**2065 words** CYOA, build at the bottom.
Vignette, in his Vignette.
There is not a saying: 'The wise man casts a great shadow when he recognises enlightenment comes to those who keep themselves in the dark'.
Except, thought Vignette, that wasn't it at all. Universes of nuance were lost, prosody and lyricism disunited, at the attempt to distil the nearest and meanest expression of its sentiment into English.
With the curse-broker vanished, the world came into instant focus. Vignette was in a copse, in a bare wood. Decaying leaves, a slimy mulch, slipped between his toes, too cold; his breath puffing into the air. The trees were all dark, and even with bare branches they wove together in the canopy so that only the barest filaments of grey light could make it through. All the trees were ash, he noticed, and their trunks were covered in blight.
Fuck, thought Vignette. Why couldn't it have been something cosy, or luxurious? Why this? The voyaging realm. Fiction rendered into fact. It was all true, the Accursed and his curse-bearers, universes full of hyper-powerful beings who could eradicate whole nations with a breath and he, now, the most removed of distant cousins to a true cursebearer.
It didn't affect him quite so much as it ought to have, skittering over his cerebrum, slippy to hold on to. Neither did the fact that he could no longer remember his own name, only Vignette – the existential crisis that this implied similarly failing to appear. No, it was the armour that caught his eye.
Biting wind whistled through the wood, buckles clanking against metal. On a tree stump, disassembled, was the armour that had cost him a curse. Vignette didn't consider himself an unintelligent man – though few men were so honest with themselves – but it was clear now that he had made mistakes. The stanza that rested on his tongue now, with all the weight of a firstborn child's name, promised a sharp and continuing rise in wisdom and intelligence. The sudden insight that slight curse mitigation at the cost of a curse was a net loss, was dwarfed by the sudden realisation that he had misunderstand the nature of the baseline enhancement that Ten had offered; his assumption that it would not stack with Red.
"Fuck!" he said.
The regret passed quicker than it ought to have, also. This time he caught it. Beneath his fingernails (fingers and toes now corpse-grey, and wan) there was a pale light, a reddy-purple ember. Magenta.
At the temple, somewhere else in the infinite realm, Hunger had encountered a powerful colour user with limitless and limited progression in Blue. Two colours choosing the same vessel was unnatural, that was clear, and it seemed they had combined to form one. A problem, or a prize, for another time.
The sunlight had the faintest touch of colour now, a deep orange. In this realm it was the winter solstice, the night when the dead would rise. He had to
focus, had to get out of the woods. The wood was grim, and undoubtedly the scene of some horrific slaughter in the past, with the curse that he had chosen.
The sigil was next to his armour, on the stump. A small badge, the size of a sheriff's tin star. It was blank, black and cool to the touch on one side. On the other, it held an icon, a strange mobius strip contorted into the shape of a crown.
Vignette pressed it to the lower part of his trunk, just inside his inguinal ligament. Rihaku's worlds did tend towards choices and conflicts that threatened limbs. The sigil glowed magenta and then settled. He felt no. different, but he smelled frying bacon: the badge was now blank and the borders of the sigil showed the black of burning. And it hadn't hurt.
A problem for another time, again, Vignette had his goal. The gauntlets went on first, then the cuirass over his head. Self-repairing and self-adjusting turned out to also cover self-fastening. He was struggling to put one pauldron on when the figure stepped out from the trees.
"How strange, to find a mortal man divesting his armour below a maelstrom, the likes of which not seen in the Realm of Risen Night since its labours birthed Nightbringer an eon ago."
Vignette almost jumped out of his skin. English speaking, he noted, absently.
The figure was dressed in a black cloak that covered everything but a bloodless face beneath a peaked cowl. The gown slithered over the leaves and the frost as the stranger glided nearer.
"Stay back!"
Every sense Vignette possessed was screaming 'panic', like he had come face to face with a bear, even the new one. His third eye was open now, and the cloaked figure was shrouded in a faint mist that had to be the Astral energy that the Curse-broker had referred to.
"I won't hurt you, child."
A burst of astral energy in faint blue-white exploded above the stranger, like a bag of flour struck by a baseball bat.
The danger was certain. The threat in front of him. Vignette had not felt as deeply as he was supposed to, had not felt the horror of his transition and loss as he would have expected to. This realm's striving towards gothic terror did now what more dispassionate loss had not managed. His heart beat a drummer's marching tattoo against his sternum. His not-vital stomach flopped, bloodless, and magenta light traced along his limbs towards his fingers, shining from within every vein. A moment longer, and it slipped from his pores, a faint penumbra, turgid and slow but with a strange rebounding motion that sped his every twitch and micro-adjustment.
It took no longer than a second, but the creature was already moving. It hissed. Its mouth unnaturally wide. Pointed fangs. Slow, so slow in comparison, Vignette pushed off against the slippery ground to meet it pauldron first.
This wasn't a risen dead that had killed its way to intelligence again, something beyond him by a small margin. This was a vampire, an ethereal creature: horror given human form.
The vampire jumped, a cat-like pounce that saw him make to clear Vignette's head in a single leap. Its agility was greater than any Olympian's, its speed superlative. As was Vignette's now. It was still daylight, and the vampire was much diminished. At the apex of its arc, Vignette cast his hand up.
Without a spark there could be no lightning, no flame. With only scant frost there could be no barrier. But with air, with air there could be a blow. Eighty kilograms of air roughly compressed into a space the size of his own body. The blow caught the vampire in the leg, the clip sent him tumbling into the canopy, spinning like a catherine wheel.
Vignette skidded to a halt, stumbling up against a tree, still unused to his speed.
What did Vampires in the classics fear? Holy items, but that was no use here. Running water, but there was none. He remembered a need to sleep on land from their home country, or their grave, something of that type. If the vampire decided it needed to sleep then his earth control would be a great help, but not before. Sunlight had done all it was going to, Vignette didn't want to risk grappling with the creature over its cloak. There was only one thing left.
The branch above him snapped, falling to his hand. Quickly smaller branches fell off, and its tip lengthed and speared to a point. A long stake, it would have to do (Ethereals are impervious to physical force, his worse nature said).
There was an flurry of that ghostly astral energy from the tree to his right, and he spun to see the vampire skitter down its trunk on all fours. It crossed the ground between them in an unnatural spider-like movement. It didn't look to dodge Vignette's spear, but darted straight under his guard.
He had time to notice its smell. The smell of the grave, the deeply unpleasant breath of dead air coming from dead lungs over a dry mouth. Then his spear was ripped from his grasp, shattered. A claw caught him in the leg, ripping through the thigh in a flash of luminous gore. Its hand took him by the neck and, almost negligently, it threw him through the bark of a dead tree, the world turning over and over as he bowled across the ground.
Vignette reached out to the earth to slow him, but without muscle his leg didn't work as he expected and it let him fall onto his back. And then the creature was on him. A claw struck him across the face, taking his eyes, his nose, his lips. The world was dark, but he felt the teeth on his neck. Even in his disorientation, he felt the teeth.
No ecstatic, delirious experience. These were jagged, crooked fangs and they tore into his neck. He felt them against his bone, a new sensation.
I lasted less than fifteen minutes, thought Vignette.
He tried to move one arm, but a cool hand caught it by the wrist and held it against the ground.
Vignette's neck was cold now. A radiating chill that was spreading towards his heart and his head. Vignette had thought that he didn't have blood anymore, only essence, but it didn't seem to have given the vampire pause. Vignette tried to move his legs, but they only twitched. In the end, he supposed it was the essence that they were after. Why would an
Ethereal creature have an interest in blood for blood's sake? Vignette was probably like fillet steak to it. It would have been a different story had they met in even a month's time. Red had been supposed to make Vignette the master of all things essence.
That was all it took. The half-cotton, half bubble thought. Popping in an instance, an understanding that the colour
was the master of essence and no vampire could steal what was
his.
Vignette's heart beat faster, then stronger. Very quickly the Vampire tried to flee, but this time it was Vignette who turned its grip to his advantage. He wrenched on its head, refusing to let its teeth free. The world was still dark, but inside he was bright. He burned with light and the vampire's struggles got weaker and weaker. Then it was still
.
He rolled to one side. Without his sight, in the darkness, he could focus on his heartbeat. As it pumped the magenta flowed quicker and quicker, circulating. Nourishing.
"One."
He was pristine. He pushed himself up on fresh limbs. He touched his neck, which was unmarred, and his face, which was unscarred.
The vampire he poked with his foot; it didn't move. Cowl drawn back, it was skeletal. Its emaciated face haggard and lined and ancient, something more fitting a care home than a bare-knuckle, down and dirty fight to the death.
One down, nine to go, before he was as fast as the wind. He shuddered. Quickly, Vignette placed the rest of his armour on and secured it tight. It was cool against his skin, but not uncomfortable. It definitely weighed more than five pounds. Still, he quickly muttered the Verse in Long Form, melodious tongue reproducing perfectly sounds that a human throat should never have been capable of. He stripped the cloak from the vampire and threw it over his shoulders.
Magenta aura seeping from his skin, he ran. He ran as fast as a sprinter, and as steadily as a marathon runner. The forest was not large. It couldn't have been more than thirty minutes before he escaped it onto a hilltop, and the Realm of Risen Night was laid out beneath him.
In the distance, a town of dark stone stood out against high cliffs on either side. Smoke rose into the sky from the squalor of ten thousand chimneys. Although, greater still was the fire that burned in a great pit beyond its walls. Was that…?
He stepped forward, trying to make it out clearer, as the last of the sun's light slipped behind the horizon. A golden moon hung over the realm, its light throwing strange shadows. It almost looked like small figures were pulling themselves from the flames.
Behind him, there came a moan. And then another. And then another. Then more.
*********
2
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8 Copper, 3 + 2 platinum, 1 Jade
[ ] Hunted - +2 Platinum
[ ] Resilient [2 Copper]
[ ] Violet [2 Copper]
[ ] One [1 Copper]
[ ] Three [3 copper]
[ ] Seven [1 platinum]
[ ] Sigil [1 platinum]
[ ] Step Up [1 platinum]
[ ] Plate [2 platinum]
[ ] Red [1 Jade]
The fact that some of these abilities cost a platinum or two really puts the cost of Hunger's cloak into perspective doesn't it? I also note that he sold us abilities cus he wanted that Jade. I can't help but feel, even as infinitely powerful as some of the Jade powers have the ability to become, the curse-broker must have a very good deal of us, with his supernatural abilities how could he not? We didn't know what we had, guys. Shoulda' haggled.
