[Mkguild] MK: Homecoming (2/3)

[Hallan Mirayas]

    "The creature you will be facing," Malger had said just before their departure, "is called the Beast of Revonos, and he is aptly named.  He was once a Keeper that each of you knew.  What he has become now is a weapon, a living embodiment of chaos and destruction, deliberately and powerfully designed by Lord Revonos.  We do not know how much of his mind remains, nor what state it is in.  I'm sorry, Misha, but the odds are very good that he will not remember you.  If you want to survive, you must help him to do so."



    Raven had weighed in next.  "When you find him, remember this above all else: do not attempt to combat him by matching strength against strength.  You will lose.  Contests of power are what he knows, and where he excels.  If you play by his rules, he will destroy you utterly.  Remember from where he comes: the court of the Lord of Betrayal.  The Sixth Hell does not countenance co-operation, so it is unfamiliar to him.  Work together... or die separately."  The wolven priestess turned a worried gaze on Merai.  "The gods have forbidden me from going with you, and you will be both uniquely strong and uniquely vulnerable against him.  You know of what I speak.  Beware the shadows.  Remember your training."  She unbuckled the holy sword Elemacil from her waist and handed it over to the young priestess.  "Bear this well, Priestess Merai.  May the High Lord Kammoloth guide you and keep you safe."



    The final word had come from Duke Thomas.  "If you take him alive- I'm sorry, Misha, but I will not risk your lives with anything more restrictive than that- if you take him alive, he is to go directly to the dungeons, to be kept under strict ward and guard.  If he is found competent, he will stand trial for the deaths and damages he caused three months ago.  If he is not competent, then... we'll see.  Be very, very careful."



    Tychicus and Saroth heaved themselves over the top of the ridge, the downward slope opening up before them... stained red by the blood of a black dragon dragging itself upward in the other direction.  It collapsed and died before they could reach it, its wings shredded, a foreleg broken, and its head partially caved in.  Around its neck it bore the teardrop ankh of Lilith.  It was not the only body they found on the mountain that day, nor in the foothills beyond.  Flyers of all kinds littered the area: dragons, drakes, gargoyles, and more, all of them with their wings destroyed, and most looking as if they had fallen from a great height.  It was not difficult to guess why.  The sudden storm, and whatever had happened after, had wrought utter devastation on anything airborne.



  It had also started fires.  Many of them.  Smoke stung the nostrils and, as they emerged from the foothills, darkened nearly a quarter of the horizon.  Misha heard Wolfram yell something, his tone sharp with alarm, but the wind snatched away the words.  {Only the fringe, and only for a moment} came Tychicus' reply.  Like Saroth, he spoke telepathically.  The two dragons banked sharply away from the denser forest to their left, turning toward the fires on their right.



    From this height, Misha could see a distinct arc to the columns of smoke and, as the dragons wove a path through them, a concentric pattern of damage established itself on what portions of the forest had escaped burning.  First, leaves had been stripped from trees, then branches, then entire limbs the farther east they went.  The air turned strangely chill, a dull white gleam mottling the forest floor.  "What is that white down there, Saroth?" Misha asked.  "Can you see it?"



    {I can.  It's hail, and it's getting thicker the closer we get to Lik.}



    "So is the damage," Charles added, peeking out from behind Misha.  "It looks like the hail came first- see how the downed trees cover it?"



    "Good observation, Charles, and it makes sense given what we saw from Metamor.  If it was centered near or over Lik-"



    Saroth's wingbeats faltered, a telepathic bow wave of shock radiating from him.  Misha's head snapped up, wondering what had so startled the dragon, and his jaw dropped open as the veil of smoke parted.  Absolute devastation unfolded before them, stretching from horizon to horizon.  As far as the eye could see, trees had either been blown down or snapped outright, stripped of limbs and even bark.  Fire had scorched them where they lay.  Hot patches still smoldered, lingering embers from a great conflagration that had since passed on.  In the middle of it all gleamed a strange, perfectly circular ring of barren, darkened ground.  And inside that…



    "Lik."



    "Or what's left of it.  Oh, Eli."  Charles narrowed his eyes until they were lost in the gloom of his brow, and made the sign of the Yew.  When he opened them again, the surprise had gone from them, but the uneasy amazement remained.  He had warned them all of the power of the Beast he'd encountered in Revonos' arena, but even he had not been prepared for this.  A yawning crater like an empty eye socket marked the epicenter of destruction: not a single building remained standing.  "Are those..."



    {Yes.  Bodies.  Lots of them.  And it looks like many of them weren't killed by the blast.  Misha, I don't think you should use the teleport disk here.  The magic…}  He struggled for words.  {It feels as if reality itself is scarred.  The sky is in pain.  I would advise against any use of magic at all, if it can be helped, at least until we are well away from here.}



    {Priestess Merai believes it to be some sort of burn from the portal}, Tychicus sent.  {From the Sixth or the Ninth Hell- she's not certain which.  The auras are mixed, but they're also the strongest she's encountered outside of direct presence.  It seems to have opened almost directly above the temple.}



    "So that's the point of origin.  Saroth, can you see anything alive down there?  Anything moving?"



    {No, Misha.  Nothing moves.  I see bodies aplenty, but-}  His head jerked sharply, eyes fixing on something below, to the side of the city in an area that had somehow escaped burning.  {Wait.... there!  Follow me!}  Saroth heeled over, wings opening to sweep into a wide, descending spiral.  Tychicus followed a moment later.



    After criss-crossing above the town to draw any hidden archer's fire, and receiving none, Saroth and Tychicus found a clear spot amid the rubble near the edge of town.  In a whirling backwater of wings, each landed facing out from the other; teeth, claws, and flame poised to strike.  Wolfram and Merai rolled off Tychicus to cover a third direction, while Misha and Charles readied themselves against a fourth.  It was a potent defense executed perfectly to plan, ready for assault from any front... but none came.  Only a faint, distant moan greeted them.



    With a gesture, Misha sent the two dragons back into the sky, circling overhead like aerial cavalry, while the four groundbound Keepers closed in on the source of the sound.  The dead lay everywhere: under the wreckage, on top of it, whole, in pieces, and every possible variation in between, all under the unforgiving glare of the merciless sun.  Those that had not burned outright were quickly beginning to putrefy.  The stench of death was indescribable.  The silence was almost worse.  It pressed down with almost palpable weight, magnifying a whispered comment into a careless shout, a minute shift of rubble into an echoing avalanche, and transforming the recurring moan from afar into a beacon of unending suffering.  Misha was reminded of the days after the tornado had struck Keeptowne- it had taken three days for the songbirds and insects to return, and the silence had been just as deafening.



    The rubble came to an abrupt end at the dark ring they had seen around the city from above.  The buildings, the bodies, toppled trees, bushes, even the ground itself, all of it ended at the ring as if sliced off by a red-hot knife.  Beyond the knife edge, three feet of ground had been melted down into to glassy, black rock.  Wolfram poked it with a length of wood he'd pulled from the rubble and frowned.  "It's like glass.  What happened here?"



    "Hellfire," Merai answered, springing with feline grace over the stretch of glassed ground to examine a burned jumble of bones beyond.  "This one probably tried to leap through, and was incinerated in midair."  The lutin's blackened, fleshless skull stared up at them, its jaws gaping open as if still screaming even in death.  Stooping and making the sign of the twin cross, Merai rested her fingers on the bones and whispered a short prayer for the dead.  "Even lutins don't deserve to die like that."



    Not trusting the hell-touched strip of obsidian glass, Misha vaulted it using Whisper as a pole.  Charles did likewise with his Sondeshike, and then tossed it back to help Wolfram across.    The lutin was not the only creature that had tried to leap the flame wall: as they closed on the sound of the moaning, they found many other skeletons and half-skeletons.  The worst was the giant that had fallen half across the blaze and then dragged its cauterized, half-incinerated body for another ten feet before dying.  Misha prayed that the trail of blackened, roasted organs would not haunt his nightmares.



    Then they found the werewolf.  Twenty feet up a splintered oak, impaled through his chest, gut, and thigh by scorched tree limbs as thick as a man's arm, only his lycanthropic regeneration had saved him from instant death.  Even that was more of a torment than a blessing, as he could not free himself.  Grizzled fur streaked with coagulated and dried blood, a pink froth bubbling at the corners of his mouth, the beast moaned in agony with each breath.  His lips twitched as if he were trying to say something, but Misha couldn't make it out from the ground.  Wolfram stepped up next to Misha, drawing in a breath through his teeth as he sized up the situation.  "I'm assuming you want him alive?"



    "If possible.  We need to find out what happened.  But if we can't get him down safely..."



   "We can," the ram interrupted.  "It will be tricky, but we can.  Better get started."  Scaling the tree with surprising efficiency, he revived the beast with a careful drink of water.  The offer of help received a faint nod in reply, and the ram signaled for Saroth and Tychicus to land.  It took both dragons at their largest size to ease the tree down without jostling its captive, and the beast bit on Charles' Sondeshike while Wolfram and Merai carefully extricated the tree limbs from his body.  Misha kept Whisper close as the wounds healed, but even when physically restored, the werewolf proved to be in no shape to fight.  He didn't much care that he'd been rescued by Metamorians, just so long as "that beast, that bloody Beast" was gone.  His hands shook with fear, trembling so badly that he spilled as much water as he drank.  He didn't seem to notice.



    "Eyes.  G-golden eyes," he finally stammered through chattering teeth.  "G-golden eyes and bloody fur.  That's what I remember most.  Burning fire.  Burning ice.  Madness.  Slaughter.  He slaughtered us.  Some got away, I think, but the rest?  Screaming.  Burning.  Freezing.  Dying.  It came out of the crater, I think.  Froze the vampires solid.  The sun burned them to ash where they stood.  I remember that, too."  He gulped down the last of the water, handed the canteen back, and then pulled his knees to his chest and rocked back and forth, shivering.  "Golden eyes, bloody fur, black claws and teeth... fire, ice, walking death... burning, freezing...  It looked like a wolf.  A giant, terrible dire wolf.  And when it howled..."  He cringed, his massive, dark-clawed hands rising to clutch his ears.  "Red!  Red everywhere!  Everything red!  Everything rage!  Death and death and death and death..."



     Charles' hand drifted to his neck, brushing his fingers across the fur as if half-expecting to find something there.  His eyes narrowed and he carefully lowered his hand back down when he realized what he was doing.  "So... it's not just hellhounds he can drive mad."  After a moment's reflection, he appraised Misha with a worried glance.  "No wonder Raven was warned not to come with us."



    "Stupid vampires!" the werewolf whimpered, resuming his rocking.  "Stupid!  Stupid!"



    A screech cut through the werewolf's anguished rant, and the two dragons landed in a thunder of wings.  {We need to go.  A swarm of giant spiders are coming.}



    At the same moment, Merai gasped in alarm and spun westward, raising Elemacil in a warding guard as shadows began to coalesce.  "It's not just spiders.  Get on the dragons and get airborne, now!"



    "'Let's catch it!' they said!  'We'll sacrifice it to the Queen!' they said!  Stupid vampires!  Stupid!  Stu-"



    "Hold."  The voice was neither loud nor harsh, but radiated such a potency of command that everyone froze in their tracks as if paralyzed.  A woman stepped from the shadows, her hair the color of pitch and her eyes like a starless night; like a raven, bereft of pupil or white.  Clad from neck to sole in intricately tooled black leather armor and flanked by a pair of glowering dire wolves, she radiated an aura of dark nights filled with watching, hungry eyes.  The werewolf toppled forward and kowtowed instantly to the ground, his rant silenced.  Behind her, the spiders could be seen arriving from the west, a black-and-gray swarm that made short work of the tree-strewn ground.



    Ears flattened and hackles rose throughout the group as Merai put a name to the new arrival.  "Lilith."  The Keepers backed away from the daedress and closed ranks, spells and dragonflame ready to blast an escape route if necessary.



    The woman nodded slightly in mocking acknowledgement of the move, but waved her hand in a dismissive gesture.  "At your ease, Lightbringer.  For now, I have no quarrel with you, nor with your companions.  We share a common cause: you want your wayward beast, and I want him gone from my lands as soon as possible.  Do not invite more trouble than you already have."  As the spiders encircled the group, she pointed to the ground before her.  "Come here, William."



     The werewolf crawled to her on all fours, whimpering and groveling.  "I-I'm sorry, m-my Lady.  I failed you," he stammered when he finally reached her, his tail tucked and his ears lowered, his trembling returning twofold.  His head and eyes he kept averted, expecting punishment.  "I sh-should have-"



     Lilith stopped him with a single finger laid on his nose.  Cupping her hand under his chin, she lifted it until he met her eyes and, to the astonishment of all, she smiled.  A reserved smile, the smile of a queen to a lowly and meager servant, but still a smile.  "You were completely out of your depth, my boy.  I would sooner expect a mouse to kill a mountain lion than expect you to battle the Beast of Revonos.  Even the fiercest of predators must run sometimes."  She stroked his gray-furred cheek with an almost maternal touch.  "That you've survived at all suggests you're strong enough for greater things."  She stroked his fur for a bit longer, soothing him until his tailtip wagged, and then turned her attention to Misha.



    "You have done much to advance my ethos here in the northlands, Janaluk Shaltu.  Entire races have grown stronger from fear of you.  For that, I grant you this small boon: safe passage through my lands for the span of two days."  A gesture of her left hand materialized a silver ankh in midair before them, dropping it into Misha's hands with a clink of metal on claws.  "Show this to any who would stop you, and they will let you pass.  Do not linger.  Get the creature for which you've come..." Her eyes narrowed and teeth flashed as her condescending magnanimity vanished instantly into deadly threat, sudden and certain as an arrow to the heart.  "And then get out."



-----



    Lilith had allowed them only one direction of departure from the ring: southwest.  It was in that direction, she advised, that they would find the Beast.  "If you wish to survive, make certain that you see it before it sees you."  With the party back in the air, it did not take long for them to find the damage trail- a straight line of smashed and shattered forest and rock carving through the blast-flattened trees.  They tracked its undeviating course until the fallen trees gave way to still- standing ones, at which point they decided to land rather than risk losing the trail.



    "What did she call you back there?  Janaluk Shaltu?" Charles asked as they descended.



    "It's lutin.  It means Shadow of Death."



    Charles' brow furrowed for a moment.  "Wait.  Does that mean that, to the lutins, we live in the Valley of the Shadow of Death?"  Misha snorted, his mouth quirking up at one corner.



    The release provided by the wry humor lasted until the two got down from Saroth's back and found themselves standing in a pair of pawprints… with room to spare for each of them.  Wolfram and Merai climbed down from Tychicus, and the ram sized up the situation in a single sentence.  "We're going to need a bigger dragon."  Tychicus and Saroth exchanged a glance as they shrank down to join the ground crew, but said nothing.  They pulled on a pair of robes for clothing, easily shed in case of an emergency shift.



    Misha stooped where he stood, frowning as he used his own hand to measure the size of the prints.  Then, measuring the length between front paw prints and the height of the blood smears against nearby trees, he tried to extrapolate the size of the rest of the creature.  His frown deepened as the numbers added up in his head.  "Charles, how big was he when you met him?"



    Charles clicked his teeth together as he came to his own unpleasant conclusion.  His ears and whiskers flicked back and forth between amazement and alarm, not quite certain where to settle.  "Not this big, I assure you.  If paws this size had landed on me, I would have been crushed."



    "Look at this," Wolfram said, drawing their attention to mixed canine paw prints in the brush to either side of the main damage trail.  "Looks like our friend has an entourage."



    "Actually, Wolfram," said Merai, who had continued forward, "I think 'had an entourage' is the correct term."  The sound of half-choked nausea in her voice brought the others running.



    Not much of a breeze blew under the iron sky, but with no flies to buzz over the corpses and a strange, pervading chill seeming to press the scent of death from the air, the charnel house into which they stumbled gave little warning.  Bits and pieces of bodies lay everywhere, most of them human, none intact.  Also, strangely enough, none clothed.  {The werewolves of Lik,} Saroth opined.



    Wolfram stooped, investigating a scrap of coarse white fur that clung to a shattered piece of bone embedded in the trunk of a blood-splattered tree.  Around the base of the tree lay the rest of the beast, in strangely sharp-edged pieces no larger than his fist.  "And a moondog, too, I think.  What's left of it, anyway- Ow!"  He jerked back from trying to work the bone shard loose from the tree, shaking his hand and staring in wonderment.  "It's frozen!"



    "This one is, too," Charles replied, his Sondeshike making a faint clink when he prodded the headless corpse of a werewolf.  "When I fought him in Hell, he could exhale a wave of ice.  It appears that he still can."



    "Well, it appears he's been improving," Wolfram snapped, shaking his hand again to try to get feeling back into it.  Breathing hard across numbed fingers, he then stuffed them into his right armpit to warm them more quickly, just above the rim of his breastplate.  "You said he froze your feet to the ground.  You never mentioned anything about instant frostbite."



    Charles' brow whiskers arched upward, lifting his Sondeshike for a closer look as crackling frost traced a foot of the way up its length from a single touch.  "Agreed.  Are you going to be all right?"



    "I'll be okay, I think."  Wolfram clicked the hooflet-capped fingertips of his unfrozen right hand together.  "If I had bare flesh instead of hooves, I think I might have left behind a few layers of skin.  Still... that's really cold.  Don't touch them."



    Misha frowned.  "That's why we have gloves, Wolfram.  Wear them.  Merai, can you-  Merai?"  To Misha's surprise, the priestess had knelt to the ground, her forehead pressed against the sinuous spine of the holy blade Elemacil.  Her lips moved faintly, her eyes closed in concentration or prayer, or perhaps both.  Was it his imagination, or was the sword starting to glow?



    Without opening her eyes, the young priestess explained.  "I am trying to better attune myself to Elemacil, so I can better hear its warnings.  I don't want a repeat of Lilith's surprise arrival."



    Detecting a note of budding self-reproach in Merai's explanation, Misha deliberately broke in on it before it could blossom.  "Don't beat yourself up over that.  I recognize a short-range teleport when I see one.  If I wanted to surprise somebody who could sense me approaching from a distance, that's how I would do it: get to the very edge of their range and then 'jump' in."  After a moment's reflection, he added, "Was that what Raven meant by 'beware the shadows'?"



    "No.  A daedra, or someone they have altered as radically as they have your friend, can perform a temporary empowerment, an enhancement of aura, allowing him to cut through the defenses of an aedra or those of their servants.  For example, me.  If you see the shadows 'pull' toward him, wrap around him like wisps of flame, he's using it.  It's unmistakable."



    "At least we'll know who his next target is," Wolfram replied, sheathing his sword long enough to pull on a glove.



    Merai nodded.  "Misha, there's something you should know.  What he's done, the continuous power he's displayed since his arrival... as far as everything I've ever learned tells me, what he's doing is impossible.  I would expect this level of destruction if we were chasing down a young daedra noble, a scion of the daedra lords, but a mortal?  Even one who has been the personal project of a daedra lord, as Charles' tale seems to imply?  This does not make sense.  He should not be capable of maintaining this level of power separated from the Lord of Rage.  Something is very-"  Her eyes snapped open, her ears backing in shock.  Now Misha was certain the sword was glowing, because for a moment so were her eyes.  "Very wrong."



    "What is it?" the fox asked.



    "I found him."



    "And?"



    "Do you want the good news first, or the bad?"



    Misha scowled, his one ear lying flat. “Just spit it out!”



    "Misha, Elemacil doesn't recognize him.  It is saying that, somehow, what we're following is both mortal and daedra at the same time.  The sense wavers back and forth, refusing to settle as one or the other.  That's-"



    "Impossible?"



    "Yes.  Fallen possess, not daedra.  This doesn't make sense."



    "That definitely sounds like Drift," Wolfram commented.  "Corner him, and he goes off in some unexpected direction.  And who's more cornered that someone chained up in Hell?"  He tugged at his glove again to make sure it was properly settled, scowling as he muttered, "I hate wearing these things... as if my sense of touch were0n't bad enough already.  So, back to the chase, Misha?"



    "No.  If Merai can keep his location pinpointed," Misha said, waiting for Merai to confirm with a nod, "then it's time to get ahead of him and start stacking the deck."  Pulling a small paint pot and brush from his pack, Misha gestured everyone close.


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