Sine Nomine Feels Life

[Lucien]

An opium den; the smell of the wretched plant hung heavy in the air and clung to fabric and flesh alike, as if pleading with each customer to take just one more taste. It was as foul a temptress as any disfigured whore; despite whatever faults you found in appearance, the allure was too great to ever question. Addicts lay strewn about on coaches and finely craft rugs as they gripped their pipes for dear life. They moaned and wailed with each sweet intake of the bitter taste, their tortured faces betrayed by smiles of utter bliss.

Virtue, like the quality he took for a name, felt out of place in such a den of wickedness and sin. Every alcove carved into the tan stone wall had tasseled silks lining it for clientèle to sit upon, entertained by the occasional young pretty girl in a tight fitting dress who goaded them on to spend more of their riches. It was sickening to the core that such terrible deeds were possible in the world.

Virtue covered his face with a lace handkerchief as best he could. The vile smells of urine and human degradation were as prevalent as the misty smoke the near motionless bodies produced. The moving white air had almost a dream like quality to it, and the man had to struggle to stay on his slippered feet as he crossed the stained carpets and stepped over the decaying decadent. Every movement was labored as he felt himself succumbing to the malaise of atmosphere.

At last he reached a dark back room obscured by a pair of maroon velvet curtains that slid closed with only a slight tug on a nearby rope. The room was much dimmer, with only three oil lamps atop small tables to offer any light, as well as the night sky that came through a few well placed openings to offer pale blue moonlight.

Although dim, Virtue had no trouble navigating its scarcely furnished hardwood floor. He came to rest a small brown sofa that was just firm enough to keep his generous figure from sinking within its depths. He loosened his rather plain robes just enough to leave room for his bulging stomach, and eyed the other sofa opposite him.

It was long and sky-blue; it looked handcrafted out of fine wood and plush cushion and ran along one corner of the room. On it slept two occupants; one a beautiful maiden, and the other a terrible lecher. They were curled up, holding fast to the pillows they drooled without the slightest movement aside from the soft heaving of their breath.

"Drunk asleep," thought Virtue slyly. The men he paid to carry them in were worth the price, but the half empty bottle and two goblets knocked over told him that they had helped themselves to some of his wine.

[Magdalena]

Smoke hissed at the edges of her vision, red and slow, swirling against a thick shroud of black. Through the sound of whispering snakes, Sati could hear the rhythmic strums of a sitar, a strange and obscure song in this strange and obscure world. Waves of heat rose from nothingness as the tempo quickened, soothing without, burning within, as though her body and soul had sunken into a hellish river. ‘Is this death?’ Strange, how her thoughts seemed to scatter here, like echoes in the deepest of canyons. ‘If so, then the realm of perdition is not as cold a place as I had thought.’ Mute lights flickered in the distance, glowing dimmer and dimmer, until only two red glows remained, seething fires in the smouldering night.

No breath, no heartbeat. Only a sudden brush of cold, and the blaring silence of falling snow.

The musical thrum was broken when something beat against her temple. Once. Twice. Again and again. The sides of her head flared into pain as she began registering the surrounding cacophony, a warble of noises that terribly stung. Beryl blues flickered behind quavering eyelids, and the glare of tinted oil lamps, faint as it was, made her wince. “Where...” She groaned, interrupted by the sharp knife that had just lodged itself inside her head.

‘Where am I?’ Sati pushed herself up, peeling her crimpled left cheek from a periwinkle pillow. With her returning eyesight, she took in the details of this strange locale. The face of a hulking man was first to greet her, asleep mere inches from her. She cringed at his sight and smell, rapidly turning her attention elsewhere. Rickety tables with scarcely anything atop them, save for colored lamps, were second to greet her vision. Ceiling apertures let in pale shafts from a blue moon, shafts that streams of smoke seemed to climb like ladders to the sky. ‘This smell... opium.’

And it all came back to her.

She had spent her day drinking; not the quality wine that was the norm, back in the old days, as the daughter of Baron Sarasvati, but the piss-stale beer they served in the cut-price taverns of Radasanth. Hells, even the ceremonial alcohol from her years as a Salvaran priestess had more bite. That didn’t matter, though; nothing ever did, when her sister was away on one of her extensive hunts. ‘An excommunicate priestess and an assassin, what a riot.’

Someone came to her table that evening, a fine young woman with raven hair and eyes like quicksilver, full of sinful interest. They talked, then laughed, then exchanged adventurous touches and fleeting caresses; at first, Sati only played along, but even piss-poor alcohol had a way of making someone entertain new and curious thoughts, or perhaps that was due to pinch of powder with which the stranger had surreptitiously sifted her drink. Whichever it was, Sati had followed the woman here, to this den of waking slumber, where they crossed arms and drank the quality wine that she had fancied for so long. Everything that followed was a blur.

Now, hours past midnight, she was stranded in an opium den, with some sort of drunken titan snoring next to her. She scanned the room again, this time noticing the black grime that covered the fading floorboards, the numerous footprints upon the filth a testament to the sizeable clientele that frequented this establishment. On the other end of the room, she could make out the outlines of another couch; immersed in a screen of shadows, it had hitherto eluded her attention. What surprised her, however, was the voice that came from its ghost occupant.

“I bid you welcome, lady Sarasvati.” Sati made a hasty gesture, reaching for her belt, but where should have been he handle of a sickle, her hand only met air. “I would advise you against any rash behaviour.”

“And may I ask why?” she snapped back, venom seeping from her words and, unbeknownst to the man, her hands. In the eventuality that he gave her an unpleasant answer, she was prepared to leap out and give him his due.

He remained out of sight, cloaked in the hazy darkness, which only unnerved her more. “My only wish is to speak with you.”

“Then speak.”

“I apologize, but I cannot comply – not yet. I need you both awake for that.” The silhouette seemed to shift, and the vague shape of a thick and scraggly hand could be seen under the intruding moonlight, its index extended to the loafer at her right. “A gorilla he may be, but this man sleeps like a dormouse.”

Saying nothing, Sati turned to the drooling ruffian, eyeing him with an impersonal contempt. She reached out to his hefty nose with a delicate hand, clamping it down between her thumb and index. Angling her head back to the stranger in the dark, she gave him a glare of ice, and a naughty smile.

Sati pulled, then twisted. Hard.

[Slayer of the Rot]

The Red Beast's eyes snapped open and his hand darted towards his face, snapping closed around the priestess's slender, pretty wrist in a fleshly shackle numerous times stronger than any restraint one could find in a dungeon. Grunting, he blinked, and sat up, shaking his head fiercely to throw away the sleep and the drink and the drug that had put him down so heavily. His free hand deftly lit a cigarette with a spare match, and he cast the charred thing to the floor. If he had dreamed, it had been forgotten, and pushing the useless thought out of mind, he squinted, wondering where he'd woken up, the girl's captured hand far from his thoughts.

The search for Meredith had become increasingly frustrating. He could tear down this world's greatest men with his touch, but he couldn't find a single scared little girl. Smoke poured over his top lip and into his eyes from his open mouth, but he did not flinch. He'd decided perhaps three; four days ago that fighting to alleviate his frustrations wasn't worth his time. None of the warriors or mages he had ever fought lasted long before he split them with a knife or crushed them with a sword. So he had turned to binging, liquor, whiskey, drugs, and smokes. It had taken an incredible amount of alcohol just to get him started, and he'd stuck to the shadier bars of Radasanth where the patrols never went, with his hair long around his shoulders, never once summoning a coin to pay for his drinks. Time had blurred, bunched, vanished. His shirt was wrinkled and only three cigarettes remained, along with the one he was smoking, and the whiskey still flowed in his veins. With hooded eyes, he struggled to understand where he was, though his metabolism was quickly eradicating the chemicals that hindered him. When he moved to sit back and cross his arms over his chest, pulling the girl, he remembered he still had a hold of her.

"Ugh. You've got some fucking nerve, little girl. You must be stupid, so I guess I'll forgive you for that whore." With a disgusted sneer, he threw her hand away like casting aside garbage. Bringing the cigarette to his lips, he looked at her a little closer. Those waves of scarlet hair reminded him of Claire, and hung over, with her murder still fresh in his memory, it just made him angrier at the woman. There was no denying that her beauty was incredible, the sort that took your breath across the room, and she had most likely broken thousands of hearts - though on Althanas, that translated to breaking them with a knife slipped between the ribs. However, it did little to impress him. He was swayed these days by bloodshed first, sex second.

He had awakened to a silk wrapped nightmare. As his vision cleared and his senses sharpened to their normal keen selves, he could hear the people stirring outside, could smell them, and their presence grated on him. The Red Beast slumped back into the pillows in the couch and at least thanked Hromagh for the small favor that he had came to in a sectioned off area, closed away from those lost and poor in the waking dream. And as his strange body brought itself back to normalcy, he finally took notice of the bulging shadowed form that shared the room with him and the ignorant girl.

"I don't remember coming into an opium den, as drunk as I was, last night, and I sure as fuck don't remember removing my knife from myself. You sure as shit better hope it wasn't either of you, whoever the fuck you are." Holding out his palm, the knife appeared them and he affixed the sheath to his thigh again.

"I'd like to talk business with you, sir."

"Yeah? You know who you've disturbed? Dan Lagh'ratham! The Red Beast, the Black Tree. Do you know how much blood comes with that name?" The shadowed form shrugged slowly.

"It comes by the god damn gallons," Dan snapped, and rose to his feet, summoning a titanic blade to his hand, resting the squared tip of it against the floor before throwing his arm over its hilt.

"Speak fast, motherfucker. Or you're all dead."

[Lucien]

The time for pleasantries had quickly ended as the behemoth of a man stood up in his filthy stupor. The egregious attitudes from Virtue's two guests was alarming, and he knew he had to turn the situation in his favor.

He cautiously stepped into the most well lit spot: directly in front of his guests. He slicked back his balding hair using only the thick grease he produced, and tried his best to straighten out his robes. The burning smoke stung his eyes, but the man knew he could not winch in a power play. To win these two over, he had to show he held a royal flush to their pair of sixes.

"How would you like to change the world?" He spoke with a dry passion that hid beneath it a layer of vigor. He words were clear and sweet like the poison Dan and Seti had consumed earlier, a slow acting venom that could coarse through their veins and coerce them to a more correct state of mind.

He shot a glance at the slayer and withheld the contempt he had for the murder. "Not just for the world's sake, but for your own?"