[X] Company. Friends. Belonging. All those connections you never had.
I think...Jason was a very brief relationship for Alexius but he was a really important one, and Jason's betrayal shook him to the core for good reason, but I think it's interesting if in spite of being burned Harrower keeps reaching out and trying to connect with others.
[X] Tools. Materials. Foundries. All that freedom to create you never had.
He's too gun-shy for Companionship just yet. Maybe when the wound has had a little time to heal. Same for wealth. Sure, Harrower will take some, but it won't be his focus.
[X] Company. Friends. Belonging. All those connections you never had.
IC, I think the most damaging thing helotry imposed on Harrower was the absence of personal ties. The few glimpses of them we had in ihis past (likehis birdfolk boyfriend) seemed like something he grasped onto with the fervor of a drowning man.
OOC, I'd rather read about lovingly detailed portrayals of characters, rather than lovingly detailed portrayals of comfort or arms and armor. The latter three generally don't talk back, although I'm sure TenfoldShields could make it work somehow .
[X] Company. Friends. Belonging. All those connections you never had.
He's yearned for this in this quest. He threw caution to the wind and gave up food for this is this quest. I think having a taste of it only to lose it would only make him want it even more.
Also, Eclipse, the social skill, is the only skill that Harrower has at Novice/zero. That suggests some interesting scenes where he tries to connect to people without any known social rules to fall back on.
Alrighty, trying my hand at this whole homebrew thingy.
The Accuser
A soldier who marches off to war accepts that death may come, from the bite of a blade, from teeth or claw or frost or flame. And while many die with loved ones waiting at home, or plans for the future unreached, they move on, for they have done their duty, and died with honor. But there are those who perish in the killing fields who do not go gently into the beyond; the soldiers who died from a blade in the back.
There were two soldiers once upon a time, raised from the same village, thick as thieves from the time they were young. The young man and the young woman left together to fight in the war, to earn their future. But through their training, and through their journeys into the battlefield, it became clear to all who knew them that the young woman was superior to her counterpart in every way, and a jealous flame caught in her friend's heart. Then one day there came a dust swarm, wherein the darkness, steel parted flesh, and the man emerged, the sole survivor of an ambush.
But as he returned to the camp, his friend unmourned, he saw a helot boy laboring in the dust, barely able to breathe, but with a set of familiar eyes gazing at him from behind the slave's tired eyelids. The boy died before the next day was done, his hands on a crate of weapons. But it did not end there.
Around the camp, some whisper that they saw the fallen hero again, her bright blue eyes peering out from beneath a passing soldier's helm. As the army carries on, during a skirmish, another soldier takes a spear through the spine before an ambush, and his attacker dies in a pool of their victim's own blood. You recognize the soldier as a boy from the other side of Lookshy, but the corpse's eyes have changed from amber to blue.
Food goes missing, patrols are thrown off keel when three show up for a watch of two. This time it is a helot wearing stolen armor, who dies where they stands. A week later, it's an officer who abandons their duties and wanders off to patrol the camp, blue eyes beneath the helmet of an inferior soldier. He tries to speak but it isn't his voice that comes out, but a strange, androgynous one that makes a few turn their heads, remembering a comrade who'd died some time ago. He slips into the tent of the boy from the village, knife raised, and gets a sword through his guts before her can finish the job.
It's everywhere, now. At night you see a soldier ducking around a line of tents but never emerging past the other side. Official registry documents are found covered in red ink, blotting out the names of every soldier that marches with the army. Drawn out battle maps change, pointing backwards to the site of a battle long won, where one soldier, now rising through the ranks, had been the sole survivor of an ambush.
it was half a year since the night in the desert when one helot dragged themselves into his tent. When he'd awoken that morning, he was an old man, but now his bones were young and strong, his skin painted milk-white and smooth instead of dark and cracked, his thick beard replaced with a strong, bare jawline. As his body remolded itself, bones grinding and fat shifting, he shambled over to the sleeping traitor and plunged the knife into his neck. By the time the others came, the old man lay dead, as withered and old as he had ever been, save for two wide, staring blue eyes.
The Accuser spirit rises when a soldier is killed with treachery, betrayed by a comrade they loved dearly. Its hunrefuses to cross to the afterlife until justice has been delivered, but as it died from an attacker who no one suspects, it cannot level accusations against the perpetrator. Instead, it finds a host it can sense will soon die and possesses its body; fellow soldiers or helots are both common.
After several possessions, the ghost's power grows, and it begins to change other aspects of the host; the physical sex, the height, the racial makeup, hair...the hosts, however, remain unaware of their metamorphosis. It isn't until the ghost has possessed dozens of victims that it gains the strength necessary to attempt its revenge; it begins to influence the thoughts of its host. They may receive memories or skills that the ghost once possessed in life. Some may inherit affections or dislikes, but all know the name and face of the one who slew The Accuser, and they know that the traitor must be punished.
Necromancers and Exorcists
The simplest way to exorcize an Accuser is for the killer to be brought to justice. The presence of such a spirit means that there is someone amongst the camp who would kill a fellow soldier, and such treachery cannot be allowed to continue. If the killer is made to answer for their crimes or perishes for any other reason, the Accuser spirit departs its host and allows itself oblivion.
In some cases, however, it may not be practical for the killer to be brought to justice, due to their position or their usefulness to the army. In such cases, the spirit can be contained in a number of ways. The spirit cannot leave the body of its current host until its death, so ensuring the host does not die will prevent the haunting from advancing any further. Bathing a host in salt water and opening bleeding wounds in the flesh will drive the spirit from this realm and into the next.
A spirit may also be captured if it's current host perishes while looking into a silver-backed mirror, and it is kept away from the light of the sun and the moon. By pouring oil over the surface of the mirror, the necromancer may alter how the Accuser remembers its appearance. By storing the mirror with its face pressed against an image of another person, you can trick the Accuser into believing that the subject of the picture was its actual murderer. should you combine these two facts, you may be able to use a captured Accuser to sow discord in an enemy case, creating a witch hunt.
It's nothing you've ever thought about, it's nothing you've ever really considered. A truth as distant from you as the Sun, the Moon, the Poles. As far away as your hollow Heaven and a full five-day march into the depths of a brass Hell for all that it was relevant to your life. But it is still true and it is suddenly so, so very relevant now: you are not the first.
There are helots who find power. There are Dead things who prey upon the slaves, who nest within them, who feed upon them and are fed upon in turn. Fox-faced monsters who fill their lungs with stolen breath, who sip daintily from cupped hands overflowing with blood. The soft murmur of a crowd in a second of silence, a second shadow stretching out beside yours. An amalgam-king of corpses in a char-blackened heath, lords of cinders on thrones of ash. There are things that will crack open your chest and fill it with pyre-flame. There are things that will lift an accuser's words to your lips. There are things that will take your pain, your pride, and give you something like salvation. There are a hundred stories about the darkness beyond the walls of the row houses, about the nightmares just past the farthest edge of the flickering firelight. The shadows clustering in so close, standing shoulder to shoulder and grinning toothily as they listen to the elders. To the tales of half-remembered mothers and forgotten fathers.
Death walks alongside you, bound to you by manacle chains and clinking shackles. Working beside you as you stoop and dig in the hot sun. Every helot is haunted by those they survive. Every helot has a shadowland just beneath the skin; a world of skeletal fingers and the worm-white roots of Autumn trees. There are slaves who have found some succor there.
This is what you have become, that nightmare fully realized, but even so: you are not the first.
You are not the first. Even if an Anathema could be said to be anything like the City's Exalted.
It's an old story, a good story, and you know it by heart: he was born among the dockworkers, the sweating, gasping work-gangs who load Lookshy's massive merchant-ships. He was born in a place of black mud and emerald green reeds. He was born among your kind and he was, to the ignorant eye, cast in your mold. But the whispers of ancestral dragons slithered through his veins, the murmurs of brooding serpents; a trickle of saltwater from the Western Ocean, The Sea that Quenches the Sun. And one day those whispers rose to a roar and spoke so loud, with a voice of thunder, and the seeming-slave was transformed. Sapphire scales swimming out of his flesh, the power of the Dragons protecting their Chosen from the blows of lesser men and unworthy masters. With their power he became a pirate-king of the Yanaze, a spiteful, careless laugh tossed in the face of the City. A lesson given from on high.
First the Encrypted Ones were sent against him, but they failed for he stood above so many of them in the cyclic coils of reincarnation and was outside their mandate. Then, ships were sent against him and they failed, for how could the wrath of the waters be undone by mere wood and linen and jadesteel? Great generals were readied, an army was raised and the garrisons of the City marshalled but then, amidst the chaos and confusion a wise archoness counseled careful contemplation; consideration of Daana'd's teachings. And the Conclave knew her strategy was sound and acquiesced to her designs.
Thirdly the City sent a woman to him, beautiful and perfect in every way. And she took him as a husband and he took her as a wife and, thusly completed, he sailed his armada back to the gates of the City and humbly sought their pardon, for he now knew the truth of himself. A Lost Egg, lead astray by the licentious lies of slaves, born to believe he was a helot.
His name is Damianos Afion Peritaxikhon. Aspect of the Element Water. Lord of Gens Afia. He is of the City, one of its great regents. He is of the City and is forever above those scarred, whipped masses that birthed him.
What is it you want? No, that's not the right question is it? You should be asking who do you want to be. Do you want to be like him? Do you really think that it's as simple as saying "no" when the Wolf-King dangles all the riches and luxuries of the world in front of you? Do you think that saying "yes" will somehow damn you? Denial won't make you a saint and you've lived your whole life with nearly nothing. You want to know what it's like to be something else, to be someone else. You want to know what it's like...
You want to know what it's like to see something beautiful. To be something beautiful. To make something beautiful.
the horizon is burning
the skies are on fire and the sun's gone dim
armageddon in white and gold and black and blazing blue
You push yourself up to sitting, slowly, slowly, the work of long seconds. All stiff muscle and rigid sinews, new physiology lashed to a frame pushed nearly to breaking. Still settling, still adjusting, still becoming in a hundred different ways, in a hundred minute degrees. Absent the howling change of your resurrection, that first heartbeat after you accepted the thing in the cage, that shard, that spark but still just as pervasive. You feel the Elemental shift from its perch, clambering onto your bare shoulder as the blankets slip to your lap. As you plant your feet onto the cool floor.
Grounding yourself in the little details, the small things. Easy to grasp, easy to keep cradled in your hands.
Palm to your bare chest; breathe deep and feel the air fill your lungs. Feel that slow expansion, that gentle exhale, the tension and the relaxation. It's all just tissue in the end, you know that don't you? All just meat and mechanical motion, born out of some souls-deep contamination: you are cancer, the living-dead flesh. You could peel back that pretty lavender skin and see it for yourself if you wanted to. Hah, it's funny isn't it? You've never been good at speaking, at talking and being heard, but now you don't have to be. Now you can show people. Now you can show them your heart, all the pieces of you that you treasure. Now you can make them feel those flickering, fleeting sensations, those emotions that are so hard to dissect and and harder still to articulate.
The fury and the awe, the longing and the craving. If you lean too far over the edge you'll be lost in it, you'll fall into the whirlwind that swirls just at the edge of your attention, howling winds churning and chewing at the limits of your skull. Fall forever, past all the things you used to know and all the things you now understand and all the things you want to be.
Just breathe. In and out.
In and out.
Basic rote and simple ritual.
"I-" no, no you don't need to hear that. He doesn't need to hear that. That soft, almost shy, barely-audible whisper; already so apologetic for it's very existence. Show him.
Your hand falls from your chest.
Reach for that power inside you and for a second there's a queasy spike of dread, a sudden surge of mute terror; a child's sudden certainty. That it won't be there. That it'll have fled. That it'll fail you. That he'll look at you with scorn and disdain and know that he saved you for nothing. That it was all a dream, all dying delusions and misunderstood nightmares and all you are is everything you always were.
That you haven't changed. That nothing's changed. But...you really are a fool aren't you? Don't you understand yet?
You can never go back.
The colors are carmine and amethyst purple, the colors are scarlet shot through with sapphire blue. Your skin sublimates, boiling away in veils of mist. Tendrils of shadow, veins of light crawling along your arms. Spreading across your shoulders, interlacing and pouring themselves down your spine. Flesh fast-flaying itself, stripping itself into essence and ether to bare the mechanisms beneath.
The sound is the crackling crunch of vertebrae rising, thickening, a ripple of overlapping bone working its way from the base of your skull to your tailbone. The sound is the slick, serpentine motion of ribbon-thin tendrils unspooling about your waist, capped in toothy spikes like buckles done up enamel. The sound is the soft whisper of the blankets falling as you stand -and you sway but you still stand- the sizzle-hiss as skirts of indigo and deep lavender and gory, glistening, crimson gather around your waist. Something like fire and smoke and fabric, billowing behind you as if caught by the wind. Preserving something of your modesty.
The anatomy of your arms is on display in its entirety. Striated muscle, glossy tendons, veins pulsing, visibly throbbing with light. Smooth white nodes rising from the red. You draw your hands back, you breathe out.
You let them unfurl. You let them unfold. Delicate assemblies of scythes and knives drawing themselves free of organic sheathes. Extending out on arcs of gristle and grey, layering themselves over your fingertips, a gauntlet of living petals even as skeletal boughs grow along the backs of your arms. As blood vessels swell into necrotic-fueled tentacles. As the structures themselves shift and snap to accommodate the new design, the imposed form.
"These aren't for war, are they?" He breathes after a moment, eyes wide.
You slowly shake your head.
"Ahh," he says and you see the greed, the fear, the fascination, the raw curiosity and the bending, gradually-buckling restraint. But you see the comprehension in his eyes too, that precious, treasured moment where it clicks and he sees you and he can size you up like a piece of bloody meat all he wants. You'll take the Wolf-King's appetite if it means you can have his proper fucking appreciation. He gently lifts an articulated blade with a claw, turning it this way and that, gingerly folding his finger back and watching as it retracts, "and what things might you make with these hands?"
You consider it.
"Whatever I want," you say.
He laughs, "And what do you need then?"
The answer comes, unbidden and half-unconscious, crawling its way up from the depths of your brain.
"Bodies. Blood. Shades," a pause, you probe the hollow space in your head, insight dripping from the wound the shard left, from your third soul, "foundries."
"Ah, what luck," he says and you think his smile is wide enough to swallow the world, wide enough to swallow you as he rises and you feel his hot breath on your face. His hand on your shoulder, steadying you as the power slips and fades and your body adjusts, compensating. Shifting back into something more human, the light diffusing until it's just you, nude and shivering with a dragonbat curiously cocking its head. Nibbling on Nerius's hand with needle teeth. "We have such things in ready supply."
There is a room. You have it all to yourself while you wait. You've paced the span, you've counted it off in your head, you were already able to do basic numbers and simple sums and they come so much faster now. So much easier now. You reach for things and they slot into place, click into position, your mind tallying the calculations with all the cold dispassion of a water clock.
It's the size of your old home, the one that was split and shared between half a dozen helots. Those without families, those without spouses or children; the fragments of previous relocations who didn't quite fit but had to be fit in somewhere.
And all of this space, just for you while you wait.
A bed and a lounge and shelves of books you can't read. An empty desk and an empty chair. A small attached closet of a room with a toilet and a small- it's not a bath but there's water and it comes out, ready and hot. Fresh clothes and simple blue robes and dark metal walls and stained timber, pipes snaking over your head like so many steel serpents. He says it used to be an officer's stateroom.
You half know what that is.
Rest your forehead against the cold glass and watch as your breath mists across the sleek surface.
A metal tray sits on a table behind you. A cup of tea with curls of steam rising from the surface, bowls and little plates sitting about it. Sliced pears. Bread and cheese and olives and oil. A palm-sized platter of oysters in some kind of sauce. A cup of plump doormice, their bodies charred orange-red and gleaming with a honey coating. The food is rich but there's not much of it and you know from experience that that's good, that you've been on starvation rations. Your body's not used to this kind of thing, if you eat too fast you'll probably make yourself sick.
Or something. You've eaten people -you think, does draining their blood count?- you're not really sure if the normal rules apply. And that's not what bothers you besides.
There are a pair of guards outside your door, not to protect you no (as if), but to ensure that you're not disturbed. That you're not bothered. And in a way you're grateful for that, you're grateful to Nerius for how he's treating you. How he's allowing you this time, this space, how he's keeping your surroundings limited, keeping the world outside at bay for now.
Nerius is preparing for Calibration's End. If you want anything in the meantime, those guards will fetch it without question, without hesitation.
And that thought-
aching arms and aching legs and aching lungs and aching bones
Disturbs you. In a way that Nerius's offer didn't. And you're not quite sure why.
And yet…You have some hours until Nerius wishes to speak to you again.
[ ] Spend them here, alone in your room. Maybe sleep a little more. Maybe dream. Try to adjust to this space before the feast, before you next speak to Nerius. If anyone important wants to see you, they can come to you.
[ ] Ask the guards to take you to the gardens onboard the palace. It will be peaceful, pleasant, quiet and still. Maybe you'll meet and introduce yourself to the other souls frequenting it in this pre-Dawn hour. If there are any.
[ ] Ask the guards to take you to the training gym. Where the living members of the Wolf-King's elite legions and his personal guards drill. Stretch your legs, clear your head. It will probably be mostly empty at this hour.
[ ] Ask the guards to take you to the observation deck. Where priests to the warlike dead and mercenary necromancers rub shoulders. Nerius mentioned it as a place relevant to your interests. Albeit nearly deserted now.
Adhoc vote count started by TenfoldShields on Apr 4, 2019 at 4:44 AM, finished with 1003 posts and 29 votes.
[X] Ask the guards to take you to the gardens onboard the palace. It will be peaceful, pleasant, quiet and still. Maybe you'll meet and introduce yourself to the other souls frequenting it in this pre-Dawn hour. If there are any.
[X] Ask the guards to take you to the observation deck. Where priests to the warlike dead and mercenary necromancers rub shoulders. Nerius mentioned it as a place relevant to your interests. Albeit nearly deserted now.
[X] Ask the guards to take you to the training gym. Where the living members of the Wolf-King's elite legions and his personal guards drill. Stretch your legs, clear your head. It will probably be mostly empty at this hour.
Yoooo, apologies for the long-ass delay. I really like this, it's a classic tell-tale heart kinda ghost story but executed imaginatively and engagingly within the setting. It's good work! Especially since you're just getting into this kinda thing. Take 50xp.
His name is Damianos Afion Peritaxikhon. Aspect of the Element Water. Lord of Gens Afia. He is of the City, one of its great regents. He is of the City and is forever above those scarred, whipped masses that birthed him.
"Ahh," he says and you see the greed, the fear, the fascination, the raw curiosity and the bending, gradually-buckling restraint. But you see the comprehension in his eyes too, that precious, treasured moment where it clicks and he sees you and he can size you up like a piece of bloody meat all he wants. You'll take the Wolf-King's appetite if it means you can have his proper fucking appreciation. He gently lifts an articulated blade with a claw, turning it this way and that, gingerly folding his finger back and watching as it retracts, "and what things might you make with these hands?"
Wow okay you two, this is still a first date. Keep those in your pants. Not that either of you are wearing pants you sluts.
Anyways.
[X] Ask the guards to take you to the observation deck. Where priests to the warlike dead and mercenary necromancers rub shoulders. Nerius mentioned it as a place relevant to your interests. Albeit nearly deserted now.
So, the way I see it. We have:
1: Spend time with our Pokemon, maybe get a pompous visitor.
2: Meet the really nice flower guy, who probably feeds people to his plants alive.
3: Muscle. That is all.
4: Meet the awkward/creepy necromancer, who just finds Harrower sooo interesting.
....I mean I could be wrong, this might not be a meet-cute event, but like why not?
[X] Ask the guards to take you to the observation deck. Where priests to the warlike dead and mercenary necromancers rub shoulders. Nerius mentioned it as a place relevant to your interests. Albeit nearly deserted now.
[X] Ask the guards to take you to the gardens onboard the palace. It will be peaceful, pleasant, quiet and still. Maybe you'll meet and introduce yourself to the other souls frequenting it in this pre-Dawn hour. If there are any.
We aren't done having nice things done for us yet, we will go and enjoy the fresh air and meet people!