[Mkguild] MK: Homecoming (2/3)

[Hallan Mirayas]

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

The last three paragraphs are nice asides that
set up the danger of what they face very well.

Everybody do the Exposition Dance!  Hah cha cha!

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

Nothing but fulgurite glass left there.

"Jamie want big boom."  I drew a lot of inspiration from photos of the Tunguska explosion.

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

Nice intro of the teleportation disk.  Always good to have an escape route.

It's a fantastic story device, and I am glad that CarpenterAnt created it.  It would have been very difficult to get Drift/Carcarak to Metamor without it....

He might have run into Gmork. ;)

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

People have no idea how remarkable actual silence
is until they experience it.  It is deafening
because the lack of noise is all you can hear, if that makes sense.

Natural disasters, and tornadoes in particular, have been a study topic of mine since I was eight years old.  (The incident that set me on that path also gave me my ongoing phobia of a particular type of warning klaxon.)  Between that research and stories told to me by both of my parents (each of whom survived one), the unearthly silence after such a disaster has been repeatedly highlighted.

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

Given all the blood and death he's already seen,
to have anything more cause him nightmares is scary itself!

Yup.

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

Good trick making a plus a minus here with the werewolf's regeneration.

The pink froth (punctured lung) I remembered from Tom Clancy's _The Hunt for Red October_.  The book, not the movie.  Being stuck on something you've regenerated around gets a tip from Dorian Grey in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen".

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

I like that you have them using the Sondeshike
like this to keep the werewolf from screaming or eating its own tongue.

He'd have bitten through anything weaker, and I've read too much Civil War and WW2 history to not give him something to bite on.

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

I love this bit here.  Vampires are stupid. ;-)

That was -fun- to write.  I was -very- sorely tempted to toss in a scene of a female vampire named Stella being the first to stumble upon Carcarak...

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

Charles meanwhile is thinking, "My
Collect-All-Nine Daedra collection is now
complete!"  Actually he's more thinking, "Oh sh..  Oh sh.. Oh sh..!"

I had forgotten that Lilith was the only one he didn't get to meet!  Happy to oblige. :)

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

The werewolf being named William just humanizes
him all the more.  I like that touch.

It says something about Lilith as well, that she knows her servants by name.

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

I'm honestly reminded of Gmork and his pups in this scene.

As you should be.

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

Ah, an attempt at levity!

I didn't plan it... it just walked up one day and smacked me in the face.  Still, it serves a useful purpose, much like Brody's grumbling about the smell of chum just before the shark shows up...

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

Channeling your inner Brody I see!

It's a classic.  It was required. :)

>     "This one is, too," Charles replied, his
> Sondeshike making a faint clink when he prodded
> the headless corpse of a werewolf.  "When I
> fought him in Hell, he could exhale a wave of
> ice.  It appears that he still can."
>
>     "Well, it appears he's been improving,"
> Wolfram snapped, shaking his hand again to try
> to get feeling back into it.  Breathing hard
> across numbed fingers, he then stuffed them
> into his right armpit to warm them more
> quickly, just above the rim of his
> breastplate.  "You said he froze your feet to
> the ground.  You never mentioned anything about instant frostbite."

I should reread the battle sequence because I
don't recall him freezing Charles to the ground
right now.  I'm sure it happened, but it has been
a while since I looked over that fight.

He did.  I assure you, because I reread that battle sequence over and over and over for _months_.  No, I am not kidding.  Months.  I had it saved on my laptop until my laptop fried, and it was very much a bundle of awesome and a talisman of epic.

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

Good touch here with noting the different finger
structure of our beastly Keepers.  Always good
when it works to their advantage!

It's an expression of the question that got me into transformation and furry fiction in the first place: "What if?"

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

Always nice to see a group actually
prepared!  Still, those had better be good gloves!

This came from an incident during my college fencing class.  My best friend and I were both taking it, and he did not like wearing gloves on both hands, thinking it unnecessary for the rear one.  That is, he thought that until I accidentally sliced his hand open with a nicked practice blade- he still has the scar!

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

And I bet it's wicked cool looking too.  This is
why we need to have Metamor Keep the TV show so we can see all this happen!

That would definitely be something to get illustrated.  I'll have to add it to my list.  The one problem is that, of all the artists I've commissioned to draw quad Carcarak, none of them have managed to give him his properly blood-soaked look.  He should look like somebody dunked him in a vat of it.

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

Yeah, I always start worrying when people's eyes
start glowing too!  Awesome effect!

*grins*  Carcarak's Goldeneye enchantment should keep you well and properly worried, then..

Hallan