To Fall and Rise Again

[Cyrus the virus]

((If anyone is interested in creating a story, this need not remain a solo. Just PM me.))

One month ago...

A thunderous symphony battered the heart of Corone Forest on one fateful morning, a dozen hooves pummeling the muddy path which led deeper still into the emerald maze.

Three men buckled down close to the reigns of their ivory steeds, gripping tightly as they barreled through the trees. Near-blinded by the downpour surrounding them and drenched to the bone, each fighting shivers of cold and fear, the mercenaries, the good guys, pressed on.

Not one citizen of Corone had seen the sun rise that morning, so blanketed by grey clouds was the sky. A chill had crept upon the region in the dead of night and showed no sign of retreat, clinging to each droplet and melding with the morning fog. The men and women of Radasanth would sleep late and rise with dreary, but strong, resolve. The soldiers who rode through the forest now could not afford themselves the luxury of a warm morning bath or breakfast, but rose and dressed as soon as their calls came.

The promised reward was grand, more than ten-thousand gold pieces for each man who played a part in killing their quarry. To ask that he be brought in alive was laughable. It had been more than two years since Luc Kraus last broke the law, but so numerous and heinous were his crimes that not one Radasanthian who heard a tale of his exploits had ever forgotten it. Murder, crime, rape and mayhem were his hobbies (once upon a time), and though the mage had moved on to more constructive projects, he’d etched his legacy into the collective consciousness of the Coronian people.

And so the three mercenaries, their iron armor frigid in the cold, could not suppress their anxious roars as they saw him off in the distance, taking short strides through the muck. Their cries seemed to drown their fears, and for a moment they saw the target for what he was – a short, dirty-haired cretin of a man, boots muddied from the ground and hunched over as if hiding from the rain. His cape was black with wet and draped over his head for protection, exposing a body which presented a fleshy, vulnerable target for their blades.

They split off from one another so as the approach from different angles all at once. The warrior who remained in the center, a black-bearded, long-haired beast of a human, drew a sword as long as the mage’s body which glistened dangerously in the rain. Before he’d lowered it and closed the distance, a haunting revelation came upon him.

They’d been heard.

In an instant he saw the mage turn, witnessed the glint of metal, and suddenly his world was red and orange and pain.

He struck the ground hard as his horse reared in agony, instinctually trying to escape the flames. Sudden as the assault was, the mercenary had the presence of mind to roll sidelong in the mud before his steed could crush him. He heard the scream of steel and another roar of flame and knew that he must rise, so by sheer force of will he did so, pulling the charred remains of his cloak against his face to protect from the heat.

Luc Kraus had felt their approach in the ground. A filled pack slowed his trek through the forest, but he’d been swift enough to drop it and draw the Slykrit Blade in one fluid moment. The light of his summoned fire showed him three men in shining armor approaching from differing angles, and in the split second which followed he had made haste to the nearest tree trunk and pressed his back against it.

Hiding was impossible, considering the flaming beacon of fire which he held. He watched as both men passed him and made wide circles about the trees to double back, neither in range to strike with their limited weaponry.

“Wizard!” One cried, pointing a lengthy blade in Luc’s direction. “It’s time your crimes were paid in blood! The dead of Radasanth’s graveyard yearn and cry for respite that only your death can bring!”

Luc met the man’s words with an icy stare, his bloodshot eyes offering not a blink to his hunters. Deep curves below his eyes lent experience to a youthful face, but his disheveled brown hair, unshaven face and general lack of expression evoked an image of lunacy.

The men dismounted quickly and took tentative steps in Luc’s direction, approaching from behind trees so that the mage could not fire another stream of flame to consume one of them. The victim of that first strike, badly burned but fiercely determined, had risen and was approaching from behind, careful to keep his footsteps more silent than the rain.

The moments that passed were long, and the four men in the forest found themselves at a standstill. Luc awaited their move, and they awaited his, for each of them knew that the first man the mage targeted would surely die. Finally, one could take it no more.

”For Sara!” bellowed the shortest of the men, who raised his sword above his crown of sloppy black hair and plunged forward. The others followed his lead, knowing this was their only opportunity to catch an exposed side of the mage.

The third warrior, another black-haired and bearded hulk, tensed up and brought his sword down low to strike. In his mind – and in fact, in the mind of his brothers as well – was an image of his sister. He remembered her not as the molested, charred remains Luc Kraus had left behind, but as the girl she had been in everyday life, bubbly and considerate, bossy and insistent in pushing her brothers to do the right thing. It was the last thing saw.

The mage threw a hand forward and upward, willing the ground below to rumble and manifest an appendage, a hand from the mud which rose up and gripped the warrior, plunging onward into the trunk of a tree and splintering it violently with the man’s body. The sudden earthquake caused his nearby brother to tumble into the mud, but the burned victim of Luc’s first attack had closed the gap. With a triumphant roar he slashed downward with his heavy blade, striking violently against the head of Luc Kraus. And bouncing right off.

Luc wheeled on him, slashing with abandon with the Slykrit Blade. Though stricken by surprise at the failure of his attack, the soldier parried the red-hot blade easily and came back with a mid-height slash which Luc dodged by leaping backward; the wind between them suddenly came to life, sending the warrior toppling to the ground as it simultaneously brought Luc further than his jump otherwise would have, creating distance between himself and his opponents.

By then the second man had risen again and was closing the distance. Sara’s death had been a tragedy for their family, had driven his Father to cheap Dwarven ale and his Mother to a perpetual depression – she had not spoken a word in two years. His brother Michael, his brother Ben and himself, Arnold, spent every day of their new life training for this precise moment. They’d trained daily and gathered as much information as possible about the wizard who’d raped and killed their sister. Such information was uncommon as people in Corone feared even speaking the name, but armed with as much knowledge of his spells and abilities as possible, the brothers had as much confidence as they possibly could have considering the man’s reputation.

Now, Ben was also dead. It had taken the mighty mage but a second to snuff out his life, to mix the splintered remains of his bones with the narrow strips of wood broken off from the trees. To say that Arnold poised himself to strike without any fear would be a lie.

Luc whispered some words into the air, a phrase which tingled with magic. Arnold and Michael both stopped suddenly, their expressions twisting from determined resolve to ones of agony. Their armor had become burning hot, as intense as sizzling coals in an Alerian steam train. They dropped their weapons and made attempts to remove their armor, which quickly melted through clothing and skin alike, filling each man’s senses with the smell and taste of their own burning flesh. They cried aloud in unison and fell to the wet ground, torn between the absolute need to remove the armor and the sheer impossibility of willing their hands to grab it and do so.

The spell’s effect did not last long, but it didn’t need to. By the time the armor had returned to normal, both men were nearly unconscious from the pain. Michael lifted his head to look about, struggling to maintain an awareness of his surroundings. Luc Kraus was nowhere to be found. Michael saw only the blur of morning mist and falling rain.

[Cyrus the virus]

Raiaera and Luc had a long history, but it was the obvious choice for where he wanted to retreat to. It was the region in the world in which magic was most prevalent at the time, a fact which filled Luc with inspiration and made the long nights of study easier.

Near the Raiaeran settlement of Karazund, within the southern part of the mountain scope, there was a small opening in the rock from which a faint orange light escaped. It was here that Luc Kraus materialized just moments after his encounter in Concordia Forest. Snow blanketed the plateau outside of the cave opening, but Luc quickly stepped inside the cave to escape the storm.

Within the mountain he had carved himself a comfortable home away from society and civilization. The chamber beyond the entrance was hemispherical and large, built around a center area in which Luc kept a large desk, upon which were mountains of parchment, a pen with ink, and a white tome that had haunted the man for two years.

The walls were stone and unadorned, save for a half-dozen torches which were kept ablaze permanently by Luc’s magic, warming and providing light to the cavern. His bed was a makeshift mattress against the far wall, created from leaves, twigs and cloth. It was seldom used.

He dropped the pack and it rest against the side of his desk, a hardwood structure Luc had initially been rather proud of, having magically carved it himself from the remains of a tree in the red forest. Now it never seemed to have enough surface area to satisfy him and accommodate that many piles of parchment he kept. Sitting in the chair he’d similarly created, Luc swiftly removed his gloves and rubbed his sore fingers.

It would be some time before he once again journeyed to Corone, he knew, and in fact this last sojourn had been made solely to retrieve the last of his personal items from his headquarters there: a similarly-constructed settlement in the Windlacer Mountains.

He snatched up the tome and ran a bare hand over its surface. Its cover was blank, giving no clue as to what was written inside. He opened it and let his eyes run over the lettering within, as he had done so many, many times before, but still he could not comprehend the complex text. It’s not that it was written in an elaborate way, but that the language of the tome, if it was a language at all, was unknown to him.

“And not just me,” he reflected aloud, recalling his trip to Ankhas long ago and his tireless search through the thousands of texts there. He shook his head as he remembered going to Istien University before the return of Xem’zund and speaking with a score of elven scholars there. He’d checked with everyone who’d come to his mind, including priests and monks who could communicate with their divinities on some level – nobody had any clue.

And yet, because the tome gave off an unbridled measure of magical energy, Luc could not go a day without trying to decipher it. The papers on his desk were essays from his own pen, reflections and observations and hypotheses on the words. Some felt like sensible ideas and others were far-fetched, but the mage took everything down and organized his ideas like only the most dedicated researcher could. He also had stacks of notes speculating on the characters of the text and attempting to translate them into a language he could understand, but in two years he’d barely made any headway.

Even with this in mind, Luc could not take a night to rest. Bloodshot and with deep, tired grooves under them, his eyes scanned various pages of the tome, looking for some kind of pattern to the characters, looking for whatever it was that would cause understanding in his mind. But this wasn’t the only reason why the mage could not find rest.

In his dreams, voices had been speaking to him. It was a phenomenon not uncommon within Raiaera since Xem’zund’s conquest began, but this was a detail Luc himself was not privy to. The undead forces would benefit greatly from his allegiance – that was the gist of what the mage was being told. The sinister whisper of an undead minion in his mind at first tried to simply overpower Luc’s mind and dominate him, but was entirely blocked. Since then he was constantly hounded as he slept: threatened with death, promised great rewards, promised a high place by Xem’zund’s side in the new world he would bring. But though he was truly selfish and showed a general disregard for life, Luc had no desire to bring about the end of it. The necromancer had nothing to offer him that would change that. At least not as far as he knew.

He studied that night for several hours, fighting the insistence from his body that he get some rest. Eventually, as the sun began to rise outside the small entrance to his cave, Luc no longer had a choice in the matter.