Breath of the Unquiet
18th of February 2007 A.D.
A scion of death was Lydia Rhys, but also of the deep earth, born to lightless halls under the hill. She felt the tumult and the torment of the earth and knew that it was wrong, intimately, viciously wrong. "It's not like Vegas," she called back, more to assure herself than them. When the False Dragon had tried to open tear the city asunder by the power of his broken stewardship, you could hear the laughter of his true masters, like hyenas about to fall upon a feast of fallen flesh.
"It's geomancy Great Lady," said one of the mages in robes of green, not quite used to talking to the wizards, to their eyes uncanny in form and in power. "I've never felt its like before, but one might say the same of all things of this world where the
Sun shines above."
"What's so special about the sun?" Warden Dresden asked.
"It's a bit like if you looked up and saw the Philosopher's Stone just shining over all the world," she explained, or started to at least. Turning the corner the company stopped dead. About thirty feet in front of them the floor fell away into a jagged pit whose far edge was of ancient stone and black basaltic foundations. At least one set of marble stairs had already slid in.
"Think you're going to have to redecorate?" Even Warden Dresden's attempt at a joke sounded faint. If any unprotected wizards had been caught up in that they were dead, sure as sunset. Wizards for all their power were only flesh and blood.
Another tremor, more stones falling into the pit as flashlights peered within. It seemed then to Lydia that as the light traveled down something else came the other way, a black exhalation, a stillness of the...
"Warden Morgan, are any wizards
buried in the Halls themselves?"
"A handful, the Council has only been headquartered here for about five hundred years. Most wizards prefer to be burned or else buried on family plots, but there were a few who were old when Headquarters were new, followers of the old pagan ways who would not lay their heads in a on earth that had been sanctified to the White God, but also didn't trust the old burial grounds that had laid untended for so long."
"Shit, fuckin' ghost Druids," someone mutters Warden Morgan snaps his head at his youngest colleague, though this time his gaze goes awry, for it's one of his own who said it, Zadok, Lydia thinks his name is.
"Worse," Lydia is in no mood to smile. "The souls are long gone, a darkness has been called to dwell in them and it loves well earthly remains of wizards, though it must be coaxed to take ones so old."
"Speak plainly girl!" the senior warden barked. Once she might have recoiled from it, but Lydia had stood in the halls of her father and called for judgement, she had descended into hell and freed those unjustly bound. Down in that pit now there a kind of little hell now festered. "Keep your wits about you, we are about to crash a soiree of the Black Court, though gods and not the kindly ones know what the power that moves them was promised to allow such a conjuring."
"'Necromancy', the magic of the Untimely Death Twisted is only partially understood lacking examples..." The War Weaver began speaking and Lydia was about to offer what comfort she could in the face of the horror that likely awaited them below, but the spirit was not done.
"We are metal, never flesh, never alive, never bound to the Cycle, or to the Not-Cycle of the Beyond. We are least likely to be harmed. Let us go ahead."
"Ayup, that's a sixty foot drop, you got anything that can deal with that?" Zadock had been looking into the hole.
"Time to be the Dragon again I guess," Molly-Sophia said, her form already bright and smoking as it began to
change.
The Dead would heed me, they would listen at least, Lydia thought, recalling all the times in which Molly had with words prepared a foe for their ultimate defeat.
"They are not Dead child, they never lived," the voice of her father replied, a still and secret thing at the back of her mind.
"Close enough," she countered with courage mostly unfeigned.
"I just need to distract the things while someone else kills the Warlocks who called them. Thankfully I have all these warlock-slayers with me."
The first War Weaver was already climbing spider-like into the pit.
"Do not bandy words with them," the voice sounded sterner than when she had taken Tiffany's offer of power—
and that worked out alright father, didn't it? she thought with some resentment— but more than that, he sounded afraid.
"Why?" She asked even as she climbed easily down, finding handholds and footholds.
"Because they will have more barbs to throw than you." The answer has the virtue of sincerity, but that did not satisfy Lydia.
"And whose fault is that then?" she snapped back.
The silent admission of fault did not warm her.
Lydia decided to...
[] Try to distract the possessed corpses, the ritually made vampires working the geomancy
[] Focus on the mortal warlocks, she could kill them far more freely than the wardens and they use their power on the Black Court things
[] Write in
OOC: Not going to lie, I was stocked when you guys decided to send Lydia down to deal with the tremors. Peabody's been a busy boy. What's worse than a fake vampire attack? A real one... of the worse vampires made from old bones that shouldn't from the Council's understanding of necromancy be able to do that. Of course the Council's understanding of necromancy is much like that of mind magic, hindered by the Laws.