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Shadows in the Dark
The party had four people: Daria Storm, a Scion of Dareos Nyx (Scions being people who has an echo of memories and personality of an ancient hero taken out of death instilled in them in infancy), Alastair Brooks the battle cleric, Everetta Demure the countermage, and Dan Calder, Boatswain on the Evening Star. A fairly motley group.
The four traveled by boat far to the west, heading to the blasted beaches which supposedly border on the Coral Desert, the place that seems to defy placement on maps or any similar simple locating. On the way there, Daria starts having nightmares. Visions. Much akin to her Scion visions, but she knows that they aren't Dareos Nyx's memories, they're from somewhere else. Flashes of death and destruction, war spreading across a continent. Blood and bone. And always, approaching on the horizon, a wake of smoke and fire.
They make the trip without any trouble, and arrive at this wasteland beach. The four, equipped with a whole plethora of standard adventurer's and explorer's gear, set out, starting in the afternoon, to seek the Coral Desert. After half a dozen hours traveling...nothing. They saw a vulture, at one point. That was about it. Just empty white-yellow sand, dune after dune after dune, sweeping to the horizon. Night falls and they set up camp, with a regular watch prepared. The moon is full, and it's not too difficult to see.
Alastair has first watch. Two hour pass uneventfully. Daria has second watch. Partway through her shift, another of these nightmare visions hits her, much the same as the others: blood, bone, murder, trailing a wake of smoke and fire. She wakes up in a sweat, as the visions seem to have made her lose consciousness.
The first thing she notices is that it is darker than it was when her watch started. A lot darker. Which is weird, because it was already completely night.
There's no moon. And the stars are dim, much dimmer than they should be. It takes her a moment longer to realize that one reason things seem so much much darker...is that the sand is all black, as far out as she can see. She wakes the rest of the party.
They respond fairly well (also with a lot of "...Oh ****." out of character). They get a bullseye lantern lit, to see. It seems to put out only about half as much light as it should. But it's better than nothing.
At this point, Daria spots a flicker of movement, right on the edge of the light. They look, but can't see anything.
Not knowing what else to do, they set out. They take a pole, set a lit lantern hanging from it, and set it in the sand at their campsite, to find their way back. They start moving through this empty black sand desert. More tiny flashes of movement keep being spotted by all of them on the edges of what they can see. Daria has a very strong feeling of being watched.
They spot something white sticking out of the sand a ways ahead, and move to it. It looks like an old dead tree at first, but they realize it seems to be made of bone as they approach. They look it over for a few moments, trying to figure out what the hell it is.
Then Calder touches it, and a drop of blood wells from a finger cut by sharp bone.
He is suddenly overwhelmed by a vision. For a long long moment, he IS somebody else. A young child, hiding in the basement, as her family told her to, her mother still upstairs. Noises. Wood splintering. A scream. A sickening crunch. The child flinches as a warm drop of liquid strikes her forehead. Reaching a hand to it and pulling away, she finds blood. Red drops are pooling on the ceiling above. She is crying, and panicked. (the player is also freaking out.) Heat. Crackling. The wooden ceiling cracks, and after a minute, collapses, half crushing the child under broken wood and rubble. Her vision slowly fades as the fire consumes the ruins of her home and her along with it.
And Dan Calder sits bolt upright in the black sand in front of the bone tree. He is fine. Physically, anyway. Everetta tries to feel for magic inside the tree, touching it, and the bone cuts her hand.
She is upstairs, in her home. She's told her young daughter to hide in the basement. He is here. With his armies. And there's nothing they can do to stop him, they're just a small town. As she tries to figure out what to do, the noises grow outside, and her door smashes inward, splintering, a ten foot tall humanoid construct built fully out of human bones storming inside. She screams. It grabs her by the head with one hand, slamming her to the wooden floor, her skull giving way with a sickening crunch she can feel.
Everetta wakes up. For the others, they simply see their friends fall for a moment, then sit up, panicking, if not screaming. They explain what they have seen, and deliberate for a time. They chip a piece off the tree and keep it without touching it. Everetta felt magic in the tree, but not arcane magic she could dispel. More divine. Alastair opens his eyes to the spirit world, and feels for souls and divine energy. The desert is...empty. When people die, they leave behind some semblance of divine energy, even when their souls pass on to Death properly. But there is nothing here. Just a horrid emptiness. And there is divine magic of some kind bound into the tree.
At this point, Alastair makes a decision. He gathers his energy, and slams his palm into the tree, throwing a spirit shock through into it. He feels the vast, nearly overwhelming fear and sorrow of dead souls sealed inside. Four souls are ripped free of the bone structure, and sent properly on to Death. Alastair's hand is cut by the bone of the tree, but he has no vision like the others: the bone is empty of souls.
They continue on. Flickers of movement still seem to follow them, right on the edges of their vision. They find another half buried skeleton, strange large bone growths akin to coral beginning to spread through the body, rooted partway into the black sand. Calder digs away at the sand where the bone goes into it, trying to see more of the skeleton and the growth. He discovers that this bone growth seems almost to have taken root in the black sand, spreading broader roots just under the surface. Though he tried to avoid touching the bone or being too close when he started digging, the bone extends out small growing roots in all directions, and he scratches one with his palm.
He is standing on a chair, looking up out of the window, far into the distance. He can see it, there on the horizon. A wake of smoke and fire. They are coming. He kicks the chair out from under his feet, and the noose pulls taught around his neck, which breaks with a clean snap he can feel in his spine, and Dan Calder wakes up back in the Coral Desert. Alastair has one more spirit shock, but he saves it.
They realize at that point that Daria is no longer with them. She was walking in the back of the group, and has vanished. They start shouting for her. I leave them to stew in their panic and pull Cas aside for a bit. As they moved along the dunes, a bone somewhere under the sand shifted on a small ridge, and she rolled into a small gully between two dunes. On the way down, her arm is cut, pretty badly, on a bone sticking out of the side of the sand.
She is pressing against her door, trying to hold it closed. Her husband is battering at the outside. He died ten years ago, but he's trying to break down the door. Not just trying. She loses her hold, and the door flies open, batting her back, stumbling, a bruise on her face. The rotting body of her husband, half decomposed, steps into the room, teeth visible in a horrid grin through rotting lips, and grabs her as she turns to run. Its arms twist with an unnatural strength. And twist. Pressure. Pain. She feels her neck crunch, and break, as he wrenches it around.
Daria wakes in the Coral Desert. The injury to her arm is fairly bad. Not bad enough to kill or cripple, but it's a gash of not insignificant depth, and probably about five inches long. She hears the rest of the group, panicked, calling for her, and she follows their voices back until she finds them. Alastair seals the wound on her arm with a touch of magic, as he has with the other spot injuries the group has suffered. They move on, still with a feeling of being watched.
They find...something. It's bones, but it's not a human skeleton. At least, it's not one human skeleton. It looks almost like a ribcage, but the spine continues further than it should, curving down into the sand on both sides, whatever else it might be buried in the sand. Calder steps up, and willingly cuts his hand on the bone, hoping to find some understanding of how to fight back against the Fallen One within the visions.
A small child is in the street, running. She turns over her shoulder to see the thing coming at her. It looks almost serpentine, winding as it moves, only five or six feet off the ground, but nearly a hundred feet long. Spines, attached end to end, still with ribcages, maybe two or three dozen of them, hook together into a horrifying bone abomination. Skeletal arms are still attached to the spines, ending in hands with fingers sharpened to jagged points, scraps of flesh of her friends and family in the town, trampled and torn by the monstrosity are still hanging and dragging bloody along the fingers and the ground. The bone centipede runs her down, she falls, and it catches her, jagged bone fingers ripping her to pieces.
Calder wakes. The group is getting demoralized in their goal, not to mention simply panicked and stressed to an enormous degree by their situation. In all these visions, they have seen no real fight back against the Fallen One's armies, and worry they may be impossible to fight.
Then they make a disturbing discovery. The small cuts they received on the bones seem to have...scarred. Or left marks. They feel the small white lines where the cuts where to find them hard. Like bone.
They panic, fast. Smart of them. Alastair immediately prepares and carries out small exploratory and experimental surgery on Calder's hand, and finds two slivers of bone left where the cuts where, which seemed to be growing deeper into the flesh. He carries out similar procedures to get all such small bone slivers out safely from the small cuts, before they turn to Daria.
There is a five inch line of thin white bone visible on the surface of her skin on her arm. On the spot, Alastair carries out a horrifically painful surgery, opening up a huge portion of Daria's arm, parting skin, flesh, muscle, and cutting out the curling tendrils of bone beginning to grow down into her body. The process takes some time. But, in the end, the surgery is a success. As far as he can tell (and he turns out correct), Alastair has removed the full growing bone spur from her arm. It's about five-six inches long, and almost an inch deep, thin. They cover it, and keep it. Alastair repairs her arm, and weaves everything back together with magic, but she'll have a scar.
The group moves on. They've resolved to avoid the bone, and do, though they pass a number more skeletons, in various stages of coral growth. They seem to be finding more and more of them. Eventually they find a large dune, and make their way up the side. They reach the ridge to find that it is roughly circular, around a central pit. The dune slopes down, fairly sharply, to a basin, about a hundred feet across. There are more bones here than anywhere else. Not solidly covering the ground or anything, but there are a lot. And, in the very center of the basin, is a white obelisk. It stands about forty feet, and is covered in curling runic markings.
As the four of them reach the ridge, something large in the sand is off balanced by their motion, and shifts. All four of them are hurled off balance, rolling down the side of the dune into the basin. All four of them receive at least one cut from bone on the way down, Everetta getting a fairly nasty gash on the back of her shoulder.
It is the capital city. One of the last bastions against his armies. A small force of guards stands just inside the gates, spears readied, all terrified. He is outside. They know he is. The fires have spread, burning much of what is outside the capital's walls. The enormous wood and metal gates rock with an echoing blow. And a second. The guards prepare for what comes, but none are truly ready. The gate explodes inward. A pair of golems built of bone of all kinds, standing nearly thirty feet tall, break and smash through the gate, ripping their way inside. Small constructs, the size of dogs, all built of bone, bound in incredibly quickly, teeth bared in snarls as they weave in between the legs of the golems.
And between the golems is a silhouette, black against the raging fires outside the gate. It looks simply human, and steps calmly over the threshold, a wake of smoke and fire trailing from his steps.
Calder feels a massive wooden splinter of the door sink into the gut of one of the guards, and he flies back, slamming into stone. The hounds close. Daria lives the death of another guard as the bone hounds mob him. The guard strikes at one of them, the spear connecting and snapping through thin bone, and the construct falls aside with a limp, stumbling, but more of them whip past and leap, bringing the guard down with flashing red-stained teeth. One of the enormous golems lifts a third guard, Alastair living through him, and crushes the man with a simple closing of its fist, tossing the rags of the body aside. One guard backs away, doing her best to fend off dogs with her spear. Everetta lives through her, as the dogs suddenly peel off, going for other guards and targets, and she looks up to see Him.
Konstantin's hand closes around her throat. Despite the fires raging all around, the sight of his eyes makes her shiver, freezing cold. There is no determination, no anger in his eyes. He looks...almost casual. And with a single smooth motion, violently parts the guard's soul and body, and kneels. Clutching the screaming soul of the guard in one hand, he draws the fingers of his other hand across the stone courtyard ground, leaving black marks in the rock, etching a single rune. As the shape is drawn closed, the soul is pulled into it, bound, watching from the stone as her city begins to burn around her...
All four wake in the central basin of the Coral Desert, not more than fifty feet from the obelisk. They lay a moment, recovering. As they gather themselves, Everetta realizes the ground under her is not completely sand, but there is something beneath it. Brushing a little away, she finds stone. Courtyard stone. And a small black rune etched into it.
The four stand and move to the obelisk, cautiously. Each of its four faces are covered in coiling runes, reaching to its full forty foot height. The base is broad. They are unsure from the sight of it whether it is rock or bone, as it does not appear to be grown like the other bone coral they have seen, but it does look about the same color. Everetta notes that the runes on the obelisk are very similar to the one etched into the courtyard: soul binding.
She touches the obelisk.
And nothing happens. The consistency of the surface feels like bone, but it is made, not grown. Ground smooth. No sharp edges, no cut, no blood, no vision. She can feel the same magic within it as was within the tree, but stronger. Incredibly strong. She takes a notebook and begins copying down the marks of the obelisk.
Alastair feels the stone, and opens his eyes into the spirit world, feeling his way out with his sight into the obelisk.
And he feels them.
He feels their fear. He feels their sorrow. He feels their anger. He feels their dread.
He has opened himself to feel, and so he feels. He feels the emotions of a hundred thousand dead, bound for hundreds of years into this bone column.
Alastair falls back, crying out. The emotions of a hundred thousand, of families, loved ones, all murdered, and all bound with no proper rest. He curls on the ground for a time, mental state blasted into utter inaction, crying into the sand.
Calder takes his knife and saws a small ways into the side of the obelisk. It is bone, and so he manages to cut a small ridge into the side of the structure.
Then, the takes his thumb, and presses it to the point until it breaks skin. Perhaps still hoping, still hunting for truth, but he has sought too deep.
As a drop of red drips out of his thumb, one hundred thousand souls, one hundred thousand DEATHS, flood Calder's mind.
He lives them.
He lives each and every one of them.
And Dan Calder, convulsing in the black sand of the Coral Desert, dies, one hundred thousand times.
It is at just this moment that Daria first touches the obelisk. She simply lays a hand on it, as others had done.
And the Scion's mark on her forehead flares blinding white. The channel opened in her in her infancy opens wide, as the souls of a hundred thousand weaken the lines between the living and the dead. And through those weakened walls a soul steps out of Death.
And an echo of Konstantin Tremaine steps into the body of Daria Storm, visions of blood and bone, and a wake of smoke and fire filling her mind.
He overwhelms her immediately. Daria's body, now simply a vessel for an echo of the Fallen One, turns and extends her arms. Bones begin to rise from the sand, ripping through her flesh, latching and building. A second cage of rib-like bone closes around her torso, enormous curving stretches extending the reach of her arms and legs. Massive jagged arcs of bent bones rip into the flesh of her palms and knuckles and fingers, stretching into massive claws, until Daria Storm, her eyes cold and calm, stands at ten feet, a framework, a second skeleton of bone forms a body and armor for her small natural form.
Calder and Alastair manage to get to their feet. Everetta backs away with them, as several skeletons, and two bone-construct hounds, rise out of the sand behind them.
They start thinking fast. Calder smashes two bottles of lantern oil, spreading an arc behind them, and then lights it, raising a wall of fire between them and the simpler skeletons. The human forms advance, but burn and half crumble in the flame, easily finished by Calder's spear, as a hound runs towards Everetta. With a blast of fire, she smashes the constructs shoulder apart, and it collapses into the sand and stone, crumbling. The last hound leaps for Alastair, and he meets it cleanly between the jaws with his short sword, smashing the hound into fragments which tumble to the ground around him.
And the massive bone golem that was Daria Storm steps closer. Alastair pulls Everetta and Calder in, calling up his magic to form a Sanctuary. A Pilgrimage. They can escape, they can flee, protected by the divine.
As they begin to move away, Konstantin's claw closes over their sphere of protection, and with a simple push and force of will, it shatters, the break cutting all the way into Alastair's soul, severing his protections, his sanctuary broken.
She swings a claw at Alastair. It would kill him. It would connect cleanly into his chest and rend him wide open. But the monster hesitates. For just a fraction of a second, Daria Storm holds back the soul of Konstantin, and the claw barely nicks Alastair. His eyes, still open to the spirit realm, see into her body for just an instant as contact is made. Daria is still in there, there is no question. But what can they do? Alastair's last spirit shock would destroy Daria's soul as well.
And a thought flicks into Alastairs mind.
Calder runs distraction. Pouring another bottle of oil over the head of his harpoon, he lights it, and hurls the flaming spear into Konstantin's chest. It barely even takes a step back, before approaching for Calder, who stumbles back, barely holding on to consciousness after the trauma of the deaths he lived through.
But it's enough time.
Alastair dives past Konstantin, pulling together everything in him, magic, mind, body, and soul, and pouring it into his magic, a wave of severing divine energy gathers, and he slams his palm into the side of the obelisk, and pushes with power beyond anything he has ever attempted. And pushes, channeling, pouring out the last of his magic, beginning to tear up his very soul to empower the spell.
Everetta, only a second behind, places her hands over his shoulders, pouring the entirety of her own magic into him, flooding her power through him so he can channel it forward.
And the spell breaks.
Alastair's hand slams an inch forward, a handprint broken into the side of the column, suffused with cracks. One long crack makes its way up to the very peak of the pillar.
One hundred thousand souls scream free from the runes that bound them for centuries. Alastair collapses, conscious and alive. He would have ripped out his soul to finish the spell if Everetta hadn't poured her magic in to support him. The link to Death is severed, and the echo of Konstantin silenced, an unconscious Daria falls as bones scatter away from her. A massive half-cauterized wound crosses her stomach, and her entire body is striped in deep slashes from where bone ripped into her body. She will die of blood loss within a minute.
Everetta manages to rise and make it to her, using the last and simplest of her magic to hold Daria in stasis. Alastair, barely conscious, drags himself to her side. He empties a final spark of magic into Daria, enough to seal wounds, although not enough to stop scars, and he collapses, unconscious. Everetta and Calder collapse back into the sand, their vision fades to black.
Alastair, Daria, Everetta, and Calder wake outside of their tent, on the white sands of the wasteland beach where they set it. The sun is rising. All are torn, beaten, and exhausted. Alastair and Calder have not, and never will, fully recover from what they experienced through the obelisk. Daria's torso is mapped with scars, and she will wear gloves from that day on to cover the slashes that were opened all across her hands. By the time Everetta realizes bone coral is growing in the gash on the back of her shoulder, it will have already reached bone. There is nothing Alastair, or anybody else, can do to remove it, and it doesn't seem to have stopped growing.
But the four are alive. And they return with a notebook of soul-binding runes, and at least a little bit more knowledge of what they are facing.
And so Daria Storm, Alastair Brooks, Everetta Demure, and Dan Calder rise with the sun, and make their way back to their ship, to return to Bantora, and to confront the Fallen One once again.