Exalted: Out Of The Eater

[Indivisible]

[x] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[1337Procrast]

[x] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

God I love every single bit of Harrower's dialogue so much.

"You can't actually kill me you know." You say, softly, almost conversationally as General Navona bodily picks you up and simply plunges through reinforced walls, one shovel-sized hand closed around your throat. Reinforced timber shattering over your spine. "I hate you too much to die again."

Click to shrink...

Especially this line.

 

[Broken25]

[x] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[SolipsistSerpent]

You know, I was actually surprised to hear the Mask of Winters still held Thorn here, considering the Death Lords are radically AU in this setting (and for the better). But then, what the Mask of Winter looks like in this timeline, I cannot say.

 

[Strypgia]

[X] You are, you think. It's how you imagine gorging yourself til you bloat must feel (not that you'd know). But the sickening ache of overindulgence, drowning your brain in pleasure 'til everything's heady, hazy. You're rapidly becoming familiar.

Oh, we have got to go with 'self-loathing' here. It's practically our brand.

 

[TheOneMoiderah]

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

it back :O

 

[WanderingEye]

Beautiful update as always, welcome back Tenfoldshields

[x] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[SolipsistSerpent]

By the way, since everyone's voting for Elegia, here's his write-up from the general Exalted thread, if anyone wants a refresher:

General Exalted Thread

Are there any examples of monsters or Behemoths that the gods send out to fuck over people as punishment for various transgressions? On a semi-related note, how good or terrible is the Disease of an Evil Conscience adventure considered?

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

It took a little while to hunt down because I started out looking for it in this thread.

 

[Camellia]

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[GGreader]

[X] You are, you think. It's how you imagine gorging yourself til you bloat must feel (not that you'd know). But the sickening ache of overindulgence, drowning your brain in pleasure 'til everything's heady, hazy. You're rapidly becoming familiar.

 

[thewatcher]

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[ZerbanDaGreat]

This is the mind of a helot: thoughts limp slowly through wastelands of memory and yearning, lost in a sea of choking grey dust and hissing sand. Leaving bloody footprints behind in the endless, trackless, nothing; the sole signs of passage, proof of existence, swiftly blurred into shapeless clots, erased seconds later. They fall after a point to their knees, hands pressed against the drought-parched earth, feeling the rasp of grit against flesh torn to ragged white shreds. They fall again to their faces and lay still. Every dream dies this way: choking, struggling for breath, divorced from its origin, unable to recall where it was headed or why only that someone once wanted something so very badly. It is...more than mere denial, more than a loss of opportunity, more than a refutation or a barred door to some chamber of higher learning. It is deprivation. That juncture between starvation and thirst, the point where it feels like the navel kisses the spine and nerves are worn bloody and raw. Too tired to stand. Too tired to think. Too tired to remember (and even if you could, what would be the point, the dead are numberless; you could never remember them all). "The mind of a helot is weak" they say, the learned citizens and the wise archons and the Encrypted, their noble, cruel, hunting hawks. "Look at how little it retains. Look at how little it comprehends."

As if they hadn't broken your ribs till they swung open like hinges and filled the spaces within with dust. As if they hadn't peeled back the scalp and cracked open the skull, packing your brain in dust. As if they hadn't pushed their fingers between your jaws and pulled your mouth wide, pouring a river of dust down your throat until it drowned your souls. How is one supposed to feel about that? How is one supposed to feel about such violation, such wretched hypocrisy? "Rage" is too small a word, too quaint. "Sorrow" is all painted melodrama. "Hate" cannot even begin to describe those black depths in your chest (and oh they are so lovely, so dark, so deep). You never had a choice. Never had a chance. From your mother's hands to the fires of your funeral pyre you never could have been anything but what you were made to be. And you understand that fully, completely, with a perspective you never could have known before your death.

They made such a ruin of you, didn't they? A few pieces of shattered pottery from something that maybe-was, a few words on a long-eroded wall in a language nobody speaks. Torn and tattered lips mouthing little fragments of things that were once so important. Your mother's face. Your siblings and kin. The pretty boy with the handsome plumage who died once upon a time- his name, his name, what was- what was his name?

This is the thing about this world of the living, this is the nature of its wisdom and light: it reveals with a clarity that breaks the heart. It demands and that demand is imperial, arrogant and tyrannical; it will not be defied. "This is the whole of things" it says. "Everything that you see is. Everything that you do not, is not. So say I."

But the wisdom of death, those few things you have seen...it doesn't demand does it? No, oh no. It tempts. It promises. It spreads its arms wide and takes you into itself and whispers in your ear: "come then, let us think of things as they could be". When you drew your Second Breath it was like a gentle rain falling across the sum of your self. Dust into mud; titanic, desolate basins slowly filled drop by drop, becoming black oceans. A primordial wild. An abyss so impossibly ancient and vast; full of potential, full of possibility. Waiting so eagerly to see what you would do, you would make, what new horizons you would explore. It and you together, embraced forever.

Click to shrink...

Tenfold be like "hm what should I do for my next update, I know, five-paragraph guitarsolo". Seriously this is another homerun right out of the gate to launch us right back into the environment and mindset and upbringing that made Harrower what he is and why he absolutely deserves to default dance on all these draognbloods.

Your skin is shadow and ivory scale, organic segments as cleverly crafted as any plate draped over a slender form. Cloth made from flame in every shade of a dying sun billows from your hips in an open skirt and graceful horns curve into a shattered halo. Splendid plumage spills down your back, your spine, down the line of a saurian tail. Closed eyes, lidded in living armor sit in your forearms, your shoulders, your shins, your thighs, the very center of your chest. Your face is a blank milk-white mask, the suggestion of something saurian, something skeletal in the shape of the ivory and the shadows cast by the fires. It has been etched with iron and gold in elaborate wire-designs. Stylized monstrosity, a dragon's death mask, pressed on the blind, mute planes of your helm. In the dying light of the burning town is the impression of four thousand reaching hands. Against the backdrop of cold, coal-black clouds the impression of a more visceral, celestial anatomy is slowly resolving, becoming more real.

Listen: this is your Anima Banner and it is a carving knife working through the cosmos. Stripping away the veil of sky, of skin, to show the system below. Baring those beating, wetly organic stars and the shadows between that seem so like serrated teeth. The rainbow of pulsing nebulae, slit and split til their ichor drips down upon you in iridescent shades. Thickets of bone transfixing a realm of red, red meat and the silhouette of feathered wings.

You are a holy monster flayed into carrion, a messenger made into a message.

A promise of peace on Earth and goodwill toward all mankind.

Click to shrink...

Comfy Chair Urizen crossed with Urizen Forma Perfeccion, all wrapped up with that Tenfold fair - big approve. This is exactly why I voted for The Aesthetic.

"Listener," you say "Welcome". She doesn't flinch but there's something that shifts in her posture, a subtle leaning back. You wonder if it's your voice, if it's so contrary to your regalia, to her expectation. The armor does nothing to modulate it, it is as it has always been: not especially deep, not particularly loud by nature, a little soft perhaps. Slightly high but recently flat in aspect, as if you've had all the energy drained from you, a tap driven into your spine like your chest was a cask of wine and all the light drained away.

"Anathema," she replies, her words even. Considered. "May I hear your name, before your death?"

A twang of a bowstring, a hand snaps out and a titanic bolt transfixes your palm. Punching through the armor, piercing the meat and spearing out the other side. You flex your claws, it shatters like the others. The wreckage pushed out by the inexorable motion of the cut closing, sapphire and scarlet worming through the wound as your Banner shrouds you. A snake flickers a tongue at Damianos. You'll deal with him, deal with both of them in a moment. But for now you find yourself enjoying the...ritual of the exchange, the address. The acknowledgement.

"I am titled Harrower of the Celestial Skein," you say, "And I have already died. Who then are you, Listener, who has come to lay me to rest?"

"Listener Ekhidna‌ ‌Tomaria‌ ‌Paradoxica‌," she says as she splays her fingers and you can hear, even from here, the crunch-crunch-crunch of her working her knuckles. Slowly twisting her neck. Beneath your death mask eyes narrow, you watch as water pulls itself into slender strands around her, something weaving itself out of the air, anchored around her spine. "One last question then, before the reckoning. Why has the Mask of Winters, Master of Thorns, sent you among us now?"

"The Mask-," oh. Oh this is new. This is new and this- you like this. The asymmetry of knowledge. The implicit assumption of power. You let your head tip to the side as you spread your hands. Ekhidna can't see your smile beneath the ivory and gold and iron but you imagine that something of it seeps through your posture, something of it stains the air around you. "I do not serve the Mask of Winters, I know nothing of him and he knows nothing of me," you say with a mouthful of sharklike teeth, a carnivorous grin, "I serve Steel-and-Ember Elegia. The last king of Deheleshen. He brought me back, you see. To bring pain and punishment upon you, the children of traitors and coup-plotters and assassins. His was the first body laid at Lookshy's foundation. And now I will hang your corpses from the seven walls by the thousands."

Click to shrink...

It is genuinely impressive how quickly Harrower has gone from zero to JRPG endboss. I mean this is his second ever fight as an Exalt and he is sparing no time getting to the good part. Just give him a seven-foot-long katana and a blonde twunk to be villainously gay at and he'll accelarate to the absolute apex in no time.

The moments come in cascades. Halting in brief instances of clarity before hurtling ahead.

One.

"You can't actually kill me you know." You say, softly, almost conversationally as General Navona bodily picks you up and simply plunges through reinforced walls, one shovel-sized hand closed around your throat. Reinforced timber shattering over your spine. "I hate you too much to die again."

They spin, pivot, hurl you. Liquid ribbons spear through your limbs, through the hairline gaps in your armor, pinning you to the wall like an insect. Arrows aglow with azure power destroy the half-filled storehouse as Damianos bombards you. It doesn't matter, the contamination, the corruption is already creeping along Listener Ekhidna's tentacles as you flood the world with necrotic Essence. Sacrificing reserve power to restore yourself, knit your monstrous physiology together and make yourself whole. She sheds the limbs with a hiss and skips out beyond the border of the poisoned sphere. Traps and snares of strangling vine and clouds of perfumed, intoxicating violet bloom underfoot, covering her retreat; Opiter you suspect, intervening as he's able. They lash themselves to your feet, your forearms, wind around your wrists with armor creaking strength only to rot and wither a second later. He cannot hold you. They cannot hold you.

Another.

"It's concerning, isn't it?" You ask, broadly indifferent in your curiosity as the grease-smear shimmering heatwaves from General Navona and the fanged mouth in the priestess's palm, that desiccating, sorcerous organ strip blood from the air, power from death, turning essential streams of energy to clotted dust. "You're veterans of- how many decades? I died during Calibration. I shouldn't be able to stand against you. I should have fallen by now. Something is wrong, don't you agree?"

The Fire Aspect's daiklave comes in a cleaving, overhead blow. Fit to split you from helm to groin, past even your ability to heal. A muted start, a flinch away as spear long spikes of sharpened bone explode from your body in every direction. A slick, still-steaming starburst that nearly impales them through the stomach, that does spear them through the meat of a bicep, that embeds itself in the plates of their armor. Your regalia re-seals itself as the organic polearms shatter, one white-clawed foot sweeping through the staves, breaking them like fine china. Talons curl in the collar of their breastplate. You burn Essence as you haul yourself up on thigh muscle alone and kick them in the jaw hard enough that their hair rustles in the shockwave. They grab you with a wounded arm, teeth gritted with agony and you drink deep of their blood as they drive you into the ground.

A third.

"I think I can do this forever," you say, confident and confiding in equal measure, almost at ease as the air above the town blossoms with explosions. A rolling thunder as booming detonations overlap, spilling over each other. Beams of bloody light intercepting ship-destroying arrows, diverted and scattered in turn by the selfsame missiles in vast plumes of hydraulic force. The snow and sleet have long since turned to rain, falling upon the semi-extinguished ruins in an artificial storm. Damianos swears in the twilight, both of you half-flashblind but you wear the handicap better. And you know he can hear you. The slaves and soldiers alike have fled, desperation to escape the cacophony a universal sensation. Listener and General on a pair of wide flanking paths, forcing you to use your false flash-step, blurring through the landscape in stutter-stop motion. "And I know you can't, kin of mine. The ending is inevitable, you should save us all time and blood and just let me kill-"

Thalia stabs you through the shoulder with a lance of white jade. The motion is so utilitarian and unromantic that for a second you don't even realize what's happened. You just blink beneath your death mask, muscles in your throat locking semi-rigid as you struggle to turn your head. Smelling, more than feeling, the sizzle of muscle and armored flesh as it begins to slough away into denatured, tar-thick strands. A cleansing white halo wreathing her, eating into the core of your being. You should be stepping out of range. You should be relocating. The other three will recover soon and this is-

This hurts. This hurts. She hurt you.

"There was a plan. You stupid child." She says, voice even, cool for all that it's still just the two of you, only you, here in what was once an alleyway. Ship sails are burning in the night, you can see them from the corner of your eye. Part of your brain sluggishly seizing on the detail, trying to remember if you did that. "There was a point to all this, if could you could even understand that. Do you have any idea how much you've jeopardized everything? Months of work, the trust of Archon Basilia, and then this moment. This...opportunity. This victory against the ravening wolves, the only truly moral target of the City. We would have won. And we would have purchased so, so much with that victory."

She smoothly withdraws the spear, and as if it was the only thing keeping you upright you slowly sink to a knee, hand pressed to the slope of your neck. Trying to reallocate what power you haven't carelessly expended, trying to halt the decay. It's not working like it should, it's happening too slowly and the Winglord is deliberately spinning her spear. Snapping it into her palm. Lining up the thrust with a keen, cold eye. And there's a drumming in your skull, a steady, even thudding in your head but it can't be from your heart. You don't think your heart really beats anymore. But still the noise, the noise, the noise.

Her words sound like hissing sand, the whisper of choking grey dust.

"All that effort wasted now," she says, as she steps back, "Because of you. Have you even considered what Lookshy will do to your kind? Once they learn what you were-"

What is it that pushes you through the pain? Rage is too small a word, and anguish is the word of poets. And hate? Hate can't encapsulate the feeling, not at all. The simple, overwhelming desire, the all encompassing need to hurt her back. You don't really know what happens next. It all comes in flickers. Fragments of sensation scraping past raw nerves, moments of focus in an unreal world.

The feeling of her throat in your hands, sandstone scales bruising, then breaking under the pressure as she tries to do what Navona did, and leverage you off with her righteous weapon.

The feeling of breaking wood as it flies past your knuckles, your arms, and glances off your helm. A no-longer-standing wall behind you, another one soon to join it as you tear speed from the darkness, from the deep, from the black ocean within you. As you push muscles to the point you think they're going to tear.

The feeling of her twisting, flipping in your grasp, bracing her feet to your breastplate and breaking the lock. Falling back into the earth, solid soil parting like water as she sinks. The paving stones exploding as you plunge a clawed hand in after her, close them around a greaved shin and pull her free. As you drag her up.

And up.

And up.

Blasts of Essence from your soles, your palm, ramshackle wings of induced force and manipulated power sending you higher and higher into a lunatic sky. Winglord Thalia struggling in your iron grip, lacerating your thigh with the spearhead in a burst of agony that whites out your senses for a moment. You just smack it away with your whip-like tail and pull her higher. Higher until the well within is almost empty. Until the town is rendered far, far below your feet in miniature. You glance down at the woman hanging by one leg, her spear braced against your chest now, the shaft splitting open like some strange tuning fork. You look down at her and think how dumb and mindless she is as flames build in that hollow haft.

You just open your hand and let gravity take her.

An inferno comes howling out of her lance, you can taste the resonance of the jade dust as it ignites, as she falls. It doesn't quite reach you.

You splay your fingers and let a single serpent coil around your forearm. A scarlet spark burning into being between its fangs. The lone crimson beam seems almost needle-thin as for a moment, a moment, you bridge Heaven and Earth through Winglord Thalia's belly. Lancing through her right flank.

And you hear her cry out, that impenetrable facade fracturing and watch as the Dragon-Blood is swallowed up by the darkness below.

Click to shrink...

Kinda just...



[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

Far be it from me to just go with the crowd, but in this case I think the crowd has the right of it. Not just because it feels like it has a more constructive reaction in store than say "oh right I'm being a self-indulgent supervillain and I overdid it a bit" but because there's the slightest chance that brings us closer to Harrower as Elegia's weird yet affectionate stepbrother who works the nightshift, consumes espresso by the litre and kins Emet-Selch.

 

[BadAtScreenNames]

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[slybrarian]

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[TenMoreMiles]

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[meianmaru]

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[ctulhuslp]

Idk, I am not quite feeling Harrower's first thought after refreshing fight with his ex-overlords being shame when thinking about his new bosses, so eh...
[X] The trio, you think. Your ostensible subordinates, even if they're assigned by Nerius. After you made such a good impression on at least two of them too, to be seen like this…so uncontrolled and manifestly unstable. Hardly leadership material.

 

[BungieONI]

I have read this.

And my brain left this fucking plain of existence I swear to god its like Word-LSD while listening to Combichrist.

I have no idea who to go for so uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Childe who is also Shin Godzilla?

Sure why not.

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[Nervaqus987]

This is the mind of a helot: thoughts limp slowly through wastelands of memory and yearning, lost in a sea of choking grey dust and hissing sand. Leaving bloody footprints behind in the endless, trackless, nothing; the sole signs of passage, proof of existence, swiftly blurred into shapeless clots, erased seconds later. They fall after a point to their knees, hands pressed against the drought-parched earth, feeling the rasp of grit against flesh torn to ragged white shreds. They fall again to their faces and lay still. Every dream dies this way: choking, struggling for breath, divorced from its origin, unable to recall where it was headed or why only that someone once wanted something so very badly. It is...more than mere denial, more than a loss of opportunity, more than a refutation or a barred door to some chamber of higher learning. It is deprivation. That juncture between starvation and thirst, the point where it feels like the navel kisses the spine and nerves are worn bloody and raw. Too tired to stand. Too tired to think. Too tired to remember (and even if you could, what would be the point, the dead are numberless; you could never remember them all). "The mind of a helot is weak" they say, the learned citizens and the wise archons and the Encrypted, their noble, cruel, hunting hawks. "Look at how little it retains. Look at how little it comprehends."

As if they hadn't broken your ribs till they swung open like hinges and filled the spaces within with dust. As if they hadn't peeled back the scalp and cracked open the skull, packing your brain in dust. As if they hadn't pushed their fingers between your jaws and pulled your mouth wide, pouring a river of dust down your throat until it drowned your souls. How is one supposed to feel about that? How is one supposed to feel about such violation, such wretched hypocrisy? "Rage" is too small a word, too quaint. "Sorrow" is all painted melodrama. "Hate" cannot even begin to describe those black depths in your chest (and oh they are so lovely, so dark, so deep). You never had a choice. Never had a chance. From your mother's hands to the fires of your funeral pyre you never could have been anything but what you were made to be. And you understand that fully, completely, with a perspective you never could have known before your death.

They made such a ruin of you, didn't they? A few pieces of shattered pottery from something that maybe-was, a few words on a long-eroded wall in a language nobody speaks. Torn and tattered lips mouthing little fragments of things that were once so important. Your mother's face. Your siblings and kin. The pretty boy with the handsome plumage who died once upon a time- his name, his name, what was- what was his name?

This is the thing about this world of the living, this is the nature of its wisdom and light: it reveals with a clarity that breaks the heart. It demands and that demand is imperial, arrogant and tyrannical; it will not be defied. "This is the whole of things" it says. "Everything that you see is. Everything that you do not, is not. So say I."

But the wisdom of death, those few things you have seen...it doesn't demand does it? No, oh no. It tempts. It promises. It spreads its arms wide and takes you into itself and whispers in your ear: "come then, let us think of things as they could be". When you drew your Second Breath it was like a gentle rain falling across the sum of your self. Dust into mud; titanic, desolate basins slowly filled drop by drop, becoming black oceans. A primordial wild. An abyss so impossibly ancient and vast; full of potential, full of possibility. Waiting so eagerly to see what you would do, you would make, what new horizons you would explore. It and you together, embraced forever.

You are fighting the City together, here, now. Its holy champions stand cast their defiance in your face, they will not fall to you. You are not done with them even so.

Click to shrink...

The more I see stuff like this; the more I want to see Harrower's perspective on Jiro.

Harrower: *four or five paragraphs of dismal mood setting*

*enter Jiro, crashing in from off stage and smashing what is likely days worth of Harrower's time in necrotech*

Harrower: *regarding Infernal himbo clad in a demon latex body suit with a cape of tentacles, a obviously demonic prosthetic arm, and a sword almost as large as his abandonment issues.*

Harrower: "And then there's this asshole."

 

[Vaalintine]

Just binged all of this, and damn is it all so very poetic. Only shame is that the updates come so slow. Personally I don't think there is very much to be ashamed of here, Harrower came out to try and find meaning and motivation because he was listless. There really hasn't been any room for going about dissapointing anyone so far, I think.

 

[Razios]

[x] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[MiracleGrow]

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

 

[Imrix]

It occurs to you that all you know is his story. It occurs to you that you don't know much of the man at all, that you don't understand the triumph and the fury and the hints of shame on his face as he looks at you, his hair blowing in the slow-building gale that whips through the camp. You wonder what, if anything, you said pierced his hide, stayed lodged in his side like a poisoned arrow, turning the blood toxic. You wonder if he feels grief, or if that guilt is for a past he can no longer change, or if all of it is for that moment of mortal hesitation and that he thought he was shed of such things. You don't know.

But maybe when you pull his heart from the ivory nest, the bed of meat and bone you'll ask it your questions. Maybe it will answer.

Click to shrink...

Yes, good, perfect attitude. They have their reasons, and their reasons aren't worth spit.

But hush, hush and hear the sound of a body being broken beneath it all. Hush and hear the sound of a form remade by the will of one. Hush and hear this secret, whispered then, at the beginning. Bounced back now through the angles of the aeons to buzz and hum in your ear.

Before the Unconquered Sun walked as a man he flew as a Dragon. His scales were golden plate, each one unbreakable. Down his back were feathers in every color of dawn and dusk, each one a marvel. His tongue was a golden flame and with it he spoke wonders into being. He had not four hands then but four thousand and in each palm he held one good thing, bestowed upon the earth and around each scaled wrist he had a golden shackle. And so bound he crawled across the heavens, lustrous chains wound link by link around an ever turning wheel, from horizon to horizon till at last he could rest, if only for a time, (and he would understand, you think, that feeling of lost thoughts and lost dreams and he would understand, you would like to think, the idea of living with a soul full of dust).

Click to shrink...

... I know exactly where this is going. It's utterly predictable from TenfoldShields of all people.

You are a holy monster flayed into carrion, a messenger made into a message.

A promise of peace on Earth and goodwill toward all mankind.

Click to shrink...

AND I AM HERE FOR IT! Yesss dragon form goodness.

A twang of a bowstring, a hand snaps out and a titanic bolt transfixes your palm. Punching through the armor, piercing the meat and spearing out the other side. You flex your claws, it shatters like the others. The wreckage pushed out by the inexorable motion of the cut closing, sapphire and scarlet worming through the wound as your Banner shrouds you. A snake flickers a tongue at Damianos. You'll deal with him, deal with both of them in a moment. But for now you find yourself enjoying the...ritual of the exchange, the address. The acknowledgement.

Click to shrink...

Ah... Hm. Is this the first time a Dragonblood has formally acknowledged Harrower? I think it might be. Yes, the circumstances are... fitting.

"There was a plan. You stupid child." She says, voice even, cool for all that it's still just the two of you, only you, here in what was once an alleyway. Ship sails are burning in the night, you can see them from the corner of your eye. Part of your brain sluggishly seizing on the detail, trying to remember if you did that. "There was a point to all this, if could you could even understand that. Do you have any idea how much you've jeopardized everything? Months of work, the trust of Archon Basilia, and then this moment. This...opportunity. This victory against the ravening wolves, the only truly moral target of the City. We would have won. And we would have purchased so, so much with that victory."

She smoothly withdraws the spear, and as if it was the only thing keeping you upright you slowly sink to a knee, hand pressed to the slope of your neck. Trying to reallocate what power you haven't carelessly expended, trying to halt the decay. It's not working like it should, it's happening too slowly and the Winglord is deliberately spinning her spear. Snapping it into her palm. Lining up the thrust with a keen, cold eye. And there's a drumming in your skull, a steady, even thudding in your head but it can't be from your heart. You don't think your heart really beats anymore. But still the noise, the noise, the noise.

Her words sound like hissing sand, the whisper of choking grey dust.

"All that effort wasted now," she says, as she steps back, "Because of you. Have you even considered what Lookshy will do to your kind? Once they learn what you were-"

Click to shrink...

Oh this... Mmm. I'm hardly the first to pick this passage out as worthy of comment, this is well-trodden ground, but oh the arrogance of her in this speech, as if anybody from Lookshy deserves to cast themselves as a saviour of the downtrodden, the sheer presumption in trying to make out that Lookshy's cruelties are the helot's fault for daring to rebuke them. Oh that burns. You deserve everything you got and more, lady.

[X] Elegia, you think. Your mostly-still-enigmatic Deathlord. At the start- at some point you were here bearing his flag. Fully intent on staking it on a mound of corpses. And then you simply...forgot about him completely.

Honestly, I just want them to have some more screentime.

 

[Tanor]

[X] You are, you think. It's how you imagine gorging yourself til you bloat must feel (not that you'd know). But the sickening ache of overindulgence, drowning your brain in pleasure 'til everything's heady, hazy. You're rapidly becoming familiar.

 

[TenfoldShields]

Death has a direction.

There is a current to it, motion and imparted force. It catches everything in its irresistible pull, drowning them within itself even as it carries them onward, deeper. Consider: a man caught in a flash-flood, holding onto you with a white-knuckled grip, eyes wide as the torrent rages around him- the waters black, curling and foaming around his waist. His grip slick and starting to give as the wreckage and ruins of his village drift past, stately and graceful. Consider: the visceral anatomy of a body entombed beneath your feet, slipping below the glass-sided waves never to be seen again. The abstract reality of cities and nations swallowed up by the sands, by the ice and rolling hills and the breakers that wear even imperial walls smooth, sluicing through long-forgotten fortifications. Death flows like water, trickling from its countless founts and hidden springs. A thousand, thousand streams towards some strange sea. A black ocean beneath everything, briefly glimpsed through the cage of titanic fingers that carried you here, to this place to do your bloody work. Work your bloody art. But known, known and understood to be cousin and kin to the thing inside your soul.

This is the truth: death has a direction and that direction is down.

You are falling, the world inverted around you. The sky beneath your feet, soles to the stars and moon; the Yanaze yawning above you. From this distance what you did to the camp, to parts of the Afia river-fleet is just sparks and cinder. Candle-tips and embers. Ragged patches of red-orange framing, reflected on a glassy sleek black mirror.

Azure novas stitch the air around you, two dozen meters trailing your white-taloned toes. A dozen, each one tracking closer. Walking down the line of your descent. Each one a searing bright sapphire cross, an expanding, all-devouring sphere at the center. Elemental Water roaring out with stone-shattering, bone-breaking concussive force. You can taste the leading edges of the destructive envelopes, like fine mist off a waterfall, like a Summer night's storm given to an early morning drizzle. You can taste the echoes of the rage, the wrath that make them and know that they'd bruise you to the muscle, to the tendon, if it weren't for your armor.

The trio of poisoned bolts that come hissing through the gloom are less accurate, the pattern wide. You see them to the left, to the right, above -"above"- you. See the emerald light that curls and flourishes along the oak-dark fletchings. Watch as they shatter from the inside out, bursting into dandelion clouds of shrapnel spray. You feel, distantly, distantly, the rain of splinters and slivers and impossible, knife-like thorns against your organic regalia. You realize (dimly, faintly) the true danger as the thorns ignite one after another. Flaring into long, luminous trails of violet. Unspooling behind you like bolts of cloth even as the toxins within catch at your consciousness, cloud and fog your head.

Opiter. What a pleasant face for such a poisonous man.

Exhaustion is biting deep. Worrying its teeth back and forth, tearing out pieces of you. You're suddenly so aware of your breathing, so ragged and so...heavy, as if you can't quite fill your dead lungs. You're suddenly so aware of the ache between your shoulderblades, the impossible lactic burn in your limbs. You make a decision. You let the armor go, let it dissolve into red-black nebular gas and unhallowed, carrion light. Subsiding back into the shadows, the darkness between stars and leaving only the ragged scraps clinging to your legs. Relief hitting you like a wall of icy water. A sudden slack. You seize it. Channel it through your legs, acceleration bending your spine into a curve, folding you almost in half.

The wind is howling past your ears, your white hair is whipped up over your eyes. You're staring right at the space, not ten feet away, when Damianos's final shot transfixes the shape of your crumbling deathmask.

Empty space. The tips of ship masts. A single point of blue light. The shockwave grabs you in a giant's hand and hurls you straight down, spiking you into the river. Black water crashing against your back like so much concrete. Liquid night wrapping itself around you, a mercury film between you and the rest of the world now. Lit up only by the tattered shreds of Anima that still cling to your half-nude body. Moon-bright bubbles drift past your lips. Cold currents tugging at your limbs. You're falling slower now, so much slower, almost stately, almost gracefully into the deep. The arc of your descent carrying you far, far, past the shallows so close to shore. You wonder if Damianos is charging to the river bank right now. You wonder if he's going to dive in, try and knock your teeth out.

You wonder if anyone's going to bother to hold him back.

It doesn't matter.

Soon even the surface is just a distant silver gleam. And you close your eyes as something stirs in the frigid guts of the Yanaze, something among the smoke-and-swirling-ink impressions of wrecked slave barges and storm-drowned longshoremen and souls given to despair and to the riverbed mud. Something like the shape of titanic fingers, juggernaut claws closing around you. With all the same cautious care of a child catching a lone firefly in their hands.

There is no twinge and spasm in your chest. There is no trembling in your arms. It is only a monstrosity in human skin and the memory of human need.

Reality realigns itself with pressure differentials, a popping in the ears, an easing of the bone-deep weariness as you pass the inflection point. Down becoming up with a sudden, inexorable violence. With the thunder and roar of coal-dark waterfalls, the infinite river reduced to quantifiable gallons; a dozen diverging streams pouring past your pale form. Draining away through the cracks and the seams in the memoryscape. The level dropping, dropping, dropping, until it's ebbed away almost entirely. Leaving behind nothing but a slick, damp floor and the sound of distant dripping. A second more and the floor is bone dry and it's only the latter left.

You can feel the red before you open your eyes. Feel the vivid color pressing against your lids like a tangible thing. You can hear the music playing somewhere close by, scratchy and tinny. A quavering voice, a pretty songbird thing, rising and falling as she sings a song in a dead language. Strange but...not unpleasant. You smell salt and brine, harsh notes of copper and metal layered beneath something fragrant and spiced. Like incense or burning pine resin. It makes you think of teahouses, places where people sit and drink and smoke until late in the night. Surrounded by comfortable pillows and muted conversation and the quiet clatter of porcelain on polished wood. How you've always imagined they must be, you suppose.

It's not as if you'd know.

A blanket drops around you with a muffled wumpf. The edges immediately damp where they hit the ground, undermining the comfort just a little but it's warm and you've had far, far worse. Slowly, you sit up, peeling yourself off the floor with the aching, arthritic motion of a man worn ragged. Worked from sun-up to sun-down, and now limping back to the bedroll and the bunk. You slip it around your shoulders. Scrubbing your face with the heel of your hand as you fight the floor's gravity, fight the urge to just lay back down, lay there forever. Eventually cracking open bleary, bloodshot eyes with conscious effort.

The Shogunate salon is the same as it was last time, on your journey there. Gilded, dripping with buttery-gold light from fixtures in the ceiling and free-standing lamps; puddling and pooling into little islands. Scarlet shaded lanterns set on the walls, on small stands at the end of chaise couches and the corners of low tables; their glow somehow so distant, like bloody pinpricks against the darkness. And the darkness is everywhere. In the stained timbers and sumptuous rug beneath your hips, at the edges of the opulent landing, pressing at the brass and glass windows from the outside and trickling past the handsomely painted shutters. The room itself is one half of a kind of concourse, a geometric arc framing an open dining area lower down- mirrored on the other side by an identical lounge (you think, you assume, you're only guessing based on the silhouetted shapes, sparsely illuminated).

The space between the two halves is a well of black water now, furnishings and little luxuries and exits drowned alike in the black. The windows across the way are laced with spiderweb cracks, the woodwork on the walls shattered, exposing an organic snarl of copper-gleaming pipes and ducts. Metal sheared apart, torn open as if raked by the claws of some great beast. Gushing more and more water down the steps even as you watch, a miniature cataract.

Lean your back against a chair leg. Take it in, ground it in your own senses- the softness of the blanket, the warmth of the rug, the way the colors seem to wash out of this place (save for gold, save for scarlet, save for the shadows). Remember what Elegia said, how he explained it. Teach yourself to accept it, the reality of it, the truth of it instead of panicking, instead of reflexively trying to fight it. Trying to wake up. This shattered, sliver of a world, a celestial body caught in the inexorable gravity, the all-consuming well of a cthonic god. Such things a Deathlord lavishes on his Knight without a thought.

You sit in silence for a bit, in that empty room; rubbing a thumb across the Hesiesh stone that sits against your sternum. The worn leather necklace still intact, still in place, despite everything. Eventually the nameless dragonbat crawls out. Emerging in slips of embers and sparks, cautious and wary and casting about for danger. Settling on your lap after a moment like an anxious cat, still large enough that it'd be spilling out of your arms if you tried to hold it. The weird, lean little monster. But it's not like you're in a position to judge are you?

You quietly scratch it behind the bone mask, sharpened nails dipping into the thick ruff of ash grey fur across its narrow, bony shoulders. It folds and refolds its wings after a moment, ducking its snout beneath the membrane after a two. Muffling the soft, almost plaintive cry as it bares its neck to you. Glaring holes through its splayed finger-bones and all but daring you to stop. You sigh softly but you don't.

It's not like you're in a position to judge that either.

"What's his name?" The boy sitting across from you asks as he pushes his lustrous laurel-leaf crown back to sit more securely on his head. His elaborate purple-and-orichalcum robes so large, so ostentatious that it seems as if he's almost swallowed up entirely by them. Dark water drips from lank hair, from soaked relic-cloth, from pallid grey hands and the corners of his eyes, his mouth. His features are thin. Sallow and sad. As if he's expecting you to slap his half-outstretched arm away.

"...I don't know," you admit after a bit. "I haven't thought of one yet."

A pause. You shift slightly, legs already going a bit numb under the spirit's weight. Letting your hand slip to your thigh and motioning tiredly for him to pet the Elemental if he likes. The boy does so after a minute, smiling slightly to himself. The expression doesn't seem quite natural to his face. He laughs a little as the dragonbat glares sullenly up at you, utterly outraged at this betrayal. Promising retribution (eventually, certainly) even as its eyes gradually glaze over.

"You two have the same look you know. Maybe you should name it Harrower II."

"I don't know if Creation could handle a sequel," you reply.

"Hah. Um-" the boy begins, glancing from the elemental to you and back again, hesitantly gauging your mood even as he dances around the elephant looming large in the corner of the room. How to chastise you, you suppose. Or how to apologetically address the whole Comprehensive Inadequacy Of The Entire Camp Debacle at a minimum. You're sure it'll be agonizing. In the meantime he eventually settles on simply asking, "If he doesn't have a name then...could I name him?"

Shoulders rise and fall. "Who am I to deny a rescue," you say. He looks at you uncertainly. "...By all means." You clarify.

"Oh! Um. Hrm." Steam curls up from where his fingers meet the spirit's fur, but the monster doesn't seem to mind all that much and the boy is nothing but gentle. The creature lifting his head eventually and butting his snout into the boy's palm. The kid carefully stroking the sleek fur along its skull, between the ears. Staring down at it hesitantly. "How about...how about Chrysaor! After- well. Hah. I guess you wouldn't know him. But he was a good snake and I bet he'd be happy to know a good familiar like you had his name."

It's a good name you admit. You watch as Chrysaor flicks his curved, leaf-like ears. If he objects to it he gives no sign. The quiet between you and the boy stretches on, the song in the background fading out. Replaced by another a moment later. This one slower, almost sultry and backed by deep bass strings. You like it you think, even if you don't recognize the instruments.

"I apologize for my failure at the camp my liege-" you begin. The syntax stilted and overly formal, unfamiliar on your tongue.

"(I didn't forget to give you presents for your panoply it just took me too long to pick between them and and I'm really really sorry because they could have helped at the camp but then you didn't even need them so- so! So it didn't matter! Or no it-)," Elegia blurts in an anxious rush. Words tripping over each other in their haste to get out. Like if he can just get the thought, wholly formed into the air all at once then he can puncture some of the awful tension and carry the rest of the conversation on pure momentum.

"But I..." you continue. Trailing off as whatever half-formed abortion of a thought you had, whatever miserable, sulking amends you were planning to make is abruptly flattened by the Deathlord's own apology. You stare at Elegia. Elegia has his face in hands, the motions of a terminally flustered, deeply-desiring-death civil servant or merchant factor pasted over the frame of a child. Chrysaor is not currently being pet and nips at your fingers with obsidian teeth until this is remedied.

"Ah." You say, petting the monster.

"(Fuck)." The small boy says and you don't laugh so much as exhale sharply through your nose. Tipping your head back until it rests against the chair behind you. Without looking you lift up your familiar by the armpits and gracelessly drop the sleepy, only belatedly resisting beast onto your Deathlord's lap. You didn't really have anything emotionally affirming to say to the cthonic god and this felt like the next nearest thing. But it seems to work- he hugs the dragonbat unconsciously, almost reflexively and the creature is some combination of too lazy, too confused, and too comfortable to resist. Worming and wiggling to find some obscure, ideal positioning as more tendrils of mist issue from the contact. A soft hissing added to the room's already eclectic ambiance.

"I," You enunciate each and every syllable. Hoping if you commit with enough conviction that the rigidity, the extreme focus will re-rail this mutual mess of a conversation. "Had intended to carve your glory into the very being of Lookshy. And commemorate your official reintroduction with a Dragon-blood's corpse. Or I should have intended, I mean. I was not thinking of my responsibilities. And I am sorry for that."

Elegia has his face buried in Chrysaor's fur; holding him like a cushion clutched to the chest, the spirit almost the size of his torso. "(Harrower I had a small army I could have given you.)"

A pause. You stare at him blankly, the boy in the red, red room. "What would I do with an army?"

"C-command them! Lead them to victory!"

"...I don't know how to command an army."

Another pause, longer this time. Elegia's shoulders start to twitch with half-hysterical giggling. "(Oh I wanna die. This is awful. I don't think Mask of Winters or any of the rest ever had to deal with this.)"

"We're already dead," you say out of a kind of pedantic reflex. Seizing on, for some reason, the least important part of your Liege's thought.

"I know and it's by far the worst part of this!" He shoots back.

You can't stop the laughter that comes bubbling up at that, hushed and barely even there. Just a kind of sound at the back of your throat as you push a hand through your hair and try to breathe deep. To figure out a place to begin again.

"How much- how much longer do we have until we reach the Underworld beneath Xauma?" You ask at last.

"An hour I think."

"If you have a spare corpse or two, I could show you what I've been practicing in the Wolf-King's palace. Just some early prototypes but..."

"(I'd like that very much)," Elegia says.

You brought the papers on your journey and left most of them here in the memoryscape- not that there's much to them really. Just small scraps with some sketches. Aimless exercises rather than anything with real purpose or intent, meant more to feel out the shape and scope of these new, sunken and submerged structures in your brain. These new partially-automated abilities.

None of which include literacy apparently but it's not as if you needed to label these for anyone else.

[ ] Attempt The One With Large Fangs. Initially an exercise in drawing the familiar anatomy of helot tiger-beastmen, it evolved into an exploration of why, exactly, you couldn't make the elaborate muscular-skeletal system look right. You distinctly remember thinking that the original idea was for some sort of augmented shock troop (not that you, precisely, know what that is).
[ ] Attempt The One With Wings. It is in fact, mostly wings. Or at least the wings, insectile and delicate, are the most common element (or just the one you were happiest with). What exactly the wings are carrying is another matter entirely. Some sort of monstrous carrion-insect? A gigantic eye? A crossbow? Several crossbows? A frustrated crossed out scribble? It's unclear.
[ ] Attempt The One That Is Actually Just A River Dragon. It is not a powerful manifestation of necromantic ingenuity and grave-bound genius, some tool of unholy war. It is literally just a river dragon drawn from memory. It's actually probably the best of the three sets, you think, certainly the one that you're happiest with. For all that it has nothing directly to do with corpses.