through our fingers. If
you fail us again in your tasks.”
Gasin was quite certain he would have cracked a molar from how tightly his jaw was clenched, were it not for some lingering instinct guarding him against such harm. “I assure you, High Priestess, I will not fail.”
“I hope so for your sake, Gasin Crewcanyons. Should events not fall as planned, I shall have to take a more… direct hand in these affairs.”
One of his eyes twitched. Cold fingers ran down his back, sending sweat dripping down his brow despite the night’s cold. “A-a more… ‘direct’ hand?”
“An intervention. In the flesh. In
person.” The High Priestess stalked through the shadows until she was directly before him and bent down to his height, staring him in the eye. “Do you understand?”
He bowed his head hastily, clamping down on the fear and frustration roiling deep within his gut. “Yes, Master. I understand.”
“Good. Now go from this place. Recover the Sage. Ensure the continuation of the Great Work. Do not fail us. And do not forget – your life and death belong to us, now. I would be gladdened to extend your miserable existence until your debts are paid.” She extended a skeletal finger from the depths of her sleeve, its tip resting inches away from his nose. “Think on your sins, Gasin Crewcanyons.”
The Dark Sprawl of Monal Gole was ablaze.
The battle had been raging for the better part of an hour, now, though to name it such stretched the definition. It was less a single battle so much as a near-unbroken chain of individual fights and brawls as the attackers moved from tower to tower, mercilessly clearing each one before moving on to the next. For each, they would split into two groups – one to hold the lowest floor, cutting down anything that sought to come up from the pits below the tower, while the other would advance up the stairs and deal with the sentries above, cutting the goblins down and casting their bodies from the battlements to crash wetly against the ground below.
In some towers, they even dared to enter the pits below, cutting their way through the maze of tunnels and cramped cells that serviced the needs of the population. Much of the space was occupied by beak dogs, trolls, and the other war-beasts the goblins bred down in the depths. They cut them down without hesitation, exploiting the cramped quarters and the beasts’ lack of intellect to their advantage.
Even so, they did not dare the larger caverns. They all remembered well the old tales of those stygian places, deep enough that they were said to lead directly to the chained frost-iron gates of the Sunless Realm itself, where all souls must one day go. Not even the most bloodthirsty or wild of the belligerents lacked caution to such an extent that they were willing to challenge that claim, and so the greatest caverns were studiously ignored in the course of their rampage.
Mori struck another of the goblins down as it turned to flee, swinging her hammer’s killing face into the retreating greenskin’s back. It dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, the spine broken midway; a hard stamp to the back of the neck provided a satisfactory
crack and a wet gurgling noise. Blood frothed between its lips as it slumped face-first into the mud. She stormed on into the fighting, leaving the wretched thing to drown in its own blood.
Wrenching her hammer free from the cracked ribcage of a troll, Mori sent its killing face hurtling into that of a charging lasher, taking most of his face off with a single blow. A glance to her sides before she finished the job confirmed the resistance in the pit was mostly eliminated. The creatures had come eagerly rushing toward the source of raw meat standing at the narrow entrance to the pit, only to be cut down by axe and sword with swift, efficient strikes. As the bodies had begun to pile up and the attacks became less frequent, they had begun to advance deeper into this tower’s pits, cutting down the greenskins and their minions wherever they dared to show their faces.
Mori paused for a moment to block a desperate spear-thrust from a greenskin animal keeper, before shattering his arm with a retaliatory blow from her shield. It was sloppy, next to her usual movement, but she barely cared by that point.
Her muddied, bloodstained consciousness lacked the time and focus for finesse.
Grunting, she swung her hammer back into the goblin’s arm with enough force to pulp the bone. A second swing split his skull apart like an overripe fruit, broke his neck, and sent scarlet blood spraying in all directions. Mori tossed his twitching corpse back into the shifting morass and turned in search of another life to end.
There was nothing. The resistance in the cavern was all but destroyed – anything still alive was either too well hidden or too far for her to see.
Gasin and the rest of the party met them at the stairs’ top. They were bloodied similarly to her and her comrades, their armour and weapons speckled with red and coppery blue from the carnage they had wrought. Bodies and bits of bodies carpeted the stone around them, the remnants of the goblins and trolls that had managed to slip past them or which had dwelled on the towers to begin with.
“No problems, I take it?” Thadar growled, eyeing Mori’s bloodied form.
“Only in how long it took to kill them all.” She answered, voice equally tight.
They continued on in silence after that. The mood was still tense between them after the events of yesterday, the death of their comrade still weighing heavily on all of their minds. With each tower they came across, the pattern repeated – only the number and kind of those slain in the battles changing. With each fight, they drew closer to the black tower at the centre of the network of pits – the home of whatever creatures controlled this corrupt sprawl.
They had just cleared the last tower before the central spire and were advancing toward the end of the final trench when Gasin suddenly flung out an arm, stopping the group’s advance in their tracks. He was staring at the citadel suspiciously, liquid black eyes narrowed to slits as he glared at the stone.
“Wait.” He hissed, suddenly alert. “There is something strange here.”
“The hell are you on about?” Mori let out a growl of irritation, visibly resisting the urge to shove past him and keep walking on. “I don’t see anything out there.”
Gasin grimaced. “I would not be so sure. Those creatures may have some foul magic worked into the stone.”
Mori bared her teeth in reply, features twisting into a snaggle-toothed snarl.
“Whatever it is… it will not keep them safe.”
Mori took a single step out onto the plains, and then another. She turned back, raising an eyebrow as if mocking the inquisitor’s hesitance. The others began to follow her, emboldened by the hammerwoman’s confidence. Gasin hesitated a moment longer before stepping forward to join them.
And in that one moment, everything changed.
Space became forbidden. Time contracted to a single frozen instant. Every step was an eternity.
“-ri.”
She pushed forward with all her might. It was like shoving against a wall of solid steel. Time contracted further. Her thoughts slowed, stiffened, began to grind to a halt.
“-ori.”
What was she doing here? What was it she had come to find? It was something important, she knew that, but she couldn’t remember why. If it was so important, why couldn’t she recall it? She’d wait for a bit. Then it’d come back to her –
“Mori!” Somebody screamed.
The voice broke her from the strange stupor that had settled over her. Gasping, she reeled back from the tower, staggering back across the loam. A look toward her comrades confirmed it had not been some isolated delusion – most of the group were pale as ghosts, breathing as though they had run a marathon; Gencesh was slumped against the trench wall, crushing his temples in both hands, sweat dripping down his forehead. Gasin himself had seemingly been struck the worst; he was on his hands and knees at the edge of the trench, emptying his stomach’s contents onto the soil below. When he rose again, his face was waxen, and his liquid black eyes bore a horror to answer that in Mori’s eyes.
“This place is cursed.” Mori felt herself saying. She felt strange, almost light-headed; her mouth felt as though it were moving independently of her. “This place…”
Gasin shook his head, silently making an unfamiliar sign over his breast with one hand. He was physically shaking, though whether it was from the evident nausea or whatever terror had struck upon his mind, Mori could not tell.
“We must leave.” He rasped, tone brooking no argument. Beneath the strength of his voice, there was the unmistakable tremor of some deep-seated terror. “Before we are drawn in too far.” He sucked in a sharp, pained breath. “Now!”
Little further encouragement was required. They turned from the tower and retreated without a word, the universal fear of the strange power that had ensnared them stifling any questions. Time bent, changed, shuddered. One moment their legs were slow as molasses, stumbling along like sleepwalkers caught in a nightmare; the next they were fast as lightning, scrambling across the loamy ground with exaggeratedly swift strides. They ran, and ran, and did not stop until the tower was a distant shape and reality had re-asserted itself. Only then did they let themselves rest, slumping to the dirt and taking in long, deep gulps of air to ease the burning stitches in their sides.
“What…” Gencesh wheezed. “The hell… was
that?”
“I have heard tales of such places,” Dubmith’s voice was unnervingly soft, her features paler than ever. Were it not for the faintest hint of colour to her lips, she might as well have been a marble statue. “Places where time itself is corrupt, and the gods hold no sway.”
“I remember those stories,” Hathur rasped, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. She shook her head, almost disbelievingly. “Tales of worms that devoured time, or else turned it in on itself to ensnare the unwary.”
“They were true, indeed.” Gasin whispered, his jaw tightly set. “To feel that even once…”
It took Hathur a moment to comprehend the implications of that statement. Slowly, Hathur looked up toward the black-clad figure of the inquisitor. “You have experienced this before?”
“Aye.” Gasin’s voice was quiet, devoid of its usual bombast. The colour had drained away from his face, to leave behind a dead, grey mask. Blood vessels had burst in one eye, staining it red. He spat a ball of red-flecked saliva to the dirt, blood dripping from where he’d badly bitten his tongue. “Once.”
Something moved in the haze. Mori surged to her feet with her hammer in hand, immediately alert, but the sight before her froze her in mid-motion.
“By the Dark Forest…” She whispered.
Gasin forged forward to stand beside her, and his face grew greyer than ever at the sight before them.
Before the plains around the tower, there stood themselves. Gasin, Mori, Thadar, Dubmith – all of them, standing in the very same places they had before.
“What is this magic?” Murmured Gencesh. “This trickery?”
Mori looked closer, taking in the sight before her. It was then she began to notice the oddities and the differences of their counterparts.
The Gasin of the other side was older and bearded, his face bearing a trio of wicked scars that ran from one temple to the base of his neck. Ritualistic tattoos crawled across his features, slitted eyes and dyed fangs forming an elaborate tapestry on his face. Thadar’s face lacked her brutal scarring, and her armoured hands held a bloodied morningstar forged from some shimmering metal; she wore a similar outfit to the original Gasin, finely-tailored black robes and clothing beneath armor. Dubmith’s skin looked almost bluish, her normally slender frame bulked by ropes of unnatural muscles and plates of heavy armour. She clutched a maul rather than a sword, and as she tilted her head towards them, Mori caught sight of the blisters and lesions that crawled across her face.
“This...” Hathur whispered. “This is impossible!”
Hathur’s doppelganger was a dwarf, her armour missing and a pair of wickedly sharp axes forged of blue metal clutched in stubby fingers, her hair spiked and stiffened into a huge crest. Gencesh was missing entirely, replaced by a one-eyed reptilian brute of charcoal scales and wings. Sizet, too, was absent from the image – instead Mori stood in her place, her features grizzled and harsh, a rapier in one hand and a crossbow in the other. And there, at the very edge of the image – Mori barely held back a gasp at the sight of Luki, alive and whole beyond the gleaming metal prosthesis that replaced her left arm, the archer staring back at them as though in shock.
“It is – a path our lives might have gone down, had fate taken a different course.” Gasin shook his head, blinking furiously. “Look away from it, and it will fade.”
“You have seen this before? Is it real?”
“Perhaps,” Gasin shrugged. “Who but the gods can say? It is a glimpse of things that never were, that never could be. We should not be seeing it…”
The figures were coming closer. The alternate Gasin seemed to be in heated debate with Hathur, the dwarf woman’s features visibly twisting in anger or frustration. Her axes scraped against each other in a spray of sparks as she snapped something at Gasin. The others seethed and shifted uncertainly, exchanging glances and mouthing words. The alternate Dubmith drew closer, letting them see the ravages of whatever disease had claimed her in painful detail. Luki came with her, reaching a hand forward as though in wonder before snatching it back at a snarl from the alternate Dubmith.
“Enough. We must move on – and quickly, lest it ensnare us in madness.” Gasin shook his head as though pained, motioned with a hand to wave them away. He drew another sharp breath, eyes widening slightly. “Quickly!”
Almost hesitantly, the entire party turned their backs and slowly began to walk away. Gasin alone remained facing toward the strange mirage. After a score of steps that felt like hours, he slowed to a halt, and suddenly nodded.
“Stop.” He said, voice sounding oddly strained. “We should be far enough. But – do not look back.”
Mori turned her head, just enough to catch sight of it. For a moment, she saw the land before the tower again – now host to a manifold display of variant scenes, where a multitude of Moris stared back at her. One of them in particular seemed to look directly to her, and mouthed something through a fanged, blistered maw at her.
Strong hands touched against her shoulders and turned her about. Gasin, grim-faced and pale, stared down at her.
“That is enough, Mori.”
When she dared to look back a few minutes later, the tower was no more than a tower again. No strange vision greeted her, only the increasingly distant black smear of the tower. And yet, her counterpart’s strange words still rang in her head, clear as day:
Nusta ogur osmze.
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Topic: Museum III, adventure succession game (DF 0.47.05) (Read 474592 times)