Part of me Died

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InTheFlesh
Posts: 135
Joined: Mon Sep 08, 2014 6:57 am

Part of me Died

Post by InTheFlesh » Mon Feb 26, 2018 8:29 am

"In my dream I saw a featureless grey landscape, an open battlefield. There was the most beautiful young woman - Willowy, pure, the embodiment of all that was good and sought - Holding the hand of a massive brute that seemed to embody everything she was not; Thuggish, aged, cynical. A more discordant pair I fear I've never seen..." - Cyllin Skaeva
"It's just BUSINESS, damn it! She's replaceable, you're replaceable - What are you going to do, KILL me over this?" - Jerhardt Seastar; Last Known Words
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A part of him really didn't want to come out of retirement. He could remember his childhood in Benwick's serene and bustling walls, checking the teardrop-points of his ears in the mirror when he was old enough to wield a sword, taking on the vows of a Knight of Benwick.

He remembered the fire, the women and children bodily being dragged by hulking Barbazu and Cornugons into the catacombs to their fate. The screams, pleas for mercy and salvation, and the desperate flight to escape.

He remembered his loving wife, their young son. He felt pain leaving them, taking on an oath and the grace of Torm against Manfried.

But that pain was nothing compared to what was coursing through him right now; bare eye-sockets blazing with red pinpoints of light --



The skeletal war-wizard that had come from the old Chateau grounds at the head of a throng of undead warriors - The red spheres of light in its empty sockets craned over its shoulder, distracted. Alcarin - Broken, lacerated, and bested - Tried to assess his final moments. The cadaverous form of Knight Erica and her mighty hammer stood by the black-robed monster's side, hours before his sole remaining companion to hold the line until more reinforcements came from the Knights Vigilant to the South.

The fact her seabrous, hanging-open mouth wasn't tearing into his warm flesh was a threat in itself; She was actively being restrained by her new Master, who was knelt before him. A horrific fate was moments away.

Whatever ritual was about to be committed upon his person - it was thrown off its schedule by the appearance an almost palpable cloud of darkness behind them. Breaths shaky and helmed head drenched in sweat, Alcarin noticed that the other skeletal warriors appeared just as confused by the object's appearance. They fixed poleaxes and circled it, the simple "intelligence" governing their orders possessing only a rudimentary grasp of tactics on their own.

As the other skeletal warriors made to circle the cloud, tendrils of darkness lanced out and grabbed them one by one. The first yanked inside the mass was tripped up, the poleaxe clattering to the ground and the bleached fingerbones of its hands digging into the soil fruitlessly, defiantly. To no avail, it and nearly a dozen were disarmed and wrenched inside the cloud, not emerging. The sound of dry bone snapping was the sole sound aside from the wind that graced cursed Minmir for several terrible seconds.


Just as abruptly as it appeared, the cloud vanished. In its place was a peculiar stranger; A tall figure stood there, nearly as pale as bone. He had long greying hair down almost to his shoulders, a shaven face and widows' peaked forehead. Not a single inch of his body was uncovered in scarring and wounds, from his tusked face, to his tattooed chest, to his padded cotton greaves with some clear sign of wear and tear.

In either hand he held a skull, and the severed spinal column and ribcage of the skeleton that met a nebulous fate within the cloud. He let them clatter onto the cobbled road from which the assault had come, before he gritted his tusks and drew in a sharp inhale of breath from his piggish nostrils. In a swift motion, a massive silvery blade was drawn from the scabbard over his right shoulder, and his maw fell into a deafening roar - spittle clung to one of his tusks as it bellowed out all over the battlefield.


The outburst was all the order to attack that the host of skeletons needed, charging at the stranger with poleaxes fixed and at front. He stood still with tusks clenched, heels dug in; as if he intended to take on the conjoined charge of two-dozen of them unarmored.

At the very last second, the figure simply ceased to be. The animated bones clashed, three or four of them getting their ribs hooked together. Their basest sentience struggled to pull themselves apart; the figure re-emerging from the shadows obliged them by force. Almost half-a-dozen were cleaved in twain by the staggering horizontal swing of a claymore following a profoundly orcen shout; a self-affirming emboldenment for a being clearly fueled by fury.

Bones clattered onto the ground and spread over Alcarin's ebbing body as the hordes crashed in upon the figure, but none seemed able to stop him. Alcarin almost laughed to himself; the being was the strangest combination of clumsy and agile. A heavy, silver-embossed claymore that must have weighed dozens of pounds crushed or sliced through the bleached automata in turn. Incredibly swift and unarmored footwork ensured that he always had a pocket to part through in the throng. Even when they staggered their approach and adapted to the man's heavy horizontal swings - One undead soldier rushed in with poleaxe fixed as it noted the figure had lost balance. He merely reached out and grabbed for the spinal column from the ribcage, before hurling it and all bones connecting at four others preparing their charge.

And yet the slowly dimming vision of Alcarin was perturbed by this mysterious man. Glancing blows and the accompanying burbles of crimson against the pale backdrop of skin - They were almost entirely ignored. What would otherwise have been thrusts and swings powerful enough to break iron were simply impeded, stopped, deflected, all by various shapes emerging from the darkness. Occasionally a misty tendril would manifest in a horizontal flourish and catch the vertical cleave of a poleaxe; the image of the man they swung at dissolved into an exploding curtain of inky shadows, befuddling them before they were wrenched apart by the thing's sheer brute strength. The man intercepted grasped the spinal column through the ribcage as one went wide on its poleaxe charge, and hurled it from there into another five gathered in a tight cluster.

Alcarin could barely tell how many of the bones closing in on the stranger were standing on their flat skeletal feet, or flying in all directions and falling like a rain of hardened marrow. He tried to rise but it was no use; he was maimed, and slowly losing what vitality remained within him - And he knew it. He could feel it, like the tortured ground summoning up the ground to swallow him.


The stranger had just felled a final stack of bones and planted his blade in the soil - Alcarin could see the sheer magnitude of the sweat pouring off his body, some of it tinged cadmium red. They made eye contact, and the orcblood began to pad towards him.

The murky mist behind the approaching stranger illumined itself a bright orange. Alcarin attempted to croak out a warning, but the figure sensed the flaming spell's approach - He ducked down just a moment before it ignited the spot he'd been in hellfire. Tucking and rolling aside, he patted out stray flames that had singed his hair and pants, squinting into the direction the flames came from.

The scent of ozone and the flickering flames from the incantation revealed to the stranger the approximate safe distance the war-wizard had reached in the minutes it took to slay their warhost - The stranger began to move into a run in pursuit, long loping stride covering feet at a time with each bound and step. The clanking of heavy plate at a speed far faster than a shamble caused him to skid to a halt, however - And to barely raise his blade in time to parry a crushing reverberation down the length of the blade, and a screeching of steel.


Only one combatant, however, was constrained by onset Rigor Mortis. The stranger's blade dragged on the ground a moment as he vanished backwards into a shadow, before launching forewards again for momentum. The blade - Dozens upon dozens of pounds of it - swung in an almost full circle from left to right. The heavy platemail provided only token resistance, two halves of the undead body collapsing into a heap on the ground. He scuffed aside the warhammer from the twitching arms of the still-struggling upper half of what was once Erika, before he looked up at the arcanist perhaps fifty meters away.

They were already halfway through a spell, a couple hand-gestures away. The stranger lifted the gigantic blade upon his bare shoulder, let out an imposing shout, and charged.

It would have taken but seconds to get there had the arcanist not completed their spell.

The silvery blade turned a powerful orange all the way down to the hilt - The heat quickly intensifying from green to blue. The shout transitioned to a howl of pain as the hot-potato of a weapon slid out of his hands and onto the loamy soil. Undaunted, he drew a hinnish hornblade from the small scabbard at his side and resumed his charge, winding around a rocky outcropping - As fast as he was, the next incantation was faster.

The hornblade was wrestled out of his hand by some unseen force - It rotated one-hundred-eighty degrees, and the sharp end plunged itself into the stranger's bare gut. He let out a challenging snarl only five meters away from its caster, but he found that his own body was no longer upon the ground either. A blast with the force of a great wyrm's wing-buffet plowed into the vaguely suspended stranger, hurling him ten meters back...

...Into the rocky outcropping he'd circled but moments earlier. The back of his head connected with solid stone - But the far greater injury was his fall onto the ground afterwards onto his stomach, plunging the impaled hornblade deeper within him.


His sight swam with flashes of pain and ethereal urges to "g̼̘̫͉̙̗͍e̘̬̭͠t̢ ̢͕͈͓u͉̥̮̙̜͇p͇̪̭͍̣̤,̧͙̺͎ ̬̗̘̬g̖e̵̞͕̫̟͖̞̰t̰̫̻̯ ̝̠̙̖͕u̷p̕,̶̫̪̻̟͍͍̣ ̣̞̖g̪̩͍̹͉̫̪e̵̳͔̫̦t҉ ̨̺͖̱͖u͔̱̞̱̟͍͡p̣̬͓̀"̗ swirling about him. Quickly getting to a knee despite the coppery taste in his mouth, he left the blade inside - As long as there was pressure, he was unlikely to bleed out; he knew this well as a veteran adventurer.

The skeletal arcanist had made up the distance they'd flung the stranger back to, five meters away. Necrotic energies coursing through its right hand, they halted and slowly extended the index finger towards the orcblooded stranger, back on his feet AGAIN and this time charging with a long-blade apparently forged from shadowmatter itself.


Pain. Torture. Anguish. The weathered skin of the stranger practically had the consistency of a thug's boiled leather all on its own from the amount of abuse and scarring it'd weathered over decades. Still, he felt the magic worm its way into his heart, straining at the valves and threatening to collapse it.

The stranger's limbs ragdolled to the ground and onto his back as if they were cut from marionette strings and left to drop on their own - Twitching and foaming at the mouth, his body desperately sought to fight off the spell, one of the apexes of the School of Necromancy.

Whatever controlling intelligence governed the skeletal arcanist had decided to end the fight on a theatric note. A simple cantrip of flash-freezing frost projected horizontally at the rocky outcropping above the stranger's head severed a large chunk of rock from where it had stood defiantly out of the ground, gravity causing it to tumble towards where the helpless orcblood lay.


The arcanist had already turned its back to the scene towards the Knights' defiant command tent by the time rock and earth made contact. After apparently considering a moment longer, they turned back around, invoking and hurling loose a second fireball into the dusty mass of rock and fog, decimating it and sending jagged shards of stone flying in all directions.

At longest last, the Knights Vigilant were no more, and nothing on Arelith would have been able to stop the gnashing, broken teeth of Earl Manfried's --


An arrow lodged itself in the skeletal spine of the arcanist - Hardly sufficient to do it severe harm, but enough to sever the connection between ribcage and legs perhaps a quarter of the way. They turned, indignant and already scanning its "memory" for a suitable spell to sling. It turned just in time for another arrow to strike true within its eye socket, fletching protruding as the shaft wobbled from the inertia of impact still running its course.

It was the stranger - ALIVE. Already he'd nocked a third arrow, seven-and-a-half meters away on the other side of a murky bog. It couldn't have been possible, especially considering the ivory hilt still protruding from his bare gut and the limp with which he moved, loosing the arrow from an orcen razorbow and barely going wide this time. Even the governing undead intelligence of the arcanist struggled to compute what had happened - But it was not so witless as to refrain from abruptly slinging dozens of force missiles in a wide arc, all to conjoin upon the crimson-drenched hide of the stranger.

He saw the dread-inducing blue orbs pick up speed as they tracked his location, staring balefully out at them through bruised and cataract-ridden eyes. He reached into his pack for a scrap of parchment, everything deliberately and carefully placed and categorized for quick retrieval.

Blood dripped on the parchment from his lips and fingers as he croaked out the arcane incantation, fudging together what little he grasped about the Weave with having witnessed thousands of spells over his life - He turned his back to the onslaught of destruction, hunched down, and prayed.

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From a field away Alcarin's gradually dimming vision finally opened a little more as he spied a massive blue explosion converging on one point. That, regrettably, was the only thing he could divine about the fetid bog where he lay; the wind and rain were barely felt. His wife and child...

How would they mourn?

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The stranger stood, limping behind a different rocky outcropping as the arcane Mantle surrounding him petered out at last. Both blades were far-flung somewhere, and the arrows from his ordinarily lethal razorbow would simply catch harmlessly in the arcanist's ribs... --

Catch in the ribs.


He had only about ten seconds, he realized, before the next spell from his arcane panoply of a foe would topple more of his rocky cover down upon him. Hands fumbling and shaking from the loss of blood, he retrieved one of the "trick arrows", occasionally used by thieves' guilds in Luskan and abroad - A rope arrow. Essentially, a time-wound grappling hook shot from a bow.

Two, three seconds were wound. He settled for two and a half, nocking the bow and attempting to let out a steadying breath. He was shaking too much to convince himself it was "steady", the dull thud of his straining heart and the blade in his stomach a constant source of bodily-radiating pain. He listened around the rocky pillar, hearing yet another flame-based spell nearing completion. Lunging out, he quickly took aim at the thing's center of mass, draw back, and let fly.

The hook-containing canister of the "arrowhead" sensed the motion of launch and the time immediately began. It flew not entirely aerodynamically with rope trailing behind it. One second... Two until impact. Perfect timing.

Taking the staggering impact of the high-speed canister-bludgeon caused the next fireball the arcanist flung from their arms to go wide, shooting skywards at a slight diagonal and exploding like a flare above the battlefield. The stranger saw them begin to invoke a red-tinged spell, something necromantic. Time almost seemed to slow as he heard the ready click of hooks deploying and lodging the canister into the arcanist's ribcage.


The strength of orcenkind was legendary, especially in comparison to their basic humanoid size. A being with nearly twenty years of adventuring experience through the most trying circumstances imaginable had turned one particular veteran's body into that of a juggernaut, practically that of an ogre's. He yanked the magically-shortening rope as hard as he possibly could.

The abomination's body cleanly, completely left the ground, practically lassoed by the retracting rope and being drawn in to where no mage, living or dead, desired to be - Directly adjacent to a hulking, furious warrior.

Himself caught off-guard by how quickly he managed to yank the skeletal mage towards him, he tossed away his bow and regained his footing practically at the same time /they/ did. He ran forewards, only a meter away before the familiar sight of an extended index finger stirred his blood cold.

"How?!" he thought - "How could they possibly have completed the spell mid-air?!" was all the gravelly internal voice could register before that pain recurred.

A familiar pain, but one with which there was no means of truly being prepared for. He felt as if his heart and lungs were swelling like dwarven balloons with the wrong mixture of gases, primed to explode. He fell to his knees, blood dripping from his tusked maw and his own ears not registering the shouts and screams from the crimson maw; defiant to the very end. He managed to shuffle a step's pace or two closer - The arcanist's pointing-arm straightened out, as if in the hopes that doing so would FINALLY put the interloper down, END HIM --

He'd managed to wrap a hand around the pointing finger, cauterizing the living flesh on the spot from the negative-energy still channeled around the skeletal knuckles and forearm.. With a massive, shaking hand, he grasped the pointing arm by the wrist. Tug. Yank. One hand managed to crawl up to the shoulderblades, the other clasped around their radioulnar joint. The orcblood grinned through bloodied tusks...


Minutes after he'd beaten the bony monstrosity into the swampy soil with the arm he'd torn from it, the orcblood finally wrenched its spine apart and cast the ribcage-and-skull into the marsh. Bubbles rose from the jaw and eye-sockets as it sank to the murky bottom.

He felt the compulsion to sleep, with a smaller voice in the back of his head advising him to treat his wounds before he bled out, and a third voice patiently reminding him --

The KNIGHT.

Clawing out of the miasma of injury he'd sat and resigned himself to, he clambered to his feet and stood - Albeit barely. Haze swam across his vision and the whispers, giggles, and distant laughs of the shadows enveloping him grew a little louder.

Through hazy, dimmed vision, he located the inert Alcarin - "No. No. NO!" he shouted, echoing across the marsh. All that battle had been for to SAVE him, he COULDN'T be... -

A sixth-sense that the stranger possessed was that of the ebb and flow of shadow; The Plane of Shadow and its basest Shade denizens being a sort of "energy disposal" for the Prime; at least to his own understanding. From all the blood shed and deaths finalized here at the marshy battlefield, dozens of shadow-beings had converged for a quick snack on what pain and anguish lingered before the painful rays of morning came.

Many of them gravitated towards the stock-still Alcarin - The orcblood had closed his eyes to open his "third" and make certain. The pattern in their hungry movements was clear...

Alcarin was alive. Barely.

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A wheezing, bloody cough wracked his crimson-tinged hide - As poor as Alcarin's situation was, the stranger's wasn't much worse. His hands shook and he knelt down, barely keeping from wobbling - And laying his hands on the knight's bloodsoaked tabard.

"R͇̠̗h̼̪̝͍a͈̥̟̫͙̼͟ͅe͔̲̙̮͖̗g̳.̰̖̩̤.̺̹͖̞̞ͅͅ.̬ͅ ̹͘U̲̖͓̳͙̹s̠e͔ ̞̬̰ų̲ș̨̤͇͉̦̙ͅ,͠ ̺̫u̬̩̦̪s͙̥͙͇̼͙̤e̤̫͡ ̨u̩̫͇ś͉͓̖̬̬͚̥,̦̞̦̟̺͢ ͠u҉s̝e̷̘ ͙̙̥̪͍̀u̞s̵ ̵͇̜n͖̫̟̹o̹̦̟̹̲w̥̠̮" droned in his ears, among dozens of others bonded to him. Rhaeg was no Paladin, no knight, no cleric. And yet he prayed silently to himself, because he knew that if his last-ditch efforts to keep the man's life anchored to his body failed... Then he'd be a feast for the undead, this day or the next.

Though his mind and body screamed at him to stop - Only barely peaking through the curtain of shadowy whispers and pleas - Rhaeg mustered the last remaining shreds of willpower he had. If it were possible for Shades to have a midnight snack of the battlefield to bolster themselves...

Perhaps the opposite may have been true?


His inky black tattooes detached from his body and wound down his forearms as he concentrated. "Come on... Come on..." his mind pleaded. "COME OOOONNNN!" came starkly louder from his tusked, bloodcrusted maw. Voices, emotions of terror, fear, and pain - They were at his beck and call. Rhaeg was the conductor's baton, attempting to reverse-engineer the process that kept the waste energy of the Prime running smoothly.

This knight was worth it.

He was no longer sure if he were even seeing that which a sane person might, as he watched his scarred body practically tear itself open to reveal inky, bubbling blackness. He screamed - He cursed - But he didn't relent. "Live, damn it, live!", ran through his mind. "LIIIVE!", he shouted, no longer able to discern or feel his limbs - Or much else besides the agony, pain, and other energies coursing through him, the locus of all of the battlefield's suffering in the prayer that it could be recycled.

Rhaeg thought he saw a trace of Alcarin's eyes fluttering before he felt his mind split in twain like a ripe melon, and everything went black.

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Morning wasn't supposed to be this bright; his eyes winced further shut, but somehow they couldn't keep all of the radiance away. His body felt... Unharmed, actually rather soothed. No ivory hilt protruding from his gut. Regardless he raised his forearm to shield his eyes from the willowy, female shape standing in front of him. While the light dimmed a little, he looked over his shoulder and saw the darkness that had welcomed him from what felt like only minutes prior.

It appeared to be a tiny pocket plane bisected into a darker and lighter segment, his veteran-adventurer mind surmised. Some sort of ideological theme? Was it a coincidence that the darkness was on HIS side? --

"No." It couldn't be, not like this. He beheld a woman with pointed ears and white or bright-blonde hair; he couldn't discern which. Her rather ideal form was one he could scarcely take his gaze off of even though it was all he wanted - Those eyes, those blue orbs speckled with golden freckles within... They penetrated him. Judged him.


Judged what they'd seen. She'd seen it all. The Luskan Girl had seen the entire thing.

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