- Location
- New Zealand
Gods be damned. I really hope Crimson Chrysalis Strike works like this.
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Exalted: Out Of The Eater
- Thread starter TenfoldShields
- Start date
NonSequtur
a body
[x] [Dusk] Shattering the World's Spine. You excel at close combat but mere "distance" will not keep them safe. Strike the ground and send shockwaves of razored bone ridges and visceral red blades rippling out. A focused line of destruction as devastating as any cataphract charge.
Reaper is probably what I'd choose if this was a video game, because it just increases the effectiveness of standard tactics without altering them much. Simple, effective.
I'm going for the World's Spine for two reasons. One is for that sick Transistor reference, baby. The other reason is because this looks like the biggest dramatic move on the list, and nothing says 'I SEND MY SCOURGE, I SEND MY SWORD' more than using this to breach the proud walls of Lookshy, shatter its ancient aqueducts and bring all it's built down around their heads.
Reaper is probably what I'd choose if this was a video game, because it just increases the effectiveness of standard tactics without altering them much. Simple, effective.
I'm going for the World's Spine for two reasons. One is for that sick Transistor reference, baby. The other reason is because this looks like the biggest dramatic move on the list, and nothing says 'I SEND MY SCOURGE, I SEND MY SWORD' more than using this to breach the proud walls of Lookshy, shatter its ancient aqueducts and bring all it's built down around their heads.
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- Location
- Classified
[X] [Dusk] Incarnadine Reaper. All Deathknights can draw Essence from the lives of others and spilled blood is one of the most common mediums. But you. You have learned how to feed from multiple enemies at once in the heat of combat, rapidly fueling yourself in the process.
We came here to murder an entire empire. Better make sure we've got the gas in the tank to see it through.
We came here to murder an entire empire. Better make sure we've got the gas in the tank to see it through.
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[X] [Dusk] Incarnadine Reaper. All Deathknights can draw Essence from the lives of others and spilled blood is one of the most common mediums. But you. You have learned how to feed from multiple enemies at once in the heat of combat, rapidly fueling yourself in the process.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Vote Called.
"Incarnadine Reaper" wins, update before the weekend ideally.
Music wholly unrelated.
"Incarnadine Reaper" wins, update before the weekend ideally.
Music wholly unrelated.
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I think that after this battle Harrow might run into the wolf-boi husbando who's leading this attack against Lookshy. The poor guy doesn't have this nicest clothes to make a good first impression, but fortunately the blood of one's enemies is always fashionable. Especially mutual enemies.
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I almost voted for this one anyway so I'm glad it wins 
- Location
- HELL
- Pronouns
- They/It
aw but i wanted exploding corpses
but it's still fuckin rad tho
but it's still fuckin rad tho
Are we assuming the Lunar warlord is a guy?
I mean, Lunar. Even the use of male titles is not definitive.
EDIT
Looking at the char sheet, the PC has a proto-dragon familiar and a Dragonfly's Ranging Eye. And a very Prototype aesthetic. Interesting loadout from his Deathlord, especially with the lack of weapons and armor.
Guess the dude is new at the whole equipping minions thing.
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- Location
- madison
don't lunars have a charm that lets them swap genders?
Like I said, Lunars.
I'm not even counting cultural customs from Exalted societies like the Delzahn, where biological sex has nothing to do with social roles, and you have biological women adopted the cultural roles of men, and be referred to as such, without issue.
Well, there's a whole army of beastmen here. I'm sure at least one will be Harrow's type. It would probably be weird from his perspective to be the physically more formidable partner.
Well, the familiar was already on hand and the mirror is something called out as floating around Steel-and-Ember. Given that he said that he chose Harrow at random it gives the impression that he chose Alexius, realized he didn't have any weapons around, grabbed and shoved a lens into Alexius' hand and imbued him with Abyssal Messiah Style to make up for the lack.
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Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
call me out by name why don't you >:|
and right there I'm sold on him. A wholesome and accommodating boy, 10/10 would murder nations for again.
Yes. Good. Start the fire.
L O R G E B O I
On a more serious note; historically I have had Opinions on Exalted, and one of them is that I am very much in favour of Exaltations as autonomous entities - but not visible ones. An intangible presence flitting hither and thither throughout the world, heroism felt but not witnessed. I thought it best not to try to do the grandeur of Exaltation justice with aesthetic description, that such was impossible. I am happy to announce I was wrong. Well done, @TenfoldShields.
Sic. Semper. Tyrannis.
I am sorry to have missed the vote. Had I made it in time, I would have voted for Crimson Chrysalis Strike (there's something... extremely appropriate about the imagery of revolutionary fire literally rising from the ruined bodies of tyrants), but I count myself quite satisfied with this.
The local lookshy command must panicking at the moment, wolfmen in one direction and a anathema in the other.
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Worse.
It'd be [Signal Lost] readings advancing rapidly until suddenly there is a dread banner in the sky...
We can literally kill people faster than news spreads
- Location
- New Zealand
Huh... Aren't Daybreak's the Caste with a damage reduction essence aura?
That... makes Harrower more than a little scarier with his ability to restore essence through murder.
He's the ultimate mook killer. A non-stop juggernaut who can't be beaten by greater numbers.
Now we just need to look out for "Hero" class foes.
That... makes Harrower more than a little scarier with his ability to restore essence through murder.
He's the ultimate mook killer. A non-stop juggernaut who can't be beaten by greater numbers.
Now we just need to look out for "Hero" class foes.
Origami Clock
Right twice a day
- Location
- Brighton, UK
Hopefully we get to have a better love life than Gendo though. Though getting ourselves a tactical ghost husbando (or two, or more~) to pilot our screaming meat-horrors wouldn't be the worst idea.
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- Location
- New Zealand
One could argue that a screaming meat horror would be the worst idea.
...they would be wrong, but they could certainly argue it.
...they would be wrong, but they could certainly argue it.
Prologue Part Ten: Jawbone
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[Dusk] Incarnadine Reaper: Basic (0/250xp)
Son of the Sun, would your father weep to see what you've become? Hypocrite. His oldest, truest rituals have always been red-stained things.
Blood is holy. Blood is unclean. But above all: blood is power. When active nearby corpses exsanguinate, their blood flowing to Harrow, while crimson pours out of the wounded, hastening their end. All of this serving to fuel the Deathknight, rapidly replenishing stores of expended Essence. With some effort he may trade scope for potency and effect even the healthy.
Son of the Sun, would your father weep to see what you've become? Hypocrite. His oldest, truest rituals have always been red-stained things.
Blood is holy. Blood is unclean. But above all: blood is power. When active nearby corpses exsanguinate, their blood flowing to Harrow, while crimson pours out of the wounded, hastening their end. All of this serving to fuel the Deathknight, rapidly replenishing stores of expended Essence. With some effort he may trade scope for potency and effect even the healthy.
Howl and the world howls with you. Scream and it screams with you. The sound shuddering through charred timbers, through gutted ruins and soot-blackened walls, setting the still licking flames twisting, dancing. It goes on and on, tearing its way free of your chest unbidden: raw throated, voice cracking, the tips of your toes just brushing the searing hot drifts of ash as you hang suspended. Back arched until it seems like it could break and your spine about to snap; every nerve flickering electric. Hands outstretched and fingers curled into claws, sinews standing out like bridge struts and tendons on the verge of tearing. You're a corpse spitted on a spear, your arms lashed parallel to the ground for ease of display. A battle standard.
But it doesn't hurt.
For the first time in your entire life it doesn't hurt.
Helot. Slave. Filth. Scum. What have you done?
Beneath the Calibration sky, sunless and moonless and starless you burn. A shaft of light scorching itself against the night, a radiant pyre visible from every horizon: a hundred colors and one, a thousand heresies and one. The power within roils and rages, devouring that dreamy, soft everywhere-and-nowhere orange glow even as you open your eyes, even as you drink it in, eat it up. You float in the center and from the center you can see every hue. From the center you can watch as they curl away from you and swirl into the maelstrom.
The richest, reddest crimson you've ever seen bleeding, seeping into shades of Imperial Purple, a violet as deep and lovely-dark as the Goddess's robes. The column is shot through with veins of cold blue. Threaded with sickly green witchfire and flashes of iron grey. The tower wavers, ripples and sways from side-to-side. The base fattening, unspooling into fat tendrils as the peak turns ragged, as the thing decoheres. They shoot through the ground, through the still-smoking remains of the helot quarter; snaking along every surface and stretching up into the air, dividing and multiplying out into vast brachial wings of scarlet and sapphire. Amethyst, ivory, and iron bursts from the sides of your shoulders, from the back of your arms: boughs of bleak bone and lavender flesh forking and branching like the limbs of some titanic tree, growing through the town, into the mining outpost. The two intertwine, weaving themselves together into a slithering, pulsing cloak of color: the world flayed into your visceral-wet banner.
The scream fades into a hoarse rasp, a croak, before dying completely. The force holding you aloft ebs away, gravity returning by degrees. Your legs take your weight and you immediately crumple and fall to a knee. Above you the last of the light is sinking down, collapsing in upon itself as it melds, merges, with the forest of marrow, the arterial jungle. Tethering itself to the ghostly anatomy, leashing itself to you. You see the shape of something vast and skinless. Something with rows of fangs in a naked jaw and eyes that glow like the setting sun. A massive thing, a feverdream beast settling over you, hunching over you. A shared hallucination for all to behold. And can you see the patchwork quilt that makes it up? The stripped, half-fused silhouette repeated within again and again, until the details run like so much candlewax.
It's you.
A chimera made of you, your copies, your clones; ten thousand echoes smelted into a single nightmare-monster. An amalgamate dragon of blood and bared meat and conglomerations of bone. Cancer incarnate.
The last of the power leaves you. You go slack, you sag, palm to your chest, breathing just...breathing and even that's strange now. The air rasping raw on your lungs, hissing past too-sharp teeth. There's a pollution in you, a kind of contamination, and you can feel it swirling between your lips when you exhale. You're a stain, a blast shadow burned into the world. You should not be, you should not exist, but you do and you can feel the brand shining on your brow as proof: the half-filled circle, the coming dawn. The carrion carcass of the Unconquered Sun as he climbs above the rim of Creation.
You feel something against your fingers and you cradle it hesitantly, ignoring the sounds around you, paying no mind to the shouts and the cries and the clash of steel on steel. Gently push back a few stray locks of hair and note, numbly, that they're white now. That your skin is ash-grey now, tinged with lavender hues. That it fits you too tightly, and splits at the seams to reveal the muscle below and your body all but ripples with muscle now. Hammered anatomy bared beneath your burned black clothes. The fabric crumbling away, sloughing off with every motion, to expose more lean thing you've become. All whipcord and rawhide and sleek, smooth cables of strength. Veins stand stark against the surface, swollen and bloated, pumping indigo and green. It's like you've been riddle with roots, infested by worms. Most visible on the right hand side of your body, where the skin is the thinnest and your body still dappled with burn patterns, and you can feel them as they climb your cheeks (an impression, a grotesque imitation, of tears) but not a part of you is untouched. Not a part of you unmarked, unchanged. Even the cut, the old scar beneath your eye has opened again into something red and the right corner of your mouth, so rarely worked into a smile, has been drawn up into a fixed snarl by the fire.
But it still doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt at all.
Motes of flame drip from the Hesiesh stone that sits cupped in your calloused hand. You turn the pendant this way and that, brushing away the black flakes with a thumb. Studying it as an Elemental creature half-coalesces around the emblem, its torso barely bigger than the icon itself. You could cage it, crush it between your palms. But instead you just watch, watch as molten fangs, no longer than the joint of your little finger, work wide in a sleepy yawn, and chiropteran wings stretch and flare and fold back into the stone itself. And for a second, amidst the chaos on every side, there is a hush. A kind of quiet. A kind of peace.
It's broken soon enough.
The sound of boots, the whisper of heavy folds of fabric, the clink of chain and scale and plate. The barked orders, voices faltering as they see the thing that looms above you. You smell sweat soaking through the layers of cloth and leather. You can taste their apprehension, their fear, the bile on their breath. And beyond them something...else. Something you don't have a word for, something you don't have a name for, something so familiar and so strange all at once. You let the pendant fall back to your breast.
You press your palms to the ground, ignoring the streamers of smoke, the heat-wave shimmer, and push yourself back up to standing, vertebrae clicking, crunching as you straighten up. Knuckles popping in sequences as you clench your fists, joints almost audibly creaking as you splay your fingers back out. You start walking. Somewhere you feel more than hear a heart start to beat, a steady tempo, leashed thunder. A drumming in your head, a buzzing in your bones, it resonates in your chest ceaseless and relentless. It will not stop. It will not be silent.
You will not stop. You will not be silent.
The air is thick with the scent of roasting flesh. Corpses, half-consumed by the guttering blaze, carpet the concrete around you. Laying where they fell, where they were pinned, where they were thrown by the shockwave of your resurrection. Heaped two and three deep: some only visible as an arm, a leg, pinned between waist-thick beams or silhouettes shrouded in ash. Most are exposed, a hideous tangle of the half-unfleshed and half-unmade, the broken and the burned. Torso atop torso, limbs entangled and seared skulls gleaming, grinning wide, their smiles edged in scraps of still-roasting red. They start thinning out as you near the entryway and the sole exit; vanishing entirely at the threshold.
You pause. The doors to the charnel pit that was your church, your cathedral if only for a night, have been torn off their hinges and cast aside. A young woman in bronze-brushed armor and a crimson cloak lays at your feet. Tanned (like you were), her hair dusted with charcoal and grey (beautiful, like yours never was). A blade in hand and the other bisected half of her torso laying a few inches away. The wound runs from her shoulder to her hip, the flesh along the single cut carbonized, the metal run to slag. Your eyes flick around the small square, there are others: cast in the same mold as her, of the same make. Scattered around like so many Autumn leaves. After a moment you step over them too, it's not a mystery that matters to you now.
"(-oose Dragons damn you, loose.)"
Bowstrings snap to staves in staccato rhythm. Crossbow bolts sing, metal heads humming as they slice through the air. Most of the shots stray, thudding into wood and breaking against cement. One hits the heat-baked earth two meters wide. Another whispering over your shoulder, splintering against the ground. You absently tilt your head an inch to the side and yet another passes close enough by your ear to kiss the cartilage.
An idle thought crosses your mind. You reach out, hesitate and then just...close your hand as a quarrel slips across your fingers, catching it mid-flight. A hailstone plucked from the storm. Study it curiously, feel the polished wood against your skin and the razored edge and that's- that's all it is really. That's all it is to you: a curiosity. The promise of death from on high reduced to something numb, something unreal, contemplated with all the vague interest of a farmer watching clouds scud past, a suncrow flying over distant fields. You let it slip free, let it fall as another bolt catches you in the back, just above your kidney, and forged steel shatters like glass on stone. It doesn't matter.
Lookshy is here.
The smoke-choked streets of the helot quarter are filled with soldiers and now, now you stop. Standing backlit by the remnants of the bonfire blaze, framed on every side by the dead and shadowed by the beast above. They're arrayed before you in rushed, sloppy order; steel chain catching the glow of a hundred slow-fading pyres, steel plates shining like the dawn, steel helms crowned with the reflected inferno. You hear choked gasps behind the silvery veils, muffled curses as they see you now for what you are. As the scales of fighting men see your touch upon the world for what it is.
Deathknight.
Anathema.
You feel something crawl across your face, a jagged fracture feathering towards your ears. It takes you a moment to realize that it's...a smile. You're smiling.
And why wouldn't you? There's no doubt now. There's no fear. There's no shame. There's just that drumbeat, the pulse of a corpse world stirred to a mockery of life. That metastatic mantle draped over your shoulders, binding you to the beast that is the purest expression of your soul, your self. There's just you and them and there's nothing in you left that'll run and hide or beg forgiveness because there's nothing in you that they can torture. Nothing that they can deprive or starve or brutalize into submission.
So you just throw out your arms as if to embrace them all; the scorched scraps of your jacket slipping away completely, leaving your torso bared.
"So is this what it is to be dead?" You whisper to yourself, just yourself.
Their only reply is a battle-cry, a deafening shout and how could it be anything else? How could soldiers of the greatest military in the Scavenger Lands, in all of the East, in all of Creation answer any other way? They charge, splendid in their scarlet jackets and red-dyed coats and steel. Spearheads glinting lethal, leveled at your guts, your limbs, your heart. You don't bother to move. You don't bother to raise your arms to defend yourself. You don't stop smiling. You can't stop smiling. It's more than trust, more than faith, it's revelation; an enlightenment from below. And in this moment you understand what your Deathlord gave to you, his vassal-knight.
They crash into you, this company of the faithful, this talon of the wild-eyed and determined. And with the all strength in their backs and furious will in their hearts, flanked by their beloved brothers and sisters and set before the gaze of the City itself...they drive you back a single step.
A half a step.
Keen, killing points screech and wail against of the milk white blotches that bloom over your skin. The material like porcelain clay, like poured plaster, but you don't have to be told to know that it's something more organic in origin. Sparks fall as metal grinds against your armor. Rattling as the spears start to tremble with the force put into this single, sustained thrust, with the infectious fear that you feel welling up within them. You should be spitted on their spears. You should be impaled: spiked through to the polished wooden shafts, a ruined body borne up on a thicket of knife-edged heads, but already it's gone wrong. An officer with eagle-wings framing his jaw shouts out something, urging the men on. They roar again and hurl themselves into it. Every sinew visibly straining, teeth gritted, the commander himself the length of a polearm away. They're so desperate: can you feel it? Can you taste it?
You reach out, shifting the array, a dozen different killing points shrieking in protest. You take a step forward and those in front of you stumble back, trying to dig in their heels, brace themselves against their comrades, not even realizing how little of a difference it makes. Curl your hand around the haft of his spear and in that moment you see the raw fervor and rank terror in the young man's eyes. His face slick with exertion beneath the helm, a strand of spittle caught in his thick beard and he can't be much older than you can he? Not even thirty.
You squeeze and the reinforced wood detonates into so many splinters and so much dust. You dart forward, slip ahead even as the man sags, catching him by the face and for a heartbeat you're eye to eye and inches apart. Your smile widens by feather-fine cracks.
"Oh, brave hero," you whisper.
Milk-white shoots down your arm, steam hissing into the cool air, tongues of mist rising from flash-grown plates and ten inch talons bursting from your fingers. There's a sound like a shovel sinking into mud and shale. The points jut out from the back of the man's head, punching out through the draped segments of his helm that sit over his spine. Ruby drops beading, falling. You pull your hand free in a geyser of gore (so much, too much) and a bold, brave man falls. A proper Lookshyan citizen, noble son of the City collapsing to the ground, his head riddled with sucking wounds. You can see through the perfect punctures that run through his brain.
Scarlet flows over parched earth; winding crimson threads, ribbons of red that wind up your calf and slither up your gleaming arm. Shimmering, shifting into shades of purple as they coil tight. As they sizzle and smoke away, something serpentlike in their motion, or maybe draconic.
How many stand before you, range and rage against you? Half-a-hundred, easy.
The better question is "how many helots lay dead beyond them"?
Hundreds. Easily.
It starts as a rumbling in the ground, it rises into a roar. It sunders barely standing walls and surges through broken foundations: a deluge of blood. Textured with scales and writhing, sharp-toothed things. The spent lives of unnumbered slaves, yours now. Leaping in the air to strike into you, sinking into you. The phantasmal conduits, the forest of bone quickening, growing; the sound of that heart deepening until it all but rattles the teeth.
"Oh what brave heroes!" You shout over the screaming, the sound half-mad, half-unhinged and then you're upon them, you're among them your movements lazy, almost languid, too-fluid and too-fast and it's like humming a half-remembered song isn't it? A childhood lullaby, sung to you as you slept that even if you haven't thought of it in years you can still sing a few wordless bars and pick up the thread again; feel your way through it.
Dark Messiah Style is like that. A song you've never heard before, yet etched so soul-deep it's like you've known it all your life. It's melody is the bellowing of futile orders and the wet rending of flesh and the squeal of carved open armor.
Soldiers hit the ground like falling stars, shaking the world underfoot and shattering the earth with far reaching fissures. Your body shifts with every new exchange, tearing itself apart as it mutates: your right arm exploding into a massive slab of bone that's more reaper's scythe than sword, collapsing into taloned gauntlets and greaves that glove your limbs up to the shoulder, the hip, those same limbs half-skinning themselves a second later until they're wreathed in tatters of razor-edged tendrils. You clench your fist and a twist of will brings forth fat ropes of almost obscene brawn, ripping your too-tight skin open like rice paper; there for one blow and fading the next. You plant your palms in the dirt again (again) as your veins gleam amethyst and emerald and lances of sleek, beautiful bone burst from the soil all around you; an impaler's touch.
And beneath it all that thunder, that ceaseless heart. And through it all that crimson cataract churning in your wake. Buildings toppling into plumes of sparks as it rushes through them. Barracks and row houses collapsing upon themselves as it rages and rouses itself to wrath. When it hits you it breaks upon you like waves on the rocky coast and, for a second, you see shapes in the spray: a colossal colony of eels, a seven part river-wyrm.
You are a walking desolation. A devastation in almost-human form. Can you even call this killing? Chips fly from a blade as it hews into your throat. You strike the swordswoman three times and each one sends shockwaves through the swirling smoke. You twist and lash out with your leg and her corpse folds in half before sheer force and acceleration launch her into a crossbowman two hundred feet away. A missile hurled from a siege engine.
And throughout it all you feed. You feed and you feed and you feed until your banner billows above Outpost One Five Two and drowns all in its shadow. Until your blood-and-bone pennants could be the goddess's own pinions. You're dimly aware that someone's laughing. It takes a while before you realize that it's you. Bloody-handed murderer, killer clad all in purple; the energy that radiates, emanates, from you is enough to make it clear beyond all doubt: you've become a monster.
And there's not a saint here to slay you, not a hero to end you.
They cannot stop you. You will not stop.
Lunges that rupture the world, that turn into easy almost-pirouettes, slow-revolving twirls up on the ball of a foot that collapse into a slouch, another dash, a vicious bloody tear down a hard-packed boulevard. Potential thrumming in your hands, in your feet, surging out in shouts of Essence, pulses of power. You're a blur and you leave broken things and dead men in your wake. You're a blur and gravity cannot hold you, only pluck at your heels. Through the streets. Through the square. To the base of the inner walls, your knee smashing into a grown man's sternum like a grand goremaul, so hard dry mortar trickles down on his shoulders. You let him fall and scale it in an instant, your banner-beast planting a wagon-sized hand on the battlements as you turn and behold a vision of Hell itself.
not Hell
The trenches you and the others gouged out of the landscape, the outer walls, are already overrun. For all the pain, for all the toil, in the end they couldn't keep the Wolf at bay for longer than a night. Argent mist shrouds the earthworks, swallowing the stakes and the thaumaturge-sculpted ramparts whole; spilling down, crawling up against the stone fortifications of the town itself. Entire swathes of the inner curtain are wrapped in that caul. The tentacles of some sea creature, pulling the whole ship down into the deep. To the crushing, cold, inky black where Xauma dwells.
The mist is less of a barrier to your eyes and within its embrace you see them, see their foot soldiers, the first wave of the Wolf-Kingdom. Young men, young women in long tunics filtering through ragged holes in the fortifications; the moat choked near-level with soil. They come clambering over the rise, darting through the line under the cover of the billowing bank. Black cloth belted at the waist, arms and legs swathed in tightly wound bandages, a bit of ablative softness under scraped together, mismatched splint and salvaged scale. Most have at least one larger piece, a polished silver harness closed over the chest and back. Almost everyone has a little shield of banded wood in their off hand, a bundle of spears over their back.
All wear a wolf skin. A thing of fur and grey fog; the hide drawn into a cloak, a mantle, the tail trailing behind and the head closed about theirs. Fangs joined over their jaws; enveloping their features like any City-cast helm. Paws joined together like a clasp on their chests. They advance in fits and starts, under a steady cover of loosed javelins; scouring the walls.
You see the monsters that move among them, fivestrong packs of beastmen, wolves in truth. Leather stretched taut over hard planes of predator muscle, skirts falling around backbent legs and thick thighs. Dense pelts puffing up around segmented plates, blue cloth stuffed beneath the patchwork, piebald mess. The blades they one-hand more polearms in their own right, crushing slabs with a cutting edge. White-feathered shapes soar and wheel through the upper reaches of the mist, human arms and human legs covered in snowy plumage, hanging between broad owl-wings. Hands and feet shod with steel sabers. Light chain and hide leggings all they really wear besides the heart-shaped mask hiding avian features. A sheer expanse of polished grey. Beyond the trench you can see the crashed carcass of an airship, wood scored all along the flank.
The Dead watch it all from the top of the earthworks. Regimented ranks, braced shields and short swords. Their armor only a few shades darker than the murk that flows over them, blending into it, forming from it, feeding it. Capes trailing into torn, filthy shreds. The plumed feathers of officer helmets like ink smudges, or droplets of oil dripped into water; oozing around their outline. They're sketches in charcoal and ash, tarnished silver and streaks of platinum ore ripped from the ground. Except for their faces, for the death masks, cold and remote features that gleam like Luna's Throne. Ravens and owls top their standards, blue banners fluttering in no wind.
And they all see you. Each and every one sees you. Good.
So does Lookshy. Even better.
And best of all? Not five hundred meters distant you see her and you know it's her because who else could it even be? Aikaterine Sidonia standing surrounded by the theme of Gens Aikaterine. Resplendent in verdant cloth and engraved jadesteel, bearing blades torn from Shogunate machinery; arms and armor harvested from the great works of the Age of Bronze. The bow she draws is a living thing, an arc of dark wood shot through with lines of power. A perfumed garden grows all around her, delicate flowers and thorned ivy twisting free of the brick. She's beautiful in that way they're always beautiful, something more than merely mortal, something holy, something sacred. Copper skin that all but glows, flecked and dappled with scales the color of fresh-bloomed leaves. Crowned with graceful antler horns and as you watch she looses and a bolt of light vanishes into the mist, a flash of green following a second later. The ground rolling, rocking underfoot. But then...her head tilts. Her head turns.
Her eyes meet yours and she beholds you in all your awful glory: blood soaked, brand burning on your brow, the beast behind you. And in those slit-pupiled eyes, on the face of the draconic and the divine…
You see fear.
One foot in front of the other. You start walking again. Your gaze only for her, you have no mind for anyone else, anything else. Her guard, the defenders desperately holding the walls, rush you and don't they know how this goes already? Their deaths are a matter of details, of finer points and smaller things. It doesn't really matter. You walk on, over slick stone and their still warm bodies, and the heart thunders triumphant. Crimson coils waving and undulating, drawn towards you. Wrapping around bare, nearly naked skin in twisting spirals of scarlet; burning purple as they ignite, as they sublimate into Essence.
You break into a lope, bare feet padding on stone, sweat dripping down grey skin. Anima anatomy manifesting around you, growing and spreading and weightless for all that, for all that it sprawls out. Infecting and subsuming this small town, their corpse-choked hearth.
She draws back another arrow, she speaks a word and you feel the world catch and grind around you, the gears of an immaculate machine stuttering, and twitching. She raises her bow and looses and it soars up, blinking away. Howling down as a hail of petrified saplings, bark like stone, and stripped of all branches. Oozing toxic green sap, each fossilized thing longer than you're tall.
You drive your heel into the pathway hard enough that the edges crumble. Arms across your chest, you clad yourself in threefold armor. Steam curling from your chest, your back as jagged plates, flawed, imperfect bone grows through the flesh; sealing away your vitals. A cloak of midnight fire, twilight and sunset and a murdered dawn billowing from your shoulders, turning you into an effigy as it wraps around you. And then those veins, those arteries, those wrist-thick channels; that fractal bone, malignant wings for a malignant thing folding to cover you. A shield of skin and layered ivory and the beast-that-is-you, that behemoth, roars as the barrage comes.
As the world shakes and your shields shudder and the ground beneath you threatens to crumble away.
But you outlast it. You endure. You who have suffered so much, who have borne so much, who have known your own death. Did she really think that a single will-working, a single, sorcerous spell would be enough to end you?
Please.
You respond. Exploding through your own layered protections, kicking a half-embedded sapling free, sending it spinning up lazily through the air. You catch it. You twist your shoulders, your hips, and she ducks just in time for it to impale one of her bodyguards through the heart. No more lingering: you drop low, rings of light contracting across your palms, your feet. Focusing down to a single flickering flame before you throw them back and a shockwave of energy, of Essence, screams behind you. Hurling you forward, your toes barely skimming the ground, arms stretched out to either side.
Impact is a starburst of choking thorns and dying trees, scattering what's left of her bodyguard. Nature red and nature green grappling there, in full view between the full might of an advancing army and the half-shattered remnants of another. The army's camp an ocean of flames at the edge of your vision. She blocks your blow with her bow and your taloned hand smashes through the thing. She fades back and the massive blade your arm becomes shears through her breastplate, gouging deep into the metal, drawing no blood. The socket of your shoulder a tangle of muscular cords and organic cable. You advance, she gives way; all around you Xauma begins gaining the walls. In the distance the army camp is burning.
You understand, you think. As her smaller blade is smashed away, hard enough to wrench her fingers and make her cry out. As she strikes you, batters you with the heels of her hands, the soles of her boots, with her knees and elbows, the motions textbook for all that they're frenzied, panicked. As you slip almost parallel to the ground and your leg scythes out her ankles from under her and you follow the momentum of the motion through, your other leg descending like an axe-blow and she has to desperately pitch herself away, rolling, to escape it. You follow, thrusting your mutant arm forward.
Hers is a life at court. Hers is a life of palatial manors and marble bridges and blue rivers. Her hands aren't like yours you see. You wonder if you were ever real to her or just...an idea. An abstract. Not a person but a tool, no more animate, no more aware than a pile of shovel, a rack of picks beneath the baking hot sun.
You think about asking her. You open your mouth.
And then you see the scarlet dripping from hers. Sticky red running from the corners of her mouth, your blade piercing her stomach, parting her cape on the other side. Her palms pressed to either side of the polished ivory slab, webbed with lines of Essence. Her own heart's blood running along the edges, already weaving itself into you.
She makes a sound, a soft sob of pain. Is she trying to speak? Trying to beg? You don't know. You consider what to say, these last words, this final exchange; indifferent to the chaos that rages around you.
"If you had not murdered me," you say at last, "I would not be here."
And then you slowly, slowly, swing your arm out over the side. You tilt it, you tip it, and you let the not-quite gone Dragon fall.
She's dead before she hits the ground.
The heart is beating quieter now, the forest of bone, the bloody veins are fading away. Withdrawing back into themselves, back into you, the world returning to its natural hues.
You're...tired, you think. More tired than you've ever been in your entire life. Your arm melts into itself, a cocoon of lavender-grey flesh wrapping around it once more. You flex your fingers, absently feeling the pop. Your knees slowly folding as you sink, back to the crenellations, until you're sitting. The brand on your brow gutters low, embers cooling. The beast above coming undone. You're so tired. You don't think you could fight anymore, you don't think you could eat anymore. But it's an academic question really, it's not as if you have to.
Lookshy is routing, you see Anima banners flaring on the far side of the mining town. The marks of Sextes Jylis, in the center of clusters, concentrations of troops. Beyond them you see the Western gates opened, and beyond that-
You still, you blink sweat from your eyes, every motion sluggish and drawn out by exhaustion. And you see it, this nonsense input, this glaring error in the world, and your leaden brain crawls through the train of thought; connecting disparate dots. The chaos within this makeshift citadel, the garrison scattered and in such disarray; already half depleted. The bodies sheared in half, the broken doors to the stockroom. That thing you felt when you first awoke that you couldn't name, but you can now can't you?
A sun shines in the West, pure and golden bright. Elemental banners ringing it, the infernos that are the birthright of Hesiesh's children reduced to the size of a lit twig by the distance. The impression of men moving around, a ragged column, fleeing the now-closing jaws. Abandoning the death-trap and returning to the City, ceding this place to the Wolf-King.
You watch it for a time. You smile a little to yourself.
The dead surround you on every side, eyes empty and staring, blood drying into a tacky skim on your skin and pooling all around you. You pay them no mind, they can't hurt you, there's nothing to fear from them now.
Tip your head back, let your eyes drift shut and your breathing slow. You don't open them when you feel the air shudder around you as something unspeakably big lands on the battlements, argent light shining through the thin skin of your lids. The scent of half a dozen different beasts assailing you, the shadowy impressions of branches and armored scale and fur and feathers. You don't open them when you hear the crackle and creak of snapping bone, compressing tissue, when you hear padded footsteps drawing nearer. When you feel ragged claws cup your jaw and hot breath wash across your face and something massive lifting you, slinging you over one bulky shoulder. When you feel feathers brush your face and the whole world falls away.
You're already asleep.
You're already gone.
Congratulations on completing the Prologue! For attaining his Exaltation and slaying the Dragonblooded Aikaterine Sidonia, Harrower has 1000xp to allocate across his sheet.
All voting must be by plan. The full total must be spent.
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