Nerius's back is like a sculpted slab of black marble: hewn and smoothed by a mastercraftmen's hands, the product of a hundred practice sketches and long nights spent toiling by steady, even, jadelight. Salvaged Shogunate technology, the minor miracles of the Age of Bronze the priceless treasures of this Age of Iron but no expense spared for this workshop oh no. His fur is thicker around his throat, the back of his neck, the tops of his shoulders. A heavy layer that thins as it descends his chest, mirrored on the line of his spine. The pelt on his back is short enough that you can see the muscle below. The broad, hard planes of the larger arrangements. The smaller groups, each one like ground river rock. A voice in your head whispering each name, each function, secondhand knowledge assimilated so readily, so easily, it's as if it had always been yours. See how they all interlace, interweave and frame the bone. See how the sleek, gradient lines lead the eye down to the waist. To a tail wider than your hand, longer than your foreleg, an artist's flourish. To the curved haunches beneath, draped and framed in royal blue. Just enough to make some token pretension towards modesty but you can't imagine he's particularly humble. He has no reason to be. And everything -everything- is lit from within and without by that anima glow. By those argent tattoos; all mercury and molten moonlight, deepening definitions, illustrating and illuminating.
The Wolf-King: if his body was only a thing people would call it almost obscene. A demonstration of such peerless technical skill, such talent, such genius that it would put the next three generations to shame. If his body was only a thing it'd sit in some Archon's manse: an object of envy for every guest, tended monthly by a thaumaturge and a cadre of house-slaves with soft gloves and gauzy masks and hammering hearts. If his body was only a thing you'd feel an odd stab of jealousy seeing it, of unhappiness and a strange kind of self pity. Some part of you bitterly regretting that something so wonderful could only exist captured in stone. That it could never be real, never be warm, never be the kind of thing to sweep you up in its arms and hold you close with all its strength.
If it was only a thing.
But he's real. He's flesh and blood and all of ten feet away. If you crossed the space between you you could touch him, run your hand along his backbone, watch as your fingers sunk into that fur and feel the power just beneath the surface. And you won't, of course. Because he's the Wolf-King and he's addressing his people and you can't even focus too much on the words or the crowd without feeling this queasy tug of nausea in your guts. This vertigo like the whole world's been tilted on an angle. Like everything beyond the shrine steps has been smeared with so much cooking oil, ten thousand faces swimming in a sea of grease. Their eyes too big, their mouths too wide, their hands too thick and fingers too fat. Reaching up to you. A single rancid moment that won't end, no matter what you do.
So you settle for staring at his ass from the shadow of your cowl and do your best to block out the rest of the world until the talking stops.
The Sun creeps in anyway. Sol Invictus, your dear old distant dad, come to wish you a good morning.
You can feel his rays like they're a tangible thing, like they have a weight, a pressure, a
taste. The heat of it all seeping through your coat, carrying with it this scent, this stench, this sensation like the rich, savory fumes of grilling meat, like pyres heaped high with bodies. Flesh roasting red, lipids running to liquid as fatty tissue drips down, splattering and sizzling on the logs. And you, you're bathing in that smoke. Feeling the oils in your skin congealing on the surface, like there's a glistening, shimmering layer clogging every pore and matting your hair. Feeling the coarse rasp of that Heavenly light as it rakes over you, a piece of sharkskin patiently flaying away exposed flesh, layer by layer. You are unclean. You are filthy in your father's sight. And now, now you truly appreciate the functionality behind the tarps and elaborate trappings that decorate this city, this shadowland. Dense thickets of shade and gloom, some gentle mercies for the other-than-only-human, so that they can enjoy this festival too.
Cool winds begin to blow, drying the sweat on your body. The golden glow dims and fades. In the background, Nerius's voice rises to a roar. A triumphant snarl, a near howl, the sound echoed and multiplied by the shouts and cheers of the crowd. Above your head fluffy, billowing clouds dyed with drops of orange juice and half-washed out splatters of blood churn. Some colossal celestial well, a pool of flame flickering, leaping at the bottom.
It's a mercy to watch it gutter and dim.
The breeze is a little stronger now, the long tails of your coat catching in the flow, your raised hood twitching as the chill caresses you. A few feet away a raindrop strikes stone. Nerius's speech is concluding. You catch little pieces and fragments, not even half paying attention as you study him. "And so we begin, this, our true campaign! This Winter to come, these long nights of frost and fang-", "-children of silver and shadow, of the once-lost and now-found, the scattered and broken made anew!", "Seven walls stand against us!"
there are seven wings.
"And every! Wall! Shall!
Fall!"
There's an itch between your shoulderblades, like a set of ant-bites flanking the vertebrae. It's gone by the time you raise your hand to scratch.
Nerius holds out his arms as if he's embracing the people below, all the city, all his subjects and they welcome it with an almost frightening intensity. The timbers of the shrine shivering, the living branches all but swaying, and you can almost imagine that the slow-forming puddle at your feet trembles from the sheer force of it. From the pressure of the sound, the sound, the
sound. It's like a shuddering, heaving ocean of noise. Crashing over you with an irresistible will, currents coiling around your waist, your ribs, your limbs. Pulling you in deep, pulling you farther out to sea even as you try to dig your heels in, even as you try to anchor yourself in the fast-dissolving sand.
And Nerius descends into it willingly, gladly, at the head of a stately procession of sapphire and sable and silver. His Praetorians gliding past you, falling in double-file behind him. Nude or something near it, stripped to a band of dark blue around the waist, from mid-thigh to sharp hipbone. Stripped to hammered argent bands around their calves, their upper legs, their forearms and biceps, their throats. Stripped to skin that's so dark it seems almost wet, glossy, as if they crawled dripping from a pool of ink, a pit of bubbling pitch. Cloaks the color of white-hot ash, of minted coin and Luna's throne, swirling in the wind; half-concealing the long sword hilts that hang from their hips. Their faces are blank, inhuman; volcanic glass, black mirrors, cut into sleek, austere angles. The nails driven through the material as if it was wood, each head shining like a star, framing the flawless visors in an inverted heptagram. Renartus trails along at his left, every inch a dutiful vizier, their hands clasped lightly behind their back, fox-ears up and attentive. The Dead-
The Dead at his right pauses for a moment, a half-step out of time. Looking over one hulking shoulder, glancing back at you with hollow eyesockets filled with orange and red and yellow flame. The skin beneath his armor is stripped away, striated tissue all on display. Red material winding, twining around spurs of bone, heavy slabs of ivory white. The raised ridges of a naked spine visible at the back of his neck. Every tooth -too many and too sharp for cattle- gleaming in his jaws. He catches your eye, you think. And you squirm a little, ever so slightly, under the attention, dropping your gaze. He looks away a moment later. Following his king as a landing down the robed ranks of the Magicians part. As the Legates in all their regalia join the column and the musicians strike up their instruments. Everywhere, the fire. Everywhere the flickering light in the hazy grey. What do you see down there, in that forest of hands, of reaching arms and flashing teeth? What do you see down there, wreathed in all the colors of Fall? Between the patterns of the mosaic, still swimming in and out of focus.
Something living? Something breathing?
Maybe it only makes sense that you're so ill at ease, you were a ghost even before you died. What do food carts and festival games and lovingly made costumes and lovingly worshipped kings mean to you? Shade that you are.
And yet it's as you're turning away, a part of the small, tattered crowd left behind, the lictors and the civil servants and the few Legates who have no interest in meeting, mingling with the crowd, that you see him. A figure in soft azure robes, folds of blue layered atop black; worn open over a segmented chestpiece, the metal enameled with cerulean shades. Silver tokens hang from his sleeves, his mantle, his cowl, each one shining like a small star against the darkness. His long, all-obscuring cloak stitched with steel grey threads, bordered by thorns and fangs. Painting a picture of a forest at night. Stylized animals, nightmares and chimera, dancing beneath a polished silver plate.
For a moment you consider turning away as you did before. For a moment you think of ignoring the unspoken question and continuing along one of the soldier-guarded side-paths on your own; down slender staircases that descend the pyramid's flanks to the shadowed arcades and flooded streets and covered concrete causeways of Xauma proper. Headed back to the palace along with the small river of other figures where a quiet, dark room is waiting just for you. But maybe it's curiosity. Maybe it's a kind of petulance, a sort of self-directed frustration. Maybe all it is a passing whim or the way something almost hopeful seems to radiate from under that cowl.
It doesn't really matter. Whatever it is it's enough to make you stop, make you half-turn, and hesitate, your own hood tugging back over your bone white hair. You grimace, you consider pretending it was for something unrelated but- no you already stopped so really, you might as well see it through now. So you beckon. And a second later that figure is noiselessly flowing up the steps, and matching his strides to your shorter legs. The mysterious Magi, eager and haughty and excited and aloof in equal measure. And you…
And you. In all your glory. Already regretting it, but committed to the course. So together you walk then, two strangers in silence, side by side.
"So you're one of the Wolf-King's mercenaries then?"
Expensive cloth and glimmering metal hits the bulkhead in a messy heap. The man who was until a few seconds ago so carefully bedecked in the whole, complex ensemble falls backwards onto his cot, bare chested and groaning in relief as the soft pillows and mussed up blankets cradle him. A kind of nest made out of lovely, plush things. Occupying a corner of the cluttered room, the magpie's hoard he's build up here. He hugs a cushion to his chest immediately, rolling back and forth as he all but squeezes the stuffing out of it. You stand by the door, pale lavender hands curled in the pockets of your coat. Just sort of...studying him.
"You could say that!" He says cheerfully, "I mean you should because it's- I am. Judecca and company, aaaaaaat your service! Nerius told me I should try to talk to you when I get a chance, Thought we'd have enough in common that the conversation wouldn't just meander across the tundra and die of exposure. Just
blegh facedown in the permafrost like an octagenerian Icewalker."
"Oh?'" You ask quietly, more bemused than really offput by his chattiness, by the man's sheer
energy, "Is Nerius paying people to be my friend now?"
"Well you're pretty socially stunted right? It's not the worst thing anyone's ever done in the name of cozying up to a desolation-on-two-legs kind of deal, even sort of considerate!"
"Hm," you reply. It's difficult to disagree.
"But nah, he's not paying me for this in particular. Mostly I just rob graves. Plunder tombs. Raid ruins. That sort of thing."
That sort of thing.
You squint at the man on the bed. He blinks back guilelessly. He's paper-pale, skin the color of fresh fallen snow, of deep drifts and undisturbed banks, a body blanched bloodless. His hair feathery and blue-tinged, like frost fractals sculpted by the wind in the night, doomed to melt by morning. Limbs dyed a gentle blue that bleeds to dead black, somewhere between carved ice and and corpseflesh. He's barely even taller than you really and slender, almost slight, almost
skinny. It's only the suggestion of sleek angles, of whipcord brawn drawn long and hammered toned that saves him from looking outright emaciated.
And he's your age you think, maybe a year younger, a year older at most. One of Nerius's -apparently- most trusted agents and he couldn't even be on the far side of thirty.
"...You earned a room like this through grave robbing?"
"They were some very. Big. Graves."
His quarters are in one of the front compartments of the war-walker. An observation deck, nestled in the depths of the machine's chest; just by a foreleg. A bank of sloping windows looking down on the city below, on the dark forest and distant rivers. Most of the space within is given over to something that's one part library, one part treasury, one part arsenal. Books bound in steely scale and midnight leather and thin-veined vellum. A half-open safe in the corner stacked with Sijanese scrip and bars of minted jade; a thing halfway between a tuning fork and a crystalline key laying on a top shelf, pulsing with a sunset orange light, shedding coils of coal black smoke and threaded with a leather thong. In the corner: a Xauman wolfskin on a stand, the dense pelt turning somehow insubstantial, unreal at the edges, like the black iron and raw greys of the the fur are turning to mist and fog and stormclouds. Some ancient battle dress -"Shogunate riot control armor! It's from the Winter Turtle Northern Directorate"- hung on another stand. A chestpiece, almost sectioned in the style of Xauma's legionnaires, paired with a long, heavy coat. A round helmet cleverly joined to mask that's a little like a muzzle, a little like something saurian. Round bulges -
air filters- set in the side. Azure eye-pieces gleaming, the whole thing gilded with glacial frost.
And weapons of course. Weapons everywhere. On racks and in cases and devouring every last shred of room that isn't given over to the standing space around the desk and bed or other, precious things. A man used to living out of his pack, suddenly given long term commitments and too much square footage with no idea what to do with either. You empathize, you think.
There is a light on Judecca's belt. A glow that coalesces, clots crimson and citrus shades, centered around a stone that looks like a massive drop of gory, bloody red amber. Matched a moment later by the tar-colored miasma that pours out of a smooth, egg-sized sphere of...you're not sure, actually. Some polished rock, its colors equal parts loamy earth, shot through and riddled with loamy filth. A three legged raven the size of an eagle settles on the back of his chair, gripping metal with razored talons. A suncrow, an honest to Gods suncrow, the ambient heat in the room rising by tangible degrees even a few feet away from its wings, its plumage all dying daylight and dusk's last embers. A black furred, sabertoothed thing with an anvil-like head emerges next. Shaking out its hind legs one by one, looking like someone crossed a tiger with a dog with some monstrous snake. It pads across the room with delicate grace and climbs up onto the cot, all but burying Judecca beneath its bulk and acting for all the world like it belongs there even as bolted in struts creak alarmingly.
The other three stones on the belt are dark and silent. But the pendant on your chest burns and a second later your small dragon bat is settling on your shoulder. Hooked wings digging into your coat, squeaking, chirping softly. Ruff of fur bristling a little (just a little) as the suncrow regards it imperiously.
"There's not really enough room here for the others to come out without breaking everything," he explains, voice apologetic and somewhat muffled by the behemoth currently pinning him down. Arms visible on either side of the Elemental's torso as he scratch-scratch-scratches the beast's back, digging fingers between heavy scutes and thick tufts of fur. "Oh! What's that little guy's name?"
You don't know so you ignore the question. Electing instead to study the wolfskin up close, running your fingers over the cloak. Feeling the almost solid material resist the motion ever so gently. Like smoke with more mass.
"Ah," you say after a moment, "I was wondering why a place that reveres wolves would skin them by the thousands for their army. This is a- what? Some underworld creature?"
"Mhm!" He replies, wheezing as the monster approximately the size of a wagon cart shifts its weight. Planting a dinner-plate big paw on his chest as it rolls over. "Do you know the story behind them?"
You shake your head.
"It was at the tail end of the Contagion, the Scarlet Empress had just used the Realm Defense Grid and your boy wasn't even cold in his grave. It's important to understand, the world didn't collapse all at once. There were cities that were empty and cities that were bombed out sure, but parts of the Shogunate were still limping on. And the weapons and war striders, those didn't just vanish either even if the parts to fix them weren't being made anymore and the people who designed and developed them were all dead." His voice is light, his words are bright, as grim as it all is. He could be excitedly talking about a pretty girl, a handsome boy, a trip he took to some foreign land once upon a time. Not death. Not destruction. Not the all-consuming devastation, the apocalypse that murdered the Age of Bronze. "Deheleshen was the main lynchpin of the Spring Dragon Eastern Directorate and all the Special Administrative Zones and Semi-Autonomous Provinces that surrounded it. So it had all kinds of awful shit in its arsenals. This one? This palace? It was called an
Abattoir-class. One of the largest autonomous walkers the Shogunate ever fielded outside the Walking Devil Tower and one-off freaks and Deheleshen had
five. Two were- shit, two were lost when the shadowlands swallowed them up. One's half-drowned in the bayou around Anthem and the fourth was brought down by the raksha eventually, it's a Wyld reef about fifty miles outside of Nexus now. So they just had this one, overtaxed and half-repaired and barely operational. And they still used it, can you imagine that? They called Xauma's defiance rebellion and
used it but...it was all just self-serving shit. Xauma had people, Xauma had an army, Xauma had some shreds of the central government left and Deheleshen used it to ensure that even ten generations on the children of Xauma would never be a threat to the City. They say all the wolves in the exarchate's shadowland are like blast shadows, one for every person killed before the palace finally blew out its reactor and shut down."
You are quiet for a time, your head tilted, watching him and his Elemental with your mismatched eyes as he cheerfully scratches it -her, he keeps calling it a "good girl~"- behind the ear. Thinking it over.
"Would you like some tea?" He asks abruptly, doing his best to sit up, smiling a wide, utterly shameless smile as the monster chuffs beside him.
You decide that you would. He keeps talking, and doesn't even seem to mind that you barely say anything. You like that about him.
They're constructing a laboratory for you, half-carving it out of the raw earth and ruined city, half dragging it up, from deep underground. Nerius has promised you it will be something truly spectacular. He has promised you it will be something truly special. He has promised you he's seeing to it himself. You wonder if he notices you've scarcely left your room since Calibration. That night the servants respectfully, almost reverently, bring you a few plates of food. Sticky cakes and stuffed venison and sweet salads and a half a dozen other wonderful things. In the morning Nerius gives you your first body, a man beneath a fine cloth, cold and still on the table. A Lookshyan, carefully preserved.
You take him apart. You destring the muscle and separate out the organs and lay all the bones on the floor. You hold his brain in your bare hands, fingers ghosting over every fold of the pink-grey meat. Everything that once held a pleasant, precious memory, cradled in your grasp.
You can name each and every part of him.
You can almost see how to put him back together, how to build him
better. But insight eludes you. And- no.
No.
It's more than that isn't it? You're sitting at a desk, pen poised over a sheet of paper, a drop of ink falling from the sharpened tip. Splattering, staining the page. The only mark you've made in an hour. You're reaching for something you know should be there, and it slips through your gory fingers. You're reaching for something you know you can do and your brain shies away, finding things to distract yourself, finding reason to curl up in the dark and sleep if nothing present itself.
You have all the tools you need. You have all the time you want. Everything is as it should be, except for the fallible, feckless, organic element. Except for you. Sitting at a desk and staring at a vast expanse of empty nothing. Imagining your thoughts as ancient Icewalkers, straggling this way and that across the paper until one by one they slow and cease to move at all.
Three days pass thus. The laboratory is already nearly halfway completed, at least the initial working area. Nerius has poured time and treasure into its design. Countless man-hours, funds from his warchest. All of it for your sake. They really think you can help them don't they? They really think that you can save them, that you can help make the victory the Wolf-King spoke of a reality.
"I am struggling," you tell him at last, the two of you alone in a rainsoaked garden, watching the sunset. You sitting in the darkest part of the once-aerial dock.
"Of course you are," he replies with a slight smile, "You know all the reasons why you should fight, intellectually, practically. But you don't know why you want to yet. You don't know why you don't just-"
"Leave," you say softly, shoulders drawn in. Hunched upon yourself, water dripping from your hair. "I could go anywhere in the world. I could do anything I wanted. I promised Steel-and-Ember Elegia that I would kill the City. You pulled me from that battlefield, you have been kind to me, and you share the same goals. Everything is as it should be except for me. And in my mind I turn it over again and again like a coin, pick at it like a scab: why don't I leave? Why don't I just...leave?"
"Harrower, you needn't fear failing me," He says, his voice a quiet rumble, a soft snarl, "You needn't fear failing anyone, except yourself. What is it you want right now, more than anything?"
"Clarity," you murmur.
The Wolf-King smiles, black lips drawn back over long fangs, tongue all but lolling, "
Then go and find it deathknight."
And he knows doesn't he? He knew from the start.
Hah. That bastard.
It is the 5th of Ascending Air, Realm Year 767. It is sleeting in the Lookshyan camp, the evening cold and wet and miserable. Flecks of white falling, far out over the Yanaze. The trading post and its small harbor once just a junction, a way-change in the massive network of canals and roads and currents that feeds the City. Now bloated twice, thrice over with soldiers. The piers thick with ships. It's the forwardmost position of Lookshy's forces, the rally point of the riverine navy. You walk down the razor-straight, meticulously planned streets of the makeshift fort, one shadow among many. One faceless soldier among many, off on some minor errand in a uniform a size or two too large for him. But if anyone notices, no one says a thing.
And if anyone sees the blood dappling the collar of your stolen clothes, no one raises an alarm. And so in the dark you wander.
There are Chosen of the Dragons here. Princes of the Earth. They cannot smell you out for what you are, not yet. Not with so many bodies obscuring you with their warmth, their breath, their motion. Not with your true face shrouded by more intact flesh, a more wholesome lie. You can just...pick one at a whim, follow them as you like. Study them. Your enemy. Your inspiration.
[ ] A woman in light armor, a Listener. Her hair long and blue-green, reminding you somehow of seaweed, washed up on the banks of the Rivers. Scales the color of summer seas flecking her tanned skin, her right arm clad in a shoulder-length glove and her left bare. Both folded across her chest as she frowns at a small pack of young couriers.
[ ] A woman in long robes, a Sorcerer. The air around her reeking of ozone and beneath it something alien, something strange. She bustles around the inside of a commandeered customs office. Talking at excited speed to an ever-rotating carousel of exhausted soldiers. Pinning up pieces of parchment, unpacking trunks of books.
[ ] A woman soberly dressed, dark hair drawn back over her shoulders, her posture rigid but her stony-scaled hands at her side. She is short, lean, and it is only her soldier's bearing that gives her away as anything other than some rear-line logistics officer. She stands opposite a trio of helots, issuing them...orders? You...would assume so.
[ ] A general in full regalia, their hair clipped short and their towering, imposing body clad all in deep crimson jadesteel. A weapon on their back that's less a sword and more a slab, scarlet edged in gold. They pace back and forth before a massive table, the air around them shimmering with heat distortion. Addressing a loose cadre of officers.
[ ] A man drinking wine, at all apparent ease in the magistrate's home. His clothing loose, a shoulder bared despite the chill, the garb too rich for the battlefield. Living vines and flowering branches weave a crown in his long hair, a faint pink flush to his cheeks. A sheaf of papers sits in his lap as he lounges, largely (deliberately) ignored.
