Note: I am posting this as a co-written project, mostly done by a friend of mine who is terrible with computers, does not want to create an account and also is not on this website. As such, a lot of the writing isn't going to resemble mine and updates are dependent on him. I'm still mostly offline these days.
This is going to be purely narrative. Voting opens immediately.
Of Stars and Sunless Skies
Once, they say, your ancestors tamed the stars above. Once, they say, shining cities stretched from sea to glittering sea, ribbons of steel and gleaming glass over a world sundered and made anew. Once, they say, your ancestors stole the fire of the gods and the secrets of the soul to build twisted children wrought in gems and glinting gold, and for that sin your people suffer still.
Once upon a time a storyteller told you of the day the world was young again. Long ago, he said, when man was old and the stars were older still, when the Old Sin was young and the Twisted Children younger still, the world remade itself as punishment. Ten thousand years ago, the earth rose and swallowed your ancestors' shining cities, the woods grew over gleaming glass and flame belched from deep beneath the earth to drown the glittering spires stretching like claws to the stars that saw it all. Ten thousand years ago, the Twisted Children turned on their parents and the monsters came to your world. In all these ten thousand years, they never left. And for ten thousand years, it is said that your people have fought and laughed in the face of the punishment of the gods.
Your family did not die laughing.
Once upon a time you made a deal with a demon. You gave it your aid against another of its kind, and it gave you cunning skill, with which to wield weapons of sharp steel and bright glass. You whispered to it your dreams in the dead of night where the nighthawks howl and Children hunt in silence, and it gave you a path to glory. You gave it your birth-name as the stars looked on from above, and it gave you a teacher, wise and learned and branded as an outcast from the world of man. When it asked you for your soul, you killed it. It whispers to you still, as you walk upon a dying world.
You walk the path of the Old Road, where the dead and dying lie in their multitudes under an unquiet earth. A straight path from Night to Day, from half the world to the half that left it behind, a single streak of smooth basalt black as midnight across the dust and ashes of eternal night under a starlit sky. The Old Road smells of fear, its air redolent of the iron tang of blood and the heady scent of ambition, and on its expanse walk powers of the sunless world - your world. You walk among these powers and their half-finished stories towards the Sunlit Lands, where the stars are dimmed and the light is bright and harsh, where the grand tablets of heroes stand at the border of nightfall as if to say 'This far, and no further'. It is there that Day meets Night, Light meets Dark, and stories end to begin anew.
Before you is the Old Kingdom, the last throne standing in the Sunlit Lands. Above them is the great halo of their gods, and below them is the dying earth parched and red beneath the sun's sullen glare. In the wide world of Night and Day, of Light and Dark, the Old Kingdom is civilization. It is culture and sophistication in shimmering silks and perfumes, it is the story of beauty, treachery and sin on the bard's lips, the ancient war-song in a maudlin tavern, the shining gemstones in a merchant's pouch, the relics of the ancients pulled from dusty tombs to kill and kill again. It was born when the gods made the world young again, and drinks deep of its own legends as if to forget the sins of ten thousand years and the corpses under its foundations. Along and past its borders is the Wall, where sunlit civilization meets the Night and the thin gray line of stone and sorcery stands in eternal twilight. It is here that the dust of a hundred hundred kingdoms along the vastness of the Wall lie dead and restless, and the scavengers pick over their old, dry bones.
Before you is the City, the great gleaming gemstone in the crown of the Last Kings. It is a hive, a teeming citadel of civilization on a dying world, an ancient decaying metropolis under an eternal pitiless noonday sun. Deep are its vaults, reaching to the heart of an old world that wears the flayed skin of a young one, reaching to the past where men were as gods and walked the stars in glory. Tall are its spires, soaring to the heavens and lying empty under the pitiless sun, a hollow glory in the shape of history. Teeming are its multitudes in the domes clustering like overripe fruit, trusting to the Last Kings and the legacies left to them by the ancients to keep the Children and the Night away. The great powers of the City walk under the eternal day waxen-pale and dead-eyed, clad in silk and jewels, perfumed and beautiful, unable to hide the decay and the stench of rot.
Behind you is the Night, deep and dark and comfortable. It is half the world, it is the weight of ten thousand years of sins, it is the legacy of your ancestors and their greatest folly. It hides monsters and terrors and the Twisted Children, who are terrible and monstrous and beautiful and grand, a tale told a thousand ways in a thousand places. It hides treasures to shame the Last King's courtiers, glories beyond the dreams of a City gladiatrix, temples to gods long forgotten and the tablets and tomes of gods yet to come. Its earth is ash and dust and barren, its skies bright with stars, its winds carrying the howls of beasts and terrors beyond mortal ken. Its hills and valleys hold villages and farms, parodies of the civilization in the Sunlit Lands made with aching sincerity and toil. It is home to compassion and hate, predator and prey, comradeship and enmity. It is always, always, always cold.
It is in the Night and from your demon that you learned power, and is from your teacher that you learned to harness it. Every parry is a work of art, every thrust a hungry snarl, every blow taken is borne in the silence of a hundred hundred dreams denied, and every battle a chess game played in sinew and bone and muscle a split second at a time. You are power, writ in stories and legends given flesh and bearing a name you have chosen after losing the name your mothers gave you. You will be glory, writ in the stars above, a power of the Night that will break the Sunlit Lands and rewrite the world anew. You will choose your name over your teacher's cooling corpse, and you will set the stars aflame.
You will redeem a hundred hundred years of broken dreams, or you will write your name in blood across a dying world as you try. Choose a name, kill your past, and walk the Old Road to damnation or glory.
The world deserves no less.
The mausoleum before you is cold and gray, a curving, twisted ruin with a broken roof that from a distance resembles a chipped, cracked skull. Above you the stars shine brightly, a dim light that reflects off the stones and bright moss of the roadside, a false light that does little to dull the cold as you reach the hillock by your teacher's home. It's fitting that the old bastard lives in a skull, you think to yourself. God knows he looks enough like one.
"I heard that, student mine," comes an amused rasp, the old man himself stalking forward with a stave in one hand and a lantern in the other. He is thin, a rail of a man tall and gaunt and with eyes that speak of secrets no man was meant to know. His skin is parchment pale and shifts with a multitude of characters, letters and numbers and ciphers that tell tales to him as he sleeps. And on his forehead is your demon's brand, your mind singing for a moment as you see it.
You tamp down on that thought, hard and fast and too slow for the old man not to catch it. So you glare at him instead, down on the old bastard from your two handspans taller than him, "I told you to eat more, you old goat. Your fault you're a talking, walking skeleton, not mine."
He cackles for a moment, suddenly going silent and then looking at the woods before turning back to you. "The Children are abroad, little glory-hound. We have little time."
"I didn't hear shit." You didn't, and you didn't smell anything either. No blood or fear or hint of unearthly songs on the breeze. Just the animals and the howls of the nighthawks.
The grass ripples in the wind for a moment before the old bastard smiles, "Well, that just shows you might die this week, then. And I'll have wasted five years on your carcass. I'd prefer not to have done that, so I'll be quick. Today is the day I deem you almost finished - I have taught you all I can, and I have set you what tasks I can. You have completed them, all but one, and you have learned much of the Ways that the powers of this world wield their gifts."
You nod, impatient. You tossed the head of a Twisted Child at his feet yesterday and all he said was to come back tomorrow, and now you're listening to a recap. "I know, I know. The Twisted Children with the Shifting Ways, the Old Kingdom with the Way of the Light, the Last King and the Way of Dust. So what now? You give me a key to your Way?"
He taps his staff on the ground for a moment, and the brand on his forehead shines slickly in the lantern-light. There's a soft chuckle, and you can't be sure if it comes from your old teacher before you or the demon in your mind, "No, no. You will find your own, or you will die and be found a failure. You wanted to change this world, boy, and to do that means remaking yourself. You used my staff for your tasks, a Way of secrets and lies and hidden whispers, and that will not suit your path. No, now you will face me and win, and win by your own hands and the power in your soul."
"Or?" What if you
don't want to kill the old goat? After all, he'd done a great deal for you since that Twisted Child rampaged through your village, leaving death and terror in its wake.
"Or you die." He's pitiless, eyes gleaming a brassy yellow as the lantern light wavers for a moment, "You probably won't kill me, boy. But you can damn well try, and the Way you choose in doing it will be the path you walk to glory." The staff raps once more on the floor, and he fades away before you can ask another question.
There's a wailing, a howling in the distance. A wavering scream, sharp as glass and jagged as a tomb-robber's smile. A whisper comes to you on the breeze in the old man's voice,
There's a weapon in the house, boy, and Children abroad. Survive, find me, and win. Should you do that, you may claim the Name that you will bear to the Sunlit Lands. Should you not, I will not be wasteful.
You swallow reflexively for a moment, fear cold and clear cutting through the anger and frustration. You can handle a Child or two, but the old goat might be more than you can handle…and you'd prefer your soul wasn't flensed into another secret on his staff. Waste not, want not is the old man's creed.
True to form, then, there are weapons in the tower that he's stolen and hidden here against some eventuality. One of them calls to you, a melody in craftsmanship and tinged with remembrance of its past. It is…
[]A Sword: A long blade as sharp as a serpent's tooth and with the edged grace of a courtesan's smile, it sings of a legacy written in death and blood on the Old Road. Swift and sure was justice in this blade's time, and now it will sing again.
You are a swordsman. Your soul's power and your Way will parry bullets, slice lances of light in twain and cut a soul from its body. You are the Wandering Blade.
[]A Pair of Pistols: Two long-barrelled pistols, firing bullets of brass and gold that never seem to run out. You wield two revolvers, one in gray steel and gleaming ivory and the other in bright brass and dull oak. Their voices once rang out like thunder on the Old Road, and now that thunder heralds your tread on the path to the Sunlit Lands.
You are a gunslinger. Your soul's power and your Way will strike fast and true, dodging bullets and shooting apart the ancient weapons and relics wielded by lesser Powers on the Old Road. Your bullets are brass and gold, and they may strike spirits and flesh alike at need. You are the Last Marshal.
[]An Axe: Two great butterfly blades, silver-steel and hungry, with a great rod of blood-red wood between them. On the Old Road they call it the blades of no return, for its wielders all died in blood and terror atop a mound of their enemies. Once, long ago, this axe struck terror across the Night Lands and in your hands it will do so once more.
You are an axeman. Your soul's power and your Way will cleave bullets in twain, block beams of bright, lethal light with silver-steel blades and sever the secrets of a demon from its seat of power. You are the Axeman, the Silver Slayer.
