The Wormaxe Cometh

[Savas Tigh]

Pretty sure I've been on this boat for about two weeks now. To the best of my knowledge, it's a large galleon shipping out of Salvar, through Scara Brae, en route to Corone. It went from Salvar with a bunch of rare meats, fruits, and vegetables that don't grow too far South. It went from Scara Brae with...lots of stuff, actually. The city recovered quite nicely by the time I left. A whole hold's worth of food and arms, by the look of things.

To my knowledge, I am the only actual passenger on this stupid boat. And I've basically been pressed into service as a crewman since they were undermanned to begin with. The pay is mediocre; I get free food and most of my fare back, plus my luggage stays in place and I've a minimal chance of being shanked in my sleep. I've decided to secure my chances by carving security spells into the space beneath where I usually sleep. Aside from work and studying though, this is all quite bor

"-ing," Savas said aloud as he heard a man screaming something above deck. There were feet pounding the stairs on the side farthest from his little cubby-hole. A man apparently named Ratface swung around the corner. He had a gigantic nose, a missing eye, and a badly made glass replacement.

"We been spotted!" he shouted.

"By who?" Savas wondered.

"By those damn rebels! They got a clipper inbound an' it looks t'ave a whole crew comp'iment!"

Savas stared at the man, utterly unaware of what he was going on about.

"What a'e ya? Daft? Stupid?"

"Ignorant," the Wizard clarified. "There's a difference."

"Wha'eva! All 'at mattas izzat you get off ya duff and get ready fer a fight! They don't take prisoners, these godsdamn rebels, they don't. take. prisoners!"

Savas arched one thick brow as the man bolted back up the stairs. He was less intimidated by the prospect of pirates than he was perplexed by the man's ability to butcher punctuation in a spoken sentence. As a Wizard, and a steadily improving one now that he had decent material to study and an actual teacher, Savas noticed things like that. He was, in fact, perfectly capable of speaking with or without proper punctuation. After a while, he heard the captain screaming, heard boots pounding again, heard the distinct cadence of Ratface's feet falling on the stairs. The little man rounded the corner again, screeching as he came.

"You comin' o' not!?"

"Question mark after exclamation point," Savas replied. "Be up in a second."

Ratface bolted back upstairs. Savas sighed and closed his journal. He then checked his trunk, making sure that it was secure in the corner, before taking up his axe and a few bone dice. He had already decided that it would be better if he kept obvious displays of power to a minimum. If only so that the crew didn't get paranoid of a necromancer in their midst, nevermind what rumors he had heard of the Empire conscripting anyone with fighting talent.

"Once more into the breech," Savas said to himself.

"Breach!" Blightcrow corrected him from the confines of the trunk. Savas ignored it. There was killing to be done on the high seas of Corone.

[Savas Tigh]

The thing about naval warfare in an age of sail is that it's slow. Really, really, bonegrindingly slow. There is, in fact, an unbelievable amount of waiting involved in it, and that's easily the worst part.

Wormaxe went topside just in time to see an arrow kill one of the deckhands as he descended from the rigging. It whistled in high, fluked its way between two ropes thicker than a man's arm, then hit him square in the left temple and didn't stop until it had come out of his lower right jaw. He spasmed for a moment, hung tight and then went limp and dropped to a pile of crates and spare equipment that lay by the mast. He twitched a few times before the ship's nauseating up-down motions dislodged him from the pile and left him sprawled on the deck, dead as a doorknob and bleeding at a slow, steady pace.

There was time enough for all this and more to happen. Wormaxe could've easily taken a bath and shaved most of his beard off by the time the actual fighting took place. Instead, he hunkered down beside a spot of cover and took stock of the situation as best he could. Most of the crew were similarly hidden. The only one who wasn't was the helmsman, and he was still mostly shielded by a tiny metal-plated hut with plenty of slits and slots for visibility's sake. It was a necessary add-on, according to one of the deckhands; he'd be easy pickings for an archer otherwise.

Eventually, there were grappling hooks. Savas could hear the calls to arms as Rangers made ready to board. The captain, an imposing man in an orange jacket worn over steel plate, motioned to the rest of the galleon's men to wait just a little longer. His name was Gander. He had done this a few times. Savas had seen his quarters, complete with the skull and crossbones he ritualistically painted on the back wall for every time he had a run-in with pirates or privateers. There were a lot.

The ships finally cracked together, the galleon almost crushing the smaller clipper under its weight. There were battlecries by the bucketload as the Rangers' boarding party climbed the ship's side. They came onto the deck in threes and fours, and that was when Gander finally issued his own battlecry.

"KILL THE FUCKING FUCKERS!"

...it should be mentioned that a man like Gander does not ascend to captaincy through education and refinement. He had made mention of replacing an old captain, the one who originally owned the coat, by cracking him over the skull with a club and throwing him overboard when he kept taking 'idjit risks.' Law of the sea and all that.

The rebels drew first blood but the men of the galleon were fighting for their lives and they were on home territory at too close a range for the Rangers' archers to have much of a shot -- even the ones hanging off the clippers' rigging weren't going to do much more than get lucky. Cutlasses and great knives went through the soft parts of armor, and improvised clubs did a bang-up job of ignoring pesky things like chainmail. The deck was an overcrowded mess in short order and chaos was the order of the day.

Savas was not in the thick of it. He was off to the side a bit, blithely hacking down men in blue when their backs were turned. He still had the advantage of being covered by a partial wall near the stairs to the helm, and there was much bigger, nastier looking people to take shots at. Twice, a rebel came within five feet of him without even noticing. Twice, Savas split open a solid steel helm and broke the head underneath like a watermelon.

It didn't take long for the deck to become soaked in blood. Most of it belonged to the rebels, at least while the galleon's men still had time to pick off anyone coming up the grapple lines. Savas waited until the fighting was near a zenith, then nonchalantly started tracing spellwork on the nearest drenched floorboard. He stayed low and passive, trusting the carnage of the battle to keep him unnoticed. Ratface hobbled by with a dagger handle sticking out of his side and his glass eye broken in the socket. One of the few arrows fired took him in the throat and the rest of his life was spent flailing and gagging and tripping any poor bastard foolish enough to come near him.

There were a lot of things Savas could have done right then and there. He could've ended everything by tapping into the chaotic powers inherent to mingling, freshly spilled blood that had come from the heat of battle. It would've probably resembled a lightning strike without the lightning -- electrocution, thunder, men being boiled alive from the inside out, probably more than a few of them being thrown clear from the ship...

He could have -- and really wanted to -- try using that bloody power to raise some of the newly dead. Most of their bodily functions were still intact so it wasn't like it would've been that difficult, in theory, but that was risky. Savas was a necromancer but most of his experience in raising the dead involved fleshcrafting golems and the like, and that had been done in the high energy environment of Raiaera. He had never raised proper undead outside of Raiaera, with past experiments in Salvar resulting in the kinds of mishmash abominations that would give him away in an instant. If he did that and it worked, then there would be all kinds of questions from the crew and an increased chance of shanking in his sleep.

Assuming the entire battle didn't just stop cold and turn into a lynch mob.

[Savas Tigh]

Subtlety is a Wizard's best weapon.
- Tön're Aullum-seu
Savas settled for something considerably less impressive in terms of showmanship, but much more difficult overall. The blood was dead. Savas was a necromancer. He took hold of the power in the blood and, through that power, took hold of the blood itself. Then he waited, timing his spellwork for the moment when the shop was cresting on a tall wave.

Savas twisted his hand.

The blood slicked beneath the feet of rebel and sailor alike, throwing most of them off their feet. Savas waited until the ship hit the bottom of the space between waves, then twisted his hand the other way. Rebels went sliding all over the place, and more than a handful tumbled right over deck's edge, either into the sea or back onto the clipper. One unlucky soul went tumbling right between ships only to be smashed between hulls when they cracked against each other at the water line.

The men of the galleon came up faster, and Savas lunged up with them. He came back down axe-first onto the back of a Ranger, burying the blade eye-deep into the man's chest, his axeblade plowing through the rings of chainmail like they weren't even there. The man screamed and abruptly silenced as Savas jammed a hand over his mouth, popping several bone dice into the back of his throat. He drove the body all the way to the edge and then kicked it overboard, letting luck and gravity steer the corpse back onto the clipper.

Barely a second later, someone tackled him from the side. Savas heard screams of, "My brother! You killed my brother!" And instinctively grabbed the wrist of a hand with a long dagger in it. He twisted the dagger arm back on its wielder, but couldn't quite drive it all the way in. There was a lot of confusion and Savas blocked a second dagger short of his face, just before making eye contact with the man trying to kill him.

It'd be unfair to say that Savas was bad at evocation. It'd be an insult to people who are bad at evocation. But he was learning, and any idiot with power with the gift can throw out a burst of energy if they're desperate enough. Point blank like this, Wormaxe figured he had nothing to lose. He locked eyes with the man and replied, "I've killed lots of brothers. You're nothing special."

Eye contact was step one. Words were step two. Eye contact establishes the channel, words provide a conduit for power. Savas dumped raw power through that channel, almost completely uncontrolled. Anything could've happened. Nothing could've happened.

Something happened.

That power coalesced and blew out his ear drums -- literally blew them out, spilling blood from his ears in tiny red geysers. Cue screaming and instant disorientation. Cue an opening. Cue Savas lodging that first dagger into the guy's collarbone, then stealing the second and burying it guard-deep in his face. Through bone.

Savas looked up and took stock of the situation: utter bedlam.

And then the bone dice finally went off. There was a purple-black explosion on the clipper, knocking two of its masts over and shoving the ships wide apart. Grappling hooks went flying off the galleon's deck, some of them taking chunks of wood in the process, but it could've been much worse. The Rangers on the deck went from struggling to regain their footing and the advantage to being slaughtered wholesale as their morale broke.

Savas sat out the rest of the fight, choosing to lick his fingers clean while the galleon's defenders took their bloody revenge on the Rangers of Corone. All this to the backdrop of the clipper listing, dead in the water with a gaping hole in her deck, just above the water line.

[Savas Tigh]

The other thing about naval warfare in an age of sail: The aftermath is basically post-traumatic boredom.

Clean-up efforts began almost the minute the last Ranger was put to the blade. His last words were some poetic drivel about the spread of democracy, the righteousness of peace, the value of dying a free man...all that hypocritical nonsense that goes out the nearest window in a civil war. Savas noted with some irony that the man saying these things was a pirate whose efforts would, ultimately, lead to starvation of the so-called 'innocent civilians,' who were never anywhere near as innocent as rebels made them appear to be.

Part of a Wizard's education includes politics. Because a Wizard is, by his very nature, a literal powerbroker. He has power and he can break things, for himself or for other people. Back the right guy in a conflict and you'll be set for decades; your own tower, your own servants, wealth beyond whatever you can conjure, and a certain leeway when it comes to breaking those pesky mortal laws. Back the wrong guy and you're the next evil archmage power-behind-the-throne, propping up a corrupt regime so that you can twirl your mustache and make nyahaheha sounds as you boil some monstrous potion...and then come the pitchforks and the torches and having to fake your own death and make a hasty getaway at the bottom of a dung cart.

As a general rule of thumb, Wizards are cynical, opportunistic realists with a deconstructive eye towards how the game is played. Where an ordinary man sees a black-and-white conflict of Good and Evil, a Wizard sees ten thousand shades of gray that all represent some way to better themselves.

Savas heard the man's screaming declarations for the propaganda-speak they were. But he saw opportunity. After the galleon sailors had torn into the poor bastard with an assortment of very, very long knives, Savas searched the body. He greyhawked it of anything valuable on the crew's behalf -- they were still somewhat squeamish about having too much contact with the dead -- and then he threw the naked carcass overboard. Savas kept the papers he found on the corpse, leaving the armor, weapons, clothing, and money to anyone who was willing to take it. He repeated this for thirty more men, including eleven galleon sailors who were given 'proper' funeral rites by the captain. He wasn't even close to getting it right, but he had the authority to lay a spirit to rest at sea, whether he knew it or not. Sailors are an inherently suspicious lot, more clued in to the laws and the goings on of the supernatural than their landlocked counterparts. Savas took the opportunity to Whisper away the souls of the departed as he stripped each body of its belongings, his Voice kept so low as to be inaudible to the living.

Savas knew the fates awaiting most of those spirits and he was not envious of them. From what he knew of the dead realms, land was terrifying enough. The ocean made it look downright heavenly. There are reasons so many advanced spellcasters look to ways of cheating death.

The night after the battle, most of the crew got rip-roaring drunk. Savas chose to remain sober, as did the captain and the helmsman. A few of the men became women. Nobody told stories about it the following morning. Savas resumed his studies in earnest, carefully reading up on the situation in Corone and controlling for the fact that any information the Rangers had was going to be biased in their favor.

That's another thing Wizards learn early on: accounting for misinformation, be it intentional deception or ignorant omission. Some of the things they have to deal with require precise understanding of language, context, reality, everything. A Wizard who knows everything about a word can cripple or kill someone with it. Likewise, a Wizard who commits himself to a certain viewpoint to the exclusion of all others is a Wizard who's probably going to die young, screaming, and in undescribably horrific agony of body, mind, and soul.

When he was done studying one night, Savas wrote notes. It was part of an ongoing attempt to turn his ratty, leatherbound journal into an actual Grimoire. At some point in a Wizard's career, he simply writes enough in a book that it becomes a Grimoire entirely of its own volition. It hadn't happened to any of the dozen or so journals he had already filled with notes cribbed from the Wizard Blueraven, but that didn't stop him from trying.


War is the best of all disguises.
- Throgoth Visinore, the Black Seer of Old Corogh

...and actually, I think that bears explaining. To keep the mind fresh. And to waste space on this godsforsaken page.

Throgoth Visinore was a Wanderer in Starlight, an elf who lost himself on the Path of the Seer. He was also one of the first elfborn Warlocks, although his contingency for death took him clear into transmigrationism. I don't know a lot of the history involved, but he eventually jumped from the body of an elf into the body of an orc, and from there into the body of one of a wyrmfolk, and from there into the body of a man, where he stayed until his final death sometime in the final years of the Century of Severed Dreams. He apparently gained the eyes of a true seer, the seventh son of six generations of seventh sons. He also had a full-blown fortress at what is now the Three Kingdoms Crater, where Raiaera, Alerar, and Salvar all meet.

It was originally called Corogh. It used to be one of the tallest mountains in the known world, dating back to a time when there were harbors and docks in the clouds. There's a town there now, basically abandoned due to elemental encroachment, also known as Corogh. I keep meaning to go there, but...oh well.

Among other things, Throgoth built his power in the shadow of war. And he was really, really good at being everybody's ally of convenience. Having a mountain fortress towards the end of your career will do that for you, but earlier? He could build a shadow network in the heart of a kingdom at war by just taking advantage of reality. He used alchemy to help alleviate food problems, he poached corpses while posing as a funerist, he weaponized the rhetoric of his allies and more besides.

I am not going to do all that. I am going to be a good little evil overlord-in-training and hide. In plain sight. Haven't quite figured out how, but I've got money and malice to spare right now. The Empire's got food problems and an abundance of dead from the abuses of power. I highly doubt such an unstable regime will survive in the long run but the would-be military countercoup -- the 'rebels' who are actually an old guard faction broken off because they dislike the new strong man -- they don't seem especially friendly to people like me. And even if the rebels win, they're entirely too driven by ideals. Revolutionary governments founded in the heat of the moment almost always collapse under their own weight once the Liberators realize just how godsdamn difficult it is to keep everyone fed and secure, meaning I can probably ride out this civil war, the following peace, and then the civil unrest and/or war that destroys it. Even if someone does suspect me, it'll be easy to get rid of them at any point in time and let the fog of war cover my tracks.

And to top it all off, Corone is also fairly ignorant of magic in general, though not quite as hostile as Salvar. I'll have to rely on wits, misdirection, and subtlety to get by, more than anything else.

This is going to be fun.

[Savas Tigh]

Radasanth.

One of the biggest cities in the world, where the civil war had first broken out, along with a few other disasters scattered about the place. It was a city full of scars and rain on the dreary day that the Wormaxe first set foot there.

On the whole, Radasanth was a city full of canals, cobblestone streets, high walls, thick walls, walls for the sake of walls, and a mixture of religious, civilian, and military construction that made it impossible to wage war here without causing collateral damage. There were towers every few blocks, some of them merged with huge walls of any given age, others standing alone like grim reminders of the city's otherwise heroic origins. There were armed patrols all over the place, guards assigned to streetcorners that didn't need it, and hardship was the order of the day. The galleon was empty inside of an hour, and Savas' trunk was the last thing off the boat. He carried it by hand, all the way up to the moment when he found some wheels, some spare wood, and a nice quiet corner between warehouses.

Alchemy made everything easier. Savas slapped wheels on the trunk and dragged the thing around by some rope he had stowed away. He spent the rest of the day exploring the city, looking for some abandoned bolt hole to call his own. He spoke Common with a Salvic accent and already came with the look of a dead-eyed refugee by default. With what he had studied, it would hopefully be easy to convince people that he had come here just prior to the outbreak of the civil war. Noone bothered asking for papers or any other form of identification. Corone lacked the infrastructure for that kind of nonsense, and it was raining besides so most paper and ink was vulnerable.

What was not vulnerable were the signs plastered everywhere, mostly protected from water by virtue of placement and the overhangs from a good many rooftops. Wanted posters: Killian Jahaad, Tenniel Lisosian, and Edward Stormcrow. Savas mentally corrected for any ugliness added for propaganda's sake and found the men to be, respectively, babyfaced, queer, and generically military. They probably had considerable charisma and intelligence between them, considering how well they had Radasanth by the gut. The city was starving and people were suffering for the Rangers' idealism.

And that's another thing about Wizardry's understanding of politics: There's no such thing as a Good Guy in war, especially a war of brothers and countrymen. The best you can get is understandable evil, and that's hardly ever got anything to do with the virtues of freedom, peace, and democracy. While the Rangers were off fighting for the rights of the common man, the common man died of starvation in the streets so that the Empire's soldiers could stay in shape waiting for attacks that would probably never come. Even going off of wanted posters and propaganda reaved from corpses, Savas had the feeling that the Rangers would only attack a place like Radasanth if it was already on its last leg from starvation.

Savas crossed bridges, walked streets, familiarized himself with a bazaar or two. He started committing faces to memory for the guards, for shopkeeps, for civilians and the like. He went from top to bottom, looking for the red lantern district or its equivalent, and the black market too. Radasanth had neither, at least not formally, but there were brothels all over the place and more than a few markets so black that there was practically a psychic miasma around them.

And everywhere he went, soldiers of every kind had an advantage. They lived to a standard that would've been normal in Scara Brae, Salvar, or perhaps even Raiaera. Here, though, in the Heroic City of Radasanth, that standard was miles above what the peasantry had to put up with. They had warmth, money, hot and cold running women and men. They even had beds. Clean beds.

Savas eventually ended up at the center of the city, where an absurdly large palace stood tall and distinct from every other building in sight. It had the look of both a medieval fortress and a grand house of senate, complete with four great towers stretching high above the rest of the city, a slanted roof visibly staffed by guards, and a wide enough canal that it took two drawbridges to cross at any given entrance. One of the towers had been broken and the debris still lay at the bottom of one canal, just barely sticking up out of the water. Other signs of battle also littered the place, but that was easily the biggest.

Structure-wise, anyway.

Another thing about Imperial Radasanth: They weren't shy about putting bodies on display.

Grizzly, horrific display.

Savas approved. He passed no fewer than sixty dead men, women, all hung or crucified, and a few petulent looking brats who'd been stuck in iron cages high off the ground and left to rot. A few of the bodies looked burnt. Others had been picked at by birds. None of them were clothed. There were a few random bodyparts on pikes too, and at least one great wall declared DEATH TO THE RAVENHEART!

Seeing any permutation of death to ravens made Savas feel warm and fuzzy.

Even if he was soaked to the point of pneumonia.

[Savas Tigh]

Another thing about the Civil War is that it did not happen overnight or in a vacuum. The men at the top may have acted swiftly and decisively, the people on the ground may have slapped boots to the pavement and put daggers to throats quickly, but the men and women in the middle had all seen writing on the wall months ahead of time, if not years. Coups are not instant and there's always going to be the rumor mill and the crazy people who react to it -- at least until the malicious slander becomes horrifying truth and the crazy people turn into righteous prophets.

The Empire struck first but the Rangers hit back on a metaphoric reflex and they had one badass right hook about it. Radasanth was battle-scarred because there had been some nasty fighting in those city streets and along the canals. More than a few buildings had been blasted out or burned down. Among all that devestated real estate were a handful of towers that were, for all intents and purposes, bloody well abandoned because they were untenable from a military point of view. All that property had been looted, either by the army finding leftover supplies, by Rangers on their way out the city, by thieves looking to make a quick buck on Radasanth's black markets, or by squatters just trying to stay alive in a world gone mad.

The thing that set Savas apart from all of them was that he had money. And by the standards of Radasanth, with the Empire's control on the economy and on prices, he had a lot of money.

So he waited out the night under a bridge, casing one of those broken towers and even exploring it a little bit. Then he found directions to the nearest seat of government at bought the damn thing and the land it stood on at a steal of a price -- a hundred gold for a place that had probably taken several dozen times that to build. And half of that price was a bribe to make sure that the army wouldn't come 'requisition' the tower back if it was repaired -- an unlikely event since it was in an old, shabby part of town with relatively little military presence and even less governmental concern. Savas judged it to be an excellent spot regardless of the war's outcome.

Savas got the deed in writing, stamped, sealed, and all that good stuff. Then he went to his new home, took out an axe, and did his civic duty to reduce the homeless problem.

There had been a family hiding in that place.

They had two little boys and a daughter in her mid-teens.

Nobody ever noticed when they disappeared. Even if they did, nobody cared.

[Savas Tigh]

The concept of a demesne is not unique to Wizardry. It's common to every single non-nomadic spellcasting tradition, and even the nomadic traditions still have places analagous to it. The only confusion, outside of the semantic bickering that accompanies any distinction between sufficiently skilled magi, is caused by how many names there are for the same thing. A demesne might be known as a manse, a fetch or fetich, a domain, a territory, zone, quarter, acrage, sphere, realm, dominion, or any one of a hundred other names relating to personal property.

It all boils down to the same idea: a place of power and security.

You go after a mage in his demesne at your own peril.

The reason for this is as much practical and logical as it is magic. The longer any given mage, particularly a Wizard or similar spellcaster, has to live somewhere, the more likely they are to establish defenses of all kinds. Combine ownership and longterm residence and a Wizard is likely to attract lesser leylines, building up a personal nexus of power, claiming ownership of it, and essentially shaping it to his own purposes just by being there.

Of course, nothing about crafting a demesne is quick. It takes time and effort, both conscious and otherwise. A Wizard has to really invest himself into the place to take ownership of it at such a metaphysical level.

Savas had tried to establish a demesne during his time in Scara Brae, but the disasters there and his subsequent infamy had made short work of it. He had considered one in the Raiaeran city of Beinost, but the land of elves and song is a very bad place to be a necromancer. Third time's the charm. He started with the murders, carrying them out slowly, ritually, and with a great deal of personal enjoyment. The things he did to that family would've had him drawn and quartered in any other part of the world. It would've made an orc vomit and a drow cry.

When he was done killing them, he took their souls and ground them up within a circle of power, funneling them into the castle's walls to project a certain atmosphere about the place. It was a subtle spell aimed at making people avoid the broken tower, whether they had a reason to or not. "It just gives me bad vibes," someone might say. "I don't wanna go in there," another might comment. Basic security, but effective.

He used the bodies for raw materials to seal up holes in the roof, which had once been a mid-tower floor before the top half of the building broke off and collapsed into the street and the canal next to it. Savas applied alchemy to the wood, flash-drying it, toughening it, spreading it out with the aid of the dead, essentially giving himself a waterproof patio for a roof. With time, he planned to add more.

He kept the skulls and ribs for himself. He burned the hearts, one by one, and blended the ashes as a reagent for gods know what.

The tower itself was basically one big circular room with a staircase leading up to its new roof. There was a firepit in the center and a basement below. It had been filled with supplies in case of an emergency prior to the war, but it was an empty pit of broken wood and splinters now. There were a few cellar-like slit-windows on leading to a knee-level view of the outside world, just high enough to avoid intake from rainwater. Further down, Savas found a trap door leading into a secret room, once an armory and now just a dark place full of weapon and armor racks.

Savas immediately went to work breaking down the wood and metal, moving it from point A to point B, transmuting what he could and saving the rest for later. When all you have is an axe and the tools for bonecarving, options limit themselves quickly. Alchemy fixed most problems, but there was still the matter of material lost in transmutation. Mending clothes is one thing. Preserving food, that's easy. Changing the shape of solid objects completely, that takes effort and design work, and Savas was learning the hard way through trial and error, with nothing but feeble light from his few windows and the stronger glow of his remaining stock of alchemist's light from the Catacombs venture.

By the end of the third day, Savas Tigh had furniture. A worktable, first and foremost, and then a chair. Then a bookshelf. Then a bench in his main room upstairs, just next to the firepit where he would be cooking food, among other things. Savas ran out of material right after throwing together an improvised toilet beneath the staircase, which was little more than a wood seat with a hole leading to a bucket he would have to empty afterwards. It was better than what most people got.

The only issue was that all of his furniture looked like one piece. It was like the wood had literally grown to fit a particular shape. Savas counted on Coronian ignorance of magic to save him there. It was a risk he was willing to take for the time being.

Only after he had used up all the spare material, thrown together sufficient furniture and the like, did Savas start emptying his trunk and stocking his shelves, his desk, his home. Thirteen journals crammed into one shelf, he put Blightcrow's skull on a pillow above them, set up a makeshift alchemic brewery on his desk, and turned the hidden room into a cross between a laboratory and armory arcana, and a private storehouse. There were chalk lines on the floor, the beginnings of a grand ritual circle he intended to throw down over time. Dragon bones -- a wing and an actual forelimb -- took up most of the floor along one wall. It helped that the room was big. Someone had planned to either hide out here for a month or make a gruelling last stand. Either way, it fit Savas' purposes like a glove.

When he was done with all that, Savas improvised a bed in the upper basement, emptying out all of his clothes and piling them up until he had a nicely sized rat's nest to sleep on. He had no bath and he didn't need one. The canal was all of a ten second run out the door.

"So..." Blightcrow began around the end of the first week. "Now what?"

"Good question," Savas admitted, standing around stark bloody naked in his basement.

"...now what?"

[Savas Tigh]

Zabeli Detris was a woman trying to survive in a city plagued by indirect siege warfare, under a military occupation by its own government. There was a lot of rationing when it came to what the civilian population got compared to the soldiers. Not exact rationing for each given civilian, just the whole bloody population; everyone who wasn't wearing the red and black silk and steel of a soldier of the Empire, or at least a red and black badge or strap to show that they somehow worked to benefit the government and the army. In such conditions, a woman does what she has to in order to survive. Prior to the war, Zabeli had been a shop worker and sometime housecleaner, doing the menial labor that most people of wealth would rather not bother with. She wasn't especially educated, nor did she really stand out in any meaningful way.

Times turned hard and Zabeli's shop closed. Nobody had money enough to afford a sometime servant, not when the Empire was seriously talking about bringing back and expanding slavery and the idea of a rigid class system. It hadn't been decided on one way or the other just yet. It probably wouldn't be until the end of the War, whenever that was.

Zabeli did what she had to in order to survive. More often than not, that put her on the streets, or in taverns, inns, or even the occasional bedroom. She had worked at a brothel for a little while, but turnover was high and there were prettier faces just waiting to be pressed down into its pillows. Zabeli worked for money, but she'd settle for food and shelter in a heartbeat. Sometimes there was pillow talk. Sometimes she was a pillow. There were often awkward mornings, and there were always the routines.

Meet, a few words here or there, you'd know in five seconds or less if anything was going to happen or not. Men who came to see one of the cold-eyed daughters of the night walked with a certain sense of purpose to their steps. Most of her clients were soldiers. They didn't pay well at all, but they had food and drink and it was good enough to get by. Every now and then, she'd get in with a man, or a rare woman, of standing; the kinds of people whose houses she used to clean. In wartime Corone, such people were stand-outs just because they still basically looked healthy and fashionable, even if they were only barely hanging on.

Zabeli enjoyed such encounters, for want of a classier way to put it. Soldiers were rough and tumble. The high society-types would at least pretend to sugar talk a girl.

Tonight, Zabeli had gone through four soldiers and one ragged civilian who had enough money and desperation to pay for her. It was the hour of the witch, midnight, and the evening was still young for a woman like her. She paused by a streetlamp, long since left unlit, and straightened her dress. It was more or less pink, shin-length nowadays, and did an adequate job of looking Okay. She wore tight stockings underneath, and shoes. Actual shoes made by a cobbler. Women in shoes were more attractive, she had learned. Less likely to have bits stuck in them.

And her next client, actually her last client, was a tall gentleman in a tall hat, tapping his way along with a thin black cane. He wore a waist-length cloak with a high collar.

"Evenin', m'lady," he greeted her, walking with that same purpose she'd come to expect. "Fancy a go at it?"

His accent was a bit odd, but not entirely out of the question for a city like Radasanth. Zabeli looked him over a few times and figured that if she was going to work the night, she might as well enjoy it: the smile she gave then, still impossibly white even while lackluster, reached her eyes. "A go at what?" she asked. "I'm just an innocent girl in the big city."

Cue a laugh like dogs barking. An arm around her shoulder. A companionable walk to a nearby inn. Up the stairs. Through a door.

The room's walls were already red when she went in.

They were redder than all Hell by morning.

[Savas Tigh]

News spreads whether authority likes it or not. The rumor mill of Radasanth had long since replaced the old Reader newspaper. It was a million times faster and a million times less efficient. It'd take a lunatic to decode exactly what the hell the story was.

By any charitable standard, a Wizard is clinically insane.


They're calling him the Radasanth Ripper. Word on the street is that he's killed between three and ten women, all of them whores. Normally that sort of thing goes unnoticed, but with how far many of the girls in this city have to go just to get food and water, that's not the case here. From what I've been able to make out, here's his basic strategy:
Find a whore. Any whore.
Get under their skin, so to speak.
Take them to an inn - so far that's held for seven of the suspected murders, including the three 'confirmed'
A second-floor room -two rumors hit upon the number 13
Mutilation - probably to a respectable degree, but...rumors!
Organ theft - at the least, a heart and both lungs; probably more but can't be sure - medical knowledge is not up to snuff for most of Radasanth
Body found in the morning
Killer is never spotted or identified beyond vague sightings
May or may not have a tall hat and cane?I've thought about it and consulted the Magic Talking Skull. Sounds to me like I'm not the only black mage running around these parts.

I've decided to lay low a little while longer. I might...involve myself in the investigation somehow. I've been needing to establish an identity. So far I've settled on an occupation -- funerist -- but I have no property fit for that kind of work. I might see about buying another tower on the cheap, something I could convert into a proper crematory, parlor, and all around chamber of death, but I'll scope the city out first and see how many others deal with death. Just to be sure. I still need to educate myself on the local customs, if only to see what I can get away with.

I also need to see about getting myself some proper knives and tools. Dark Messiah is still very much a theoretical martial art that I'm not willing to test in a fight. Easier to just shank some fucker and be done with it. I've begun the process of amending my wardrobe as well, the better to match Radasanthian fashions. The Mad Monk look might be my favorite, but the people here are a bit more...uptight? Secular? Something. I get the sense that this place used to be a fashion hub and they're not quite ready to give that up. Not even now.

To Do List:
Finish updating wardrobe. Nail down personal style.
Visit black market/s.
Buy cutlery and tools.
See about investing in a sword?
Get food. Actual food-food, not magic-or-dead-spirit-or-not-quite-rotten-corpse food. I'm tired of cannibalism.
"I'd advise against the sword. Long knife, maybe. Something you can poison," Blightcrow said as Savas put his journal away and started to get dressed. He had settled on loose pants tucked into heavy-duty boots, along with a dark gray shirt and a brown leather vest. It wasn't up to snuff with nobility and it was decidedly Less Than Wizardly, but he was trying to avoid too much notice.

"I agree, more or less. Temptation's there though."

"You also need to decide on a name. Unless you want to reuse Yanov Cross from Scara Brae."

"Eugh. No. Bad luck on that one," Savas said with a wave of one hand. "I'll come up with something when I'm at the market."

"...like nothing could possibly go wrong with that," Blightcrow replied.

"You shut up."

[Savas Tigh]

The city of Radasanth had more black markets than Savas could shake a stick at. For a city built on the legacy of a hero, once governed by the guiding lights of virtue now espoused by the rebellion, it was a city where the black markets were old, entrenched, and not going anywhere any time soon. They weren't confined to back alleys either. Whole neighborhoods had gone over to the bleaker side of capitalism, especially now that the city was essentially under siege without a single hostile army in sight.

They actually advertised now. In plain language signs left hanging on walls underneath the wanted posters. Right below a perfect rendering of Letho Ravenheart's face, you'd find a sign saying, Come On Down To Eigen Cerbere's Shop At Seven Points - For All Your Human Trafficking Needs!

There were supposedly debates going on right now about legalizing and institutionalizing slavery, but the market had effectively decided the matter already and it was not pretty. There were some men, far more women, and plenty of children on sale, price tags literally hanging from chains around their necks. None of the 'goods' looked particularly untouched, nor did the 'vendors' look like the type to sell fresh merchandise. Hardly any of them even wore clothes beyond what was necessary to be Publically Decent -- as if their situation could somehow be worsened by nudity.

Savas scoped those markets out on general principle, made note of it in his head and decided to debate the matter with Blightcrow later. It would be a pretty convenient source of cheap labor, ingredients, reagents, and emergency food. The souls of forsaken children had weight in black magic, and the broken spirits of men and women were nothing to laugh at either.

Further on, there were less scandalous markets. Weapons and armor for sale all over the place. The only way most people had a chance to prosper right now was to be good at fighting and killing, and army surplus dominated the market. Here and there, you'd find more exotic weapons and items. Greatswords from Dheath, scimitars and razor-wire jewelry from Fallien, a knock-off mithril vest, and a helm of truesight -- except that the helm had no enchantments whatsoever. There were crossbows, long bows, short bows, recurve bows, an Akashiman shotbow and a Salvic yetikiller. One of the shops was nothing but Akashiman imports; katana, katana, katana, more katana, and a handful of jian that stood out like sore thumbs.

Most of it was steel.

But every now and then, there were diamonds in that rough.

Savas went home with six plynt daggers and a few raw ingots as well. He bought cutlery. He picked up a box of tools, as suitable for disposing of a body as they'd be for working on furniture. He bought chemicals too, not that he really needed to restock his supply just yet. The whole excursion set him back another hundred-fifty gold, most of it spent on plynt goods.

And he bought a servant. Fifty gold. His name didn't matter since Savas was intent on renaming him anyway.

The poor bastard.

[Savas Tigh]

"For future reference, and just so I can eventually say I told you so, this is not going to end well."

"Oh shut up," Savas ordered.

"Did that skull just talk?" the slave asked.

"Of course not. You're just insane," Savas told him.

Chains went clink this way, clank that. The man was short, scrawny, and more than a little malnourished to begin with. He was a weakling in mind, body, and soul -- exactly why Savas had bought him in the first place. He was better dressed now than he had been an hour ago, when Savas had first lead him out of the market by a heavy-duty chain and collar. His hands were bound. His ankles too. He was more or less stuck in place, bound to a tube that Savas had chalked into both the floor and ceiling of his first basement. He actually leaned against thin air.

"What's going on, Master?"

"Oh, call me Wormaxe. Master's not really important just yet. Blightcrow, do you remember which book had the notes on renaming and enthrallment?"

"The third journal on the left. You really should number them at the least," the skull sighed. "Does it even have a name to begin with?"

"On the contract, I think. Ah. You're right, here it is."

"M-my name is Yianni," the slave said. He wasn't an it.

"Yianni? Hn. not a local name, I don't think. Audelasian?"

"My f-father was from there, yes."

"And do you have a family name?"

"They revoked it when he defaulted on protection money," Savas answered. "Slaves don't get surnames here."

"That's true," Yianni answered. "It was-"

"Unimportant then," Blightcrow said with the impression of a shrug. As much of an impression as a bodiless, rune-marked skull with glowing orange fire-eyes could give, at any rate. "Pay attention to the bit about semantic precision."

"I know, I know," Savas answered.

"Did you decide on a name of your own yet?"

"I was thinking of some permutation of Ivan," Savas answered.

"Too Salvic. Perhaps you could go with something like...oh, how about something that goes with Doctor of the Dead?"

"You were abused as a child, weren't you."

"...and you weren't?"

Savas stopped reading, stared at the wall for a moment and shrugged. "Fair point," he admitted, because there's no such thing as a truly Salvic Wizard who hasn't suffered some kind of abuse in his or her lifetime. The sexual dysfunctions of a Salvic Wizard are the stuff of nightmares. "I was thinking of Alistair or some variant, but that'd be too ironic."

"As long as it's not Akashiman. I don't like Akashimans."

"Eh? What's that about? Get burned by a catgirl prostitute?"

"...shut up."

Savas looked at the skull. So did Yianni. Blightcrow's ghostfire eyes gave the impression of looking up, up, and away from both of them.

"It needs to be something Close To Ordinary," Savas said, deliberately capitalizing letters in speech as a Wizard is wont to do. "Sinyamin Erringway?"

"Sin of the Right Handed Mistaken Path? You call that Close To Ordinary?"

"I like it," Yianni said, hopefully.

"Hah. Sinyamin Erringway it is. I'm from South Salvar, in a village with lots of elves."

"...you almost could pass for Fallien if you had a tan and a lighter bone structure..."

"My great-grandmother was from Fallien," Savas admitted with a shrug. He said again, "Sinyamin Erringway. My name is Sinyamin Erringway. I come from a small village named Daggerguard in Southern Salvar, with lots of elves. My name is Sinyamin Erringway. My name is Sinyamin Erringway," Wormaxe Declared, shaping each and every word with a precision that normal people are simply incapable of. It was like molding clay into a fine work of art. Even his choice of lower-case 'name' was deliberate, as a name can mean or be anything. It was nonbinding to the Wizard, unrelated to the birth name his mother had given him, the True Name of his soul, or the Sorcerous Name of his power.

He had gone through a similar process in inventing Yanov Cross. It lent the name a certain metaphysical veracity that even ordinary people would detect. It meant his hands would be able to sign the name as if it was real.

"...how did you do that?" Yianni asked. He was living proof of how authentic the name sounded.

"Easily," Sinyamin told him, just before closing the journal. His accent had actually changed, just a tiny bit, to better resemble the one used by Salvic southerners. "I think I'm about ready to do this now. Walk me through it one last time, Blightcrow. Just so I know my notes are right."

Blightcrow explained the process in full.

To his credit, it took a few seconds for Yianni to start screaming and begging for his life.

It didn't do him any good.

[Savas Tigh]

"I told you so."

Sinyamin yanked the axe loose and silently gave the skull a middle finger.

"You're not far enough along," Blightcrow sighed. "Yes, you had a legally binding contract of ownership. But none of the avenues of power and control had been established yet. Setting someone up for enthrallment usually takes years. You have to build up familiarity, trust, despair...you have to actually prepare someone for it."

"That's not how the notes portrayed it," Sinyamin muttered. There was blood all over the place. Scorch marks on both the ceiling and floor.

"The notes are from a Wizard who cleaves to the Chaotic Neutral-Good corner of things. Those are the basics and the lore, not a very reliable guide to doing it yourself. Only an expert can enthrall someone that quickly."

"Then why didn't you tell me?" Sinyamin asked as he put away the axe and started greyhawking the body.

"You wouldn't have believed me. It was a miracle I could get you to bind him the way you did. Imagine if you hadn't."

"I would've been fine."

"Pride, falling, etc.," Blightcrow said, complete with abbreviation, period, and comma.

"Noted. I'll apply more caution and take my time in the future. No need to rush, I suppose. And I would kill for some kind of help getting this downstairs..."

"Zombie the stupid bastard. Instant servant right there. And less trouble than a thrall!"

"But also shorter-lasting. I think I'll make reagents out of him. The way he died has to count for something," Sinyamin noted, dragging the body towards the trap door leading downstairs. "I'll be right back."

Blightcrow probably would have grimaced, if he had a face.

Yianni the Slave had not gone quietly, easily, or sanely. Wormaxe wasn't even able to strip away any of his personality; he just cranked it all up to eleven and everything was downhill from there. As the Wizard's Voice chipped away at Yianni's identity, something inside of him had snapped like a twig and replaced the weak, frail little man with a violent, chainbound berserker whose body was no longer hindered by its own natural restraints. He broke free of the containment spell, scorching circles where there had been chalk, then spent two minutes chasing after his owner while swinging around both fists like his cuffs were lethal weapons. Even having his ankles bound didn't do much to stop him.

Sinyamin had to kill him the old fashioned way: Axe to the chest cavity. His heart and a lung had both been ripped wide open and the little man bled out all over the place -- and he was still dangerous even then. His corpse twitched the whole time Sinyamin was dragging him downstairs for proper disposal.


Note to Self: Buy cleaning supplies.

[Savas Tigh]

Sinyamin didn't come back up until he heard a banging on the front door. It took him the better part of ten minutes just to answer it, as he had to stop, change clothes, clean the blood off using alchemy and a handtowel, get his axe, have seconds thoughts, get a dagger, have third thoughts, get a bone wand, go upstairs, and finally open the door.

The street was eerily well lit. There was a fog. There was also noone there.

"Ha-bloody-ha," Sinyamin muttered.

He took a step back into his tower and then an invisible man broke his nose.

[Savas Tigh]

Sinyamin came to with a sputter and an instinctive feeling of having been violated. Less because of any actual physical violations, more because someone had knocked him out cold, dragged him inside and laid him across his own dining bench. That same someone had deigned to wipe the blood from his nose, leaving the handkerchief on the floor beside him, less a warning and more a mockery.

Blood has power in magic. Having someone's blood is basically the same as having a two month pass through any number of countermeasures when it comes to laying down curses on them. Spreading your Name, as the Wizard Blueraven had done during the Corpse War in Raiaera, was useless against someone who has a good blood sample. Sinyamin knew as much. He had been among the people who laid down curses for a living during that particular war, and almost all of them missed because there were upwards of a hundred human men named Blueraven, including at least three or four with active magical talents.

And that wasn't everything. As Sinyamin sat up, slow and steady with a hand covering his nose, an envelope fell from his chest into his lap. It was big and beige, held shut with a red wax seal bearing a stylized R|R.

Sinyamin looked around. His wand had been taken. The front door had been locked from the inside and the door to the roof was still shut, though it had no lock at all. He turned the envelope over, examining it with one eye while trying to look through the back of his own head with the other.

It was addressed to Savas Tigh.

"...son of a bitch," the Dark Wizard muttered to himself. "BLIGHTCROW!"

"WHAT?"

Savas actually felt a hint of relief. At least he hadn't been burglarized. He looked to the envelope again, turning it over one more time to see the seal. The R|R was practically mocking him.

Whatever the envelope's content, Savas had already decided that someone was going to die for it.

[Savas Tigh]

What follows is a very short letter written in very red, red ink.
Dear Boss,

Hello. So sorry about the nose. I can't help but notice that you smell like death warmed over. Minty. I would like to play a little game with you.

My name is Septimus Golgol. Let's have fun.

Yours truly,
From Hell

P.S. Hope your semiotics are up to snuff, kiddo.

P.S.S. Sinyamin Erringway sucks. Come get me. What followed that was a string of obscenities the likes of which Coronian ears had never heard, and would likely never hear at all. When a Wizard loses his temper, he draws upon the very ur-profanity from which all other cuss words and verbal obscenities derive. He can turn the air blue with a string of rotten syllables, nevermind if they actually form words or not.

"I think you've picked up a rival," Blightcrow noted with all the glee of a sadistic surrogate parent.

"No. What I've picked up is a dead man who's too stupid to know it," Savas replied. "He wants me to come get him? Fine.

"THE WORMAXE COMETH!"

[Savas Tigh]

END INTRO

...what? You expected another ballbusting marathon thread? I'm breakin' this crap up. >_>

Just trying to establish Savas for now and nudge him past that 4 EXP line into Level Two Land so I can finally update his bio.

Spoils: Savas has gained a Partially Renovated Guard Tower in a Radasanth ghetto (-100 GP). He has also gained Six Plynt Daggers (Below Average to Average), Several Plynt Ingots, among other less important things (-150 GP). He also blew 50 GP on a (now deceased and/or chopped up) slave. Alas, poor Yianni. We hardly knew ye.

[The International]

…And poor Tigh. Someone should have rounded up just a little bit.

Plot Construction 20 /30

Story 6.5 /10

Strategy 7.5 /10 – I like how you made wizardry a task. You gave Savas something to do rather than just waving a wand.

Setting 6 /10

Characterisation 22 /30

Continuity 7 /10 – I like that you involved some of the events of the Corone Civil War, and that you mentioned the Corpse war and other Althanas regions. You gave the world a genuine feel.

Interaction 7 /10

Character 8 /10

Writing Style 20 /30

Creativity 6/10

Mechanics 6 /10

Clarity 8 /10

Wildcard: 8/10 – Why was I laughing when you killed the slave?

Total 70 /100

Savas Tigh gains 1078 exp and looses 300 gp for the material spoils requested.

Welcome to Level 2 ya evil bastard.

[Breaker]

EXP / GP updated, thread archived. Savas Tigh reaches level 2!!!