The Guardian Quetzalcoatl, Provoked

Not a country of its own, yet given the title of its own place and history, the Tular Plains is not how myth would imagine it. Habitating the southern peninsula of the main Althanas continent, it holds recognition as being both the homeland to demons, vampires and other darker races, and also various entrances to the hells. In this spirit one might imagine that all it is is a land of fire and brimstone, where eyes can only see death. The truth is rather opposite - for though decay does lurk in the darker corners the land itself is full of life. A thriving temperate forest filled with wildlife sits aside vast plains. Villages sprawl beside mighty fortresses, though the dead live here as much as the living do. Great demon lords and half-fallen angels dwell in temples and on thrones, but rule just as righteously, as peacefully and as honourably.

In the small place known as Tucanon the people were devoted to such a mysterious lord. A beast of great proportions who had, since anyone could remember, lived amongst the tall, full trees of the forest. The small villages that depended on his protection from other deities pledged themselves to him. They left offerings of meat, grain and on harsh winters, human sacrifices. The guardian lord brought peace and prosperity, and never attacked them ... unless provoked.

"My lord! The guardian of Tucanon Forest has been provoked!"

So puffed the exhausted messenger rushing into the huge stone temple. Dark and grey the entire place was a dreary one in the exterior, only made more glamorous with a hundred bright torches. Two lords, one with flaxen hair and fat, the other white-haired, gorgeous looking and thin, looked up from the stone dais where they sat discussing.

The messenger came to a screeching halt as his hooves, for he was a twisted form of a faun, came to a halt. He had dark blue skin and numerous grey tattoos over his body.

The fat lord stood, robes of white falling about him.

"What?" He asked, incredulous. "The guardian of ... How?"

"The people - talk of a - a brown haired man," the messenger puffed out in staggered words. "Who ... They did not give details."

"Who did not?"

"The villagers ... They call for help."

The large man looked shocked, his chest heaving up and down. Looking left to right in uncertainty he seemed to struggle to gain understanding of the situation.

"Why should you give help?" a smarmy, chilling but seductive voice came.

The messenger looked over to the other lord, brows rising to the height of his horns.

"Sir?"

The other lord also looked over, long confused. "Quansaldo, I have an agreement, a responsibility to make a move if one of the ancient guardians goes awry."

"'Goes awry'?!" Quansaldo laughed mockingly, "You lot ... You really are ..." He waved a hand, still grinning. "It is that important to you?"

"... Of the utmost," the fat lord said, actually the demon lord Sabazios, of Excess, frowning at Quansaldo's reaction. "You ... Do not think I should go?"

"No, you have work here, with me," Quansaldo shook his head, also known as Vindrexis, half-god and originally from a far distant planet. He paused, and then a light lit in his eyes. "Ah, send Avin."

Sabazios rose his brows. "Send ... Avin?"

"Indeed," Vindrexis Quansaldo grinned from messenger to demon lord.

And they agreed.

And that was that. Hence me ending up outside the Tucanon forest, sighing as I saw smoke rising from the trees.

It looked like the guardian's rampage to its former guardees had begun. I gripped my naginata with a growl forming in my throat. This was not going to be very fun.

The trees danced gently, branches shaking around swaying trunks. Great rocks jutted out from the peat clotted forest floor, lichen and dead leaves atop dirty ground. Leopold Winchester strolled through a clearing not one hundred feet from the edge of the village, spear held aloft in his left hand, the fingers of his right splayed to read the wind. It was not the first time the merchant found himself drawn to the aide of people beset with a monster’s ravage. This time, however, the people needed his help because he had dared to presume he was better than the beast that slumbered in these lands.

“You have a wonderful way with words, sir.”

Jeren Silvers, his long-standing man servant, man at arms and moral compass, walked alongside his employer with a hand resting casually on the hilt of his rapier. He held no thoughts of needing to be carefully, there was little you could do to hide from a gigantic winged creature that encapsulated the heart of storms and the eyes of hurricanes. The wry smile on his face told all he had no intentions of reminding Leopold of this.

“Shhh,” the merchant hissed. He tensed, as though that single phrase would bring the heavens down on them both.

“Forgive my uncouthness, but isn’t time you admitted your mistakes and tackled them head on?”

Leopold stood upright, a frown on his face that displayed his realisations. He turned to Jeren and prodded his spear tip at the man’s chest.

“The only mistake I see is bringing you with me.”

“contrary to popular belief, I’m very much the reason you’re still alive.” He made to count all the times he had saved Leopold from certain death, eternal incarceration, or evisceration at the hands of primordial beings.

“You’re enjoying this.” The merchant pouted.

“Immensely,” Jeren replied. He dropped his hands to his sides and pointed north, between the copses of hawthorn and weeping willows that marked the edge of the village and the commencement of the hinterlands proper. Whilst Leopold had tried so intensely to find tracks of their quarry, he had focussed too hard on the ground. Jeren saw the crackles of lightning and the hum of the creature’s radix almost immediately.

“What am I looking at?”

“Oh, I don’t know, how about the prangs of lightning dancing in the tree tops?” Jeren rolled his eyes and felt the pull of his sword and the conscience within. The man at arms faded and Syrian appeared with a thirst for sarcasm and put downs.

“Oh.” Leopold readied his spear and cantered forwards, pulling down the goggles resting on his hat to give himself a magical view of the woods. Green tint cast the trees ablaze, and through the gaps in the trees he could see something behemoth-like skulking in a nest of toppled trees. “Let’s get to it, then!” he said over his shoulder.

Syrian was behind him, silent and grinning from ear to ear. He fired a flare gun over his own shoulder towards the village, to indicate to the other hunters and the ‘sentry’ of these strange backwater people that they had found the beast and were doing what only stupid ignorant men did. They were running straight at the god of thunder.

Thunder and lightning crashing around them would have absolutely terrified a normal person. A tree burst into flames, only for the flames to be blasted away by a massive thunderclap a moment later. A normal person would have been hiding, terrified in their village, waiting for someone to save them, or for the embrace of oblivion to release them from their terror. A tree was smashed by a massive tail and crashed to the ground -

And a figure, so small in comparison to the mighty beast that was the source of the devastation, rolled out of the way, narrowly avoiding the tee lbs that would have pinned him down and spelled his doom. Despite the narrow brush with death, there was a wide, brilliant grin splitting the man's face as he came to his feet. He hadn't bothered drawing his sword - there was nothing the simple iron blade would be able to do to harm this glorious creature. He needed range, needed a distraction of some kind.

Erik had no earthly clue just why this massive winged serpent was so enraged. He had woken from... Well. From what most would normally consider a permanent sleep, back at the smoldering remnants of a campfire that he had slept at a few days ago - really, the last time he slept. He had plunged off the side of a cliff he was trying to work his way across - some of the stone beneath him had crumbled away at a rather inopportune time for him, and he had fallen down to the sea below. Or rather, to the large and pointed spires of rock that emerged from the sea below. The implement had been rather painful, but at least he had expired quickly enough.

But so, he had woken up at the last place he had slept - and found a destructive beast raging across the forest he had been in just days before. A normal person would have been terrified in this situation - but a manic smile had spread across Erik's face. How fortuitous for him - this thing was definitely large enough to have a Grand Soul inside of it, which meant he wouldn't have to hunt down a large amount of forest animals to regain his Humanity. And it was already attacking, which meant there would be no need to feel bad about defending himself.

So to keep the crazed serpent from leaving the forest, and attacking the Flame only knew what else, Erik had picked up anything he could grab and thrown it at the thing, getting the winged beast to focus its attention on him. The lightning plunging from the sky to hit the ground was nothing new to the sage - in fact, it was actually more normal than the fights he had been in before, because this thing seemed to just generate the lightning and call it to the area, it didn't have the fine control necessary to directly target him.

In the end, t was just another big winged lizard. It didn't even have claws with which to attack, just its tail - and the occasional blast of lightning from its mouth. But for a man who had once fought dragons, dodging lightning was just as easy as dodging fire. Meaning, he had taken a few shocks, but avoided the brunt of the damage. And hey, he was already well used to electrocuting himself - messed up Lightning Miracles tended to shock the unfortunate caster.

Flame curse it, it was just his luck that this world didn't have soapstones. Summoning a phantom to help in this battle would have been a huge boon. He needed to get the time to get his great bow out and start shooting this thing. Even if they were of iron, the hard metal spear-arrows would hurt even this thing. Still. It was just a big snake with wings. He would kill it eventually - it might take him a few tries, and he would almost certainly die repeatedly to this thing before he figured out its patterns of attack and its weak spot - but Erik was proof positive that 'the bigger they are, the hader they fall' was an effective strategy.

So it was just a matter of time. And he certainly had plenty of that to spare. So he dodged another tree just as it was set ablaze, and waited for his opportunity.

“The Tular Plains?” William asked skeptically.

“Indeed,” the Keeper said, his attention spread between the three massive tomes lying open in front of him. This left very little attention for William, who found it quite rude to be summoned as he had been only to be immediately shunted off to one side as an afterthought.

“Southwestern Tular, in the village of Tucanon that lies within the forest of the same name, to be exact.” There was no just no talking to the monk when he was like this. Any other man would have been wrested from his seat and threatened by the revenant until William was satisfied with all of the answers that the man had to give. Dealing with the Keeper wasn’t a normal situation however, as the man in front of him was actually just a solid illusion construct that had been created to house the consciousness of the true Keeper many hundreds of miles away.

“And what am I supposed to do there?” William sighed, deciding as always that it was simply just faster to go along with the Keeper’s nonsense. He thought about what he knew of the Tular Plains. Though he’d never been there himself the place help quite the reputation as a breeding grounds for all sorts of unsavory types. It made a certain sense that his power would be needed to put down some errant demon lord or godling who’d risen too far for his own good.

“You’re to protect Tucanon from its spiritual guardian and also to protect that guardian from the people trying to hunt it,” the Keeper said.

William blinked. “What?”

“It’s gone crazy, you see. But it can’t be killed, or rather, it shouldn’t be killed. Sadly there’s quite the lot already lined up to take a stab at the old flying serpent, including some of the local talent.”

“I’m supposed to guard a crazy, rampaging flying snake god?”

The Keeper paused at this, a slight smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Indeed.”

“How in the spirits-damned realms is that supposed to help me achieve apotheosis?” William shouted. He threw his hands up in frustration, making sure to stay well away from the Keeper’s books. Throwing a tantrum was no reason to be rude after all, and the Keeper was trying to help him even if he was being an ass about it. That was just his way.

“I’m not sure,” the Keeper answered truthfully. He shrugged off William’s glare apologetically and pointed at his own head. “You know that these forms of mine are somewhat restrictive in how much knowledge I can bring into them. I’d be more than happy to fill you in on all the details the next time you’re in the Monastery, but sadly you don’t have time to make the trip right now.

“Because, I’m guessing, I need to get to this Tucanon Village as quickly as I can?”

The Keeper nodded, “indeed.”

*****

William glared at the smoke pouring out of the treetops and spat out a curse. It appeared that the flying snake had already lost its mind. Even so it could be worse he thought as a thick vine of scales and feathers rolled over the treetops before darting back down into cover. At least the hunters down there hadn’t yet had time to kill the beast.

He pulled on his reigns and the massive apix he was riding jerked to a halt. The thing was a local animal, sort of a cross between a horse and an iguana, and it had been bred for travel in the swampy overgrown that was common in this part of Tular. It hadn’t come cheap and it was almost as ornery as William himself, but the trek through the Tucanon Forest would have taken three times as long without it.

The beast remained placid as William dismounted and tied its reigns to the low branch on a nearby dander tree. The apix eyed him once and went back to stoically ignoring him, for which William was extremely grateful. He didn’t have time to waste on wrestling a stupid mount under control. Not if the roars and the screams from Tucanon Village were any indication.

“Stay here,” he ordered to apix, not that the creature would understand or obey if it had half the mind. Hopefully the dander tree was strong enough to hold the thing because William was leaving half his equipment behind with it. This part of the Tucanon Forest wasn’t the most densely populated part of the woods, but there was still enough foliage to catch anything loose that he might have jutting out at an odd angle. To that end William left most of his travelling gear tucked away in the apix’s saddle pack, taking only his the breastplate he wore and the massive dragon bone cleaver that he currently had strapped to his back.

He was more familiar with his warscythe, but somehow felt that he’d need the extra protection the massive Carver would afford him in his instance. Besides, bone weapons were still decently common in the more savage backwoods areas of Tular, he understood, so maybe no one would think it odd that he carried a massive sword made of the stuff. Especially when that sword was worth more than the entire village of Tucanon all put together.

William turned and ran down into Tucanon Village, keeping his human guide in place to as to not frightening the already panicked villagers even more.

"So," I grunted. "You burn and shoot lightning. How fun."

I shifted my naginata, watching from the branch of the tree I was in. Before me the great beast that I had been told was called Quetzalcoatl by the people it has sworn to protect. Shimmering greens and blues it was nearly fifty feet in writhing length, with a mighty wingspan that was close to the same. Beating it's lofty and feathery appendages it curled around huge limbs of trees and beat thunders of air, literally waves of mighty wind that flattened an oak or two, before lunging at various villagers.

Far to the west lay their village, almost in ruins now. The fire that had been summoned by the monster, likely by lightening or possibly a dragon-like breath, had been burning for a few hours now. Likely already one entire village had been decimated by this coiling, gorgeous beast. I admired the way it's scales seemed to merge into feathers, and then rise again on its underbelly. Truly, it glistened when it caught the light and I caught myself hungering to just watch in awe.

There was a flash of a bright light somewhere. A ... Bang of some sort, and it came from the trees to my west. Taking in a breath I gave a last look to the battling monster who was pausing as it balanced on three large tree trunks and had its head thrown back. Then I held tightly onto my spear and began the descent back onto the ground, knowing what I had to do.

Protect the villagers and calm the beast who could cause whirlwinds with his wings and possibly breathe fire. As I took the last leap onto the carpet of debris, charred matter and dead leaves I saw a ... Well a tattered, skeletal man, who looked just as I really should with gaunt eyes and eerie dead features.

He held a jingling cross and looked anxious.

A priest? A dead, zombie like priest. I rolled my black eyes into my grey skull and began to hunker towards him.

"Quetzalcoatl is not to be killed," I grumbled loudly in order to try to stop him. "Oaths. Protection. S**t like that."

My eyes glanced to were a couple more men were running down the slope towards the endangered villagers.

Raising my voice I spoke again, hating it. Man I really hated to talk. It was so ... Ugh.

"Don't kill him. It," I roared as a general reminder. "Defeat him a bit, calm, rescue villagers."

Rroooaarrr ... There was a vivid clash of brightness that lit up behind me. Looking around I just saw the final sparks of lightening crashing to burn a human straight to ashes.

"... Please?"

Baring myself I slid the blade of my naginata forwards and moved to face the beast.

In all honesty then, I didn't know if I could stick to 'my rule'. Their rule. Sabazios' rule.

((First one he saw is Erik, second is Leopold and his companion.))

Leopold heard the spearman’s plea, but for a few awkward strides he tried desperately to ignore it. Only when Jeren slapped him across the bow with his flailing arm did the merchant concede the request and skid to a halt. He turned to his man at arms and stuck out his tongue.

“I was giving it some thought.”

“Thought,” Jeren wheezed, “doesn’t usually lead to you raising a spear ready to throw.”

Leopold looked at his right arm and, true enough, his sabre spear was raised, grip firm about the well-polished shaft and pointing in the general vicinity of his prey. He bit his lip, the man behind the beast emerging and realising his mistake. He lowered it and shrugged.

“He looks quite certain about his claim.” Jeren span the rapier between forefinger and thumb, flicking its edge nervously as his loyalties and morals fought a little private war in his heart.

“Let’s find out.” The merchant nodded gruffly and turned to face the spearman. He approached with a friendly smile, with a little dash of questioning added for good measure. “When you say don’t kill it…do you mean, don’t kill it a lot?” He stopped ten feet away, just out of reach of the naginata and close enough to fire point blank should he need to.

“M’lord means to ask if you know what that creature is, truly?”

The thunder god continued to rage, unaware of the decisions bringing heroes and villains to it’s proving grounds. Though Leopold had assumed it was an Old God gone awry, the look on the undead creature’s face, and the reverent presence of a dead priest made him question his view of reality.

Don't kill it. Don't kill it. Don't kill it? My wide, unblinking eyes shifted to the avian being that had approached me. It looked almost exactly like a Corvid - only it lacked the sagging, protruding intestinal tract that was a feature of all of the 'sane' members of that race. Instead, it looked more like the Corvid Assassins, those damn bouncy elites that chased me throughout the hidden world. Armed, a warrior in armor. But - there was something strange about it. It had an aura, a feel to it, that I was surprisingly familiar with, even if it was not properly the same. It was - he was? This looked like garb for a male warrior - it was Undead, like I was. Well. That.. I did not expect that. I shook my head as sharply as I could - my range of motion was a fair bit limited with the Hollowing process - and glared at him.

"That thing, is attacking these little Souls, and you think we ought not to kill it? Darkling, why in the name of the Flame would we NOT kill it?" I watched as a saw a human was burnt to ashes, his charred skeleton falling to the ground. This was definitely an immensely powerful beast - and the other Undead thought that oaths, protections, would save it? Was it a follower of this world's own Cycle? That had to be the case - but no, that didn't make sense. The cycle was about gathering as many Souls as you could in order to fuel the rebirth. Saying not to kill some enormously strong being was counterintuitive. I growled in frustration, the sound rattling from my desiccated throat. FINE. You want to keep the demented godbeast alive? Fine. I'll just maim it a little, that should be fine. I growled in frustration again and set about pulling out my bow. The weapon was none the worse for the wear in - considering my rather rough arrival to this place, I should be glad of that. I took a deep breath, and nocked one of the massive, spiraling javelin-arrows to the string and drew back, muscles straining. Oh how I weeped for my lost Souls, increasing myself had been such a .... well, literal, blessing.

THe world around me cleared away as I stilled my croaking breathing. You didn't want to kill this thing? Fine, I'll leave the overgrown serpent with stupid ass wings alive. But you can sure as hell bet I'm going to ground the bastard so the rest of you fucks can actually hit him without jumping around like loons. Another deep breath, and my angry thoughts melted away as well, leaving me alone in my own little world with the rampaging divine beast. And my bow. I drew back further, muscles screaming in protest - but what did I care, I could just die and come back after this bastard again - and narrowed my gaze. There was only me, the arrow, and the beast, more specifically, one of the two wings that were flapping frantically as it attacked around, leaving destruction in its wake.

TWANG The bowstring snapping forward kicked up a breeze around me as the twisted shaft of iron split through the air, shooting towards the base of the wing. I didn't wait to see if my attack connected - I was already nocking another arrow, to wait for another opportunity to shoot this bastard out of the sky.