Holy fuck, torroar. I just wanted to say that you are an awesome writer, and your writing is awesome. O_O
Just... it feels like you bring us into a whole world. And you bring that world alive; it feels like the world is living and vibrant, and it also feels like -- whatever setting it might be, whether Draenor and Dranosh, or Zul'Gurub and Jojo, or Warhammer Fantasy -- it manages to remain true to itself and exemplify the themes and vibes of the setting. You look upon the things in the story and you think, you feel, like "This is a world where the stories and characters appropriate to Warhammer/Warcraft/etc are capable of happening in." The story feels like it does not merely depict a setting, but it feels like it can
keep creating stories and heroes and villains of that setting; it does not feel like it merely takes a few mini-stories or characters and plays them out until the energy ends or the mini-story runs out, instead it feels like it builds on itself and to lay the grounds for further life in that setting.
And you manage to take our characters, your characters, and guide them through that setting. Telling their own stories. Interweaving their stories with the stories of the people and places they inhabit. And all the while, managing to nail the themes and genres of the setting you write about, too. Amazing, torroar.
"Avast!" Laughs one of the latter kind, a cutlass replacing the former Westerlander left leg and two burning – literally – red pits for eyes that set his tricorn hat to smoking. "In the name of Khorne, and by the demands of the mighty Goretrawl Fleet, stand ready and prepare to have your skulls plundered, blood spilled, and treasures taken!"
"You should have let me die asleep!" Soya interjects from where he lays in Johanna's arms, glaring angrily at a bemused Tanrala. "For Asaph's sake, even Zandri's sailors have heard of these degenerated mongrels of the seas!"
"I do not care, I did not request that knowledge, kill them all!" Natasha shouts, and the warband roars and surges in answer to her, yourself included.
Soya has been an amusing and well-fitting addition to the impromptu party; he provides
comic relief.
He is just so grumpy. So old and disappointed. ((He's not actually that old, 3000 years for a Liche Priest is actually... Nagash cast his great spell sometime around, what -1100 or something like that? Either he's rounding down in order to make himself look younger and more youthful (lol), or... I dunno. He was made a Liche-Priest in some very interesting times and circumstances.)) He's also an accomplished caster himself of course, but still; his role seems to be that of comic relief at times.
The world is slow around you, the noise muffled, your heart's every thump louder than anything else in your ears.
(Last Chance: 25+Natasha Martial(11)+19+Tanrala's Spells(20)-Hungry Harpoons(15)-Off Balance From Deflection(5)-10-Crowding Bodies(5)=40/100)
Your fingertips touch.
Ledstali to Ledstali, soul to soul, agonized eyes to agonized gaze.
Then she is gone, slipping over the edge, with one final angry cry.
... This felt reminiscent of Magnus and Anna, back in Karak Ungor.
Also, it makes for an interesting mini-booknote; that after Natasha had spent time and a mini story arc getting ready to rescue Frederick... now, it is Frederick who has to go and rescue her. Bookends and mirrors.
Also also: this sort of stuff that happens with the rolls, is an interesting example of how you manage to deftly weave dice rolls into your story. To make dice rolls -- some of them, when they happen in the right time and place, or by the right person -- change or alter or add to the story. But without doing so in a way that just goes "Well'p, you die" or "Well'p, you win". It's great. Rolling poorly for the harpoon roll just before this, meant that the dice suddenly introduced a "Your wife got harpoon'd onto a Goretrawl pirate ship; you now have to somehow rescue her back from the ship" mini-arc for an update or two.
An unearthly noise arises from deep within your soul and escapes out into the world loud enough, angry enough, that those around you reel backwards. Fear, pain? You can't tell and it doesn't matter. None of it matters.
Somehow, these set of lines just... somehow very nicely communicated how angry Frederick was.
Not only that, it somehow communicated or made it feel like, everyone else around Frederick would just...
notice a sudden aura of anger around Frederick. Like something you'd see happen in cinema or a videogame, where shit hit the fan. And you manage to do that in a few words. Moreorever, you managed to insert a place for it to happen in the narrative; the ebb and flow of the tension made it feel natural to happen.
"Natasha, don't…I…," you reach up for a moment and in a split second of fury realize that the Light of Summer will do not a damned thing for her.
It is bound to your blood, not hers. Perhaps that would be different, with the strange changes of the soulbond that neither of you can explain, but a second's effort has it looped around her neck for no effect whatsoever.
"Damn it!" You curse.
... Hey, I wonder... could Sunweaver alter the Light of Summer to work on Natasha as well? Using this deepened soulbond connection between Natasha and Frederick?
Is that something we might think about happening later in the future, when we get back?
You'd like it if they were completely drunk and stumbling about like some of the tales say about their kind, but these are not just the sorts of pirates that one could find in Sartosa, but sworn to Khorne. They run, rush, and leap about as if you aren't in the middle of the air, the clouds and winds whistling around you, and for all of that, they might as well not be. This is normal for them, and a struggle for you. Johanna is having a better time on that front, the claws of her feet dig into the wooden boards, and while her wings are still horribly damaged they can still clearly flap and beat every now and again.
Again, that mention of "This is normal for them" -- this is just... yeah. The world is ending for us, and for the Druchii, but like... you get across very easily and quickly that, like... for somebody else, this is just an "in media res" type story for
them. For the pirates, this isn't the height of their story arc as they finally begin to escape from imprisonment; this is just the middle of a battle for them. A big battle, to be sure, with much glory and carnage in it; it's rare to be able to take down a Black Ark. But still. In media res. This is the middle of the workday for some pirate. This sort of thing happens to them all the time; they fire off cannon and harpoon, they reel in some fish ((they probably call it reeling in fish, or some other slang, huh?)) and then they rush in to chop it to bits. Average day at work during a big battle.
I have my serious doubts about his claims about still being alive, I can't tell if he's taken a single breath amidst all his complaining!
If you think for a moment, you can hear it through her ears.
"-than Phakth Himself! No sky such as this would be blessed by His presence, praise be to him! Besides which, it was only at thousand years ago that his fury shook the skies above Zandri so much that-,"
Starting to think that this guy copes with life and unlife by complaining, like how Ostlanders drink. Perhaps he feels that if he complains and makes things feel normal enough, that the world will contort to his complaining?
... Also, despite me calling him a comic relief provider, his initial appearance included both petty, petty, squabbling with the Necrarch...
and some surprisingly bone-deep-weary resignation about the cycles of vengeance and betrayal and ambition of blood kin. Few words to establish character and history and age and experience. Emotional depth.
It looks like the ocean itself has invaded the Ark's waters, tearing through the outer sea gates, those meant to raise and lower to allow Druchii ships to leave and enter. There are even a few broken Goretrawl ships on the inner shoreline, casualties of the sea's wrath. But what you see beyond that, all of it, is what quiets you utterly in shock like little else has in your life. For you see ships. Imperial ships, bold and true, but without the accursed tinge and rank revulsion in your soul that even sighting the infernally tainted ships of the Goretrawl can bring up. Imperial ships, but not a one of them looks natural, or at least as they should be. Many of them have huge holes torn in their hulls, their masts shattered, their sails tatters, and more than that, they are surrounded by a strange, blueish green glow. Even that is not as shocking as the fact that some of them are in fact pushing out onto the shoreline far beyond the waters, responding to some unseen current of air or perhaps something else altogether. Algae and seaweed choked cannons fire out concentrated blasts of water that scour stone as if it were butter and the water flame, almost acidic in nature. Other rotten timbered scorpions launch bolt after bolt after bolt. Then there are the crews, too far away from you to see clearly, but clearly touched by those same strange energies. It's actually quite easy to spy a ghost when there's so many of them in one place, after all. Especially when there are full on spectral ships ghosting through buildings and firing ethereal weapons.
Imperial ships? What the fuck, where did they come from?
Wait... is this some sort of Davy Jones Locker type shit? Manann's Locker??
Your wife is a blessing in and of herself, but she has freely admitted that she is the lesser compared to her sister when it comes to pulling upon the powers of her homeland. You have witnessed before some priests that can draw out a faint warm glow from Sigmar while there are others who can set their enemies aflame outright. There are Shallyans who can soothe pain, and others who can outright restore wounds. You have no true context, personally at least, as to the weight and magnitude of a God's favor and channeled divinity. But you've seen a Grand Theogonist and an Ar-Ulric, how grand their power and how terrible it can be should they falter for a brief moment. Against Zacharias. Against the Blood Fane. All this and more. But before this moment, you can honestly say that you simply had not thought more than a few times in respect to a lesser tor brought down and grief and respect after the battle atop the Tor of Dominance…
How favored was Magdha Sprenger, High Matriarch of the Cult of Manann, divinely drawn out of the seas and her people there to serve on the mainland?
... Apparently it is. Holy shit. What a woman, that Magdha.
Beholding that, you nonetheless continue to carve down the Tor, the other ships doing their level best to pursue, and some of those harpoons are getting awfully close to sticking into the hull, and as you do so, you can see whole waves of those ghostly mariners storming the docklands and beyond alongside beast and spirit and whatever the hell else is there. Down, down you go, the ship creaking and groaning and stone shrieking and breaking beneath, until you curve around the Tor's side once more so that you are able to view the actual surface of the Ark proper beyond the Docklands. In fact, the Temple of Khaine, or what used to be the Temple of Khaine, is directly in front of you, that gigantic statue of Khaine taller than the Cathedral of Sigmar in Nuln. Or at least it used to be. Now that vast statue has toppled, collapsing to the side and completely flattening dozens of buildings and damaging even more, leaving only the ankles and feet. It's certainly attention grabbing, but so too is the tableau of the temple itself. No longer a mere temple, either. Instead, worse than what your wife faced in the arena, the small tear in reality that Alyssa Voidreaper managed to bring forth has grown.
Well. What a time to be disappointed by one of the Cytharai. Natasha murmurs through the soulbond.
I wanted to touch on something here -- despite the fact that the toppling of Khaine's statue is just one part of a paragraph in the middle of an update here...
... This feels like an example of the sort of writing of your's that just, sorta populates the world and makes it feel vibrant? Like... this random few sentences here. But you managed to
place and pace those few words in just the right spot.
Because you manage to evoke a feeling of magnificence. Ruined magnificence. The end of an era. Or a great polis. A Black Ark. Moreover, it feels like the sort of brief scene you'd see in a movie somewhere, where some notable building -- maybe Big Ben, maybe the Statue of Liberty, maybe just some local building or tree or landmark that had appeared in the series or movie beforehand and felt like it characterized the place -- gets toppled or felled, and the video watchers gasp and feel feelings.
It is thankfully a sensation that does not last long, however, as over a dozen Goretrawl ships are currently sailing the streets between buildings, and circling the ruins of the temple and location of the much larger portal. Infernal smoke rises into the air and everything else, while brass chains rattle, cannons and scorpions firing as well. The rivalries between the Dark Gods are made clear once more as the devoted of Khorne eagerly and angrily fight against the rising tide of Slaaneshi invaders into the material world. Even as your own badly tilted ship keeps traveling downwards, the rain filling the air, the clouds and smoke, the storm blocking out the sun entirely, the fires both natural and not burning, you can see the Keeper of Secrets leap and land on one of the ships, partially shattering the entire thing under the impact.
"How long were we in that tower?!" Johanna asks incredulously.
I feel exactly like that too, Johanna. How the hell did
this much happen, in such a short amount of time?!
Also: a fucking Keeper of Secrets showed up. Holy shit.
Your eyes fall upon a new figure, warily watched by Sadrina and Kerillian and a host of other elves and freedmen, as well as the skink priest. None of them dare stand ten or even fifteen feet close. And why would they? The one they ever so cautiously watch, hands on hilts, or power gathered and at the ready, is monstrous to behold, and powerful to boot. Your breath grows harder and harder to maintain, almost like trying to breath through water itself, even more than the rain and wind has been managing. A deep cold wafts outwards from them, not like Natasha, who's cold is that of pure ice and snow, but something else. Primordial, in its own way, but different all the same. Dispersed where Natasha's is concentrated. A different hue, you could almost call it, for the Winds of Magic do crackle and twist and spin around them, tangled up in thick cables that link them to….everything, it feels like. You've seen your wife cast spells now, and know what it looks like to see spells woven into reality, but the ethereal columns that exude from this individual simply trail off into the world, beyond your perception, undulating like ghostly tendrils and watery fronds.
In the material world, they are hardly a better sight.
"…so you the…last...come…,"
Is that a demigod of Manann or something?
But it is a damned near thing.
"Maghda," you say softly, fighting to keep the disgust out of your voice and only barely succeeding.
Wait, no, that's
Maghda?
Bone that has shaped itself as it protrudes outwards, the shape of it such that you cannot rightly tell if this is a mutation brought on by exposure to Dark Magic in tremendous amounts or something of a blessing as conveyed by her God.
For the shape of that exposed bone is that of a five-tined crown.
Maghda's head tilts suddenly, with an audible crunch of bone and chitin.
"Mag…dha…," she murmurs, yet the sound itself is enough to buffet Oskana into quietly screeching. "Yes. No."
... Uh, wait, no, maybe it
is some demigod or spirit of Manann after all.
"What have you done?" You ask more insistently.
"Bought vengeance with sacrifice," she whispers, lips quirking ever so slightly.
The seawater pouring from her empty right eye socket is beginning to tinge more and more with red the longer she is like this.
"Maghda Sprenger died when she was cast from the skies to the waters below. When she hit the water as a stone, and was dragged through carved channels in stone to the depths beneath," she shake her head slowly. "I'm just…what's left. At the end of it all. An ember. A current being overtaken by the greater sea."
"You're not coming back."
"Not from this. It is too much. He is too much, and I, too mortal," she rasps, the sound disgusting as bone cracks and flesh squelches once more when she raises up her other arm and almost marvels over it.
Maghda.
I'd say more words, but... She was grand. And she will be missed. Sorely. What could she have done, have kept doing, for the Church of Manann and for Marienburg if she had survived all this? A leader as holy and beloved by Manann as, I dunno, Magnus is by the Gods, or the Everqueen is by Isha. A leader and holy figure like that can do a
lot for a place, a people, a culture. She will be sorely missed.
That a Druchii sorceress, in desperation, out of love, and fury, not only not knowing but outright incapable of knowing what your wife would attempt and accomplish, called the gaze of Khorne upon this Ark. She could not have known. If Maghda had known, could she have crawled or swam to freedom, to elsewhere, and survived? Assuredly so, you think, though it might have taken her years to recover. But instead, she did not know if you, or Natasha, or any others might be able to properly answer for the savage destruction that those holy temple-ships suffered, that the coasts and temples of Manann have suffered at the hands of the Druchii. At this Black Ark in particular, more likely than not.
She couldn't have known. You wish she had, but she didn't.
Dammit. I wish she could have survived, too. At first, Freddy was pissed that Hultressa did this... but now it's like, "dammit I wish Magdha had known this would happen so that she wouldn't have died for this." What a bunch of
whiplash there, man.
"What do we tell the rest of the Cult?" You ask her quietly, and that burning light in her left eye dies down again, but only faintly.
"She returned to the sea, and the depths," she informs you calmly, bone crackling and brunching as she straightens slightly. "Tell them that, and they will know. What comes next…is up to the Gods."
o7
And you manage to throw in some sea chanties too, torroar. Just... as an atmospheric thing. Just adds to the whole thing. Like, of
course people would be muttering in disappointment to themselves like Soya, or glaring in rage like Frederick when he sees his wife get taken, or melancholically and yet loudly singing sea songs -- it's just the sort of thing that people in these situations
do. They are people and they act on their habits, they express themselves. And this all helps set the tone and the scene and the story. And also helps build the feel of the whole world. Because it gets across that these are normal and average (if heroic and unique) people of the world, who worship the gods, who feel tied to the land and the times and all. And just... yeah.
... And then you finish up by giving a What-If? omake of Fanriel's adventure again. To show an alternate version of how the Black Ark story might have ended instead.
A notable way to mark this story arc. It makes it feel unique and notable. And also gives it a sense of finality. And identity on its own. That this whole story arc was a thing that happened and felt notable, both in-universe and out-of-universe (i.e. in-thread). Cool stuff, torroar.
[X] Remain With Frederick von Hohenzollern As Main Perspective And Choice/Control Going Forward. This will involve the Warband cobbled together out of freed slaves, a number of heroes, and Norsca.
... I wonder if the Tsarina is being taken to Norsca or something? If Roland's son is following her and will meet with her coffin? And if Roland himself will also meet her?
I wonder if there will be a grand convergence of storylines? Either in Norsca, or somewhere in between the border of Norsca and Kislev?
Given how the Black Ark ended with a finale
bigger than what I was expecting -- I thought the hype would end JUST with Alyssa's defeat! Instead it got
even more crazy, holy shit! -- it would feel appropriate or expected or amazing or surprising all at once somehow. If it happened, it'd feel like a neat bookend to a large amount of stories, and also the explosion of big events that just happened this year.
... 'course, then we'd have to trek to the rest of the Empire too. And may or may not arrive late for the Beasttide, who knows. And
then there'll be the literal YEARS of aftermath of the Beasttide after that -- as well as the aftermath of the Battle of the Everpeak, and who all will return from that huge battle -- and, yeah.
This whole thing is shaping up to be as big as not just the Third Vampire War or Thorgarr the Bloody, but potentially as big as the Everchosen invasion. Because Norsca, Kislev, and the Empire saw huge battles and wars all in one year. What a goddamn year to be alive, holy shit. And then the world continues on. Keeps rolling on.
