Warhammer Fantasy: Thirteen Tolls - An Apocalypse Quest

MiskWisk said:

Vote seems to have been messed up.

Adhoc vote count started by MiskWisk on May 20, 2024 at 5:04 PM, finished with 28 posts and 3 votes.

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  1 people have voted

  [X] Plan: What lies in the Spring?
  -[X] A lone actor.
  -[X] To kill Mistress Marvos as a cover-up.
  -[X] To allow you access to Myrmidia's Spring.

  • MiskWisk

  1 people have voted

  [X] Plan: The Spring and its connections
  -[X] Myrmidia (may change to League of Salvation if discussed)
  -[X] To kill Mistress Marvos.
  -[X] To allow you access to Myrmidia's Spring.

  • Netos

  1 people have voted

  [X] Plan: Myrmidian Conspiracy
  -[X] Myrmidia
  -[X] To kill Mistress Marvos as a cover-up.
  -[X] To allow you access to Myrmidia's Spring.

  • Parzival95

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Currently it's a three way tie with one vote apiece.

I assume people didn't realise the vote had started.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

Seems like it. Vote's open for another couple days then. I'll manually count the votes, so no problem if you've already submitted.

"Myrmidia" you say, after a thought. "To kill the Mistress, for some plan with the Spring".

A catlike grin crosses the Princeps' face. "And why would the Goddess seek to harm the bearers of her gift?"

Past one of the Roost's high windows, you swear you see the shadow of a hawk swoop by.

"I cannot say, for I know nothing of it."

"I wouldn't suppose you do. Have you a strong stomach?"

You think of your endless falls from the Tower's top, and how, each and every time, your guts twist as you plummet to your doom.

"As well as could be expected."

"Well then!" Suttar says. "Be glad, citizen! Time to see your true inheritance!".

…

The doors to the Tower are twelve feet tall. On them, in enchanted, moving bronze, tall Tyleus, with a single dolorous strike, kills the ancient Dragon the cities were founded on. The beast is four headed, snarling, trapped eternal in it is dying, as Tyleus steps on its prone body to drive the blade that the Princeps now wields. Was that it, you wonder, the damnation? Any city born in blood fated to die? Or, as with great fanfare the great gates begin to grind open, perhaps it was more literal. You cannot Look at the Princeps without being blinded, his soul's radiance is so. If that was the sword – was the dragon in there too? Legionnaires pour out of the building, marching in perfect time, their red plumes waving in the air, bronze spearpoints sharp. The Princeps salutes them and grins and beckons you inside. What was he? You catch his eyes, clear blue to your brown. Something stirs in the shadow of his pupil – you flinch, and he's already turned.

…

You enter the Tower, and immediately hear the screams. You cannot see the beast inside, Hysh warding each and every brick of the godforsaken building against any attempt at divination. But through every ward, you can feel animal sympathy to something in terrible pain. No matter what walls may be, man can always recognize another's distress. The eternal death cry of a million rats is somewhat difficult to ignore. But no one seems to react. You see pages shuffle by with notes and papers, stressed but not distressed as you. Another one is looking at a painting in the hall. He waves to you (you think, your vision going a bit hazy). You swear the painting morphs and you see Tyleus stab his sword right into your heart. The keening screams are biting at your ears. You head throbs, your mind reels. In your confusion you trip and near fall. But a strong arm catches you – almost inhumanly thick – and the Senator Nivet, still wrapped in illusion, helps you stand.

"Your Father's blood!" he says with a laugh. You do not know what he means. "Steel yourself" and he puts your hand on the hilt of your sword. The screaming lessens, just a muffle, dying, dead, dying dead. Nivet looks at you straight, and you know it's not a proper recovery, because you swear he has horns. "Your Father must judge his children's work – go!" he says, and pushes you down the hall. The Princeps is waiting, with his too wide smile. There is another door, of simple oak, girded with iron. It could be any garden shed. He opens it, and a spiral staircase descends, lowers, falls. The Princeps lets him in behind you and unsheathes his blade. Truesilver shines with soul-light. "Onward?" he says and begins to descend. You follow, into the bowels of the Tower.

…

You walk for what feels like hours. The passage is all rough-hewn stone, older than most you've ever seen, and badly crafted. More like the walls of a well than any building you'd seen, and for a well, ten times as deep as most. You do not speak. The air is thin here, like you're ascending some great cliff. You feel yourself begin to huff and puff, and your body seems to be pushing against some great pressure with every step. Not only to walk, but just to exist – as if the walls of reality were slowly closing in, and you had but your meagre muscles to keep the world alive. The Princeps has no trouble it seems, but you think you realize why. You see his body less and less in his sword's light, a phantom fading in the dusk. There is but his soul, himself, radiant, and you realize as you loop what seems to be the final flight you are not Looking at him at all. You're merely looking, with your eyes, and his soul is completely visible. Your look down at yourself and see what you think you should not – the edges of white, torn as if by thorns, the threshold of your own soul, as if you yourself was separated from it – if it could be distinguished from you. Your nose begins to bleed. Shaking, you find yourself at the end of the stairs, in not any place in the world, but somewhere just beyond, a grey fog without beginning or end.

"Welcome" the spirit of the Princeps says, golden and oh so very bright "to the Spring!"

"I think" you say, before coughing so hard you spit up bile. "We'd call it the Portal"

The Princeps smirks, and you note where he stands, the fog clears to be ordinary Cities cobblestone.

"Right and wrong, Raven, as all you theological types are. Lack of imagination."

"Then what is it?"

"Not your God's. A portal of our very own."

Your head swims at that. Morr's Gate led to – the land of the Dead. You look at your own feet, and you see the fog clears to show soft dewy grass, just like the gardens of the Roost.

The greatest secret of the Cult of Morr was that His realm was not, as most thought it distinct, but the same Aethyr that from whence all gods lived and even daemons came. The cut of that revelation was if the afterlife was truly somewhere, not merely away … it could be pierced. Morr's peace might not be so eternal as promised.

The Princeps has stepped away from you now and is walking into the grey. You follow, but never seem to catch up. You lose track of everything – distance, time. You and your patch of grass follow a man on cobblestone in a featureless grey expanse, without left, without right, without up, without down, without before, without after.

You travel for an eon.

There is another door, of oak and iron, same as the one at the top of the stairs. On it, a simple label – "the Source". Its frame is nailed into the surrounding grey, and from its edges you can clear water flow. You put your finger out and taste it. It's salty, like tears.

The Princeps opens the Gate, and what you see is madness.

It is an impossible shape, a self-encircled torus, some weird twisting donut without side or edge. It is made of pure black glass, obsidian, engraved in every available inch with countless shifting runes and symbols. In an ancient hieroglyph language you've never seen, older than Nehekaran, letters written in truesilver flow and join and split and flow again. Sums appear, are divided, disappear, the whole effect like a flock of millions of starlings shifting across the setting sun, an endless concert of shifting figures. The whole room bulges and shifts around a central, unmoving point, a crystal spear. You take one look and know to touch it would be not only to split yourself in twain but the very concept of you into a thousand fragments that could not be reassembled. It is embedded at the centre of the swirling patterns, head stuck in the floor, beneath and through the obsidian, and from through its shaft flow – you cannot say. Your eyes look, but do not see, because there are a thousand million billion colors and shapes and things that move and see and hate and love and know and you cannot comprehend even a hundredth of an atom of their true essence so your mind simply does not perceive. It is pure spring water. It is the Aethyr. It is the source of all things. It is the godhead. It is the rainbow. It is the most beautiful and most terrible thing you have seen in your allotted days. It is broken.

Along the crystal spear, countless hairline cracks, and from them, not the beauty within, but sickening green dust, warpstone, pouring from the wounds of perfection. You see their source, as the spear suddenly shakes, and you here another tinkling fracture. Attached at the end of the shaft, where the universe springs, five ugly wires are clumsily attached. The work of man, marring a miracle. One is a green vine covered in purple flowers, ever blooming and wilting. The petals fall and dissolve into yet more dust as the plants' roots dig into the crystal light, piercing it repeatedly. Second is a pipe of glass, clear, but compared to the spear, a candle to a star. In it is fire, magma, hot to turn you to cinders. Where it touches the spear, it dirties the God's work with soot, and deforms the crystal with heat. Third is a copper thread, interwoven with gold and electrum, that buzzes with electricity. Every so often, it lights up – blinding you with a momentary vision of a hooded stranger come to call – and the resulting thunderclap shakes the spear, ever so dislodging it. Fourth is the Spear's own shadow, which flows like inky smoke up with the rest into the above. Fifth is an outcropping of bone, spurs and joints you recognize – you passed some just like it in the halls underground, warpstone dust pouring from breaks. But that bone looked new, and this looks dead – black with rot, you see maggots writhing inside. The whole mess is as a great tree – the trunk the spear, the five pillars the branches, stretching up into grey nothing – and eventually, you presume, the Cities. This was the source. It was dying.

Suddenly, the flowers bloom and the electricity flares and the fire sparks and the bones crack and the shadow dances and you see another hairline crack in the Spear. From it, a wave of sorrow and magic and the room twists and you and Aoife were fleeing in the dead of night and you were Tyleus slaying the dragon and you were falling and –

Ding dong.

You're on the floor, in an impossible space. Grass grows around your feet in an obsidian room that cannot exist, and silver symbols gather to you like moths to a flame.

Suttar continues. "You have convinced me of my worst fears. Myrmidia means to destroy her gift. You know the story of the Spring?"

You nod.

"As my father told me, and my father before, it was true. The Gods made a door to this world, to have and to hold and be happy. There were many once, in the north and south – but all but this one fell. This one did too, for a time, till Tyleus arrived to cleanse it. We have maintained it ever since – and from it stem all our Cities' works."

You stare at the cables and wonder what flowed from the Spear without your people's intervention.

"I see that these flaws are not age but design." Suttar continues. "As I always suspected. She asked us to reach" he turns to the spear "She asked us to excel! But the gods have always struck down who reach too high!" He's yelling now, screaming at the godhead. He takes a hand, and you're afraid he'll punch it, but instead, he merely strokes it like an upset child.

"We have contingencies for that – contingencies we have been preparing for a very long time."

You think of a screaming monster, and see his name, and his light.

"Man will survive this. I will see to that. We will rise higher than we ever have, and cast all those down who seek to keep us from those heights."

He stares at you, and you feel your soul begin to begin to heat, almost burn, beneath your gaze.

"You are know this world better than I" he says, gesturing to the madness, the symbols, the crystal. "You are a steward of the Portal, as you claimed to be. My contingency – it will take time. Have faith in Tyleus and his sons. But in the meantime – I need this, all this to survive – for a few weeks longer. You did well in what I asked. Will you help with this" and he points to the righteous spear. "I'll give you what you ask – truly – whatever you need. Just make sure – until at least the election, the lights stay on. Thwart a Goddess – ha! - that's all."

What do you say?

[] Yes.

Take up stewardship of the Spring.

[] No.

Do not.

AN: Sorry for the wait, was facing a real block on this, not very happy with how it is, but wanted to get something out. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and as always, happy to answer questions. Next turn start after this.