"The creature you will be facing," Malger
had said just before their departure, "is
called the Beast of Revonos, and he is aptly
named. He was once a Keeper that each of you
knew. What he has become now is a weapon, a
living embodiment of chaos and destruction,
deliberately and powerfully designed by Lord
Revonos. We do not know how much of his mind
remains, nor what state it is in. I'm sorry,
Misha, but the odds are very good that he will
not remember you. If you want to survive, you must help him to do so."
Raven had weighed in next. "When you find
him, remember this above all else: do not
attempt to combat him by matching strength
against strength. You will lose. Contests of
power are what he knows, and where he
excels. If you play by his rules, he will
destroy you utterly. Remember from where he
comes: the court of the Lord of Betrayal. The
Sixth Hell does not countenance co-operation,
so it is unfamiliar to him. Work together...
or die separately." The wolven priestess
turned a worried gaze on Merai. "The gods have
forbidden me from going with you, and you will
be both uniquely strong and uniquely vulnerable
against him. You know of what I speak. Beware
the shadows. Remember your training." She
unbuckled the holy sword Elemacil from her
waist and handed it over to the young
priestess. "Bear this well, Priestess
Merai. May the High Lord Kammoloth guide you and keep you safe."
The final word had come from Duke
Thomas. "If you take him alive- I'm sorry,
Misha, but I will not risk your lives with
anything more restrictive than that- if you
take him alive, he is to go directly to the
dungeons, to be kept under strict ward and
guard. If he is found competent, he will stand
trial for the deaths and damages he caused
three months ago. If he is not competent,
then... we'll see. Be very, very careful."
The last three paragraphs are nice asides that
set up the danger of what they face very well.
Saroth's wingbeats faltered, a telepathic
bow wave of shock radiating from him. Misha's
head snapped up, wondering what had so startled
the dragon, and his jaw dropped open as the
veil of smoke parted. Absolute devastation
unfolded before them, stretching from horizon
to horizon. As far as the eye could see, trees
had either been blown down or snapped outright,
stripped of limbs and even bark. Fire had
scorched them where they lay. Hot patches
still smoldered, lingering embers from a great
conflagration that had since passed on. In the
middle of it all gleamed a strange, perfectly
circular ring of barren, darkened ground. And inside that
Nothing but fulgurite glass left there.
{Yes. Bodies. Lots of them. And it looks
like many of them weren't killed by the
blast. Misha, I don't think you should use the
teleport disk here. The magic
} He struggled
for words. {It feels as if reality itself is
scarred. The sky is in pain. I would advise
against any use of magic at all, if it can be
helped, at least until we are well away from here.}
Nice intro of the teleportation disk. Always good to have an escape route.
With a gesture, Misha sent the two dragons
back into the sky, circling overhead like
aerial cavalry, while the four groundbound
Keepers closed in on the source of the
sound. The dead lay everywhere: under the
wreckage, on top of it, whole, in pieces, and
every possible variation in between, all under
the unforgiving glare of the merciless
sun. Those that had not burned outright were
quickly beginning to putrefy. The stench of
death was indescribable. The silence was
almost worse. It pressed down with almost
palpable weight, magnifying a whispered comment
into a careless shout, a minute shift of rubble
into an echoing avalanche, and transforming the
recurring moan from afar into a beacon of
unending suffering. Misha was reminded of the
days after the tornado had struck Keeptowne- it
had taken three days for the songbirds and
insects to return, and the silence had been just as deafening.
People have no idea how remarkable actual silence
is until they experience it. It is deafening
because the lack of noise is all you can hear, if that makes sense.
Not trusting the hell-touched strip of
obsidian glass, Misha vaulted it using Whisper
as a pole. Charles did likewise with his
Sondeshike, and then tossed it back to help
Wolfram across. The lutin was not the only
creature that had tried to leap the flame wall:
as they closed on the sound of the moaning,
they found many other skeletons and
half-skeletons. The worst was the giant that
had fallen half across the blaze and then
dragged its cauterized, half-incinerated body
for another ten feet before dying. Misha
prayed that the trail of blackened, roasted
organs would not haunt his nightmares.
Given all the blood and death he's already seen,
to have anything more cause him nightmares is scary itself!
Then they found the werewolf. Twenty feet
up a splintered oak, impaled through his chest,
gut, and thigh by scorched tree limbs as thick
as a man's arm, only his lycanthropic
regeneration had saved him from instant
death. Even that was more of a torment than a
blessing, as he could not free
himself. Grizzled fur streaked with coagulated
and dried blood, a pink froth bubbling at the
corners of his mouth, the beast moaned in agony
with each breath. His lips twitched as if he
were trying to say something, but Misha
couldn't make it out from the ground. Wolfram
stepped up next to Misha, drawing in a breath
through his teeth as he sized up the
situation. "I'm assuming you want him alive?"
Good trick making a plus a minus here with the werewolf's regeneration.
"We can," the ram interrupted. "It will be
tricky, but we can. Better get
started." Scaling the tree with surprising
efficiency, he revived the beast with a careful
drink of water. The offer of help received a
faint nod in reply, and the ram signaled for
Saroth and Tychicus to land. It took both
dragons at their largest size to ease the tree
down without jostling its captive, and the
beast bit on Charles' Sondeshike while Wolfram
and Merai carefully extricated the tree limbs
from his body. Misha kept Whisper close as the
wounds healed, but even when physically
restored, the werewolf proved to be in no shape
to fight. He didn't much care that he'd been
rescued by Metamorians, just so long as "that
beast, that bloody Beast" was gone. His hands
shook with fear, trembling so badly that he
spilled as much water as he drank. He didn't seem to notice.
I like that you have them using the Sondeshike
like this to keep the werewolf from screaming or eating its own tongue.
"'Let's catch it!' they said! 'We'll
sacrifice it to the Queen!' they said! Stupid vampires! Stupid! Stu-"
I love this bit here. Vampires are stupid. ;-)
"Hold." The voice was neither loud nor
harsh, but radiated such a potency of command
that everyone froze in their tracks as if
paralyzed. A woman stepped from the shadows,
her hair the color of pitch and her eyes like a
starless night; like a raven, bereft of pupil
or white. Clad from neck to sole in
intricately tooled black leather armor and
flanked by a pair of glowering dire wolves, she
radiated an aura of dark nights filled with
watching, hungry eyes. The werewolf toppled
forward and kowtowed instantly to the ground,
his rant silenced. Behind her, the spiders
could be seen arriving from the west, a
black-and-gray swarm that made short work of the tree-strewn ground.
Ears flattened and hackles rose throughout
the group as Merai put a name to the new
arrival. "Lilith." The Keepers backed away
from the daedress and closed ranks, spells and
dragonflame ready to blast an escape route if necessary.
Charles meanwhile is thinking, "My
Collect-All-Nine Daedra collection is now
complete!" Actually he's more thinking, "Oh sh.. Oh sh.. Oh sh..!"
The woman nodded slightly in mocking
acknowledgement of the move, but waved her hand
in a dismissive gesture. "At your ease,
Lightbringer. For now, I have no quarrel with
you, nor with your companions. We share a
common cause: you want your wayward beast, and
I want him gone from my lands as soon as
possible. Do not invite more trouble than you
already have." As the spiders encircled the
group, she pointed to the ground before her. "Come here, William."
The werewolf being named William just humanizes
him all the more. I like that touch.
The werewolf crawled to her on all fours,
whimpering and groveling. "I-I'm sorry, m-my
Lady. I failed you," he stammered when he
finally reached her, his tail tucked and his
ears lowered, his trembling returning
twofold. His head and eyes he kept averted,
expecting punishment. "I sh-should have-"
Lilith stopped him with a single finger
laid on his nose. Cupping her hand under his
chin, she lifted it until he met her eyes and,
to the astonishment of all, she smiled. A
reserved smile, the smile of a queen to a lowly
and meager servant, but still a smile. "You
were completely out of your depth, my boy. I
would sooner expect a mouse to kill a mountain
lion than expect you to battle the Beast of
Revonos. Even the fiercest of predators must
run sometimes." She stroked his gray-furred
cheek with an almost maternal touch. "That
you've survived at all suggests you're strong
enough for greater things." She stroked his
fur for a bit longer, soothing him until his
tailtip wagged, and then turned her attention to Misha.
I'm honestly reminded of Gmork and his pups in this scene.
Charles' brow furrowed for a
moment. "Wait. Does that mean that, to the
lutins, we live in the Valley of the Shadow of
Death?" Misha snorted, his mouth quirking up at one corner.
Ah, an attempt at levity!
The release provided by the wry humor
lasted until the two got down from Saroth's
back and found themselves standing in a pair of
pawprints
with room to spare for each of
them. Wolfram and Merai climbed down from
Tychicus, and the ram sized up the situation in
a single sentence. "We're going to need a
bigger dragon." Tychicus and Saroth exchanged
a glance as they shrank down to join the ground
crew, but said nothing. They pulled on a pair
of robes for clothing, easily shed in case of an emergency shift.
Channeling your inner Brody I see!
"This one is, too," Charles replied, his
Sondeshike making a faint clink when he prodded
the headless corpse of a werewolf. "When I
fought him in Hell, he could exhale a wave of
ice. It appears that he still can."
"Well, it appears he's been improving,"
Wolfram snapped, shaking his hand again to try
to get feeling back into it. Breathing hard
across numbed fingers, he then stuffed them
into his right armpit to warm them more
quickly, just above the rim of his
breastplate. "You said he froze your feet to
the ground. You never mentioned anything about instant frostbite."
I should reread the battle sequence because I
don't recall him freezing Charles to the ground
right now. I'm sure it happened, but it has been
a while since I looked over that fight.
"I'll be okay, I think." Wolfram clicked
the hooflet-capped fingertips of his unfrozen
right hand together. "If I had bare flesh
instead of hooves, I think I might have left
behind a few layers of skin. Still... that's really cold. Don't touch them."
Good touch here with noting the different finger
structure of our beastly Keepers. Always good
when it works to their advantage!
Misha frowned. "That's why we have gloves,
Wolfram. Wear them. Merai, can
you- Merai?" To Misha's surprise, the
priestess had knelt to the ground, her forehead
pressed against the sinuous spine of the holy
blade Elemacil. Her lips moved faintly, her
eyes closed in concentration or prayer, or
perhaps both. Was it his imagination, or was the sword starting to glow?
Always nice to see a group actually
prepared! Still, those had better be good gloves!
"No. A daedra, or someone they have
altered as radically as they have your friend,
can perform a temporary empowerment, an
enhancement of aura, allowing him to cut
through the defenses of an aedra or those of
their servants. For example, me. If you see
the shadows 'pull' toward him, wrap around him
like wisps of flame, he's using it. It's unmistakable."
And I bet it's wicked cool looking too. This is
why we need to have Metamor Keep the TV show so we can see all this happen!
Merai nodded. "Misha, there's something
you should know. What he's done, the
continuous power he's displayed since his
arrival... as far as everything I've ever
learned tells me, what he's doing is
impossible. I would expect this level of
destruction if we were chasing down a young
daedra noble, a scion of the daedra lords, but
a mortal? Even one who has been the personal
project of a daedra lord, as Charles' tale
seems to imply? This does not make sense. He
should not be capable of maintaining this level
of power separated from the Lord of
Rage. Something is very-" Her eyes snapped
open, her ears backing in shock. Now Misha was
certain the sword was glowing, because for a
moment so were her eyes. "Very wrong."
Yeah, I always start worrying when people's eyes
start glowing too! Awesome effect!
May He bless you and keep you in His grace and love,
Charles Matthias
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