Topic: [ Shadowbound ]

Grave Circumstances

Date: 2007-03-28 21:52 EST
"Between the motion and the act falls the shadow." -T. S. Eliot

"NELIKOR..."

To call it a voice was to call the tallest peak in all the multiverse a simple pebble. It nearly crushed him against the inside of his own skull; it filled him with....rapture. He sank to his knees.

He had been here before. This was not the first time that the Necromancer had come to the Citadel of Indifference. Outside, the world was twisted and bizarre. It was not the world of his birth.

He had been taken from Rhy'Din as a babe, and brought to this place. Above, roiling gray clouds hid the sky, an inverted sea of sluggish ashen waves crashing around the Citadel's hidden spires. Below, odd lights flashed across the barren valley, washed-out blues and reds that failed to dispel the dusky murk that surrounded their source. Lightning streaked up at the clouds, and a slow thunder rolled across the sky. Across the valley, steam and smoke rose from scattered vents, some holes as small as a man's hand and some large enough to swallow ten men. He had often wondered what befell those who were cast " or worse, those who fell in, by accident or stupid clumsiness " into the largest of the pits. They could still be falling, all these hours and days and weeks and years later. Things did not work here like they worked elsewhere in the multiverse. And, he had read, there were things in other planes and other worlds that made the Citadel of Indifference seem normal. The world outside the barren valley was little better. It was a blasted plain of tumbled rocks, jagged pinnacles, and sinister gorges devoid of natural life. It was always dry as any desert he had crossed in his life, but the whole of the world was smothered in winter, complete with freezing winds to lash at his eyes and skin.

The Citadel of Indifference was not really a castle at all, however. A single tower of black iron gridwork that pierced the roiling heavens above, it could be seen from anywhere he had ever traveled upon this world. Humanoids of every variety were woven into the metal itself, as if used as a ghastly mortar. Most of the forms were truly dead, yes, but many more were undead which constantly wailed and clawed at the air.

Feathery mist marked his breath, barely visible before the dry air of the antechamber drank it in. The corridor he walked down to reach this room had suddenly opened onto a wide ledge overlooking a lake of molten stone, red mottled with black, where man-high flames danced, died, and rose again. There was no roof here, only a great hole rising through the mountain to a sky that was not the sky outside. Here, when viewed up through the hole, one could see wildly striated clouds streaking by as though driven b the greatest winds the world had ever seen. The Necromancer had spent a great deal of time studying the layout of the Citadel of Indifference from the outside. Near as he could tell, there could not have been any possible way to have both the enormous lake of molten stone, nor the open roof of the Great Lord's chamber.

He had to remind himself, though. There were other planes, other worlds, that made this one seem normal.

"ARE YOU LOYAL, NELIKOR?"

The frail skeleton of a man gripped his head between gloved fingers, and wanted to howl. The Great Lord ruled the Citadel of Indifference with an iron-fisted grip, with reminders to all of his servants that there could always be made more mortar for the tower's wall. Occasionally, the Great Lord himself took physical form, but never when there were servitors such as he about. Still, he had heard many of the Infernal inhabitants " minions of the Great Lord far superior to himself " The Great Lord did not even reveal his name to worms such as he.

"As you command, Great Lord, so shall I obey." There was pain. The voice crashing into his skull was rapturous, but ecstasy and euphoria that came too strong, that rushed too swiftly, turned quickly to agony. His muscles twitched with a dull, aching burn.

"SO YOU SHALL."

A bid of sweat traveled down the man's face. Though the muscles of his body were jerking, his voice was steady as a rock. The Necromancer's knees began to blister from the hot stone he knelt upon, but it might as well have been someone else's flesh. He could focus only upon the voice that boomed inside of his head. "I wish only to serve you, Great Lord, however I may."

"THEN LISTEN WELL, AND SERVE..."

The Necromancer screamed as the voice crashed against him again and again, echoing and bouncing around his head with every sound, every syllable. He was weeping tears of joy, so glorious the sensation of the Great Lord being near him. Speaking to him. To one such as he. And when it was done" When his instructions had been given?

"YOU WILL GO FORTH, NELIKOR."

A gibbering mess, his face wet with sweat and slobber, the Necromancer crawled out of the antechamber and sucked air in through her nostrils, trying to regain his dignity before rising to his feet. The Great Lord had made his instructions clear to him. His voice could not be mistaken for anything else, and one did not merely pay attention. Anything the Great Lord said directly to you was imprinted indelibly upon the mind as sure as a stonemason carves into rock.

First, he was to be sent back to Rhy'Din.

Grave Circumstances

Date: 2007-03-31 09:42 EST
"If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do." -Angelina Jolie

Rhy'Din. The shining beacon of the multiverse, wherein all layers of all worlds of all planes intersect and meet into a chaotic, jumbled mass of disarray and dynamic stasis. The more things change, the more one can say that Rhy'Din has remained absolutely the same as it always has. Except, as the Necromancer noted within an hour of his arrival within Rhy'Din City, there was something terribly wrong with this place. Perhaps it was the smell.

The world from which he came, wherein lies the Citadel of Indifference, was a cold, barren, near-lifeless realm. The only beings that dwelt there resided within that hard, iron-work tower, under the purview of the Great Lord of Indifference himself. Rhy'Din, on the other hand, was a bustling, incomprehensibly huge city that seemed to constantly stretch the boundaries of the human mind in any way you could possibly look at it. Great manors and castles and keeps and sanctuaries and temples and inns and taverns and brothels were thrust in shoulder-to-shoulder with more "advanced" edifices. No place in particular did this stand out more than the strangely bizarre WestEnd.

The Necromancer reached Rhy'Din City through the Great Lord's mastery of multiversal travel. It was a testament to the Great Lord's power and wisdom and knowledge; what else could it be that allows a being to harness the power of the Nexus on mere will alone" There were times when he had considered the Great Lord to be on the same level as one of the many Gods and Goddesses of old. This was one of them.

But exactly where the Great Lord had deposited him was the matter for some concern. Cracked and broken, the earth itself bled great rivers of black with fading striations of yellow or white. Strung between great buildings made of a dull red or brown brick were cables, with boxes that blinked unerringly and in perfect time. Green. Yellow. Red. Sometimes just one color, over and over into eternity. He did not understand it, but he would refrain from shutting it out completely, and ignoring it. Ignorance, as they say, is the night of the mind. And it is a night without moon and star.

It sounded first like the blasting of a great trumpet. The man spun on his heel and then leapt away to the side as a great iron carriage roared past him, with the passenger just inside raising his fist and shouting some manner of words at him. Nelikor did not understand what the man had said, though. There were words he used " metaphors, perhaps; perhaps something else entirely " that he did not know. He knew what an ass was, of course, it was a beast of burden. Did the man streaking by in the iron carriage compare him to a donkey' Perhaps an ass-hole is a place where one keeps their livestock" But why then would one dig a hole to put one's ass in" Some things just did not make sense, and must be puzzled out. Or one must find one who knows, and then one must ask questions.

As he picked himself up off the river of black ice, a man leapt at him from the dark. There was a flash of light reflected upon steel; a knife drawn, though it seemed not to be a dagger. Single-edged, curved back, serrates in the base of the blade. "Just relax, man. Hand it over and nobody got ta' get hurt."

The Necromancer stared. With his face schooled to careful neutrality after many years in the service to the Great Lord of Indifference he made no outward sign of any expression at all, save only the flexing of long, thin fingers to loosely curl his fists. That man spoke with the most peculiar of dialects.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Give it up, fool! Your jee-pee, or your aych-pee."

That's what the Necromancer heard, anyway. "What do you mean' Aych-pee?"

"Money, dumbass!" The man sneered. He was young; younger more than the Necromancer himself by nearly half again his age. There were no wrinkles or age-lines creasing his face, and his skin was supple, youthful, vibrant and alive. "Give it up 'fore I cut 'choo."

Nelikor was almost disappointed at that turn of events. And here he was hoping for someone to speak with; someone he might learn from, to tell him the ways of the world. He was still curious about that dialect, yes, but somewhat less so now.

"You're no more than a common cutpurse," he declared.

"...A wha'?"

"...A cutpurse."

"...I'll cut 'choo, gramps! I ain't cuttin' no womens here."

Ignorance is the night of the mind, indeed. Nelikor would be mildly shocked if this man had ever knew the basking glow of moon and stars.

"I?" He hesitated, stammering his words though not out of fear. Honestly, the Necromancer was simply at a loss. Had Rhy'Din fallen so far in his long absence" "I don't want any trouble, here." And it's true, he did not. Dependant upon how much of his capabilities he had to tap to fend off an attack, he could be very easily found out and discovered. Even in the best of times, those that practiced the darker arts were not warmly welcomed. In the worst of times, it alone would be enough to have him overwhelmed and burned at the stake.

Or so he had read, at least.

"Yeah, well, you gon' have some trouble if you don't start making wit' the silver in the next three seconds, you retard!"

He stared long and hard, the Necromancer, before lifting one hand to the array of belts buckled one over the other about his waist, some loose enough to fall on one side to his hips from the weight of the adornments he wore. Two small knives, more tool than weapon; a short kris; a short-sword wrapped in a leather hilt, and a truncheon upon the other side. A few bags and packs hung from his belts, as well, tied around the heavy leather to simply hang, or strapped solidly to it. Ignorance of the world he was coming to would have been foolhardy, so he knew the coin of the realm was the Silver Crown. Accordingly, he had brought a small handful with him.

The coin-purse was plucked free of his belt, and tossed at the man. Coin cost merely the value of the coin, but to be forced to defend himself? That could cost him everything.

"That's what I thought, punk-ass!" He watched impassively as the man caught the moneybag and turned, fleeing into the night with Nelikor's thirty pieces of silver.

Turning, the Necromancer stepped onto the stone pathway running beside the trash-strewn channel of cracked, broken black ice that the iron carriages sped upon (though they were rare, so this was few and far between, and did not lend itself well to intensive study).

If he were going to fulfill the Great Master's instructions, however, he would need to go to where the people were. To see them. To watch them. To speak and converse with them, to learn them. Hopefully this cutpurse who had robbed him was not the equivalency of the vast majority of the citizenry of Rhy'Din City. If that were the case, then perhaps he would consign himself to death?s comforting embrace early, and fall the city-bisecting river clutching a cannonball tight to his breast.

A most unusual place, this Rhy'Din.

Grave Circumstances

Date: 2007-04-01 10:46 EST
Night.

It was a glorious thing, this moment of darkness, that enveloped the world. Most of Rhy'Din City was still busy at this hour, with people coming and going and being all about their business. Most of their business took place at the Red Dragon Inn, the centrally-placed edifice that dominated the central region of the city, where they laughed and caroused and drank and politicked amongst themselves. It was a good place to go to be around people. But it was not where the Necromancer went.

He needed to be around people. To learn the way the world worked, now, to learn the people and to know faces, but where he got that knowledge from was a different subject. Finally, blessedly, out of the WestEnd he had turned not north toward the river and the Inn of the Red Dragon, but south into High Town. He moved steadily and determined, without pause nor break (perhaps it was because he was thirty silver crowns lighter); not even to look at the wondrously beautiful homes and buildings that made up High Town. Only the great, white, shining walls of the Temple of Divine Light struck his interest, and even that was a fleeting thing. The Necromancer came at last to the Southern Gate where the members of the Town Watch eyed him suspiciously, but not overly so. After all, how many people in Rhy'Din wore black leathers, hm"

There were fires blazing upon the Southern Glen, but they too were ignored. It had become a popular haunt for many who did not wish to convene in the Red Dragon itself or the adjoining Great Hall. The path out of the city southward was ended after perhaps two or three hundred steps, where a single-stone walking trail led off to the left into the woods. From there, it was only a matter of minutes until he had entered the Rhy'Din Cemetery.

Cemeteries. Necropoli. The cities of the dead. They were a quiet place, a hallowed place, a comfortable place. He enjoyed them, he basked in them, he simply stood in the radiance of being surrounded by so many at peace. It almost' almost "pained him to know what he was about to do. After much time spent standing as a statue does, he made his way to the far side of the cemetery, in a corner out of sight of most people who visit.

The lock would have been left to hang, broken open, onto the latch meant to keep the door shut. Inside, he noted it smelt vaguely of earth and mud and grass, no doubt from the usual use of that blockhouse. Supplies for the gravediggers, no doubt, but he was quick to find an acceptable spade-tipped shovel and then" Then his search truly began.

Up and down the rows he walked, between the columns, reading headstones and grave markers and inscriptions. Some were scribed in Common, others in languages even he had not heard of. Yet. For over an hour, he spent his time marching through the many graves and tombs and mausoleums and shrines and memorial plaques, scanning names and dates of death, reading eulogies of what their life's accomplishments were, until he stopped abruptly.

It was one of the higher graves, true, resting not six feet into the earth but upon it in a stone casket. Near as he could tell, the writing upon the sealed lid of the tomb was in common, but the name stank of Elfish if he had ever heard one before. A female elf. But the date was acceptable" she had only been laid to rest four days prior, making her likely one of the newest residents to the necropolis.

Hefting the shove, he pressed the sharp tip into the tomb where lid met base, and gave it a firm push. Nothing. He gave it another push. Nothing. Another. Nothing! Rage swelled up inside of him before he could squash it back into neutral indifference. Turning, he changed the angle from which his force would come, and pulled firmly upon the handle of the shovel to create leverage. The tomb groaned under the stress, and the tip of the shovel broke the seal in that one tiny little spot. Not so easy as he had expected it or wanted it to be, but then again he was old, too.

Oh, well. At least he wasn't digging six feet down to drag a coffin up out of the soil. Bit by bit, he worked the shovel against the tomb, breaking the seal all the way around...