The Writ Of Malediction (Open)

[Madrasah]

The Writ Of Malediction (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee1S5OUI9rM&feature=related)


2622



Closed to Etheryn.

Caution. This thread may contain material that might offend.

“What better place to sedate the senses than a carnal house?” Madrasah enquired, expecting her slave to give her exactly the answer she so desired. She glared down at him with fire in her eyes.

The twitching, blood stained, and dishevelled looking goblin continued to twitch. With jittery motions, and an increasing miasma of urine rising from its rags, it replied in earnest. “Yes mistress, a perfect place, desire, driven, and leisurely!” he clucked. The broken grammar and strange lexis with which the creature spoke was unfamiliar to the halls of the Citadel, but the dark elf understood it perfectly. A long decade of union with the creature had been a migraine for the slaver, but she had finally cracked his skull, his spirit, and his strange dialect.

“See to my entry, would you Nikkei?” she pointed a wraith like finger at the curved mahogany counter that formed the central registry of Radasanth’s fighting arena. Without further instruction, interaction, and without further punishment Madrasah walked off to the left. Her heels dug into the sandstone flagstones that bedecked the chamber, her heart beat out a rhythm of arousal, and her eyes shimmered with malice.

The dark elf had travelled to Corone purely out of habit, enroute east through the port of Jadet to travel to the island of Scara Brae. From there, she would travel in cognate as her unfamiliar attire allowed to the desert realm of Fallien. There, she hoped to acquire a new gaggle of wily, downtrodden souls to drag kicking and screaming back to the spires of the Kabal. In the Under Dark, the Bedouin dervishes, lumbar brawlers, and kukri assassins would find out the true meaning of indoctrination and tyranny beneath a cruel, hellish, and pious mistress.

“Let us see how these foul smelling wretches serve their meat, shall we my dears?” she spoke aloud, but directed her inner thoughts to the barbed pommels of the cruel daggers at her waist. Their well polishes steel forms were bright in the gloom of the sandy dome. “I am rather,” she licked her lips, clicked her neck back and forth, and then clucked…”famished.”

Without instruction as to which tunnel she should enter, the witch advanced into the nearest exit and felt her eyes strain as they adjusted to the twilight. The candles that floated like a star lit cosmos in the abyssal heights of the Citadel’s central dome cast a weak and sickly light over her shoulder. Guided by the solitary bracketed torch in the distance, she continued until her heels brought her to the large, iron frame of the arena door. It was an imposing presence that pressed against her mind, her will, and her desire to drive her weapons into the gullet, throat, and sphincter of whomsoever waited beyond.

Her sarong pleated and ruffled from her traversing of the cityscape found it flicked into conformity by a quicksilver hand. Her ears, long protrusions of darkened skin were freed of their loose ends, and her harp on her hip was strapped tightly into place so as to prevent any self-injury. The strings of the nocturnal instrument vibrated eagerly, and Madrasah looked down at the familiar form of Hesperia with a rarely seen fondness. She patted its upper ridge affectionately, and rolled her head as if she were about to climax.

“Oh, now come on my sister. We are nearly there; soon we can lull the senses of the newly dead on their way to temporary sundering.” She cackled and let out a long peal of raucous torment in its wake. Aroused by the prospect, the N’Jalian witch ran the tip of her tongue over her elongated canines and teetered on the prospect of clicking the poison mechanism and elating her senses in one equally as violent death. She sighed, realising she was getting too carried away with herself before she even drew her blades. “No, no use in denying my prey the opportunity to think themselves in with a chance.” Her deft statement clicked against the wood, and as if her desire to kill were a key, the doors fell inwards.

She blinked her flaxen hair parallel with her flat, symmetrical expression. Her silence indicated that even her maddened mind could not make sense of the circumstances. Madrasah pieced the information available to her together, chuckled madder still, and then strolled with a swagger in to the unknown. The Kabal would hear once more about the usefulness of slaves, and how she above all, had made a savage thing like Nikkei into something worthy of keeping beneath a witches’ heel.

“A malediction that I am all too happy to defend,” she whispered. Her heart, stomach, and intestines all grumbled with a soft acceptance of the times to come. Whatever waited for her in the great beyond would be a mere appetiser of the carnage to befall Irrakam when the Kabal of the Daughters of N’Jal rose to the surface and took its toll on the populace of man.

[Etheryn]

((OOC: Minor conversation bunnying of non-crucial detail for conversation flow. Discussed between participants.))

If the decision was graphed as a single point on the timeline of Dan’s life, its coordinate was vague. Impossible to solve. Did it take a second or an hour of deliberation? A week or a year of second guesses? Did he decide before he lost more than he could ever think to lose, or was it after?

Irrelevant, Dan thought. Irrevocable. He swatted the puzzle from his mind like it were a mosquito.

He stood on a lamp-lit street and the world around him was a muted, uninteresting pastel. It was only the great dome of the Citadel he found himself interested in. A flight of stone steps was shouldered by ancient statues of beasts and warriors and battles, each lit by a brazier from below that cast dramatizing shadows on its subject. Dan was quietly awed. He’d never been here before.

It was quiet outside, and what would’ve ordinarily been a centre of activity was reduced to a few vegetable wagons and Empire guards. He approached the steps with eyes downcast, expression sullen, and both hands in the pockets of his olive drab overalls. To outsiders it was humbleness and respect in presence of the monks of Ai’Brone. To anyone privy to the contents of Dan’s clouded mind, it was an outward projection of the choice made to come here.

An oaken door was slightly ajar and led into a foyer. As he turned sideways to stepthrough the gap without opening it wider, he was surprised by sentinel figures standing watch on the other side. They ignored him, and it was hard to decide whether they were human or simply painted statues. Like the latter, they ignored him.

As Dan crossed he forced himself to be uninterested in the armour suits, brilliant swords pommeled with priceless gems, and glass cased portraits of gruff men and steely women who’d made their mark here or in battles elsewhere. The shine of everything was frustrating. No matter where Dan looked he couldn’t avoid his own reflection. Even the registration desk wore a coat of lacquer to force his own image to his retina.

“I’d like to enter for battle,” Dan said, fixated on his a vague point somewhere near his feet. He’d approached a monk who stood behind the registration desk.

“A moment, please,” the monk replied. Dan hadn’t noticed the hobbled creature occupying the monk’s attention. It stank of an overflowing latrine.

“This is where your master has gone,” the monk said to it while pointing to an area on a cloth map.

There was a mumbled reply punctuated by the clicking of overgrown toenails or claws. The creature turned and faced Dan and beamed at him. He couldn’t help look back, and then looked away. Whatever the creature was, it was pleased with his presence. The reason was clear—its master was waiting for an opponent. The creature meant to bring Dan, as belied by the gleeful stare it bore into him.

“You would like to register for battle?” the Ai’Brone monk said. His solemn face was all but obscured by the cowl of his thick robes and a braided goatee.

“Yes,” Dan said, still looking away from the creature and the monk. “Anyone will do.”

“Let me show you where to go,” the monk said.

Dan sighed and approached the counter. The creature scampered away as he approached. The monk tapped a point on the intricate and masterfully penned map, and said “Go here.”

Dan looked up to nod his thanks. He was caught off-guard by damnable ornamental mirror, framed in gold and positioned just right for to force him to see himself. He found himself disgusting. A sweaty bald head with thick purple scars that ran from the top to the nape of the neck. Beady eyes ringed by tired black splotches. A patchy mess of beard punctuated by yet another scar on the chin which prevented hair from growing. Dan found his own face disgusting.

“Follow the goblin if you get lost,” the monk said. “His master waits at the arena.”

So that’s what it is, Dan thought. You learn something new every day. How useless.

He followed the goblin from a distance through the Citadel’s vaulted central dome to a thin capillary hallway. It was dark inside and the flicker of a lit torch at the end of the passage guided them along. Dan regarded the goblin and the tattered cloth it wore for clothes. He noted the awkward lumbering gait of broken bones and permanent injury. A foul waft settled behind it, yet Dan didn’t mind. His senses were numb most of the time.

“Pleased,” the goblin said with a snivel. “Mistress will be pleased!” It tried to jump and click its heels with merriment but couldn’t quite secure the landing. It crumpled on its weak limbs and hissed with pain.

“I’m sure she will,” Dan said.

The goblin turned and grinned, showing teeth yellow as butter and jagged as the edge of a can opener. “She will! Nikkei brought a big one!”

The hallway was long and bounced Dan’s image back to him as if it knew in its mindless mortar and brick what Dan disliked most. Privately he yearned to stomp every over polished tile into powder. In them he saw the barely tied laces of his tannin brown boots, and the rolled up sleeves of his sweat stained undershirt which still showed signs of fray. The pinkish marks and scars and grafted skin of his forearms was hidden by the taught camouflage leather of the bodysuit he wore beneath the rest of his rags.

Despite his inactivity in recent months Dan hadn’t lost not a pound of his considerable frame, and in spite of days without food his strength didn’t waver. It was like his body refused the mind’s decision and became rebelliously resilient because of it.

It could be worse, he thought, and focused his attention elsewhere to be rid of the eyesore.

The iron arena doors were before him and at the same time closed. A shimmering, mirage-like wall of air appeared in the very frame of the doors obscured any view of what lay beyond the entrance. It wavered and boiled upwards like anything that stepped through it would burn to a crisp. Dan hesitated.

There was a tall, lithe figure considering the passage as well. The goblin Nikkei shambled to its side and looked up, supplicant. Pointed ears and skin like the night sky, all wrapped in exotic leathers and a white and red sarong. Long daggers that threatened from the hip. Dan knew of her kin—the dark elves—and their intolerance of every facet of life that wasn’t dark or violent or treacherous or cruel.

The muted syllables of a conversation she had with herself weren’t important to Dan. He stopped, stood tall, and abandoned his apathetic mode entirely. This was what it came down to. It was time to switch on. His chest swelled with forced vigour. His entire existence, through all its seasons, led him to this person who truly fit the vernacular of her nickname—“Mistress.” He watched the dark elf walk through the veil of the arena entranceway.

Dan followed. He considered his tools, the things by which he would make his mark: the black dagger he wore strapped to his left arm, the pistol crossbow dangled from his hip, the thaumaturgic pouch and claw hammer strapped to his belt. A coolness and clarity washed over him as he crossed the threshold.

This feels good, Dan thought. It'd been long since he tied a positive adjective to his own being. It will be done.

[Madrasah]

Madrasah could not help but smile seductively as her opponent, her victim, and her pressing engagement entered the arena with a crossing of the threshold that made her jolt to attention. With every advance of the man’s firm, authorities, and rugged walk, the dark elf began to feel more and more alive. Whatever her goblin servant had done in the dark cavernous expanse of the Citadel to ascertain her bountiful and most certainly nourishing trinket would earn him much in the way of a reward. Candles would flicker to the last of their wick before people forgot the glory, the carnage, and the spectacle that would unfold here in the sandy borderline succour.

“Greetings,” said the slaver, her voice almost barking, but not quite harsh enough to cut skin or temperament. “My name is too long for your common lexis,” she ran a finger across her lower torso, and brought it up over her navel, breasts, and chin before she continued, “On the tip of the tongue, though, you might call me Madrasah.” She smacked her lips with two placated fingers, and then dropped her limb back to her side.

Her words seemed to placate the air around her body, leaving her glistening, moist, and on the verge of beauty. The daggers on her hips, her black, bloodied hair, and her demonic grin, on the other hand, removed any hope of her form being considered angelic by anyone bar the most twisted and eschew individuals. When the goblin slipped in behind Dan the atmosphere burgeoned into one of potential, chaos, and uncertainty. The sound of the lanky creature’s footsteps over the sodden sand, wet with blood, moist with horror filled the silence between the two combatants.

“I brought him, mistress, brought him good!” the goblin scuppered his own composure as he began to walk on all fours, his fish stained hands and crooked teeth rickety and gangly. “Is he succulent, yes, yes?” he looked up with pleading, dinner plate eyes at the fair and cruel mistress that had, for so long, kept her heel firmly on his tail. He stopped five feet, as was her custom, to her right.

“Yes, my dear,” she held out her left hand affectionately, and let him suck a digit with his rotten maw.” The sucking sound echoed through the chamber. “He is…” she licked her lips, “perfect.” Promises were kept in her words, tone, and temperament. When she spread her legs, pushed the goblin away, and drew her favoured instrument of murder, the arena seemed to pulsate.

“Yes, yes!” the goblin proclaimed.

“Perfect, you are most certainly so, good sir.” She gestured wide and true, “advance, perfection, and declare yourself against the writ of malady that binds us together.” Her heart skipped a beat, the scent of blood filled her nostrils, and her eyes tinkled with malefic. “Come, and let me drive this blade into your testicles, clavicle, and navel.” There was no irony, doubt, or displeasure in her voice. Her words echoes, bounced, pulsated, and cleaved the air throughout the Citadel.

“Mistress will kill,” the goblin seethed as he retreated to the side-lines.

[Etheryn]

Dan could scarcely believe his eyes. By stepping through the sombre antiquity of the Citadel and the aberrant barrier of the arena doors, he spirited across and unquantifiable distance into a distant underground cavern. Above and all around he was dwarfed by the vaulted stone walls that were jagged with irregular stalagmites and stalactites, and as he tread carefully in quiet awe, the patter of his own boot echoed back to him. He knew little of the mystism surrounding the monks of Ai'Brone and cared less for their methods.

Dan considered the history painted on the floor. Here and there and further on, in the loose micah gravel and red shale, were dark splotches like wine stains in carpet. They ran in cut lines and arterial puddles and bludgeoned misty spray. It was foreboding and at the same time a confirmation of the reality Dan lived. This nameless pit was not some imagined fantasy. It bore the blood of men before him, real as anything could be.

He glanced at the perimeter and piled spreads of black stone that folded like pillows and sheets. The goblin Nikkei perched awkwardly on them like grandstand seats, grinning and clapping and fidgeting with excitement. Nikkei wiped his forehead with a tatter of its rags and prompted Dan to notice the sweltering temperature and aridity of the air. He imitated the goblin and patted beads of sweat from his head with a sleeve.

The geography of the cavern became clear with all its traits as clues; they were impossibly deep in a planet's crust. Magma that boiled around them, rumbling in a perpetual syllable of giant floes that ground against the other side of the rock. High above in the ceiling was the reason Dan could even see the environs at all. There were crystal portholes that conducted the magma’s glow to bathe the cavern in hellish amber and red.

“I don’t think you’ll be doing much stabbing of my testicles,” Dan replied to the dark elf, advancing casually on her and stepping over slags of minerals that’d been liquefied and gone solid again. The reverberation lent gravity to his denial and the twenty feet between them closed dramatically. “But if you must, dip them in that, uh...thing. Over there. Y'know, to numb ‘em first.”

Dan tipped his head to an out of place feature in the potential tomb. A fissure in a far, otherwise uninteresting corner, was exhaling a constant stream of misty vapour. Dan diverted his course to Madrasah and considered the vent. When he edged closer to the vapour he was certain. It was a siphon of arctic wind, and like a conditioning duct, cooled both the cavern and the gateway to it. The vapour was the changing state of boiled snowflakes. It made sense. The gate from the Citadel to this cavern—what looked like an illusionary wall of superheated air—was more than just a blindfold to prevent anyone from sneaking a preview of their chosen duelling space. It really was, in fact, superheated air made survivable.

Dan waved his hand through the fissure’s breath and snapped it away instantly with a stifled yelp of pain. In less than a second longer he would’ve been nursing fingers turned black and purple with frost burn. This place was a demonstration of the elements in extreme, and Dan extrapolated upon that idea. There was polarity between himself and his opponent, too.

“Let's get to the point. You have a need to kill,” Dan said. He took a fragmented rock shard from the ground and into the leather pouch at his hip. “And I have a need to die.”

He took off at whatever sprint one could manage in a straight line over irregular terrain. His bulk wasn’t suited for it and he fixated upon Madrasah’s shape in the uneven light with a hope to spot any telegraph of a feint. He knew he wouldn’t see it coming and thought best to arm for retaliation: midstride his combat knife joined his right hand and his hammer joined the left. The rush of blood in his ears drowned out a whooping cheer from Nikkei—it sounded something like “murder him!” gargled underwater.

In one adrenalin fogged instant, where everything unfolded a thousand times slower than it truly did, Dan’s imagination abused him again. An acquired defect of thought that plagued him with sight and sound. He could see the carving arc of his black blade streaking in an overhand swing, point down like the knife was a nail. The following hammer blow would drive it home. He could see the pallid, almost alien visage of Madrasah smirking with knoweldge that she’d sidestep with ease.

Worst of all, he could see the mangled figure of his brother Aaron on a rocky outcrop. Dashed from a fall too far too survive. Dan knew the figment wasn’t there, and he summoned a white blanket to cover it up. The world fast-forwarded to regular pace and he concentrated on the task at hand.

[Madrasah]

With a blinding, blistering, and balefire ridden eruption of speed, Madrasah, on cue, melted from view. As the hammer and dagger, a blow and a cut attempt to end their engagement cut through the air where she had been, her heart feinted skipping a beat. It took all of a split second for her grace to expel her from harm’s reach, but in doing so, she gave away her strength, ability, and tactics to her robust, revolting, and revolutionary aggressor. He had shown her nothing but eagerness to kill, understanding about the act therein, and a gritty personality that was as intriguing as it was worrisome. She, on the other hand, had exposed her pallid flesh to the winds of fate.

The harp on her hip, the cruel, barbed, and malefic dagger in her hand, and the pale grey strands of hair resting on the nape of her neck identified Madrasah as a temptress of war. She hid nothing about her origins, person, or her intent. When Dan regained his composure without so much as a flinch, she could only cock her head seductively to the left, gaze at his blackened, charcoal hue blade, and wonder what she had stumbled into. All the hope in the world of a simple, cruel, and carnal kill vanished there and then – she realised now she would have to fight for her sexual thrill, battle for her ravishment of death, and dismiss her servant to concentrate entirely on one thing; his death.

“Bygone, goblin,” she waved the servant to the darkened portcullis that had fallen over the shadowed exit. “This man’s death is mine, and mine alone to witness.” Her voice was shrill, demonic, and full of contentment. She had requested the monks make this arena secret, hidden from view, and bid them disband the audience. When this man died, or if she died, nobody but they would mark the momentary passing of a soul into the abyssal night of the beyond. She spat, unceremoniously, as a way to driven certainty towards the haggard but secretively loved companion.

She waited, dutifully and poignantly, for the goblin to scupper his own presence and flee, like a monkey, from the sandy bowl of blood stained sand. Unrestrained by the vows that chained the combatants to the dome, the creature slipped through the portal of iron bars unheeded, and melted through the seemingly illusory barrier into the cold, dark, and humid tunnel beyond.

“Now,” her grace and humility died, there and then, as she levelled her gaze to her opponent and cut Malys in a flourish and an arc before her supple, moistened, and perspiring skin. “Where were we, sir?” the inflection of class, title, and honour was a momentary observation of Madrasah’s newfound place in a more civilised land. If she had been in her native kingdom, in the fight pits of her cult, she would have offered no respect, and cut the man’s throat long ago. Corone, it seemed, was a different game in which she was a novice and the rules were woefully unfamiliar.

Dan gave the woman a momentary pause, and then let the white cloud that smothered the regressing memories expand. His intention with his blade, and his cruel, brutish, and simple weapons reformed at the forefront of his mind. With heavy booted footfalls, he strode towards the unarmoured, elegant, and fickle form of the elf. Madrasah, uncertain of the man’s potential, unsheathed her second blade in a flash, crossed them, and aimed them into the path of the anodyne edge that threatened to end her need for satisfaction.

“Why do you wish to die, mortal?” she quipped, her tongue lashing like a serpent in the night, “tell me with delectation before I drive the Blades that Sever into your heart.” The clash of metals rang out over the soft sand, and in that moment, the magic in the Citadel was unleashed.

The sand shook.

The sky shone.

Needles, cruel and barbed and laden with long rotten corpses began to erupt from the ground, spread thirty or so feet apart, and reform the simple landscape into a carnal slaughterhouse. The scent of dead, dying, and freshly cut flesh swarmed Madrasah’s nostrils, which gave her the strength her lithe form needed to push back against Dan’s advance and remain unharmed, for now.

[Etheryn]

Dan rushed past, thrown off centre by the recoil of the dark elf’s counter, and tried best he could to dissipate the momentum of his sprint in the abruptly shifting gravel and sand. A stone ahead broke apart at the breaching of pikes bearing skewed bodies, and Dan dropped to a slide to avoid impaling himself as another morbid javelin pierced the space he would’ve occupied, had he remained standing.

He rolled over a shoulder to one knee, balancing on the knuckles of a balled fist, and was terrified. The sight and smell of the pustule-ridden, bloated corpses dangling limply on bloody spires would’ve been enough to raise vomit in the throat of any man. Their faces, however, tore Dan’s composure and focus from him. All those he’d ever known or forgotten or loved or hated were laid out dead.

An Empire soldier, face all melted featureless like candlewax, tried to speak. He yelped as swollen blisters on his lips burst open. A little girl twitched around the puncture wounds in her frilly white dress and her cataract grey eyes rolled back. A dwarf flapped his arms desperately to catch the roping intestine that unspooled from his abdomen. Dan knew each of them but dared not revive their memory.

He heard echoes of words. Madrasah was speaking, but he couldn’t drive his mind to listen through the screaming, thought-consuming emotion of basal fear. He looked away, grit his teeth, closed his eyes and stood up again. Despite the true horror of his very world turning into an underground mortuary, he gripped on to one piece of sense.

It’s not real, he told himself. None of it is real. None.

When his eyes opened once more the faces—those terrible, mournful faces—were gone. The gore remained, yet the familiarity and thus emotional shock was lessened. It was no less foul or gruesome, but allowed a detachment of feeling that would see him through the battle.

Madrasah repeated herself. “Why do you wish to die?”

Dan kicked a severed arm out of his path, and the clots and sinews of the soggy end made a squelching sound against the base of a sharp stalagmite that now dripped with chunks of dead flesh. He marched on the wicked elf, intent to crush her, for the sights he’d seen told him a truth. There wasn’t a unit of good in Madrasah, or a measure of room for redemption. Only something eternally wicked could summon such tumults of the macabre.

“It isn’t a wish. It is a need. Would you ask for any other reason but to deny me of it?” Dan said with conviction and rhetoric.

There was a real threat. There was something otherworldly in the Citadel that could transmit men across countless leagues and even below the earth, and there was something in Madrasah that could bend that otherworldliness to propagate the buried dead. It wouldn’t be a stretch for Dan’s thoughts to not be private either. If he reminded himself why he needed to die, and revisited those abandoned memories, the dark elf may just steal them from his head and reject the pleasure or murder for the greater torment of not killing him.

I’ll die, Dan reminded himself. I’ll come down on you so hard that you’ll have no choice left but to run me through!

He’d deliberated on the reason of his decision for so long that he couldn’t possibly force his mind to change. The weeks he’d spent debating it alone in back alleys and puddles of spew, all the while stupefied with drink, were enough. The choice was made, and the prior apathy of his existence up until this time was boiling away. It was close. Only when he’d achieved a good death, and he gasped the final lungs of breath, could he revisit the horrid memories that drove him to walk to this path. So, his monologue became a mantra.

I’ll die, he thought again. I’ll die. I’ll die. I’ll die.

In a moment of clarity, brought forth by his belligerence and stubbornness to achieve destruction, Dan reduced the world to but a simple image. The spindly tips of stalagmites and stalactites, some sharp and some dull, were all his eyes saw. His magic flicked to life and came to bear. It buzzed and charged through him like an electric current, and grounded into thaumaturgic pouch. His ears hummed with the restrained potential, and as he strode toward Masdarah, his will conducted it through the fragile tip of the stalagmite he’d snapped off earlier.

The picture of his imagination was the spell itself. The magic allowed him to control the world, as long as it was made of the same thing in the pouch—which acted as his wand. It was the thought to do the deed. He saw the pointed mineral deposits breaking off where they were most fragile, and taking flight like arrowheads to their intended victim. They did so in a dozen audible cracks.

As the stone projectiles preceded him, Dan redrew his blade and stowed the hammer. He wouldn’t do well with the heavier, more lumbering weapon against such a figure of speed. It would only be a successful hit from his spell to slow Madrasah enough to engage her in a blade fight. Dan committed to an advance, knees limber and body angled on to provide a smaller target. He closed in quickly yet cautiously, because he’d find severe trouble if the magically animated stones didn’t do their job.

[Madrasah]

Madrasah’s blades, twinned together in blood and virtue, crossed once, twice, and failed to do so thrice. The magical stones, invigilated by power and providence alike slipped through the lightning guile of the slaver. Once they struck her cheek, twice, they collided with her forehead, and thrice, the stones knocked against her upper torso and knocked her back. She stumbled back, desperately trying to regain her footing before she lost it in its entirety. Her feet shifted, shuffled, and sauntered through and over the sand, entirely uncertain of where they belonged.

“For a man,” she spat a gobbet of blood onto the sand, and looked into her opponent’s eyes with a rising glare ad a smouldering smile. “Who wishes to die…” her teeth clenched, and her lips curled, and her glare tore through the fabric of time itself as it flickered between the two deranged souls. “You are struggling quite valiantly against the notion of death,” her voice shrilled into a rolling trill, the sort of unsatisfied accent of dissatisfaction that could come only with failure.

“You are not trying hard enough.” Dan replied, glowing with the after image of his arcana. “Not hard enough at all.”

It was all the spurning, sarcasm, and salacious incitement to violence Madrasah needed. The cackle of her goblin assistant, or rather, the cry of her goblin slave ran up her spine and in the moment of his cackle, she cackled too. She rolled her neck as she righted herself, clicked the column of her spine back into place, and then began to roll her shoulders through concentric cycles to ensure that the muscles, sinew, and bone were able to contend with the physical excretion she resigned herself to.

“If that is your will, sisal”, her tongue slipped into Drow without meaning too, “then I shall comply, with much gratitude.” She cut her blades in a double circle, triple cross, and a lightning speed flourish. “I will return each strike in turn.” She licked her lips, and as she did so, the moisture on her skin mirrored the trickle of blood down her forehead from the impact of the enchanted geology projectile. Pain was something lost on the elves of the Under Dark. It was both a way of life and a form of servitude. They lived, and died, in the pursuit of greater heights of pleasure.

With a burst of speed that bordered on the subliminal, Madrasah began to close the gap between herself and Dan, bootstrap and sandal sole slapping against the sand with the relish of an age. Her daggers, flashing grins of physics against the solar backdrop of their maddening arena flourished again and again, as if she did not quite know what to do with them, and when she converged into his personal space, they drove, dived, and ducked through his guard as best as they could.

Madrasah could only ratify her decision to attack with the wishes of her opponent. If Dan wished to die, then who was she, a mistress of shadow, slavery, and solitude, to deny him the privilege of his final demand? The scent of heated glass, abortion refuse, and smouldering blood intoxicated the sandy dome of the Citadel.

Madrasah was in her element.

"Die!"

[Etheryn]

Hot lines spread over Dan's body in succession too rapid to know which came first; a laceration spanning the cleft of his collarbone, diagonally down to the solar plexus; a superficial slice to one deltoid; a cleave to the hip and belly. The flurry of his arms against Madrasah's onslaught of thirsting sloppy and lacking precision by surging adrenalin, was barely successful in preventing his vital organs from tangling about his feet in a gooey mess. He staggered back, mind too entrenched in survival to allow the searing pain to sink in properly.

He sent a drilling, two-handed punch to the dark elf's chest to repel her, allowing him a moment of breath. He was quite simply outskilled, and although the impacts of his animated stones created a brief opening for attack, the opportunity was too brief to be capitalised on. The consequences for slow movement in her reach were clear. Blood. It lacquered him in crimson, and as the surprise of her retaliation wore off, the pain set in.

Dan backpedalled as deftly as someone of his bulk could do over uneven terrain. He reached his blade hand, using the flat of his tense knuckles to lever against an irregular, chest height outcrop that plateued in the centre of the cavern, and turned to hoist himself over it. As his legs shimmied over, he thrust an outward kick to prevent his hind quarters developing a new orifice. A yelp followed, be it the goblin's spectator cheer or its master receiving Dan's boot, and he put precious metres between his attacker.

The inhibition of his movement was clear. Although each wound on its own merits wasn't life threatening, their sum slowed him and caused the usual effortlessness by which he moved his heavy frame to become a tiring weight. The ragged pants of his breath drew the open lips of his chest wound apart at the rise of his diaphragm. The cut of his hip and lower abdomen, where there was little between skin and bone, stung sharply with each step. His shoulder burned. The fight involved his whole body, not just the uninjured parts, and he needed to lessen the involvement of any area that'd been hit.

Of the past three advances only one worked: the use of his preternatural force, to which Madrasah, quick as she was, was unable to reply. His mind was yet uninjured, at least in a purely functional sense, and should his opponent's assault break through to that part of his person it was unlikely Dan would be alive to care. He'd not yet tried a shot from his pistol crossbow and lacked confidence in the option to. He wasn't trained well enough in its use and knew it wasn't a weapon to be used at close range with limited time to aim and set a shooting platform. It was a one chance affair, and given the speed with which Madrasah clambered over the rock and darted between the aberrant skewers of dead, he'd be carved to ribbons before a bolt knocked against the crossbow's lathe.

The decision was made midturn, and before it'd fully formed Dan was forced to committal. He scooped a handful of red sand and gravel from the cavern floor and donated it to the interior of his pouch. With a grunting effort, throat raw and veins bulging from his bald head and neck, he faced down the black, murderous blur that relentlessly closed in. His imagination generated a wave, rolling at the peak and rising high, spraying mist and sounding of crashing whitewash, and he superimposed the eidetic thought to the true sight of his eyes. His concentration wavered in pain, and as the familiar deep sound of his magic's outpouring filled his ears, rumbling like the angered tide of which he thought, the culmination of his spell was less intense than the grand power of nature he'd envisioned.

The sands rose before him, and somehow it seemed appropriate to gesture forward with his hands to send it off in a moving wall toward his enemy. It was wide and quick yet not impenetrable, and jus as the ocean bed drains to reveal coral moments before a tsunami's impact, a smooth pane of crystal appeared where the sand lifted up. Like the mineral portoculi above which transmitted magma's glow to illuminate the battleground, the newly found geology gave clear view of pulsing molten clag, and it radiated dramatic light and shadows upward over Dan's features, angling to emphasise the striations of his muscle and contortion in his face of pure will and grit.

Dan's body wracked with pain the expenditure of will. The kinetic energy required to gather and lift and propel such weight had to come from somewhere: each cell of his body. It buckled him to one knee, and suddenly he flared with ingenuity he ought not have after such a thrashing bout of concentration. He found himself able to take advantage of the collapse of his legs and half way to a follow-up. One hand flicked to the retainer loop that bound his pistol crossbow to his uninjured hip, and the other to a quiver of a dozen bolts. They met in the middle, and with fingers shaking he loaded an eager, stiff shaft of iron tip and black feathered flight to the weapon. He couldn't hear it click into place, or the boiled kettle hiss of the pneumatic gas piston as he depressed the loading switch, and if the shot failed all he could do amounted to little.

Dan wrapped both hands around the stock, propped a dominant arm on the elbow to support the shot, closed one eye and struggled to aim through the blurring sting of sweat in the other. He guessed where Madrasah would emerge, if at all, through the wave. He pulled the trigger.