New Blood Bracket: Bearman vs. NightCast

[Tainted Bushido]

The match begins at Midnight 7/31/2009 and ends at Midnight 8/15/2009.

Best wishes to both participants!

[Bear Man]

It is often assumed by people in more temperate climates that their northern fellows have many words for snow. In the case of Eskra Pitsiark’s people—who lived in about as snowy a climate as you can find—that was not true. Eskra’s people had exactly as many words as they needed for snow: one.

What they did have was a lot of words for was darkness, as is befitting a people who live in constant mortal peril. There was the almost friendly dark-before-dawn, the new-fallen-dark, the domesticated dark-inside-houses, and of course the dark-that-dreams. Currently, Eskra was experiencing the latter. He slept. He dreamed.

Eskra Pitsiark is having the Falling Dream. It’s a dream experienced by all humans, ingrained into the species’ collective consciousness ever since the first tree-dwelling hominid fell to his death. Air whips past his face and yanks his hair upward; his arms flail in meaningless windmills. Somewhere far below he sees a grassy plain. There is nothing exceptional about this dream, except that it has been interrupted by an old man.

“You know, I never did like this dream,” the old man says. He appears to be wearing some sort of bathrobe. It has a yellow duck on it. “I always wondered: what happens if you don’t wake up when you hit the bottom?”

“I...what?” Eskra asks, dumbfounded. He is still falling. He’s reminded strongly of his first experience at the Citadel. The monks there had teleported him there in his sleep, and then spoke to him in a similarly strange and unintelligible fashion. In fact, the first thought that crosses his mind when he sees the strange man in his dream is not What’s happening? but AGAIN? which really says quite a bit about Eskra’s life up until this point when you think about it.

“Well, I’m just saying, maybe that’s why people die in their sleep. Death by falling.”

Eskra ponders this. “Is there some reason that you’re here?” He is quite certain that he did not dream the old man up. That would take some amount of imagination. Eskra has none.

“Ye-es I should probably get to the point, shouldn’t I?” The monk ponders the yellow duck on his bathrobe solemnly. Both of them continue to fall. “I do hate to do this to you, boy. We’re well aware of your history, and don’t think you’ll appreciate this, but...”

“Let me guess,” Eskra says. “I’m being kidnapped by a group of powerful dimension-travelling monks to a strange place to do battle with random people for your own amusement. How am I doing so far?”

“Er, something like that.” The expression on the monk’s face manages to remain serene and look profoundly embarassed at the same time. “It’s called the Magus.”

Eskra sighs. “Do I have any choice in the matter?”

“Well, not really...no. None at all, actually. Sorry.” The old man looks genuinely remorseful. “Look, we know that all you want is to get back to your idyllic homeland of Salivar-”

“Salvar.”

“-whatever, we understand that. So, when the tournament’s over, you can go back home. Good? Good. But now we’re running out of time. Now, listen, the arena is twenty foot square, stone. Your opponent will start at the opposite end of the room. Understand?”

“I...it’s not like I have a choice anyway, and wait, why are you telling me this? Won’t I be able to see the room once I’m in it? And why are you wearing a bathrobe?”

“Good luck!” the monk says. He gives Eskra a huge wink and vanishes. Eskra is left alone. He falls and falls. The ground looms up beneath him, and it looks decidedly unfriendly. Eskra hits the ground, and then there is only darkness.

Eskra woke up. Then he opened his eyes. Then he opened them wider. Nothing changed, except perhaps that it got a little bit darker. So this is why the old man had to describe the arena to me, Eskra thought.

In the arena, there was darkness. In most dark places, there is some light. Either the after-effects of light that once was there, or even the shadows of light that will be there, like a theater-going nobleman reserving his seat with boxes of overpriced chocolates and exploded corn kernels. In this room’s case, there was neither. The darkness made quite clear, in terms of absolute certainty, that there never was, and never would be light here. The darkness was all, alpha and omega. It was as dark as a black cat’s luck, dark as a sinner’s soul, the absolute darkness that exists only in very deep places, the depths of cold, lonely space, and the hearts of the most evil of men. This was the darkest of dark, the home of the Great Suffering Spirit Sila—a great enemy of Eskra’s people. This was the most terrible of all darkness: the primordial dark-that-eats, that speaks to the deepest rooted fears of mankind and gnaws away at the very souls of those who experience it. He could expect no spiritual help here. He was all alone.

It was very, very dark.

Eskra was not afraid. He never had been afraid of the dark, even as a child. In truth, it requires some amount of creativity to be afraid of the dark. You have to imagine what might be in it for darkness to be scary. For Eskra, it was merely darkness, and therefore he felt no fear.

Beneath his feet Eskra could feel cold, hard stone, and he guessed that the monk had told him the truth about the nature and dimensions of the cavern. No extra tricks here, then, just him and the enemy. That was better than his last fight had been. The barbarian had been forced to fight a teenage boy on an island surrounded by a lake of the liquid fire that he thought of as larva. He still remembered the sensation of his skin and bones boiling and melting in that fire; would remember it for the rest of his life. Darkness was better than that. Wasn’t it?

He wasn’t quite sure.

Eskra felt for and found his axe strapped onto his back. His axe always reassured him; in a world that quite frequently made no sense, his axe was solid, real. He took it into both hands and waited. So that was how it would be. Him against an unknown, invisible enemy. Just the two of them, and the darkness, each deprived of the sense of sight entirely. Two warriors locked in combat in the heart of darkness, strength and willpower pushed to the limit, battling for their lives and their destinies. He accepted this, and smiled ever so slightly. Something about the idea was remarkably attractive.

Eskra stood in the darkness and waited. He would have to do his best in order to return to his village and to his life as Shaman, where they surely needed him. That was, after all, what duty called for, wasn’t it? Nonetheless, some small but growing part of him was thankful for the little old men who seemed intent on kidnapping him and forcing him to do battle.

His life would be a lot less interesting otherwise.

[NightCast]

When DarkStrike is around, Morgoth is full power, as in level 1 bazillion. The introduction into the Magus Cup is him at full power and then he’ll revert to Level 0 after this ~*~. I’m picking this up right at the end of the ToC

“I really wish you would stop finding ways to get yourself impaled,” Morgoth’s spoken voice was a deep and clear baritone. The shadowy humanoid demon crouched upon the coarse cave floor where he had carried his master, the Seraphim known as DarkStrike.

“I’ll keep that in mind next time I have a ten foot avatar of a Nordic god trying to skewer me.” The response was dry, issuing from the angel propped up against the smoothly eroded walls of their most recent haven. Morgoth gave Ryondel (his master’s real name) an appraising look. Tall, lean, and handsome with medium length brown hair and hazel eyes, his appearance was marred only by his canine teeth, which were fang-like and protruded slightly forward of the rest of his teeth which were now bared in a grimace of pain as the movement of his diaphragm threatened to expel his lower intestines through a large and heavily bleeding hole in his abdominal region.

Morgoth stared at the gaping wound, completely ignoring DarkStrike’s cynical witticism. “Well, you know the drill. Gotta get that closed.”

“No,” Ryondel’s response was short.

He stared at his master with no small amount of annoyance. “Whaddayou mean ‘no’? I have no intention of trying to perform another calling. Do you have any idea how long it took me to find that gem and that dagger?”

“I know, but I can’t afford to have you draining your strength into me. I gave as good as I got to that Honuse fellow, but he’s probably still ou… Wait, didn’t you say that gem was a diamond?”

“Yeah, what of it?” Morgoth’s tribal markings that were imprinted all over his body were beginning to glow red, betraying his agitation and impatience.

“Diamond and Orihalcon blades are the only things that can cut diamond.”

“It was a curved and plain looking Orihalcon dagger; we’ve been over this, before that stupid tournament thingy,” the tribal markings now were thrown into sharp relief against the dimness of the cave, pulsating slowly like the heart of a large beast.

“’Stupid tournament thingy,’” Ryondel snorted and regretted it instantly. His bowels had just made another heroic push for freedom from within his body. Indeed, it had been that “stupid tournament thingy” that had put his master into this condition. The final fight within the tournament had resulted in a sudden loss, though DarkStrike had defeated his opponent, and then the mighty Honuse had turned his wrath upon the only person he could: his own partner. The fight had not lasted long; both combatants had stumbled away from each other in a stalemate sporting injuries that would have killed lesser beings instantly. That was when Morgoth had stepped in. Grabbing DarkStrike, he had spirited them away to the dank, moldy, and gloomy cave they conferred in now.

It was some time before DarkStrike spoke again, “Do me a favor, find that blade that you used for the calling; I want to look at it.”

“Really? You expect me to find that shit?”

“Yes, it might be Azlaylius,” DarkStrike said through gritted teeth.

“…The long lost hunting dagger of the Sky God?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh good, a quest for the lost blade of Artaria. This plan reeks of cliché-ness. In any case, I left it in the Hall,” Morgoth said, making reference to the Eternity Hall, a nearly indescribable place that existed upon the fringes of reality.

“It’ll have returned near to the place where you found it, you know that.” DarkStrike sounded thoughtful.

“Whatever. Can I heal that now so that I can just get on with this stupid quest thingy?”

“I still don’t like the idea of this, but I’m more anxious to find that dagger. You do remember that by flooding me with that much energy-“

“-Will render you senseless for about a week while making me only slightly stronger than the average human? Yes, I know; can we just get on with this please?”

DarkStrike sighed lightly, so as to not cause any further distress upon his stomach and agreed.


~*~

Morgoth peered down into the stone room, not that it helped, since he couldn’t see a damn thing. Breathing in the musty air, he found it ironic that being a shadow demon with an affinity for dark magic he couldn’t see his own feet. Hence why he had nearly fallen into the pit in front of him. It hadn’t taken him long to get to this stone structure (he had no idea what it was); the cave where DarkStrike now slept deeply, as though from too much drink, was only about ten miles to the north. Kneeling down he gazed down into the hole yawning beneath his feet. The stone was smooth and he supposed the masons who fashioned the place must been immensely gifted to have glossed down the surface of the stone to such perfection, but that point was neither here nor there. Morgoth cast about, searching the floor for something to drop into the man-sized gap in the floor. Though he had explored this place before, he had not come across this opening before; naturally, it had now become an object of some curiosity for him.

Feeling nothing loose in his immediate vicinity, Morgoth moved a little ways away from the gap to continue his search. It took about five minutes, but he managed to find a large fist-sized rock by stubbing his foot against it. Cursing the inanimate object to a point that would have made a soldier go pale, Morgoth carried it over to the hole in the floor – using his feet to gently feel around before stepping – and lowered himself onto his stomach and peered over the edge. He then held the rock out in front of him and let it drop and began counting. It took about five seconds before he heard a loud clatter below him and judged the drop to be no more than twenty feet.

He shrugged (an odd movement to be making while laying on the ground), a useless gesture as there was no one to observe it; not that anyone would have been able to see it anyway. Morgoth sat up and thought hard about what his mind was proposing. Was it worth it to drop down into that pit or should he just move around it? He realized that this probably wasn’t the best place to start his search for Azlaylius. He couldn’t see anything and unless he fell onto it, he was unlikely to find the blade here anyway. The other option was to come back when he had regained his power to see into the dark, but his curiosity was piqued. He had explored this place from top to bottom before and had evidently missed a part of it. Now he had two options, but which should he choose?

What to do, what to do? he thought as he continued to breathe evenly, letting the drafty air flow past him. He sat up, crossed his legs in the style of shamans, and pondered his options.

[Tainted Bushido]

Bearman has forfeited to Nightcast, who will advance.