Carion Child
Elsewhere, Time Indeterminate
What stands before me? you ask again, your own voice echoing in your own ears more and more distant as though falling away from the sound of it down a uncharted chasm filled with the sound of waves.
The sea around all around is not dead and neither is it black, it foams and froths green and white under the rays of a pale veiled sun which still seems larger than the one you know. Dozens of people crowd the tilting deck, a jostling mass of faded colors and torn hems, unfamiliar robes and sashes emblazoned with flowers and beasts, Cyanin cranes and Amphiro Orchids. You can barely move your hands any more, limbs too heavy as if the child you bear, having taken everything else now wanted to sup on your life. Yet you cannot bring yourself to curse him, gift of grief that he be... Child of the dead. Dead are the peaks claw their way up towards a veiled sky breathing not smoke, but a cold murk that shimmered like shroud over grandfather's face. Darkmist Island cold and dreaded, the stuff of stories to scare disobedient children, though you never held to such things...
Why, why, why am I going here?
Each question sounds like a blow of fists against glass as you take flight as if on the wings of a corpse white seabird and see from afar the thrice ruin of Okeanos into the cold seas. That rise up in cataclysm that would end an age, moved by tragedies as distant from the fleet of the deposessed as the face of heaven. The child within would never be born, made seed of a purpose unspeakable. Teath of hunger, claws of dread tore at flesh and spirit, a thing far off.... Fool-Lackey-Madman... lashed at them like the storm and all were dead and all were made not, a
hungering swarm fit for the war that would herald.
One of many, one of countless, hungering ghosts hammered into a mold to contain the raw power of the Grave, a creature never meant to survive the first clash, much less the last, but the plots of great minds are oft brought to ruin. So fell the bodhisattva of those waters and in the carrion world that remained before the new dawn it is the scavenger who thrived, or at the very least endured born aloft on a graveyard wind.
It remembered that it was born of mortal death, though it was never living not even for an instant.
Down, down, down it sank in the passing of the world until a day not fateful, but fateless another will called it in mirrored want. That man might want to be eternal in death, and death stillborn might wish to be man.
Thus you know the one who calls himself Lamentations of the Void is well named, once many they a weapon, now wearing the face of a child never born.... Neverborn, it echoes with a symmetry transcendent in its emptiness. It, they were meant to fight a war horrifying beyond what the tongue of man can tell, one that had outlived its usefulness, then outlived its maker and at last its whole world, spreading its hunger and desire abroad in the world, final black legacy of one long since consigned to the maw of Oblivion:
Bodhisattva... Anointed by Dark Waters
As for that title, it too has weight in your mind, hatred and contempt as if cast from lead. You return to yourself with jarring immediacy the feeling of blood in your veins, of hair rising on the back of your neck, of steel rungs chaffing your neck under the padding almost painfully clear, every fiber of your body clamoring to remind you:
I am alive, I am not dead.
The ancient...
ghost? —the word almost seems absurd to apply, it makes the horrors that infested the flesh of the Fallen seem quaint, almost harmless by comparison— looks up at you with empty eyes and you know it would wait like that even if you took ten thousand years to answer, for what are years to one who has endured whole ages of the world in endless hunger matched only by the ocean below?
"You speak of the world without sun being free, but have you ever thought that the Sun was born... so shadows would exist?" you ask at least, trying to goad it into more answers.
"So they live, that they may die, metamorphosis of black butterflies in the wind." the carrion child chants. "So it is and so am I, but..." he frowns. "If you agree with my porpose why are you here, sword in mind if not yet in hand?"
An image from
Return of the Living Dead flashes through your mind, corkboard pinned butterflies flapping their wings. Did... did Aakebushu see it? True he's speaking English, but the thought of some infested corpse propped up in front of an old static-ridden TV watching a classic horror comedy seems itself too much like a cruel joke to be real.
"Why does it have be be one purose, a river flowing straight in narrow banks? Light is, many hued, from many points sprung, be they sun star, a flashlight's fillament or an angler fish's lure and so shadows are in in just as many shapes, the world is meant to have shadows I think, but shadows alone a lonely world would make."
Aakebushu nods, again that odd clockwork gesture. "It does get lonely down here, most who make it this far slip and fall in."
"Who was the last one?" Lydia asks, in the tone of someone who dreads the answer they might get.
"Him that took from the waters Daughter of Ma'at, the waters you bear" the eyeless face turns towards her without guile or even malice. "You hear the ocean don't you? I hear it's echo in you like a seashel brought to the ear."
For a moment all you can do is stare at Lydia as you try to kick your brain into gear, but Tiffany has no such qualms. "Interesting to know I am not the only sprouted form dark roots. I still mentain though that mine are the darkest."
"What... what did...?" Lydia looks at you, as if for conformation that this is a time to talk, not fight. It's obvious what she wants to ask:
What did Kemler do?
Lydia Essence 6/7 (0/3 Jade Talisman)
Molly Essence 9/18
Molly Willpower 8/9
What does Molly answer?
[] The more you hear about this thing the less you want to stab it, as mad as that may sound
[] Try to trick it into telling you more, then get rid of it
[] Write in
OOC: Some pretty good guesses between last update and this, but you missed one thing, not everything has to be an exalted, the second age was brought to an end by cataclysmic war, new weapons are made. In this case made and lost and... mutated. This is something like a necromantic Von Neumann machine that outlived not just its creators, but the very memory of them at least until Molly's Exaltation half-remembered old enimities. 
