Giving Chase (battle)

[Herald of the Storm]

“Not … not like this,” the dying guard wheezed, his fingers clawing at the air in a last futile effort to escape his fate. His failing strength gave him one last push forward before giving out completely, dumping him unceremoniously to roll in the spreading pool of blood spreading quietly beneath him. “Mitra, please,” the guard begged, staring up piteously into the abyssal Fallien night.

Next to the guard, casually watching him expire, Vaahnzerekh stood with the uncommon lack of motion shared by all of the Kron’tyr constructs. No sign of emotion showed on the cold metal skull plate which made up his face, and indeed none was possible. But though he couldn’t show it, and though he couldn’t even realize it himself, Vaahnzerekh wasn’t completely without emotion. Watching the human squirm and expire under the light of his sickly green eyes brought the slightest of stirrings to life in the power orb which animated the shell that the construct currently animated. It was disgust; the lingering disgust felt as a racial memory throughout all of his kind. Disgust for the weakness of the flesh creature squirming in his own fluids at the Kron’tyr’s feet. Disgust for how low his glorious race had been laid by both the ravages of millennia and the jealous treachery of those who had feared and coveted the power to shape the stars themselves as the Kron’tyr had.

But the moment was fleeting, wafted away on the currents of time like the fresh breeze of summer. And just as the moment had passed, so too had the guard at Vaahnzerekh’s feet, alone and unanswered in his final moments in the firmament. An irregular tapping broke the silence as the last sigh of life’s breath rushed from the newly christened corpse.

“Oh course Vyrabron,” Vaahnzerekh answered the question that his mute companion’s tapping had asked. In his infinite wisdom, the Storm Herald had seen fit to imbue the shells of living stone that the Kron’tyr inhabited with autonomous self-reparation. Unfortunately, the long years in hibernation had proven more difficult for Vyrabron than it had for most of the infiltrators and as such Vyrabron’s ability to create speech had been almost irreversibly damaged. Even now, months after reawakening and being tasked to gather information for Khotemi, their mutual master, Vyrabron’s self-repair had failed to make any lasting effect on his infirmity.

Not that the damage had caused much grief to them while on the surface. They had found the people’s who had infested the Fifteenth Circle of Tyr’Erekoh, called Fallien in their own tongue, to be a superstitious and gullible lot. All it had taken to waylay any suspicions against them on Vyrabron’s behalf was to explain that whomever it was that had been Vyrabron’s current persona had taken a holy vow of silence and all suspicious of the infiltrator’s intent fell away.

That wasn’t to say that Vyrabron was incapable of communication however, as the tapping motions of fingers on the infiltrator’s chest indicated. It was a coded language of sorts, one developed in the earliest days of the Kron’tyr’s rise from darkness and savagery. It had been all but forgotten amongst their people until the Storm Herald ascended, found it, and passed it back to his people. Now it was Vyrabron’s primary means of communication, and a subtle enough one that most viewers saw it only as a nervous tic, never truly understanding the sinister meaning underneath.

Nodding to indicate that he understood, Vaahnzerekh stepped away from the fallen guard’s body and assumed a position over the one of the corpulent merchant whom the guard had been protecting. Such was their method of operating. Vyrabron, always the more martially inclined of the two, assumed the role of warrior and guard, while Vaahnzerekh, with his ability to speak and fluidity of words, was the honoree. It only took a moment for the infiltrators to split the bodies that they were to wear, their own forms flowing to take up residence within while the sickly green glow of their power orbs began to seal the damage the process caused.

But before the highlighting green of the assimilation glow could fade from view, Vaahnzerekh heard a stifled gasp from the darkness. The Kron’tyr’s assumption of their new forms had been witnessed.

That just would not do.

[Mordelain]

Irrakam, in the wake of war, was a den of paranoia. Seething lies and furtive glances got a man shot, stabbed, and garrotted quicker than simply asking. In the night, things got worse, and Mordelain Saythrou, Il’Jhain and heroin, had to swaddle herself in a gown of wit and a suit of vigilant armour to survive. She had expected all manner of maladies to befall her as she advanced across the city to the eventual sanctuary of her mentor’s villa. Assassins, jiggalo, slavers, and the occasional sand wyrm had all been obstacles in the troubadour’s way in recent weeks.

What she saw before her now even clad in twilight, however, shocked her to her core. Grave whispers from dark devils could not have unnerved her more. In the midst of the early hours, a creature, if it could be called even tha, grossly shifted. It was as if the light, or absence of it, morphed, warped, and twisted reality eschew.

“By the Nine,” she gasped a harrowing cry to the unknown for aid. She bent her knees, as if to run, but found her transfixed by what she saw. When her fear finally faded, and her intellect described the scene, the creatural transmogrification was complete. She had witnessed, and in witnessing, she was not a part of some unholy crime. So close, she thought, realising she was merely a few minutes away from her destination. If only I had kept my eyes to themselves!

Resorting to the only course of action she knew to take, Mordelain reached for the kukri at her hip, and withdrew it silently from the simple leather scabbard that shielded it from the harsh environ of the salt stained wind. In Fallien, where the desert was life, the kukri was not just a weapon, but a status symbol. Hers was untarnished, polished to a fault, and lusting for blood. The Troubadour’s chosen weapon was peace, and although she had once been called upon its aid, her staff, a blunt weapon of force and artistry had always found itself in her hands before her sayyida, her mistress.

“I mean you no harm!” she exclaimed, realising now she had gone beyond simply slipping away into the darkness and the solitude of the Outlander’s Quarter. Irrakam would hide her well enough, if only she could break away with enough lead to vanish into the storm of night. “Your business, like all business in the markets, is quite your own!” her own words continued, but she mouthed something else entirely in her mind’s eye. She knew the strange, silent, and deathly creature would not believe a word she said, no matter how strong she was in delivering the lines. Truth had lost it’s worth long ago, and not just in Fallien – Althanas was born from lies, and lived in their wake.

If she had been better prepared, then the bells on the tastes of her simple, loose robes would have tinkled a song of remembrance and battle, instead of one of meek shift and timing. Her feet scuffed the dry stone as she spread her legs into a stance of battle, and her heart began to pace undesirably quickly. It would seem, that despite her best intentions, her efforts to reach Suresh’s villa without engaging in anymore mercantile activity after a long day’s work and trade in the city were to be in vain. This time, however, she was not bartering for fig wine or Ambrosia…she was bartering for her life.

“Won’t you let me be on my way?” she said, her accent belittling her meek form, her tongue the tongue of world weary heroines in a xenophobic land.

[Herald of the Tempest]

Vyrabron studied the woman from his spot as she pleaded for mercy. The concept in itself was rather off putting to the Kron’tyr construct, eyes filled with morbid curiosity. The flesh walker looked to see his accomplice study her too, and in the flash of green that illuminated their eyes, the mute warrior lifted a hand to his chest and began to tap it in a steady rhythm. When he was done the other was silent, before with a curt nod he gestured upwards to the woman.

“Kill her,” was the simple commands given by Vaahnzerek. With a stoop to his body the construct hunched over and began to move forwards, eyes flashing with green on his new persona. With a wet noise like a knife cutting dead meat talons grew out from his fingertips, splitting the endings of his flesh. He stalked ever closer to her, an intimidating aura giving him a far more menacing look to the now dead body he used. Eldritch green pulses flashed along the body as it softened and tightened over the Kron’tyr frame, and with an extended grip the talons cut along the mortar wall, dragging deep grooves into the masonry with a sharpening echo in the room.

Vyrabron, prone to little emotions, had at least some basic level of understanding the hunt, and in some small, variable way, he could assume it was the so called pleasure of the hunt. Just as he was nearing her, a mere ten paces away a door shot open. Vyrabron instantly reached into his subconscious for stealth protocols as a restaurant owner took his meager, rotting food and dumped it in the alleyway. He looked up to the woman, his eyes filled with frustration from a long day and with screech in his native tongue he thickly began shouting.

“Get out of here you urchin rat! Go on, get! You will not be eating my scraps tonight, mongrel!” The woman looked to him, as if to say something, but before she could formulate words the man’s mouth opened to shout at her again. Yet instead of a tongue their was a glistening spray of mist, followed by the ringing of metal on bone as the talon Vyrabron had relinquished from its prison tore through his skull. Clasping around the cook’s head he squeezed, the human’s mouth gurgling in blood as terror struck his lungs silent. He hacked, gagged and wheezed, but was dragged down where the other set of talons swiped across the back of the Fallien native’s head.

He didn’t struggle anymore.

When Vyrabron looked upwards he found the woman was already giving into an earth eating run for her life. Annoyed, Vyrabron narrowed his gaze and with no sound he gave chase after his prey.

[Mordelain]

Mordelain paid no heed to the nagging doubt at the back of her mind that boisterously voiced its concern for her wellbeing.

“Come on, you stupid jihta,” she cursed. She knew she was in danger. It was the only word in Fallien’s pervasive and difficult tongue that seemed appropriate. She would have been stoned had she uttered it in front of one of the guards. Suresh, her mentor, friend, and benefactor had refrained from telling her what it meant exactly, only that it was the word to use.

Peril had, in her short stay in Fallien, become almost second nature to the il’Jhain runner. Wherever it was outrunning a sandstorm that could quite literally flay you alive, or teetering over rocks to avoid tumbling into quicksand, it was a way of life for the people of the desert. Succumbing to daggers and backstabbing, however, was less intrinsic to the environment. She had come too far to be ended by another’s midnight schemes.

The sound of her feet padding against the dusty stone was outweighed by the tinkling and soft melody of her bells as they dangled from her extravagant garb. As the summer zenith gave rise to more and more religious festivals in praise of the She-goddess Jya, her duties to the gleaming white walls of the Abdos had faded, and her respite had afforded her the ability to don her traditional and cultural garb. She cursed its flamboyance and weight as she grits her teeth and pushed on. She turned a corner, then another, and then a curved road cut her off from the view of her pursuer.

Her heart continued to race, even though her feet were still and her body tired from the sudden exertion. It dawned on her, between heavy breaths, that there was no all too familiar sound of pursuit. There was no heavy footfalls, no angry shouts, and no shadows dancing on the walls of the idle abodes that lines the vein like avenues.

“This is strange,” she whispered. Her experience of being chased was telling her that there should be signs. There were no clear as day heralds of her doom ascending or descending upon her location. “Very strange indeed,” she cocked her head to the disappearing street and waited, transfixed to the spot. A logical move would have been to continue her escape, to flitter into the shadows, to disembark the dangerous twilight. Something, something distinctly un-like her kept her fixed on the spot.

Mordelain felt a surge of energy rise up from the ground and into her thighs. Like adrenaline tightening muscles in a sprint, the energies that bound the nine realms of the Kalithrism called to her. Her urge to flee began to run wild, but she fought it, sweating all the while, kukri in her hand, and waited to see if her paranoia had gotten the better of her.

[Herald of the Storm]

Cold eyes peered out from behind the husky façade which Vaahnzerekh wore. Those eyes calmly took in everything, the woman’s appearance, the restaurateur’s death, and Vyrabron’s pursuit without so much as batting an eyelash. In sharp contrast, the face’s thick jowls curled downwards in a severe show of displeasure. Vaahnzerekh himself felt nothing stirring in his breast as he watched these events unfold, but the Storm Herald’s overwhelming command towards mimicry made the grimace a reflexive.

It was only after Vyrabron disappeared around the corner that Vaahnzerekh was able to overcome his body’s inertia and make his own move towards chase. Once again his choice of targets to inhabit came back to bite him as he did so however, and the Kron’tyr construct was forced to a panting stop after half a dozen steps. He could feel the merchant’s false heartbeat hammering in his mind as his weight griped him in a constrictive vise. While it was a perfect disguise for blending into the crowded streets of Irrakam, the merchant’s corpulent frame was completely ill-suited to the task of chasing down the Kron’tyr’s voyeur. It was very apparent to the construct that he would need to lose the body quickly if he wished to have any chance of catching up to Vyrabron and their prey.

The most obvious choice, of course, lay in a still-twitching heap at the fat merchant’s feet. It was a suitable enough vessel Vaahnzerekh supposed, though the restauranteur’s stocky frame was far from ideal. The nature of the wounds which had ended the man’s life were dire enough that the preservative functions of Vaahnzerekh’s power orb wouldn’t be able to seal them till well after the chase would have ended, but it also meant that the debilitating effects of his mimicry would be offset and less of a weight on his shoulders. With a thought, the merchant’s fatty bulk parted away from the construct’s dark frame and fell into a wet heap beside him. Freed, Vaahnzerekh swept aside the matted clots of bloody mud clumped alongside the dead restaurateur’s wounds and entered the body, assuming direct control.

With no more time to spare, especially given the worried nature of the voices approaching his position from within the building, Vaahnzerekh’s new body shook off the malaise of death and propelled itself off a nearby rubbish bin. Head swimming from the confusing mixture of his mimicry’s death desire, the restorative aura of his power orb, and the rush of beginning a hunt, Vaahnzerekh swung himself up to the rooftops and burst into a sprint. He was already at full stride by the time the screams began behind him.