Castle of the Bloody Night (Open) {October Event!}

[Slayer]

"It's Saraelian." Dan looked at the bird-woman, then to the page in his hand, and finally down to the pistol still clutched in his fist. After a moment's hesitation, his face twisting in a rare moment of puzzlement, he holstered the gun. No point wasting the bullet, he had nineteen left and they cost a pound of flesh per piece. No one had even breathed a hostile word at him, even the cat-woman, though her tone made him roll his eyes. No one had a sense of humor anymore.

Pulling a long, thin silver pipe from inside the leather jacket - which upon close inspection was dirt cheap, stitched out of irregular hides, and made to last only a few days in the Tular climate - Dan clenched it between his teeth and then shoved the pages at Stare. The odd cerulean ink, mottled with flecks of gray seemed to shiver on the stained paper, the glyphs seeming to fade her at the tip of the eye, or grow bolder when turned at another angle. "It's Siocan Saraelian, actually. Uh, they were..." he paused, frowning and thinking of the best way to put it as he pulled a match out of his sleeve and flicked it across the pipe, casting his face in an orange glow that made him look vaguely monstrous, his tired eyes hollow in the flickering little flame.

"They were primordial things. Old elementals that descendants of modern society called demons." He didn't know much about his own people, but he knew enough to pass a pop quiz. He knew their caste system was a brutally heavy chain on the necks of anyone less than a Sol, the Saraelians that "brought the sunlight down to Saraelia", or so a book in a Raiaeran library had told him. And he knew they'd killed each other in a violent war where the princes literally tore each others throats out on the battlefield. But there was more, so much more, and a little more was there in his hands, in that castle...perhaps. He'd had the vague notion that this was all too simple, and perhaps nothing more than a set up for some homicidal wizards murder game, but he'd never been killed by a wizard, and he was sure today would not be the day it happened either. Bending down, he eyed the Kenku, admiring the silky sheen of her sable feathers, wondering why he'd never seen something like her before. He pulled on the pipe, and as the ember began to glow a bright red, the smoke that wafted off of it did not smell like tobacco.

"I like you. I'm gonna keep you safe," he announced, his lips splitting open in a wide grin that somehow managed to look a bit accidentally sinister. "You all seem to be going into that castle, listening to the rabbling. Now ain't you all just the luckiest lot of shit kickers on the Plain right now? Know why? Cause I'm gonna come too, because i think the book is in there. So!" He spun away from Stare just as Nevin gently pushed open the door. His face fell in disappointment for a moment. He had been expecting some abomination of an eldritch door guard, or ballista turrets, or maybe even some sort of blood sacrifice seal of some kind, but nothing. Shrugging, he started across their makeshift campsite with long strides of his tall legs, eating up distance rapidly. He tore off the shoddy jacket and threw it by the waning fire as he passed, revealing that he was wearing just a tattered vest that had been black many washes ago, and was now a dark gray, and a white collared shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows and dotted with many old, dark stains. Butcher stains.

He didn't look back, didn't even arm himself as he crossed the threshold, only leaving behind a cloud of the harsh gray smoke behind him as castle's void swallowed him.