Pariah of Wolves

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]There was no telling any length of passed time from the moment he fell unconscious at the hands of Borja Sennex to when Seroth awoke next. He slept, in a dream fugue dredged up by his mind’s need to cope with the supreme agony of overseeing a ruined body. Time was empty, fathomless cosmic eternity. Just a long black he drifted through, aware yet unaware, watching for flickers of white smoke that broke against invisible peaks carved in the outlines of familiar faces.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Eventually he woke. His eyes refused to work. Seroth tried blinking, plotting to ignore the voracious stiffness infecting his throat and chest. Breathing still hurt, though there was an impression he was drawing in air from against some shallow culvert. His tongue dripped with something sour, metallic. He hadn’t had a drink to arrest his thirst and parched esophagus for perhaps hours on end. Bodily need for moisture nourishment alerted his mind, which alerted his conscious, which slowly rose him up from a water cradle of nothingness and sleep. With relative gentleness, he jinked his right wrist; no tying restraint. Thank the Gods, as he needed to feel about. It was so pitch dark, he couldn’t tell if he’d opened his eyes or not. He went to reach for his face… then cussed as the wrist banged across a hard, steely plate less than a foot or so away from his waist.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What…?” He sputtered. Blood still caked his lips and mouth in long, coagulated crusts.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Tentatively, he felt about. His fingers pressed up against that metal wall, feeling along the washed, burnished surface that was textured with subtle, whorled striations indicating origin in a factory sheet-stamping mill. The plate was about as wide as his shoulders, with a few inches of give either side and connecting to further plating that told Seroth he was boxed within a solid container. There was a slight seam where two lengths of plate were meant to connect, giving slightly when the lad pressed his fingers up for a push. The lad stilled himself, listening. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nothing. Whatever was outside his compressed cell gave no hint of noise. But the silence was unsettling. Seroth had spent enough time in empty, freezing ship berths and dripping, swamped cavern holes to know the differences of quiet. This noiselessness felt too close. He became aware he could hear pounding swirls of rushing blood ramming upwards against his frontal lobe, the laboured, reluctant beats manufactured by his heart, even the must subtlest scrape of palm-skin against the steel wall at his back and the long bar welded in by his arm and shoulder. The quiet had closed inward. It may have been sound dampeners shielding and lacing his prison with deadening waves, but that didn’t negate his sense of space.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth tried reaching over his chest. It stirred a light twist in his backbone. Deadened nerves suddenly came awake with such rage that the pain washing over the lad nearly caused him to pass out a second time. He couldn’t hide the throaty cry he loosed, bellowing out his agonies. Seroth pushed, forcing his arm to wrench over. There was a suspicion but he couldn’t lift the broken remnants of his left hand up to feel for it. In the wretchedly tight space, he held out his trembling fingers, scrabbling them along the opposite box-seam. Finger-tips scrolled against drilled lid-brackets wedged with slicks of acrid grease. His hand fell away, collapsing back to his side, as Seroth braced himself for the mounting horror shuddering through his faculties.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A length of metallic box that had him entrapped with minimal space. A sixth-sense impression of weight enclosing and pressing in on him from virtually ever angle. Lid hinges, bolted and stamped to hold in the plate-wall in front of his face. Seroth swallowed back dry spit and rested his head back against cold steel, sighing direly. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He was buried alive.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was Stenwulf’s parting gift. The Mutt had suffered under near-suffocating conditions in the worst of Contruum’s many raised prisons since the failed uprising funded by Republic coffers. Greyram; ill-lit cell blocks with mold slowly eating its way through the defective concrete, copper pipes bursting every other day, prisoners waking up with snake-rats gnawing at their feet, food not fit for even animals served on rusty trays that infected the slop with slivers of tin. Stenwulf came away from that hell of frothing torment, but blamed Seroth for sending him there. The lad wondered for a moment at the amount of responsibility he was culpable in acknowledging, what he’d caused in that man’s suffering. Of course, he recalled the dead lying in the street, hosed down by walls of blistering las-fire and stubber bolts. Suddenly, the lad didn’t feel so sympathetic for a man with little compulsion to strangle even babes if they were making too much noise.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The man had thought this a fair parting gift. Taking his worst foe, the boy who’d defeated him, laid waste to his mercenary outfit, slayed his corrupt taskmaster, and sticking him in a lightless space slowly filling with emissions of CO2 generated by his own breathing. Stuck in a cold miasma with little escape. Stenwulf wanted the boy wide awake and suffering through pitched fits of agony and soulful despair. How far was he buried down? Six feet? Twelve? A single foot? Seroth felt his imagination focusing on a generated image of Stenwulf’s shaggy face sneering down at him, features cast in a resinous glow of hellfire that dripped off his whiskers and beard like volatile sap. He smelled sick breath, felt crushing hands squeeze around his throat until he swore the blood pressure would pop his eyeballs. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth drew in a brief hiss of breath, braced his nerves for the coming pain, and began wriggling his right hand down. His captors, probably at Sennex’s directive, had redressed him in his old, grey undershoot. It was pocked with small moth-holes, seeing better days. Seroth reached and gripped at the waist-line hemming. Inch by inch, he tugged up his shirting until he could finally snag the cloth over his face and behind his skull. Lifting his neck for the effort brought judders of ache that pierced even his blood. Yet, he managed the effect: his face was covered with a makeshift filter-mask.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth didn’t want to be inhaling in dirt when he broke up out of his steel coffin.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The casket itself would never give under any battery. His physical ability was extremely lamed, hampered by exhaustion, injury, a ravenous thirst mounting in the back of his throat. There weren’t many tales of broken cripples escaping from the grave. But he recalled with exactingly clarity those fingers of mental construct ravaging through his memory. How Sennex pilfered his mind like it was little more than an old, dust-ridden tomb, searching for a hint written on the stone walls. He had the names of his friends. The Lord High Inquisitor was knowledgeable that out there, somewhere, laid the Levantine worlds and on one of them sat the last personal affects of Shev Rayner. He had seen his wife, Rosa, in filtered visions. With psychopaths like Stenwulf, Harcress, and Cassat as his warband, there was little doubt he felt any regret or hesitancy concerning violence.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He reached, managed to unbuckle his belt harness, wrapped the leather around his right knuckles one knot at a time, and began to thud his right fist up against the side of the casket. The latch had to give. Despite the pounds of earth laid overtop, the grave was still freshly dug. Dirt required a bit of age and stillness to take on anything close to compact and solid. Seroth prayed it was only loose top-soil burying him in. What he would do, exactly, when he managed to pry off the casket-lid was still a working solution his faculties were in a fever to solve. First, the latch. There was a gamble of assumed behavior: Seroth had to believe in Stenwulf’s capacity for sadism. Nothing would bring the Mutt greater satisfaction in his handiwork than knowing that the lad would try and, presumably, fail to escape.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dull echoes of leathered, knuckled up fingers bashing against the plate-steel resounded in the closed space. Motion was an effort through irritation that glittered shards of torture behind the soft of his eyes. Seroth stopped himself from counting the seconds. He just softly breathed, bunched the still working muscle in his shoulder and bicep, and then jacked his fist up as hard as could be managed against the lid seam. There was a sound of tinkling, scraping metal on metal. Dirt stirred into the coffin, falling like dry grains. Seroth struck up again. Again. Again. Most coffins were manufactured for cost-efficiency: cheap hinges, cheap latches, cheap locks. The lad clamped down on his tongue as he felt his knuckles beginning to scrape and bleed. Again. He struck again. The coffin jarred from the heave. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Again. As many blows as necessary, Seroth murmured to himself in mental conversation. Fear was the mind-killer. Fright gave the God of Death her power and thus control of a mortal soul that was too scared to react. The Levantines did not have the luxury to afford him time to be fearful. Not free space, not Thurion, Judah, Kala’ndryl, Turin, Illias… Not Kida, Jax, Nohemi,… Not Thorvald, not… Not Rosa… Not Rosa, who shared his name, knew his soul, and claimed his body. The blackness subsided to a small vision of sun tickling through long, golden locks, brown eyes looking over to stare his way. Seroth grunted, bludgeoning his hand against the seam harder yet. Muscle already oozing with fatigue toxins screamed at the abuse. The leather over his hand was beginning to wear and there was no count for how many times he’d struck against the same time.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The metal plane was beginning to slowly dent, staining with washing strokes of blood and skin tissue. The lad was loosing a savage groan with every strike. He could hear the gods-damned lock outside the coffin-hatch jingling with annoying, torturous clinks. But… there was further and further give showing every time the hatch snapped upward to strain against the catch trying to hold it down against the funerary box. Loose earth was beginning to pile in growing heaps over and against his thigh. However, air was becoming increasingly warm as Seroth sensed some shallowness starting to make his breathing ache more and more as he tried to draw on oxygen that simply wasn’t there. His body would sooner give out than the coffin.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…Finally, a cracking ping of aggravated alloys twisting into a note of wailing metal as it snapped under the constant, assaulting strain. The lad slowed, pausing to gingerly test against the coffin hatch. An ill move now would drown him in soil before he had a chance to properly brace and ready to attempt a long, breathless climb. Six feet. Long tradition dictated burying a casket at six feet. If he didn’t escape now, Seroth would die of simple suffocation and undergo a process of skeletonization. Bones, flakes of loose, dead skin, a ratty shirt and holed pants, and signs of shocking trauma, stuck in a wretched pose.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He’d be flogged by the press of loose topsoil the moment he fully wedged open the industrial burial-crate. It would not be so simple as to just pump his single good arm and virtually swim up against the fall of crushing, entombing earth. If his faculties still held any degree of ability to properly anticipate, this leg of escape would be what made or damned him to an agony of screaming death, shut up by dirt clogging his mouth, filling his nose and drowning out the light in his eyes. Somehow, he would have to press his torso up, dig with the one hand, and pray the resulting misery inflicted by Stenwulf’s injuries wouldn’t stunt his chances.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lid flung over wide. Earth piled in, pressing a wet weight down across his face. As the soil cascaded down, Seroth gritted his teeth and kept from biting through his tongue as he wrenched himself up into a sitting position and began shoveling dirt aside with his good arm. There was no sound. No sensation of light against is eyelids. Everything was too moist and compact like the grip of giant hands, molded in by sweaty palms trying to encapsulate and suffocate him in the earthy blackness. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Long minutes passed. The lad pushed himself upward against the loose drag handful by handful. He let his mind fall into a habit of old mental exercises, calming his bodily functions. His lungs began to ache less. Blood filtered oxygen with increased proficiency, if only temporarily. Seroth commanded the nerves registering fatigue in his muscle-tissue to ignore the ache. Climb. Climb![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]As before, time blacked out into an oily cradle of embryonic thought drifting in haphazard, purposeless directions. Instinct was his flesh’s commander. Seroth dug and dug, ploughing through pains that came viciously close to wrenching him out of consciousness. His back couldn’t take it, neither his thrice-broken left arm. Suddenly, the lad thought he could smell the Gueda No. 66 perfume Rosa loved. She always spritzed it on her neck on special occasions. Dry, dusty, grainy, with an underlying sweetness so cloying, Tempting. She wore it every occasion they made love. Seroth had never felt a stronger urge to simply run home. …Then his hand stopped clutching at bunched earth. His touch was failingly against empty air, scrabbling for more purchase. Surface! [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth bent his wrist in and clutched at top-side earth, sloughing as much earth and rocky detritus aside as his fingers could swipe away. The material he touched at was almost too fine, as if the dirt had transitioned into a fine comb of silt that washed through his reach like ash. With a push, he began wrenching up. A muddied crown of hair-mop breached before Seroth managed to pull up his nose and mouth free. Despite the pressing jagged of many broken rib-shards painfully impressing against his lungs, aided by the pressure of earth, Seroth gasped in air, coughing raggedly. He spat out whatever was trying to well on his tongue. Blood. Grip by clutch, he pulled himself up from the rapidly closing tunnel utilized by his body’s space. Soon, he was lying against a bed of sand-ash that was cool against his cheek, pushing on his wrist to roll over and offer his screaming, mutilated spine some respite.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]For a very long time, he simply laid in another chamber of absolute dark, half at rest and half delirious from effort. As silence grew around the notes of his halting breaths, the lad became aware of a distant, plastic click. It ticked over every few seconds. Twelve, he managed to count, though with his head beating as hard as it was, the count may have been in error. Another wondered more pertinently: just where had he dug himself out to? Where was the lad now?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]As he lied prostrate, one arm dangling in odd, unnatural angles and the other crossed over a long, bruised, almost bleeding welt across his stomach, Seroth listened to the tick. Slowly, his eyes embraced the sightless gloom until faint tones of very gentle ambience began to hint at structural details. He had dug up into some manner of vaulted ante-chamber, though it suggested great spaces that spanned upward and out of even the soft glows of distant, immaterial light. Nearby was a tall arcade of vast walling bulbous with many oriel nests, laid arches and crumbling spandrels, hanging corbels, arranged ribs, and drum curls hinting the chamber was a wide-floored, massive dome. Sneezing dust and earth particles out of his nose, he could finally scent an overpowering reek of ancient mould. There was still something oppressive about the atmosphere. Seroth felt the air was too stale, too close and clingy on his skin. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Somewhere to his left, the ticking had worked itself into a constant staccato pattern. If Stenwulf had planted ordnance to kill the lad if he managed to surface, Seroth was too weak and uncaring to be bothered if he was blown and shredded to pieces. The staccato rose into a long buzz, and then stopped. Close to true quiet descended upon the vault chamber. Finally, after interminable seconds, something hummed a gargle of electronic noises before hissing into empty audio. A voice tinged with white-noise muffle began speaking.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I rigged up a liddle somethin’,” Said Stenwulf. “Jus’ on the incase, somehow, yuu managed t’make a crawl outta that box I planted ya in. Liddle heat sensah! ‘Ttached to a recordin’. Iffen you’re hearin’ this, boy, then ya tripped off its sensah paddle. Congradulazions~ I ain’t evah heard of no one managin’ to make a casket-escape wid a lame fethin’ arm and no back! Ya feelin’ accomplished~? Ya miserable bastid~?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shut up, Sten…” Seroth grunted hoarsely at the recording.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Y’know, gotta hand it to the Sith,” The message played on. “More o’ less, they’ve fethin’ rebuilt this little shiddy mud-arsehole worl’ tyme and tyme agin. An’ they’ve found liddle ways to build in secrets~ There’s this place, roight? Called the ‘Dark Temple’. …Gotta admit, piss poor namin’ devices. Howevah, it’s one of their most… I guess you moight say, ‘sacred’ places. Lotta buried dead here, lotta old kings and lords and ladies and the loike. Fethin’ haunted though, holy shid. No idea of the spooks I got tryin’ ta drag yo’ half-dead ass along. However, ‘fore y’git the wrong idea… S’not the temple you’re in. Uh-uh. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“S’what’s below it that interested me. See… Good ol’ Sennex told me that, fer centuries, may’ap thousands uv years, there’s been this place where the real damned of the Empire were tossed inta. Back inna day when there was this somethink Sennex called a ‘Cold War’, Sith were dealin’ with a lotta tumult. T’deal wid it, they dug out a place where dey could toss off any wretched bastids thinkin’ ‘bout given ‘em the sharp end, savvy? Dug it down real, real deep… Roight into ‘is cloud of… Of badness, y’moight say.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad was managing to prop himself up on the single elbow and dragging himself bodily over to where he found a small heat-wand attached to an upended micro-rotisserie. Lying beside it, in a nestle of cool ash, was the digi-‘corder, speaking in its one-sided conversation. Seroth felt tempted to stick his thumb through the speaker-bud, break the fragile circuitry. Stenwulf’s voice was aggravating every sickness coming over him as tiredness overwhelmed his state.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They call it ‘Jurgoran Prison’. Forgotten liddle shidhole where the cruel dump out their liddle embarrassments~ Still inhabited, too, did I forget ta menshun? Oh yeah~ Ain’t abandoned, Seydon! Regular fethin’ nuthouse down in there, where da loight nevah shines, and nakid’ things rustle ‘round. Prisners… Gangs… Buncha local freaks lookin’ out for the fresh meat~ Ah wondah when they’ll find you, boy. Ah wondah what’ll happen~ Don’t know how you can git out now. Local architecthah’s a maze, dun make no sense, half a prizen and half a mausoleum! [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But it’s moi gift – to you. Seydon. Ya left me to rot an’ die at Greyram. Well I found a worser place than that. Jurgoran makes all the nightmares o’ Greyram look like a liddle pale, by comparisen~ It’s moi turn now. Free air, free space. Do wha’ I want~ Go where I want~ …I owed you this for a long time, Seydon. I’d tell ya to go to hell – [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yer already there~”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Time swam on again. When Seroth found his attention returning from a half-asleep void of grey, sluicing matter, it was entirely possible he’d slept on for a full day rotation. The thirst in his throat hadn’t eased. He hadn’t had a proper sip of any wetness or moisture and his body was taking note. A headache with enough pulsating anger in the center of his brain felt like someone was taking a tenderizer-hammer and beating over cells, neuron-ganglions, thudding with incessant, ever increasing magnitude. Somewhere, in a vacant hallucination, he swore he could hear Stenwulf’s warped laughter whooping in the broken shadows.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]By the ashen coarseness of the sand pillowing the vault-chamber flooring, smelling like a caked mixture of bone-meal and fire salts, Seroth could guess he’d been buried in a grave room. Bodies thrown to the ground, roasted by some means of combustion, turned from flesh to sludge to ash. The stuff of tainted legacies. Sacrificed to fire, maybe, so that their remains wouldn’t serve as some devourer’s awful meal. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In the dimness, cut against a wall of blue flint sparkling with mica and black obsidian that made night look bright, was a long, singular stairway disappearing upwards on and on. Seroth had managed to clamber over, pushing himself close elbow over hand and elbow again. His limp feet dragged at the toes and knees. All the damaged bone cutting into the tender, compressed skeins of nerve-flesh in his spine rattled at every and any motion. Rotating his neck was apocalyptic agony. His ribs ground against the contours of pitted ash and bone-sand, adding on another layer of pain that made being birthed seem regretful. When the lad reached the stairway at its first, half-crumbled step, Seroth shivered and wrenched his head aside. Acid-bile hosed from his mouth and nose. It was too much to control. Feeling was a scorch of rawness burning in his belly until the lad couldn’t take it. What was vomited up looked awful. The smell was worse.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He steeled himself for the climb. Some portion of needling, dour conscience put a question to his heart: what was the use? His arm was crippled in three places, his back… everywhere. To say nothing of his ribs and damages sustained to his internal workings, dragging them up an endless stair-flight would further foil attempts to let things set and heal. Heal, he thought? There’d be no healing. He could not set the bones on his own. Every surface was a stale, worn rock affair, no lichen growths in sight to try and subsist upon, no herbs, ampoules, pain-killers, nothing that could expedite his body back to full health. The lad figured either dehydration or starvation would find him first, before he could sulk and mope about the condition of his mobility.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]‘Why then?’ Needled that inner voice. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth pressed his hand onto the first step, and began to mount. For every slash, gouge, pang, dolor, or woe of pained misery found scraping over the hard edges, the lad dredged up memory. Rosa Mazhar; dressed in a pearlescent bathing suit made out of water-proofed silks and tiger-seashells, watching horned dolphins cloaked in dagger scales of silver diving by in great schools of hundreds. Arda; a second home of islands and ocean waters, where everything seemed to have a specialized name, time slowed and idled, no one cared much for anything save fun and getting the perfect fish-catch. The Sanctum worlds; bright orbs lying in gravitational anchors, enormous buoys in the void, hidden places with free people. Friends; a hundred smiling or smirking faces, souls he should have come to know a little better, warriors, poets, scholars, lovers, explorers, some who came to them just to hide away. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They were ‘why’. Weakness had betrayed them. Hellions and ghouls, aspects of vicious nightmare under the command of a Lord Inquisitor, were sailing closer for them hour by hour. All for the sake for musty journals with faded, penciled in hand-writing. For Ys. Bloody Ys! Seroth snarled aloud, hauling up another umpteenth steep. His bare hand was frosted in coated, milky dust scraped off the chisel-cut rocks. Grit flecked and collected on his eyelash, stinging when he blinked. Once, he slipped and fell away by sixteen steps before he lashed his hand out and caught himself. More blinkered pain. Another retch of vomit that spilled down the stairway in off-coloured rivulets.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Weakness… His weakness, the lad believed. A hundred poor decisions compounded into a perfect storm of coming doom. Seroth forced himself to pause before the slithering fires of burnout in his arm punished him. Where had it all gone wrong from, he stopped to wonder? Calamity seemed to originate from some point beyond the cold, windy night he first met Guenyvhar Gunn. They hadn’t been wrong, Ajax and he. A conspiracy, a wide plan to commit evil and robbery, was at work. Yet, his imagination stole up a vision of a tendrilled galaxy inter-woven with reddened arterial plot-lines originating somewhere beyond the galactic edge, all crossing into roping events spinning down and down until it found him, alone, in a dungeon prison of immemorial age.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]What was Ys, really? What was Lord Sennex and Ys, if maybe just the tip of something he couldn’t yet perceive? The idea chilled Seroth. He wondered how half of it was just paranoia brought on by pain, and the other just plain over-imagination? Rested, he pressed on, shouldering up every two steps with the reach of his arm. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth spent a time outside of minutes or hours in a tight pocket of ambient darkness, lost to the grave-chamber below, not yet at the top of the stair-well. Motion became rhythmic. Fingers reached and felt for a proper hand hold, digging in with knuckle and palm, pumping the wrist, heaving with the shoulder, hauling up another set of steps. The edging would inevitable catch into his broken ribs. Seroth would scream. His howls echoed with ghostly cadence until they became lost, hollow. Crying out was the only fashion to cope with the pain. He’d never taken up much tutelage on silence nerves and dampening sensation with Force energy. It seemed like a redirection of actual effort taken to operate through pain, not skip around it. Luminous beings. No. Seroth was convinced if they were born to flesh wrapped about a soul, then neither was greater than the other. Another two steps. Another bite of panging sear in his chest and belly, behind the middle of his back. More cries in the dark. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]More wishing Rosa hadn’t married herself off to a damn fool. First Darron Wraith, now him. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Eventually, peering up, he could just make out a very faint impression of white light gently curling over a step-lip at the top-most sectioning of the stairway. Seroth slowly hurtled along. One sectioning of walkway had broken away entirely with a portion of the curled hall-ceiling, opening into a dried, magmatic cavern. Seroth leaned his chin over, peering down. There was no light. But he could sense something like motion. Things screeched and chattered in that primordial space. Eyeless, driven by sonics, sound, taste, touch, fat and pallid things with translucent skin and chitinous scales. Then Seroth did see something with eyes. Humongous, compound, glowing with an inner hellfire light that buzzed up to the opening before teetering away. The lad climbed faster.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Time seemed to catch up with him as he raised himself to the top of the well. After a last grip and pull, Seroth settled half his warped chest up to the step and looked about. There were barrel-vaulted hallways constructed out of some sort of greenish bricking and mortar that looked akin to gritty tar. Pillar capitals were addressed in a carving that was thoroughly gargoyle. Bracken torches were set in clawed-iron sconces bossed with spikes, flickering guttural, red flame. The corridor leading to and fro off the stairway chambered into a sort of nexus room. He could see further pathways leading off into further prescribed sectioning of Jurgoran Prisons maze-like underground. There were no cells in sight. Guess-work hinted the lad was in a sub-basement super-structure. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Condensation dripping through a worn tear in the corridor ceiling to pool in a black puddle slowly seeping away into an unseen slot eroded in the flooring. Water. Seroth felt his thirst return with full vengeance. With speed belying his ruinous state, the lad shifted forward by his arm almost half a meter with every swift pull and grasp. Shaky fingers splashed into the little pool. Seroth brought up his chin and face, and simply sank both in until her was almost submerged past his ears. The water began to drain away; his mouth was gulping in vast intakes. It was dirty, tasted as stale as could be imagined, but it was glacially cold and slaked away the rawness in his mouth and throat. With a hearty gasp, Seroth pressed up, water dripping off his face and whiskers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Liquid. By this singular patch of too-cold water, Seroth might stave off dying by dehydration in time enough to find food. Starvation would catch up in roughly thirty days following any standard twenty-four hour chono-period. Stenwulf mentioned in his gloat details about Jurgoran Prison still being inhabited. Inhabitance hinted at subsistence. There had to be something to eat, somewhere, underground farms, herds of sub-surface creatures domesticated for their protein rich flesh and nutrient-laced skin. Unless, Seroth morbidly considered, the prisoners had devolved to a cannibalistic method to maintain survivability. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad couldn’t help groaning aloud. Save, he immediately regretted it. Ahead weaved a sound that told something close by had been roused by his voice. Seroth craned his eyes up. The brick laid floor beneath him was lightly shivering in rhythmic vibrations.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]What Stenwulf had either failed to mention or intentionally kept from informing his abandoned captive was Jurgoran Prison’s notorious ‘wardens.’ The ancient labyrinth system of separated floors, miles upon miles of tunnels, cell-block pits, and corridors were watched over by a special kin. They patrolled in silence, weeding out souls that had strayed too far from where they were meant to stay housed. It was oft-times bold Sensitives that tried making their escape, trusting on sheer Force power and handy luck to see them through to some possible escape point. Jurgoran’s guardians had been bred out through successive alchemic generations to counter-act and even specifically hunt anyone with a signature too bright in the Force. They would come, plodding step by step, unhurried and wafting creeping airs of true dread and death. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He watched it walk around the corner on heavy trunk-legs ending in three, ichor-black claws as long as his forearm. A meaty torso of wrinkled, scaly flesh rested on a thickset waist, extending out into arms thick as glow-lamp poles, with clawed paws sporting scythe-hooks half a meter in length and gleaming bony-sharpness. Atop was a massive, angular head ending in a wide mouth lanced with tusks and a hundred set razor-teeth and broad, limb-crunching molars. The head swept back into a proud crown of skin and scale wrapped bone, narrowed, white-on-black eyes peering on with perfect nightvision.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No…” Seroth whispered.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Terentatek. Jurgoran’s loyal watchers. Fiends in the dark awaiting on the approached hour of personal doom when someone came venturing where they shouldn’t. Brutish hulks, made in days more ancient than the Republic. The products of mad invention, spawned from forbidden magics and alchemical intent, bred from the blood of a dozen monstrous species into this single, perfected frame. Terentatek were famed for their reputations as Jedi and Sith-killers. They didn’t hold preference. Rumour was they could simply scent someone with Force aptitude and hunt them down, to say nothing of extra-sensory prowess. Broad. Incredibly strong. This one looked down the corridor and saw Seroth laying against the bricked floor. A wet, dirtied, pitiful figure with one arm in odd angles and feet spread out limply behind.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth stared back. The Terentatek gusted a phlegmatic breath and began to saunter his way. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I love you…” He said to someone under his breath…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then the beast paused. It started, as if it heard or sensed something else coming in to approach them. Sure enough, Seroth could hear a rapid beat-set of booted footfalls hurryingly running in from the ahead hall-nexus. Past the Terentatek’s hip, the lad thought he saw a hint of gold eyes and a silver blade flashing high in a kill-guard. The beast turned to face the interloper. A man cried out. Seroth couldn’t make out the fight as the monster kept its back to him and tried to slay something darting and hacking in front of it. A flash: acid-green blood poured and spewed in an arterial blast onto the ceiling. It groaned, roaring, swinging its brawny club-fists and knuckle-swords about. Seroth saw it missed, scouring into the wall, ripping out stone and mortar. It missed again in several thick beats, before another cry. Force power shook the corridor. A ripple wall of concussive telekinesis rammed into the Terentatek. It couldn’t upset it off its feet, but it could temporarily halt it.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was enough pause for whomever was embattled against the creature. On came the intruder, rippling incredible speed, arms hewing with impossible strength, dexterity, that technique he'd seen on occasion before. There was a single shivering slice that took it clean through its waist-line. A second struck up and severed its left arm. He could see knee-high boots backpedaling before stepping forward. The Terentatek seemed to go limp all over, as a sword-point stabbed in through its maw and out the back of its bone-ridge. It fell apart off its waist; the legs kicked out and tumbled backwards. Inhuman gore and blood that stunk like liquid putrification poured onto the brick flooring.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked up. A man in a long coat, head topped with a firm agal, knee-boots and gold wolven-eyes approached him. A bloody, silver-plated sword virtually glowed in the half-light. He knelt, and the lad could smell traces of fine tobacco and a bit of worried sweat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Young wolf,” Said Ajax, softly. “You do not look so well.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No, Ajax…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher pressed a small hypodermic instrument against his neck. He was too exhausted to try protesting. Cool sleep began to tred on the edges of his vision, and Seroth was losing against the slack tide of unconsciousness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rest,” He heard him say. “You are with a friend in this hell.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]He walked through the cradle of nascent stars, looking down through rising pillars of golden smoke laced with a thousand sun-eyed skulls racing up in incorporeal flocks.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He stepped forward and pressed bare feet against a bridge constructed out of mathematics and data-stream information rendered into solid, glass-like matter. His fingers wove against guard-rails hissing with a thousand million whispers gauging him all the secrets behind time and the flow of fate.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]At the bridge’s end, past fog banks writhing with nymph-frames dancing and fornicating amidst the blurred mists, waited a plane of bleached bone. He walked on, across algebraic formulae bathing his feet in ribbons of concentrated equation and solution.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blood seeped up from the porous skeletal plates wherever his footfalls touched. As he strolled, his soles became inky prints strewing crimson and carmine about in his wake. Wherever the blood was left to stagnate, it shivered with aurora until some unfelt heat cooked the wet footprints into lengths of ruby scabs. A wall of cascade lightning swept over him. Overhead up high against a nocturnal space turned a hurricane eye, rippling with the billion billion dead, cavorting, singing, moaning, writhing. Sound was a choir of constant, keening screams.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He came to a tree made from flesh-less arms cemented together with human and alien skulls. From the outstretched bough-limbs hung jittering statuettes. Each was pierced through in a dozen spots by long steel trident-forks, constantly bleeding from their porcelain wounds. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad walked up to look closer. Every statuette shared his face. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Why do you make this always so hard for yourself?” Asked someone.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned and looked at Rosa Mazhar, standing in her gold-white wedding gown, brow wreathed with coral-flowers as sand swept up at her feet from seemingly nowhere. The sound of micro-grains across dry bone-plate skittered a hiss like rain. Behind her rose those gold gas-columns in the far-away sun womb, embryonic star-globs pitching about in ecstatic agony. “What? Rosa…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“She’s has a point you know,” Said Jaxton Ravos, stepping behind the lad, dressed in his days as a Jedi Knight. “Why do you make this such a trial?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t understand…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Don’t understand??” A heavy slap roused a sting across his cheek and jaw. Guenyvhar Gunn, dead and pale with rent wounds across her bared torso, stared down at him disdainfully. “Must we spell it out for you? You lost. You’ve let your weaknesses cloud yourself from reaching out to accept the power’s you’ve always required.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned about, slowly regarding the specters at a time. Quite inexplicably, there was a fourth figure at Rosa’s side. Tall. Hard jawed. Deep-set eyes twinkling with mischief beneath a royal-blue hood, dressed in the finery of a Corellian assassin. The lad started. “Father?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Haven’t they all told you?” He asked. “The adage has been in your lessons since childhood. ‘Trust in the force.’”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad felt himself start. “I… No, I… I don’t understand… What… What do you all want, what do you mean, Rosa? …Rosa, what’s happening, where am I?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where are you?” She asked softly. “Love, where are we? We’re nowhere. You brought us here, so you could listen to what we have to say.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then what do you mean ‘hard for myself?’”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Jaxton gave his back a pitying, friendly slap. It almost bowled him over. “You can’t remember?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A brawny hand twice enlarged over his own swept over his shoulder and conjured a screen of silver particles coalescing into a shivering mirror. Stenwulf. Raising his body high. Bringing him down with a sick crunch across his armoured knee. Seroth felt memory transform the recollection into a hiss of brutal agony in the center of his back.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I think he remembers.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Love, why did you let him do that to you?” Rosa asked. She looked close to crying. “You could have torn him apart, why did you let him do that to you??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ashla…” Seroth breathed, trying to manage the pain and grief. “I… I didn’t have anything left… I couldn’t just give up…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Maybe,” Guen shrugged dismissively, snorting. “Maybe if you were anything like that so-called ‘Jedi Master’ moniker people threw at you, you might have just twitched a thought and pulled that animal to bloody pieces.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No,” Seroth warned. “No, that’s… Knowledge. Defense. That was always the lesson. The Force isn’t a catalyst for attack.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But is that it…” Asked Dathan Gunn from beside Rosa, comforting her in his close hug. “There’s a hundred other fighters like you that don’t believe so. Is it that you believe in that philosophy… Or that you don’t trust yourself?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I always thought it was a lot of things,” Jaxton said. “Doesn’t trust himself and he doesn’t trust in the Force. That hobbles you, what kind of Sensitive doesn’t trust in the powers that invest in him?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I…” Seroth stammered. “I… I don’t know…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh, you do~” Guenyvhar laughed and gave his shoulder a slug. The vibration ran a pang up his hips and shoulders that made breathing especially difficult. “But you won’t tell us. The truth is so ugly inside you, that you think if you voice it, you’ll be turned inside out into an abomination.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It doesn’t matter…” Seroth murmured.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You wouldn’t even tell me…?” Rosa whispered, looking at him from crying against his father’s harness-laden chest. “After what I’ve risked in sharing with you…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s not – “ The lad checked himself, and the rise of frustration beginning to tint his voice.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then what, son?” Dathan Gunn asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Come on. We’ve always said we’re here to listen,” Jaxton hugged his heavy arm around Seroth’s shoulders. “…Not that you, you know, really came around to say much. We’re here now, though.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t need confession.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No, what you need is someone to reach over there and drag out this squirming tidbit so you can finally let it wriggle nakedly about for all to see,” Spat Guen, shaking her head. “Did I mistake you for my son? I’m sure I must have.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What would you know?” Barked Seroth at his mother. “You replaced your conscience with a bank deposit and a cheque balance. You killed father, you tried to kill me, you hid your sins behind a bank account and let credits be the way your conscience decided on a matter. Slavery and murder! You were a monster hunter and then you let false friends turn you into a mercenary whore.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Easy, son…” Dathan murmured.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Alright. Alright, do you all want to know something?” The lad felt his throat fit to burst as bilious sentiments threatened to lunge out. “…I don’t trust it. I can’t find anything worthwhile to trust in the Force. That’s why I shun it, past anything that’s immediately utilitarian.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The four witnesses watched the him turn away, shrugging off Jaxton’s touch. “’Trust in the Force…’ …By that power, I’ve watched an irresponsible wretch of a woman try and conquer her way across the stars. By that power, I’ve listened to an idiot girl-child preach at others about her impeccable ‘balance’ before turning around and helping murderers and rapists raze worlds that won’t bend their knee. By that power, a sociopathic monster ripped innocents apart so he could rouse the attention of an equally amoral son of a queen with his own designs on the galaxy. …I have seen too much of that Power in the eyes of too many murderers. Self-assured bastards, that can do no wrong. That act without conscience or pity, hiding behind sneering creeds[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And I just stand there,” He said. “I stand there and all I do is keep wondering if what I do is right. Do I do good? Am I good? Or am I just like everyone else, using justifications to mask an obvious and terrible truth: I’m just another bastard with a sword and his own agenda. I don’t know. I don’t know. I try my hardest and it never adds up.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“There now,” Seroth looked back at Dathan, Rosa, Guen, Jaxton. “There, that’s the heart of it all. I think the Force is an indiscriminate thing. I’m scared that if I embrace it, I’ll turn into some creature of ego and cruelty. …Though I can’t even tell what sort of man I am…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Weakness,” Rosa declared tonelessly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Indecision,” Jaxton then in turn.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“When you’re not fit to be a warrior,” Dathan began.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How can you expect to be a leader?” Guen finished.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t know…” Seroth breathed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A sword needs a confident hand, love,” Rosa murmured, coming up to stroke his scarred face. “And you feel yourself falter in doubt against even the worst enemies…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her love shivered on the spot, his face screwed up with clenched eyes and a set jaw writhing with some unseen, inner coil of moral anguish. Despair: that the visions of his friends there upon the endless fields of bones and skeletal trees bleeding carmine-ichor from inflicted wounds were just his own insecurities finally given a proper voice. Anger: that he possessed the power and ability to be whatever he wished, but feared the consequence behind such decision. Looking up again, he was suddenly alone with the memory of Rosa. Her starling features looked up into his face with great eyes swarming with no small amount of pity. Winds drifted the hemming of her of her wedding lace and cotton. He thought he could just scent her usual fragrances of careful perfume, over the hideous staleness and iron-sour aromatics of rotten blood that was now slowly coursing in the bone-seams beneath their feet. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then, Rosa changed. Seroth stepped away as light broke up beneath her skin and cracked her flesh like crazed mud under a parching sun. The keening screams from that far away and above hurricane of flittering damn reached his ears in growing, buzzing intensity. Specters of half-shape rose unsteadily from the bone-ground; mangled torsos with clean-sliced ribs poking up from devastating blows, cracked skulls, jawless mouths with tongues wagging, throats speaking in hoarse, roaring gurgles, hands lacking flesh reaching up to hail their brethren dead swirling above in the hurricane clouds. Rosa and her breaking flesh disappeared behind a veil of blackened sand, emitting a pulsating note of song that rang as clear as rain upon silver.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A moment on, the sands whisked away. The screams of the dead and gone silenced themselves. In Rosa’s place stood a taller woman roughly the lad’s own height, dressed in black with long harnesses glittering with shining stakes, throwing knives, lengths of tensile, steely wire bound up tightly in brackets off her hip. Across her shoulder, just like Ajax, she sported a pair of sheathed longswords, hilts bound in jet-leather and capped with spiked pommels. Her face was glacial, sharp as an axe, a pointed nose and thin lips framed by high cheekbones. Those eyes, Seroth thought. Oval and slit, wolven-gold. She walked forward on thin boots, letting a warm breeze hinted with unseen rain stroke at her silver-white hair.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]After a long time simply staring at each other, Seroth spoke in his cracked voice. “…Who are you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…My name is Sayda,” Said she, a Dunaan, a witcher.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I… I don’t know you…” The lad felt his tone stammer unintentionally. “Why are you here…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She shrugged. “Because I must. Because I need to be. Will that do?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I guess it’ll have to…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You’re very pained,” Sayda murmured, pressing a hand to his chest. Seroth came to a blank realization that he was spending the majority of this strange, reaving dream in a completely naked state. “All your life you’ve spent wondering what it means to be a decent sort. I know that agony. Everything’s so grey. You look around and wonder how you’re ever going to get away from being lost all the time.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah…” Seroth nodded, head bowed. A cool, gloved touched reached and stroked across his cheek and temple, messing his dirty hair.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It never gets easier, unfortunately,” Said Sayda. “But that’s the point. The universe is perfect. We’re the ones screwed up. If being good was so easy, it’d be the most natural inclination. It’s not hard to work at being evil.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Thunder like the sound of star’s screaming in boiling heat-death sounded above in the soul-hurricane. The witcher cursed, drawing Seroth closer. “Listen to me. Listen very carefully. To stop a monster’s evil, you need a monster’s strength. A good soul in the shell of a beast. But only if the blood calls. Actions will prove what words cannot. …Have faith, Seydon.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sayda dissolved away in whipping hurdle of black-glass shards that swam around to swarm and lift the lad off his feet. His flesh began to waiver, glowing now almost incorporeally. Below, the ground left him. The infinite landscape of knobbed, crusty bone began a horrifying process of fleshy collapse. The bone fell away, revealing a juddering underworld of fleshy muscle strands, carmine on crimson on blood red, issuing from within a dark light swimming with blank, nihilistic corposants, of aurora that was somehow colourless. Geysers of blood rushed and burst up from the writhing scene, miles wide and even taller.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth tumbled up into the waiting arms of those uncounted ghosts, sucked along into the dance of the dead. Steaks of grey wind and cloud rushed around to cavort and foil his vision. Up and down became relative concepts. Time dissolved into streaks of liquid metal that wove into a quadruple helix, showing off the interwoven relation between the four dimensions. The storm hurtled the lad on. His flesh fell and broke through the endless polymers of forever repeating, incandescent nucleotides of one dimensional lines, two dimensional illustrations, three dimensional bridges of universal DNA, and fourth dimensional espers of enigmatic time. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He fell and fell on. The silver strands soon fell away, opening up a corridor of white-smoke and lightning tunneling him along at breakneck speed. Ahead yawned an open exit that whisked him into a place of blue skies. Below, a verdant world hung still, clouds floating on wide banks, like a kind of translucent skin. Continents propped with forestry, scars of mountain ranges, blemishes of desert and tundra, marked the world below. And above… Great islands of stone and granite…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Towers of steel, ivory, marble, and quartz…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Castles in the sky…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth woke up.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The cell room was stocky but long, the walls tapering upward in hard angles to form a recessed groove about a meter wide, running back until the ceiling hit the back wall. Battery-powered glow-lamps had been stuck with bee-gum into a few spots overlooking the widest cones of the flooring and walls, beaming out semi-constant, soft light that worked to lend a bit of illumination.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth had been laid down onto wide cot-bed, supported by gnarl-wood boards and framing. His mattress were futon-mats stacked two high before covered over with thickened quilts that felt damp against his skin. He had been dressed down to just bare skivvies. Sweat clung to his legs and torso, virtually swamping his brow, cheeks, and throat. It hurt a terrible deal to swallow and motioning his neck left or right seemed like a gamble with further discomfort. The lad laid as still as he could manage, running through a slow breathing exercise. That, too, hurt him. Stenwulf’s augmented blows had punched especially hard into his ribs and Seroth was counting on the fact most of them had probably been broken. Vision flashed of hooked punches, knuckles sheathed in black flexi-steel, capped in augment braces over the fingers, delivering force that could plow his blows cleanly through ferrocrete without stopping.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Monstrous. Seroth sighed, feeling his heart-beat calming enough to settle into a half-meditative haze. Again, there was no telling for how long he’d laid in the grip of that vision. Rosa. Jaxton. His parents. That… That woman he didn’t know but did. Their confessional on that endless plateau of human bone and structures constructed of rotten ivory, bleeding like wounded statues. It had to have been an internalized criticism of his own worries. What he had said were personal truths and details of his convictions he’d never spoken aloud. Cathartic, in its own right, but still mystifying. The visions seen felt like a byproduct of outside tampering, massaging the folds of his mind open to allow dreams to siphon through, if the appearance by the stranger ‘Sayda’ had been any indication. Had she just been a pieced construct of his will made manifest, something to give him a charge, soothe his conscience? No… Why would he dream of a witcher?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He looked about the cell, as much as the limited angles allowed. His cot rested against a gloomy wall bricked with reddened stone growing black lichen and a warty fungus in between rots in the mortar. Copper banded pipes laid in an ordered row-bracket further down, clamps hardened over by caked hoarfrost urchins slowly bleeding ice-water down into the a small puddle below. The cell stunk of mould and brisk, wet manure. Opposite the wall and his cot was a long cell-bar wall. The iron that kept him fenced in was suffering under noticeable oxidization decay, with some bars appearing almost wholly eroded through. A cage-door was jammed into place against freshly greased bracket-hinges with a hanging lock of ridiculously enormous size, stamped by brushed duranium alloys and looking generally new.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Past the cell door was a length of walkway strewn over with broken tiling, ferrocrete shards, raggy tears of discarded pants, piled up against grille guard-railing. And beyond was simple, whole shadow. His cells meager lights helped just faintly to show off the view: a deep basin-pit falling out into perhaps countless miles down, lined with hundreds of floor sectioned off with cellblocks and confinement rooms. Decay had collapsed floors down atop of each other like a cliff-face suffering mudslide avalanches. The longer Seroth peered into the deep gloom, the more he swore he could see furtive outlines climbing around, naked but with belt-loops strapped to their waist. Jagged iron-blades glittered against the night dark. Wide, reflective eyes would glance up his way so often.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad heard footsteps. Ajax stepped into view at the door. Sure hands fiddled with the oversized lock and he eased himself into the cell, balancing a tarp-wrapped bundle in against his belly. The gate slid back into place behind with a too-loud grate of squeaking hinges. The witcher frowned, turned to reset the lock, then strolled up to Seroth on his cot. Gold-eyes peered through the half-light.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh,” He murmured. “For the grace of mercy, you awake finally.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How long was I out?” Seroth whispered. He hardly recognized his own voice: it had burnt into a gravelly mix of grating vocal cords. His throat felt like he had swallowed a fusion-lamp in his sleep.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…About four days,” Ajax said. “You’d taken on a spectacular fever, young wolf. I suspected it was in part due to your many injuries. Your broken bones especially. I bled you, and found marrow in the bloodstream. I worked to save you from a dreaming death.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Thank you…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher pulled a metal stool close, taking up a cool napkin and gently wiping across the lad’s sorely reddened facial skin. “Ohhh, I did nothing. Save I may have taken a small gamble with your health,” The man admitted. “Your condition was declining rapidly. Death was arisen on black wings, young wolf, coming to claim your soul. I hadn’t any of my medicines. Yet, I recalled this place has a few herbs that I use for potion work, time to time. I gave you a drink. It’s ordinarily highly toxic unless your metabolism is suited to accepting its bite. Either it would help stabilize you… or kill you painlessly.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s wonderful…” Seroth grunted. “I see I managed to survive…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh aye. I wager you are reconsidering your good fortune,” Ajax tried joking. “…Although, it seems your voice is a little seared.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“From the potion?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I know it to have a few adverse effects if one’s body is ill-suited to handling its potency. We should feel fortunate that only your voice box seems a little warped for the trouble.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Silence fell. Seroth closed his eyes and allowed the cool seep to refresh the too-hot aspect that covered over his mind like a snotty film. Eventually, he raised one arm, peering at every clench to make sure he still maintained mobility in the limb. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I have placed your left arm in a holding splint,” Ajax said. “It… will help it lay still and not toss about like it is jelly. You have endured frightening violence.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stenwulf…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. An animal in man’s skin. I had the misfortune of encountering him on my way to find you, below the power plant. We dueled. However, he managed a retreat and collapsed several tunnels that sealed me off from a direct route to your arena. Had I not been delayed, we would have put pay to this ‘Stenwulf’.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I thought I saw you…” Seroth smiled slightly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax smiled, though with sadness. “Aye. I wondered if you had indeed. They took you to a place further beneath the plant’s substructures. I waited on your captors to see what would be done with you. I thought to break in, attempt a rescue, but I dared not jeopardize your condition. Eventually, Stenwulf emerged carrying over his shoulders a casket. Were it not that I could hear a heartbeat…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Gods…” The lad sunk deeper against his pillows, blinking against the dislocated focus in his eyes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“At first, confusion. Where was he intending to take you? Then he came to this place and I believed I felt a taste of true fear for what he meant to do. I lost him in the mazes. This place… it does strange things to the natural make-up of scent and heat, all the markers we use to identify a trail. Eventually, I trailed one of the wardens… Who found you in turn. The rest you saw.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Buried me alive,” Seroth said in croak. “Managed to… Somehow… Break out of the box and dig up…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax paused as he lifted the covers to attend the lad’s limp knees. “…You escaped living entombment with just that arm, the other lamed, and your back split in half?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yeah…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I had wondered why you were covered in such filth,” Ajax chuckled. “…Do you know where we are?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Jurgoran Prison,” He groaned. “Stenwulf… he left me a… A recording, in case I got out… We’re… Somewhere out in the… In the Kaas wilds. Beneath something he called a ‘Dark Temple’.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. An edifice constructed to celebrate a dead emperor’s triumph over his entombed enemies. Jurgoran prison is even older. At its heart is a nexus of bleak energies, feeding off the misery and death this dark place engineers. Phantoms, monsters, wardens, weird and pale things that scavenge in the mazes, alongside incredible disrepair, it is a miasma of torture for the soul.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I can see why Stenwulf liked it…” Seroth spat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ha! Just so. But our immediate concerns pertain to your health. It… I do not possess the medicinal skills to set the shatter in your arm and back. Unless we visit you to proper physicians, in all likelihood you will remain lame in all but your right arm,” Ajax admitted with some reluctance. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Then there isn’t any time to lose,” The lad wrestled up his hand and tugged with surprising strain on the collar of Ajax’s shirt. “You found a way in here. So you must know a way out. Ajax, I… I gambled and failed. The enemy knows another way to Ys now.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?” The witcher hissed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev. Shev Rayner. In his books, they said – said that he had documented an adventure he partook with you, out beyond the galactic north.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Mister Rayner?” Ajax started. “Young wolf, I do not understand. Please, slow yourself. Explain everything to me. Do not mince on detail. What is this danger we are caught in?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth sighed, sagged his sweating back into his pillows and futon-mattresses, and proceeded to relate to Ajax a long tale that began on Saijo. He illustrated through progressive increments his first encounter with Shev Rayner, a woman named Guenyvhar Gunn, her mercenary lover Stenwulf, and the sordid details of purposes gone awry and the price paid for greed and the corruption of the soul. Ajax sat, listening avidly, pausing the lad every so often for clarification on certain details. His relation to Shev Rayner was of especial interest. ‘The fulcrum’, Ajax likened it. Mention of the mercenary band ‘Sayda’ piqued his ire on occasion. After an hour’s passing, he knew the whole of the Gunn family’s destruction, and pains the lad suffered hunting down his mother, slain in the end as the sum of her lies caught up. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Their master is a man named Sennex,” Seroth told. “Cassat liked to call him ‘High Lord Inquisitor’. He’s… He’s this… Cultured monster. A Sith Lord, incredibly potent. He… He reached into my mind. Shev left me his belongings and more, as… As a kind of inheritance. Like a wereguild. Sennex broke into my memories and dredged up enough details to point him to where I’ve kept them stashed. You… You have to go. Leave me. And go stop him, Ajax…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Borja Sennex.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth peered up at the furrowed, tight pinch in Ajax’s brow. “Sennex,” The witcher murmured. “Is a ghost. A persisting rumour across the Outer Rim, Wild Space, and the Unknown Reaches for the last thirty years. Even I had my doubts that he existed. There are a thousand wild stories attributed to his name. Strange murders, thefts, massacres. Armies of shadow that come in the night and leave entire cities as barren and fresh necropolis’ come morning. The visitation of dead gods. Summoning beings I can only describe as demons to attend his will. A dark master with a hidden fastness dedicated to the hoarding of every terrible artifact created since times before our count, master of assassins, a Lord whose greed for the noetic and perverse knows no bounds. …And you say he kept company with your family?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye… Again… If he finds his way to my home, Ajax, he’ll burn every world. He’ll set Stenwulf and those monsters loose until they find what he wants. I… My friends… I have a wife… Ajax, I can’t save her like this… Please…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With surprising adamance, the witcher turned to the lad with refusal. “No. I cannot. To depart would be to leave you to die. My conscience will not allow it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Damn your conscience!” Seroth swore vehemently. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]At the witcher’s stare, the lad averted his eyes. “…Forgive that. …Ajax. Free space is just a stone’s throw away. It won’t take him long to find it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ohh? Just like it did not take this fiend three years to simply plan for a handful of ambushes to find me?” Ajax chuckled. The lad just blinked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“With some luck, we do have time, young wolf. By his nature, this Sennex is a meticulous planner with a singular aversion to chance. He is… uncomfortable leaving outcomes up to simple fortune and luck. That is what I gather. For all his power, ability, learnedness and kind, he takes a slow road to approach triumph.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…And you’re going to leave the fate of my home and friends to a rough estimate of his psychology?” Seroth looked up, not the least bit dumbfounded. “I thought he was the dangerous one.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sennex will not move until his absolute assured of a successful outcome,” Ajax replied. “At the least, we have a year. Twelve months, fifty two weeks, three hundred and sixty five days, give or take, to see to a better degree of health. We have to affect our own escape, you know.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad bit through the writhe of sour fear and worry that threatened to coax his faculties into a panic. His blood still ran with a remnant of that killing fever, and suddenly heat was beginning to blossom and spread from the wound in his belly out into his extremities. Not for the first time, he had to simply trust the elder hunter. Seroth swallowed back gritty spit, and glanced his way, listening to a dry, rustling wail echoing from beyond the wretched cell. “…How do we get out?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How do you escape any ordinary dungeon, young wolf? You go up,” Ajax thrusted his hand into the air. “This prison is not infinite. We are here in the central cell-shaft below the bottom-most catacombs of the Dark Temple. To escape, we simply need only brave whatever creatures are waiting out in the dark there, maneuver through the catacombs, slay a few Sithspawn, battle against the assassins Sennex left to guard the temple, and save one for questioning. …Then find the front doors, it is quite simple, trust me.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“For anyone that can walk and fight,” Seroth had to laugh. “…Unless I get every range of prior mobility I possessed, I’ll be the liability that holds you back. …Ajax, what are we going to do?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That depends…” Ajax sat his face closer. “…On what you are willing to do. What must a man who cannot walk do so he may save his friends?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]That chosen verbal emphasis changed the grey, hard hue inside the lad’s watery, tired eyes. Seroth stopped peering at Ajax and seemed to stare off through his face and up at a glow-lamp fuzzy with orange light. “…You said I was out for four days?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Did you know what I was dreaming?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No one is privy to those hints of memorial and madness, young wolf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Past my friends and this… landscape that was impossible, I saw a woman I never met before. She told me her name was Sayda, and said to me: ‘To stop a monster’s evil, you need a monster’s strength. A good soul in the shell of a beast. But only if the blood calls. Actions will prove what words cannot. …Have faith, Seydon.’”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher lunged his hands forward and pressed his companion against the pillows, surprising him with the wildness apparent in his eyes. They glared wide, gold, disbelieving. “These words. She said these words… To you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes!” Seroth barked, feeling his tattered vertebrae spiking against savaged pieces of muscle and torn nerves. “Ajax!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Pardons!” The man unlatched his fingers from tugging into the lad’s shoulder blades, stepping away to address himself against the barred cell door. Seroth behind him coughed, trying to readjust his prone waist more comfortably against the drying bedding. “Pardons, my friend, a hundred pardons… I had not meant for my demeanor to undergo something quite so transformative. Your statement caught me quite off guard.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth stared hard at his shoulders. “…And why is that? …Ajax?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Sayda was the name of a Dunaan belonging to our dead caste,” He said. “Amongst our kine, she is regarded as a special legend. A worthy warrior. Her exploits and feats were the stuff of myth, young wolf. She was the one who helped the Dunaan in their exodus from Ys, when darker powers sundered that wondrous place… Yes. She lived and died over forty thousand years ago, my friend. Do you see now, of why I am so curious that you saw her ghost in a vision?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad said nothing. Ajax fiddled with a buckle holding the strap and sheathes of his blades. “You told me a great deal of your story. May I repay the trust, and tell you some of my own?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He sat against the stool and fished a bone-pipe from his coat, striking a fire with his bare fingers. Seroth regarded the slight example of ever rare pyromancy. Ajax indeed had a storehouse of secrets. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher puffed a low cloud and hucked on the pipe. “…Once I was a very ordinary man that had a few too many extraordinary things to say to any who would listen. My enemies came for me. I defied them, time and again. One day, I could find no longer. They caught me. Then broke me. I was dragged to this world and given over to Jurgoran prison. …Yes. This was where I was to die as well. But I was angry, young wolf. So very angry. After everything I had worked for, it was all to be thrown away. The loss of my friends… The death of my family… Everything I had done to keep the monsters at bay, everything I had been forced to sacrifice, all for naught! My rage alone would have killed me. I fell into a stupor, then a fever. I dreamed…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…It was a palace of ivory and steel that sang whenever the wind stroked it. Empty, in ruins, you know, but so beautiful. I had never seen a place like it. …A woman with a wolf’s eyes, hued like gold and fire, came to me. Hair white. Dressed like a warrior. Like you, she said those words to me. I… I understood it as a kind of offer. Maybe a summons? When next I woke, something was drawing on my heart. Despite my injuries, I followed the sensation. It brought me to a mausoleum in this prison that was secret even to those who first laid the brick and stone. A fantastical laboratory. A… A baptismal chamber. Within resided an Ancient that I can only call the Lodge of Shade. From him, I learned the truth of what prowls in my veins. Of the greatest importance… was the offer.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I… could refuse. Crawl away, pick any hole that so pleased me, and die. Or… I could brave the Trial of the Waters. Change myself. …And accept work as a witcher. As Dunaan. …I slipped into the embrace of that madness and woke up as I am now,” Ajax turned so the slight shade of his long, tan hood lent a contrast to his eye-glow. “And that place resides here still, young wolf. …And now you peer into the face of the same precipice as I.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Now I lay you with the offer…” He drew his silver-sword and laid the hilt out for the lad to reach and grasp. “And I urge you to seriously consider.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The next few days were spent with Ajax adopting a role of care over his charge. Ravaged by a fever that scoured his body with little thought for mercy for four days had left Seroth in little condition to do more than eat, drink, and go to the lavatory, aided by the witcher. Rest came in short, grueling episodes compounded by dreams that defied description and logic. Sometimes Ajax would be waiting or resting nearby on those occasions he came awake prior to receiving a needed sleep. Other times he was gone, the glow-lamps off, leaving the lad in the darkened cell recesses, on the watch for movement. Ajax never failed to leave a small, hand-held bolt-caster on the nearby stool, beside a mug of water[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Twice, he received visitors in Ajax’s absence. First was when a harsh squeal of metal against metal tore him from a nightmare vision of smoky phantasms, forced to take a moment to allow his eyes adjustment against the dark. In time, he saw a band of some seven figures pressing against the cell bars, peering at him with crooked, wide eyes. Each were naked, clothed only with a loose belt, clattering jagged daggers across the bar-screen. Seroth managed to lurch up his arm and fire a warning bolt over their heads. They fled at the barking thunder-crack and sudden cannon-shot of light that burst like a trailing firework. Second was when he was gently dozing, and fourteen returned to assail the cell and attempt to break in the door. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Make-shift throwing axes and short swords flew through the bar-spaces, rebounding off the far bricked wall. Some of the tossed implements actually found purchase and stuck above his resting head. Seroth gripped the hand-bowcaster and again shot warning bolts across their bald pates. The brief firework of gelatinous light didn’t seem to faze any one of them. One pointed a scrawny arm through the barring and spoke something in a whispered tongue sounding like a razor on whetstone. It waved a pointed needle-sword at his throat. The lad hefted up the weight of hand-caster and shot that one through the top of his skull. Then cocked his arm, braced for the recoil, and blew another three off their feet. Death sent the raiding party off into a blood-frenzy. Their hands grappled on the shivering cell bars and shook, determined to simply tear the gate out of its stone-jamb.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One of them paused a moment later as it looked off at some place Seroth couldn’t quite see. It howled something in alarm. Ajax kicked it off its feet and sent it spiraling out of sight into the blackness of the prison-pit. His hands flashed a long steel sword and drove off the rest, slaying another nine where they stood before the wretched survivors careened against spilt debris piled and grown mossy on the flooring block and tiles. Naked feet could be heard scrabbling out of sight. The witcher paid a closer watch on the cell ever afterwards, reluctant now to leave its immobile guest alone.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dinner was paste mulch and water distilled with Ajax’s supply of purification tablets. Each meal was memorable in that they seemed to increase with their distasteful potency. Yet, Seroth was assured of their nutritional value and stomached the stale, ammonia taste. His bodily systems were currently craving any number of numerous protein compounds, nutrients, vitamins, minerals to help cope with the constant sustain of trauma. Every evening, he propped up against the cold bricked wall behind his headrest and spooned mouthfuls of grey, yellow veined slop. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Relief from the tedium of sheer survival was the conversations held between himself and the elder hunter. Ajax happily illustrated through dozens of tales regarding his exploits in the hunt. Of Dunaan, of himself, of the increasingly dense mythology surrounding him and enigmatic Ys, he had strangely shut up. If the lad felt tantalized, if he wished to give his appetite further whet, then he would have to take the baptismal plunge and survive the scouring Trial of the Waters. Anything more from Ajax would just be initiation into a kinhood that he had not yet earned his way into. Seroth bided by the rebuttal, but couldn’t hide his disappointment. However, he consoled himself that he had caught Ajax in one detail. Though the slayer looked no older than a fit fifty-year-old humanoid, the span and scope of his experiences hinted at travels spent across more than one lifetime. At least, he was over a hundred years old. Doubtless, he was even older. By what amount, Seroth declined from guessing. Something like ancient weight hung from Ajax’s face on some occasions, recalling a few affecting tragedies.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“There’s no glamour to this life,” He said softly one eve. Ajax gestured to his care-worn face and a slight palsy in his left hand. “It is work, coin, pain, and more hardship beyond. One day, it will be you who breaks and not your prey. Some hours it is a sleepwalk through terror…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One eve, the witcher woke the lad and pointed to something outside the cell and beyond the walkway and guard-rail. It took a moment for Seroth’s eyes to adjust against the constant, near-lightless pitch if shadow. Then, he saw it too: a skinny, pale, naked frame dressed with just a loincloth. It was skittering up the cell-levels floor by floor, climbing with incredible dexterity that belied its starved appearance. Every so often it paused, looking about, loosing feline gnarls and sneers. It continued striving upward. It slowed for nothing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That one is seeking the catacombs,” Ajax whispered. “It has decided it has had enough of this place. It is attempting an escape.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How often do any of them make it out of the Dark Temple?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Never.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The creature scaled up another cell-floor before darkness swallowed it up. Seroth glanced and saw Ajax was still following its progress. Could he see in the dark unaided? [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ah. It’s reached the Cragfall. …And there it goes. Gone into the catacombs. Now we wait.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“For what?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It took three hours before their answer came. Ajax called for silence and they waited in the dark. The witcher puffed from his pipe, the lad meditated lying back against his pillow. Eventually, they both started at the sound. It erupted as a long, hoarse wailing travelling down from the shadowed ceiling lost far overhead. Its echoes hurled and rebounded off the worn alloys creeping with rust and tar-growths, reaching a pitched fever describing unseen horror and agony. Seroth sat as he felt his hearing grow further disturbed by the dual-tonal growl issuing from behind the pained cries. With the same eerie suddenness as it began, the voice lost in the hollow catacombs ceased its thrashing vocals. A deep quiet fell upon the cell-pit until the lad felt the silence begin ringing in his ear. He didn’t ask what the lost climber had met in his ascent through the ancient damnation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]On the next chrono-cycle dictating change from early ‘morning’ to mid, Seroth beckoned Ajax close to his bed. “Have you ever taken dictation?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What is that?” He asked. “Letter writing?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye,” Seroth nodded. “I wrote one out prior to that mess at the power plant. I… didn’t have the chance to see that it got mailed out by the Commander. It was addressed to my wife. …I’d like to have something readied that you can relay to her, in case this all goes further sideways.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Like a will? Young wolf, that is too morbid yet. You are not finished with this hunt,” Ajax said quietly. Then he shrugged ruefully. “…Besides, I did not bring pen or parchment.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A datapad?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The slayer shook his head. Seroth sank his skull into his pillow and chuckled. “Hmmn. My wife… Rosa… She doesn’t like that I’m shy with datapads and the like. But we’d been on the run so long it’s just habit to keep things off the digital spectrum. There’s nothing like touching ink to sheet.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We are alike then, my friend,” Ajax patted his shoulder. “You and I, too cantankerous yet for these centuries. Mayhap if we had been born in those ages before silicone and plastic, we’d have rose a little easier in the mornings, jah?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Jah. …Ajax.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan looked as Seroth began to bunch his good-hand into the stuffing of his futon-bed and was forcing his torso upwards so he could sit upright. The effort was tremendous and the witcher did not like the way his back appeared so bent and warped, reaching to lend a touch of aid and ease the lad up. “Young wolf, you seem to be rising with purpose.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I’ve been lying here two weeks. I know, I’ve counted the days,” Seroth said slowly, gritting through pangs of rippling hurt running from his hip up to the back of his throat. “And I can tell my strength isn’t returning. My body is trying to knit itself back into what it was, but everything’s too broken for the healing factor to cope. A few months and not even bacta will be able to correct the damage. I’ve wasted enough time being in two minds. Find me some pants, will you? A coat? Help me up. Let’s go and see the Lodge of Shade…”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Something in the very stone had caused Jurgoran’s original architects to abandon the ordinary rules of order when constructing the multi-layered globules and nexus’ of great cell-pits. In spite of the heavy gloom of smoky black, Seroth looked about, lips creased in hardening frowns. It reminded him once upon Tython, a boy learning the skills and craft of a proper Jedi, when they showed him and a few other trainees a dark artifact. Immediate memory recalled a brief, icy sensation stinging their fingers and assaulting their perceptions. Like the Dark Side had warped the object enough to make it seem as if the angles were not adding up right. It was the same in the cell-pit. The floors were not evenly spaced. In fact, there seemed to be a gentle suggestion of loosening symmetry. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt] The pair wasted little time evicting from their cell abode, with Ajax packing his field-kit into a neat sack slung over his free shoulder. Neither of them wished to return to the dank, clammy space. There, the air was rotten with mold, one woke with cement spores dusting their face and sheets, their feet were never warm, and somewhere below by a hundred floors nested a small clan of naked things that had come to kill the lad while he lied recuperating. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Transporting Seroth in his state proved an especial difficulty. Ajax resorted to simply roping his legs together with makeshift splints of discarded rebar and cell bars torn from their bracketing, adjusting a similar solution to keep his back straight as he plodded his friend along. He held onto the Dunaan with his one good arm latched tightly across his shoulder and nape. They’d not taken twenty meters before Ajax had to call for a moment’s rest.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How far is the walk on good legs?” Seroth asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Perhaps a handful of hours.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He looked down at his numbed and stricken legs, glued together with nylon cording and pressed metal. A few hours for any with ordinary fitness, reckless bravery, and no small amount of luck. Stenwulf stole his legs and arm, leaving Ajax with the lion’s share of effort to drag both himself and the ‘young wolf’ along down into Jurgoran’s unlit dungeons. He’d mentioned wardens. Phantoms. Things nameless and capering in the dark on blade-limbs, singing past broken teeth rotted to the gum and jawbone. Ghosts, poltergeists, wraiths, living spirits bound to the haunted stone by their dying hatred. Perhaps even undead waiting for passing warmth to stir the curses binding their rotten flesh to hollow bone, devoured dry of marrow by insects and time. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax tugged him down a corridor descending sharply away from the cell-pit. It drew them into an abandoned panopticon. Seroth saw sixty floors of arranged single-person rooms, all with cell doors gored open, arranged one pylon observation tower extending from the roofing down to the floor and sub-levels below. The witcher paused to retrieve a torch from his pack. Magnesium flint lit the turpentine and sog-grease knob on the torch end, providing flickering lights panning from coils of short flame. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Why are the cells arranged like this?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So that the watchers in the observation decks could peer into the cells without the prisoners spotting them in return,” Ajax said. “It is a common function in many facilities designed for incarceration. Social control. Surveillance. These are the tools that an imprisoned body and its soul might be controlled with efficiency.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Another passageway was opened on the sixty-second floor some twenty eight levels below from where they’d entered. Most stairwells were collapsed. Ajax maneuvered them through back-wall maintenance corridors, where the cement staircases hadn’t yet suffered total foundering of their structure integrity. The dead lay strewn where they had fallen. Skeletons collapsed face down, still covered over in issued overalls, their limbs dislocated at the joints by total ligament disintegration. One sat up in a staircase corner missing a majority of its jaw and skull-pate. A disused blaster sat in their lap. Scorch marks were still burned in the casing ceiling overhead. Stepping in, Seroth could see the inside of the brain-pan and jaw had been flash-cooked. Despite its shattered, crooked mouth, the skull-face seemed to grin in mocking triumph.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Decay was a state of frozen vandalism and physical break-down. Despite the increasingly frigid temperatures the further they ventured from cell-house to cell-house, air was a dry pall of hanging ferrocrete particles, dust motes, insulation beads, flakes of brittle skin cells. Light fixtures were torn off or their encasing plasteel caved in. Some sectioning was littered with ponds of glass fragments arranged in patterned mosaics, reflecting scattered refracts of light off of Ajax’s torch, casting the ceilings with green-emerald sequences. It likened to being trapped within an emptied absinthe bottle, sunlight peering up from the glass beneath your feet and stunning you with rippling light-sequins and refract-bars.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Slivers and cracked panes broke under their treading, loud as pistol cracks. Their intrusion through interrupted something’s meal on a slab of displaced concrete, licking off algae growths. The pair saw a suggesting of rubber-joined legs belonging to a central carapace-body upon which the stilt-limbs were mounted, an oblong head bereft of eyes sporting a slit-mouth, needle teeth, and a tongue that swung out three meters long. Its head was featureless, save for rows of flared nostrils that wheezed as it sensed their presence. Up and away it skittered, climbing through a hole tunneled out in the tile flooring and disappearing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth’s guide carried him onto a marbled floor eaten through by acidic drips, falling from breaks in the piping overhead. The length of chamber had once been utilized as a showering facility. Skinless, meatless bodies floated in the wider puddles of dank condensation. Blood dried to flaking rust-hues coloured the walls. Discarded razor-knives and jagged-swords clattered out of their way whenever Ajax kicked them aside. A make-shift axe made out of a length of industrial piping welded with saw blades on the far haft-end had been used to impale a flogged rib-cage. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Their travels paused when a note in the scenery began to change. Cement was exchanged for walls rendered near bulbous by warts of lichen growth, ferrocrete became distended bricking, hallways widening into ornate vaults of bar traceries, facades, arcades, of divisions in the walling marked by pillared column bays. Ajax had guided them through the under-basements of one complex that had been almost entirely dedicated to solitary confinement housing. The stink of wretched fear, of stale human fecal discharges, the aromatics that made the air pungent with the smell of suffering in that place had been almost overpowering. Once, Seroth swung off Ajax and perched over a length of railing, vomiting into the darkness below. Out of sickness. Out of pain. Out of worn exhaustion. Ajax guided him on through the desolate congregation halls below the main floor and into a vault revealed by a length of shattered walling.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They camped in a fan vault that seemed to belong to some ecclesiastical cloister of a wider structure shadowed by fallen slabs of granite, shale, and dark stone. Seroth sat below the yawn of a wide, bricked in window frame of barbed quatrefoil. A fire was quickly struck, flames dining on smokeless wood-rods. Ajax rolled out a single sleeping mat and lent his strength shifting the crippled lad onto its plush. He proffered some rather tasteless salt-jerky and water sloshing inside an old canteen. Seroth gratefully bit into the former and drank deep of the latter, sighing a quiet note of odd contentment.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“How are we fairing?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked to Ajax. “I will fair, but you are the one carrying both you and me on through all this emptiness. What of your own aches and pains.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh, what ache? What pain?” Said the Dunaan as he sat beside the lad on bare, rubble cloaked flooring. “But we have made significant progress. We’ve breached into the old cathedrals. This is Old Jurgoran now. Before they worked to set all the material down into the folds of the earth.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What does that make these ruins then? Were they found when the architects commanded the tunnels to bite down further?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No. It was only when decay set in, when walls collapsed, that these passages became exposed for the first time in millennia.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If not some ancient Sith, then who? Who built all this?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Gold eyes twinkled. “Those who fled from Ys, my boy. They came here under Sayda’s direction and tore up the ground. These places of untouched, dark holiness were pieced in, and reburied. Adamantium and ceramite circulation stacks travelled air from up in high at the surface. It was cosmic chance that Jurgoran Prison came to be over the remains of the old tombs and reliquaries.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Cosmic chance?” Seroth murmured. “No… I don’t think so.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You subscribe to fate?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I don’t know. But there’s coincidence and then there is providence, Ajax. I’m beginning to see it now, the more I think about it. I’ve… a fairly small part to play against the greater happenings in this galaxy. That doesn’t wound me much. Yet… Here I am, now, with you, in this state, in a place that’s old beyond recounting. On a quest to see a wise man that may be dead.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Are you still so certain as to go and be appraised?” Asked Ajax. Seroth chuckled in the half-shadow dusted by the furtive bonfire. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You’re thinking I’m having second thoughts.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I am thinking you are a sane creature, faced with something rather maddening. It is good to have someone be a voice to address the doubt, the worry.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ajax…” Seroth began, coughing a moment as the rib-shards in his chest ground together. “Uugghhhnn! Feth… If I don't see the Lodge of Shade, I won't leave this prison on my own two feet. I'll be a cripple for years before I can see corrective surgery and in that time... In that time, what could happen is this. Sennex finds his way to the Sanctum worlds. City by city, he ravages. Steals. Seeds monsters in his wake. Then, he finds Rayner's old books and through them, finds the way to Ys. And whatever he finds there, he uses to rob a wider galaxy. Burn... Destroy anything that dares rise in his path. Kill worlds, people, their families, friends... It's stopped being about what I'm 'comfortable' with. It's about saving people. And killing monsters.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher put the lad to sleep for an approximate seven hours to allow his constitution some course to regain its strength. Will had carried him far; it’d risen him up from a buried entombment and up two miles worth of stairs, fingernails cracked and knuckles bleeding for that supreme effort. Seroth survived against injuries that would have killed anyone with a lesser fire than what churned his heart-valves with inexorable, powerful drive. He put his mind into a half-sleep, portions of his brain cycling through a kind of dozing phase, allowing him pseudo-consciousness that would snap him up alertly the moment his senses appraised something lurking around the vault corners.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Soon, both woke, and Ajax broke camp before picking the lad from the ground and continuing on their long stroll. He surmised they must have been passing below miles worth of overhanging stone and layers of age. Barrel corridors and ribbed tunnels exuded sensations of crushing density. They passed through corridors resplendent with ornamental motifs: beak-heads, beads and reels, capitals and fleur-de-lis, nail-heads and quatrefoil. Some lengths of walling showcased illuminated text woven on hanging tapestry flowing with phylactery dancing through the hands of robed women and men. Curiously, their faces were censored by black halos ringed with white-fire coronas. A word in a tongue he didn’t know was writ against each dark circle in red threads. All beheld swords of steel and silver-plate in their outstretched hands. One tapestry, in particular, was a beautiful recreation of an idealized scene: grassy meadows with blue peaks in the distance capped in snow, above which was anchored an impossibly floating island with crenellated towers, buttresses, castles and fortresses propped atop.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Worn sigils in that dead-tongue were carved into certain pillars. The whole of the underground felt like a massed ecclesiarch construct, one grand church that was linked hall-by-hall into a fashioned complex that belied considerable sophistication. Everywhere they peered in the gutturally lit blackness were further treasuries locked behind doors laced with chains Ajax said were alchemically doused. Unbreakable, even if the sun burst and tore Dromund Kaas to pieces. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One particular hall was bare: flooring, wall, and ribbed ceiling high overhead hanging with iron-wrought chandeliers was constructed out of a black metal that glittered in the torch-light. Faceless statues, an even twenty, were placed in asymmetrical displays. All were wrought of marble. All were harnessed clothes sewn for explorative work, sheathes strapped over their backs, blades in hand as they slew great and mythical beasts writhing at their boots.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Your kin,” Seroth breathed. The air was rich with thickened ages of dust. He’d tied a mask across his mouth and nose. “Have their faces been worn off?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They were never carved with any features to begin with,” Ajax said. “Our role is transmutable, descending from generation to generation. …Either that or the sculptor was particularly lazy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The way opened up into a windowless atrium watched over by still gargoyles carved from that same noetic metal from the hall prior. They peered upon a wide, empty floor lit by fantastic, hanging gardens of phosphorescent lichen-moss. It was a hanging garden, with fleshy clovetails, bellheads, creeper-leaves all coated with similar veins of viscous, pulsating sky blue. Ajax took Seroth, hanging by his one arm off his neck, padding up to a square divot in the flooring where the flinty tiling had been levered away. Two large, pristine quartz doors lined with gold were set in the ground. The witcher turned and depressed his heel into a cunningly hidden switch camouflaged in the seams between the tiles. The doors sundered open, grinding on ungreased trolley frames and mechanical gear-cogs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stairs led into further catacombs. Interior spacing utilized bays separated by pillared columns of faded silver, with every bay scaled from floor to rolling ceiling with hundreds of arranged skulls. Each must have belonged to some fabled monster of legend, lost to antiquity, remembered by their now-resting slayers. Some seemed no larger than an average humanoid cranium while others were truly grand, heavy bestial maws of rowed teeth or enlarged fangs and tusks, sporting emptied bone-sockets for half a dozen or a hundred eyes. Some bays had been hollowed out in reservation of solemn, white-steel sarcophagi. They were unmarked, save for small copper plaques scrawled in those unknowable characters Seroth had seen in decoration almost everywhere about. Crossed blades laid in their stiffened, leather sheathes were kept chained atop their masters’ tombs. One steel, the other silver. ‘Why?’, the lad had to wonder.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“One day,” Ajax broke the silence. “I have hopes to be buried here myself. If I am so worthy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are, Ajax,” Seroth replied in softened breaths. “You are.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In time, the catacomb narrowed into a thin set of phrik-laid stair-steps leading down into an apse-room. Save for bare walls roughly hewn out of a boulder of red granite, it was only decorated by a single set of paired doors. The lad started.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s Taung-steel,” Said the lad. “Mandalorian iron…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Carved into the adamant metal were devilish sets of sigil-words and signs, all arraigned around an embossed skull of which looked to have belonged to the Devil himself. Suddenly, the lad felt cold. Chills wove up his numbed legs to harry his lungs, throat, and mind with esper-murmurs that chattered from seemingly every direction and yet from nowhere. Ajax did not seem troubled. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We have arrived,” He said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher stowed away his glove and reached to palm his fingers in against the skull. It briefly shimmered, vibrating at his touch, eye-sockets aglow with red fires as, somehow, its fleshless metal jaw craned open to issue out a hoarse groan of sub-sonic howls. It juddered the bones within the lad’s ears, exciting a tempest of ill-feeling that tried to work into a perfect knot of panic in his gut. Seroth steeled himself, letting Ajax lead him as the hell-door swung in open.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Inside was a low hall lit by glass-encased lanterns slung from the ceiling by black-metal links. Unnatural lights flickered behind the warped crystal guarding the flames dancing behind their frames. High-chairs been carved out of the very rock itself instead of having been brought in and installed, solid, unyielding thrones of calcium-white stone stuck with a sheen of mica-particles and diamond dust. Rowed tables of roan-wroshyr wood lined the spaces between the stone-thrones, topped with archaic chemistry equipment: alembic stills, subliming pots, potted furnaces, chemical and cupellation crucibles, retorts, sand baths, hanging show globes, and dozens of other pieces of esoteric equipment Seroth couldn’t name with his limited knowledge. Above the walls were shelved with hundred on their hundreds of half-filled phials, beakers, and herb boxes. All were filmy with dust. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In the room’s exact center, sitting in the midst of solomonic magic circles and diagrams burnt into the very rock, laid a coffin-bath. The contraption was constructed out of a tub of thickened emerald glass suspended in a framing of brass that locked a gasket seal over the top and kept whatever was placed within submerged in an airless pocket. Brass tubing ran from beneath the tub, extending to purification boilers that sat clenched against floor, wall, and ceiling. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was an air of disuse. Seroth felt his faculties writhing with throbs of headache, assaulted by unseen dark force energies of considerably and insidious might. It was so akin to the aura left in Sennex’s wake, save that this power stemmed from an immeasurably older source, refined and deathly insidious, anathema, like a nova wash of colourless fire streaming from the core of a dying sun. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]That was when Seroth met for the first and last time the Lodge of Shade. He stood there, taller than either he or Ajax, dressed in a kaftan woven from threads that shimmered with mercurial starlight, overlaid with a midnight robe clinging to his long, narrow shoulders. They could not see his face. Perhaps there wasn’t any. Seroth looked up into the hanging cowl and only saw a pair of blank eyes. Not blank in the sense of emptiness, but like peering into an endless plane of space. He thought there was a hint of comet-light staring thinly from within his shadowed skull. Characters in noetic combinations were stitched on the hemming of the robe’s opening, along his sleeves and the lengthy, open cuffs, upon lengths of dried paper wrapped around his wrists and naked palms. His skin was dried and had the consistency of a desiccated mummy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]When he spoke, it was from across a chasm of cosmic time. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You have this moment to make yourselves known to me. If you do not, if truth hesitates on your tongue, then the two of you are charlatans and I shall burn out your agony centers before snuffing out your untrustworthy souls.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Man of Shade, have you gone so blind you cannot see your own handiwork?” Laughed Ajax, trudging them forward. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge peered closer, then backed away as if in high dungeon. “Damn my eyes, all’s gone to fog with cataracts and sickness! I have lasted too long and now I cannot see even when Kinhood comes to greet me! Ajax. The wretch-bastard with no tongue when he came to me with tidings from Dear Sayda. …What is this you have brought me?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth felt that mummified hand reach out and grasp his jaw unkindly, swinging his skull from side to side. “One who dreamed of the Silver Fox. One with the right blood, Lodge of Shade. He is here for the Waters.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Is he? Are you? Or you a pretender to the legacy of Ys, like so many that have some asking for the Cruel Gifts?” Spat the Lodge. His breath was rife with liquorice and cinnamon. “Speak to me what the Vision hailed and perhaps I may not scour your dreams for the truth.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Hesitantly, the lad raised his voice and replied verbatim. “’ Listen to me. Listen very carefully. To stop a monster’s evil, you need a monster’s strength. A good soul in the shell of a beast. But only if the blood calls. Actions will prove what words cannot. …Have faith, Seydon.’ That… That’s all she said, Black Gods, who are you??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Who am I, Child of Sayda?” The Lodge drew up. “I am He who has Endured through Age on Age, until the appointed hour when I quit this place and make sojourn for our umber home. The Lodge of Shade they titled me, for my name is my own to keep and only for She to speak when at last I part the silver glass and step in to take up my reward. Do I speak in riddles? Truly, for that is my arena of providence to keep and for you to stay mystified over. …I’ve a question for you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What has brought you here? Not your injury or self-pity, what is the cause? The cause of your soul!?” He looked to the Witcher. “Not a word, you. Now begins the Assessment. So tell me, boy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I’ve failed,” Seroth answered after length, bowing his head low. “I… I believed I could stop an evil, but I wasn’t prepared. My flesh was not strong nor swift enough, I hadn’t enough ability to make my work count. I failed to stop enemies that seek a prize, Lodge of Shade. They seek the Way to Ys. Where… Where I guess all of this has issued. They… They seek a road. And I gave them all but the map-work. My thoughts were scoured. Now… Now the Dunaan’s inheritance is at risk. My wife, my friends, my home, they are in the same danger. I… I have to stop this. I have to make right what I did wrong.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You intend… reparations, for this grievous error?” Whispered the Shade. “Truly. For now, your soul is mine for this betrayal.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Man of Shade, it was not the boy’s fault,” Ajax spoke up.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then who is at fault, Dunaan?” The Shade whipped his cowl about. “I am told that enemies unseen are coming to pilfer our Castles in the Sky, the boy admits the truths were ripped from his tongue, and you say I cannot hold his soul for the responsibility?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We are contending with dark powers, Man of Shade. Of the same ilk as the Black Queen in the City Below. Creatures of greed and malice, that were beyond the boy’s strength to cope or contest. He fought valiantly. To the last, he nearly gave his life’s blood fighting the Primordial Enemy. I tell you this, he slew many of their number without the Gift of Sayda.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It is no great thing to bandy with lesser daemons,” The Shade dismissed. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“When I came to you, Shade, I had nothing to my name either,” Ajax said softly. “Simply the Dream I divulged. The same Dream that has come to this young wolf! He is chosen of Sayda, blood of Sayda! What else matters!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]After a great pause, the Immortal drew in to the lad and forced him to look back into those sickly eyes. “I have been entrusted with the last arts of this venerable Kinhood. To be Dunaan is to walk down the shadowed way in the Forest of Darkness. It is not any gift that I can bequeath lightly and I work to ensure it never results in regret. …And I sense much regret in you, boy. There is only the Road, the Long Hunt…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…To ensure the innocent and the ordinary survive against all the harsh beasts waiting for them in the dark,” Seroth finished. “…Lodge of Shade, please. …I just want to do good. And save my family.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge drew up and padded about on slippers made of reptile hides and a worn, silken fabric. One hand with dreadfully gnarled fingers stroked at an unseen chin and tapped vacantly on a hollow cheek and jaw. Every so often, he peered upon the land. Threads of ice stole into the lad’s chest until it felt an iceberg-clamp squeeze over his heart. Whispers on the edge of his hearing haunted him. He waited leaned against Ajax’s frame, blinking through tiredness, sick with dread and what felt like a second oncoming of fever. Their journey through the passages of Jurgoran had taken them almost two whole days. Pain like fire was eating its way up through the torn sucks of slashed meat and muscle up his back.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Bring him forward,” Said the Lodge finally. “I will know the make of this young wolf myself.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The examination table was a heavy slab of that same dark, unidentifiable metal he’d encountered in many portions of the underground Yssian ecclesiarch. Black, sleek, light, yet coated with a punishing aura that seemed to reject luster or even touch. It was set behind the coffin-tub beside a length of roan-wroshyr wood table, stacked with dusty, brimming beakers, burners, alchemical contraptions that fed clear plastic and glass tubing to and fro from various apparatuses. Ajax obliged carrying Seroth over, helping to settle his sluggish bulk onto the table until his shoulders met with a pre-conceived contour molded to the dark steel.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge hovered over him. Light issued from the void beneath his cowl, reaching to draw on a neural-sheathe glove over the crooked lengths of his cocked right hand. Each digit ended in a scrying needle flickering with charges of corposant, sometimes dripping ethereal ectoplasm as it suckled from an unseen power source. Possibly from energy generated from contact with the Ancient himself, who turned to Seroth and caressed the needle-points over his face. The lad shuddered involuntary. Ajax stood by over his brow and tutted, his expression braced. It wasn’t a comforting look. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He undid the bindings keeping his legs hobbled close, disposing of the rebar and cord splint that managed the twisted flop of his broken left arm, letting the materials litter underfoot. With supreme surety, the Lodge began his examination. Needles glided like razor-scalpels, relieving him of dirtied slack-pants, socks gone mouldy from moisture contacting rough cotton, rendering the lad naked from head to toe. Seroth was thankful for the significant numbness that rendered anything below his rump just cold and ungainly. He had managed to ratchet his head up, in time to observe the Lodge lancing the neural-glove and its attached pricking-knives into the meat of this thighs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Examinations lasted for six hours, spanning six sessions over six days. Seroth wasn’t moved from the table. Sustenance was provided by Ajax carefully feeding him a kind of nutrient slurry and ice-water dancing with proactive electrolytes. In that time, not an inch of his body was left unexplored by the crafty physician who plied his corporeal frame. Blood, tissue, muscle, marrow and bone samples were collected, stored, analyzed, and cross-referenced against prior collections and annotated observations the Lodge had noted in an enormous wood and paper codex. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Man of Shade?” Seroth murmured in a hoarse tone. It had been the fifth day, the Lodge milling halfway through the session as he cursorily whipped a pen-ink stylus across a shale clip-board flaring dog-eared pages. He’d overheard Ajax conversing with the Lodge; his prior fever was beginning to ferociously attach itself to his respiratory system. The lad breathed and felt both the grind of his shattered rib-bones and an inner sting labour his lungs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge peered up, regarding him as he lanced the barbs in the neural-glove down into the skin of his left-bicep. “Yes, lame wolf? What is thy query?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Tell me about Ys…” The lad whispered, heat like a desert rash of fire crawling up his cheeks. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He heard the ancient draw close, take note of his reddening complexion, tutting as he nodded to Ajax. The witcher pricked a hypodermic chamber in between the vertebral bodies cradling his skull, just below his jaw-line. Warmth choking over his facial muscles began to ease.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are bored of the quiet?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m curious. Ajax speaks like it’s between a myth and reality. It shared the same dream with Sayda. Ivory and quartz towers, floating impossibly…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth observed the Lodge straighten, flicking his stylus along the paper and slate. “Not impossibly. Yssians garnered for themselves an understanding of universal underpinnings, bypassing many so-called ‘laws’ that others allowed in restricting them to base and banal ‘triumphs’. I was not born in those days when the first cities were raised.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What was behind their conception?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Strife. Misery. Our people suffered under a weight of garnered sins born from the loins of those with enough arrogance to believe they could match the perfection found in the layers of cosmos. Ys was beautiful: more elegant than Eshan, wilder than Kashyyk. It was a place out of time. Anachronistic but that always seemed the point. We rejected advancement for its own sake. We dreamed fairy tales, and believed in them.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The cities… They were bulwarks, then? Fortresses?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge nodded, delicately finessing his touch over the poked, warped skin sheathing the lad’s arm. “Once in an age that was old even for our kin, our ancestors made war from the fastness of city-castles. Our understanding of Chaos was nascent but rapidly expanding, maturing at such a rate that we would one day pay for such reckless arrogance.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Chaos…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The… Power. What some prefer calling the Force, if you so like. Our discovery of Chaos and the boons to be had from such might intoxicated those able to touch at its tempest energies. It was the matter of creation. With it came the belief that anything was possible. …They were right. Spellcraft bloomed overnight. To have a practiced mage in your retinue meant you could boil entire troop companies alive, call down writhing storms of fire-balls, even tamper with the skeins of time itself. Yet the danger was too great. So they turned to other arts. Yssian alchemy was born overnight and the remnants of which you observe here, now. Tens of thousands of yeas before any paltry, childish, so-named ‘Darksider’ dirtied their hands.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax levered his hands beneath the lad’s shoulder blade, easing him onto his side for the Lodge to prod and observe the wriggles of welted, knotted skin. Seroth accepted a length of leather-bite and clenched down with a warbling growl, the Lodge unkindly seeing to the damages cast on his spinal cord and attending vertebrae.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hhhrrggnnn!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Steady yourself, lame wolf,” Admonished the Lodge. “There’s more to be endured before I can conclude a prognosis.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Th-Those wars…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh. Noble browed against noble browed, with every champion a claimant of some sort. It took the winnowing of their armies for those crowned to commission their battle wizards and mage witches to bolster their failing ranks. They turned to unspeakable arts that sundered the laws between life, death, and natural systems of creation. Dead were risen. Beasts of all make and manner boiled to life in flesh-cauldrons seething with the stuff of Chaos. These wretches were seeded into the ranks and sent off to win battles. No one thought to account what would occur in the aftermath.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They ran wild and mad.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Those wars only halted when the hordes of shambling carcasses, cursed undead, devourers of living flesh and those that were simply too bestial came and sundered all the kingdoms. Our people survived by a bare thread.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But they were haunted…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge nodded. He gestured for Ajax to lower Seroth back against the table and continued conversing as he strolled to a far table. Glass contraptions and iron stoves vented with writhing steam. He observed the Ancient fiddle with exacting compound mixtures before allowing heat to activate their bonding agents. “For generations, the peasantry that outlived the dead nobility struggled and fought. Those who lived to see their grandchildren were rare and few between. Roads became disused. Villages slowly rose into picketed towns believing each were the last bastion against the writhing dark. Those who could touch at Chaos were pariahs; feared, imprisoned, exiled, reviled. Regarded as little better than the shadow-things prowling at the gates every night.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That was when the Dunaan first made their appearances.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked round to the Lodge. His wizened frame plied his instruments with silken control. One hand dialed on a marked nob and coaxed an extra iota heat from a brass-burner. That sloping hood turned and saw to the lad, still too-darkened, wafting eyes blank as a starlight sky. “They rode to town on the backs of baleful mounts. Wolf-eyed with ugly smiles, girded for the road and the rigors of surviving the wilds. Most were jeered. ‘Monstrum!’, they would say, ‘Consorts of Devils!’ But they would wait by the gate. And without fail, at nightfall, they were approached for help. Thus began the practice of paying a witcher their wares in exchange for their hunting skills. Dunaan were who freed the countryside’s enough to enable travel. Travel secured communication. In a hundred years, a renaissance they were never accredited with grew up from the dark times.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The narrative went on. The Lodge described the survivors of the ancient wars and their alchemic malpractice as regaining a zest for existence. Survivability, ensuring the strength of staked walls and heavy gates, gave way in time to pursuits seeking to resuscitate the glory of the millennia prior. Ruins were scoured, materials reclaimed, vast projects initiated to rebuild cities grand enough to house their populations against wilds that were still far too dangerous. Efforts to pacify woodland forestry and arboreal bog resulted in ludicrous death counts and a re-enhanced fear of those unknown quarters. Dunaan were never want for work. Though few in number, demands for their specialized abilities and ever increasing numbers of wilderness darkspawn ensured their status as an archaic if effective caste.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A question rose regarding what precisely had birthed the first of the witchers. They were born from an august organ of surviving mages and warriors that lived to see their work return to sunder the world. Such exiles lived in isolated chateaus at the world’s end, pondering the mysteries of their sins, beseeching the gods for guidance in rectifying their mistakes. Secretly, inquiries were made into threading their hands back into the black arts. Resistance was swift. Those of a mono-dominant mindset refused to collaborate in tempting disaster once more. Radicalism became rife: one spectrum demanded they seal themselves totally from the world and await their fate of a wasting death. Others of similarly harsh mindsets thought to unleash hellacious wildfire on Ys until every last beast was cinder. Whoever got caught up in such an apocalypse was no concern of theirs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Factionalism led to further infighting. Mage preyed upon mage in Wars of Shade until even those few who survived were further reduced. A handful remained to contemplate their folly. With the last of their resources, wit, and a brooding cunning that swore to never again underestimate the spiteful fates set out by Chaos, they began a magnum opus. Orphans and castways, any rejected for their touch of primordial Power, were recruited. They’d nowhere else to turn to anyway.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Alchemic practices veered from the mindset of reconstituting flesh into more favourable profiles to the complex refinement of existing physicality. The mages turned to applying herbal supplements and potion-craft, marrying the transformative process into a hybrid emphasizing increased strength, speed, enhancing the canals of the mind, fashioning immune systems against the myriad poisons employed by the Primordial Enemy. Eventually, experiment and failure led to a final perfection: the Trial of the Waters. An alchemical bath measured in exacting ingredients derived from some of those toxic and neurologically stimulating herbs and grasses in existence upon Ys, suffused with warping Power to trigger the changes. The survival rate was always four in ten. But it worked. In the end, it worked. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Survivors were then bred into ways of old Yssian combat, emphasizing a nomadic existence. There had to be a denial of the self. The Path was all that had to matter. The hunt. The fulfillment of contract. Coin. And then taking beaten tracks off the long roads in search of places ordinary folk were warned never to tread. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“He won’t live,” Was the Lodge of Shade’s projection.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax remained adamant by the table-side, touching to Seroth’s bare shoulder. The sixth day and his returned fever had swollen a rash of reddened, irritated skin up and down his naked body. When he slept, it was in the throes of nightmares, babbling gibberish. Waking brought him into a half-and-half reality coasting with hallucinations. Seroth blinked, eyes stinging. Fever-heat refused to break.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“As he survives now, a regiment of restorative elixirs and considerable surgery may be able to mend him back to a semblance of mobility. To subject him to the Trial of the Waters will ensure demise.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You would deny him?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“His body is wholly broken,” The Ancient said. “And his mind and heart are both compromised. He doubts, Dunaan Ajax. Past wounds are hold considerable sway on his judgment habits. I’ve peered into his the codices of his mind. The Waters require a candidate be of powerful flesh, armed with a Songsteel will, to face a chance of improved survival. I’ve found nothing ironclad about this boy. The Trial is kind to none. And many, many have fallen to the pains of change.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ancient of Shade, Keeper and Lodge,” Ajax began respectfully. “It is not your place to deny his claim to the Trial. He has seen the Dream of Sayda. Will you betray the confidence she so generously bestowed on you that you’d see your responsibilities kept? Barring nothing save End-Time?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do not lecture me on the promises I swore for the Silver Fox!” Bellowed the creature from behind his ratty, tan robes and arched cowl-hood. “I was there when she stepped from the burning palisades, swamped in the blood of the King Dragon! I know what is expected of the Lodge of Shade!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Weakly, the lad raised an arm. Beckoned, the Ancient and the Witcher leaned close as he whispered above his sickness. “No warrior ever succeeded being afraid of loss.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“But do you know what you face, child?” Asked the Lodge.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m trapped in the bowels of a hell-sought prison. I stood against evil massacring over Dromund Kaas and have paid the price for being found wanting. Now men, wickedly intentioned, governed by cruelty, greed, and spite, are drawing close to my home and family. I… hunt… monsters. That’s the cause, Lodge of Shade. The cause of my soul, as you wanted. It’s either the Waters or nothing. I’m not dying in this place.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…So be it,” He heard the Lodge whisper for the first time.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The examination table was mounted on six wheels, each an ungreased nightmare of claws-on-chalkboard that screamed in protest as Ajax swung the table about. He wheeled Seroth on the heels of the Lodge, who now had drawn himself up into air of brooding premeditation. The Trial of the Waters was the culmination of his life’s purpose. Stationed by the Silver Fox herself; this near-mythical Sayda, who’s memory held power and notoriety enough to command the obedience of individuals like Ajax, the Lodge, beyond the grip of death. Seroth stared at the dark-bricked ceiling curling overhead, mounted with bracketed lantern-cages glistening with strange, unhealthy lights. A rectangle of leather-bound metal was recessed in a catch high above the coffin-tub. The Lodge strolled to a far wall and pulled against a lever. Seroth stared over at the brass-caged tub of armoured glass. Blood was caked on the inside.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A gurney lowered from its chamber overhead, falling slowly on attached iron hooks. When it fell to a pause some inches above the tub, Ajax came up to the examination trolley’s side to scoop Seroth into his grasp. The lad was held up like a bride, the trolley shunted aside with a brute kick. His backside met with cool wood, lacking all dressings. There was not even a bolster for his neck. Lodge and Dunaan moved to secure his limbs. Leather restraints fashioned from Tikulini-hide and that strange, invincible dark metal locked around his wrists and ankles. Further shackles of beskar snapped across his elbows and thighs. The Lodge busied with those steel-encased boiler-cauldrons across the room and nestled by the tabled instruments. Seroth heard a gurgle of vibrating piping before a rush of acid-green fluids burst to begin flooding the tub beneath the gurney. Froths of multicoloured bubbles swamped against the glass edging. A stale aroma of spent rain and wet leaves reached his nostrils.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Why am I held down?” Seroth’s voice by then was just a growl of injured vocal chords. With this second fever, the gravelly texture of his wording would probably become a sticking feature. Ajax adjusted the lad’s head against its ride on the edge-eaten gurney board.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The latter stages of the changes sometimes can induce violence and convulsions,” The Lodge explained, leaning to lace the brewing alchemical bath with further elixir mixtures. “The process requires total liquid emersion.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“For how long?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Exactly a hundred sixty-eight hours,” Ajax replied. “Relax, young wolf. You will not drown. Listen to the Man of Shade.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The solution is an oxygenated liquid, very similar to prior models of perfluorocarbon. I can only recommend exhaling as deeply as your lungs allow before submersion. Otherwise, your faculties will begin to panic at the possibility of ‘drowning.’ Simply breathe as you ordinarily would.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His body would be drawing in the alchemic catalysts and mutagenic compounds almost directly, Seroth realized. Circulated through the respiratory system through blood oxygenation, until he was literally suffused with the Waters. He couldn’t anticipate the process would be pleasant. Not if every six out of ten candidates for the Trial had died in the prior centuries and millennia beyond.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If you can endure, then your body will begin accepting the changes prescribed in the bath,” Said the Lodge. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Those grey-cracked hands, skin sucking onto the bone-knuckles, manipulated a panel of bulbous controls. Electro-rods wrapped in casement of copper-sheathes twice bound with lustrous metal coils emerged from the ceiling rafters. Bolts of lightning that were not the true colour of plasma-electricity cascaded from rode to rode. Seroth felt his head beginning to tighten as dark Force power began to swell the room with jolts of cold might. The infinitely deep hood of the Lodge looked down into his face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The alchemical bath initiates changes into your flesh down to the introns of your genetic material. The composition to your muscles, bone density, nervous and immune system, even sensory organs will be irrevocably altered. This is your final opportunity to let your conscience debate, lame wolf. …What say you?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth closed his eyes. Rosa’s straw-gold hair touched at his face as she rolled in their bed… “Choice? There isn’t any choice at all. Lower me.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Fare thee well then, lame wolf,” The Lodge departed from his side. “I will see you in seven days time. …If Sayda favours you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a jerk to the cabling suspending the gurney, a long mechanical roll of grating gears on cogs, rust flicking from the chain-links as it descended into the tub. When Seroth felt the first laps of oddly too-cool, too-warm liquids begin brushing across the back of his head and lapping at his ears, he exhaled. The gurney continued lowering. The combined weight of his own body and the heavy wood-table itself ensured no buoyancy would rock him up to float. Air coughed over his dried lips and tongue. Glows of incandescent waters writhing with a shock of power closed over his face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax settled the armoured brass lid over the tub, securing it with a series of reinforced clamps. The Lodge coaxed further displays of sour lightning-arcs and electric bursts from the shivering copper-rods. Below, Seroth was in the process of trying to relax his lungs through the hurdle of liquid breathing. His grey eyes were wide, already feeling an uncanny sensation soaking into his soul from every pore. Tingles became needle junctions skewering, snapping aches. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge depressed a small, unmarked button carved out of ruby-stone. Ajax braced himself away from the ancient, standing across the room as a howl of wind wrecked through the chamber. The copper rods convulsed. Standing before the immersion sarcophagus, the Lodge of Shade was struck by sustained bolts of unleashed lightning. Conducting plasma scorched into his raised palms, coalescing into a writhe of altered Force power welling deep in the pits of his long emptied belly. The Lodge touched to the brass of the casket lid. Chaotic plasma was the agent required to stir the bath and all its constituent catalysts into action.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dark strikes of black lightning lit into the brass. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth loosed a muffled howl of shrieking bubbles, the alchemical bath conducting over three hundred thousand amps of killing energy. The cocktail of mutagens glowed to a blinding intensity. The lad went into spasms, feeling his heartbeat under go increasingly off-timed palpitations. Throes of magical fire burned through into every nerve until it felt as if every sensitive ending was being clamped and pulled through his skin. His vision filled with hallucinogenic kaleidoscopes constructed out of solid light and infinite space, a lit starfield banked with thunderclouds beckoning him with a song. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He felt his legs move. Seroth walked to the vision. The Trial of the Waters swallowed him up as colourless sleep crashed him down from consciousness.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Blink.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A timescape of space made physical, on a glowing grid plane expanding outwards into infinity.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blink.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The grid broke, showering pieces of a glittering puzzle down into the hungry maw of a juvenile star.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blink.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Feeling in his knees. He could walk. Strolling forward, he pressed over the shattering grid-plane of unreflective matter, tossing down and down into the nuclear furnace of the devouring sun.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blink.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Light. Terrible, awful, flaring illumination, crisping his skin black until he could see marrow burning out from his cooking bones. Falling. Tumbling feet over head, crushed by gravity. Impressions of ash and metallic sourness upon his tongue. Then, he and the light became one, merging into a globule of liquid crust stained with sun-spots.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blink.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Proper matter and the progression of right time finally coalesced again to form reality around Seroth. He awoke atop a grey hill crushed with crazed grass-blades whipped into petrified stalks of literally solidified ash. Air was just a smoke-fog of hazing mist churned with enough dust-grit to choke a man with one breath. The lad breathed in anyway. His lungs still felt charred, eyes sensitive, baked by the lording glow of that young, cavorting sun. Where was it now? He looked up. Overhead was an overcast of bruised thunderclouds spanning in every which direction until it merged with a darkened, jet horizon. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a suggestion of grey-silver light trying weakly to beam through a spot in the immense cloud-cover. It was failing. Light came from below, in colossal bonfires scores of kilometers high lashing flame-tongues against the wind. It was a hellscape of dead colour washed by reddened lambency, of prairie acres pulverized of feature disappearing mist walls, scored by pitted impacts that drove bowl-craters into the very stone. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth rose up. It didn’t register that he suddenly had regained locomotive control of his legs. His left arm responded to unconscious reflexive command, patting to see if the cloth against his skin felt real. The lad was dressed in black slacks and a long, tied tunic over his torso. He was lacking his usual harnesses. Boot-toes sank against an ashy loam. In his right hand was his old vibrosword, somehow restored from Stenwulf shattering it in his grip. Seroth depressed a control stud, feeding energy into the alloy-edge until it hummed bright and hot. He whipped the sword and carved a glassy line through the fried dirt by his feet, scenting crisped ozone in its backwash of scoured air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He knew this place, came the blank revelation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The taste of metal on the air hearkened back to when he was just barely old enough to keep track of memory. He’d never smelled so much death like when he awoke in that damnably cramped tent, staring through shielded glasteel ports. Feeling enthralled and horrified by a world so dead it ached to merely be alive. Five years old. Strapped inside a rad-suit two sizes two big. Struggling to walk. Peering through a visor hatch scratched by wind that could strip his body to just a scoured skeleton. Trying to follow one, comforting figure that seemed cyclopean, he was so tall. All adults were in those ages. …Then shouting. A roar. A rip of shattering plastic and glass. The figure tumbling back to lay in his hands, dead with a hole through his eye and skull.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…He looked down at his now adult hands. Blood. Bone matter. His palms were glistening with wet gore. His boot-soles trundled over a wrecked rad-suit torn to ragged pieces of skein-like garbage. The roar sounded again. No, not a roar. A burst of super-heated gasses encased in projected energy shrieking against the sound barrier. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Turning confronted Seroth with monolithic shadows that stretched to swallow up the horizon, landscape, and sky. Ten of them, cyclopean, peering with veiled contempt and sneering jocularity. Each was featureless, just vague blocks of arms, legs, torsos, heads that pierced the gloom with harsh glares of black-light. He could perceive speech… But it was too distant, shielded by muffled displacement that reverberated and pitched their tones through weird octaves. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Son?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned to see a mountainous spine of rocky hills that hadn’t been there a moment prior. Atop the first rise of broken stone and glaring mineral was a figure backlit by hurdled fire. He couldn’t make out a detail of his face. But he was tall, broad and wiry in some odd, juxtaposing anatomy. The man was dressed in the dark navy-blue fatigues of his Corellian long-coat and pointed cowl, a buttoned grey-black vest over white shirting, black pants ending in knee-boots clipped with jagged, steel spurs. Like the Lodge of Shade, there was no face but a suggestion of inner light coursing through his eyes. His call for the lad sounded in a bare whisper tickling the back of Seroth’s ears.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Father?” Seroth murmured.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The figure bowed its head and turned, walking over the hill’s line and out of sight.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Father…?” His feet picked up and started the lad into a run. “Father, no – No, wait, don’t go that way!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth reached the top lip of the hill. Dathan Gunn was ahead the next, picking his way through a forest of trees turned from wood to cracked stone. Leaves were glass and broke across his frame. “It can’t be helped,” Came his voice on the holocaust air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No! Stop! Just stop, wait!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Tree-boughs snapped off his chest, crumbling like caked char. Son followed father on through the unreal forestry, bursting through the network tangles of snake-nest roots at his feet. The glass-leaves fell, slicing open his cheeks. Razor shards torn over his mouth, catching at his lips, snapping across his brow and tearing slivers of red wounds. Blood seeped into his eyes and briefly foiled his sight. Seroth wiped away furiously with his tunic sleeve, only to look up and find a ghost of shadow in his way. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It laughed. Skeletal hands rose to choke over Seroth’s throat. He cut with his vibrosword and banished the specter away in wails of hollowed, gloating chuckles. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Eventually, the petrified forest fell away to empty space. Seroth’s hill climbed down into further wasteland: a long sucking miasma of burping mud wells, super-heated by earth fissures, bloating and exploding in gusts of sticky mud-phlegm. Material hot enough to burn and melt through flesh until it caught and caked onto the bone. Dathan Gunn wasn’t bothered by it. He followed a pathway coursing through the fields of mud-volcanoes, snaking around atop solid bars of sticky earth. Behind followed Seroth, desperately trying to keep pace with his father’s disappearing footprints.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Wait!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I can’t.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Wait!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Some happenstances in time are momentous for those it touches, son. It can’t be stopped, nor turned back.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Stop! Father, they’ll kill you!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahead by a league, the navy-blue hood turned aside and flashed a rogue smile of charming lips and white teeth. “Yes, they will. But I’m already gone. You can’t keep ghosts from wanting to fade, son. What are you doing, running after wind?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dunes of black ash swept in with hurricane screams, dredging up wedging mounds of perfect, spherical quality. Dathan Gunn strolled up one steep edge, planting eddying foot-steps that displaced the grit beneath his boots. Ash seemed to coalesce and bubble together, like wet earth atop an ant-mound, rolled, balled, piled together into weird, asymmetrical shapes. Seroth scrabbled up after him, climbing hand over fist over toe. The mound-side all around began to shift with melting bone-meal and vacant, glassy constructs. They looked like spent candles, bearded with waxen melts that lent cancerous airs to their appearance. Seroth had to stop; just to stare, watching as men and women bound in waist-sashes and grey fur-caps formed from the half-melt of their grimy lint. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dead mercenaries of the destroyed warband, eponymous with the Dunaan who’d inspired their creation: the Sayda. They caught sight of Seroth, peering through hollow glass-sockets, shrieking. Their voices were like grinds of steel across glacier-ice. The lad raised his blade and hacked through them on his way to the dune-lip, parrying through a score of blows chopped from hands that had transformed to jagged axe-limbs and stumped wrists crystallized into glass-stakes. He turned and took one through the throat with a whisking slash, collapsing it into a pile of jeweled fragments. Another drove at him from above, taking his vibrosword through the belly. It cried aloud in that inhuman atonal range before bursting into ash burning from within. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]More fell at his deft strokes by the time he reached the dune’s brow and came atop an infinite plateau that, like so much else in his nightmare vision… or was it remembrance?... had suddenly come into existence without warning. Overhead, cloud funnels of tempest-grey and purple had thinned. Night sky black with dotted diamond star-pricks loomed over the onyx rifts of cracked earth, taunting Seroth, who ran on after the long shadow cast by the backside of his departing parent. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Further specter rose, harrying him. Phantoms with colour, hands just a suggestion of rippling bone that shivered in and out of existence, swiping at him. Wounds laced with greasy, jelly ectoplasm burned into the meat of his shoulders and hips. Their laughter was the sound of billion voices groaning in death-agonies. Dathan Gunn became obscured. Just a hint of profile bust. Limbs without constituent matter wrapped around his brow, clawing ice into his eyes, wrenching with spiteful effort.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Father!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]-K-KRACK-[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Father!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]All shadow dissipated. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dathan Gunn was lying down against a bed of gravel, head propped against a smooth river-boulder. Ten phantoms dressed in tattered hazard-suits observed his prone pose upon the earth. Each looked up in turn as the son approached, half-limping on numbed toes, stumbling. He couldn’t keep the phantoms from shrugging and shivering away up into the night vista. One of them paused; it dropped a spent hold-out blaster, hissing with a hot stub-barrel. Seroth fell and crawled over to cradle his father’s ruined skull across his lap.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh Gods…” He whimpered. “I… I can’t keep myself from dreaming this. I think I can save you. But you always fall away from me… Father, I’m sorry… I’m so very sorry… I can’t make this stop… Oh Gods… Why do they always take you away…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dead eyes peered up at his son, blinking. Seroth started. Dathan raised a white hand to touch his cheek, now wept with hot tears. “It’s alright.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It’ll never be right. Oh God… She killed you and I killed her… It’s my fault. It’s my entire fault… Father, I’m so sorry…” Seroth sobbed. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dathan just smiled. “You have to promise me something, kid.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He felt his father beginning to relax against his hold, drifting as his idle, deadened form was consumed by star-fields lighting him from within. “Don’t ever let it become just about the greed. It’s difficult to deny that feeling of having to consume. Difficult. But not impossible. You have to make yourself disciplined to an ideal beyond anything monetary. Coin is just a means to an end. A way to support yourself. That’s keeping alive… but not living. You have to give your soul a cause, son. Don’t let weaker men cloud that purpose from you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dathan Gunn transfigured into a fade of particle-motes, each a gem of iridescent light, floating high into the night like a stream of petals. Below, Seroth stared on, cracking cheeks still stained with wet strokes of tear-runs. His skin fell away to crisped matter, bones flying apart as wind blasted his skull across the plateau.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Streaks of blood used the sand to clump into damp, viscous rolls.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth couldn’t recall with any exacting detail precisely how and when he had strolled in the glare of sun and realized heated sand was baking up through his boot soles. Like the prior vision of dead Tund and the haunt of wandering Dathan Gunn, it made little sense… Save that it was happening, faculties registering every sensation with detached awareness. Overhead gleamed two, unkind suns blistering his skin raw. Yet, it wasn’t. Sand was gritting into his clothing, chaffing at his hips, knees, and ankles. But there was no sand.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The vista of unending desert landscape, of crescentic and star dunes, domed ridges, parabolic horseshoes of trillion on trillion particles overlapped, airless and snug. Seroth followed the blood trail up a low relief of sand and stood still for a moment. Sunlight was just a dream of immeasurable heat. His cheeks felt cracked and welts of heated flesh had already burst and begun to bleed down his jaw. Seroth ignored the dry run of thirst aching in the back of his esophagus. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He’d been following after a figure stumbling ahead in the endless escarpments of gold-dust and parched earth for probably eternity. Seroth remembered finding the splatters of vitae coating a chalk rock, before noticing a haggard frame tripping over their feet some miles on in the dunes. He took his up his sword and followed. Heat cooked the blood and grit together until both emerged a hardened crust of crispy gore. No matter how much mileage his strides saw, wearing his boots out until they were ruined, he couldn’t gain any pacing on the stranger. They were hurt and bleeding out, forced into some dazed struggle to caper on until they got lost in the ergs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hey!” Seroth called after a while. “Hold up! Hey! Let me help you!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Turning at his voice, the distant man tripped over an inconvenient boulder somehow rolled up his dune. Curses echoed on the dry mistral. “Augh! Fethin’ spast!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad paused. He knew that habit of cussing. Knew the crazed voice cracked with grainy decades. “…Shev? Shev Rayner!?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Lad, is that you??” Shev called back. Shade contorted his form into just an inky, lost shadow, waving a vague arm. “Boy, what the hell? Hell are you doin’ out here! I gave ya laps to run!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev, I finished them. I finished all of them! Stop walking, let me help you!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ha!” He laughed. “This – This can’t be helped! Ain’t nothin’ to help! Just gotta keep on goin’!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You old damn fool, you’re bleeding out!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh, aye! Come on then, if you’re gonna keep comin’!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Hours drifted without meaning in an infinite daytime cycle. Twin suns over in the too-bright blue sky held their thrones like stately, immovable monarchs presiding over the hellacious dust-ball. Shev didn’t slow as he cavorted ahead, appearing dizzy of blood loss as he continued leaking out a steady line of trailing red. It mixed against sand, browning, losing thickened consistency as it drained down into the dune ergs and reversed reliefs. Dragon-lizards about a meter long with flaring neck flaps hissed at the lad’s passing. Most scuttled out of his way, crawling down dune faces with surprising aptitude and speed. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Save for one lizard. Its face was a bare skull, eyeless, dry, toothy with long, clear fangs. The jaw cracked open and began speaking. “Leave evil, and it will leave you,” It said in a rasp. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]When Seroth blinked, the lizard had become a length of quartz curiously shaped like a reptile of some kind. Had he ever seen the skull-dragon to begin with?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Eventually, Shev’s stumbles meandered him into the mouth of a narrow canyon culvert. Despite Seroth’s calls trying to waylay him enough to allow both to catch up with one another, the old Legionnaire simply waved him off and disappeared. The lad came up to a bend of wind-smoothed rock. Padded steps against silky dust and further blood marked the winding paths taken by Shev as he strolled on. High walls of ribbed stone, brushed ivory, gold, cinnamon, cayenne red, and orange shivered ahead before twisting in an abrupt turn. Seroth raised his vibrosword high into a guard and began following the Legionnaire’s trail.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Winds picked up, playing odd tricks of echoes. Whispers whistled into shrieks of air passing through narrowed cracks in the canyon walls, slivers no larger than half a raised finger. Every so often, the lad passed by deadened bones bleaching in the heat and sun. They still possessed clings of dried, scratchy skin and bits of tattered jumpsuits and second-skins. Otherwise, they were poor, looted for their gear. Seroth kept following the mark of blood upon the dusty flooring, climbing along.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He stopped when a ululating cry hitched overhead. Seroth was already diving aside as a Sand Person lept from the canyon top and smashed his gaffi-stick across the pebbles and rock. It turned and crossed its salvaged implement, meeting the lad, battered by crisp barrages that worked the stick wide. Seroth stroked a flash of blade through its shoulder, again on its forearm. The Sand Person certainly gave out the familiar guffaws of his people. But he barely resembled them.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was a standing creature of black robes that dripped with night sky, scattering inky pustules that evaporated the moment they touched to dust. Seroth saw its head was spiked with arrowheads, edges ragged, trailing razor-wire in a cage around its eyestalk goggles and grill-mask. Both hands ended in three claws, scales showing through the ripped binding. He killed it with an abrupt embrace, gripping its shoulder, driving his sword-point up through the ribs and heart. The vibroswords edge shimmered magma-bright to set the touched flesh on fire.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]More emerged as Seroth ran on after Shev Rayner, trying to keep after his sparse blood trail. Gore spun like petals in the air. Half a dozen, a score, more continued to meet his blade and a ferocity that was becoming increasingly unbridled. Sand Daemons howled, cut to virtual ribbons, battered aside as Seroth called after his mentor.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev! Shev, feth’s sake, wait up!” He spent his voice up at the arched canyon walls. A Daemon rose from a rock behind. Seroth reversed his motion and tripped the Sand-Thing past him, cutting in a blood-flecked arc. The Sand-Thing fell apart, sliced in a bisect from shoulder to thigh. His vibrosword flared, vaporizing fluid from its edge.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His disembodied reply froze in and out of hearing. “C-C-C-Cah-Can’t! – J-J-J-Juh-Just - - - - K-K-K-K-Keheep f-f-f-f-f-fuh-followin-win-win’! M-M-M-Muh-Mind the deh-deh-dead-ed! Th-Th-Th-They - - - th-th-th-this p-p-p-puh-puss-place-ace - - - - th-th-their own-own-OWN! CoMe oOon! K-K-K-K-Keep ffffff-f-f-fuh-followin’ or you’ll-you’ll-you’ll-you’ll never get-et-et out!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Soon on, the spattered markings of Rayner’s spent blood stopped making sense. In some sections of canyon, it looked like the Legionnaire had walked upright along the stone walling. There were reverses, switchbacks, cut offs, places where the marker trail simply hanged suspended in the air. Droplets turned over themselves in false zero-gravity. And every few minutes, if Seroth paused and strained his ear to listen against the gaunt, flat echoes, Shev Rayner could be heard calling out. Yet, his words were increasingly nonsensical, offering advice one minute before viciously ripping condemnation into his former pupil.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He was approaching a fulcrum of time. Like the death of his father, there was something momentous within his memory that destabilized the fabric of his dreamscape. Half-formed Sand-People… Daemons… Things crawled out of the very rocks. They stood on feet missing wrappings and flesh save for bones formed of compacted chalk. Others simply lacked heads, limbs, others plodding in frames gored with sickening wounds hosing blood like uncorked oil-wells. Seroth ran on, trying to pick his way through hollowed out tunnels that were missing any ground below his feet.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Heh.” Said a heckling caller peering down from the skies, perched as a sneering gargoyle behind the swelter-glare of those incandescent suns. “Whass a mattah? You losin’ the plot already? Well c’mon, haul it togethah! Ya gotta know I ain’t dun with you yet~ Burryin’ you unnagroun’? Juss’ the start. Had a ‘ole two years, mate, t’think about makin’ ye regret evah squeezin’ out ya mommy’s. Yu come crawlin’ outta thah’ place, guess wut? I’ll be there~ Waitin’~ And we can juss’ keep on. You an’ I, boy. ‘Cause it ain’t never gonna get ol’ the things I cahn do t’make you weep.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahead, the route taken by whatever disembodied ghost-form Shev Rayner had adopted ended with the canyon forming into a crucible. It was a high bowl-chamber with slippery-smooth walls curling up into a thickened, knobby ridge atop. Shadows crisscrossed in odd diagonals, framing the bowl with illusory dimensions and distances that simply weren’t there. At the bowl’s dead center, against a tall construct of crystal-teal and nickel-veins, laid a singular skeleton. It was dressed in a tan uniform of flared jodhpurs, a white shirt with rolled sleeves dirtied by sweat and sand, black runner-boots that had lost its polished sheen. In one empty, skeletal palm laid a broken bayonet dagger with an out of place holo-recorder untouched by age. In the other arm, a disused slug-rifle, its magazine having long run dried.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The skull seemed to peer up at the approaching slayer. Toothy. Grinning. Wind rattled through its exposed ribbing. …Seroth paused when the fleshless jaw somehow began to work and speak.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh come on, m’boy, I’d never make it jus’ that simple!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]An impact slammed across his backbone and hurled him across the open-bowl chamber. Brow, shoulder, and ribs impacted smartly with age-worn stone and slid him down onto the sands. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“G’won, at ‘im!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]‘Him’ was a broad Tusken War Chief. Less monstrous yet more disarming than whatever creatures he counted as clan-mates, the War Chief stood at an easy seven feet, two hundred kilos heavy and wrapped in taut, black sand-gear. Etched proverbs in a scrawled tongue were sewn with tin threads into the fabric stretched across his brawny chest, upon the wrappings clenched with fierce tautness upon his rock-hands and wrists. His head was just a mass of helm-metal, twisted with spiny growths, with a visor for sight rather than the ordinary goggle-stalks common amongst his kind. A kind of yellow gleam bloomed from where Seroth guessed its eyes peered with unfaltering animosity down at his knelt posture. It wielded an axe-gaffi, one end of spike replaced with a double-headed beard of thick steel planed until tipping into brutal, razor sharp edgings. The Chief spun it overhead with gruff howl and leapt, crashing the axe-end down at Seroth’s skull.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He rolled away, twice over, coming back onto his feet tipped over in sand washing from his head and shoulders like grainy rainwater. The War Chief circled him in tandem. Sunlight glinted off his opponents bleak visor-helm, catching an iridescent beam of reflection that briefly blinded the slayer. Sensing his temporary pause, the Chief moved in. His axe swung a carve through the too-hot air, chipping into the standing crystal formation, shattering off flinty flakes and broader chunks before he could arrest his momentum. Up came the spike pummel. Seroth back-stepped, whipping out a strike that scored sparks off the iron gaffi-haft. The Chief swung again in shorter, curt blows, twisting round in an under-hand swing. He felt the implement whistle and stir the air less than a hair’s breadth from his chin.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Chief rolled back his arms, barking the gaffi-haft into a blunt jab aimed at the lad’s brow. Seroth ducked, stroking a ribbon of blood from the Tusken Raider’s chest and waist. Pain briefly staggered the beast’s momentum. Seroth dressed him with a second and then third blow that opened up wounds parting both cloth and flesh. Blood started to stream in hard runs down the folds of its legs, bright as sun-washed jet, stinking of incredible ichor. The Chief growled something in his abrasive tongue, shaking high his weapon, working himself into a berserk mindset until both pain and joy numbed away.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It cleaved deep furrows through sand and rock, chipping and showering planes of gristle and debris, just a step-behind the lad. Seroth didn’t bother attempting any hooking guards and even parrying the dreadful weight of the too-heavy axe-gaffi. If it caught his sword, the steel would bend like putty if not snap apart outright. The ground beneath vibrated at every trundling gait. The Chief swung again, again, tireless and purposed with either death or victory. It ran the lad up against a spot of flattened canyon walling and bore in. Seroth cried out as the axe-edge bit a chunk of his left arm. His foe just barely misaimed. His gaffi-axe was stuck against the ringed shale, though it was rapidly crumbling free. The lad took the offered moment.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The first stroke: through the meat of the Chief’s left wrist, dismembering the hand.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The second stroke: a stab up into the underside of its arm pit, piercing widthwise through the Chief’s shoulder, clavicle, trapezius, and sternum.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The third stroke: Seroth slid his blade away in a clean flush of bursting gore and chopped into the exposed necking behind the Chief’s now sagging plate-helm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Rent and dying, the Chief plodded onto his knees. Arms hung uselessly by his wide hips, breathing coarse and raggedly. Blood like shark-ink ran from his harrowed throat, pissing from the wrist stump, jetting out beneath the same wounded arm. Off tumbled the flecked, gory helm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax looked up sadly at his friend from behind curtains of salt-pepper hair. Wolven eyes were crossing into dimmer and dimmer lights.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What…?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Leaving his vibrosword clattering listlessly onto the gritty earth, Seroth knelt forward. Disbelief trembled his frame. Shaky hands gathered Ajax into his embrace, peering over his bowed face with wide eyes stoked with moisture. “Oh… Oh Gods… Oh no… Oh no… Ajax… Oh, please, no, not you too… Not you too… First Father… Shev… Guen… Now you…? Oh God… Forgive me… Please, I… I did not see… I’m sorry… I’ll make it right, please!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hey, m’boy,” Crackled Shev Rayner’s lost voice from the holo’corder idling in his dead, bleached hand. “Real kick in the teeth, ain’t it? S’cruel. Some part of ya’s probably thinking: ‘Relax, ain’t real!’. But yer conscience haggles ‘But what if it is?’ Suddenly, looks like yer friend is dead and you held th’ blade that slew ‘im. Ya don’t know what to think. …But ya know th’ fault’s yours. No excuses. Ya done fethed up and th’ aftermath’s yours to live with. But see, here ya gotta listen to me, boy. Listen real hard, real close. Ya keep wonderin’ what the difference is, between good men and bad? It’s this.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A good sort accepts the responsibility inherent to his actions. A bad sort denies it, warps it, shifts and scurries blame round, jus’ so they don’t gotta listen to their souls. That’s one big difference. What that is to you, well…? …I guess we’ll both see.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]An ache of chill ran up his spine, causing Seroth to turn about and peer down the canyon road. It was gone, or in the process of warping to yet another locale. The sand beneath his knees pressed to the ground by the slain Ajax was rapidly transmuting from textured grains to solidified ice. Ice began falling in token clouds. His companion’s body dissolved through his clutching knuckles, shifting from corrupted flesh and ichor-blood into a frigid, sludgy mixture. Bone collapsed into gelatinous water. Skin flaked, catching passes of wind, joining into the thronging congregation of increasing snowfall. Seroth clutched at his skull. Calcified bone rapidly took on the texture and contours of frozen crystal, juddering in his palms as hair-line cracks began pulling it apart. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Dessert landscapes of mica dunes and salt-flats baking under furnace heat fell away. Seroth found himself kneeling against ice-drifts atop a thin line of ledge protruding against the face of a craggy matterhorn. His world became a whorl of spinning drafts hurtling snow into his face, lashed with a cold that was bleeding heat out of his body and replacing comfort with a pain in his marrow and blood. Seroth rose up, fishing his vibrosword from the ground, letting the heat-edge warm feeling back into his bare palms. Stepping out, he approached the drop-off of his ledge and peered out. Arboreal forestry stretched on until it became lost a distant horizon of choked smog and blinking city lights. Above was a murky sky reefed with coral-bunches of black clouds stained brown. Winds were shrieking into the unordered tree-rows below, savaging them until all became a sway of blanketed pine-limbs tugging to and fro with maddening animation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The lad knew this place. Contruum. The Peak of the Blade, contorting pyramid of jet-black stone permanently crowned in caps of glacial freeze. Guenyvhar Gunn fled to use its ancient systems of water-carved pathways, bridges, and tunnels as shelter against her son’s wrath. His wrath. Seroth picked away from the ledge and gathered a cloak around his hunched shoulders. He hadn’t been wearing it a moment prior. Vision-logic edited shaky continuity with impunity. Some motive told the lad to keep strolling against the freeze. He forced his cleat-less boots against the ice and began walking, turning along the ledge westerly in the face of the wind. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Soon, he passed over a bridge-way with petrified wood-boards hanging from distends of thickened rope-work swollen thick with hoarfrost. His footing nearly betrayed him, slipping out against his weight. A phantom waited from him across the drop, standing idle at the cofferdams. Pellucid blue illumination wrought a fire of phosphor corposant over its shredded and bloodied deep-winter gear. Seroth froze to look at her arch, broken face crying streams of icicles down her torn cheeks. Guenyvhar Gunn raised an accusatory arm at her son.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You would steal a mother’s breath with your own hands?? I granted you opportunity just to have you spit back in my eyes with all the treacherous spite you could muster!! I thrice damn you, Seydon Son of Dathan!! I set all the hounds of hell on your heels, so that they may drag your screaming, jiggling corpse to the Ninth Hell!” She screamed over the wind. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen disappeared. A harrowing roar of voices composed of dead air and wretched vengeance rose from behind him opposite on the bridge. Seroth looked over his shoulder and saw a small horde of skeletal ‘things’ wrapped in ruined heatgowns, vibroaxes, knives, and vibroblades clutched in fleshless palms. They wore black sashes and furred caps tugged over the scowling ridge of their emptied eye-sockets. The dead of the Sayda Warband. Some sixty specters raced against the ice of the rope-bridge after him. The lad ran.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Their pursuit tracked him up the Blade’s face, harrying him from pathway to pathway as footing grew deathly sparse. Seroth raced around a blank corner, fingers digging on feather ice. He nearly went over a three hundred meter fall to a cradle of sharpened boulder debris below. Passage to the next path segment was provided by a crack barely seven inches out, just enough to give his toes something to purchase. The lad sheathed his blade, in a shoulder-catch that likewise hadn’t been harnessed to his back a bare second prior. Dream-logic. Seroth scurried along the meager pass-way, praying his toes would keep their hold and his hands wouldn’t miss their next grasp against the rock-face. Chasing ghosts jeered at his progress, forced to halt and watch, throwing missiles of discarded axe-heads and knives. Handle-butts and axe-hafts bounced off his shoulder, rebounding from his hip into the empty air below. Seroth broke into a refreshed sprint the moment his feet had enough reasonable gripping on the resuming pathway. Behind, the ghosts cheated: each floated across in a throng of waving weaponry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They forced him up sheer faces of ice and rock, across natural bridges that wobbled horrendously under his weight. The damned wailed on the air of their unquenchable thirst, of desires that spanned from simple revenge to just retribution. All the Saydakin he’d ever crossed blades with and won out over harried the lad until he felt his ice-wind choked lungs were fit enough to swell over and bust inside his hammering ribcage. Ahead, perched on outcroppings, suspended against naked stone, piercing the storm-gloom with eyes warped by white fire was Guenyvhar and her damning voice.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Your life was mine!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I could have thrown you to the gutter and been done with it!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You were sheltered when no one else would have you!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Given skills to survive our trade!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What was mine could have been yours to inherit!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I showed you truths but you still cling to your lies!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What do you tell yourself at night, son??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What excuses do you whimper while I come for you from the shadows!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shut up!” Seroth screamed across the wind, words echoing with vibrant potency. “You killed Father! Twice you left me to die! You turned our legacy into a band of murderers, thieves, enslavers! And you refused to look back at the paths of blood left in your wake and admit: you were a monster! You weren’t my Mother then! You were never any kind of Mother!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guen’s galing scream concussed the mountain-side. The ice-bridge Seroth had been swiftly attempting traversal began collapsing out beneath his legs in haphazard explosions of crystal and snow-dust. Behind him came on the ever eager Sayda-horde, a burgeoning army of dead that seemed to swell, expanding every instance he looked back. As if this vision of snowed over hell and abandonment was responding to the dread wickedly swelling in his chest. Seroth sprinted, making a ten meter leap that looked humanly impossible. He reached across the gap, slamming into rock and hardened snow drifts. The shivering, illuminated cavalry behind him simply floated over the emptied air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hypocrite!” They wailed. “Weakling!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The chase carried up the mountainside and into the hollowed out caverns worn through the Blade’s flanks. Seroth pushed himself through a narrow space jutting between two pressing sections of heavily wind-worn rock, wrenching himself along, agonizing foot by foot. The dead came for him. Hands passed through his skin, his flesh, leaving flickers of ethereal discharge that swam pain up into the back of his mind. Seroth cried out, lashing with his sword and taking several through the empty bone of their skulls and ribs. They followed him out onto another narrow of rock and ice winding steeply to another yawning cavern entry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth cut through the cave interior and sprinted up an unlit hallway of spherical if bumpy ice tunneling. Despite pitch darkness and only just a faint suggestion of grey snow-light emanating ahead, the lad wasn’t bothered for the lack of illumination. He could make out detail perfectly~ That included the literal pit-falls that opened beneath his boots were dripping sediment had caused minor cave-ins. Jumping across the depthless spans put him out of ghostly reach by precious meters. Guen’s ghost drifted by his side, swimming through snow and granite while lashing out with choking grasps and embittered groans.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Detail became increasingly iridescent. Rock and stone looked pinched from within by light attempting to issue through crack-fissures. Despite that there was a growl of snow-fall that was not and would not relent, the skies up over his head had cleared. Aurora snaked in up-lit branches of electromagnetic illumination, crossing from red to blue to violet to green and back again. The Blade, mountain and stoic witness to time, groaned hoarse notes of inner mineral veins flowing against the grain of aggregated quartz and feldspar. Logic was beginning to loosen its hold the closer the lad felt himself edging to the fulcrum memory. The ghosts harried him up another escarpment, across another naked cliff-face with minimalist hand-holds. They all opened their gum-less jaws to make themselves heard against wind-screams.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Blasphemer!” Guen cried from above in the borealis lights. Seroth couldn’t look up. His ghosts were gaining. He only stopped to carve through an encroaching handful, scattering smoking bone and tendrils of unreal clothing aside with crisp, whirling blows.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oathbreaker!” Called his mother again. The dancing fires across the sky and far horizon bolstered with wrath.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Kinslayer!” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Snow became hurtling glass. Razor particles, cutting dregs, lees of cutting stubs of blue mirrors fell and rammed into his shoulders. Seroth’s backside swiftly resembled a poor impression of a porcupine, stuck with dozens of upraised fragments of ice-daggers digging wintry cold and pain into his vertebrae. He could only clench with vigor over his teeth, grinding molars, sweeping his blade across his shoulders to try and dislodge the errant glass-shards. It caused him to fail noticing one ghost that had caught up. Deathly hands slammed into his kidneys and threw him forward off his feet. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The horde of dead and damned by his hand fell upon him. Breathe like the stink of grave mold and tomb rot burned his nostrils. Slinking limbs stripped bare of flesh, hanging icicles from the bone, scrabbled to try and tear him limb from limb. Each skull-face was both screaming and confessing: damning him for his judgment for their crimes and simultaneously admitting to horrors. Murder, rape, neither of which were exclusive in so many whispers, torture, the glee of slavery, the joy of cold palladium coin in their hands, enforcing their life of wanton greed and slaughter upon an unwilling galaxy. …The man in their hold twisted. Up came his vibrosword, ripping and hacking with enraged abandon. Dark glitters of forbidden power wafted, slamming ghosts off their feet, blitzing others to mere dust. Seroth rose as the horde tracked away down the pathway.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Around him, ice and stone was frothing with psipathic discharge. Corposant and little balls of lightning cavorted. Seroth looked to his hand, suddenly elated but crossed with fear. No, his mind groaned. No no. This was the shadow. The black fire at the edge of the Force, of Chaos. What was worse was that it was not tempting, nor seductive. …Venting the tight bands of constricted emotion otherwise kept closely balled by his heart was cathartic. Seroth stared up at the aurora-fires. They were shaped to define the contours of his mother’s glaring visage. Closing his eyes, he tried seeking out the calming aura’s of the usual ‘Light’ he’d been taught to embrace since boyhood. The further his senses tried to reach, the further that cold, white sun in his mind’s eye drifted out of reach. There was only the black fire, the grey miasma, coating him like a comforter’s blanket. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In time after seeming endless hours spent mustering his body up the slopes, arêtes, handhold crevasses, and treacherous chimneys just wide enough to accommodate his frame, the lad came to the summit. Not the true peak of the Blade, but a wide plateau supported by a deep angle of jutting rock that made it appear as if someone had pulled a shelf out from the mountain-face. The rope-bridge keeping a connected between the plateau and the descending stone-way behind Seroth was severed. Overhead was a ledge accreting enlarged ice stalactites that groaned precariously in the wind. He remembered. One pitched down and stabbed through the bridge-way. Guen and him had nearly taken a long tumble to their doom; ascent was a kicking, biting affair, forced to share the only hand-holds with his murderous progenitor.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She waited for him alone on a cleared pond of blue waters froze solid, racked with a below glow of pale blue. Those wrenching high winds had blown the rock-flat free of snow-drifts. Guenyvhar Gunn, dressed in the livery of the Sayda Warband, spun both tomahawk and dagger resting nestled in her hands. Seroth looked down. His sword had vanished: Huntsman the axe and Seydakin the sheathe-knife idled in his grasp. Predictable, almost. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Neither of them said a word as they approached, raised their weaponry, and began hacking each other to pieces…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Familial violence was often far more terrifying to behold than the confrontations between strangers. When love was lost between siblings, parents, the hollow where affection should been held became filled with the most personal kind of anger, loathing, and purpose. Even hate. Seroth was just the boy who should have died. Guenyvhar the woman who should have loved. Lungs stinging, frames burning from the ferocity of their previous trades of blows, the two brought their axes and knives to bear and ran.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was not artistry. No grand maneuvers or fancy steps. They fell into the ways Shev Rayner had trained each, utilizing brisk, easy motions backed by punishing strength. Guen caught her son’s axe aside and ripped a slice into his ribs. Seroth reached and punched a blow into her throat, slamming in a follow up strike that shattered her nose even further and split her lip. Tomahawk hafts shuddered, blocking and parrying where there was room and motion to… Doing so otherwise against the scream of shredding arm and shoulder muscle. Knives flashed, banking strikes off their balanced, honed edges, seeking that telling opening in each other’s defenses.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A clash of tools and a physical shunt pushed each away from the other. Seroth and Guenyvhar began circling, biding for the next moment. Seroth was slashed across his brow and cheek, cut with deep wounds that had been rent over his chest. He was bleeding handily, though had slowed none of his motion to deal with the shivering, itching pain that rolled up his torso. Guenyvhar was likewise hurt. Flaps of flesh had been torn off her throat, her nose shattered and bent, hacked through with three wounds that had ruined her left breast and opened a gaping swathe across her belly. They breathed hard, hacking blood up and spitting to the ground. Guen reached and gave her nose a righting snap, gusting out catches of snotty gore from the wrecked nostrils so she could breathe. Seroth winced, rolling his shoulders as he gave his neck a readying crack. Tensions climbed. A spark traded between their eyes. Snow spun up from their legs, clashing axe haft to knife blade, locking limbs in a brutal contest of efficient, physical finesse and ability.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Each strike that found purchase in skin and bone, but failed to kill, was answered back in kind. There was every reason to batter and slaughter one another, even as their blood was shared and mixed in ways only the intimacy of a mother and child could know. Flaps of clothing and splashes of wounded vitae spread out across the ankle high snows. Moonlight from twin lunar orbs cast their battle in a strange light of ethereal beauty. Stars blinked, a hundred thousand million overhead, caught up in the galactic ribbon that could only be seen so clearly these deep into one of the arctic poles. Guen rolled and stabbed, piercing Seroth through his left thigh. But he caught her right wrist in his off-hand, driving his longknife down through her palm. The tomahawk fell, upended in the snows. His own drove down and stoved in through the bone of left her shoulder. The last telling blow, as it sundered her ability to even lift her arm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Staggering, her right hand crippled and her left arm rendered useless from the bicep down, Guen managed to come to an unsteady stance. Her blade was still stuck in muscle of her son’s leg, where he left it as he limped gamely as she encircled him one last time. She was an alpha femme, still proud. She bore up a strange beauty and dignity, despite the ravages done to her. At her son’s hands no less. In that she was mirrored by Seroth. He was so like her Dathan, she decided. Unbowed, straight backed, covered in blood and hulked with tight muscle across his body, and gazing at her with the stare of a canis. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She watched her one child begin to approach while favouring the strength remaining in his good leg. Steady breezes off the arched brow of the Blade blew past them, freezing the hot blood caked across cloth and skin. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth shivered, cold, hurting… pained in a manner far more than just physical ailment. Frost was caught to the torn panting of his leggings, with one leg glistened bright with his own blood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The ghosts of thirsting gods laughed on as the pair looked to each other and stared. Guenyvhar had grown pale and wan. Her breathing was coming to an erratic grunt as she clutched to her ripped chest. If her wounds did not bleed her out dry, then the dropping temperatures would squeeze her heart until it found not the will to beat. Seroth wondered what other ends she’d imagined. Running to meet death against a wall of oncoming fire? Stabbed in her sleep by someone trusted? Or old age, surrounded by friends and children she’d thought none would come to see her in her last hours? Or as this… Broken at the hands of her son, watching him pant in the cold as he eyed her with teary pity.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It wasn’t supposed to be like this.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His hands became cased in hot blood. Seroth parried a stroke sweeping at his belly with the knife, hooking it away and gliding the edge into the meat, veins, and bone of Guen’s exposed wrist. Her cry cut him more deeply than any axe blow. She stumbled back, dropping the knife to clatter on the stone hollowly. Exhausted defenses could not deny her son. The beard of his axe caught and snapped away her tomahawk and arm, butting his knife pommel up across her teeth and nose. Gore burst onto his chest. Guen coughed fleshy phlegm out of her mouth, stumbling, blinded by vitae and pain. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth heard someone loose an even, strident cry rife with grief and agonized conscience. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was himself.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The knife plunged into her gut and ripped a line from her navel to shoulder, axe chopping through breast, meat, bone, and the heart below. Guenyvhar Gunn collapsed back onto the plateau stone, hosing blood from her mouth.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her son came to her side, hefting her broken frame onto his lap and trying to lay her head as comfortably as he could manage. She was rent; hideous glides of warmth were soaking against her pant-legs, her tunic and vest, all of her extreme weather gear torn to threaded shreds. Guenyvhar leaked out more red than Seroth ever through a person could hold. Black eyes faded to greener hues, strangely thoughtful peering up into her slayer’s face. The lad was crying. Dathan. Shev. Ajax, in a vision of possible horror and bedlam. …Now Guen, who bore him. Guen, who for a time probably did love him. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And Guen, who Seroth thought was remembering something of their brief time as family, tickling his ribs while Dathan watched from a shadowed arch-span. That was fanciful on his part. Sensation, tactile and auditory, every smell and taste, was just invention from his mind as he laid in that accursed alchemical bath. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Guenyvhar’s lips moved to say something. The lad listened, bent his ear close, but despite the draws of warm breathe against his cheek, she did not utter a sound. Smiling, satisfied whatever final admonitions and sentiments had been imparted, the woman faded in his arms. Seroth watched the ice claim her, turning her into a statuesque construct of veined ice-glass lit with hues of cyan, teal, azure. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Around him, the construct of the mountain Blade, the deposited plateau, the reaches of snowed forestry, came apart. Seroth fell and lost Guen’s ice-cased form. His body pitched over and over, in the grip of an avalanche, everything bursting into a wash of crystalline blood…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]A psychopomp appeared. Seroth imagined it had to be one. It was a long, large silver fox with wolven eyes and glinting, metal fangs. The fox padded forward on paws girded in small curtains of linked steel, jingling them together in bell-notes with each step, magnificent and warlike. It chuffed at him, swung its head about on a sinewy throat, beckoning him on. The lad had awoken in a pit of lightless eternity, sitting on a cold floor that had glass-consistency and squealed like rubber when he stroked fingers across it. The fox appeared from nowhere, oddly luminous in the dark. Naked, covered in old scars that blemished his fair skin, Seroth rose and followed it.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]What happened next was brief episode of psychedelic. Time actually materialized in long strings of winding rainbow webbing, weaving infinitely complex patterns that multiplied into infinity. Winds soared into his face, scowling with cold, passing through his flesh without contest. Above and below swirled charnel clouds of liquidated fireballs, coiling wreathes of lit smoke tumbling ball-lightning. Matter compressed, atmosphere boiled, reality tore itself apart until there was nothing but viscous Chaos submerging him in frothing creation. Against dies of immaterial aeons, walking below the ankles of slumbering Death-Gods, Seroth kept following the Silver Fox. It sauntered ahead unbothered by displays of sundering time and space. Past them swung empty worlds lit with crust-fires venting gas-plumes into empty space. Stars that were souls coalesced together blinked at him. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Scripts in forgotten tongues swam past in schools of word-glyphs, carried by currents of throbbing song. Whole lengths of censored history appeared with naked, damning clarity; kingdoms, empires, spans of conquest burning like inky skeins across whole galaxies. Evolution streamed before his eyes ‘till he saw a perfected woman with gold-blonde hair, brown hair, and a devastating smile. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rosa…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Fox yowled. Seroth picked up his slackened limbs and obediently followed along. They tracked into a writhing corridor of light with colours that defied literary description, ears assaulted by the susurration of ten billion star-howls. He could no longer tell if they were stalking across anything solidified. Matter was not such a sure concept as he’d once thought. The tunnel opened into a corpse-field, for that was it was. Earth was merely piled cadavers miles thick and stretching on until it blurred with sickly milk radiance. Grass were thin slivers of solid skin, bleeding, palpitating. Clouds were the cover of wounded, pink mists slowly strobing red-light. The scent of gut-rot was enough to gag Seroth until he couldn’t breathe.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His guide led him along a singular pathway: it was built from the cracked skulls of some lost alien race with oblong heads, dotted with half-a-dozen nostril vents. Stalks of wriggling intestine, ending in phallic spikes, lined the length of the walk. Seroth reached and touched at the juicy colon. His hand came away sticky with chalky gauze and carmine skins. On trotted the Fox, undaunted, unperturbed, almost familiar with the visions of madness. The path wove its way through hills constructed from contorted lovers, all skinless, around fountains of seminal fluid bursting in suggestive geysers. Distant figures, cloaked in the colours of twilight, strolled about with crop-scythes in hand. One turned. Seroth saw its face. He would never remember if he screamed aloud or not.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth saw the walkway of skulls end at the foot of a magnificent tree. It’d been grown into a wooded, bough-limbed thing of muscle clutched to bone-stalks, white with ligament stretches and a gauze of fat. The tree wove high overhead until it peaked at over fifty kilometers. How had he not been able to detect its presence until they came upon it’s branched, quivering roots of pallid flesh? [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A tall, narrow door of porcelain was set against the dead skin. Deep night throbbed beyond its threshold, too hot, potent with invitation. Somewhere, Rosa Mazhar was giggling. Breath kissed into his ears, asking for him to take the leap in against the tide of black. The Silver Fox did not wait on his pause. It took off into a scampering run and leapt, disappearing through the mirror of solidified night. Seroth simply braced his constitution and sprinted after his guide, leaping into the door.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now he was in the tempest of memory. Through his eyes he peered and skipped through a hundred thousand life-times that belonged to no soul he ever knew. By his side was the Fox, idling, tail waggling lazily from side to side, observing with him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The first vision was of a faceless warrior decked in fluted, polished plate armour. In one hand stirred a great sword banded with etched scripts glowing hot with iron-heat, the other grasping a knight’s shield. They stood in the center of a dusty, tan, dull courtyard bricked with sandstone and blueschist. Above soared great castle spires, jagged and ribbed with sterling green plating. Dead soldiers somehow breathed with a spark of locomotion hazarded them with rusty axes, short-swords, hefting in warped spears, growling in pungent, awful tongues. With practiced ease, the plated warrior slew through them. Up came the shield, deflecting. Down flashed the sword, parrying. Their feet wove around before addressing crisp slashes that tore through throats, hips. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Undead fell, twos by threes by fours. Until al that stood was the knight themselves, bearing up under wounds numbering in a bleak score. Red splashed onto the flagstones, as the warrior loosened the chest-plate bindings. They were swiftly refastened as a sound rose. Flagstones shifted in their square molds as mortar pulverized into dust. Something with enormous gain and weight was on the approach, pulsing the ground with sonic vibrations enough to send painful jolts up Seroth’s backside. A bony shadow rose, casting out the sun. The knight braced, shield raised, sword readied. …The dragon was an eyeless beast of metallic scales pieced over sickly, tanned skin, its head a night mare: double-jaws of teeth the size of speeders, set beneath a wide plate-skull flaring into a spiked crest stained irrevocably red. One paw large enough to flatten a gunship rose, fell, pitting the courtyard with an outlined crater. The knight loosed a challenging howl, answered by a flogging god-scream arising from the long wyrm’s throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Next was a second warrior, similarly plated in solid armour upon chainmail, dressed in a blue surcoat resplendent with a coat of arms. A gold lion clutching its jaws into the throat of a dragon rippled against the breastplate. They shouldered the weight, of arms and armour, walking from a crimson bonfire where similar killers sat resting. One in black-iron casement, its head a slit pot mounted upon an enormous head, looked and nodded at the departing figure. Seroth followed them on their journey from the abandoned bulwarks of a once great fortress down and down into a walled village. Beyond, were dungeons: a bleak underworld of blighted creatures, into the vast lairs of witch-queens mounted atop spider-bodies, across forestry cloaked in deep jade shadows haunted by cavorting beasts, and up through strongholds and dragonic metropolis’ abandoned to the ages.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Each consecutive lifetime showcased the same, winding journeys into horror. The souls Seroth observed in their life or death struggles bore up against immense, immediate difficulties. Oft, they seemed doomed, having pitted themselves on bound quests against monsters of truly daemonic fashion. All explored through places and habitats that rarely if ever saw human feet trod through, across desolation and forestation, lost in tundra while following visions in the mirages. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But they bore silver swords and grey eyes, most of them. More than a few sported eyes of slit-oval and wolvish gold, peering through darkened caverns without the benefit of torch light. All eschewed the usage of fire-arms, ordnance, personal explosives or the kind. Seroth felt anyone else would have decried their methodology as being pathetically archaic. They fought regardless. For gold or credit, disappearing from sight and departing aboard mounts or boats or starships, engines lit, peeling away into the sky. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Soon, the showcased lives became exclusively Dunaan. Their exploits were shadowy stories that were at once awesome, defying, and heart-rending. Tragedy, haunts and ghosts of singular woe, followed after their heels. It seemed fate, destiny, was prescribed against them. By his side, the great Silver Fox was becalmed, reacting to little. On and on they went, sweeping from slayer to slayer, a harrowing gamut Seroth felt linked to with intrinsic surety. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Were these ancestral recollections?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was meager triumph surrounded by black losses and soulful torture, compounded by a sense of lingering melancholy. Memories scrolled against one another, becoming a swan-song of ancient, dying breeds outclassed by a galaxy that refused to slow around them. Yet, every slayer was suffused brow to toe with iron will, strolling through raining fire and spills of pooling gore, on the Path of the Dunaan. The path of the witcher, their purpose to slay the monster, the mutant, the beast, to keep them at bay from those with no defense against their plague. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In time, all crowded webs and knots of reflected time dialed into a single jam of light in his mind’s eye. Seroth felt his conscious transported up through a column of rushing space, a kind of too cool, too-warm spiral of air-pockets slamming down on his shoulders. Or at least felt, perceived. The last few… hours? …Days? He had no sense of place or reference of time. It was all a mess, a jumble, filled with entanglements of colours that didn’t exist, of sounds that couldn’t be heard. His guide in the Silver Fox had ran ahead, disappearing. …Sounds of rushing carnage slowly began to drift into his ears.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He stood upon a causeway, in the shadow of great pylon attached with a chain massive enough to keep even a Tulak Hord-battleship anchored. But before and above him was a city wreathed in flame. Fires scorched up the white tiled sides of fortress towers, battlements, ecclesiarch domes and pitched halls collapsing as steel melted and stone fell sundered by the ripping heat. Bodies lied hewn in every street, felled where they stood, streaming enough blood to fill and choke the gutters. Shambling terrors waltzed across the dead citizenry, alright with cackling glee. Seroth watched one stoop, take a severed head in its mouth, exploding it with a crunch of flying skull-bone, brain-matter, and gored-out eyeballs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His vision tunneled, lifting him on a winding course through and around the hundred burning spires. Skinless survivors roared in horrid pain, hurling themselves from any available height to escape their torment. Ahead was a singularly breath-taking castle, livery styled after the hawk and wolf. Ramparts shaped like snarling maws or hooked beaks smoked and drooled with soot. Soldiers in black attire were strewn across the walls. Entire courtyards were buzzing combusting melee’s, fire spills igniting as silver swords and black-clad battlers warred on creatures of every description. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Travel stopped before a platform slick with gore trailing from savaged corpses. These ones were not black-wreathed but rather girded in white mail, polished plating and enclosed helms. Beneath was painted an obscured crest; Seroth thought it looked like the face of a wolf snarling in the rage and elation of the hunt, eyes painted ruby-red. Amidst the dead stood a woman alone. The lad could only see her back, but the tied plume of her white hair, the bulk of her proudly muscled physique, and the unflinching stance she held her raised sword denoted her as a leader.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Opposite, where the platform ended on a long bridge suspended with wrought chains, stood a second figure barring her way. Another woman… but of frightening dimensions and proportion. She rose as tall as nine feet, dressed in war-casement that accentuated bust, clothed in battle-kama woven out of steel-plates and iron-threading. Seroth could not see her face; expression was obscured by a helmet with its face closed and ending in a flared dragon’s snout, curled with ivory-fangs, and mysteriously belching smoke. One gauntlet held a war-mace flickering with licks of electric discharge, the other grasping a siege-shield so thick it looked only operable by machinery.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Words floated into his thoughts:[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Mountain of Snow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Queen of Black Fire.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Red Blade Dancing On The Graves Of Her Foes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]God-Queen.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And behind her, overshadowing the whole of the floating city-island raised high in the sky, rose a second, and far more terrifying visage. It was a dragon. No, Seroth thought. The Father of Dragons. Wings so massive they could have furled against entire Star Destroyers, a body of such bulk that it could simply rest and render a crater a score of miles wide in length. It’s head was just a blade of skinless bone, scoured to a steely finish. Super-massive eyes peered down upon the carnage… And Seroth came to realize bleakly that it was not simply this single floating construct that was bathed in apocalypse…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was a world on fire. He turned to see a horizon venting walls of coursing carmine flame hundreds of meters tall, sheets of smoke that crowded the sky and blotted out the sun. The king-dragon roared, summoning that dark light, that pulsating Force energy that caused the blood vessels in the lad’s nose and throat to open. Pressure viced on his skull. Portions of the smoke-fogged heavens rippled with effects of lightning. Thunder crashed, shattering glass panes and cracking tower foundations. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth listened to distant, smug laughter as further lightning bolted and flew down to strike him through his heart…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax had deposited a length of bedding nearby the temporarily disused examination table, lying down in a half-sleep across from the massive glasteel tub and its clamped hatch of pitted brass and iron. The Lodge of Shade promised one hundred sixty eight hours of full, total immersion. No more, certainly no less. Waiting by the transformative mutation chamber worked his nerves raw. Seroth was breathing against the alchemical mixture currently circulating and modifying his physical form. Every so often, he jerked, yanking on the tied restraints, sluicing chemical water against the tub-siding, convulsing through mind-throes that were a byproduct of the mutagenic compounds currently rearranging his constituent matter and deoxyribonucleic acid. Ajax paced, running his nerves raw. The Lodge of Shade sat away against a carved throne of calcified rock and jet stones, appearing half-awake in a meditative state of disinterest.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]To occupy the hours, the witcher took up exploring the Yssian ecclesiarch with attentiveness. He had only ever been amidst the discarded and slowly wasting catacombs, reliquaries, amid the chapel houses and ambulatories once some seven centuries prior. Gloved hands swept layered dust off a baptismal font, admired the worn, smoothed marble of an overly heavy chalice, and peered at the scores of back-lit canon-tables plied against the walling. To think of the exhaustive agonies endured by the exiled stone-wrights, masons, Dunaan who had little to no working knowledge of engineering or construction, piecing together this buried away sanctuary for others like himself. Like the young wolf. Ajax checked his wrist-clamped chronopiece. 6:23:59:59. 7:00:00:00.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Return! The Lodge streamed a lance of ‘pathic messaging into his brain with certain urgency and hard unconcern. Ajax wore off the wince on his expression and hurried out of his perused cathedral, sprinting down the length of a long communicating hall. His strides carried him at a unseen blur through the fleshy hanging garden, through phosphor leaves, nary stirring at his passing. A horrendous glow of jade light and emerald lightning was cascading up the laboratory chamber-steps and Ajax felt washed with a massive flux of ethereal dark fire. He stepped through the opened beskar-gates, into the laboratory proper, and froze.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The process was cycling to a finish. Illumination pulsated from the chemical bath-chamber, a long, dark shape writhing as it struggled with its restraints. Ajax swallowed back on dry spit. An arm had broken against the shackle clamping it against its wooden gurney-bed, pounding upward at the brass-hatch. Latches keeping a sturdy, hermetic seal upon the tub were beginning to crack from unrelenting blows trying to force the hatch open. The Lodge came around the noetic coffin, twisting open stubborn latches and merely snapping off others that refused to budge under his touch. Ajax instinctively ducked as a battered impact wrenched the lid up and broke it off the thick, steel brackets keeping it bolted down, heaving it aside in a curled arch that smashed the metal sheeting in. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Make yourself useful,” Said the Lodge. “Operate the crane. Raise the gurney, swift-like, before he totally destroys the sarcophagus.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax walked across to a set iron panel and began operating the series of knobbed levers, manipulating unseen servo-motors in the ceiling. Chain-lengths chattered and clanked, snapping taut as they were dragged upwards and carried a thrashing figure struggling to undo his binding. The Lodge reached in. His scaly, skin-tight palm pressed and wrenched down the man’s brow, exercising a hiss of mental commands that forced his throes to subside. Now there was just a long quiet, chains clinking against winding gears, and long retches as the strapped-down man turned his face aside and retched mouthfuls of sappy chemical-water out of his mouth and nose.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Keep still,” The Lodge was murmuring. “You’re body is disgorging the oxygenated elements from your lungs and air-pipe. You will begin to breathe as you were in a few moments.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He groaned, fixing the Lodge with a certain feral glance, appearing unimpressed at his proffered instructions. Despite a tremulous weakness that was giving his hand momentary palsy-shakes, the man was already rolling his chest over and unlocking the restraints keeping his second hand and legs bound and shackled down. Taut legs swung over the gurney-wood and tentatively supported his weight as he deposited onto his own two feet. Ajax appeared suddenly by his shoulder, granting him a pillar of physical support against his sickening disorientation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ajax…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are with friends, young wolf,” The Dunaan assured.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ohhh… - “ He turned his head round and hurled further dredging fluids up from his gullet and chest. “Uggghh…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Bring him to the examination table,” The Lodge was already gliding towards the steel slab, sliding on his well-worn neural-glove and testing the tensile flexibility of the needle-points protruding from each digit. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax began to help the man hobble-walk from the emptying vat-tub when he wrenched away with shivering stubbornness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Wait!” He cried. “…Wait.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His face, the whole of his skin, had lost significant pigmentation. The flesh was pallid, supple from its lengthy soak though it would dry and regain its toughened, leathery texture, still trailing drips of incandescent drops from bends in his naked frame. He turned, rolling his now burly shoulders, flexing the muscle over the repaired, improved bone in his left arm. More significantly… He began taking furtive steps towards the Lodge and his examination slab under his own power.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth Ur-Rahn’s expression was blank, humbled, and a little bit disbelieving.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“It succeeded,” He breathed, rubbing the back of his hand over the small of his rump. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes,” The Lodge of Shade sounded almost impatient, tapping his neural-spines against washed metal. “If you please, before you trip and break your nose, come to me. As paced as you like. There…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He stumbled foot over plodding foot, getting used to full locomotive ability in his hips and legs. In his darkest moments of riddled self-doubt, Seroth had begun believing he would never move unaided without some repulsor-chair or stapled augmentive-skeleton. Now… Now he was walking and he could feel a new, rippling, tense power that was only just keeping itself leashed with every step. He glanced from the Lodge, to Ajax, breathless now, amazement stealing itself onto his face. Ajax laughed and pushed at his shoulders, telling him to hurry up. The man slid onto the examination slate and awaited the Lodge of Shade’s graces. It – he – bent over, looming his infinitely empty cowl down close by the man’s face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Describe to me your condition, any discomforts, oddities,” He said, prodding his glove spines gently through the skin of Seroth’s throat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“There’s… a pain,” Seroth murmured, gesturing over his bare torso. “All across the skin. Like the air’s too cold; as if I can feel little pricks of oxygen dragging over the epidermis. Everything is like that… Lights are too bright, sound’s too loud, I can… smell the grave-mold seeping in down the steps from the reliquary sixteen flights up. I can taste that… that Water… Like it’s all I’ll ever be able to feel when I eat now.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Temporary discomforts, momentary until your faculties draw better control over your senses. In a few hours time and the intake of a few restorative spirits, you’ll feel more at ease,” The Lodge murmured. “You should feel so lucky that’s the extent of your agonies, boy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We idled time exchanging the possibilities of what might occur if you took to the Changes badly,” Ajax admitted softly. “It was morbid, if necessary. The Man of Shade mentioned in times past, that if the concoction wasn’t perfect, whatever broke from the Waters would be incredibly dangerous. Mad. In need of death to soothe its screaming mind. …Those first hours, it seemed like you would not take, young wolf. You did not seem to be breathing on the third day. That I find you here and keeping good company? …I am amazed. That’s all that can be said. I am amazed, young wolf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth pondered at the ceiling, rolling his eyes to look about at the elder witcher. “When you were in the… the sleep. …Do you remember if you saw anything, dreaming?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax shrugged, glancing at the Lodge. “No. Not for my time in the vat-pool. There was pain, blackness, for a great while I knew nothing. Suddenly, I woke, and here I am before you now.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmmmn…” The man sighed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What did you see?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He told them through broken recollections, reserving certain details to himself for prudency’s sake and to maintain a masque of privacy. There was the apocalypse of Tund and chasing his father’s memory on until it suffered destruction. The sands of Tattooine where he crossed dune seas and endless canyon depths in pursuit of Shev Rayner, who seemed to never cease bleeding as he dragged himself off to the grave. Then followed Contruum and that mad climb up the face of the Blade, pursued by phantoms that wounded him with un-real hands. And then the sojourn through time and corporeal matter, both of which broke and became interwoven, running across semi-sentient winds, guided by the White Fox towards a grave-world composed living flesh. Finally to the end-days of Ys, describing the sight of the burning fortress island floating with unnerving, idyllic grace as citadels and armoured spires were consumed by unnatural fire. Seroth illustrated the sight of the white-haired woman, a Dunaan on her own facing against a giant arraigned in white-steel casement with mace and shield… And the haunting shadow of the King of Dragons, one vast creature with command of Chaos, the Force, splitting the air with its roars before telling the skies to rain down lightning.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Perturbing,” Murmured the Lodge.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Are visions common with the Change,” Seroth had to ask.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No. They are not. All those who have survived, your predecessors, did describe brief hallucinatory episodes before falling unconscious. Some upon waking,” The Ancient turned the man up onto his ribs and shoulder, pricking down his healed spine and reassembled vertebrae. “But never in the throes of Change. Perturbing. Unusual. But, so I must admit, your Trial was altered.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned his head over the crook of his neck, peering intently through the Lodge’s missing face and worn tan hood-cowl. At his side, Ajax piqued an eyebrow. “Man of Shade, did you conduct mischief?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You were not expected to survive an hour, let alone a further hundred sixty seven,” The Lodge said. “If nothing else, I was not to let a precious Trial go to waste over what I perceived was assured doom. The chemical mixture was changed; I took liberties feeding more potent mutagenic compounds into the alchemical wash, herbs and the ilk. Several theories stipulated that a suitable candidate could survive the spiked concoction. With you, I decided that if you were to die than at the very least I would have an invaluable cadaver to examine in the wake of a very probable demise. Something to further bolster this art, boy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax felt his companion bristling. “Cynical.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Quite right. All the better that you lived to spite me,” The Lode murmured, trailing his sheathed hand over the rise of Seroth’s high, needling into the skin. “…This is utterly magnificent.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Words of high praise from One who has seen much,” Ajax chuckled. His palm slapped the broad of the man’s chest. “Welcome, young wolf. You’ve taken your first step into a larger world~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Every change made to his physicality and beyond was recorded, annotated, and re-addressed in a wide codex book, with crumbling grease-parchment somehow magnetically attracted to the book spine, the Lodge swiftly, surely noting down observation. His demeanor had changed. The Lodge had eased into an attitude of pure academics, subjecting Seroth to his neural-glove, an archaic sensor paddle pinging with scan-returns, several steel injectors that stole phials of darkly thick blood. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Pity,” He would mutter, unseen teeth clacking in excitement. Or agitation. “Had I the time! Pity me! Had I the time! Hold still.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth was trying. The Lodge’s touch into his skin and muscle were less than kind. He’d only this singular opportunity to mark down whatever details of his transformation became apparent before Seroth, like Ajax, disappeared on the Path. He endured it. Comparatively, it was a minor indignity. Ajax kept him company, conversing in idle chit-chat to blunt his mind against the long hours spent settled against the gurney-slab. Seroth felt cold, hungry, and restless. He longed to walk, to run, sprinting against blasts of tundra wind with sword in hand and caution thrown behind him. In time, though, he came to know what had been done to his body.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Firstly were simple visual cues. In thanks to the Lodge’s modifiers in the pitched alchemical bath, the man’s hair had been bleached from mops of dirty blonde locks to a permanent white. His eyes too, gone were the hues of gray slate, replaced with wolf-gold and single, oval slights that kept adjusting with precise minuteness to every change of light and shadow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge went on in visceral explanation of each and every pertinent change that had been sewn irrevocably into his flesh. Again, his now bestial ocular organs: whatever fine vision Seroth had practiced and utilized prior was now enhanced by an improvement factor of ten. Unlit darkness would look to him as if it were no different than standing under high Tatooine noon-suns. Colour, detail, depth of field, all enhanced by the same factor: times ten of anything he’d previously possessed. To his ears the Lodge came about, pressing a knobby instrument against the auditory canals. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ordinarily, humanoids only possess enough sensitivity to measure sound and frequency across the twenty kilohertz range, give or take. Dunaan Ajax can hear up to ninety. You, boy, about one hundred twenty.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Out came a pair of stainless steel tongs, gripping his tongue out past his teeth. “Hmmmmnn… As anticipated, and then some. Your tongue, boy. Do you know how many individual sensors are in place to relay information regarding your meals, what you drink, to tell if whether or not you may have attempted to ingest something unwholesome? Roughly ten-thousand. By my indication? You’ve over fifty thousand.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What of his skin?” Asked Ajax now, curious as to the boy’s continued reactions to touch.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That I had not accounted for, I must admit. His epidermis has grown virtual armies of impossibly fine hairs,” The Lodge wracked a magnifying tool up to his cowl. “For tactile purposes, I must believe. Vibration also, perhaps? A method of judging footfalls, quakes, any motion translating through the ground? Another method for detection… Remarkable.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Smell?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Another horde of growth over his lobe,” A paddle swept carefully over the man’s brow. “It was a point of debate, as I can recall, what determined a creature’s power of scent. The sheer count of receptor cells? But there were some beasts with as many as a million and they could tell no better than any average human what it was they were sniffing at. Yet… Considering appropriate human potential…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?” Seroth asked below, lying against the ergonomic slab. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Simple estimation. If you applied yourself, boy, you could track a wampa through a hundred kilometers of Hoth ice.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Even Ajax whistled. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth noted the Lodge never truly divulged the secreted processes that actually caused each successive difference that he explained in striking detail. He’d guessed that asking after specifics would rope him a long gaze with an equally lengthy, cool silence. The Lodge of Shade was the keeper of his alchemic laboratory; secrets ranging back before the coming of the Tho Yor and other, disguised histories. Doubtless sworn to codes stipulating silence and anonymity in the face of questioning. Even Dunaan were not privy. The Lodge continued, sitting the man up to test certain reactions cued in his joints.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His nervous system had been completely re-wired, with uncountable further ganglions and sheathes of neural material overlaid across his entire frame. Even the make-up of his grey brain-matter had been subtly altered to accommodate an increase in reactive speed. The Lodge didn’t lecture on the sheer complexities of neurophysiology, of reflex action and arc, the differences of the biceps, brachioradialis, enxtensor digitorum, triceps, patellar, and ankle jerk responses, or cranial nerves. Distilling it to essence: with practice, dedication, and a small mote of luck, he could pick a slug-round out of the air from five yards away. With luck. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge all but beggared to simply deflect the damned shot and not waste energy showing off to foes that would lack the signal appreciation for his skill.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Strength was a rapturous beast waiting for exertion beneath his flesh. Muscles had been reinforced, ‘altered’ was the word that continued to see re-use, to lend him the optimum power of fifteen other men condensed throughout his frame. However, to accommodate this dramatic ascendance in brute strength, lest he shatter his body once more with idle movement, density and durability had been visited to the cartilage fibers, bone marrow and calcium, and surrounding nerves, including a majority of inner organs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What of poisons?” Seroth had to ask.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What of them?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’d be surprised if there was a spot on my body the Waters failed to somehow mutate. My immune system – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Lodge rose from his metallic stool and crossed over to one of the far tables heavy with dusted chemical distilleries. Seroth observed him scroll back and forth and back again along a row of precisely labeled beakers, picking out a sour-lime glassed vial held strung by a leather thong. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do you see this?” Asked the Ancient, returning to his seat. At the man’s nod, the Lodge shook up the lambent, groggy water sloshing inside. “Poison of Terentatek. Nine measured drops, into the vat-pool. The concoction exacerbates its effects until you feel certain death would be a kindness. It is one of the many pains those chancing the Trial of the Waters experiences. Now? Unless you ingest or are subject to enormous amounts of viral agents, you’re immune system will simply devour it with wolfish gusto. Common colds or flu’s will never touch you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His first examination under persistent, physical scrutiny took upwards of six hours when the Lodge had first laid un-eyes on him. Now, with interest, the second review lasted a whole day-cycle with change, roughly twenty six hours if his internal clock dialed the hours correctly. Finally, not quite satisfied with his notation but secure in the diagnosis that Seroth Ur-Rahn had emerged physically and mentally complete.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a final check.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We’ve no paltry rites of initiation. The Trial of the Waters is judge enough alone. Dunaan need not be of Ys to honour her. To come here as ruined as you were, to survive as you did, and to stand as you are now marks you out of many as an individual of singular character. Though your thoughts are always in a trouble, and you venture black paths so can know the make-up of your soul.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seroth Ur-Rahn. …Go with the Wrath of Sayda. Claim your blades and heritage. Listen to Ajax and apply yourself now to his tutelage. You are Dunaan. You are witcher. And for you, there is only the Path.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The pair was shooed from the chamber. The last either Seroth or Ajax would ever see of the Lodge of Shade was his stalwart back turned as he peered about his beloved shop-space. Charms of cast protection and ancient spell-work wrote light back into the carved devil’s-head and esoteric runes scripted upon the impenetrable Taung-steel double doors. Seroth followed after Ajax up the steps, again looking back over his shoulder. Hints of coiled flame belching sheets of pitch and sickly smoke peered through the seam before the gates closed and locked with a sonic-throb shivering the air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ajax - !”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No, boy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned and gazed up the stairs. Shaking his head in its algal hood, Ajax beckoned his friend to follow him on. “The Lodge has departed. To where? He wouldn’t tell me.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Tell you when…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“While you were enduring the trial~ I asked what laid before him if you succeeded, survived. His stores of materials had run low, young wolf, and Shades cannot birth further witchers if they lack the necessary materiel. Fear not: he’s not died. But he’s slipped from us and gone off again, somewhere, to retrieve his herbs and poisons and mutagens. From where? Only he knows.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Now, come,” Ajax waved, smiling with enigmatic anticipation. “The Lodge has his work before him, and we ours. You are powerful in body now, young wolf. Strong, swift, hardy. These are grand things. Noble, when possessed rightly. However… It is one thing to fight as a man. It is another to fight as you are now. To me, young wolf. You’ll learn how to fight like a witcher yet!”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Combat began with crunching immediacy. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax had chosen an isolated and thoroughly disused barbican, plied away from the remembrance cathedrals, hidden above ancient stations of granite layers, where Yssian basilicas, chapels, katholikons, and palaces slumbered in shuttered memoriam. The guardhouse was a brutal construct of iron-ribbed stone set atop a breathtakingly treacherous column of solid stone rising against the pitch of a lightless ravine. Passage was over a creaking, rusted bascule bridge that would never budge under its own power. Seroth followed Ajax cross. He was shown his sleeping quarters: a drafty guard’s barrack nestled beside the upraised gates. He was shown the training grounds: a paved courtyard marked with chalk outlines signifying training circles, overlaid with die-straight lines crossing, intersecting with the radial dials, chipped at precisely measured intervals with blue-cast paints. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There were warped brackets lining the yard: collections of sharpened longswords that retained their edge despite neglect. Ajax walked by, fondly trailing his gloved hands across their worn pommels and leather bound hilts and sturdy cross-guards. When he turned and gestured his companion closer, humour had gone out of his eyes. Seroth was being addressed by a worn battle-master scoured of any notions other than pure, unequivocal success, and would demand nothing less than what he perceived to be perfection in his student.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I will apologize now for any untoward brusqueness, my friend,” Ajax said. “I will grant you credit in that I recognize the whole of your skills and abilities. You have cut your eyeteeth across the Outer Rim wilds, harrowed Wild Space on the trail of the hunt, and bested beasts I have known to be a match against better men. The Trial of the Waters tested you, but could not find you wanting. …But that is not enough. You’ve not received the whole of Sayda’s gifts. From this day until I judge otherwise, you are mine. This place will be your sanctuary. Here, you will fight, eat, defecate, and sleep. In exactly that order. And you will not stop until I give the say so. Have I at any point made my statements unclear.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Good. Strip off your shirt and bare your feet. We begin with the hands.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]‘The hands’ was short-term terminology for Dunaan flavoured close-quarters martial art. Seroth was quickly disabused of the notion of ‘formalized’ fighting. Ajax gauged him in a serious of ten bouts that cracked his bones and shuddered breath from the man’s lungs time and time over, flipped and smacked to the naked pavement with a few curt maneuvers. The elder witcher tsked, frowning, aiding the lad in standing. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Sloppy, young wolf. Who taught you how to slam-punch?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Shev Rayner.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax gagged. “The fool! Six years trying to finally best me, he does, and I find the legacy of my lessons bastardized? No no! This shall not be! Again, young wolf! The hands! We go again!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Days blurred into punishing routine, a regiment of exercise, practical lessons, full-barred contact sessions, dinner, and finally rest. The Dunaan continued to recognized familiar patterns inherent to the man’s style, what Shev Rayner nicknamed ‘Street Kung’. It was an ugly mixture of several Eshan principles and Teras-Kasi, designed to break an engagement and subdue or kill an opponent as quickly as possible. Ajax derided it as uncouth brawling. Seroth counted six weeks simply spent weaning him off old habits the witcher insisted was going to see him killed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It took another three to land a blow, and even Seroth had to count it as a lucky clutch that somehow confused Ajax’s defense enough to gouge his side. Then he was clobbered in a six-set retaliation that would have blinded him, tore out his jaw, collapsed his throat, split his sternum, and broke his knees had the witcher not been taking care. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do not count the days,” Ajax said, wiping away crossed bundles of marked chalk on the bricked wall above Seroth’s cot. He’d come in one evening to simply chat, bringing with him cups of a vulgar tasting brew that nevertheless managed a pleasant burn behind the nose. Seroth was sitting up, marking a rough calendar. Ajax snatched the chalk cigar away and washed off the number counts. “Progress is progress. Do not hold yourself to standards you cannot meet. Worry only about meeting mine.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Yet, Seroth couldn’t help the sentiment that he simply wasn’t ‘getting’ the lesson plans. Despite that his alchemically mutated reflex actions made him whip like a bullet, a bullet was less impressive when it continually missed the intended mark. He feared Stenwulf had destroyed something more than just his arm and backside in their lopsided face-off. Noting his student’s sullen moods, Ajax simply intensified the day-plan. First morning exercises were a grueling marathon to meet the thousand-plus repetitions the witcher asked for. Lesson-bouts lasted until the man felt his body cramped and stinging with fatigue. He took wounds across his fore-limbs and torso, bruised with spotting welts that often broke and bled during their fearsome struggles, smashed and thrown across the unkind courtyard paving until there wasn’t an inch not baptized in a wash of his sweat and blood. And Ajax would wait, watch for his adopted pupil to come to his feet, repeating the system.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Soon, the lad-become-man began to take to ‘the hands.’ Ajax insistently illustrated with mean emphasis the concept of the body weaponized. Every span of skin, muscle, and bone, nothing could be spared to idle in a struggle. Shev Rayner’s ‘street-kung’ had been an ugly amalgamation. Through the elder hunter, Seroth was introduced to an entirely different, far more nastier animal, one that called for punishing victory that ensured personal safety over any consideration for the opponent.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Empathizing your foe is not your responsibility in a confrontation,” Ajax explained in a brief lecture, slapping aside slicing, flat-hand cuts, accepting a heavy knee-jab into his hip and levering, gripping the leg and hurling Seroth off his feet. “The enemy must be stopped. At once and completely, young wolf. Just who they are, why they have chosen to be who they are, their social background, their ideological or psycho­logical motivations, and the extent of injuries they incur as a result of their actions - these may all be ruminated over another time. Now, your first concern is to stay alive. Let your attackers worry about their lives. Don’t hold back. Strike no more after they are incapable of further action, but see that they are stopped.[/SIZE]”

[SIZE=10pt]“If they don’t stop?” Seroth had to press. “If they will not, cannot give an inch?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“As I said. Stop them. It will be upon their loved ones to mourn them, not you. But this does not mean you are free to dismiss responsibility for your actions.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They drilled through fore-arm and elbow strikes, close grapples, knee and shin blows, head-butts, limb-breaks, chokes, alongside traditional jabs, punches, hooks, blocks, and counters. Eight hours daily became eighteen. Seroth still felt slow. Slow with his feet, his hands, slow with the whole of his body when he knew he could once move with deathly, liquid grace. He was still absorbed with the complexities of Shev’s old street-kung. Ajax had him repeat a personal prayer every time the witcher felled him to the ground. ‘Simplicity is the answer to Complexity.’ He dueled against Ajax when he was armed with basket-hilt daggers, forcing the man to contend with the reach and killing potential of an armed adversary. There many cuts and gashes suffered, before Seroth simply… reacted.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax came at him, whipping up a set of dizzying feints before stabbing at his liver. Seroth pedaled out of the way, an inexplicable blur, striking and numbing the witcher’s hands, crunching is forearm across his teeth, gripping his hair to yank back and pop a falling anvil blow with his elbow. Ajax fell, the lad following in, crushing him to the stonework and walloping him with unrelenting hammer-fists. He awoke three minutes later. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Victory over his teacher never came easily, but though he was ever wan to celebrate, they came more frequently. He discarded habits of fluidity for crisp economy of motion, learning hour by hour, bout by bout, how to leash inner ferocity into controlled burns of maximum effort. Contests between himself and Ajax now fell into a kind of ritual. Either he or the Dunaan would win the warm-up round, initiating a win-loss-win pattern that shifted victory between them with every session. If Ajax suckered him with feint-work, Seroth would reply with small-joint manipulation, then the witcher would exacerbate his aggression, followed by the man utilizing deflection and dexterity to tire him out. Uncounted hours and days panned by.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One morning following habitual exercise and lap-drills, he was introduced to a finalized set of formal tests judged by Ajax in the center of the courtyard. He called it the Jurgoran Gauntlet. To progress out of purely physical contest and CQC, Seroth had only to defeat Ajax in ten consecutive sets. Both lined themselves upon the markers chalked into the zig-zag flagstones, offering one another formal bows before Seroth met with Ajax’s launching initiative. Ten consecutive triumphs. If the victory-run was spoiled, if Seroth lost one even once, the Gauntlet was over and he’d have little recourse other than to start over.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They fought through ten hours of blood, pounding limbs, streaked with contusions, discolorations, swollen with savaged epidermal black and purple marks. Ajax slugged him and nearly tore the man’s jaw loose. Seroth answered with a snap-kick that made the muscle and nerve in the slayer’s belly explode with breathless pain. Frost-bitten cords of ventilated wind from grilled shafts burned up through the stone to the surface blasted them with cold. Breath panted in white-smoke fog from their split lips. Through the slog, Seroth kept bringing Ajax to the floor. The count reached five when the pace blistered into frenetic counter-blows and block-crosses, the witcher making pupil earn passage by the skin of his teeth. A vicious culmination of precise muscle control, leverage, timing, and correct force.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth knocked him out for the tenth and final prevail. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]When either of them could move again, some six days later, Ajax passed a clean, two-inch kiri into his open, rigor-stiff hand.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]As with ‘the hands’, old habits that had become practice under Rayner were readdressed until Seroth was sufficiently receptive. Scores of training dummies, full-body cotton and leather-sewn bags, thickly gelatinous bust-sculptures, even the odd stone sculpture set in taunting, mocking airs, were coolly savaged and shredded into unrecognizable pulps. The key was recognizing the raised potential that had previously anchored Seroth into ordinary feats of combat acumen. He was bullet-fast, monstrously-strong, and had to learn the art of simply keeping up with himself. Ajax guided him through runs in the battle-circles, taking especial attentive care; Dunaan trained with edged weaponry, eschewing blunted instruments. They practiced gripping, blocks, parries, counters, the differences of innumerable strikes that Ajax had adopted across seven centuries of wandering. Of import was marrying knife-fighting to the principles and movements learned previously in their exhaustive hand-to-hand curriculum. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Bodily weaknesses were illustrated until Seroth could see them on an unmarked body with off-hand deftness: the heart, stomach, lungs, liver, intestine, spine, genitals, and windpipe. Of the tendons, connective tissues, of certain muscle-groups, the bones of paws and hands and appendages. Seroth graduated slowly, piecemeal, from kiri-knives to boot-daggers, until he grasped with comforting finality a stone washed sheath-blade.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His instructor proved a wicked-devil with anything edged. Ajax took particular joy in showcasing his marksmanship, pinning daggers through combat-dummies as many as a hundred fifty paces off. As before in their hand-to-hand struggles, the witcher didn’t offer quarter and never requested consideration in return. He bowled the lad off his feet, dagger spinning away across the ground, pressing knee and edge to his throat. Defeat came with lecture, observation, critique. A grip too loose, too tight, too forward, too slowed. Stop ignoring his footwork! If the blade was an extension of the arm, then it was the arm! And the body had to move with the limb in order to correctly apply his physique, speed, reflex, and technique.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Graduation was a second ten-round contest. In as many attempts, Seroth lost out: flattened out onto his back and haunches, disarmed, killed with mock-slaying blows, or cracked off his feet, forced into submission choke-holds with sharpened steel nicking at skin above his throat. Imagination portrayed the losses for what they’d be for true: gory tableaus, with arterial bodies slashed, severed from windpipe to belly, temple bones crushed by two-handed pick-stabs with brain matter stirred into mulch. He could see him dying from a pierced liver or a cleave through his kidneys, punched through his spine or nape, perhaps harried by blows to the soft of his groin as he steel ripped the flesh coating his femurs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Overnight, he dreamed troubled visages pussy with fog-banks of fears made material, slogging against a morass of boiling sludge that refused to allow him progress. Across the mire was a safe bank of clean sand and viridian grass. A figure in white-linen and blonde hair coiffed loosely behind her skull stood with her back to him, swaying in time to a low hum of song. The closer he swam over the bogging sucks of mud, the further she seemed to stroll and retreat out of vision. When at last he reached the isle, she was gone into wind-swirls of glittering micro-litter. A necklace length of leather bound around an obsidian-emerald ring lolled in the breeze.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth forced himself awake several hours early than what was routine. Standing, he dressed and went out from the guardhouse, standing in the cold, emptied yard that smelled of spent sweat and salty patterns of dried up scabs. Ajax appeared in time, surprised at the specter waiting on his rousing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Again,” The man asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The pair limbered up, unhooked their knives and settled into waiting stances. Seroth stole the initiative, and baptized his efforts with first-blood as he opened a long, thin gash across the exposed, hairy skin of Ajax’s forearm. Fighting was wordless; they communicated with counterattacks and counter-parries, stroking sparks onto the jagged flagstones wherever their knife-edges had occasion to meet and kiss. They crashed, locking at wrist, forearm, and elbow. Separation only came when one of them managed to impact their toe into tensed stomach-gut, levering away before bristling in for a harrowing follow-up. The trainee locked them in again but snapped his brow like a spitting viper. Ajax’s nose burst open with hosing gristle and blood spatter. He hooked the dunaan’s knife out of his fingers and felled him, punching with a backhand forearm swing that hammered Ajax’s lungs cold of breath.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]First victory. Ajax came up to his feet once more, wiping his lips of gore and promising Seroth he’d pay back the blow in full. His student made him a liar, though it took them another ten hour contest and clawed wounds into their flesh that would require stapling. It was no matter. They would heal, quickly too. Seroth took his tenth win with a deft side-step that brought him close with his knife caught squarely on the witcher’s Adams-apple. Ajax choked, stuck with his off-hand gripped relentlessly in a vise and his blade-arm reaching for empty air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What was different this time?” He asked as Seroth released him. “What changed your drive?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Perhaps I was thinking of someone,” Answered the lad, hunkering down onto his haunches and smiling faintly.[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do you know why you trained with the hand and knife?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“To respect the art?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“To respect yourself,” Ajax replied. In his hands balanced a length of steel-forged hilt and blade, a proper longsword of a mark Seroth couldn’t identify off hand. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan leaned in and passed the grip into his hands, relinquishing ownership whilst he turned and retrieved his own training implement from the raft of warped wood leaning against the courtyard wall. Seroth stepped away, swinging experimentally, remembering a few of old Shev Rayner’s tricks in wielding a sword cannily. Ajax tutted, snapping his edge up and putting the man’s point away.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmmn?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Not like that, young wolf.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then how?” Seroth asked bemused, patting the sword-flat against his shoulder.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That is what I will show you,” Ajax said, gold eyes twinkling. “And what you are going to learn.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With everything, it began with lecture, the elder hunter eschewing off hours of relaxation to inculcate the enormously varied facets belonging to Ysian swordsmanship and theory. Did he know it began with a woman? Ohh, for Ys, there was nothing finer than a woman of fine breeding holding aloft a silver sword, hellfire in her eyes, working her body and blade through the practice motions in anticipation for the coming hunt. The art of swordplay for their people was, in fact, titled the ‘Feminine Course’. Ajax related calcified legends of schools varying from expertise in the shortsword to wielding massive scale-cleavers, claymores and other two-handers belonging to the close family. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Before bed was required reading. In the barbican’s twice locked basement sub-vaults, a mass cage of wrought steel threaded with a taste of metallic Force spellwork, nested the Basandra Codices. Musty, fading volumes as large as Seroth’s torso along the spine-length, writ over with intricate lighted scripting and enclosed hordes of illustration. Coloured diagrams in their ten thousands conveyed with admirable fidelity the whole of Ys-styled longsword fencing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“These were recovered from archival estates even as the walls burned around them,” Ajax strolled his finger across a picture-set detailing a grappling disarm followed through with a killing poke. “Every page is the distilled practice and discipline of our forbearers. More thousands of years that I can bare to count, all compiled in these crumbling leafs. You will take care to read with utmost diligence. And you will take care to learn and review until all you can dream is swordcraft.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth read at breakfast, between halts in first exercises and whenever Ajax called for a break in their practice sessions. If he was at rest and not determined to cleave through a few more unlucky battle-dolls that had been re-sewn, then he was sitting in the dank quiet, sword upon his lap and the book balanced over the blood-channel, turning through chapter after chapter. Basandra’s encyclopedic epic was never out of reach. And for every ten dog-eared pages were twice as many queries. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Duels were simply applied lectures paced at a thousand miles an hour and Ajax took on the countenance of a taskmaster, ruthless, unforgiving of error, cracking Seroth over his knuckles, ribs, gut, wherever his error had exposed a line or opening of attack. No lesson would cease until the witcher had total and absolute confidence every mote of conferred knowledge had been absorbed and perfectly replicated, adapted, unified into his swelling repertoire.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In essential, stances or guards were divided into three primary categories based on the height of the blade in relation to the body: low, middle, and high. Variations abounded, with exotic adoptions that Ajax himself included in the course work, but there was always a distinct dichotomy between poses described as stable or unstable: rigid guards that answered only in defense, or more fluid, flexible parry-systems that called for proactive counter-motions against the attack-lines. Constant weight was pushed upon mastery of what Ajax loved to refer upon as ‘the basics’, explaining in addendum every day that it would allow a better grasp of increasingly more physical and technically complicated maneuvers. There was the guard, the cut, the slash, the thrust and stab, the counter, and answers to the counter-attack.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Lines of aggressive address and arrest were described in their totality, that if that if the sword is an extension of the body then the body's whole is integral to proper combat and execution of the longsword art. Movement, pacing, footwork.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If you do not tighten up your steps,” Ajax called one late eve, harrying his friend back and forth across the courtyard. “I will not be cautious against breaking your toes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Djem-So broke away, that bastardized claimant boasting inheritance of the galaxies better battle-system that’d come before. A constant criticism revolved around Seroth’s seeming ‘hesitance’ in working his bladesmanship to peak performance, exercising a weakening ‘restraint’ indicative of his days as Jedi Knight. Ajax scolded, pounding the flat of his blade across the man’s brow every time his frustration peaked and boiled.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are pariah,” He said. “Outside of ordinary mortality, outside of the ordinary itself. Ergo, young wolf, all those many common rules that you’ve kept in application over your soul are meaningless. You’ve the strength of fifteen men. You can snatch slug-rounds out of the air. You can hear a pin-drop in a tornado. You are a work of post-human potential. Allow yourself to move as you are meant to.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He bound his student’s eyes with simple lengths of ragged cotton fetched from a disused sewing chest, stopped up his ears with mercurial putty, imparted concoctions that eschewed and robbed him of natural equilibrium and swam his vision with dizzying sensoria. Days on end they retreated to beneath ground cisterns and crossed blades and blood-channels midst chutes of numbing waterfall, or locked themselves in a heath-den and set the black furnaces to stoke, drowning in sweat, heat, and lactic fatigue. If there were tools at his disposal to rob Seroth of physical comfort and balance, Ajax levered it against his footing. Hard-light constructs of multiple, humanoid opponents were spawned from set, crystalline octahedrons coruscating with violet sparks. Groups, then crowds, then virtual hordes, with constructs of tall fencers, short brawlers, lithe assassins, and stalwart berserkers hemming and bashing in. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Together, they explored fuller into the underlying concepts that made ‘economy of motion’ such a sticking point for the elder hunter, of how to bolster checked might with ferocious offense, counter-moves, counter-guards. Of importance was the killing stroke. However, Seroth brought a mode of initiative that adopted several of his own preferences, heavily inspired by the robustness inherent to ordinary steel rather than the untouchable lightsaber, or testy vibro-edges that could glide through an unwary hand petting too close. He demonstrated the necessity of disarming cuts and disabling slices, adopting a system of close-quarter brawling with the blade gripped in hand to wrestle for control of the opposing weapon. Ajax was especially intrigued with the addition of the parrying knife in the man’s off-hand grasp, having to contend with increasingly matched duels.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One day, his guard fell. He misinterpreted a feint at his collar and chased the blade, unable to round on his opponent as Seroth stepped in a half-circle out of his field and came around to his back, crossing a deadening, mock slash from a shoulder down across to its opposite hip. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Providence aided you,” Ajax taunted. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]After seven bouts and not a tie nor win, Seroth tapped Ajax against his sternum, faintly grinning. “Is it still simple providence?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You may have… some skill,” He guffawed, but nodded with chuckling approval. “Good. This is good. You’ve confidence in your flesh. I did not see you until you were neatly severing me from nape to kidney. Or when my sword was wrestled away and you cracked me upon the flagstones. Or the following five losses, damn you. Very good. Now, concisely, what have we learned.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That a sword and its wielder are not mutually exclusive instruments,” Seroth said. “Move the blade and the body must follow, let the extension determine the whole and vice versa. That fighting is a game of angles, leverage, speed. And for every problem is solution; you just need the wit to see it, recognize it, and act upon it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just so. But to also - ?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Never presume combat is formal, and that everything in your repertoire is permitted.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Never to presume, but to simply - ?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Expect,” Seroth smiled. “Just expect.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Good. Now, sheathe your blade. Our day is done and your teacher is hungry. I starve! Feed me, young wolf!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They departed to a corner of the yard, sitting atop crates blanketed with ratty cloth, covering over with old blankets stinking of must and ammonia. Seroth was quick to set a small, hot fire beneath the blackened iron of a re-purposed distilling kettle. Ice-water dunked in and began a boil, as the Dunaan-in-training fed in scatters of spice, pallid vegetables harvested from lightless farms in the barbican cellars, and meat from rat-varmints that loved to try and nibble through their toes and heels in the night. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Rat again, young wolf?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The crystal-boars have been avoiding that little ingress dug into the basement. They know we lair here. They’ve been upset as the apex devourer in this… region,” Seroth waved overhead at the solid rock.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Did you complete your readings for the sixth volume?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes, and I started again on the first volume. Basandra’s work is dense.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye, incredibly so.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Will they stay here? When we depart?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I imagine so. For whoever comes along to partake in their wisdom,” Ajax nodded to himself. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth leaned and added their last leg of boar-ham into the now muddying stew, idly chopping a blunt cleaver against a plastic cutting-bard mounted on his lap. Grey carrot-like slices, red chives, something close to corn, and enormously powerful garlic filtered into the broth. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You have questions,” Ajax murmured. Reading his movements through their intensive training bouts offered a keener insight to the man’s moods then he’d ever admit.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…You’ve said Dunaan ply their trade for coin. That… this calling is closer to a job. A profession.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What’s to stop a man from being jaded by credits and platinum bars? What’s to stop us from simply growing uncaring for those we choose to safeguard?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhhh… But therein lays your true query. …What is it that sets someone apart as ‘good’? What is good? How can we define it, when seemingly everything can be rounded out to simple, self-justification? Are we as ever as good as we seem to perceive?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He settled back against the freezing court wall. “…There is a struggle. Between opposing fields of morality, between altruism, goodness, and our worser natures. Not many still strive for those fabled ‘fairy tale’ endings; where evil is quashed and lovers unite, all are given a happy destiny. For myself, I believe it is something worth fighting for still. …Because so many of us are deserving of happiness, young wolf. Never let those embittered fools with their nihilism and observations of ‘reality’ convince you otherwise. Never!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So what do you mean to say?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I mean to say, young wolf, is to never give up,” Ajax replied. “I implore you. You must try, as hard as you can, to do good acts. Be charitable, lend your strength to those who are weak, give aid where you see a need. Mayhap we only appear where there is trouble being brewed, but it is our strength, it is our cunning, that may make all the close difference when chaos births and rears its terrible head. Of course…. You will trip, stumble. Such is natural. Such is inevitable. Such should not discourage you.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth looked, firelight bouncing in his now slit-oval eyes. Ajax continued. “Night will come and fall. But the only person in the entirety of creation that can force Seroth to give up performing good works, young wolf, is Seroth. It is will, my friend. The will to act. The will to be good. But always beware the pitfalls of arrogance, complacency, avarice. To possess a fine soul is like tending to a garden: effort must be made to pluck out the weeds and dispose of the ravaging critters. Dunaan must keep to humility. Pride and ego are not things that fuel courage.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Only failure,” He reached and spooned a mouthful of tender boar-pork and stewed broth past his lips. “Hmmmnn… And how feel you now?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“A little less lost than before,” Seroth admitted. [/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]Quietly, unremarkably, Seroth awoke on a coarse and freezing morning in the guardhouse, to find Ajax standing over him dressed in his usual apparel, swords sheathed in their across-back scabbards. In the half-light, blanketed with thick shades of off-dark, he resembled so much as an old moisture prospector plying at the stoic dunes of Tatooine or Drunland. He stepped aside, soundless and mouse-like, bidding with a hand for his student to rise and dress. Seroth swiftly and silently retrieved his insulated slacks, his grey over-shirt, binding on a long black tunic and a heatgown cape that slipped comfortably over his shoulders. Rugged, mud-flapped boots clicked with whispered snaps onto his shins and feet. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax waited on his leisure. When Seroth emerged from the guardhouse, walking out of the glum shade of the barbican towers, the elder slayer bid him further silence. The man quieted, falling into step behind the witcher as he strolled to a section of courtyard walling. His hand reached, displacing one brick that looked no more peculiar than its brethren. A sealed panel of flaksteel depressed inward before grinding aside into a fashioned groove. Before them opened the toothy jaw of a long, lightless tunnel. Ajax struck on his torch, spearing light into the gloom. At his gesture, Seroth followed him in.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was an anticipatory moment. The old Dunaan never made much of mentioning a final, ten-bout marathon to prove he was a christened master in the disused arts of Ysian longsword fighting. Between chapter reviews, push-ups, crunches, additional lunges and squats before he fell into exhaustive rest, Seroth oft wondered. Day-dreams made his stomach ball tight with boyish excitement. The airs of erudite and sectioned ceremony that Ajax called for were mesmerizing, the sort of captivating addictiveness that stole his sleep with visions of empty roads and dark figures waiting for him under broken, naked trees. The old man led on down a capering stair-case cut out of white chalk-stone. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The torch hung bars of idling, still micro-debris filtering in the light. Seroth remarked to himself the sense of austere architecture that cut bare arches and petrified wroshyr-wood ribs arched against the press of stone. Portions of bare wall were etched with hieroglyphic figures, following the cool, rectangular spiral of the staircase. Some images bore intentional resemblance to those black-hallowed watchmen sewn in the Ysian tapestries. Faceless with weaponry in hand, anonymous caste-hunters that relinquished acknowledgement in history. Seroth swept his hand across the dust filming in the edging, wiping away cobwebs to see their individual detailing. Ajax tapped the haft of his torch, bidding the man keep up. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Heat began to wreathe them. Chalky marble creased into wrinkles of hardened glass-cased obsidian, as they maneuvered stairs that wove into circular flues of supported pumice and black, igneous stone. Etchings in the frozen lava toes and smoothed bulbous contusions in the walling were painted with a faintly aglow ink. Ajax shone his torch against their grainy blush. The glyphs were now in the midst of a story-description, highlighting the exploits of one huntress that was not fixed with a disfiguring circle across her carved features. Mounds of dead lay in expiration at her feet, swords held aloft in a triumphant cross. Symbolic fire and rains of ghastly blood ran in river-banks as she whirled her way through the armies of the damned. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They stepped onto a hardened floors of striated stone washed with pungent mixtures of chemical acids, now long dried, inert, but still potent with that terrible, ammoniac stench. Further tunneling opened up a roughly hewn corridor leading down on a long, stooping flue thick with noxious vapors, forcing both to affix their jaws and noses with handkerchief veils. Irregular fissures belched further, sweating torrents of gas. Ajax shrugged forward and broke into a jog. Seroth hopped close behind, noting his faculties were beginning to choke with a baffle of fog. The flue ran on for another fifty meters before dipping into an annex-pocket of ballooned, pressurized shale and coal. Six additional square-arched doorways beckoned their choice. Ajax picked the fourth and led on.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Age blanketed them as surely as cloaks of lead. Seroth felt his imagination occasionally waking up to consider the several billion if not whole trillion tons of compressed rock layers that spanned above head all the way to the snow-cased wilds of Dromund Kaas. He followed Ajax beneath a relieving arch and into another tunnel that crossed in zipper-like, hard-angle turns. Soon, another annex. Another six archways beckoning them. The old man picked the second, stirring up inch thick curdles of settled grain-dust under his boots. There nine annexes in total before they arrived at a sealed screen façade that reached into the draughts of a hollowed out cave. Blinded statues rested in cautious poses against the Nabooian colonnades, pressed with remarkable detail slaved over their billowing dresses, corded belts of silver rope, stone faces wrapped masks across their blank, blind eyes. Shafts were stylized dragons clawing from the molten bases to reach upwards, clamping wide, snarling fangs upon capitals carved to resemble stress-fractured skulls. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Where are we?” Seroth asked. His voice sounded so small in the close air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The Marauder’s Crypt,” Ajax said, his words likewise choked and quiet despite his raise of volume.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They entered in the recesses of the west end, through along a decorated nave housed with glaring galleries stationed high in the curled walling. Above in the ceiling were painted sexpartite ribs, stuck bricking washed over with laboured frescoes. Seroth could see just the dimmest impressions of saintly figures standing before growling daemons hulked in mocking white-chased cuirasses and enclosed helms. Past the transcept, upon the choir floors were sublime ruby carpets edged with jet tassels, overstitched with symmetrical depictions of wolf’s heads and the grinning faces of extinct sea-predators. Further statues lined up before them along the choir-screen, topped with a north-star of seven points, molded from gold, silver, platinum, and a center diamond of incredible lustre. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A magnificent casket of blue-steel resplendent with guarding reapers leering with gleaming crop-scythes at each corner rested beyond the retable. The altar itself was quilted with thin tapestries woven in complex geometric patterns, signed with indecipherable scripts and symbols of noesis and noema. Seroth had seen the patterns before: on the chemically stained floors of the Lodge of Shade’s alchemic laboratory. Beneath the transformative bath, that coffin of armoured glass, brass stanchions, and enclosed, reinforced lid. There was a faint, saintly odour of power in the air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax took the man by his shoulder and gave a push for him to ascend the altar steps.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“By myself?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye. What waits for you is your own inheritance. Just you. For me to climb the steps in your company, even with permission, would be a grave insult to the wishes of she who sleeps there,” He said, pointing at the chilly sarcophagus braced with those looming, skull-grinning specters. “Go on.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His boots sounded with dull thuds echoing with unseemly emptiness up into the mausoleum’s rafters. Thick rugging muffled his steel-toes stepping off banna’i glazed bricks. Seroth went up to the altar table set low against the high rise of the interred casket. A bossed plate spoke the name of the dead resting in her adoptive Ysian splendor: Kris of Kath. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her gifts for him were two bundles wrapped in thick burlap cots and tied with stringy gut-wire. It was musty with the decay of untouched centuries, preserved by the cool dryness inherent to the air and little disruption by bacteria or inclement organisms. Seroth reached, tearing off the gut-wire, pulling apart the age-weakened burlap to expose Kris of Kath’s secreted awards. Breath clenched in his throat. Quite suddenly he could feel a pound in the pacing of his heartbeat rattling against his thickened ribs. Trembling, gloved hands reached down and picked up the paired scabbards.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Both were attached to a long torso-belt of splendid, oiled leather-skin. Ajax’s glittering torchlight hovered illumination upon their detail. They were longswords; of such exquisite quality and age that the man was hesitant to simply touch at the bonded grips. Seroth fixed his hand around one hilt and drew the blade. It was a splendid length of gently curved steel, singled-edged, sterling gunmetal-grey that still picked up a pale gleam of light from the torch-glow. He sheathed it back into its waiting scabbard, drawing the second hilt. That one was a double-edged beast of plated silver over a balanced core of high-carbon steel, coloured white as snow with an upraised leaf-star, crowned with eight points.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Those are your brothers,” Said Ajax in the quiet. “The first: Razorlight, bane of men. The second: Winterfang, bane of monsters. Once they belonged to Kris of Kath. Now? …Now, they are yours to wield.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Together, they retreated from the altar and choir, retreading their steps to the long mausoleum nave to sit down beneath the curtain of the north-face galleries. Seroth sat with his swords resting with unruly energy in his lap. Ajax had propped their single torch in against a broken slot in the half-basket brick weave. Between themselves, they shared a tiny meal of jerky and cold water from bottled flasks.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Kris of Kath was a witcher of note?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes. She came into our kinhood some six hundred years ago, a century or two before the Gulag Advent boiled the galaxy into a hemorrhage of death and misery. Kris of Kath cut her eyeteeth scouring worlds in the northern quadrants of the galactic plane.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Imperial territories.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The Sith were hardy. Most refused to allow their holdings to fall as infighting took hold. Many counted her as a strange ally. Some tried to court her affections. But Kris of Kath was a woman possessed. More bestial than the monsters she hunted, some liked to say. She slew her way from Sarvchi to Bayan, all the scores of world in between. Those swords were forged for her very hands. As chaos lessened and beasts faded into scarcity, she deigned to simply disappear. It’s noted she passed on not long after.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“To be interred here.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What few of us there were watched over the passage of her remains to this place… Ohhh, but we all admired her. Youthful, virile, just an unquenchable flame that couldn’t slow for anything, anyone. We could never discover what stole her vitality, but we all suspected some unseen enemy cast awful Sith craft over her soul. Nothing her metabolism or immune system could fight. Seeing her so still and gone was more than most of us could bear.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Did you build this place?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Us?? Good heavens, young wolf, no. Some of just remembered that it was here; the only crypt we could conceive that could house her spirit with some earned dignity. We sailed her under auspicious solar-sails, all so sullen, in dark moods. All we could offer were pathetic eulogies. Not the justice her stories deserved.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth coaxed Razorlight from its scabbard and held it aloft in his one hand. It seemed to almost contour to his grasp, content to be rescued from obscurity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax glanced from its glinting edging to the same, hard glow alight in the man’s wolven eyes. “How does it feel?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just a shade over perfect~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’d hoped for as much.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“She left these for me?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Not in so many words…” Ajax coughed little vaguely. “But she was like you. Kris of Kath saw in her dreams the White Fox. Made claims that Sayda spoke to her infrequently. It was commonly accepted she was of the wolf-blood descending from Sayda herself, when she led our caste in exile to the larger galaxy. No one else save someone of her family could stand worthy to inherit her blades.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Worthy?” Seroth looked across. “No. Not worthy. Not yet. But I’ll prove it: one monster at a time. …What now, Ajax?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmn?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The training. My swords. What next?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh, you and I? Young wolf, you and I are finished in our work. What’s left to know is but semantics. And you’ll learn a great deal more on your own, treading the witcher’s Path.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I gathered that much,” Seroth said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Ohh. Well, dear me. You mean: what’s left?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He nodded.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Well, it’s quite simple,” Ajax shrugged and sprang onto his feet. “Now, you just simply ascend the central cell-pit in pitch darkness, contending with tribes of naked, horrid things that want to eat your face, make it to the tombs of the Dark Temple, slay Borja Sennex’s rearguard keeping watch for you and I, and emerge atop the structure.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You make it sound complicated.” Seroth buckled on his dual swords across his back and rose, discarding his cloak.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The devil’s in the details, young wolf~”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The way up, the only confirmed pathway founded that led reliably to surface levels and to the spires of the vaunted Dark Temple, was through Cell-Pit Gamma-Prime. Where Seroth had wintered for some weeks, attempting a meager recovery against his devastating injuries. Where Ajax the Dunaan offered up his one and only means of regaining health and power, if only he came with him down into places untouched by outside feet and accepted a small trial. Seroth would recall those dreams he suffered in the pain-sleep for decades to come. The Apocalypse of Tund, the Tatooine Betrayal, the Duel on Contruum, the searing flight down time itself to see elusive Ys in all her falling glory. He had his blades now. Winterfang. Razorlight. Swords of a dead marauder now passed on to him. Another warrior-ancestor hinting at a larger genealogy spanning the reach back beyond the coming of the Tho Yor.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cell-Pit Gamma-Prime was as remembered: a reeking chute of tiered cell-floors cut or bolted in against enormous walls of serabite, cragstone, and granite. Light was a lambent illusion, cast from small bunched coral vines of phosphor fungi and moss, or from small illuminated globules hanging in random patterns from creepers trailing over guardrails and flooring edges. Every so often, something in the tall dark overhead wretched up gurgling exclamations followed by intensive clicking that echoed like the staccato breach of slug-gun. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Which level is this?” Seroth asked Ajax curtly as they emerged from behind a sundered cell wall, an opening which exposed a previously disclosed staircase kept hidden behind two meters of serabite glass-stone. His breath fogged under every word. The Cell-Pit was far chillier than he recalled. Neither of them bothered with torch-lamps or low-light goggles. As Dunaan, gifted with their wolf-eyes, they could both peer in the pitch black with perfect clarity.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax paused, tilting his head, drawing on some memory for clarification. He led them out onto the cell-floor walkway to lean against the railing, staring out into the vast chasms of dark space. “…I want to perhaps guess the 404th floor-block? We are in what I liken to as a strange neutral ground between the gang-clans eking out survival below and the more aggressive mutant packs above. It’s a sound enough space, roughly two hundred blocks or so.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Neutral ground?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Because I patrolled it while you slept,” Said the witcher. Gold fire flecked his eyes as he turned, blinking.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And how many floors upward? How many until I can breach the temple mausoleums?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The elder slayer could taste the eager purpose wafting thick and heady from the younger hunter’s demeanor. Seroth had taken back his old strength and then some, a fifteen-fold power that lent him a strange air. His gait was different, countenance darkened, intensive, somehow always peering at the world as if there was a trail to follow or a clue to snatch from thin air. Ajax knew it: the dark fire. Scholam apostles and those ancient wise-people of Ys looked to Chaos, the Force as everyone seemed to know it, and counted that the Power manifested seemingly interminable facets of ‘difference’. One facet was ‘dark fire’; coursing rivers of bleak energies and neutral eddy’s that Dunaan felt and could access with amplified ferocity. Its effect was a pronounced, unpleasant aura that induced temper, paranoia, terror, and general feelings of uneasiness in anyone keeping company. Such was why witchers were still a limited, shunned caste that deflected company for the loneliness of work. They could not fit in amidst the ordered cogs and screws turning the galaxy over: each Dunaan was an irregular, a misshapen piece that was destined to fall aside and drift amidst all the pollution and bedlam generated by the Universe.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Exactly three hundred seventy three,” Ajax replied. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Seventy hundred and seventy seven tiers then,” Seroth said, now smiling. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Certain circles within multiple Jedi off-shoots, especially those obsessed with ordering cosmology into neatly stacked compilations of numerical powers, considered 3 and 7 to be perfect numbers. In triplicate, it was regarded as an ultimate sign of potential luck or tiding. That Jurgoran Prison’s forgotten architects erected this prison chute with such purposed numeration spoke of heavy, growling spite. 777 block levels; a perfect hell.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax handed off a small rucksack from his own shoulder onto Seroth’s arm. “Don’t let your ability give way to vanity. Just climb, and don’t look down.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He stepped away to approach a panorama of broken anthracite walling and glass-stone, bit his fingers against hand-hold catches, and began to ascend. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Separated by exactly two and a half meters of dead space were the racked store-levels containing the unnumbered cells built to hold the best and worst of Dromund Kaas’ feudalistic society, seemingly endless floors that stretched up into unlit reaches breathing wafts of damningly cold air. As Seroth climbed, edging up floor by floor and taking care not to misplace his toes or fingers, he took stock of the conditions. Most cell doors were gaping jaws, stone frame-jambs cracked, the splintered, jagged teeth of sucking maws webbed with cobwebs and lichen growths. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was rusting evidence of stasis field projectors installed in the barred lock-doors, alongside sound dampeners and what appeared to be conal emitter rods that could masque out the cell in opaque, obscuring holo-windows. He paused at once cell, peering in through the dark. Gold eyes looked at the jaw-agape face of some long dead creature; it wore its tattered cloaks of worm-spun finery about its broad, thin shoulders. Exposed ribs showed many had been broken inward by violent blows. Seroth whispered tidings for the dead and turned to jump and grapple with a patch of exposed rebar and ferrocrete in the floor-roof overhead.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Darkness rendered colour into dull flats of deep monochrome and shadow. His palms and foot soles would dislodge piles of loosened scree and clastic refuse out of broken rivulets and gouges that formed hardy grips for his climb. Pebbles and vacant, green glass spun off into the pitted black below. They made harsh pings and spangs of jarred echo-sound, needling up into his ears. Peeling off sound or anything auditory above hushed breaths and the prickling of his sweat seemed to violate an ancient silence. The rise of silver hairs along the slope of his nape was akin to watching a drake come awake less than a few paces away. A long hiss of dry, rattling breath issued somewhere overhead. Seroth checked the ride of his sheathe-knife, then leapt across several exposed floor support columns, deflected his boots up off a span of chipped wall and came up onto the next floor.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Boulders of cracked, shattered rubble were strewn everywhere. Not one floor was in still complete condition. Age was rapidly devouring its way through the cell-pit and Seroth knew it could not be long before every ferrocrete outcropping avalanched in on themselves. Further breezes strolled down from the unseen ceiling; it whistled past his ears, through the cell barring. He walked across a landing littered with petals of serrated rust cupped and still, frosted with dust. Every footfall crunched with terrible squeals as rust-shaves snapped and disintegrated beneath his boot falls. Ahead on one floor, his eyes picked out wriggling, pallid forms of fatty maggot-worms crawling over a prone figure on the ground. It was a deadened ‘Thing’, so devolved it had a smoothed bone in place of eyes, though as Seroth peered closer for a glean, translucent facial flesh revealed vacant, blood-welled sockets. A maggot burst underneath his boot-heel.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Everywhere were tableaus and fixed scenes of death, decay. Scores of forgotten skeletal carcasses became thousands of bones scrambled across the ground in meter thick ‘bone yards’. It was slightly unnerving that most femurs, radio-ulnar bones, vertebrae, skulls, wrist bones, ribs, and pelvic bowls showed off deep bite-cracks and were sucked hollow of marrow. He found discarded weaponry piled high in certain corners, wreathed with still banners sewn out of dried, crackling skin. Emptied blaster-pistols smuggled in from outside sources were in the majority, though he could pick out more exotic entries: war blades and hammers, one vibro-trident, a set dozen vibro-swords, one colossal war hammer even his new and prodigious strength would have difficulty lifting, coptic-styled scythe-daggers, double edged and gleaming katars, even an extremely ancient example of a fusion-fire blunderbuss. Seroth paused to pick up the butt-stock and settle it against his shoulder. The tight was fit despite worn cracks in the wood finish. He wondered if the trigger would still depress if he gave it a harsh enough squeeze, or if it’d break off.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was while he held the disused blunderbuss that he saw a pale shape dislodge from a hiding spot in the ceiling. It was short by five-feet, its small head set below its needle-shoulders, giving it an odd ogrish countenance as it padded along the dusty flooring. One narrow hand held a raised section of rebar heated and hammered into a rough dagger. Like the prior corpse, it had no eyes, a set of yellow, glass-like teeth set in lipless gums, with skin clinging taut to its limbs and knobby joints badly swollen and disproportionate, and wore only a basic loin-cloth. Seroth could smell the foulness on its breath, hear the whispered hisses issuing from its narrow throat. It intended murder; the rebar-knife raised in a bleak flash as it jumped to assail him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth gripped the ancient blunderbuss by its throaty barrel and whipped the stock around. Petrified wood splintered across the miscreant’s skull, clubbing it brutally aside. Its head panned back in a wrong angle as it caught against the floor guard-railing and catapulted out into empty, frigid air.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Another creature exited from an opened cell and came at him with a pike of razor-wire wreathed axe-pole. The blunderbuss was still rattling with unspent heat-shot idling in its steel-brass muzzle. Ajax was fond of telling that you couldn’t go wrong following a hint of instinct. Seroth grasped the firearm by its naked framing in one hand and smashed the open-flared barrel end into the pale creature’s face. His finger squeezed on the trigger. Ignition chambers writhed to life and spat cold-fire onto a collection of steel bearings.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The whole of the cell-pit stirred awake at the blunderbuss roar.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Without much for a face and its skull emptied into a broken, poked cavity, the creature toppled away with boney impacts against the piled skulls and ribcages scattered across the arranged flooring. Simultaneously, choirs of the wretched and the damned awoke into tremulous cacophony, lighting into a fierce crescendo as the animalistic cannibals of Cell-Pit Gamma Prime became aware of an intruding presence climbing its way up through their viciously guarded territories. Whinnies of scalding yodels collided with roars of sonic growling and wrenched, slathered wails. Trace scuds of pebble-rock and ferrocrete garbage fell from above, dancing off the guard-rails, raising a rustling, pinging sound not unlike rainfall petting across corrugated aluminum roofing. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth could scent a nearing trace of body-stink and rank fecal caked onto disheveled bodies. His hand rose and slid Razorlight from its back-scabbard down into his readied gripping. Now he walked along the blackened cell-levels armed with sword-in-palm, fixing his gait into a swift trot and taking another leap up to the next ascendant level. He needn’t even bother with Force utilization: pure physicality alone aloud him to make the vault with ease. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They came at him a score at a time: packed creatures running on all hands and feet, most multi-limbed and showcasing sign of chemical sickness and damaging mutations. All were bald of hair, and possessed bony protrusions sticking up at odd angles from their spinal columns. Some had grown out sharpened keratin and bone implements from their forearms, elbows, and knees, enhancing their bestial appearance. Each clutched thin, wiry hands around basic weaponry fashioned out of all kinds of available materials, from spiked mauls and chained morning-stars to double-headed rebar-axes and short-swords. Above and across the pit, Seroth could see huddled shadows, massed skeins of pale bodies, herding along against the guard rails. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The first pack met him along the 501st Block Floor. Razorlight gleamed. Seroth began the killing work.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]No eye save his own could follow the course of his sword as he struck out in the Dunaan physical-catechisms of slaying blows. He cut right, dislodged a lean, narrow head, continued to dance right and sliced through a trio of upraised arms before stabbing out in neat pokes that severed bone, muscle, piercing right through heart-flesh and depressing lungs in blood-wet sighs and screams. Razorlight whacked left, right, left again, disemboweling and disarming in single, curt moves backed by formidable and alchemically forged strength. In a blink, the twenty bodies were either dead or dying. Ahead came another sauntering collection throwing wicked iron-fashioned spears his way. Up came the single sword-edge, deflecting aside the hurled missiles, some snapping apart while others disintegrated into puffs of iron-rosy mists of metallic and flint clouds. Seroth simply breathed and raked through their numbers, depositing aside twitching corpses devastated by harrowing cuts that glided through their bones, through their hips, legs, torsos, arms. Courses of ribbon-like blood rivers washed down the flooring wherever an inclined showed, sloshing dark froths of ichor against still forms lying broken on the formed cement. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They kept coming: an unending procession of unwashed faces leering, eyeless, skulls wrapped tight with skin stained by acid-etchings and tattooed by branded signs that were utterly foul to look upon. Their voices were a raised chatter of clacking teeth and long tongues lolling out like fluttering banners, red with strange, bilious phlegm. These, the descendants of the wretched abandoned that Dromund Kaas and too many cruel Emperors and Empress’ had left to rot and die. Life, though, found a way, through endless years rife with horrors Seroth could scarcely imagine. ‘Dark fire’, the blackness Ys’ ancient scryers and mages identified in the primordial stream, Chaos, the Force, throbbed with cold might in his temples. It wasn’t simply twenty apiece that met him along the now corkscrewing causeway running down against the tunneled rock. There were scores on scores, hundreds, maybe a thousand bodies all crashing down to kill Seroth and feed upon him warm bones.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Witcher met Wretches in a single, jarring collision. There was an actual, physical pause as the forward bramble of five bodies lurched and fell upon the running Dunaan. An entire press of hording, skeletal bodies scrabbled to keep their momentum charging forward. Seroth wasn’t having it. Both Winterfang and Razorlight were drawn in his hands, their steel brilliant in the dark, gleaming with the sting of sorcery: one for monsters, one for men. Those in the fore tried to draw back, screaming as their aura bit against their psyk-range. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blood like slime welled and slipped at his boot-toes. Seroth called on the mental portrait of sunny, glowing Rosa smiling on their wedding day. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Winterfang cleaved left and drove through a trio of bodies, rending them free of hands, sucking out flesh and physical matter from exposed throats. Razorlight stung, slashed, ripping through another three that tried harrying his right with primitive razor-maces and flint knives. Every blow timed with single, plodding steps that took Seroth in half a meter at a time against the horde-press. Now, the combined hail of all those scrabbling war-screeches was an unbearable drone of deafening, paining sound. He took one through its sternum, cut right and severed one across its ribcage and spinal column. Another fell with liver and kidneys pierced and savaged. Both blades crossed in a vicious X, smashing through two creatures that raised their weaponry in meager defense. Limbs flew. Vitae spread. Behind him, tens of meters at a time, the ground laid with strewn with wrecked cadavers. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Soon, the weight on his arms began to subside. The onrush had lost its momentum and was now attempting to regain its former fervor and attempt a second charge. It was Legion versus the One. Viewing their skinny limbs clawing with such feral tenacity was akin to something chitinous, insect-like, scraggly sticks gripping their broken bodkins and snapped pole-arms. Seroth saw each snarling face, all mashed together like a singular expression. He’d never forget in his dreams the visage of so many opened mouths and eyeless skulls washed black with gore and feces. Their stench was almost as overpowering as their combined strength.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Somewhere, he remembered Rosa laughing. Azure banks of crystalline water lapped at her naked waist. Grain-beer hung on the air with traces of bird guano, belonging to a small hut bar a hundred miles on by one of the basalt rises stacked against the loins of Sycaela, the Salt City.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]In real time, the Wretches of Jurgoran were dying. Seroth had disappeared. In his place stood a tornado of steel that suffered nothing to stand in its way. A blink. Twenty dead, crushed underfoot. A beat. Another score, missing their arms below the elbow, throats opened wider than ration-cans. A breath. Some were clamouring over the railing to escape, plummeting into the pitch, inky shadows welling and cackling below. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The eyes. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Gold. Oval. Flecked with scarlet points of firelight. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Teeth bared open in howling war cries. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The horde scattered away. Their hunting need, their slayer-frenzy, was stalling out. Hooting calls signaled a mass retreat that saw all those bodies turn-face and begin scrabbling for purchase back up the looping staircase Seroth watched the flight of ghosts flit back into their comfortable dens sequestered deep in broken cell holdings. Just narrow holes dug out from the bare stone by hand and basic shovels. More just ran ahead, up staircases and climbing walls rendered patched, rough with grey moss and oily lichen-vines. As surely as they’d come upon him with such nasty surety, they were gone from sight before Seroth could call on his next breath.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He stood flush with dank fluid washed against his skin and cloth, dripping strings of severed meat from his shoulders, from down off the ring-hoops wound tight on his tunic like armour. Seroth took a moment to crane back his skull, reversing air out his nostrils to clear them of stuck blood-matter. Limbs burned. His whole frame shook as adrenal glands worked to catch up. There’d been close impacts; just collisions of meat on meat. Bruising was already beginning to swell darkly around his throat and clavicle, with further more beneath his striped tunic and black pants.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just climb, and don’t look down…” He said in a gruff, seared whisper. Winterfang and Razorlight returned to their scabbards and stayed holstered for a time. For the meanwhile, Seroth drew out the longknife strapped across the belting on his left hip and wedged its back over his teeth and molars. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He strolled up to a length of vacant wall where the upper floors had collapsed and took out the bottom thirty levels below. A hand gripped into the sheer stone and coarse moss, ascending him up with a shoulder-shrug, allowing his toes to catch in. Another hand-hold. Seroth couldn’t recall exactly which level he was climbing up and away from, nor what the next few were counted as. …Only that he could now see the pit ceiling.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The ceiling was a jet and flint point of ragged, scarred stone coming down like a fat, vestigial finger. A super-massive stalactite: one ageless, singular collection of calcified mineral growths that glinted darkly pallid and wan in the micro-dust. Corkscrewing stairs had been cut and fashioned out of the flickering material, webbed and knobbed by gross pustules of further mineral collection. He could spy a narrow bridge of meter-wide, bubbly welded durasteel sheeting hanging suspended and rail-less between the upper most level and the blackened stone construct oozing down from the earth above. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It took six hours up through the shivering vaults, against broken, gutted passageways gleaned through the rotting concrete blistered with fungi and moist, strangely warm lichen micro-growths, past cell-nests and hidden dens with those eyeless, naked things huddled in terror of the passing hunter, before Seroth came to Virtual Floor 1. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Unbreakable manacles, grillos’, and electro-shackles were left unordered and disarranged on the final platform overlooking the howling, depthless, wholly damned Gamma-Prime pit. Most were crusted with ruby flares of spent gore taken from slashed wrists and ankles cut in by too tight, too sharp alloyed metals that kept them confined and helpless. Faded insignias once painted with bright traceries upon the laser-rounded walls lined all around. Emptied control pill-boxes were abandoned, armoured glass-steel portholes and slit-panes still stood, though crazed and fiercely damaged. Seroth looked about, committing detail to memory. Something on his conscience asked that he have the courtesy to remember the monumental efforts taken by sentients to imprison, maim, torture, and abandon unto death.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There could be no telling then, or ever, if there had been justification for those sent to die in Jurgoran. Something like a keening need, tinged with doubt, soulful, deep, rending, played against his physical heart. It hurt. Justification, Seroth thought. It sometimes came down to how hard one could convince themselves that their choices, their prescribed decisions, were in the right. Necessary. A necessity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth knelt, picked up a shattered manacle, turning it over in his torn gloves. He used to believe pragmatism was poisonous. Piecing together deals with the outer darkness that edged the Force and permeated it more thoroughly than many would admit, was the surest, most reliable fashion into damnation. It had taken Ulic Qel-Droma. Corrupted Exar Kun. Fooled Anakin Skywalker and turned the likes of Jacen Solo into a self-deceived monster. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]So who was he now, that he drank the Trial of the Waters and emerged changed? The same, yet different? Or different, yet somehow still true? …Perhaps, past all hubristic assumptions, through misplaced idealisms and arrogance: it came down to what time would make of it. What they would say in the memory of a strange man who dealt a deal with devils he didn’t know, so he could come home to save his family. His friends. To take on the ancient contract owed to his blood through kin down the ages. Dunaan. Witcher. Well, not quite. That status would be afforded at Ajax’s discretion, and that seemed to imply he make the impossible escape up and away over the dead slumbering in the Dark Temple above.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth put away his knife and steadied to accept the precarious balance leading out onto the long tip-toe walkway leading towards the jet stalactite. Either side was sheer nothingness: emptied air misted with ichor-dark shadows drifting up from the lost cell-pit floor. Stains of rust-rot indicated the platform leading to the screw-case was originally much wider, probably decorated with reassuring hand-holds to help lend strength against making an awkward, unceremonious tumble into the dark below. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sounds rustled from behind. He turned, peering back through the shadows, gold-eyes like awful, hellacious glows. Razorlight turned down into his hand. Some braver sorts of the naked, complexion-less, still eyeless creatures had come to watch. Just a handful, tentative and curious about where the mad slayer was off to. Seroth paused, blinking; he wasn’t entirely sure himself. Ajax simply told to climb, escape. So escape he shall, and complete the last required niche to fulfill the elder’s training regime and be wholly considered Dunaan. He sheathed the blade away, turning back to continue along the catwalk. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]At one point, the way across was no larger than a hands width. Winds with winter teeth barreled into his chest with a threat to rip him off and soar him away into the seven hundred seventy seven floors below. Enduring, he settled his footing, focusing on some arcane mental disposition that somehow kept his boots planted. Three meters until he could come to the cut-out mineral steps became one meter, then none at all. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]After another umpteenth harrow of clinging grasps clutching at swollen buboes of black calcimite, boots wet with some sort of slick of moisture along the steps, Seroth made the slow venture up the carved spiral. By then, that ambient chill that reaved through his gloved fingers and through the binding on his tunic and shirt glistened soaked hoarfrost upon the pseudo-smoothstone dripping from the pit ceiling. At the top, the zenith where stalactite met with the battleship grey, unyielding rock arching overhead in a featureless roof, he found a doorway. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was a towering length of lilac-amethyst metal, riveted with bolt-studs of gold-white, etched and bossed in daemonic visasges, set against the rock in a thick jamb constructed out of a similarly strange crystal-growth. At the touch, there was a resonance. Seroth’s temples piqued with familiar throbbing, soul haunted by chattering, disturbing echoes from outside the material plane. It seemed reasonable to conclude that the doorway and the vaulting construct itself was fashioned of psycho-reactive elements that reverberated and cast back deep, troubling echoes emerging from the inner catacombs of the unseen catacombs above.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He reached, forcing his touch against the alloys, feeling his mind ache as bleak sensations of ice coruscated down his throat and briefly encased his heart. The door refused to budge under his press. Seroth grunted, braced his footing, and shunted. Muscles along the lines of his arms, shoulders, and torso bulged, tightened. It took a moment of stubborn but weakening adamant, before, finally, the metal gave away with a thin screech of grinding alloys upon the mineral-calcite flooring. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Up and ahead into the less than forgiving rock wound a tremulous, narrow stairwell. It ended on a sharp ninety-degree turn and then strolled upwards, out of sight. One long, great hurl of grave-rot festooned air blew down with harrows of deathly moans. Figments, Seroth tried to think. A play of air against the stone. So he told himself. He still drew Winterfang into his hand before beginning to march upward into the mausoleum basements of Dromund Kaas’ forbidden Dark Temple…[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]The crypto-porticus, an exhaustive length of private passageway running the length between the jet-gilt mineral tooth hanging over the bent roofing of the Cell-Pit up into the Bone Runs, was silent, cramped, and glacial cold. Seroth found bricked walls tongued over by slides of white ice, forced to rub his shoulders through frost-swollen warps in the tunnel space as air began tickling at his lungs with flecks of melting ice-crystal. Light was even further obscured than the tepid illumination that glossed the deep vaults of the Jurgoran; he could see ahead by a dismal meter-by-meter cone which ended in glistening walls of black. Once or twice he was forced to arrest his progress. Despite the piqued treads in his boot-soles, a few segments of ice-slung interlocked bricking were too slippery for purchase. He half-fell, clawing at the mortar to stop from flopping out. Overhead were a scant dozen or more flared, copper ventilation chutes gusting bleak tendrils of snowed air from outside the outer walling. Seroth shouldered forward, ignoring the haunts of whistling breezes pitching against the metal chute-lips. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The tunnel funneled into a small doorway of rotund metal-brackets burned onto irregular stones that somehow managed to connect seamlessly. Dark fire on the edge of his conscious flared bright and cold the moment his gloved fingers reached and pressed against a small crystal geode-key centered midst the disconcertingly asymmetrical lines. Dark fire. Dark Force. Seroth pushed the teal-cyan button of crystal-stone in against its hugging recess. The rotund groaned and sunk away, wheeling into a hollow carved out of its door-jamb.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Now came illumination, in pale, sickly glimmers crawling down a vacant, short scarp of stairwell furtively angled against a foreboding mouth of molded stone above.. Seroth edged forward from the opened passage up along the sloped ingress of stepping-blocks, confined in a sort of umbilical vault, traced overhead with thin moulds of tightly compacted oolite pebbles. Claystone rifled against his boots, most strewn from rough wounds in the masonry work where age and gravity had collapsed a few inches worth of material off the walls and onto the glistening capstone pads. He treaded up through the tunnel-mouth: a stylized set of yawned jaws, with every stone tooth decorated with visages of handless martyrs standing or treading atop headwaters of corpses. The umbilical hallway opened out into a wider nave. Seroth paused, to stare at the gadrooned ceiling spanning overhead, as wide as the underside of a bulk clipper. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Thousands of skeletal hands, caked in preserving glues that rendered an ouslite gleam to their milky countenance, were pressed in between the mortar of the high bricked walls rounding up into the ceiling vaults.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Humiliation was a key practice in many of Dromund Kaas’ crueler traditions. Such that when those nameless Kings and Queens shuttled the wrapped corpses of their foes down into the Dark Temple catacombs, they likewise dealt with those professing loyalty to their memory or cause. Warriors were especially singled out: each had their favoured sword-hand sliced off at the wrist by ceremonial cleavers, forced afterward to make a terrible run for whatever medicae would be willing to see to their grievous bleeding. Morticians and corpse-magos’ saw that The Bone Runs in the sub-halls beneath the true sepulchers glowed with an off-cadence from Hutt-iron sconces shivering with spectral fire. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It took an hour and some change to navigate the Run. Though not built with any intentional labyrinth qualities, Seroth found that the singular tunnel doubled back in wide band-loops, in a constant east to west and back again dance. Devilish spellwork glamoured the bone-hands stuck in against the bricking to react at trace body-heat. They turned, grasping at emptiness, clawing Seroth’s way as snapping finger-knuckles rustled together in dry rain-hisses of rubbing calcium. Every nineteenth meter were horizontal rows of jawless skulls on either side of the passage. Emptied ocular sockets were fixed over with mauve jewels glittering blood-flecks in the pale blue-haunt light. In place of tongues, there stirred nests of snow-banded green backed vipers, lapping out fork tongues at the passing mutant.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A first, cool sepulcher waited behind six doors of meter thick steel, inscribed with the Songs of Damned Litany by heat-wicks that melted tongues of script against metal and carbon reinforcement. Chains as thick as a Gamorran’s leg had once scaled into silvertine locks. Now, the links were shattered, the locking boxes severed by some inscrutable force. Stenwulf, Seroth hazarded. He’d have had to travail his way through the Bone Run down into the Jurgoran. Silver-grey slicks of smoothed scratching showed along the cobble-work underfoot.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Inside, a single coffin of nondescript stone laid in chilling resplendence. Light protruded through a narrow oval at the apex of the coffered ceiling, beneath a glassed cupola, each recessed panel gilt with emptied battle-helms back-lit by caustic growls of red light. Loculus niches kept the company of blue linen-wrapped figures; embalmed, pinned with jade medallions wreathed with golden chain-loops, arms crossed and bearing aloft stiffly clutched, ceremonial battle-axes. Mascaron carvings of chimeric faces, thick lips cut over by toothy overbites, eyes of true ruby gleaming hotly in the cold dark, stared from their lofts beneath abacus posts. Portico columns in the classic orthostyle stood at both endings of the lengthy chamber. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth pressed through the thick air. Sensations of ice pricked at his skin, despite an opposing waft of too-warm air threading through discrete tubers at the feet of daemonic caryatid sculptures. He took time to make his careful procession through. The blank sarcophagus placed in the dead-die center of the chamber appeared almost too still. Acid swabs had eaten through a bronze-palladium plaque mounted at the head. Machine-grinders had gouged platelet scars against the stone. Petty efforts to drive out any remaining indicators of prior identity. Throbs of lambent psychic presence pulsed and ground against his temples. Ghosts whispered in the foetid shade cast alongside the arcade walls.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He passed through a dozen similar mausoleums before the acrid, terrible scope of the Dark Temple’s scale resonated within the man’s breastplate. There were scores of sepulchral chambers, each fashioned with acute differences, spanning the better part of several underground acreages. Each room opened up in four differing side-alleys leading off to further tombs. Seroth trekked on. Razorlight idled in his clenched hand now. Invisible presences balked at the drawn, charged steel, scampering directionless sounds of footsteps from every which way. A single hint of direction through the maze came where Stenwulf had dragged along his own coffin prior. Faded cuts and gouge marks shone against adamantium-grey blocks, leading along south by east by south again.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There was a constant vice of chilly, vacant pressure against his mind. Like the press of a fish-tank, that one brilliantly thick skein of clear glass clamping in with emptied air idly coursing by. Few rites had been conducted to heed the distress of those slain and sent to idle in the Temple’s underground. Phantoms flickered where ghost-light capered against long walls painted dourly with allegorical frescoes. On his peripheral, shadows loomed to twist into grappling hands caressing down his long slacks, tugging against his striped jacket, flicking obscene messages into his ears. Seroth steeled up; simple mental exercises calmed his faculties and kept his biometrics from verging into anything past stalwart alertness. Razorlight, Bane of Men, glinted frost-light off its chilly edge.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]An abattoir stink wrinkled his nose. Seroth had come around a sharp turn, keeping close against the painted bricks, always on a check against corners and angles. Ajax had made mention of Borja Sennex leaving behind an assassin cadre to act as standing guards; presumably until their master returned, they would guard over the secreted crypts of the Dark Temple against anyone who dared flush themselves out from Jurgoran Prison below. Now, as he came to a cross-tee in the path, he could scent blood. Malodorous scents wafted like blood-mist in the air. He was beneath the arched cowls of several caryatid sculpture-pillars: they each bore the medallion-insignia of the Cherub’s Fraternity, a cult of organ-harvesters Seroth knew that’d been burned out on Commenor so many years prior. The man couldn’t help peering up into one stony face. There practices dictated a method of burning certain sigils onto their bones, somehow bypassing blemishing the skin. It was a secret they’d taken to their graves. The one granite scowl he gazed upon had a loathsome character stamped across her cheek and across her eye. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]…It must’ve been his imagination.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth could have sworn the solid, merciless frown on the statue had briefly shivered into a smile. White hairs on the back of his nape stood up tall as corn-stalks. The prior abattoir effluence had gained into a rancor of such putrid smell it overwhelmed his hyper-sensitive olfactory nerves. Seroth turned about, snapping his blade up en-guard. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]She stood less than half a meter away, no more than a child but wizened with bulbous growths humping up from her robed back. It wasn’t her sudden appearance that was alarming. Not her scent of ancient gore and death. Nor how her voice cackled into bursts of buzzing laughter. No; she reached a desiccated hand up and tore off her hooding.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Her face was composed entirely of wriggling fingers slathered red in blood and meat-strings. Some pulled taut around her mouth, fingernails forming into teeth. There were no eyes. Just ragged holes burning with dead starlight. Where there were gaps spread nesting fly larvae and their breeding parents, blow-flies of unseemly size, flying about. Some tapered into a rough flight outline above her digit-skull: an obscene halo, jet-scaled fly bodies caressing atop one another until there were cicada-notes of rustling insect song. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The child-thing could have been anything in her prior existence. Perhaps a dangerously radical matron of a long-dead noble house, put to death by assassin hunter-killers employed by her enemies. Perhaps even agents sent by the Obsidian Throne itself. It was impossible to know without directing the ghost, the vaunted poltergeist leering up at Seroth, into direct questioning. Seroth didn’t bother. He recalled Ember Rekali’s lessons on how to combat the unclean.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His hand shot forward in a crisp sign and spurred a cone of infernal fire. Spitting flame lashed onto the ghost, enveloping it an orange ball that cloaked over its hideous visage. The ghost was fast consumed, crying out in an atonal wail that the man would take with him to his grave. Cartilage popped and meat gristle sent up acrid scents. Smoke boiled against the ceiling, to sweep down over the cowled faces of those looming caryatids. Departing, all that was left in his wake were black flagstones cooked over with grey ash… and a single blowfly busily cleaning at its membranous wings.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Every passed tomb and ventured mausoleum seemed to tempt with what might have been buried alongside their singular occupants. He could recall stories of tomb-raiding, the treasures to be had with a bit of guts and glory. On a fancy, Seroth approached one elaborate sarcophagus created entirely out of folded electrum plating and inlaid diamond. Its lidding felt vac-sealed and probably entrenched with Sith-styled spells warding off prying entry. A thin creep of off-blue light issued from beneath. Like the others, the interred were rendered nameless. Seroth remembered his own grisly, intended fate at the hands of vicious Stenwulf: death by suffocation, buried alive at the bottom of a pyre chamber. He left the casket alone and turned on his boot, continuing on into the mean gloom.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]An exit appeared beneath a high tympanum, organized with the likenesses of several caricature emperors and empresses blazing fire from their many thrones, down onto stony audiences of prostrate subjects. Slaves. Past and underneath the tympanum, beyond the softly bulged support pillars, laid a grand and emptied chamber leading off to an enormous stairway. Finely measured steps carved out of blue marble and topped with caps of gold-petal disappeared into faint bars of pastel teal, where the stairways spanned up out of sight. Seroth began to step into the wide room, domed right to the flooring, when a second feeling of incredible evil charged him to stop.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He hadn’t smelled it. Never heard it, either. Even the Force, what Ysian masters preferred as ‘Chaos, was betrayingly quiet. But the micro-fine hairs across his body and even over the padded calluses of his footing picked up subtle pricks of vibration emanating somewhere behind him by fifteen meters. Whatever it was loosed a heavy, dry and stony sound from its throat and crossed the distance. Fifteen. Ten. Five. Seroth played a hard game of sly dare until there was less than a hand’s breadth between the ominous killing weight and his unguarded backside. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Razorlight stroked back into its oiled scabbard, swiftly replaced by Winterfang. Seroth already felt its metal beginning to groan inside his mind; primordial hunger as its edge felt a taste of familiar prey on the air. The exchange of blades was made in mid-roll, diving out of the way by six meters as claws like short-swords drove a furrow through the flooring. Chunks of bricked granite, silvertine amphibole, coarse, grainy feldspar shredded into flint-shards that scattered across the ground, smashing into clastic debris.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth came out of the roll onto a knee, rising quick into a hooked guard, backpedaling while simultaneously side-stepping left along the chamber grounds. He eyed up the mauler that had filtered down from a high nest of linked wires and broken skulls cut in through the dome-chamber’s arched siding. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Terentatek measured out, usually, to three and half meters with half again as many tonnes in weight. They were large, yes, massive but nothing on the mean scale of something like a Rancor. This particular specimen, wearing a sleek hide bolted with strange, reflective plates of glassy obsidian, was five meters tall and a sight heavier than any specimen Seroth had ever seen. It was a sheer monster, in every sense of the term. A wide mouth furnished with rows of blunt incisors lapped at by a roll of thick, purple tongue ending in spiny flesh-growths. Tusks as long as his arms framed either side of the mouth, thick with caustic drool, smelling pungently of digestive acids and potent neural and blood poisons. Its whole body was scaled, wrapped beneath with reptilian musculature and bone, all sheathed in segmented, thickly calcified armour that was notoriously resistant against even plasma-weaponry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ajax warned against some final guardian watching the way into the Dark Temple proper. How he or Stenwulf managed to evade its attentions were beyond Seroth to discover momentarily, though he guessed there were ways. There were always proscribed methodologies against extra-sensory detection. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]No beast of this one’s make had ever attained formal martial training. Mentally, psychically, they were beyond past rudimentary behavioral suggestions, which were risky engrams to try and psy-code onto their conscious. They were animals, as intended. Brute, fast, powerful, deathly in close-quarters, for their hide was thick against conventional weaponry and slaved with such Sith spell-casting that they could soak up inflicted esoteric damages. Unless one invested in especially intensive, nasty Force power, it simply didn’t faze them. And they knew no fear. For many Jedi, coming into blade-range was tantamount to voluntary suicide; at their mention during one lecture, a teacher on Tython was asked what to do specifically when encountering such a creature. Dispiritingly, Seroth recalled her answer: ‘Run.’[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The monster shifted its weight forward on squat, bulked legs, spitting stone-debris out from its under-soles, and charged Seroth in a plunging run. One step put him from six meters to three, opening up their contest with an unavoidable charge. Ys swordplay likened such maneuvers as facing down an unbridled steed, a creature that would charge you regardless of tactics or intent. The sword was a rein, something to grasp and control against the onrush of movement. Seroth struck. Winterlight cut through the meat between its second and third knuckle-claws into the inward soft of the palm. Whether or not Terentatek’s could respond to pain as nominally as other species was up for debate. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]But it forced to favour its opposite arm and slung the wounded appendage down, nudging into a shoulder check. Seroth pumped his legs, leaping into a curt, balled jump that sailed him over the scutes and interlocked spines running down the monster’s spinal bones. His right hand shunted up his blade-hilt to choke beneath the cross-guard. Sith-steel bit in against the spellwork shielding Terentatek flesh, through sixteen-inch thick sheathes of skin, to run a long, ragged wound from behind its shoulder right off the muscle of its rump and flank. The beast warbled a note and fell forward, rebounding off the wall as its charge fell out of control.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was enough to shiver loose several ornamental projections nestled in the dome-roofs coffers. A bossed orb of unpolished brass dislodged overhead and pinked sterling, metallic notes wherever it collided with falling brick-waste. Seroth reached to pluck it from the air, winding back his arm to speedball it across the turning monster’s brow. Hide dented and deformed around the impact. Unfazed, the man watched the beast pick the fallen sphere up between a thumb-claw and fore-knuckle, and crush it into a flat snap of stressed metal. That too broke in half. The Terentatek drew itself up and this time began a more cautious approach across the flooring.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They paced until they were spread apart by another handful of meters, squared off, shifting from foot to foot and sizing up each other’s killing potential. Seroth noted the specimen’s crunching weight: every part of the vast, painted mosaic bricks and oolite pebbles shook. Deign of strength and upper-body reach meant that it could exert a far attack with punishing force. Despite the thrum of rejuvenated power idling in his limbs, his body, the man wasn’t keen on pitting brawn in a slug-match, fist to claw, against those razor-claws and barbed wrists. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth kicked his toes into the seams between the oolite-bricks and instead harried his opponent with Winterfang’s raking edge. So Ajax had told, the blade’s Spawn-killing bite was the result of its noetic forging process, where it drank a hundred drops of Terentatek blood and poison. The charged spell-properties met with the alchemic steel to fashion in it a sort of animus. Not truly alive. Yet no mere metal. Its forte was the sundering of other, alchemically enriched creations. Monsters, especially. Others it tore into with little distinction. The Terentatek raised up its meaty forearms; Winterfang collided against a volcanic-glass growth, just to smack and shatter it into glitter. Micro-dust showered the air, bare light coruscating odd shines and gleams. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He drove it back across the chamber. It felt pain, he was certain. Seroth tucked beneath an answering arm-swing, funneling a deep poke that gored through its hip, retreating his blade to cross up a guard as the beast slashed. Spell-hardened bone met across the blood-channel. The man should have staggered: steel-muscle flexed from ankle to shoulder to wrist, bearing up the impact. He sliced, taking off a talon-sword from its hand, performed a severing cut through its forearm that sundered bone and arterial vessels. The beast sucked in air for a tremulous, howling groan. Its bulk pushed out and caught Seroth squarely in his chest. Razor claws and arm-spines rent over his torso. He tasted blood, his own and that poisonous concoction weeping mightily from each wrecked tear in the monster’s body.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It clutched the would-be-witcher in one great hand, then hurled him across the way. Seroth sailed for a spare two seconds until he understood that his back and hips had met against the coffered ceiling. Square-edged bricking dislodged and followed him down onto the ground, wrenching apart on impact around him. The beast was there suddenly, having crossed the distance with formidable agility. One clawed hand reached and wrenched him up from his dazed collapse. Seroth smelled breath rife with grave-air and acidic corpulence. He hadn’t Winterfang in his grasp and Razorlight was too far back over his shoulder to reach. Dark fire, black Force energy, wreathed his mind and called on for adrenal rage. Seroth roared. His left hand snapped out in a crossing punch. According to the Lodge of Shade, he could bench-press fifteen-times his own optimal weight. As last he knew, he came in at a rough hundred eighty-five pounds, the majority cut muscle cultivated by hours of relentless, cycling exercise in the smelly berths of the Iron Snake. There was further math to equate extra modifiers, such as exertion of pounds-per-square-inch. The man didn’t have time to reckon the calculation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]His blow walloped into the side of the beast’s back-flared skull. With a sound like wet vegetables cracking apart under duress, the Terentatek flew away. In a rough arc, its scaled toes left the ground and vaulted back across the chamber. Seroth disregarded the fractious complaint in his wrist and radio-ulna bones, seeking out where Winterfang had scattered off too. Ordinarily, he detested telekinetic work in a fight. But for the occasion, he called on the dark fire swirling behind his thoughts, spinning the sword back into his hands. The blade woke up, seeking Spawn-flesh, its long winter-peak gleaming with murderous, glacial light. White-steel thrummed. Seroth turned to regard the rising beast as it hauled up off its collapsed furrow in the ancient masonry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt] “Come on!” Seroth cried, sprinting into dead run. The beast woke itself from its pained stupor and came on to resume the bout.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Steel rang off bone, issuing staccato beats, Seroth running through the killing maneuvers of Ysian swordplay against the pure, unadulterated, savage killing potential of the doughty Sithspawn. They met, crashing off one another, arresting their footing, assaulting with economic blows, overwrought swings keening frigid air. The beast tore a line over the skin of Seroth’s shoulders. He turned and took off its wounded left wrist, dislodging the hand away in bursting hoses of green-ichor blood. It screamed, gnashing blunt molars, head-butting the man. Gore burst from Seroth’s nostrils, but he reached, cupping the bloodied phlegm, tossing it up into a single large, button eye. Half-blinded, the Terentatek backed off, swatting at its laboured vision. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Enough was enough.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth raised Winterfang. Its first slash took the beast through its jaunty maw and split its snout and jaw open in a half bifurcating wound. On the second, Seroth swept it horizontal, right to left, and severed its throat open; both windpipe and a half-dozen attending thick, pinkish arterial vein-canals. With the third, he came low and whacked through the bone, ligament gristle and meat holding taut over and behind its knees. Seroth pressed in as it tumbled forward on a dying kneel, driving up Winterfang with a killing peak-attack. Bright, white metal broke through the shielding bone and keratin grown over its hard pate, puncturing with a brutal suck up into brain matter and neural ganglions.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The beast pawed at nothing at all for a scant, hollow minute. Seroth dislodged his blade down and away from its mangled head, kicking it off its kneel onto its back. There was still some foreign glimmer of vicious light cooking in the black orbs that counted for its eyes. He stared back, counting off the seconds as each mote of red firelight quivered and became spent. After far too much time, it loosed a sagging note of hot breath, spilling drools of ichor over broken teeth and gums, before lying still forever.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Wordless, he turned and wrapped a cleaning rag over Winterfang’s growling fuller and central ridge, sheathing it away for another time. Another need. Footsteps washed their echoes up the long step-well ascending out of the killing chamber, up to wherever the Dark Temple’s mortuary suites and embalming rooms awaited. Seroth climbed up, following his palm over a length of sourwood banister. Behind, the corpse of the Spawn-animal bled out. Pools traced out into an eerie pattern of a five pointed star. Small feet padded noiselessly around the corpse, stepping over sprawled limbs; a girl with a face composed of fire-torched fingerbones snickered up into the dark and loosed a hail-storm of singing blowflies from her malformed mouth.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahead, Seroth kept up his climb, already scenting fresher air gliding down from Dromund Kaas’ arctic breezes. [/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]First were the embalming chambers, above them the morgue and autopsy rooms extended up by a single floor. Both were constructed night terrors rankled with pain and grim, metallic tastes of messy deaths within the stone and acarite walls.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There were still dead lying supine upon dipped, wooden tables when Seroth came in through a tall, thin door. It was damp with a wet chill, moisture and condensation dripping from melts in the mortar where ice-beards and urchins of frost were freezing and melting over again in time with odd pulses of atmospheric warmth. He passed by one table with a prostrate body lying face down against catches of cruel, spiked clamps driven into the dried meat and shattered marrow of his limbs. The whole of his or her backside was opened from nape to anus: curled lengths of severed muscle and cracked deposits of fat pressed up against the leathery, coarse skin.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Construction fused low, angular ceilings and gargoyle faces together overhead, so close it barely measured over seven feet and gave off the impression that he had to stay hunched or risk smacking his forehead against some bar of rock and bolted steel. He maneuvered through approximately thirteen or fourteen differing rooms and their connecting passages. Gold eyes saw detail and colour as though it were bright noon on Tattooine. Every room-set garnished one lengthwise space of wall with tall brass and zinc canisters vacuum sealed with heavy, ancient, industrial clamps. Each canister draped hair-nests of disconnected hosing constructed out of inter-linking armour rings sheathed over rubber tubing. Unmarked plastic bottles once containing further preservation agents were tossed and littered with hazardous strewn on the cold, stained rugs. Something like a lingering aura of eager, humorous cruelty laughed just very faintly behind him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He encountered restoration kits smashed and spilled upon work benches, counter spaces, spraying long stains of age-discoloured flesh dyes and skin-powders. Long forceps, nostril clamps, scooping brain-spoons edged with ripping wave-curls of blades, scalpels that hadn’t lost their molecule slashing edge, and other small, incredibly evil instruments lied in scattered, broken piles beneath some of the more blood stained table-stands. Some tables were complexly arranged contraptions themselves; hollowed out to allow mass-injectors to pierce up into the flesh at a score of locations and deliver formaldehyde and cell conditioners, alongside restraining cuffs, and even broken stasis fields. Seroth ran his hand over one steely, reflective surface, removing centimeters of grime and collected skin-tufts. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Several counter-tops featured decorative metal bowls that were stuck with odd, encrusted growths arranged in almost maze-like fungal patterns. It took a second’s pondering to realize it was ancient brain matter left to rot and dry out in the coolly arid environ. Cold had begun leaking moisture particles into the air. Some of the remains were beginning to take on sickly blemishes as bacterial cultures began to stir and consume through the left-over remains. One or two gave off terrible scents that made Seroth flinch as every olfactory nerve in his nostrils curled away in revilement. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Once, he picked at a fallen trocar. It was roughly the size of a fountain-pen and coloured greasy from deposits of bracken silt. The bottom end was fitted with a wicked hollow of razor blade that would have stuck through an incision to deliver further tubing or instrumentation into any waiting cadavers. Inscriptions had been emblazoned on the once polished metal. Seroth couldn’t read them, not properly, but they seemed to twist with insidious wishes of aggrieved torment upon whoever the trocar was inflicted upon. He dropped it, stamped it in two beneath his boot heel, turning over a disused aspirator as he strolled away. A length of ascending stair-case took him up by a half floor to the mortuary aisles.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He mounted a last few steps, rising up into a doorway paired by half-stuck auto-hatches, easing through on into the neighboring, pitch-gloomy vault beyond. Immediately as he stepped in, he collided with something spun in rough fabric hanging from railing descended from unseen monofilament steel. It was a hollowed skeleton dripping lengths of peeling cloth, its skull clutched in a pair of abattoir meat hooks. There were dozens of them, hanging upright in bloodied cotton, swaying gently against Seroth’s intrusion. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The morgues counted for at least three stories buried low in the Temple’s foundational sub-structures. It was a nightmare of precisely machined bays, walls of plated, burnished metal instead of the familiar green-black granite stone harvested from Dromund Kaas’ rock shields. Air stank with lingering, gagging fumes chemical agents used to keep every surface surgically clean and scoured. Symmetry and angular geometry had been built into every adjoining dissection room with unnerving precision. In his fever dreams, Seroth had been totally disarmed by wriggling lines of Euclidean geometry breaking apart. Here, it was all enforced with terrifying commitment.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Counting, he maneuvered along past at least a hundred empty surgical stations: upright tables fixed with limb-restraints with surrounding curtains of manipulator-mounted mechandrite tool limbs and emptied tables still covered over with anti-septic coverlets. Tools and bone-keening implements were all tossed and thrown around below under his boots. The level of neglect was startling. Vast, opened refrigerators stank of dispossessed meat-rot. Everywhere were discarded bones. Some portions of shelf-space not reserved for battery-dead dateslates bore up decorative skulls. Most were washed and scoured are before some individual with a knack for scrimshaw carved in hideous runic figures that liked to move in the corner of Seroth’s eyes. A few hadn’t been washed: their white-bone surfaces were scalded with encrusted leafs of dried blood and connective tissues. They were marked with scrimshaw all the same.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Probably when their owners were still alive.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Something like a tall outline of a thin figure picked itself up and darted at the far end of one corridor. Seroth paused to fix his senses, drawing out Razorlight for added measure. After five minutes of cautious sweeping, tensed to receive any off sounds, scents, sights, or vibrating differences, nothing revealed itself. Regardless, his sword remained out, and the man moved with care along a set of connected autopsy theaters. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Soon, there was another shadow. Only its mounted ‘head’ turned Seroth’s way before it wriggled up a length of discoloured plaster, away into the theater rafters. A third appeared directly at his side, displaying a set of eyes rendered blind from their lack of iris and pupil but horrendously bloodshot. It gave the man a toothy grin before it faded away. Smashed cracks of broken crystal phials and glass snapped and popped beneath his boot steps, loud as pistol bangs. Everywhere Seroth peered were further examples of eerie Sith-practiced decoration. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He came up to a web-work of cancellarri, with each space in the crawling lattice fitted with a Daemon-masque leering some grotesque expression down at whomever was passing. It was shielding off a spiral screwcase that would lead higher into the Dark Temple’s ground floor networks and naves. Incumbent layers of lacquer thick soot and dust clouded up in his wake, as Seroth mounted the iron-work steps, letting Razorlight lead the way. His peripherals were wriggling with more giggling shadow puppets. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The sheer scale of ascent took up an hour and a further quarter before Seroth encountered a lead-off winding away from the locked network of cage-wired grille steps. He entered through, tearing down a gate in his way. The gate was a three-hundred pound mass of immovable rock and branded metal woven with liquid precision into a untranslatable verb upon the doorway. Seroth just braced his frame and burrowed his shoulder against a seam in its dead center. Stone gave under his enormous physical power. For a moment, he felt a relish at such strength; there was nothing lascivious in his effort, no drawing of exhaustible Force energies. Just pure, bodily work. He stifled the sentiment in a second afterwards. Ajax warned against contemplating his abilities beyond any past a regard for them as tools in a mechanics box. Necessary. Precise. Able to apply tender leverage and monstrous brute exertion in equal measures dependent upon the need. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth checked over his harness-work beneath the striped jacket. Though he missed his familiar tomahawk, there was still a back-up sheathe blade strapped reliably back across his left hip. Again, strange… ‘things’ skittered and cavorted just out of his eyesight. That feeling of dark fire, black Force aura and energy, permeated every material: granite stone, glasteel panes, their bar tracery, venomwood and rancor-iron, innumerable threads, cloths, fragments, textiles devoted to the Temple’s prodigious, haunting decoration, the gold, silver, faint flint-shards of struck jewelry, everything. Evil was not asleep in the Dark Temple: it was idling with a will to poach any unguarded soul fool enough to ignore its terrible, awful presence. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]After a time, he came into what he could only guess was the structure’s first and primary floor. Describing the architecture, the sheer structure of what confronted him, relied on poor words like vast, huge. Truthfully, Seroth found himself thinking of being caught under the gaze of some incredible, scaled, cyclopean darkness. Pillars, pylons as thick as a battleship’s landing stanchions, dwarfed him. Up they went, into a ceiling light by ever faint star-motes of very cold, distant firelight. Nearby torch sconces helped lend some odd cones of illumination upon the ground. Beneath his boots rested slabs some twenty meters by another score thick and wide. Carpets writ with stenciled textile-work, all ruby-red and gilt-gold, spanned away between the pillars for seeming miles in each cardinal direction. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The majesty and the concise, domineering will of some dead, petty Dark Lord: exemplified by a structure beholden to nothing save its own restless grandeur. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He walked for an hour along a lightless stretch of stonework, following a distant patch of nineteen lamp-globes arranged around and over a colossal tympanum marking a possible exit. Psych-sensations behind his forefront thoughts kept warning him about a feeling of surveillance. Despite shifting moods of increasing unease, set-off simultaneously by the feeling of invisible companions trailing behind the column-stands, his strides kept up their dull, clapping beat on the ground, evenly timed. Unhurried. Seroth was sure that whatever was staring at his backside would catch up whether he was at standstill or a dead bolt.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth stopped beneath a flared pillar ankle, peering up. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Shapes, flitting leaves of darkness against inconsolable pitch overhead, dropped down around him without a sound. Thirty bodies, all tall, wiry, androgynous and sexless. Whether by simple coincidence, careful recruitment, or augmentative surgeries was difficult to determine. All were dressed in black body-sleeves piped with white stripping down the leggings, belted with silver bosses inscribed with tiny, damning scripture. Harness clasps belted and looped around their upper torsos, strapping down the bodygloves tightly to their hard skin. Their faces were kept hidden behind silver helmets covering thin death-masques across inscrutable expressions. He could see eyes: pale, black, shot with ganglions of blue veining. Frighteningly, not a one seemed to be breathing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Assassins. Hunter-killers. Borja Sennex’s creeping guard watching at his flanks against anything that might try to bite him in the rump. They’d waited in the cold damp blackness shadowed by the hundred pillars, until the Master summoned them away. Armament consisted of varieties of ancient weaponry enhanced with more modern tastes to further maximize already proven lethality. Short vibroblades coupled with energy-bucklers that could cut and crush a man’s throat on impact. Bastard longswords crackling with displacing lightning. Combat rapiers, energy-shotels, beskar dirks gilded with poisoned edging, short battle-hammers capped with chrome plating and coruscating arcs of vibro-electricity. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]All had waited for something to come out of the black of Jurgoran Prison. One, slightly taller, thicker at the waist, knocking their paired scimitars together, stepped out from the concentric rings surrounding the would-be-Dunaan.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Surrender,” Was all he said.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A beat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]And then Seroth killed him with a slice to his throat that whacked the masked head free and bounced if off the face of a killer standing six paces behind.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Shadowed bodies ran in, thrumming with hard-to-see motion, enveloping the man in a tightened kill-bubble. Scores of gleaming weaponry winked in his vision. As one, they struck and sundered the hard granite floor in with explosions of vibro-edges biting against the unyielding stone. Seroth was gone. One assassin rose, snapping up as something ran around the edge of the kill-group. They raised their dirks and energy-buckler, repulsing a slash aimed at their mask. Razorlight’s touch was enough to whip the battler up off their feet, hammered by unseemly strength, careening over hunched shoulders before rebounding off another killer.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]As a segmented whole, their numbers reversed, regrouped into a tight arrow-head, and surged across the flooring. They poked, darting around, implements shining in the half-light as they sought to drive open wedges in the man’s defense and skewer him like roasting meat. Seroth didn’t oblige them the pleasure. Steel rang off Razorlight. He caught low scissor attack at his ankles, cocking his wrist, severing the blades off at the basket hilts, then kicking his boot up so hard it cracked through the mask, teeth, bone, and crunched the foe’s skull back into his brain. Someone swung, aiming a hammer-blow that could have severed him open from the back of his head to his hip. Up came his own sword, impact cracking away as he posed briefly in an angled overhead parry and skirting away seven more similar strikes. Another died, slit from liver to lung. Their friend on the left flank tried to counter slash to their shoulder but somehow misread the feint, losing their weapon, any attached fingers, the hand itself a micro-second later, before he carved a deep, rending hole in their ribs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]This was not akin to the ambush in the frozen swamplands so many months prior. It was not anything like they’d observed when the Master’s pet murderer Harcress was bested in the flooding basement levels below Hythe Park’s wrecked power station. Razorlight keened a slaying note in the air and harried their guards. It was the School of Manticore against the dead Besandra’s ‘Killing Work’. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A blur streaked past and then around one fighter who simply puffed in a mist of pink and literally collapsed. One stung a dizzying skewer-stab through an after-image that briefly touched his rapier, dying a quarter-second afterward when part of his torso slid off what was still attached to his trembling waist. Seroth brought Razorlight in, close and in a handed guard, one fist gripped around the bottom peak. The assassin braced their bastard-blade in, arresting them together. Too close. Up came the guard-cross, poking a crossbar through an eyehole. Soundless, the sexless creature fell, disgorging a thick pond of rheumy mauve fluid. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He parried a cunning blunt hack aimed to catch into his clavicle and collapse his sternum, working sword, feet, body through a whirl of defensive flicks foiling two score blows trying with increasing desperation to open up lines of attack on his body. Seroth twisted away and swung, taking off someone’s arm, then wrecked Razorlight through their shoulder, ribs, and heart. Gold eyes, wolven and hot, glowed through air thick with suffocating gloom. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Thirty became twenty. As a killer was felled, sliced cleanly through a part in their ribs that severed a buckler and attending vibroblade, only a scant half remained. Seroth hooked Razorlight in back behind his hip, pacing backward along by half-steps and careful side-jumps. One masked thing with sickly eyes and smelling terribly of grinding incense came on and wrenched him over with a carefully timed nine-step assail. He took an extra second to reverse his gripping so as to stab his one-hander through the bone of Seroth’s spine. Bent at the waist with his left arm obscured by the tilt of his shoulders, it never saw the punching sock that smashed into its chin. Something wet popped jaggedly. The head rolled back wrongly, and promptly fell over on their arse.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth swept up, bringing Razorlight with him. It took three through the soft of their bellies and raggedly tore through their fiber-armour. His toe kicked up a discarded dirk-knife. Flailing end over end high over head, the man spun and corkscrewed his guard around him, sweeping two attackers past him that tried a simultaneously stab-rush. The knife spun to fall neatly into his waiting palm. Fingers coaxed the blade around expertly, ‘till it rested in the knuckles twixt his fore and middle finger. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Turning over his shoulder, he loosed the dirk free. It spun in three tight curls, arcing end over end, where it met into a killer’s masking and split their head like an overripe and rotted fruit. Fifteen became ten, then just five. One he cleaved out their knees before shivering a wicked-neat sever that took them through the temple and cheek with Razorlight’s grey-silver peak. Two more he parried, stroked in through defensive gaps, piercing the skin and meat of their livers and diaphragms before reversing and pirouetting a follow up whack that killed and spun them off their feet. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blades wailed, singing their own catechisms, the final pair of hunter-killers squaring off in break neck do-or-die maneuvers that risked much to try and gain an advantage of the white-haired devil. Feint answered for dodge. Together, they broke away, spinning around to Seroth’s backside, twin blades whirling in tornado assails that slashed in between gaps left by each partner’s arms. Again, their attempt was foiled, again by that overhead parry-guard as Seroth crouched low. His hands went close to numb as strokes landed across the fuller and blood-channel. Razorlight purred gently in his hands. Up he came and rushed keen, shivering slice. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It took the assassin on the left down, through their raised X-guard, into their mask, throat, clavicle, spitting them until Razorlight left the slip of their groin. Fresh, grisly remains spattered wetly onto the monolithic flagstones. Turning, Seroth watched all engrammed discipline shatter in the remaining assassin combatant. Their hands looped their backsword up away into a shoulder scabbard, twisting over their hip before hurling away in a dead-set sprint. Sword outstretched before him like an unleashed hunting hound, Seroth took up pursuit.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The assassin led away from the West End of the Temple’s main floor plan, cavorting through pillar spaces in a constant quest to press further ground between themselves and their dogged chaser. Seroth followed along as they disappeared up a side of shaded stair-cases and along a set of empty, barren galleries. Torchlight guttered from the mouths of drooling gargoyle-dogs carved from lengths of green-flecked obsidian glass. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Ahead, the quarry became a rapidly flickering bend of motion. It retreated to the right, up a narrow set of further stairs, soft-padded tabi smacking hotly across cool brick-stone. Undisturbed tracts of settled dust and micro-detritus smoked up in misty clouds in their wake. They deposited up onto a jettied second gallery. Seroth spied his prey snap something off their thigh-catch and over-emphatically thumbed on a blink of red light. It was too late to realize this particular route weaving dizzyingly upward into the Temple’s overhead crawl-spaces and backlit tunnels was a guarded escape route.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Killer-droids collapsed from their berths overhead in reinforced rafters. They were thickset things, gleaming of polishing plating, looped with ammunition bandoliers clanking with charged tibanna-gas clips. Heavy arms unfurled from recesses in the combat chassis, leveling nasty appearing, high-powered las-carbines. Spitting storms of red-cased hail-bolts surrounded Seroth. He didn’t dare pause to slow his gait. Razorlight was still idling in his hands, whipping up into hex-patterns that caught and ricocheted errant shots away from his body proper. Sennex’s assassin guard left approximately half a dozen to cover an improbably, hasty retreat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth broke them apart. Shattered transaxle legs careened off the walls beside collapsed, battered torso now melded with their armoured battle cuirasses. He couldn’t lose his hearing range of those distant, sandaled feet crisply scathing overhead by another floor.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The assassin flushed out further deterrents to try and waylay the would-be-Dunaan, aiming to provide enough distraction to slip away and resume its ‘Go Dark’ techniques. Seroth wouldn’t have it. He came into a length of hallway dominated by Sithspawn beasts matched between akk-wolves and Mon-Cal specimens. Furred monsters overlaid with bristling, red carapaces. Winterfang waited with just a bare modicum of patience. Then it was painting white-steel liquid figure eights in the air, harrying the creatures into quarters of bisected meat.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]There were ghosts, ghoulish constructions fashioned out of animated cadavers, phantoms given shape as the fleeing killer broke open handfuls of carefully scripted scripture-bottles and unleashed their slumbering anima. Some were dealt with by Winterfang, cut down, their wearied souls either released or banished back into the aether. Others the man took issue with, torching them where they stood with rupturing gouts of ethereal Force fire. Ember Rekali’s tutelage was not wasted. Entire tracts of hall and corridor stunk with thick columns of bracken smoke. Seroth turned and hosed down one creature, a dwarf with a head three times too large. Even as its facial muscle and skin fell away to reveal a black-charred skull, arms collapsing away, it still came on. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It screamed. Washes of grizzly Force psychosis nearly broke and speared apart his mind. Crying out, Seroth grasped Winterfang in both hands and lurched forward. The blade spit the poor mutant in half with such savagery; either piece blew aside in plump clouds of indescribable gore. He’d wasted too much time dallying with the last defense measures met against his progress.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth followed the assassin up and up, until there was no space left but the Temple roofing itself.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Nighttime on Dromund Kaas was a pitched squall of screaming winds following currents up from the now long ice-glossed over south pole. Snow cavorted in blinding sheets. It didn’t matter if the man could see in pitch night as if it were day: visibility amounted to bare handfuls in front of his face. Winterfang grumbled as he replaced it back and drew out Razorlight. The assassin hadn’t time to exercise much caution in covering its hasty trails; pitted tracks marked the white drifts and heaving ice banks. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He crept through the cold with care, step by step. Exposure would ache frigidity into his body, into his meat, bones, and blood, until he numbed up and collapsed. The assassin had to be tracked down before he made an escape from some parked speeder or anti-grav vehicle waiting under shielded tarps on the upper roofing. Seroth passed around monolithic spires of dark stone, glistening blue from cakes of ice wrapping it from base to tip. Obelisks loomed out of the darkness, titan, scrawled in cased scripting that snow obscured. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The assassin managed to take him by surprise: they fell from a high vantage atop a lip of hoarfrost jutting from a crooked spire on his left flank. Sudden, crunching weight tumbled onto his back. An edge flashed in the night, burying itself into the skin between his right shoulder blade and backbone. Seroth couldn’t cry out as a punishing strength gripped around his throat and began to choke. Then a hand slapped across his mouth to try and muffle out his breath a little quicker.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]‘The body is a weapon. Every inch, young wolf, remember!’ Ajax taught on one afternoon, after having nearly bitten his way through his student’s forearm in an aggressive hand-to-hand bout.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth whipped his neck about, then snapped his mouth forward. Teeth closed around the thumb and forefinger sticking perilously free of the body gloving, severing both in an ugly crunch that spurted blood onto Seroth’s face. It was the first time he ever heard one of their ilk truly scream. Up came his elbow and broke into the killer’s mask, breaking a nose, cheekbone, and battering out some teeth. At such close quarters, Seroth’s augmented strength was monstrously brutalizing. He knocked his choker off and sat down to wrestle him against a bank of solid snow nestled at the foot of another faceless obelisk.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The mask tore away, revealing a heavily bruised, pallid face, with dark, blank eyes beneath a cropped crown of platinum dyed hair. It was beautifully asexual, utterly beguiling until it became impossible to tell them between male or female. They were still trying to fight Seroth, its one good hand snap-punching into his throat. He took the blow and lost his breath, but grappled and clubbed his brow down onto the space between its eyes. Dazed, it offered little in reply as he took a moment break its left wrist and dislocate it at the shoulder. Its eyes widened, mouth oval and issuing hoarse breath. Pain. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He frisked their killer for any datacrons or holopads hidden in the folds of their armour. Turning up nothing, save spools of garroting wire, hidden throwing blades, poison phials, and a curious, shimmering stiletto, Seroth hauled the assassin up off their feet.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“By all rights,” He growled over the cold and wind. “By all accounts, I should throttle you dead right now. Right now!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The sexless thing blinked… but then smiled mockingly. Seroth crossed it with a hard right hook. “Don’t smile. Don’t you smile. I’m all out of any consideration that might have saved you from getting pulped before I get what I need out of you. Where’s Stenwulf? Where’s Borja Sennex?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nowhere,” It managed to rasp through its broken teeth and lips. Its voice was like slate scratched across marble; rocky, hollow, unpleasant. “Nowhere… at all… He is… The shroud… Of night and storm…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If he’s such a ghost, then where’s he gone to roost? Every phantom has a haunt. Where’s he gone?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I… Will not… Say to you…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You will. You will, or I toss your jiggling body over that edge and let whatever’s left out there in the swamps have their way with your warm corpse.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You… Make threats… That your… Heart… Cannot… Commit~” It sneered.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth dropped it to the ground to haul it along by a clench of hair. It shrieked, broken ribs twisting, lifted again bodily by its neck to stand suspended above nothingness. All that was below was a bleak chasm wracked with flows of whispering ice-wind and walls of snow crystals.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I cannot, eh?” Seroth said just above the howl of raking, freezing air. “I’ve worked too hard and suffered too much, to let a stone-sucking road whore like your Master swoop in and raze my family to ashes. I’m not hurting you for my sake. I’m hurting you for theirs. If you want to live to see whatever daybreak this world has left, you’ll tell me where he’s gone.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I cannot… Some vows… Cannot be betrayed…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s conditioning speaking. It’s all just enforced psy-motives caked into your mind. I’ve seen the greed in Sennex’s eyes. Damn your vows. Attainment for its own sake is all he’s after. He’s not coming for you now and he never will. Your best bet is the angry son of a queen trying not to crunch your neck into meat.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I can’t… be dissuaded… By an animal’s… Empty logic…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Who have you sworn to?” Seroth asked.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“The Master… You fool…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And just the master…?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Aye. In the name of Borja Sennex…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just him and him alone?” Seroth pressed, pressing his thumb over its larynx.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Accghk! Yes! Yes, he! Borja Sennex alone!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then I’ll suffice with his retinue,” He snarled and brought her face in close. “Maybe Sennex might come back for you. Maybe he’s enough honour to consider the sacrifices of his brave rear-guard. But just him. Harcress, Black Vermillion, and that man Stenwulf have no compulsions on leaving you to freeze solid. I didn’t hear you saying you owed them a lick of spit.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I… I can’t…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You can. And you will. If you won’t give up Borja Sennex, then you will give up one of his tools.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are not anyone to deny me now!” Howled Seroth and shook her above the killing fall. “I’ve survived too much to be left with a cold trail! Harcress! Vermillion! Stenwulf! Give me one or all, I don’t care! And don’t lie… I can hear your blood vessels screaming off the walls of your aorta. I’ll know.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“To betray them… Is to betray… Our benefactor…” Hissed the assassin. “Killing… Us… Isn’t anything… That matters… But our benefactor… Can’t… Won’t… Be betrayed… Not on our oaths… Not on our vows…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“They’re already broken. Betrayed. Because you promised Sennex I’d be dead if I dared showed my face in the Dark Temple…” Seroth said. “And all that’s been proven a falsehood on your part. Your contract is finished. And all that can be promised to you, in turn, is not dying by a kilometer long fall.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You… Are persistent…” It managed to grit out, cheeks and brow growing blue and pinched by both the cold and the choke around the base of its skull. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Because there are debts owed to Borja Sennex that are above and beyond any martial contracts you’ve conjured up to try and stay steely.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What… Guarantee… Is there… That you won’t… Drop me…?” It groaned.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“None.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Cholganna, then,” Said the swaying killer-thing. “Make the run… For Cholganna… And maybe… You’ll pay... Your debts… Then!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It shot up its knees into its ruined chest and reeled against Seroth’s hold, kicking into his sternum. Rendered breathless, his hold loosened, and then failed entirely. His captive assassin was smiling all the way down into the black reaches below, claimed now by the frigid hell of Dromund Kaas’ nascent ice age.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And what did the cretin speak?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth turned around, spotting Ajax the Dunaan standing in a heatgown coiled tightly over his shoulders, misting curls of mercurial heat-waves against the sub-zero air. He tossed his student a similar coat, watching him bind it on before he became possessed by the killing frigidity.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You followed me up?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“As I said and intended, young wolf. And here now we stand on the peak of the most bastard religious construction that ever broke ground.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He blinked and looked up at his teacher, with something sore, tired, and quite empty echoing about in his gold eyes. “…Did you watch us?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And what? The cretin possessed clues you required and you were prepared to dredge them up,” Blinked Ajax in turn. “…Is there something you believe you owed one who would have killed you without hesitation in turn?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Perhaps. …Before, I don’t think I could have mustered the stomach to lay down threats. …But just then, all I could think about was tearing it pieces. …And the aggression was comfortable.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What are you scared for, young wolf?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I survived the Waters. I survived the training. Survived you. Made the climb all the way here and now I know where I can go next to stop Sennex and Stenwulf. But that’s quite a lot, and I’m not sure I know exactly what I’ve paid out in order to acquire it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Just what counted for your flesh,” Ajax said. “You’ve resigned against being human. Your flesh is a post-human work of titan proportions. But if you want, your soul, your conscience, these things still belong to you. Anyone can withstand adversity, young wolf. …If you wish to test their character, give them power.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Have I passed?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ohhh, the test is never finished, young wolf. Never. Not so long as you live. But… If you want to speak a little less philosophically, yes. My last requirement has been passed. The Trial of the Waters is complete, as is now your training. You are a proven hunter, my friend.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You are Dunaan. You are a witcher. …Save for one detail.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seroth glanced over. “And what is that, my friend?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“We give up more than just our humanity. A name can be everything. If you wish to be a witcher in full, then Seroth cannot survive.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Truly?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I was not born ‘Ajax’, young wolf. Who I was before I tested the Trial is a long, dreaming mystery to me. I took the name when it was time. …Now, so must you. …Or the embrace of Sayda will never come when you need it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]For a terrible while, he stood apart from his mentor to wrestle with what was perhaps the most starkest test of what he was willing to divorce from for the sake of a grim, uncertain future. He’d delved into the waters, worked day and night for the better part of what must have been a year reforging his mind, body, senses, skills. Then braved the long climb up from Jurgoran Prison to stand freezing and quaking in winter temperatures that would have rivaled Hoth for its bare sub-zero climes. …Now, he was told Seroth could not be. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He blinked. No, Seroth could not be. …But that did not mean he had to give away quite everything. The heatgown was cast aside to Ajax’s strapped boots, and he came up to the long drop vaulting over the Temple’s roof lip. Ajax’s long gaze fell upon the soft brood in his shoulders.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Then he turned about.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“As it must be.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Young wolf?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seroth died on his sojourn out of the prison, Ajax. He did.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He gave a bright, wolfish grin. “Seydon. Seydon of Arda.”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]~Outer Rim Territories~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]~Former Imperial Territories~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]~Cholganna System~[/SIZE]​

[SIZE=10pt]~Cholganna~[/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt][Seven Days Later…][/SIZE]​

​

[SIZE=10pt]By average, arboreal octopi were a meter span across the inflated bulb of their gelatinous, cartilage-cased skull carriage, with each webbed appendage another two meters extending from furred gills of skin-ganglions surrounding the base of an articulate, gnashing beak-mouth.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One saw Seydon passing below between squeezes of fallen qarrin-firs, wading hip deep in spiny ferns catching burrs against his legging. Its last meal had been a prowling Nexu-whelp. This possibility looked far less tenebrous. Striating flesh wounds scarred knots of corral-tissue where three inch claws gouged and ripped through its tender flesh. Tentacles braced; without a sound, the furred octopus shifted from its nest of partially devoured night-sparrow and rodent skulls and fell in between corssing branches and boughs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Below, Seydon cocked his head slightly and reached to free his steel. Razorlight murmured in his hands, cutting an accented, perfect crescent stroke overhead along a curt diagonal. The octopus came apart in two neat pieces and collapsed aside in wriggling, dying shivers, long barbed arms flailing spasmodically.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cholganna was a cool hell, choked continentally with indigenous growths ranging from to titanic cedars and stalwart cypresses to firs, junipers, kauri, larches, pines, hemlocks. There were redwoods whose upper peak-spires breached the biosphere. Vales of naked tsuga so tightly packed, light only cupped a sparse meter-thick canopy of thin viridian needles and bracken limbs. Blue spruces with bark tougher than warship metal hides. On the edging of what’d counted as Imperial Territory, obscurity and a noted lack of pertinent military resources promised few ever came across its bright line of green suspended in the glare of a close, glaring sun.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Mapping the hyperlane course for the planet had not proven the worst challenge. In thanks to certain clandestine records volunteered from Jorus Merrill’s closely sequestered nav-card archives, Seydon and virtually any vetted Levantine knew ways that could see them through even the heart of the Maw itself. Cholganna was a small write-off in his notes: thick with plantation, predatory food-chains, rugged terrain, rural with local seasonal shifts every four or three months. The choke of extreme undergrowth, with its too-close air thick with loam stenches and humidity, reminded him curiously of Kashyyyk’s much vaunted Shadowlands. Untouched, glazed with forbidden airs, with strange beast-things crawling belly-down as they shifted camouflage patterned skins.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]By some means miraculous, Seydon recovered the parked Iron Snake. It’d idled in a low park on Hythe Park’s eastern shanty edgings. Snow drifts had half buried it in its tarpaulin cradle. He’d driven to the disused lot in the back of a sulking rickshaw driver and her moping servitor-beast: a slim, oily hound with spring-paws and a thin tail that fanned out with neat-blades to act as a balancer when taking harder turns. Despite misgivings about ranging into what she called ‘No Soul’s Land’, she’d accepted payment in the form of several spare gold dust-nuggets loaned from friend Ajax’s personal coffers. The Snake appeared through snowing banks like a trapped, pacing raptor. Little could hide its sharp, beaked nose-cone or the black finish painted matte upon its impervium coating. Seydon paid off the driver, then spent the better part of two days running exhaustive check-ups on its slumbering ship-systems. Every piece was intact. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon murmured his goodbye’s to Dromund Kaas, and flew with engines flaring sun-bright up and out from the bars of drifting ice-fog curling over the world; until next he ventured down onto the ruined bog-terrains, where hellacious cold and warped creation waited with eager, baited tongues.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]More dismayingly, Ajax opted to remain behind. They hosted a final conversation atop the roofing of the Erace Hotel; a faulty establishment with pitted iron-shingles running ice-flues between cracks in the tar, standing in the cover of chimneystack built out of moss-grown cobble brick. Ajax would remain, to see to his own suspicions regarding further traps left in Sennex’s wake. He could not trust the wily Lord Inquisitor hadn’t developed further measures to waylay and curtail any pursuers that caught onto his trail. Duty would not be complete lest he scoured Hythe Park and a few other points of suspicion across the realm to his exacting satisfaction. Seydon would go on alone. To mete out justice. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They embraced, calling out a few sarcastic exchanges of encouragement. Neither knew when they’d see each other again. Perhaps never. Ajax disappeared into an ice flurry, dropping off into an abyssal fall, his cloak tumbling behind until devoured by late evening shadows. Seydon gathered up his heatgown for the trek back to his waiting Iron Snake.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Approaching Cholganna, after making the translation back to realspace out of lightspeed, proved a significant hurdle. One bloated example of Dreadnought rested high above the northern axial planetary summit. Make and mark unknown, its hull glinted stamps of rowed turbo-laser batteries, haired with tosses of steel-sheathed cabling plugged into thick power-outlets. Pict readings from some ten thousand kilometers away rendered bright resolutions of heat exchangers and frilled sinks. Torpedo and missile launchers furrowed the nose with black, inky divots and moles. Communication masts stuck up from the bridge-tower, thick as porcupine quills, serrated and ribbed with void-frost. Running lights winked in the void. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Coasting, most systems dead save for meager life-support and enough power to gently tweak the maneuvering jets, Seydon switched the Snake off until it was gently rolling forward along a quiet approach vector. In the dark, he toggled open a small, plastic-shielded console beside the co-pilot armrest. Silver levers sparkled in the deep silence and pools of black. One by one, he pulled them in until they ratcheted into depressions set in their gear-box. Somewhere in the vessel back quarters rose a deep, groaning note. Hearing picked up on a faint electric whine rising in timbre. It settled onto a band of rotating sub-sound of scattered interference.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Jorus Merrill’s installed counter-measure jamming suites were awake and activated. Seydon still didn’t dare throttle up. For six hours, the Iron Snake meandered idly into a rough orbit below the south axial. It cavorted, tickled by the impending gravity well, wing-tips picking at the unseen skeins of the outer magnetospheres. Only when Seydon was sufficiently assured the Dreadnought could not make a direct visual ident of his vessel did he open up the throttle and gun the accelerator to off-set an uncontrolled descent.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Night of space painted from elegiac meanders of soft, airy blue coloured down into heaving rolls of cloud-heads primped and knuckled into pie-crust formations high in Cholganna’s stratosphere. Below, pyramidal folds of felsic rock rose in peaked ranges scarring endless hills and dips of thickened forestry. Seydon flew in low, casting rimes of caked snow crystals from mountain caps and planing down their abrupt eminences to maneuver the Snake close to the canopy blankets. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He made for the northern taiga reaches. Sensor nets had pinged back evidence of plasteel materials, mixed with signals indicating varied metallic substances. Durasteel, aluminum, steristeel. Nothing native to Cholganna’s natural pitches of crude iron, nickel, surface deposits of copper and nickel along the equator belt and some plutonium wells caustically slumbering at the south pole. Tacking on a new heading, Seydon piloted headlong for a wide valley girded below the shoulders of shale-coloured cliff-faces, like swatches of emerald-pine lapels. Lakes of cobalt-blue and indigo stirred at the vessel downdraft. Murky, finned things strobed up near the placid surfaces, peaking up at the great, iron eagle passing by overhead. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Somewhere, atop an outcropping of naked stone either knocked featureless by high winds or removed by hand with hydraulic saws, further sensor pings read back a settlement of some ten buildings. The witcher studied the layout; a rough semi-circle surrounding a courtyard, with a further construction fashioned out of local timber materials. He considered roaring the Snake in, gunning through whatever savants and soldiers set up in the Sennex encampment. Seydon remembered the grim, thin, mocking sneer spitting through the assassins bleeding lips, giving him his only promised lead. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]What if it had lied?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Iron Snake put down in an angled lowland some twenty kilometers east and south of the rock outcrop. It nestled between two rocky nudges of hilling, in a spare, empty river bed, churning up smoothed pebbles, grit-sand, deadened freshwater kelp, and tiny sprits looking like spiny mollusks sucking at salt licks on the dried out rock bedding. All systems cut out save for small pulses of emergency power; Seydon wouldn’t take the chance of running detection now and ruining his tenuous advantage of surprise. He buttoned on his stripped jacket over an unwashed white tunic, lacing up black slacks and brown calve boots. Kit harnesses were webbed over his torso and thighs, locked by silver buckles, and filled with what gear Seydon decided would be valuable for the trek uphill. Lastly, he fastened on a single tomahawk, a single sheathe-knife, and the dual weight of Winterfang and Razorlight over his shoulder.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Muggy heat sweating with blood-flies and jade mosquitoes punched into his senses, the river-ground beneath his boots thick with nine-legged ants with crystalline carapace shells. The brutal juxtaposition between Dromund Kaas’ brooding cold with his now sun-bogged environ was a detail not lost on his humour. Adjusting the ride of his harness-belts, he drew out the tomahawk and began climbing out of the scree-bed, into a wall of set cyprus trunks and the shaded, celadon malaise beyond.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He struck out a rigorous pace. Long legs pistoned him through the understory, meters at a time. His hope was to reach the toes rife with boulders at the foot of the hanging vale, where the settlement nestled. Vegetation was stubborn, hellish, thick with carpets of ropey fern-growths and shrubbery. Fallen trees leaned over mossy rock, coated in devouring lichen as dark little maggots and wood insects ate their way through wood fiber and rotting bark. In a decade’s time, it would be reduced to mulch waste, to fertilize the sinking topsoil. Sound was a roar of bird-song and simian chatter. And every so often, in the distance by a hazy, fading kilometer, cervid beasts on six, powerful legs raised their antlers his way, trotting off out of sight. They left just bare signs of tracking in the loam.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A kind of fungal apparatus living bunched up on slips of smooth stone helped filter drifts of winding creeks and rivulets gently sluicing down through carves in the earth. It was enough to give the waters a curious, jet dye, though there was nothing untoward in taste or scent. Occasionally, Seydon stopped to cup a handful of moisture into his palm, trickling it back over his tongue. Bitter with tugs of earth, but still sweet. He slaked his thirst, filling up a secondary canteen, continuing on up a beast trail.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon paused under the scowl of an ancient yew. Yellow-gilt leaves, pared into thin spades hanging off enriched brown twigs, swayed under a low, singing wind whistling up from a grove of red pines. He’d scented something. Rich, stinking, organic. Kneeling, Seydon picked the edge of his knife through a hammock of dung atop some lichen. It was coarse, ripe with intestinal effluence. And fresh. He knew this one: Nexu. The sheathe knife rammed back into its small scabbard as he came up and loosened his steel sword, Razorlight, down into his hands.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Not so long after, trekking carefully through a tsuga bramble, he heard something drop from a bone-nest overhead and neatly cleaved it in two. It was a creature layered in combs of hard, thin hair that was prickly at the touch, the flesh beneath soft, no more bony than fractured cartilage. An arboreal octopus. Seydon left it for the flesh weevils and terminator-ants crawling over in swirling droves, attracted by the unexpected source of nutrients.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Sunlight began to shift as the noon hour cooled to mid afternoon. Now, the sun was drifting just past a flint-faced meadowpeak and casting spires of cool shade down into the east ravine Seydon was traversing. Despite the lessened warmth, enough coating heat kept his body running through cycles of rapid sweating and subsequent drying. His brow was nearly white with salt-crusts. Seydon loosed a canteen from his belting and whipped back several heavy slakes until he no longer felt so parched. Nearby platform streams, dipping from rock pool to rock pool, refilled any spent fluid. He followed the stream upwards in a hope to try and skirt out of a prior dip in the terrain, harried by overgrown nettles tough enough to grapple fast with his boots and cling until severed at the edge of his axe. The waters swam down from a gentle incline strewn thick with scree and boulders. Every surface was painted in leaf, vine, weed, and mossy patterns of over-bright flora, until light was just an emerald glow.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]At eight kilometers to the encampment climb, something chemical and arch began staining the breeze. Seydon had to halt. It was hard to decipher the change but despite fiendish subtlety, there was no mistaking the caustic hostility cloaking like lead over surrounding forestry. The air was a little cooler, lambent ambience a handful of shades darker. Sensation pulsed an arrhythmic, sickly beat in his temples, filled his nostrils with a cloy scent that was at once too sweet and harshly acrid. There was no smell close in description. It was the first decay of vegetation as ground cracked and crazed from drought, like the aroma of initial putrification over a maggot-crawled corpse, or the brand of fizzling ozone. Death, quantified for the olfactory nerves.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He found a pitiful thing curled up and still at the exposed root-ball of a teetering, dead cedar. The nexu was just a cub-whelp and an undersized female at that. Something in her limp paws suggested they were stunted, under-grown, with scarring around the hind claws further up the splotchy furred legs. She’d six eyes, two too many, with nape-spines and vertebrae quills faded milky-white and brittle. Skin stuck to her ribs, pronouncing a long, troubling hollow down the length of her supine belly and hind legs. Seydon knelt closer, curling back curtains of blubbery lips, to run his thumb along miscoloured gum-lines and rotten teeth. Dark fire stung at his fingertips.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Mutation…” He growled.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The second nexu he encountered was no whelp, was certainly not undersized, and bore up the experimentation visited across its frame with remarkable intractability and endurance. It was also a six hundred pound monster, four meters from snout to curling whip-tail, covered in a coarse pelt rife with painted sigils that liked to appear as if wriggling. Every over-sized paw ended in six inch daggers, cork-screw claws that pronounced painfully from the toe-knuckles. It found him as he came up to a copse of heavy boughed junipers foiling the animal trail. Seydon heard some object of heavy proportion come spearing down at a tree-snapping pace. He looked up, watching the juniper copse disintegrate in blitzed clouds of sliver-clouds, debris chaff billowing out, with something darkly furred and enormous burling through. Its snout rebounded off his belly and tossed Seydon back down the path. He landed back in the stream, scattering pebble and rock and green-dyed water. The nexu padded in, eager for a little play with its meal.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]One paw large enough to bisect Seydon cleanly in three different places swung. It met Winterfang, whose edge sliced through its claw and digits, a few spinning away in phlegmy gouts of dirty blood. The witcher rose, huddled in a tight guard, warding the cat-thing away with a narrow figure-eight, stinging its snout with a curt wallop. Wounded and its sport ruined, the nexu paced back behind the cover of a thick-barreled pine, hissing. A scorpion barbed tail lashed back along the length of its upraised spine, shaking out its stubble-fur, rippling kilos worth of slaying muscle wound tight to its fortified bones. Twin rows of slit-nostrils raked, flaring, scenting at the Dunaan’s particular whiff. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It bounded left from the pine, jinking right and back across the deer trail, blitzing through underbrush crushed to pasty mulch under-paw. He watched it skirt a handful of tender knot-firs upon his left-hand, leap over a tiny rivulet coasting by, soaring high in a closed arc to bring its forepaws and weight down to crush him. Seydon rose, backstepping into a neat roll, coming around in a wide run as the nexu clawed through grass and loam to arrest its fall. Earth plumed in great rakes of plant matter. The Dunaan tucked his blade in close, driving a run beneath its tail-sway, flicking a cut over his head. It whacked into the swollen barb leaking weeps of strange puss and severed the stinger free. Roaring, the nexu turned, flicking out its paws.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]With one fell reach, the beast could sunder the man from his brow down to his heels and end his costly venture in one splitting moment of pain. Seydon ducked back, blade raised in cool parries, working the steel and trying to keep from falling into its clawing range. Now Winterfang glistened with nexu blood. The beast sported neat hacks wrought over the flesh of its fore-legs, maw, one shoulder now sagging, limp with a haggard blow that planed off a sliver of bone, skin, and no small degree of muscle beneath. It reared back to savage at the too-warm air and bellow, exposing narrow rips above taut lengths of naked abdominal muscle, back hips shivering under the strain of support.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Winterfang surged in and killed it.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Peak, edge, fuller, and channel streaked like a steel avalanche, a white-light bolt piercing the close forest gloom as Seydon gripped beneath the guard and pommel, driving up the blade. He sped on, toes gritting against catches of root underfoot. Down came the nexu, panting and lathering spittle’s of broad-leafed water pitchers beneath its frame with caustic drool. Winterfang glided, timed to cut across pawing thrusts. Seydon took the creature in deft strokes through its right flank, sundering wrist, elbow, shoulder, running a jagged, furrowing line as he sank in the sword to the guard and kept surging. Blood burst from its savaged ribbing, jetting as steam from a hazarded water-pipe.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was already fast dying when Seydon came around as the nexu gurgled a strained, breathless note and toppled over. Its bulk displaced loam and tossed up patchy clumps of paw-shredded bracken and grass blades, leaking out a lake of darkened vitae that began gently trickling into a nearby brook. Water babbled and seeped with animal gore. All six eyes blinked and watched the Dunaan crash Winterfang through its skull.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon moved on, cleaning the blade of remains and sliding it away, clambering up a hillside of vines and back onto the animal trail. Soft mud was stamped over with dozens of cloven hoofs, some spanning as wide as an arm, meandering up the wilderness towards the foothills of the looming mountain and its hammock valley. Hemlock trees shielded overhead, tunneling the way forward. Despite the laze of singing cricket-birds, small psuda-mantis’ chirping below in wheat-grass, irritated sweat broke out across his back and nape. Jade creepers hanging in curtains from bent yew-boughs seemed to rustle whenever the breeze excused itself. Innate corruption still permeated the kilometers closest to where the strange encampment held court. He paused; there was a herculean beetle scrabbling over a bald rock. It had five legs, three wings, seven eyes, and lacked symmetry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was an hour later, eight kilometers on as he traversed a thicket of downed pipe-cedars, the pathway strolling along where hoofs gouged in the root-balls and tilted softwood trunks. Fallen boughs crossed like the innards of a vessel berth, angled at strangely perfect forty degree angles or so, veiled with bushy-browed moss coloured smoky red. Bark ants wriggled and crawled out from beneath squashed sections of punctured nesting, Seydon taking care to maneuver the damp-slick trunks. Halfway along, crouched atop a jagged stump, he paused for a canteen swig. Motes of utterly ripe smell was permeating ahead, carried by a low groan of stiff air through a hollowed log-tunnel opening into a sunlit glade. Insects hummed, lighting through sunbeams shafting through breaks in the woven canopy. Seydon blinked, feeling even his tongue beginning to curl at the pungency.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He ventured forward away from the log thicket, in through the broad narrow of bug-devoured softwood curled into a passable corridor. Pungency soured into tart glances of smell, incredibly vile, potent enough to sting the eyes until tears welled to lessen the irritation. Seydon knew he’d encountered similar acerbity before, recognizing the cloy malice and dry venom cloaked and unfurled behind the putrification. Again he drew Winterfag, letting it idle by his hip and thigh, pausing at the mouth of the log-tunnel. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Three eyed crows, with their plumage bleached bone-white, beaks long, needle-like, hunched on knuckled shoulders to caw tersely overhead. Scores of them lined the clearing; they formed a shifting, massed halo-loop, flapping and chortling seethes of bird-noise. Narrow tongues died black flicked against their beaks as they laughed. Laughed. Each crow was fat-bellied, full from some recent feast. More than a few were tottering, sluggish while their metabolisms borrowed energy to begin digestive processes. Seydon looked down onto the forest floor. The deer-path ended and veered sharply away from a bony, outstretched hand poking up from a ball of curled reed grass.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was an open-air abattoir, he decided, while his imagination fought to filter through one conscience-offending visage after another. The clearing by itself was a kilometer wide circle propped with scraggly birching along the tree line. Poor soil, fire, mayhap a cosmological event, ensured its barren qualities. Boxy clovers grew in massed droves beside silver-leafed herbs and violet-grey wild flowers. Underneath were hundreds of missing citizens plucked from Hythe Park on Dromund Kaas and slain to a man. Males, females, ranging in age from wizened elderly to a handful of pitiful babes; all were splayed out in gross repose, their physical rot so complete most were only husked skeletons draped across one another. Liquid putrification formed pools in the low dips along the floor. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Stakes and wooden pin-wheels were raised, two dozen each, ratty dressed cadavers bound to the softwood with spools of cut, twisted razor wire. Skulls were etched with crude glyphs: a flying hand garnished in gold rings, reaching up at a burning world. Or the Moto Mori Ascendant: stylized death-masques painted with Echani scripting. [/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]Little, dark rodents were roosting in straw nests constructed out of the emptied rib-cages. Seydon spotted on with buckteeth gnawing its way through a shattered hip-bone, snaking out a length of pink tongue to lap at the rotten marrow. Their neighbors were colonies of flesh-termites. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Pistol-cracks echoed beyond the glade. Something of immense gait and frame was sidling its way through the tree-dense gloom. Dried twig flakes were snapping beneath its unsubtle weight and stride. Seydon glimpsed something roughly eight feet tall, potentially more, two meters across at the shoulder, hanging trunk-arms down its barrel-waist. Reverse-jointed back-paws stalked it forward.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Harcress, former Shistavanen, brute slayer and enforcer for Borja Sennex, alchemical mutant, stepped into a narrow sunbeam glowering over a mound of tooth-gnawed, humanoid skulls. His left paw reached down to take one, tossing it upwards in an idle, lazy juggle. The skull shattered on its fifth descent, crushed to dust in his leathery palm.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What did you come looking for, you fool-runt?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You,” Seydon raised Winterfang and pointed. “You and anyone flying Sennex’s colours. An assassin gave you up on Dromund Kaas, Harcress. …Is this your work?” He asked curtly, stonily, gesturing at the hundreds of dead and moist bodies idly rotting by their feet.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Do you mean, did we take all these screaming whelps from their warm beds and tore them apart, just to make them stop pleading?” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Harcress grinned toothily. Blood flecked his muzzle. “Yeah. We did. Not much else to do with them, save watch Sillian get bored and whip at them a little. He had his day for a while. Then I had mine. Suppose you’re a little late to give them a hand, eh?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He raised a bony arm barely connected by dried out tendons and cartilage, tossing it Seydon’s way. “Damn if I didn’t think you were dead. Can’t tell you what it was like when I caught your smell downwind an hour ago. Little hero… Back from the dead. But he ain’t any sort of decent hero: he always arrives when the dead are gone and haunting.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“You’re different,” Chuffed the Wolfman, nodding.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon simply nodded, though his grip tightened fiercer and fiercer on Winterfang’s hide-bound hilt. “How do you figure that?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Pale, moon-eyes narrowed. “Don’t feth with me, whelp.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’m not. And I won’t, Harcress,” Seydon murmured in a death-whisper.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Shistavanen raised its right arm; the limb was sleek and hairless, dotted with varicose veins, ending in a long hand with clawed digits. Materials like ceramite and durasteel gleamed beneath the nearly translucent skin. A modified graft, Seydon realized.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Had Vermillion do me one more solid and attach this on. The whole acclimation process nearly killed me but the results… This prize… It’s an incredible little feat of biomechanics and DNA engineering, boy. All that magic, putting steel and flesh together. He calls it a bi-form weapon. Whatever,” Harcress shrugged. He cocked his elbow in and made his foe observe as the forearm split open with a vicious, wet snap. Razor-steel eased forward, halting against drag on the bone, until the edging cocked forward and formed into a hyper-techno reaping scythe. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“I’ve had my dreams where I split you on this.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon balanced Winterfang between his fingers, letting light cast off wintry gleams from its stark-white peak and edging. Harcress winced.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…Hell’s teeth is that?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Winterfang,” Explained the witcher. “The Blade That Sunders Beasts. Once upon a very dark age, it was forged in the cast-works of a powerful metal-master. He fed it one hundred drops of Terentatek blood and now, all it thirsts for is monster flesh. No creature of evil can stand against it.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Fancy!” Mocked the Wolfman. His bi-scythe flicked and powered on a vibro-field. “You think that’s enough to kill the likes of me?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Yes,” Seydon growled, aiming the longsword’s snowy peak up across the corpse-field for Harcress. Alchemic muscle flexed over his skeletal frame. “That and more. Do you know what a Dunaan is?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Nah. Sounds like something for other half-wits to worry over.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The witcher smiled nastily. “…Tell me, Harcress, how many dead from Dromund have you taken now?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Snout twitching in a smirk, the Wolfman took on a haughty pose. “Gotta be close to a thousand by now, boy.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Alright. I’d almost lost the count too…” Said the witcher, now striding forward grimly. “I gave them all a promise I’d send them your soul so that they’d know respite while you screamed and felt your essence obliterated to the last. Come on, Harcress. You murderer. You slaying whoreson bastard. Now you. Now you! [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Come on!”[/SIZE]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

[SIZE=10pt]They flew across the meadow of corpses and began fighting like devils.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blowflies, marrow urchins, scurrying things with fur and keratin bills scattered out of their way, footfalls churning up cracks of smashed, dislocated rot-limbs and hollowed rib cages. Steel met on steel, muscles bunching while audible whines of straining biomechanic servos levered Harcress’ bi-weapon down. Blows sang, a dozen in a second, whipping strokes of liquid motion scraping curtains of showering sparks across the gore-wet grasses. The Wolfman backed off, redoubled his assail, coming on again on Seydon’s left with fierce hacking chops. He hoped to poke the scythe-end over his guard and rip wounds into his shoulder. Seydon parried for six, feinted his guard and drew Harcress in, then countered with a mean diagonal lick that scored the beast from his right shoulder onto his belly. Shallow, the cut bled hotly regardless. Harcress forced his foe to duck, spinning away out of reach of Winterfang’s stinging edge.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon pursued, leaping across a ditch topped over with collapsed, misshapen cadavers. Synth-musculature, greased sleek by coolant discharges, knotted under the bi-form scythe, radiating heat from where fleshy temperature sinks couldn’t keep up with the demanding physical contest. Harcress spat browned phlegm from between his teeth, wrapping his arm and weapon around his torso in a guard. Despite taking wounds in their last contest, the Wolfman strived to not let injury render him idly complacent or dejected through the arduous recovery injunction. Sillian Cassat noted his embittered requests for something “better” to replace his severed limb with something more functional, more mean and abjectly fearsome. Every day following the successful graft-session, hours on end from morning till evening, he trained against dummies, slaves, rejects from Cassat’s morgue-zoo. Harcress desired to learn or at least grasp familiarity with his chosen, unconventional armament. Every cratered body, his imagination superimposed an approximation of Seydon’s likeness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Wolfman would have his revenge. He deflected a punishing set of curt stabs that nearly rent his armed guard away, lashing out with an upper-cutting sweep. It should have cleaved the man clean from scrotum to eyeballs. Even Harcress couldn’t follow his blow, air crackling around the vibro-sheathe as molecule splitting fields cooked and fried against oxygen. He struck at nothing. The bi-form scythe savaged a burning line through earth, nettles, grasses, and corpses, but came up empty. Where he’d stood a half-second prior, Seydon had simply disappeared. The Wolfman was quick; he could dodge tracer rounds and outmaneuver any Force warrior, size belying a cunning murderer’s agility. But he couldn’t keep up with the sliver of motion running round his flanks, harrying with two strokes that bit deep into his hips. Harcress cried out. Seydon stepped up off the Wolfman’s knee and slugged him, fist and hilt, into the meat of his maw and snout.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It took the monstrous Shistavanen off his feet. The witcher observed him wheeling once over his head before landing face down atop a pool of bones, briefly skidding. Harcress rose, cursing vile extensions of oath and threat while coming up to his feet. Seydon came on again, pummeling gloved knuckles into his belly-meat and sternum, punching the air out of his diaphragm and driving divots of pain up between the Wolfman’s eyes and cranial bone. He leapt, clotheslining into Harcress’ snout. He snapped backwards, hurling meters at a time until his shoulders skidded and caught his tumble.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Blood was mixing into the Wolfman’s spittle. A length of scored, pink tongue lapped at a cut dealt over an upper lip. Eyes once blank with neat, animal aggression now sagged with something unfamiliar and disheartening: a sliver of fear. Blood like syrup pattered off Winterfang’s snow peak. “…What did you do…??”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Get up, Harcress,” Seydon growled as he approached, fist clenching taut around his leather blade-gripping. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What did you do??” He bellowed anyway, sagging up onto his footing and harrying the air with hex-strokes from his vibro-scythe. “You can’t hurt me like that!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan swung around for a cut into the skin and bone of the Wolfman’s skull. Harcress parried, tucking in his graft-arm slightly in an attempt to mitigate the impact-recoil jarring into his shoulder and ribs. The blade came in again, walloping thrice until the Wolfman was forced to a knee, whirling through a meager defense cloud as the Shistavanen wildly swung to try and keep the attack out. Seydon cut Winterfang down through the meat of the left shoulder, reversing before stabbing and poking through his hanging bicep. Before Harcress could bring his weapon in to bear, his foe was already a meter and some paces out of killing-range, rotating his bi-form arm away and cocking up into a tight enguarde. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What did you do…??” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Harcress was gasping; Winterfang’s stinging kiss left indelible tracts of pain writhing up into the base of his throat, providing choking agony that made breathing suddenly a labour. The sundering longsword groused in the Dunaan’s palms, its thirst not yet slaked. After an effort, the Wolfman rose onto unsteady hind-legs, still trying to work back some functionality into his hurt left arm. Blood was running in furred sluices from his shoulder and hips. Turning, the Sithspawn tried to adopt a similar stance. Seydon twitched and angled his body line until it only took up a fraction of space in the various attack-lines Harcress could assault.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]They came on again: Harcress running his bi-form scythe down in winnowing hacks that could have taken six men clean through their waist-lines, Seydon with his Longsword and brutal, economical counters and guarded parries, just a blur of rippling metal that sundered and defeated anything the Wolfman could throw his way. This was not their bout in the bowls of the burning power plant. This was not anything Harcress had ever quite encountered. Before, losing his arm, he chalked it up to sheer, vicious luck.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon outpaced him, outmatched him. Harcress backpedalled, driven out of his initiative. His heels tripped and crumbled through maggot-ridden femurs and twisted hip-bones. The Dunaan walloped aside his arm-scythe, laying in: in a pirouetting assault, he rent three stroke-wounds across the bone and meat of the Wolfman’s pectorals and belly, reversing his swing in a left backhand cut over the line of his waist and groin, twirling Winterfang back into his right-grasp and delivering a two-handed, vertical cut to the biomechanical vibro-implement. Alchemic steel met into the atom-rending fields of the scythe. Harcress braced, narrow, dark eyes wide with disbelief. There was no resistance: the vibro-scythe snapped. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The upper blade-half spun away to wink and disappear in the sun glare. Seydon’s boot swung and kicked, colliding with the Wolfman’s under-jaw. Fang and gum-matter spattered over the face of one grinning, eyeless skull. Harcress fell away, disengaging his weapon-arm back into its prior configuration. Feedback was looping traces of motive-electric power through nerve-sheathes connecting the alchemical graft to the whole of his likewise altered body. Seydon though he briefly spied smoke eking up and out from a ragged, hooded ear. Harcress was shivering and jolting from the voltage. His weaponry smote, hosting a haggard gallery of fierce trauma to his hide, the Wolfman blithely entertained an idea of dying. But he ducked onto a knee and scooped up handfuls of insect-chewed herb blades and earth wriggling grossly with translucent, legged worms, hurling it up into Seydon’s face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Involuntarily, the Dunaan crossed his left hand over his eyes, nose, and mouth, retching a cone of witch-fire from his palm. Dirt cooked to ash, worms into wisp-husks, setting flame to the cud. Scents of scoured earth and plant-matter rifled up his nostrils. Harcress ran. Seydon spied his bulk hustling as fast as the wound in his gait allowed, half-limping to vault over ditches augered into the earth. The dead stared up at the beast, raining spatters of gross ichor in his wake. He latched up paws onto the face of a tall, vertical face of grimy stone slick with moss and lichen. Up above nestled that hammock-valley and Sillian Cassat’s guarded fastness; the armed compound Seydon had spied from the Iron Snake’s instrumentation while on approach.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Winterfang was replaced back into its scabbard, while Seydon knelt to pad his gloves with chalky bonemeal. Overhead on the wall-face, Harcress was making rapid gains; he had to scale forty meters to make it to the valley-lip hanging with boulder-scree and deadened, slender birch trunks nestled between the rocks. Canopy shielding created a distinct border between the cliff slope above and below the pine needle cover. Seydon began doggedly scrabbling up, taking meters at a time in a hurried dash to make up the difference between himself and the retreating Wolfman. Purchase for his hands and boots was initially tenuous; each rock jut or wrinkle in the granite was slogged with filmy growths of moss-slime. Once or twice he slipped and hanged precariously by a hand-hold.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Harcress had retreated over the ascent-lip a scant minute prior when the witcher slapped an arm around a stuck boulder and heaved up and off the rock-face. Past the canopy, stone was dry, grit with mica-dust and handfuls of clastic refuse, rock junk that swept away into empty air under his touch. There was a brief, tantalizing moment of sheer weightlessness as his legs hung away. The Wolfman’s physical spoor was seconds fresh; encarmine trails dripped and drooled down the cliff-juts. Muscle bunched in Seydon’s shoulders, forearms, clenching up his belly and spine. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]A breath: his weight slid over the boulder’s curl. A beat: he ducked in his head and throat, somersaulting down the stone onto solid escarpment. A tick: footfalls hammered over dried lichen caked to pebbles and oolite, Seydon charging after the Shistavanen carving a path through mist-shrouded forestry shielding the far encampment.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Immediately, daytime shifted from golden late noon columns blanketing the pine-tops into airs of cold, cobalt fugue. Seydon forced his run to slow down, capering to a low jog. Winterfang leapt into his hands out of automatic need. If below in the corpse-ravine nature had seemed vaguely hostile, laced with camouflaged mutagens scouring warped qualities into flora for a subtle feeling of corruption, then this timberland was bold phantasmagoria. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Firs and cedars stood tall at odd angles, appearing unnervingly, simultaneously straight and crookedly bent, their evergreen needles dyed vantablack, lightless, colourless, twinkling with alien lights. Birches were cowled over, dragging willowy branch lengths swaying to winds that weren’t there, bark as dried and crazed like a mud-flat. Grasses were long and thick as cobras, all wound in dizzying nests stirring, cackling wheezes of insect-rattling. Red eyes looked up from their barrows hollowed out in root-balls exposed and naked. An four-horned howl hooted overhead, iridescent feathers jacketing cavernous ribs. Its head twisted round, staring at Seydon passing by below: there were no eyes but glassed ovals screaming noiselessly with keening ice-winds bracketing every facet. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Somewhere ahead, midst the midnight glower, maybe behind the very next pine the way sound echoed, Harcress was laughing. Seydon stopped by a copse that had every trunk cut off at waist height. Wireless speaker-balls were stuck, nailed into the tree-rings. Sillian Cassat, in his laboratory fastness, spoke up. The Dunaan tracked a thin tape-camera slowly dialing its lens at him. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Well. This is damn perturbing,” Said the tinder-crackling audi-feed. “I was somewhat under the impression you were dead, young man.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Black Vermillion…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ahhh – ahhh, he remembers! That’s reputation for you. Remembrance. …But before I start off on a tangent, tell me, how precisely did you survive, Mister uhhh… Ur-Rahn, was it?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Seydon, now.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No matter. But please, the question?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He shifted on the balls of his heels; if Cassat was trying to converse him as distraction, then Harcress with his still formidable strength might be cloaked in the twisted undergrowth. “I was hurt, sick, was healed and got better. Nothing more.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Are you sure about that?” Teased Black Vermillion. “Because you’ve gone awfully pale, your hair’s shocked out of colour, and you’re noticeably thicker. I have an excellent recall, young man. And I remember our mutual friend Stenwulf shattered your arm very terribly and broke your back in half~ Not something you can exactly walk away from, pardon the pun.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Are you here, Cassat?” Seydon almost whispered. One solitary, white crow fluttered onto a nearby bough, cawing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What, that forest? No, no. Lovely, isn’t it? I decided to set up camp here as a sort of expanded experiment to see if nature can, indeed, face mutation in the same way as physical flesh. My theories on invasive Force corruption have indeed been rendered vindicated. I’ll release it as a paper, I think. Let those monotheistic cretins and their suitably insufferable piety grapple with it for a while.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hmmn…” Seydon grunted, turning to walk away further into the twilight verdigris toning the forest into nightmare.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What, where are you going? Oh. No matter.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The thicket of the underworld suddenly keened with white noise as Cassat set further speakers to maximum gain across the forestry. Seydon followed his voice from speaker to speaker, looking for tell-tale gut splatters where Harcress had tripped up and paused enough for his wounds to well blood on the earth and snake-grass. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Contingencies, my young friend. Preparation is the key difference between the wish-to-be and the truly successful. I’ve seen you’re quite the preparer yourself~ You know, it was I that did some pleading on your behalf to have you brought along with us. After all, I could have brought you back from being a one-armed cripple~ Alas, Stenwulf had to have his way…[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…And bury you in some damned prison beneath that awful place. Wasteful. Stenwulf has always been really quite wasteful. But, he’s like you and I: loves a bit of preparation.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He wove around decays of beetle-rotted larches. Things in grass-blade tunnels skittered feeble whinnies of sound, running off to other hideaways. Cassat continued to speak out over his projectors. Every so often, he’d time the activation of a holo-board, broadcasting his carapace-face for Seydon briefly stare and shiver at. Fleshless lips chewed through paragraphs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Now did you like that little mod I installed on Harcress there? Bi-form weaponry~ Stuff of the future. You see, it’s always been about the cell, lad. The cell is a robust machine of such magnificent biomechanical genius that it can be tooled, repurposed, for virtually anything. Metal is not nearly so apt. Synthetic materials, plastics, pah! Rewrite the rules at the molecular level and guess what you get? Godhood, boy… Stuff you can only realize in mad fever dreams! Who’d have ever thought about taking liquid-metal polymers, stuffing them inside an arm graft and fashioning it so it can double as a concealed weapon? Not Harcress, the moron. Not Stenwulf, that gibbering Corellian bastard. …Surely you appreciated it, hmmnn?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Can’t say I did. The blade broke, Cassat. Your weapon failed Harcress,” Seydon murmured. Directional mics picked up on his voice.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Well if I had a bit more time – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Excuses, Cassat,” He called out, goading. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And what’s yours? What kept you away for a year’s time in the bowels of the universes most shiddiest prison? You’ve an excuse, young man, or was it snark that somehow allowed you knit yourself together and emerge revitalized? Speak to me of excuses, pfah!” [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Pall and gloom had worsened; an installed path fashioned out of shale-slates, basic chip-mortar and some strange sheen of iridescence wove ahead between severed trunk-stumps fanned with fungal leaves nodding at air-currents he couldn’t feel or sense himself. Seydon trekked on with as much caution as he could afford, loathe to lose Harcress. The Wolfman was owed the dead on Dromund Kaas, now the dead they’d filched and pilfered from Hythe Park and brought to Cholganna to be dissected, gleaned, devoured, or killed and tortured for idle sport. Blood hot, Seydon called out to Cassat as he was in the midst of another monologue diatribe.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Who were they?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…I beg your pardon, who now?” Cassat coughed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon struck a thumb back over his shoulder. “The dead in the meadow, Vermillion. Half of them were devoured, the other half like they’d been pried open by forceps and knives. Who were they?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh! Oh that lot has your gander up? Well truly, they were no one! Destitute, my boy! Poor sob-stories waiting to die on the flagstone corners of Hythe Park. Just the ignored, troubled, penniless, the diseased and ancient, relegated to living as refuse by societal molds. I felt pity and so had Harcress round up a few hundred for the voyage. After all, we were facing impending boredom – “[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“What?” Came the sharp retort. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…What ‘what’? …What precisely has you in such an upset?” Called Cassat across the forest shade. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Hundreds of men and women, already in terrible straits, and you kidnapped them, broke them open on your tables or tossed them to the Wolfman – to stave off boredom??” The Dunaan’s sense of normalcy, of ordinary decency and kindness was savaged into a state of livid temper. Winterfang purred from its scabbard at the shake of rage in his shoulders. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Of course, as if their existence was to serve any other purpose! Oh, oh, and what of you, boy? Have those blades seen mercenary blood spilled? Did you feel some modicum of justification fighting for your very life against a few hordes of lethal bastards? Do not play this presuming game of ‘judging’ my actions. By the right of will, I’ve seen worlds burn at the hands of saints who now sleep on pillows stuffed tall with every iron-clad reason they can muster. I took a few souls the Universe was bored with. That’s all.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Is that all Sennex purposed for you here?” Seydon grunted and hauled beneath bends of contorted larch and yew trees. Their trunks were bulbous, almost cancer-like, flaked with peeling lengths of too-porous wood fibers. “Sit on your hands, while away time, until his summons? Murdering and mutilating between off-days?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s not for me to say. That’s not for you to know. I won’t even confirm your supposition.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“So what? You cut ties with your employer? Sennex doesn’t take at all to loose ends. Maybe you’re just another rear-guard. …Or maybe you’re here, out of his way, so whatever it is you concoct doesn’t foul up his true work.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“And what the hell do you know??” Cassat’s voice shivered like summer thunder, barking over the attached speaker nodules stuck by gum to every third tree. “True work indeed!”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Then what is it, Cassat? You got pointed out by a dying assassin.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ah-ah-ah, tit for tat, my boy. Nothing, not even paltry grains of half-truths I could vomit your way to mislead you halfway down the Mara Corridor, comes without paying whatever price I set for the exclusive privilege~ And I think you know what I want by now. Tell me a little story, ‘Seydon.’ Tell me how ‘Seroth’ died~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“…There are secrets beneath Dromund Kaas even the Dark Lords never suspected. I’m half-and-half closer to Ys than Sennex will ever reach. I was given a chance, a choice: take the Devil’s contract or die numb in a frozen cell. So I braved things you can’t even imagine, trained, fought, exercised, honed every skill I could in preparation for the climb back out. Sennex’s killers were waiting for me. One I spared. He named Cholganna and here I’ve found you, Cassat. And the half-breed you employ to see to whatever mistakes you’ve committed. Certainly you erred hundreds of times, given the number of skulls I counted…”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Cassat ticked. “Tsk tsk, but that is a bit of vagary on your part, Mister Seydon. Deals with demons and the like, secrets and buried things? Tell me more~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“No. Now why are you here? Why’s Sennex abandoned you to stalk the Outer Rim with Stenwulf? Where is he?”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Ah – ah –“[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“That’s all you’ll get, Cassat. That’s as much as you deserve as anyone else. You’ve things you won’t speak of to another soul. Particularly this ‘art’ of yours, which makes half-bit wastes of over-heated pack-beasts that burn out before they can even reach potential. That’s your alchemy. That’s your reputation. Black Vermillion is a fronting hack, Borja Sennex’s emergency monster-man when he can’t bring anyone else with the talent on board,” Seydon jibed. “Especially if Harcress is any evidence.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Harcress, feth you, boy, is a damned masterwork!” Sillian Cassat roared as he fell into the bait. “Five years laboring over hair and hide, bone and blood, to have you spit on my triumph? I do not think so, Mister Seydon! No! Nor will have my professional reputation slandered by a kid-whelp bred from the queen loins of a dead whore! Damn you! Damn Sennex, condescending erudite trash. All that I sacrificed for his furthered achievement, just to be sidelined on this mosquito ridden hell-pit! What is Stenwulf to him?? What grants him privilege over myself and Harcress, a killer ten times his mettle?? If anyone should be there to watch Arda and all those so-called ‘Levantines’ get smote to cinder, it should be us![/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Oh. Ohhhh – “ He crooned suddenly. “Ohhh, I shouldn’t have quite said that. Now I think you know. Sennex is along his way to burn your friends out and claim his prize. It’s taken him the better part of all these months, too. If you come along to try and halt him, well, he’ll have known we failed. If we’re still living, Borja Sennex will slay us personally. So there’s just one solution to that slip-up.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Echoes of Black Vermillion’s carapace-knuckles snapping with a rough, dried out rustle banked off the scores of tightly wound black-pines welded together by the hideous touch of his darkened presence. Bramble and heaves of underbrush bracken and thistle began to shift, parting. Seydon spied three figures march his way, ambling from a northern track. One was tall and narrow as a willow, the second hobbling on ill-fitting legs, and another bristling with crustacean spines and matte-coloured armor brightened by milky seams, wriggling something long and segmented in its hands. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“If my supposition about your change in condition is correct, then you too have seen some modification, Mister Seydon~ You are a rare degree of alchemic mutation, young man. That in itself makes you, and by extension your remains, quite valuable to furthering the field. So, to the point? I’ll take your whoreson head. Present it to the Lord High Inquisitor. Prove myself at accomplishing what Stenwulf failed to see through. Who knows - ?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]“Maybe it’ll stay preserved long enough for your friends to scream at while the Tingel Arm burns~”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]How exactly Sillian Cassat came to possess his trio of Epicanthix, Shi’do, and the enigmatic child of Yun-Yuuzhan would be a question Seydon would take to Black Vermillion himself. Save for the very latter, they each showed off furthered mutations that stank the air with malodorous wafts of dark fire. The Epicanthix was especially magnificent: so rail thin it seemed biologically impossible to stay sustained, walking on stilt-legs like a living caliper, gait like a dancer, supremely smooth and balletic. It discharged needle-dirks from in-grown bone-sheathes within its forearms, splitting open its palms to pass before grasping the briefly floating weaponry. The Shi’do muffled something elephantine; venomous lines were probing against Seydon’s mental skin, wiggling as if gripped by toothy suckers. Beside him, the Vong caste-warrior unfurled his amphistaff into a solidified battle-pole, taking charge of his right flank. Seydon observed the Shi’do grunt between reforming teeth, shifting one chimerical arm into a bony, hyper-sharp spade. Its other limb morphed into a spear of pointed flesh. The Shi’do struck first with both limbs flailing incredibly, impossibly fast, Epicanthix and Vong close behind at the heels, harrying with daggers and pole-arm respectively.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Dunaan snapped Winterfang free, carving a gullet through one blade arm, notching chips of broken bone from the arm-spade. Rising like a spectre, the Epicanthix blinked sallow, jaundiced eyes, pricking down at Seydon’s skull. Polished chromium-steel battered his angled parry-guard, shifting to deflect the Vong from stabbing through his liver, whacking back its amphistaff then cutting a neat line through an arm-pit seem and a space between its hip and ribs. Violet ichor dribbled on the jet grass. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]All four contested, three against one and his wintry sword. Seydon bowed, rolling up his legs until he was somersaulting on the spot, spade-arm and spear-limb ripping horizontally at the spaces where his brow and ankles occupied previously. Landing, rolling, he stood up behind the Shi’do and wrecked a terrible blow between its reforming shoulder blades and what counted for its waist. It cried out, bleeding a filmy substance more like water than blood. The Epicanthix kicked it aside, striding notoriously quick, backed up with the Vong buzzing razor-beetles through the air. Seydon caught and spun two away, tilting his head and neck slightly. A third razor-bug whipped past and buried deep into the bark and wood of a sickly juniper.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It was the Epicanthix who tumbled first. Winterfang caught in its knees, sundering cap-bone, connecting meat and cartilages, turning the reinforced but vulnerable bones and tissues to gored out gristle. It fell, soundlessly, flailing with its daggers. Seydon took its left hand in an up-stroke, turned on his foot and hip, lining up with his blade, and hacking cleanly, brilliantly through its forearms and throat. Both arms and head spun away in turbid blood-gouts. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He watched after the Vong, trying to keep it in the space between himself and bulk of the rising Shi’do. It proved more wily than the Epicanthix. The Vong assaulted in a series of increasingly sped horizontal blows, swinging his bio-weapon about his body in dizzying configurations, weeping venom from its fanged knob-head. It went after his lower-guard. Seydon fought back, ringing his guard against every tremendous strike, countering through every parry until their contest was a vision of blistering cuts and counter-slices. He saw the Shi’do trundle in on his peripheral. Seydon dropped his sword, ducking when the malformed Thing swung both spade-arm and pole-wrist. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]The Vong caught the spade-edge in his throat and lost his head. The length of bone and muscle following in behind took its standing corpse off its feet, to pulverize it into chunks of wrecked vodun crab-armour. It came after Seydon next, oblivious of its friendly kill, warping its visage through a hundred different nightmarish configurations. But it was bestial, robbed of anything beyond gut reasoning and brutal, malicious kill-drive. Seydon wrenched its blows aside, slashing curtly. The Shi’do lost its left arm at the shoulder – neck – hip – the wound disappeared, folds of super-heating skin wrinkling together. It stumbled away, reforming.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]For one terrible moment, as it stood up in frame measuring roughly five feet, nine inches. Looking maybe thirty two years old with darkly blonde hair framing a beautifully angled face and ocean-deep brown eyes. Seydon remembered the suckers of tentative mind-power trying to ravish itself on his thoughts. The Shi’do had been granted a base form of telepathy, mind-reading.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]It stood as a naked, wounded, crying [member="Rosa Mazhar"].[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]Seydon took a step forward and killed it. Winterfang cleaved the false-lover from its shapely brow all the way down through loins and belly. “Rosa Mazhar” collapsed into an undefined puddle of sloughed skin, blood, and milky organs.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10pt]He did not look back as he looped into a scorching run through the dark forest, now after Cassat, his compound, and whatever was left of the Shistavanen Wolfman Harcress.[/SIZE]