Fool's Adventures: A Demon's Souls/Buffy the Vampire Slayer Quest

You will forge a weapon of sorts. You stride with liquid grace to the shelf of lesser items, your mantle trailing along the floor behind you. Reaching through the mixing auras you pluck the binding censer from where it rests. The little cylinder is not much larger than your pale hand, and it is silvery with a dark interior revealed by the holes through which the essence of the incense within can escape.

A flicker of motion catches your gaze as you raise the censer before your eyes and examine it. Glancing at the motion you see your minion kneeling near the door, blocking it so you will not be interrupted. This is suitable behavior, a part of you thinks. With an exertion of will the spellbook on your hip unhooks and floats before your right hands, slower than it should, and the pages remain at rest when they should move. But the strength you have stolen so far from the Rat King is starting to tell.

Magic surrounds you in an endless and dimensionless sea. You turn your gaze to the mountain that sits just out of sight, the shape of magic as seen through your wards, and how it casts a shadow onto the censer. That shadow swirls and twists as it laps against the censer's own static form, being absorbed within.

Shifting your mystical gaze without moving your physical shell, your Soul examines the trapped and unconscious rat warrior. Its form is revealed to you, that of a peasant given arms and vigor by its lord's blessing. You see the tapestry of magic woven about and within its form like a cloak and skin.

Carefully, you move yourself through the flows of magic and deposit the censer at the southern end of the circle. You rise again and turn to the prisoner. With a wave of your hand the false prison of the Sigil disappears. More skeins and patterns appear to you, and your lower hands reach out. They begin to weave your Soul and the magic, kneading it and turning it into thread for a loom which isn't there.

Picking up the body with your upper hands you enter the circle and place the body exactly where the pattern you are weaving demands. With it splayed out properly, you retreat through the west of the circle and walk around the inactive magical arrangement. Your soundless and almost floating steps carry you to the blooding knife you have set beside your chair, which is not a throne.

You grab it up and sheathe it purposefully at your left side before turning and retracing your steps until you come to the northern side of the circle again and the runes burnt around it. There you kneel and clasp your lower hands together, opening the invisible weave you have woven with them. Your book floats under your right hand and you turn the pages until you find an appropriate spell from the Stonefangs.

With the proper ritual found and the mountain of magic bowing before the pattern you have created, you call the circle to life with the opening bars of your hymn. It glows with embedded Fog light, which pulses and dances like a serpent to your hum. Then that terrible light lashes outward to the four anchoring circles and they begin to surge with energy. Ghostly circles rise above all five of the true circles inscribed on the floor and they hang there in the air as you begin to chant.

"Lapidibus ferrum et flammam.
Spiritus sanctus in viribus.
Antea inimici mei."

You walk to your right, going around the circle as you repeat the opening verse of the chant. On the seventh time you reach the southern half you stop and kneel before the binding censer. Reaching with your upper hands you carefully open the censer, cap hanging by a silver thread, revealing the pitch black interior and inner lining of metal while chanting the second piece of the ritual.

"Vas, quod falsum est hic coram me.
In terram posuit super cladem.
Vas, quod verum est hic in manibus meis."

"Aperta.
Multaeque.
Egredere."

The mountain which rises around you bends completely, magic flowing to a infinitesimal point within the confines of the censer. You repeat this piece twice more, with the power of the central circle surging outwards every time the last words pass your over your tongue. You rise in tandem with the flowing curtain of Fog emerging from the circle, obscuring all within, restarting the first verse as you circle back to the northern side of the array where the runes burn.

Seven times seven times more you chant the first verse. Distantly you can feel the invader stir and begin to toss a veritable horde of magic at your working. A great and dreadful Tower rises from the mountain top in answer. The beat of an endlessly massive clockwork heart groans within that Tower, flowing against the horde with a terrible light and pounding sound, and obscuring the singular prisoner hidden within its walls. Secure from actually fighting the thing on the mystic plane via the isolation you have created with the exact nature of the ritual you are invoking, your chant shifts.

"Verum quidem vas in vincula conici!
Daemon inimicus, signari!
In avaritiae trahuntur fratribus vestris!
Egredere!"

On the third repetition of the last line there is a hideous tearing sensation form within the circle and the presence of the Rat King is cast out from your sight. You have total supremacy in this moment. As the energies roar through the room and tear at your mantle and hair and send your ornaments to clacking, you are unmoved and unbowed. Your arms rise and pierce through the barrier of the Fog before you.

It parts like a living servant, subservient to the might of your Soul. You step over the boundary of the circle as the mistress of it. Within the circle is a surging world of white and grey. You can see flickers of all the Slayer's of Demons which you have killed and eaten. And in the middle of that chaos is a bundle of grey and rotting gossamer flesh, floating above the rat warrior. Pulling the knife from your waist, you grasp it in your lower hands and start the final part of the chant.

"Cum cultro.
Et interficiam funis extremum.
Quaerite verum vasa pretiosa.
Falsum creaturae!"

On the final word you kneel in one smooth motion. And the knife follows, angling gracefully downward in a sheen of silver amongst the false light of Fog. There is a jerk and then the energy slamming at the bounds of the circle shoves out of it and flies on gossamer threads into the waiting vessel of the binding censer.

The censer shudders and would seem to twist in mortal vision as the spell settles within it and the array of circles fade into quiescence. To you however, the censer subtly changes with a temporary addition to make it automatically collect the power of those rat demons who are slain near you. The corpse of the rat warrior is not in evidence, completely consumed by the Fog you had summoned.

You stand and sheathe the knife at your hip as you exit the circle and pick up your new creation. Holding it before you, you can feel the faint susurration of fur which remains unseen. Accompanying that feeling is a sensation of pulsation and contained rage. With a ritualistic movement and final twist you seal the censer up, ready for your use.

You then gaze upon it. Examining its new shape on the mystical plane, judging how successful it was. And after a few minutes of staring at it with all of your senses gazing at it like moonlight shining on a still lake. It shows no flaws, beyond the inevitable temporary nature of its enchantment.

It is suitable.

And with that thought you are catapulted into a new memory from your predecessor.

The flash of a knife descends in the moonlight flickers, with a flower of red blooming from the meat it stabs into. You stare in horror at the thing, the utterly inhuman tableau laid out before you like some grand feast for your pleasure. The blood is everywhere. Everywhere except for a tiny circle around you.

And presiding over this dreadful feast is a thing in yellow. Terrible terrible yellow like liquid gold flows over the seat upon which the thing, the invader that wears your husband's face, sits. It smiles at you with needle teeth, and you can see the shape of the thing. A part of your mind screams as you see the magic of the world and your very Soul warp at that terrible shape.

You know, instinctively, what this is.

An Arch Demon of the Fog.

"Come my love!" It says in a voice which you know is not your husband's, but that your ears betray you and say it is. Your feet move, driven my horror and hopeless emotion and a growing determination.

"It is suitable!" The thing says, beaming. But as you approach, its face curdles like rotten milk and it speaks again. "Suitable enough for you and yours, betrayers and harlots. Latria."

It gives an imperious wave of its hands. Out of the corpses and fires and Fog, horrible wound in reality that it is, surge demons clad in armor of corrupted steel and silver. A part of you screams at the corruption visited upon the knights of Boletaria. And another, much quieter part, fears for your friend.

But you do not falter and the might of Sorcery and Soul surges from your hands in a great ball of flame. It destroys the front ranks of demon knights in a surge of purging light and oppressive heat. Inhaling a great breath, you twist your Soul, and exhale a cloud of searing Acid. While it obscures you, you cast a spell of Warding, the effects of the world being pushed away by the weight of your Soul.

The giggling of the creature in yellow flows over the battlefield, robbing your Sorcery of strength. Forcing through the mire of imposed weakness you take another breath and expel a cloud of death and plague, mixing it with the Acid cloud. Forcing your way around the battlefield you cast flame in great gouts into the cloud, trying to approach the seat of the Arch Demon. But it is to no avail.

More knights, demons with sea creatures for heads, and the demented people of your own lands rise to bar your way. You fight on anyway, casting greater and greater Sorceries. The field is so covered in the remnants of flame and the annihilation wrought by Soul Rays that the battlefield could only be described by an artist as apocalyptic.

Still the enemy comes and you fight on.

On that final image the memory fades and you return fully to the present with your latest creation in hand.

It will do.

You now have a weapon to use against the Rat King. Feeling out with your senses you know that the sun has risen and is making a track across the sky. You have time before you must go to the Bronze.


What do you do?

[] You stay home and begin to read the witch's spellbook that you have and to improve your ritual array.

[] You go out, heading beneath the ground in order to kill the Rat King's forces, beginning to charge your creation.

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And that's that, courtesy of my phone, at least in part.

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