The Red God of Radasanth [Archive]

Savas Tigh

03-04-12, 02:09 AM

As this is likely not gonna get renewed any time soon, (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23081-The-Red-Inked-Ripper-of-Radasanth) I'm just gonna simultaneously start from scratch and continue anew.

There's work to be done.

And I am sick with a fever, hung over, and generally driven by misery and pop music and the urge to not do actual work. Know what that means?

Goin' ham on it.Imagine you're in the middle of something important (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23081-The-Red-Inked-Ripper-of-Radasanth) and some idiot (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=189999&viewfull=1#post189999) gacks you (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=190086&viewfull=1#post190086) right when things are about to start making sense.

Tack on several months (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192235&viewfull=1#post192235) of faltering heroic journeys (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192291&viewfull=1#post192291) that all ended up culminating in a great (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192984&viewfull=1#post192984) big (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192989&viewfull=1#post192989) cluster (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192990&viewfull=1#post192990)fucking (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192991&viewfull=1#post192991) brawl (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192992&viewfull=1#post192992).

And then throw in some (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=193069&viewfull=1#post193069) warm fuzzy feelings (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=193175&viewfull=1#post193175), topped off with a little wholesome murder by knife (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=193844&viewfull=1#post193844) and some unholy desecration (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=193846&viewfull=1#post193846) for a good-ish cause.

And now watch the skyship speeding over the city of Radasanth, high above the clouds on a rainy, desolate evening in the Year of the (brutally aborted) Black Silk Son. Zoom in, quickly now, we'll not get much of a chance here and you don't want to miss this. A man -- a rather vengeful, violent looking brigand of a mage -- is about to attempt something suicidal. He's going to become Althanas' first true skydiver. Others have dove from aircraft throughout history, plenty have fallen off flying mounts, and many have used spellwork to guarantee their survival. But by virtue of sheer impossibility and his nature as a Wizard -- a being who does the impossible by default -- this man is about to become the very first one to jump intentionally, relying not on spellwork but on a device. It's a magical device, sure. But that's a technicality and nobody cares.

Nitpicking notwithstanding, he just got a running start.

His birth name is Savas Tigh, though he goes by a half-dozen aliases on several continents. He's probably not Althanas' first serial killer; plenty of people go around murdering for any reason or no reason. But he is one of a handful of potential Evil Tyrants-in-Waiting who actually have the potential to claw their way up out of the gutter and matter on the world stage. You might say he's got a little spark that your average monstrous bastard doesn't (http://www.althanas.com/world/forumdisplay.php?6-Realm-of-Greeting-(New-Members-Start-Here)). Either way, the world technically owes him its continued existence and he's pretty hellbent on collecting sooner or later. It all depends on how well he survives the next few minutes.

Boot on bow, skeletons have their course; all the I's dotted and the T's crossed, this son of a bitch is airborne on his own power now. By which we mean he just jumped right off the nose of the ship, one leg forward, bent dramatically, the other stretched behind him, also dramatically. Body bent, one arm stretching forward as if in the middle of a football throw, the other cast back for no good reason at all. Now before anything else happens, look at this guy. Seriously look at him.

He's like a goddamned murder-hobo from the wrong side of train tracks that haven't been built yet in a town that's only just about to go rolling downhill. Thick beard, tanned for no good reason, dark in the eyes, and great big blocky teeth. Muscular in the sense of a guy who runs from the cops and probably kills people with his bare hands.

Yeah.

This guy saved the world.

Althanas is probably screwed, isn't it?

But more importantly than rhetorical nonsense, the guy's holding a great big bone wand that ends in what look like back-bending fingers. He's swinging it forward and there's an enormous tattered dragon wing bursting out of one end. Magic in action. He catches a breeze as he nears the clouds.

He does not slow down.

The Wormaxe has returned to Radasanth, and the hour of the Tenth Empty Feast draws near.

Savas Tigh

03-05-12, 12:14 AM

Down through clouds, through rain, into a city that didn't look the same; that's where Wormaxe went now. He was little more than a darkly falling star in the night, invisible without the harsh crack of lightning to contrast him from the skies above. Far, far below him -- but not for long -- the people milled about like ants going on their unfathomably small errands for their unfathomably small reasons.

Savas had played with the big boys now. He knew at a gut level just how little the guttershit in Radasanth mattered. The world was alive and he felt himself basking in its radiant hatred, drinking it in like a drug that numbed his extra senses, the new ones he had acquired on the moon, pressuring them to the point that they faded from the forefront of his mind. Soon, he could feel nothing but vague pressures here and there. Some were stronger than others. Some were more...intricate? The difference between a pane of glass before and after it's been cracked and the jagged bits stick out; or perhaps the difference between feeling a thumb and its print. Savas felt himself literally leaving the big, simple world that monsters like Blueraven inhabited and sinking down into the complicated gray-on-black mortal coil that supported it.

And as his feet hit down on a rooftop, he knew that he would one day return to the overworld above.

The people of Althanas owed him their lives.

Savas was going to collect, eventually.

For now, he folded the dragon wand back up and stuck it on his belt. He looked around the rainsoaked city and, through clouds of mist and strikes of lightning, random fires burning in the night, he saw that it had changed.

Literally changed.

Savas was aware of certain amounts of quantum dickery (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven/page7); he was aware of the literal liquid state of Time and he had what felt like an intuitive understanding of Space to go along with it. He had pored over notes with his mentor throughout their time together, after the cataclysm in Scara Brae (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?21566-The-Catacombs-of-Scara-Brae-Dead-Sun-Rising&p=185944&viewfull=1#post185944) and during the months (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192235&viewfull=1#post192235) they spent stuck together (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192291&viewfull=1#post192291) in Kebiras. He knew enough that it was starting to eat at him. And, in hindsight, that was probably exactly what Blueraven had wanted: a Wormaxe too busy searching for inconsistencies in Time and Space to actually cause any on his own. Blueraven had, of course, been a terminal optimist right up to the bitter ends (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven/page7).

Savas reached out with his extra senses, brushing spiritual fingers across the supple barrier that divided the living and the dead; the firmament and the antifirmament, and everything else for that matter. Something had happened. A spirit whispered to him, low and tired and afraid, that the war was over and the Republic of Corone stood again. The military served the people anew, three dictators had been toppled, the world turned again. But that was a consistent, solid narrative that had withstood something big, something easily missed because it was so big, so absolute, that it had rewritten the world all around it. And Savas, for whatever reason, was able to notice it.

The city's walls (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23043-The-Wormaxe-Cometh&p=186341&viewfull=1#post186341) were gone.

The entire geography of the place had changed, in fact, without ever changing at all. It all had the authentic feel of something that had simply always been this way. There was battle damage still visible in some of the buildings where fighting had taken place. Siege scars marked the streets. Signs still hung proclaiming the revolution's virtue, half-washed off by rain where they hadn't been ripped away by the revelries that Savas had missed. The buildings were taller now and their style had changed. More gray, more stone, more red rooftops. But the towers remained. Savas' own tower remained.

Something big had gone down while he was away.

But Septimus Golgol (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23043-The-Wormaxe-Cometh&p=186432&viewfull=1#post186432) was still out there. Still mocking him just by existing. And Savas still didn't know who or what he was. He made a fist, feeling a tingle run through the very bone of his hand. Deep inhale, gathering of power.

And then the Dark Wizard of Radasanth unleashed a primal Scream, coming from deep down within him. Dark green fire rang out around his mouth, haloing up into the night as his Voice carried underneath rolling thunder and the racket of city living.

Somewhere out in the dark, he knew, somewhere out there, the Wizard Wormaxe knew his foe heard his call.

It was time to get back to work.

Savas Tigh

03-06-12, 12:17 AM

The tower, at least, was almost as Savas had left it. He felt out the defenses and examined them very, very carefully before even attempting to open any of the ways in. The only real difference was that the wards had actually grown stronger.

Savas examined the jawbone hanging from around his neck. It had been worryingly quiet for a while now. Partially because he hadn't reached out to Radasanth, to the dead Wizard Blightcrow, in some time. But also because it was two-way; Blightcrow could and should have been able to reach out to him if anything was wrong.

In hindsight, trusting a bitter dead necromancer to tell you if something is wrong was not the brightest move Savas had ever made. But he was prepared to deal with the consequences, at least. Out came a fist full of bone dice and a necrotic missile wand. He opened the door carefully and, in a manner that a tactical weapons officer would have recognized, began clearing the tower out room by room, vector by vector. Not a nook or cranny went uninvestigated. There were layers of dust on everything. Decayed cadavers rotted away where they'd fallen, the magicks originally sustaining them sapped away by the passage of time and, perhaps, other things.

Down into the basement. That's where the shit hit the fan, metaphorically speaking.

Blightcrow's skull sat alone in a pitch black laboratory, surrounded by runic circles and wards. The eyes burned like candlelights, yet they gave off no real light to see by. Savas greeted him with a preemptive roll of the dice, trusting only the skill of his wrist and fingers to get them where they needed to be. Clattering in the dark. The lights blinked out, wards lighting up all over the skull -- all over the room. Savas had a clear shot through all of them, his wand was ready, it was all good, it was already over.

He pointedly didn't take it.

"Too easy," he greeted the dead Wizard.

I've been busy while you were away. I've...tested my boundaries. And much to my chargrin, I'm bound by the Laws of Wizardry. I can't act against you or protect myself from you. Not in any way that matters.

"A better mage than you already taught me about lying (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192992&viewfull=1#post192992), Blightcrow. Game over."

The candle lights focused on him, shrinking in size yet growing brighter in intensity. They gave off enough light to see the hollows of the eye sockets.

"I'm shutting you down."

It was less evocation and more the verbal pushing of a button that had already been installed, all its programming routines and sub-routines firmly entrenched within the runes and lines and sigils that covered Blightcrow's skull -- inside as well as out. Savas had been called Bonekeeper (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?20799-The-Red-Requiem-in-Cresting-Summer&p=164380&viewfull=1#post164380) during his service under Xem'zund, when his real Name had been the Dead Lord's personal property. It was an accurate name. He had done quite a lot of bonecrafting in those days, learning how to shape it through thaumaturgy, even without actually touching it. And he had been very thorough in his work (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?21104-Twisted-Koans-and-Burnt-In-Thoughts/page3), binding the dead Wizard into his own skull and making damnably sure that he stayed there, that he couldn't fight his way out. Savas was nothing if not thorough. It was the only way he could make up for being so handicapped in a proper battle of mages.

The response was an orange Scream of absolute frustration and, more than anything, despair.

Savas grinned at it and whispered, "Better luck next time, prick."

He triggered the dice and annihilated the wards that Blightcrow had set into place. Then he carefully went about remapping, repurposing, and rebuilding them in his own image. It was a long night, but it was good to be home -- a villain in the City of Heroes.

Savas Tigh

03-07-12, 07:17 PM

The next few days were exploration and refamiliarization with a place that Savas no longer knew. The walls were gone. So were the soldiers, the bonegrinding poverty, the despair, and all the horror of war.

In short: All the things that had first drawn him to Radasanth, slinking through the city gates in the dead of night like a graverobber. What remained was an unnervingly happy town with a sense of optimism and hope. The palpable energy that Savas had drawn on before, to empower his rituals and as a base for some of his more ambitious long-term plans, was no longer there. Or if it was, it had been subsumed by the fresh lease on life that food and work will give you.

Still, the dead told tales and Savas was an expert listener. He followed the aether trails through streets and alleys, listening to the chatter of the other side. A dead soldier with a broken spear in his neck once lead him all the way down an empty city street once. Another time, a little boy with a gaping chest wound told him about the Ranger who lied. A back alley girl mentioned a client who'd had too much to drink.

And just once, someone let slip words about fancying a go at it (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23081-The-Red-Inked-Ripper-of-Radasanth&p=186578&viewfull=1#post186578). Whatever that meant.

The city was alive again, and it stank of activity and vibrant joys; there were kids playing in the streets, statues of heroes were being restored, and the recent war was being wiped way by the slow, steady progress of history. But Savas kept looking. Because Savas was a creature defined by dark things, and nothing is darker than the everyday horrors that most people miss. Picture a man screaming desperately to his wife as she moves on, leaving his ghost on the sidewalk as she holds the arm of a new lover. Picture a darkly dressed mourner at her own funeral, so average even in death as to be utterly forgettable. Picture lines. Picture the walls that people don't see, that a mere ritual can't just knock down. Akashic walls, fashioned from pathways in the brain, in the soul; the walls of a culture that doesn't even know they exist.

Savas saw the walls by virtue of not seeing them at all. He just observed as people moved to avoid them, even when they did not physically exist.

One day, he investigated a wall by breaking off a psychic chunk of it, materializing raw brick-shaped ectoplasm in thin air. It held steady for a few precious seconds, long enough to see an old heart chiseled onto one side, then dropped and simultaneously broke, shattered, and liquefied all at once, evaporating of the world in mere moments.

The walls were still there. It just took a Wizard to find them.

And another thing was still there, hiding in the middle of a street where an alleyway used to be. Savas waited until late one night, then carefully surrounded it with a circle of power. He twisted the color, contained the memory, then bid it manifest with only little sacrifice.

THE RED GOD WAKES.

Savas smiled his awful smile. The night was young.

Savas Tigh

03-09-12, 09:34 PM

Savas reached out with new senses, new rituals, and the old contempt of a monster out to defend its territory. The message was old, degraded by changes in Time and Space, but it was a starting place and Savas had taken his soul to bigger, stranger places (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=193175&viewfull=1#post193175) than the shadow-roads of Radasanth's soul. He found a comfortable alleyway, enclosed himself within a warded circle, and then communed with the other side.

It's a weird thing, doing that. Allowing yourself, even willing yourself to die just a little bit. For Savas it was stranger still because of how he pictured the exit to the other side. Some Wizards simply put themselves in a trance. Others took drugs. A few blasted their own souls out with magicks. Savas did it as naturally as a worm climbing up out of the dirt.

And that's not at all dissimilar to how he experienced the transition: Savas crawled his way up out of the space behind his own stomach, through his own skull, and he opened a window behind his left eye. He climbed out into the shadow-world between Firmament and Antifirmament, taking his time on general principle. He took Time as well, because it all works differently where the other side is concerned.

Radasanth's netherworld was nothing like the spiritual warzones that Savas had touched in Kebiras or on the moon. It was calmer, more placid, a little more confusing but nothing he couldn't deal with. Gone were the deathly titans and the howling beasts; the conceptual embodiments of things like hunger and hatred. Radasanth was a city of heroes -- and no hero is complete without a fundamental tragedy, a flaw, a horror that they keep close and quiet for the sake of their own sanity. Imagine that on a whole city-scale and you have Radasanth, and its nether self bore that out.

The streets were all twisting and winding. The buildings bent and arced in ways that would've had them collapsing in the 'real' world. Things walked underneath the light of a prison moon, and not a damn one of them looked especially human. These were the deformed tragedies at Radasanth's heart, the flaws it hid, the horrors kept quiet by its nature as the City of Heroes. These were the ones that couldn't be saved or fixed or forgotten, except that everyone forgot them anyway. And then the Firmament had been changed. Here on the other side, transitioning from Life to Death, Savas could sense it as readily as he could see the layers in a slice of cake.

What happened in Radasanth was nothing short of a city-wide reality warp that only the unchanging tragedies remembered.

Savas almost reached out to one of them, an idiot marching its way resolutely around the space where a wall's ghost still stood, forever collapsing and completely frozen in place and not there at all -- all at once.

He stopped short, knowing better of it at an instinctive level. Tragedies don't change. They change the things that interact with them.

Savas turned his attentions back to the message on the wall. He leaned close, examining it, interacting on levels that weren't possible within the confines of a mortal body. And then he nodded to himself and licked it, very tentatively. The trail in the real world had gone cold. But that way okay. A Wizard doesn't need a trail, nor does he need proper logical progression. Savas just needed to touch the message, spiritually, and the rest made itself clear.

There had been nine already.

The Tenth Empty Feast closed as Savas drew himself back into his body, gasping for air at the same time that his left eye reddened from exposed veins.

He had somewhere to start now. It wasn't great, but it'd do for now.

Savas Tigh

03-10-12, 01:02 PM

Generally speaking, Wizards don't go in half-cocked. Savas was no exception. He eased back into his corporeal body, took his sweet time to recover from the strain, locked down his mental defenses and then got a move on. He found the 'address,' such as it was, through arcane triangulation. It took a few hours. Come sunrise, he had narrowed it down to one cramped house in the red light district -- because even a City of Heroes needs to have its District of Whores. It's another of those little inner tragedies that doesn't get talked about. It just gets brushed under the rug and the locals do their best not to pay attention, until they do, and then they really do.

Savas left the house under a watcher's sign the rest of the day, dutifully returning to his tower for rest and food and preparation. Blightcrow wasn't talking to him and that was fine; Savas' Grimoire (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=193846&viewfull=1#post193846) filled in the gaps that the dead Wizard wouldn't. He spent the day researching, writing new notes, taking down a list of the necessities, putting together the theory of what would happen.

And then, that very night, he put it into effect.

Strictly speaking, any mage can accomplish any ritual. Normal people can even accomplish rituals, with little or no training whatsoever. This is what prompts a lot of possessions or demon summonings -- people go through the motions of certain rituals without even realizing it. The key differences lie in time, preparation, and results. Any mage can accomplish any ritual, but that doesn't mean they will or that they'll get the best results. Savas was a Wizard. That meant he was fast, he knew to prepare, and the results would probably be impressive.

Probably.

In theory.

In practice, he spent several hours fidgeting with chalk, trying like hell not to be noticed by anyone who might actually notice what he was doing. To his credit, Savas knew to use dark chalk and to move slow. Several times, he pretended to be a total drunk. It wasn't hard; he had the scars and the beard and the clothes for it. When he was finished, he went back to the watcher's sign and waited. Like any true Wizard, Savas was adept at improvising so that it looked like he actually planned what he was doing far, far in advance. Case in point: the sign was now the keystone to a much larger, much more complex set of spells. All it took was a few quick passes with what was now a barely intact nub of chalk and Savas set the ball rolling.

In theory, this'd go off without a hitch.

Savas Tigh

03-12-12, 05:19 PM

Montague Pedechenko was a very hard man.

He stood a grand six foot eight inches in a time and place where most men barely topped five and a half feet. He was built sturdier than the house he was standing in, all heavy Salvic bones under a tough field worker's hide; he had spent years out in the sun and it showed. His hair was blond, his eyes were blue, his scars were many, and his countenance was one of passive ferocity -- he could wither flowers just by looking at them hard. By day, he worked a butcher shop not too far from the red light district. By night, he prowled the streets dressed in his finest cloak and tophat, trying like nine Hells to be the gentleman his mother could never raise, only to slip into the monster his father had always been. He took women and beat them. Frequently. Paid them a pittance, often took over from whoever their nominal protectors (or owners) were. He was a pimp, basically.

And he had just finished up, not three minutes ago, with one of the new girls; the ones who aren't quite broken in yet because they think there's a shred of hope left in the world. The real tragedies in the City of Heroes. Montague perpetuated them like a hammer perpetuates broken thumbs. It was money and fun on the side and they weren't real people, how could there be a problem? Montague fastened his belt and reached for his pipe by the orange light of the fireplace, a towering figure who cast a long shadow across the room behind him. Montague closed his eyes and smiled; he had shown that bitch how things worked. Two or three more times and she'd be a good little worker like the rest of them.

He was so ensconced in the memories of fists on flesh, of hysterical sobbing and the blood, that he didn't notice the expansion of the shadows behind him. They grew thinner and darker in places, shaping letters and signs the likes of which mortal men aren't supposed to be exposed to. The windows slowly sealed from the inside out, the glass thickening and hardening such that sound couldn't pass through them. Not long after that, the fire began to grow and to change color. That was when Montague finally noticed what was going on. To his credit, he knew to run. To his misfortune, he was already too late to make any kind of getaway -- clean or otherwise. The floorboards creaked far from his feet. The door rattled briefly on the hinges and Montague reached for the nearest weapon -- a hot poker by the fire. He brandished it like a club or a sword, saying nothing because he knew in his bones that to speak would be to invite death.

The situation had changed a lot in just a minute or two.

And that was before the man in black came walking out of the fireplace behind him, wrapped up in green fire and neon worms, his every step echoed by the crushing of leaves. He wore a long coat, an oversized belt, Salvic boots, and a frightful smile consisting of big blocky white teeth. Montague turned and took a swing on reflex, being no stranger to ambushes. And he still wore the Ethereal pendant his mother had given him so many years ago.

The poker hit the man in black and went right through him without leaving a scratch. He surged forward, visible only by the outline of fire around him, and Montague barely had time to try screaming before his voice cut out and bile churned up into his mouth. The man stood beside him, arm outstretched, fist buried wrist-deep in the soft of Montague's torso. The big man doubled over and his attacker alone kept him from falling, except to kick out the back of one knee and force him down that way.

"Fancy a go at it?" the man in black asked, his Voice sending razor chills gnawing down Montague's spine. Powerful hands clenched tight to either side of Montague's neck; it was all he could do to breathe now, let alone to make each breath actually count for something. Oxygen flow to the brain can be a very tenuous thing if an attacker knows what they're doing, and the man in black did.

"Who the hell're you?"

"I am vengeance. I am the night."

"You are breaking my neck!"

"That too," the man admitted, driving his fingers in just to make Montague scream. It worked beautifully. Montague was a large man with large lungs; he screamed for a while before fading back out. The man held him in place, adding, "I know about the Empty Feasts, Pedechenko."

"I do not!" Montague wailed.

"Don't lie to me. I don't like when people lie to me."

Dig. Scream.

"Now tell me the truth. What are they? How are you involved?"

"I do not know what you are talking about!"

Rinse and repeat about a half-dozen times before the man finally started believing him. By that point, Montague was in tears. He had actually begun to bleed from the nose. The man let go and Montague collapsed to the floor. Boots followed him down, kicking him until he rolled over onto his back, then stomping down on his diaphragm and holding it. Montague was actually too exhausted to fight back at that point. He tried anyway, kicking and flailing with much less skill than the streets had actually taught him. He still hit the man well enough to drive him off. From there it was a blind, feeble rush to his feet. Montague staggered to a chair, lifted and swung it without looking.

Lucky shot.

Down went the man in black, like a puppet with his strings cut. As he fell, so did the spell fall with him. Within seconds, the interior of the house was back to normal and Montague leaned back, slumping against a wall with murder in his eyes. "You," he rasped. "You're a mage, like the ones who murdered the Saint."

No response. Montague ripped off a table leg and jumped in with an undefinable scream of rage. Exhausted or no, he had adrenaline and religious zeal on his side now.

He ate a boot to the face for his troubles. The table leg missed the human leg that ultimately owned the boot and Montague gave in to gravity and inertia as another leg joined it, wrapping tight around his arm as he fell. Ankles slammed his chest and neck, his wrist jarred under a tight grip, and barely a second later his arm had been broken at the elbow and dislocated at the shoulder. The man in black disengaged just as quickly, coming to his feet as Montague reeled.

Another second, a dagger was out in the firelight.

Another second after that, the dagger was embedded deep in Montague's chest cavity. There was strangely little blood loss involved.

Montague Pedechenko died in shock, his last thought being something inane about whores and his mother.

When he was gone, Savas Tigh sat up off of him and wiped sweat from his brow. In theory that should've gone perfectly.

In reality, he was gonna have to do things the old fashioned way.

Savas Tigh

03-17-12, 01:30 AM

Savas ripped out Montague's soul and vivisected it in record time. It helped that there wasn't much to Montague's soul in the first place -- it cut down on the amount of time he had to spend searching and sifting through the man's memories, emotions, core essence.

It also helped that Montague's soul was so blatantly marked by what had been done to him, or with him, or through him, or whatever had happened. Savas left the body where it dropped and slipped out of the red light district well in advance of any would-be scavengers or samaritans. He stepped through a shadow beside the fireplace, where the light couldn't reach, and almost fell right off a roof. His recovery had about as much grace as a flailing monkey.

Eventually, he wrote the following. Savas had a Grimoire now. He very much enjoyed using it. Sadly, the doodles in the margins can't quite be conveyed here. Rest assured that they're awesome.

Hide your work well enough and you won't have to hide it at all.
- Deño Deacon, the Warlock Violencia

Here's the gist of what I know so far.

Someone or something is doing some seriously high-level magic on a semi-regular basis.
High-level = Oh Gods Reality Is Warping What The Shit Just Happened And Why Isn't Anyone Noticing It?
They were so thorough about what they'd done that they didn't actually try hiding any of the evidence -- they rightly assumed nobody would go looking.
Except for me. (Fucker.)
It's euphemistically called the Empty Feast. I don't know why.
There have been at least eight of them. Probably ten if the Shadow Drifter was telling the truth (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=190086&viewfull=1#post190086) in that note he left me.
Whatever the spell? does, it goes through conduits to do it.
The conduits seem to be people -- possessions, maybe? who go around murdering prospective sacrifices, who happen to blink out of anyone's memory once the Feast is over.
The possessee? apparently gets to live. But they're...rewritten? For lack of a better way to explain it.

The rewrite is struck up. The possessee is taken apart and put back together in a way that leaves them totally recognizable, but completely different. Montague Pedechenko, for instance, was originally a mid-level enforcer for the no-longer-existent Scourge of Radasanth. The same Scourge that didn't exist prior to the Sixth Empty Feast, after which they magically always existed and were gaining a big foothold in the city due to the siege tightening food supplies. Said Scourge is gone now. After the Seventh Empty Feast, they had never existed at all. And Montague had owed them a lot but now they didn't exist so he obviously couldn't owe them anything anymore. He had his own little empire, he had all the whores he could force, he had pretty much what he wanted. Even if someone had rearranged him from the ground up to do it.

And all it took were a couple murders deep in symbolism and magic. Pretty good deal.

Whatever happened mainly affects Space. Pretty sure Time's only affected as a byproduct, if it's affected at all. Anyone outside the city might notice what happened if their involvement was scant and distant enough. I think. A Wizard worth a shit would notice just because.

Looking at Montague's soul though, I think I need to re-examine the scenes of the crimes and see if I can't find anything new about the victims. Then I could trace from Seventh to Eighth to Ninth to Tenth. The signatures for the spellcasting must change a little with every possession -- it's to be expected if the host changes each time. For obvious reasons, there's not much to go on regarding Feasts 1 through 6. I can barely keep track of the Seventh at this point. I'm assuming each hit of the spell basically wears away at the integrity of the old ones; reality warps stacking on top of each other, with the old ones being reincorporated into the new ones and then being destroyed in bits and pieces.

Simple, really.

Except not.

And also it covers a city of several hundred thousand people.

I feel I could write my Wizardly Thesis Thingy by getting to the bottom of this and taking down whoever tries to get in my way.

Savas Tigh

03-18-12, 03:47 AM

THE RED GOD WAKES.

It sat there on a wall that no longer existed, silently mocking him, nothing but the ghost of an impossibly large bloodstain shaped for the sake of malicious trickery. And perhaps, Savas wondered, a cry for help.

To be a Wizard is to know that you're cheating in a grand game with the universe.

To be a Dark Wizard is to know that the universe plays with a stacked deck -- it cheats you right the hell back.

Practically speaking, there aren't that many ways to detect something like the Empty Feasts unless you're sporting weapons-grade paranoia, an eye for detail second to none, and such wild apophenia that you can see faces in the dimples on an orange. And even then you've got to have at least some kind of idea of what to look for. The odds should be against you even then; it's not like someone can't cover their tracks, and most dark mages know to at least try like crazy to do just that. The handful that don't are usually the ones who have absolutely nothing to fear.

But that's not how it works, usually.

Evil only has to win once but Good keeps winning all the time. It's serendipity that breaks the back of your average supervillain, not competent detection. The sheer number of would-be world conquerors to suffer untimely, seemingly unpredictable deaths at the hands of foes who should've failed to even notice them is staggering. Success stories like Xem'zund are, Savas knew, the exceptions, never the rule.

That in mind, no dark mage willfully tips their hand. To do so is often an attempt at Good-assisted suicide. It is, in essence, a cry for help. I cannot self-terminate, so do it for me. Perhaps a handful actually want to be redeemed, and a smaller number are just brazen enough to want to piss off anyone who notices their work. Either way.

Savas re-examined the ghost-vandalism with what he now knew. He took a bite and literally chewed the scenery, processing ectoplasm into a finely carved piece of bone in his mouth. Then he went home, spat the bone out and cracked it with a tiny hammer. What followed was about twenty or thirty minutes of poking and prodding with everything from carved and enchanted bone to a crude butter knife. It was science. Sorta. Poke X for Result Y to Confirm/Disprove Z. Except not.

Eventually he scribbled some spellwork onto a piece of paper, put the bone remnants on it, folded the whole thing up and set it on fire.

That got results.

Specifically, the residue puffed out into the air and changed. Savas took notes on the change.

From there, he extrapolated raw technical information on the Eighth Empty Feast. He put together a tracking spell. Then he went looking.

Piece of cake, right?

Savas Tigh

03-18-12, 01:34 PM

THE RED GOD LIVES.

His name was Horace Hegel Holmes, self-professed Doctor in Law, owner of a moderately successful hostel in downtown Radasanth, because a City of Heroes is not a city of people who actually put down roots and live there for a long time, generally speaking. Heroes tend to be transitory migrants with weapons. Hostels keep them from congregating in the places where the locals dwell. It was almost public service and it was certainly profitable.

Holmes' hostel was an establishment of four floors, twenty small rooms to a floor, several paid staffers, and year-round business that peaked during the height of several successive festivals in the late Spring. It had survived the civil war and, for that matter, so had the good doctor. He was a man of relative wealth and means who lived in a basement apartment under the building. He kept a tidy home, had good relations with his staff and neighbors, and was a truly self-made man by most accounts. Nobody knew where his doctorate came from, precisely, because he claimed to have lost the paperwork while fleeing from Raiaera some years back, but he knew The Law inside and out so nobody thought much of it.

All in all, Holmes was a pretty good guy.

He just happened to have the ashes and bone fragments of thirty-eight people lining shelves on his bedroom wall.

No big deal.

Not like anyone missed them.

Holmes, you see, was not a hunter of men. He was, however, a student of them, in the sense that he studied them at every level. And he really was a doctor, but nobody ever asked what kind of law he specialized in.

Doctor Holmes was a Doctor of the Law of Nature: If you're strong you live. If you're weak, you end up strapped to a table with a scary man in a bloodstained apron slowly lowering a scalpel to your collar while whispering madly to himself about the day's events -- trying to have idle chatter even as he takes off your skin in layers, bleeds you dry into a tub under the table, and then takes out your organs one by one. Some of them end up on a dinner table. Most end up in the fireplace, discarded like the fleshy trash containers that brought them.

That's how things usually go for the good Doctor H.H. Holmes, self-made businessman and vivisector extraordinaire.

"Now then," the Dark Wizard Wormaxe began as he finished tearing the dead doctor's soul from his body. "Fancy a go at it?"

Sufficed to say, that's not how things will go from now on.

Savas Tigh

03-18-12, 03:59 PM

THE RED GOD RISES.

Her name was Teresa, just Teresa and nothing more. She was fifty going on thirty-eight by the looks of her, tall and brilliant and an utter ideal of maternity at a glance. She ran an orphanage, because any City of Heroes simply must have a few of them -- and preferably a lot more than a few. Radasanth was the Orphan Capital of Corone, and perhaps the entire region for that matter. Teresa ran a relatively small, inglorious home for bastards on the outskirts of the city's urban sprawl. The building had, by miracles and dumb luck, gone untouched during the Civil War. It was fenced off from its neighbors, a church with two domiciles built into its wings -- one for Teresa, one for about thirty or so little boys and girls, aged zero to fifteen, most well below the age of ten. On quiet days, you could hear the children playing or singing prayers to the Elder Thaynes.

But you'd never actually see them.

For that matter, Teresa herself rarely left the home's walls. She most often ventured out into the world to get supplies, or to make a new acquisition, or to spread a good word here and there. She was usually accompanied by one to three of her little ones, always the cutest of the lot. They were expectably dirty little wretches, perfectly pitiable in the best rags she could provide them. She never took the same set out twice.

At the end of such days, Teresa brought her little rabble home, new additions and all, and put them to work in the church doing Gods know what. It was a house of worship but hardly anyone ever went there. Part of that was inertial; nobody went because nobody else went. Part of it was also the fact that the church was more than a little bit creepy in its own right. It was the ideal Heroic Orphan Church -- small to an adult but gigantic to a child, gray in most places with just the right dash of color, and the perfect mother-figure to breed a hero from without her own womb...

Which means the opposite of what you're probably thinking, if you're not cynical enough to catch on by now.

Heroes are, Teresa always believed, forged through hardship. The more rigorous, the more painful, the better to instill in them a sense of humility and perspective on the world around them. In the eyes of Teresa, no true hero ever had it easy. So she set out to make her children hard. She weeded out the weaklings with punishments and work and little more. The strong survived, the weak...didn't. The church had a fireplace. There were gardens all around. Those who didn't make the cut weren't worthy of a proper burial. Those who made it far enough to actually pose a threat to her, those were the ones Teresa worried about. She was, in a way, just waiting for the day when one of them would grow strong enough to overtake her and lead the rest of them to freedom; to be the hero that she could never be, only the hero that she could create.

It hadn't happened yet because Teresa was, among other things, a world class swordswoman contending with untrained street rats whose fighting skills amounted to short-lived scraps with other children. Even unarmed, she was a killing machine. That was one of the main reasons she had been able to keep the place clear from the fighting, clear from the hassles of the Steeljackets. Teresa could take the wings off a fly in mid-buzz with one eye closed and a hand behind her back.

Savas Tigh was not a world class fighter by any stretch. But he had things that Teresa's victims didn't.

He had weapons.

He had magic.

And he had intelligence gathered from the vengeful souls of dead children still lingering around the premises, blindingly obvious to anyone who knew what to look for, and subconsciously obvious to many who didn't.

And with all that on his side, it was the easiest thing in the world for Savas to do what Teresa never could: he created heroes that night. The world would never know to thank him for it.

Savas Tigh

03-19-12, 08:02 PM

Most arsonists just use some oil and a lighter or flint and a knife.

Most arsonists are rank amateurs.

Savas was a much more spiritual professional about this kind of thing. He reached out to the spirits of murdered children, deformed monsters that they'd become, and he whipped them into a frenzy until they turned on each other in an orgy of violence that likes of whip mortal eyes never get to see. He whipped and whipped and whipped some more...

...until somewhere, somehow, in the writhing mass of ghostly violence on the other side, there was a spark of clarity.

A spark of clarity that triggered an actual spark in the real world. It manifested as a candle flame leaping right off the wick and turning blue, green, and salamander red on the way to the floor in the center of the church's hall of worship. Velvet rug and wood floor alike went up in seconds, as did wood benches and old paintings and more besides. Another spark followed, and then another, and then some more. It was an evolutionary war of all against all as despair morphed to rage and then something else.

The children on the other side devoured each other until only the strongest remained. And then one of them made it all the way to this side, fluking from Antifirmament to Firmament in a span of time that was literally impossible to determine -- because time means nothing on the other side, and Savas could only guess at how long the war actually waged before the victor came mortalside.

The children were awake, of course. The youngest ones first, then from them to the oldest, with Teresa waking last. She was the least in tune with the goings on of the spiritual world, after all. They all fled the building in kind. Several of the children were hurt. One of them lost his soul while diving through an open window, and the resulting thing ran off into the night screaming obscenities that have no meaning on this side of Death. The rest scattered in no particular order, until only Teresa remained; shocked and angered and disoriented beyond measure.

"Fancy a go at it?" Wormaxe asked as he buried the battleaxe in between her shoulder blades, jumping up out of her shadow and striking with the shrewd expertise of cowardice. Teresa screamed for just a moment before she clamped her mouth shut with one hand, then tried to turn around. Savas tore the blade out and hit her with a haymaker edged in black and teal light. She went down in a heap on the other side of the yard.

Savas soon spat on her corpse. He took a piece of her soul and left the rest for the hungry children on the other side.

Savas Tigh

03-30-12, 10:19 PM

THE RED GOD HUNGERS.

"Well," Savas mumbled to himself with a giddy grin. "This changes things."

The message wasn't fresh. Rainwater had washed it away just a night or two ago, and the body was nowhere to be found. But Savas knew it was meant for him. It had been written in a truly grotesque amount of blood on a back alley wall near the market district. The alley positively stank of neglect. Not even stray cats were going near it. Savas sniffed the air a little. He knew why.

Cats can sense things.

So can people, and everything else that draws a mortal breath. It's a sense so basic that it's easy to overlook, but anything living has it; trained magi just have more of it. It's the ability to sense magic, especially black magic, and it's the easiest sense to ignore and the easiest to cultivate and refine. Savas had been around so much black magic over the years that he had a wine connoisseur's palette for it. And he could practically taste blood on the air, and it had nothing to do with a phantom stain.

Something big had gone down with this one. The Empty Feast murders had become more pungent each time, but this was bad enough to remind Savas of the killing fields in Raiaera.

Not that it mattered much.

Savas took out a plint dagger and grinned again as he began to take another sample.

Savas Tigh

04-03-12, 09:26 PM

The way was open and the work was down and the hour was at hand.

Savas stared at the dust he'd refined out of samples from the last murder site. It was a new technique, an effort to refine his senses even further; turn the Wormaxe into a bloodhound. He'd broken it up carefully into several powdery red lines on a smooth glass surface. There was a straw beside it. He was careful not to even breathe hard.

It had, of course, never been tested.

A large part of being a Dark Wizard -- of being a Wizard -- is being your own guinea pig, if only on the off chance that you don't want your latest attempt to synthesize dehydrated ectoplasmic heroin to give some other bastard immortality and godlike power. That's just stupid. So Savas looked at his untrustworthy slave-skull and waited expectantly.

What?

"Fancy a go at it?" Savas asked with a giggle.

The skull's eye sockets glowed briefly. Blightcrow said nothing.

Savas took up the straw and started snorting ghost dust straight up his nose. Within seconds, magic and mundane reacted and necromancy pried open the Wizard's third eye, the private eye that all men bear, but only a select few ever think to use. The change was as much physical as it was spiritual -- the whites of his eyes turned black with a hint of red, and the irises looked just that little bit luminescent. In the midst of this transition, the Wizard collapsed screaming to the ground as raw, untrained Sight overwhelmed the rest of his senses like a tidal wave wiping out a tiny beach village. He flailed, kicked, gnashed his teeth and Saw the world for what it was -- for what his nascent Demesne was, what it could yet be, and more of the things lying within. He Saw himself standing there, a mere phantom out of time, lurched over the table with a broken nose and skulls popping in and out of the world around him. He Saw himself raising a staff high in one hand and a bone-bladed sword in the other. He Saw himself rising and falling at once.

He Saw a lot.

And it almost broke him. Because the Sight is more than just vision. It's sound and taste and smell and touch and thirty other senses, mundane and arcane alike, dogpiling through the retinas straight into the brain. It's why most people who try to use their third eye burn out in short order, and why Seers tend to be such a demented lot when left to their own devices. Ultimately, it didn't almost break him at all. It snapped Savas like a twig.

And then he started laughing worryingly, blathering out random incantations as he voided himself on the floor and threw up at the same time, weeping blood all the while.

An hour later, maybe five, he came back to his senses. He lay half-nude on the floor with his skin itching all over and his vision reddened for precious moments, and then it all cleared to painful extremes. The true scope of the Sight was gone now, burned down to just an echo of its form strength. Savas still twitched weakly and fought not to dry-heave bile all over the place. He sat upright and looked around again, and he still Saw the world differently...but he saw it within metaphorical reason, at least. Sort of.

Blightcrow stood, a ghastly old man with his eyes burned out and the top half of his skull plated over with phantom metal. He wore a tattered old longcoat reminiscent of an Ethereal priest's cassock, the sleeves binding his arms as if in a strait jacket. His lips peeled back to reveal tightly packed teeth pointing slightly inward. This is going to be Interesting, the dead mage Said, enunciating each letter as only a Wizard can.

"I think I took too much," Savas rasped. He looked at his hand and saw every single hair that had ever grown on the back of it, and all the bloodstains he thought he'd washed off...until they disappeared to reveal the actual limb and digits. "Oh...oh..."

That's the least of your problems, you know, Blightcrow told him.

Savas took a whiff.

"...I shat myself."

Giggle.

Blightcrow said nothing.

Savas Tigh

04-03-12, 10:55 PM

Savas cleaned himself and staggered out into the night in a fresh change of clothes.

The streets looked different. It was less like seeing the real world and more like seeing multiple versions stacked one atop the other, different even from the nether-world of the tragedies that Savas knew lurked close to the other side. He saw the seams between iterations of reality, the cracks where Empty Feasts hadn't quite been thorough about patching things back up. And it wasn't just in the scenery.

It was in the people.

There were certain people in Radasanth who weren't people at all. They were husks, or holes, or perhaps just leftovers bits and pieces without the essence that made them who they were supposed to be. He passed Ryna Ejanelly (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23081-The-Red-Inked-Ripper-of-Radasanth&p=186629&viewfull=1#post186629), a dazzling young lass with a gaping black hole where her insides should have been. He watched her stalk by, arm and arm with a young officer, as normal as could be...except that she wasn't and the real Ryna Ejanelly was gone and what remained was something emptier than words.

Savas saw more like that. None that he recognized. Some seemed older, more decayed than others. A select few were still bloody fresh and pungent about it.

And with the Sight still drunkenly lingering in his eyes, the Wizard jumped logic like an apopheniac Olympian. He saw the pattern. He saw how they were all appearing, passing him by, and he knew where to go from there. Each hollow lead to the next. He could feel a dull pressure all around him as he drew closer to the source. Sobriety began to kick in, but not nearly quick enough to stop him from throwing out all strategic sense when he arrived to his foe's Demesne.

It was a doozy.

Savas Tigh

04-07-12, 01:22 PM

Picture a wooden door.

A very large, sturdy wood door surrounded by heavy duty brick and mortar; the kind of door that, in Alerar or Kebiras or some other industrial powerhouse, would belong to a munitions factory or something along those lines. Reinforced with strips of blackened steel bolted on, nevermind the actual locking mechanism holding it shut -- a bar of steel hinged to the wall and held tight by three large padlocks. This was the kind of door that'd take a battering ram, laugh, and then insult the penis size of the poor bastards trying to break it down.

Now picture the door being broken; picture green and purple ghost-worms eating through it, tunneling through and compromising it from the center to the corners, leaving a spiderweb's worth of glowing cracks and gaps in their wake. And then picture the door imploding in from the wall surrounding it, bits and pieces flying all over the place, most of them being consumed as the worms combust into ghastly eldritch flames.

Picturing all that?

Good.

Now imagine that the door is still standing there and the wall about six feet to the left just went through everything you just pictured, except that a black-clad murder-hobo wreathed in ghost fire and worms just came plowing through the shrapnel cloud while Screaming, "DYNAMIC ENTRY!"

Welcome to Corone on the eve of the Tenth Empty Feast.

Savas hit the floor raging, literally smashing fist-sized craters into hard wood and jumping a few more feet into the building before the scenery finally caught up to him.

THE RED GOD FEASTS!

It was written on every single wall and some of the floorspace, as big or small as it needed to be to take up all the available space. The only exception, at the very center of the huge room at the heart of the building -- the room so much bigger inside than it was out -- was an enormous circle of power. It was a layered array of maddeningly repetitive phrases broken up by alien symbols, and at its heart were great, well-used stakes that had been covered in old, dry blood. There was one for each limb, and another for the torso. An outline of ghost chalk was there to hold the soul in place, keep them conscious, aware. Savas looked up and, on the ceiling, there was a corresponding circle ringed with the words And He Shall Feast Until The Dishes Are Empty And The World Shall Gaze Elsewhere While The Story Is Rewritten.

"Well this is unexpected," laughed a voice from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Savas glared over his shoulder with a lunatic's grin and the sudden, bowel-quaking call to sobriety that only an epiphany of terror can yield. "Fancy a go at it?" asked that voice in the darkness.

"That's my line," the Dark Wizard Wormaxe answered.

From his shadow came a hand.

Savas Tigh

04-08-12, 01:02 PM

Chalk it up to leftover lag from the ghost dust; Savas was too slow to respond to one of his own tricks (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=192992&viewfull=1#post192992) and he paid for it dearly. The hand completely enveloped his shoulder, neck, and part of his chest. An instant later, he was leaving the floor at screaming speeds and then stopping perilously close to the ceiling. He went back down the hard way, through his own shadow and into a dark, dark place that felt awfully familiar (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=190086&viewfull=1#post190086) and just as alien.

Things happened in the dark.

Terrible things, too quick to name or know or describe. It was a sensory overload that made the Sight seem pleasant by comparison. Savas couldn't even keep screaming.

He erupted back out of his own shadow and tumbled several feet into the air before crashing back down, his clothes hanging loose and savagely torn at places, bloody scrapes and bruises all over. The space around one eye was starting to swell and his nose had been broken. He could taste blood and bile and other fluids he didn't care to name. His shadow remained stationary, long enough that Savas was finally aware that it wasn't a shadow at all.

He'd been made the moment he set foot here.

All the knives he'd brought with him came spewing up out of that pool of darkness, raining back down at useless distances. Savas groped around in his clothes for something, but he hadn't thought to bring so much as a bone die with him when he left the tower. All he had now were his wits and the skewed powers he had inherited from Aeraul and Rowan, and those still felt numbed by the last traces of the Sight.

From the darkness rose a man whose skin was as black as obsidian or crude oil, whose eyes shined redder than the blood on the walls, and whose bearing was nothing if not terribly noble -- in the sense of a nobleman who crucified people to send a message to their neighbors. He wore a black suit with not a drop of color anywhere on it, and a black slouch Hat with a matching feather stuck in the brim. He had a great leather mantle folded on one of his arms. And he was smiling with perfectly polished, brightly shining black teeth.

"I was wondering when I would meet you," the man? said with a Voice that was simultaneously subtle and overflowing; it brought to mind the color black, seeping past any limits imposed upon it.

"You're not a Wizard," Savas rasped. "You can't be a Wizard."

"Can't I?"

Savas sneered, a Wizard's wounded pride boiling within him.

"I have no Name, if that's what you mean. I sold the rights to it."

Wounded pride met with bitter memory. The Wizard said nothing.

"I was like you once. I wanted something so bad. So bad. And I got on the right path to get it. And I...

"I met someone with the power to give me what I wanted.

"I made the deal, and so will you."

Savas felt his blood running cold as story crystallized around him, in its own metaphoric way. He tried to stand on weak legs, and the man with no Name let him. He was very patient, watching with red eyes as Savas fought his way up to his feet and wiped the blood from around his nose and eyes.

"On my terms only," the Dark Wizard Wormaxe declared.

"...that's what we all thought. You can call me Decimus Golgol. Welcome, Wizard, to the Tenth Empty Feast."

The shadow boiled up through Golgol's clothes, snaking all over his skin before erupting from his back in the form of great black wings, the feathers congealing into the likeness of obsidian blades.

"Fancy a go at it?"

Savas Tigh

06-23-12, 09:45 PM

"...that's my line," Savas mumbled pitifully as Decimus lurched forward, his wings arcing fast so that the tips came down like blades. Savas dodged it, fear and lingering pain jolting him at last. He tapped into the powers that were his by right of consuming the flesh of the dead, and it was frightfully easy to go from twenty or thirty feet to point blank, flanking Decimus on the left. Savas hesitated as his mind caught up to his body. He lashed out with an open hand and Decimus smashed it away with his elbow, grabbed Savas by the arm and pulled him in. The next thing the Wizard knew, there was a forearm braced across the back of his neck and a hand pushing back on his forehead.

Enough time and a little more effort, Savas' neck would've given out. The only reason it didn't was because his arms were free and he was quick to use them -- twin blows to the armpits, driving up and inward to wedge between the two men, then spreading out so fast that Decimus lost his grip and wobbled back. The wings came down again and Savas sidestepped them. His hand was wreathed in burning green worms as he struck, and that power burrowed right into the Nameless Wizard’s chest cavity and out the other side.

Decimus howled outrage and the building shook as he struck back. Savas staggered away and ducked under the passing strikes of wings, but he had tasted blood now. And it was the easiest thing for him to weave between further attacks as he shouted, “Oh yes, Decimus Golgol! I fancy a godsdamn go at it!”

Headbutt, and there was a spurt of black blood all over Savas' face as the slave-Wizard's nose broke. Golgol's wings sliced trenches into the floor and Savas hit him in the ribs with an open hand, grabbing on as bones bent but did not break. He struck again with an elbow from the opposite side, and then the other Wizard was nothing -- darkness, as intangible as it was absolute, completely enveloping him from all sides...

But for that handhold.

"The shadows are mine, you Nameless fool!"

Savas powered out of the darkness and pushed, dragged, and outright forced Golgol to come with him. Enveloped from head to toe in flaming green ghost-worms and Screaming one incoherent battle-cry after another, Savas bore down on the avatar of the Tenth Empty Feast and beat him to a bloody black pulp at the heart of his own demesne, where his power should have been at its zenith. Spells lanced out at one point or another, but Wormaxe was too close, too fast, too fierce; the worst that Golgol could do was graze him, and the lesser mage was used to pain by this point.

"Keep them," Golgol finally managed to say after Savas started concentrating his attacks on the Nameless Wizard's torso. Having a visible dent in his chest did nothing to alter the Wizard's Voice. "I'm after bigger worms."

Savas struck and his arm passed through black aether. Golgol walked right through him and came out the other side, bloodied and beaten and clinging to a flaming green effigy; Savas, covered in worms and lines that looked awfully like what he remembered of Blueraven's extended Sorcerous Mark. Without stalling for a moment, Golgol lunged in and bit into the effigy's face. Savas fell to the ground screaming, and then Screaming, and then screaming again; his Voice came and went as his aura flickered out. Golgol chewed right through his spiritual Eyes and went after his brain, and then his sinuses, his ears, nose, mouth, tongue, throat...

The Tenth Empty Feast happened in what felt like the blink of an awful eye.

Savas Tigh

06-23-12, 10:11 PM

...except that it didn't.

And the Eye, as it turned out, was much larger than anything Savas expected.

And it had teeth.

He woke to find himself weakened beyond belief, nailed down in the most literal sense -- there were stakes in his hands and teeth, and another right through his belly button. He should've been dead several times over from blood loss but he wasn't. He should have been dead from having the vast majority of his soul ripped out and devoured but he wasn't. All of this should have been over by now.

But it wasn't.

Decimus Golgol towered over him with a lewd black-toothed grin and asked again, "Fancy a go at it?"

And for the last time, Savas told him, "That's my line."

The Nameless Wizard laughed as the world twisted and the Eye -- whatever it was -- began to bulge down. Teeth sprang from within the pupil. So many teeth.

Savas tried to look away and couldn't.

A normal man would have simply given in to despair and waited for an end that he knew would not come.

Savas, indeed, gave in to despair.

But he never stopped thinking. And he never gave up. Where there had been an almost heroic resolve, now there was only maddeningly bitter contempt as his mind raced and the world broke all around him. This was what had happened to the other victims in all the other Feasts. This was the endgame. This was the world looking away while an atrocity went down and a slave-thing that used to be a mortal man got its dearest wish, whatever that was.

Fancy a go at it?

The Red God's teeth coming down from its monstrous Eye.

Invocations everywhere. Declarations.

Fancy a go at it?

Life stories, changing and being rewritten and being wiped out.

Blood sacrifices.

Murderers, all of them.

Fancy a go at it?

All. Of. Them.

Something clicked in the back of Savas' mind as the teeth came near. The abyss was gazing into him. Soon it would devour him. But not if...

Wormaxe gazed back.

"Fancy a go at it," he Said, realizing for the first time that it wasn't just a question. And with the weight of that realization, the teeth stopped. Decimus looked down at him, both knowing and terrified. "Fansiagoa Teet. Fansi Agoatit? Fansia Gua Tet."

It was a Name.

"Fansha Guatet!"

The world broke.

Savas Tigh

06-23-12, 10:40 PM

Hours later, Savas staggered back through his front door and threw up all over the central room of his tower. Again. It was bile and blood, mostly. He knocked over a bench on his way to the door downstairs, then fell down to the basement and almost broke his neck on the way. He lay against the door for a long while, trying desperately to remember what had happened in the time between the opening of the Eye and the emptying of the Dish. He tried and there was a hole in his mind where the memory should have been.

He barged into his own study to find the place completely rigged from top to bottom, lousy to the sight of it with chalk lines and scorched-in runes, all centered around a solitary skull lying far from where the Wizard had left it. The eyes burned plague yellow. Under better circumstances, Savas would have run.

That was not going to happen right now.

No more, the Dead Wizard Blightcrow declared, triggering the spell before Savas had much of an opportunity to react. I've been waiting a long while to do this.

"Have you now?" Savas mumbled. He tried to roll up sleeves that weren't there, but he had nothing left in the tank. The spell collapsed and a thousand white sideways lines wrote themselves all over him -- and inside of him, and underneath the essence of him. It was the most complex spell he had ever seen and the Wizard was too exhausted to even feel a shred of awe at it. "Should've known it would end like this someday."

He waited a moment before adding, "I made the deal."

I know.

"Fancy a go at it, Blightcrow?"

Not in your wildest dreams, boy, the Dead Wizard told him, just before the spell collapsed further inward; Savas felt it seeping through the network of leylines connecting his body to his soul and both to his power as a mage. And as the spell collapsed, like a tiny star caving in on itself, all of those leylines warped and strained to remain where they were supposed to. It was a whole new pain, exquisitely metaphysical in its nature, and all Savas could think was that it was a mercy kill. Better than he deserved for the things he had yet to do, for the power he had yet to truly claim...

You're the biggest idiot I've ever known to write a Grimoire, Wormaxe, Blightcrow told him, just as the spell ripped its way out through his belly button. Savas collapsed and didn't throw up for once, although it was all he could do just to regulate his own labored breathing. He watched with bated breath as the spell, all white and silver, glittered up into the air and opened ever so slightly.

Within, there was the tiniest red imp.

"...you've got to be shitting me," Savas rasped as everything came together.

Red God my disembodied ass, Blightcrow murmured. Just a tiny fragment of a truly impressive demon lord. One who's been running the Feasts for quite a while now, using bargains and sacrifice to continually expand its power base. This thing was riding in the back of your head almost from the beginning of this little jaunt, do you know that? Building up its power with every life you took, then blowing it all at the sacrifice so that the demon behind it could 'trade up,' devouring Golgol and sparing you until you'd served your purpose. And in the process of all that, you killed off plenty of past deal makers, ones who'd been freed with each new deal; you delivered them right back to the master of this thing each time you invoked its Name before a murder. And all of this is just the tip of a vast iceberg. Given enough time, this little thing could have probably helped its master obtain lower godhood through repeat ritualistic sacrifice.

Are you beginning to understand how badly you need to unfuck yourself, Wizard? Blightcrow asked. Deception is as much a Law of Wizardry as vendetta. You should have seen all of this coming from the moment you became involved.

Savas passed out on the spot just to spite him.

Savas Tigh

06-24-12, 01:14 PM

Days ticked by before Savas was up for a journal entry. He was not happy with what he wrote, but journal entries are seldom the stuff of pleasure.

I made the deal.

I made a deal. I don't remember what it was. If there was fine print, I don't think I was in a position to read it. I remember teeth and eyes and screaming.

For once, that's good enough for me.

Blightcrow has explained to me that this has all been the work of a demon lord whose Name I dare not speak, even to write. A big one that could punt around any of the others I've called up over the years. It likes to be known as the Red God. Blightcrow is passingly familiar with it, claims he wrestled some of its lieutenants on the other side. I don't know if I believe that but I do know he pulled an imp out of my head and held it in place for the six hours I was unconscious, the three I needed to finish recovering, and the hour I needed to get everything ready for a dissection. Except that it was a vivisection and I relished in it, oh yes...

I worry now though. I made a deal but I don't remember it; I don't even know how to break it and I'm not sure if I want to risk becoming a Warlock. Whatever it is, I still have my Name. I am still Wormaxe.

The city has changed again. I haven't bothered to investigate too much, but I saw an innkeeper sweeping his porch a few hours ago who reminded me -- worryingly -- of Decimus Golgol. I sat in his inn's dining room, had a full meal, and listened to him tell a bevy of orphans a story about ghosts and heroes and whatever else. I wasn't paying much attention. The bits I did listen closely to, they reminded me of the other night.

I get the feeling the consequences of this whole misadventure will be plaguing me for a long, long while.When he was done, Savas closed the book and stared at the wall in front of him.

At last he admitted, "I'm not you, Blueraven. I'm getting in over my head."

Savas Tigh

06-25-12, 10:23 PM

Wormaxe closed the book with a defeated sigh. He spent the rest of the week in a self-destructive haze, too weak in spirit to even murder anyone and too distracted to notice when a little boy with black pits for eyes bumped into him one day -- at least, too distracted to notice until well after the fact. Even when he did realize it, Savas didn't much care.

What's one more for the pit? he later wrote without giving any context to it.

The city had changed alright. It was back to whatever the consensus deemed correct, which might've been a less awful state of siege or outright normalcy; he couldn't be bothered to pay enough attention to care. Savas wandered the City of Heroes as a two-bit death-eating hedgemage who'd been conned into a deal with something awful by a lowly imp. The whole experience was, on the whole, a humiliating reminder that he had a long way to go before he surpassed his mentor. If he ever could. Blueraven had been a Sorcerer after all, and that was an avenue of power blocked to him (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?23404-Stairway-to-Heaven&p=193069&viewfull=1#post193069), because Savas hadn't sold himself to the Thaynes when he had the chance. And he had done far too much for them to trust him with that kind of power the way they trusted Caden. If they trusted anyone or anything at all.

Eventually, after far too much moping, the Wizard went back down to his study. There, the skull of Blightcrow waited for him. It rested on a satin pillow on one of the book shelves, the only reward Savas could think to give after everything that had happened. He didn't even have the heart to double up on the binding spells that should have made his miraculous exorcism impossible.

You look like hammered shit, the skull greeted him.

"Feel like it too," Savas said as he sat down at his work bench. "I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I couldn't even stop a little imp."

What are you trying to do then?

Savas considered it.

"Save the world," he admitted for the first time. It surprised even him, the words that came out of his mouth in that moment.

Yes, yes. That's all well and good. But why? Blightcrow asked.

For this, Savas had no easy answer.

He remembered his father knocking his teeth out. He remembered darkness. He remembered strangling Blueraven to death with his bare hands.

And he remembered the words, On my terms.

That's what this was about, after all. That's what this had always been about. More than the rest, Savas remembered bitterly kneeling before a black-robed archivist with a huge book. He remembered screaming his battlecry as he got his hands around Blueraven's throat. And he remembered looking up into the abyss and spitting into it. He remembered his choices. And through his choices, Savas Tigh remembered his goals.

He found Why as easily as he found What.

"Because I'm going to rule it," the Wizard Wormaxe Said, his Voice ringing out within the stone confines of his demesne.

He had the impression that Blightcrow would have grinned, if the Dead Wizard still had lips.

It's one thing to know it in your head. It's another to make that connection in the pit where your heart should be. Now...tell me this, Wizard. Savas looked to the skull. What do you want right now?

"I want to learn," Savas said, and meant it.

Good. Now open your grimoire to the Laws of Wizardry. I'm going to tell you the ones that Blueraven wouldn't.