Cradle of the Filthy

[Rogue]

She slinked through the woods speedily, leaving a trail of small overturned rocks, unrooted ferns, and snapped branches, carefully keeping to the shadows as she moved.

It wasn’t long before she came upon the group. There were four of them moving together, all dressed in practical dark colours. All of them carried swords. Their faces were uncovered. She trailed them quietly while sticking to the trees to the side of them.

Darger’s blond hair was easily recognizable. He was leading the group, and it was obvious from the way he swaggered up front. The rest were Darger’s cronies, boys whose names Arainthe never bothered to learn. They stuck close to Hruine’s marked trail. From their whispered conversation, it sounded like they were getting more anxious.

“Where is she?” Darger scrowled. His eyes at times darted left and right, before always returning to the front.

The rest of his boys shrugged. One said: “Are we sure we’re following the right person? It’s just a hood. Anyone could be under it.”

Ah, Arainthe thought, sidestepping a gnarly root to avoid tripping, and then avoiding a patch of dried leafs. Her senses were heightened from a shot of fear and adrenaline, and while her targets were careful to stay soft, their words still carried to her.

Darger glared at the one who spoke. His expression was ugly and heated. “I bribed those guards. They saw her face. Shut up.”

It was stark clear who he was after. She had a bright red target painted on the hooded cloak. Also, she would have words with the guards when she got back.

There was a palpable chill growing at her back. Darger didn’t take well to being insulted, especially in front of an audience, and Arainthe knew this since the first day she met the boy. She also knew Darger was a spiteful little snake. She had seen it in the Temple, had seen the revenge he heaped on those whom he perceived had wronged him, and she had fended off his attacks herself. It rarely got physical, but he was the son of a noble and the coin was a powerful motivator. Bribery and squeezing his target dry of resources -- shutting down their access to the instructors, to the storehouse of daily ware, to the fucking kitchens -- were his preferred form of attack. His tactics rarely worked on her because she had friends at lower places, and it infuriated him.

So what was he after, here? What exactly was he planning?

Her targets stayed quiet, but from the tightness with which they gripped their swords, from the way Darger gripped something around his neck, and from the ugliness on Darger’s face, Arainthe could guess that their feud was about to get physical.

She breathed. Her foot slipped on a rock. Her arm crushed against a tree.

“Who’s there?” Darger and his crew reacted, their eyes shooting to her direction in a flash.

Shit. Arainthe cursed beneath her breath. In the next second, she was running, silence be damned. Their flurry of footsteps soon followed.

She was more at home in the wilderness than they were. She moved faster. She tracked better. She knew her directions. She dressed well for moving, and she had an adrenaline spike on her side. It wasn’t long before she lost both sight and sound of her followers. Later, logic would tell her that they wouldn’t dare follow too closely, because what if they lost sight of Hruine’s chalk trail? There was a very real possibility of getting lost in this forest.

Soon, she found her way back to the trail of overturned rocks and snapped branches. As she forged forward, Arainthe weighed her options. What should she do now? She was on Hruine’s trail, and Darger was on hers. Darger and his cronies weren’t the friendly sort. She hadn’t intended to be very friendly to Hruine either. Maybe it was time to make some friends.

Up ahead was the rotting carcass of a very dead deer, where vines had began to show through the carcass’s bones. It marked a turn in the trail, which led back towards Hruine’s chalk-marked trees. Arainthe shivered. At the very least, it would be nice to have one less enemy.

[Rogue]

Journeying beside Hruine was very similar to journeying behind him. It speedy, efficient, and neither of them spoke. She saw him glancing at his compass and marking his trail. He made no effort to hide that. His compass was strange and glowed with an eerie blue light, and it didn’t look like it was always pointing north.

“What is it?” she asked eventually, curiosity getting the best of her.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled further ahead.

He didn’t trust her and watched her for treachery. That was obvious from the flicker of his eye, from his flinches when she made a noise, from the way he kept her at arm’s length. She absolutely planned on treachery, but not at this point of the journey. Not when he made such a convenient shield. Not when she could once again hear Darger and his cronies and their plodding footsteps.

The pace of the journey grew harder, and the glow of Hruine’s compass intensified. Before long, the compass flashed white twice, and the glow disappeared altogether.

At last, they were at their destination. The Tomb of Alkar'chuhan stood across a narrow river.

It was built like a tiered pyramid and at least half the size of the Temple. There were at least four floors protruding from the ground. The structure was built from hefty grey rocks, hewn smooth by age. Moss and ferns had sprouted between the bricks of stone, vines seemed to have burrowed through some bricks. Strangely enough, there was a waterfall running down one side of the pyramid into the river, and no visible entrances.

The entire area smelled of age and damp. The plants here were so deeply green that they seemed almost black.

“Stay here,” Hruine said curtly. Then he waded his way into the river, clothing and boots and all, and passed under the waterfall.

“Right,” Arainthe muttered. As if I’d listen.

Then she stripped off her cloak and outer tunics, rolled up her leggings, and took off her boots. Rolling everything into a bundle and clenching it tight to her chest, she made her own way across.

[Rogue]

There was a different world at the other side of the waterfall. An aged, dank world that smelled like sharp pine and sweet rot. There were no green growth here, but there was a dust and a thick layer of ash on the ground. They stood in a large hall covered in shadows with giant statues lining the two sides, and there were crumbling doorways towards the back of the hall. The air felt wet and cold, and she could clearly see Hruine shiver. Serves him right. What sort of idiot went into the river with all their clothes still on?

He glared at her approach, and then snapped his fingers to start a fire. It glowed in the center of his palms. “I thought I told you to stay?”

She ignored him. Her inner shirt was wet, so she stripped it off, fully aware that he was watching. He turned away at the first peek of her stomach. The bundle against her chest, however, proved to be mostly dry. She shrugged into her outer tunic and boots. Then she pulled her wet hair into a tight bun, and tied it with a leather cord. Much better.

“Here,” she said, tossing him her cloak. “It’s dry.”

He caught it with his free hand, and stared at her.

“It’s dry and this place is cold,” she explained, peering at their surroundings. “You’re wearing velvet. They don’t dry well, or quickly. Even with a fire.”

What sort of idiot wore velvet in the wilderness anyways? She hadn’t realized it at first, but it was blatantly clear once she started walking with him. It was surprising how little he knew about surviving the world outside in general. He was better than her in every way at magics and sorcery, better than anyone else in the Temple, but it would be a wonder if he survived outside of Temple for very long.

He nodded eventually, and extinguished the fire in his hands. WIthout another word, he peeled off his wet things, and swung her cloak around him. She was not so polite about not looking, and stared at his muscled back in interest. He pulled up the hood too, and she thought she saw a hint of flush on his face.

Interesting.

“I’ll wait --” She had barely finished the sentence before the waterfall rippled again. Blond hair. It was followed by three additional ripples.

Her lips snapped shut. Hruine’s back was facing the waterfall and he was wearing her cloak. She was half hidden in the shadows and darkness of the hall. She saw Darger’s blue eyes glint in the dark, catching sight of her cloak. She his hands moved towards his sword. She saw water drip from his toothy grin. He looked like a drenched snake about to pounce.

She would have no better opportunity.

“Help me,” she whispered.

Without another word, she sprinted for doors at the back of the hall, even as she heard Darger roar and drew his blade, and the cacophony of his cronies footsteps.

[Rogue]

She didn’t stick around to see what happened.

No one picked a fight with Hruine because no one won fights against Hruine. This was a fact. Hruine never walked away from a fight until it ended and he won. That was also a fact. There were four of them though. She grinned as she sprinted away. This meant that either Hruine would walk away weakened, or Darger and his cronies would walk away with numbers reduced. EIther outcome would be in her favor.

The thought of Darger and Hruine joining hands did cross her mind. Then she waved it away as unlikely. Hruine did not take well to being attacked from the back. She had seen similar situations back at the Temple, and not once had Hruine stopped to talk or listened to the other side.

Even so, she couldn’t count on herself being safe yet. In the best case scenario, she would find the Diadem before their fight ended, and slip away quietly. In the worst case scenario, she should prepare herself to face the victor of this battle.

Past the hall and through the door, there were two fleet of stairs, one leading up and the other down. The ones going up were in terrible shape, cracked missing entire stretches of steps. The ones going down were relatively whole. Arainthe went up.

She remembered the whispers eavesdropped from Old man Taius’ office yesterday. The sanctum is up.

The shape of this story was clear in Arainthe’s mind. Mistress Moore came looking for an apprentice, but did not announce it as such. Instead, there as an absurd quest to a little-known area in the forest surrounding the Temple. Old Main Taius then took Hruine aside and spoon-fed that rich bastard with information and a magic compass. Only one of them was ever meant to get through this game. The whole situation smelt like a set-up, a scripted game. She fully intended to destroy that script.

Going up meant hopping up a series of circular stairs that grew thinner and more fragile towards the top. There were four floors, and the fleet of stairs stopped at each one. It was unfortunate that her eavesdropped conversation did not yield more details. Arainthe gritted her teeth, and set about exploring each one.

Time slipped by as she carefully shifted her way through each floor. Blood pounded in her ears, blocking out sound. She heard the occasional roar or clang of sword against something else, which reassured her that the boys were still having fun. Soon, she was covered to the elbows with dust, dirt, ad grime, and her boots squelched with more than water.

She did not find the sanctum on the final floor. She found it on the third.

She would have almost missed it, if she hadn’t slipped and fell into it. There was a half-rotted wooden trap door in a small corner of a room, which opened to a musty tunnel. She fell into the trap door and decided to follow the tunnel, and it led to a sunlit chamber.

The chamber was the only spot with natural light that she had found in all her explorations. The walls were still built from rocks, and there were manuscripts engraved on them in a script she did not recognize. Four small statues of a hooded, masked man stood at the four corners, and all of them were carved from some black stone with red jeweled specks for eyes. A large, circular portion of the roof was made from glazed glass, which served to let light in, and also colored the chamber in a reddish, brownish hue. The glazed glass painted pictures of old mysticism, ancient gods and demons with teeth rearing and claws bloodied.

It was a beautifully well-preserved room.

There was a small raised pedestal in the center of the room, and atop it sat a small crown. The blue gem in the center of the diadem twinkled.

The roar in Arainthe’s ears came to a crushing halt. Ah, she thought in absolute silence. The Zaharberritze Diadem

[Rogue]

For a moment, Arianthe could only stare at the Diadem. Then the world came roaring back, and she snapped out of her reverie. Victory was within her grasp, and it came more smoothly that she could have hoped.

Except it didn’t.

It didn’t, because her ears hadn’t heard the clang of blades and the roar of battle for quite some time, and Arainthe had not noticed. It didn’t, because Hruine had just stepped into the room with one bloody blade in his hands, and he was growling harshly. He was still wearing her cloak, though the cloak now spotted a large rip and was missing the hood.

“Get away,” he said, voice guttural and coarse. His eyes were hard, his gaze leveled at her neck.

“No,” she said, her right hand clenching to spark the power within herself, and her left reaching towards the Diadem.

She had barely taken a step when he roared, and the sound stopped her completely. She flung the power collecting in her right hand, but it dissipated into nothingness before reaching Hruine. Then, it was as though some external power was enforced upon her body, sealed all her limbs and senses, and she could not physically take another step. She dropped to her knees and stayed there. Her mind battered against the force to no avail. She could only watch, silent and unmoving, as he stepped past her, and picked up the prize. Without looking at it, he folded the diadem into a pouch on his belt.

The frustration and hate that swelled up inside her like a scorching fireball, and it was more intense than anything she had felt before. It found its way out her throat as a shrilled shriek, and that seemed to have partially broke the spell. She found her voice back.

“No,” she gasped, still fighting. “No, dammit.”

He glanced at her. “Weak,” he said. “You have no will.”

She hurled insults at his back in every language she could think of. When that failed to draw a reaction, she asked him: “How? How do you have so much power still?”

“I have will,” he said, carefully sweeping the rest of the chamber. “More than you. Enough to hold you in place.”

She spat on the ground. “You know what’s on the line. I know what’s on the line. I want this. You have time. I don’t.”

He found nothing else of interest and turned to leave. He paused at the tunnel’s doorway. “I don’t,” he whispered. “I don’t have time, and I want this more.”

Then he left.

[Rogue]

The magic in the chamber disappeared as soon as Hruine left. More than just the force holding Arainthe in place, the magic preserving the chamber also dissipated. The world around her lost its light.

The script on the walls became illegible, and the light from the roof went away. Mossy growth appeared on the glazed glass, and the pedestal in the center of the room rumbled and cracked in two. Only the four statues in the corner of the room remained.

She picked herself up slowly and painfully, heavy with a sense of defeat. Victory was within her grasp, and then it slipped away. How many times have that occurred in her life? This was one of the worst and the hardest to swallow.

Arainthe wasn’t sure how she stumbled back through the tunnel, and into the room that held the trapdoor. She couldn’t remember how she made her way back to the rounded stairways, and began her track down.

Defeat was not a foreign sensation, and she had once known helplessness quite well. As a child with a single parent who grew up amongst the unsavory in the streets, she had tasted defeat in words and the physical. Then, when her mother passed away under strange circumstances while Arainthe was in her early teens, she had know helplessness intimately. She had her home and only family in one fell swoop, and had wandered lands with barely a penny to her name.

Helplessness and defeat? She knew it more intimately than any of her fellow fool acolytes in the Temple.

Then she found the Order of Mal’Talzin and the Temple of Praxeum, and a hint of a strange connection between them and her mother. It took every she had to force her way in back then. She was deemed talentless and had to trick her way into the Temple. Since then, with her continued survival no longer a question mark, she threw herself into the craft of sorcery, delving deeper with every breath that she drew. This was something that she could do, could be good at and control. With this, she could have a real future, and possibly a chance to investigate the past. She lacked will? Don’t tell her she lacked will.

And yet, everything was slowly slipping away from her grasp.

She growled once in frustration, and her foot stepped heavier than it should. The stair beneath her feet trembled, and the sound reverberated around her. Something above her cracked. Then something below her cracked. The next thing Arainthe, knew, she was falling.

[Rogue]

Her body twisted involuntarily in mid-air and her arms snapped up to guard her face. The debris that came crashing down with her struck her bared arms and back of her neck and drew blood.

The sensation of falling gripped her heart. Wind struck at her ears. The whip-lash of fear that gripped Arainthe was startlingly strong, grasping her like some giant claw squeezing tight around her throat, her limbs, her chest. She couldn't breath and had to claw for every gasp of air. The fear sharpened that veil of dark thoughts thad settled around Arainthe. All that flashed through her mind were anger anger anger fear.

What did dying feel like?

Arainthe didn't want to know.

She knew the feelings of absolute defeat and helplessness and even hopeless. She knew what it felt like to almost-have and then lose. She knew every shade of anger and frustration in between. She did not want to know how death felt.

Death was staring at her in the eye. She was struggling to live, damn it. She barely had a past, and she wanted to have a future.

Her teeth gritted, and she pushed away the crystalized dark feelings that were filling her mind. Hruine said she lacked will, didn't he? Instead, she drew her hands together, cusped them together, and willed to all the gods that she knew, pouring all her desire to live into her will. Power blasted out of her cupped hands, and she flung her arms downwards. The power materialized as a force that pushed her back from the ground, and it broke the velocity of her fall.

Then, with a dull thud, she landed on her back.

Her back exploded in pain. Beside her, debris landed, and some of it struck her face and throat. Everything hurt. She croaked.

What did dying feel like?

I don't know.

But the will to live felt like unpleasantness and pain. Arainthe laughed in hysterical euphoria.

[Rogue]

She searched the corpses before leaving, and found an interesting vial of powdery substance. It was on a chain around Darger’s neck, and the vial was completely unmarked. She sprinkled some of the content on a small colony of ants near the Tomb entrance and studied the effects with interest. There was little doubt that Darger had intended to use the vial on her.

Suddenly, she didn’t feel as terrible about leaving their corpses out in the open.

There was also a small blowdart hanging off Darger’s belt. Arainthe took that too. Then she peeled off her boots, made her way out of the waterfall and across the river, and back to dry land.

Overhead, the day had began to fade. The shadows of the forest was growing darker, and soon there would be no light to follow a trail.

There were little doubt that Hruine would be following his own chalk marks back. Arainthe, too, was sure that she could move faster, run quicker, and track his progress at the same time. She just had to be a little faster, a little earlier. He did better than her in the art of sorcery and magecraft, but she had the upper hand out here.

She just had to grit her teeth and do it.

She took off at a dash, darting through the trees, tracking Hruine’s chalk marks and shoe prints and the damage a man would do to the wilderness if he lumbered through it without care. She sprinted, pushing her legs to the limits.

I have no will? Her teeth bared. I’ll show you.

The Mistress had said that she waiting, and the task wasn’t over until someone actually brought the diadem to her. Which meant everything was still fair game until then.

She should have realized this earlier. That would have spared her this trip. It could have spared her a lot more, too.

She found him eventually. He had wrapped her cloak around him tightly. The night was coming, and the forest was getting colder. He was moving more slowly than she would have expected too, and there was a slight limp on his left leg.

Good, she thought, and flashed to the side. Now, all she had to do was to circumvent him, and get back sooner.