The Admonition (Open)

[Cydnar]

The Admonition (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MK0j765ko4&feature=related)

2698


Open to one.

However, this is a Wager Battle. Anyone who so enters, contributes 200 gold to the pool. You forfeit if you do not post within 48 hours. I expect either party to submit for judgement if the other does not fulfil this requirement.


The dark, glowing eyes of Cydnar Yrene pierced the shadows of the arena. With a deep, well-paced arrhythmia, his heart rattled in his ribcage. Whatever misfortune awaited him in the Citadel this day, he was more than ready for it.

“Come, enlighten me to my woes,” he said. He pleaded with a maudlin expression that bordered on the melodramatic ensconced on his prominent features. The dark skin of his ancestry was particularly abyssal in the twilight, his hair, usually grey, was resplendent and porcelain white with renewal. Change had come to the world of the Hummel, and change, most welcomed, had come to Cydnar himself.

He placed his hands firmly on the dual hilts of his sword, Altheas, and her sister, Freya. The roughshod formation of their structure reminded him of a simpler time, when the haematite, a crystal infused ore encompassed his world. In the darkest of the dark, in the brightest of moments, the element he was born to command gave him meaning. Now, there was only war, suffering, and conflict.

“Make me bleed,” he begged, to nobody but the audience and the dancing spirits in the mists. “Make me suffer, repent, adulate.” His voice was acrid, bitter, and lurid. It pierced the swirling vapours that hissed and seeped into the cavern through ancient cracks and slow, sluice-like trickles. The very environment he found himself in mirrored his mood, his reasons for being here, and the backdrop to the cause he now fought for.

Once, Cydnar would have been resplendent, clad in purple and golden robes and aflame with passion. Now, he was a war-torn hero, or perhaps to some, a villain. His seclusion, save for brief involvements with the Phoenix Ascendant in someone else’s war, had caused his skin to darken away from the once moonlight tone that had been the racial profile of the Hummel. He had died his hair so that it seemed to shine of its own accord, and cut it neatly to the shoulder, so that it no longer hindered his stride or vision in the heated exchange of blade and wit.

His hauberk was worn with half the pride it once was, and he had let it fall into disrepair. It was chipped, mottled, and worn in places, and he had to fix leather pauldrons over the weakened joists, so that his cloak, a lacklustre length of fabric, had something concrete and certain to hang from. He wore simple slacks beneath loose fitting trousers, plain and functional, and thick, well-worn boots of dragon-scale and tanned leather. He looked more like his brother, a soldier of the frontier, than the priest Templar his people knew him as deep, deep, and deeper still below the earth.

“Let me feel alive, whole, and mortal.” He lashed his tongue, spitting more than speaking as his contempt overwhelmed him. He was beyond caring, now, and beyond remorse. Few men came to the Citadel of Corone to be honourable, daring, and adventurous. Most, like Cydnar now, came to do one thing only – they came to kill. If you did not kill in the battlefield, after all, then you were to be killed.

For a moment, the cavern, some six hundred wide and more or less circular, seemed to pulsate along with the elf’s battered heart. It was, for most part, a featureless hovel of granite and mud, save for the central circle of thirty or so feet. The dais there, a raised alter where two individuals could fight in open, unhindered ground was inviting beyond resistance. The sluice, which ran into a web of treachery and mishap, gathered in a moat like formation at the foot of the central arena, and Cydnar could only guess as to what perils awaited the unfortunate victim of a mistimed step or a well-honed and forceful push.

Cydnar advanced without a second thought, careful and sure-footed, and hands eternally on his blades; he kept a piercing gaze on the far circle of abyssal shadow that could only be his opponent’s entrance. He had claimed no right, nor made any demands on the monks when he had arrived. He did not care what made him stronger, nor what levied ferocity and rage at his blood-lust. Whatever came of this encounter, here, and now, would be exactly what was prescribed by fate.

“Show me war, show me everything, and show me madness.” He stopped, some twenty feet from the moat, stepped back, spread his legs, and leant his weight onto his stronger leg. Turning slightly inwards, he waited.

[Itera]

The sound of a hole being carelessly punched through space is one of those that reached the listener by entirely bypassing the ears. It has been described as a loud, silent fabric-tearing noise on occasion and as a sharp pop of a bit of rubber snapping back into shape on others. Neither was terribly accurate, but words to describe sounds that the ears didn't hear didn't exist for the same reason that words to describe invisible colors didn't exist.

One of the few beings that did hear this unsound on a regular basis was Itera, who did not coin a word for that unsound for the same reason that fish did not coin words for wet. She was a foreigner everywhere on Althanas because she was a tourist from Tenger Jerhal, a fantastic paradise of fairies. Per the narrative requirements for tourists, she visited all the famous landmarks that Althanas had to offer and did all the 'cultural' things that she didn't feel too queasy about. Today's schedule, decided somewhere in the middle of breakfast tea, was a visit to the Citadel to see what all the fuss was about.

Getting to the Citadel was easy; Itera had visited some time ago to admire the architecture. There was a nice spot on the roof, so Itera had placed a shrunk-down rift there in case she ever remembered to return for a scenic cuppa. She floated through the Inside, a private realm of dark-violet abyss and staring red eyes, until she came to the connecting rift. One gentle tug, and it expanded to something person-sized. The stiff breeze atop the building almost bowled her over.

An hour later, Itera couldn't remember how she had enrolled to participate in one of these 'cultural' activities. It supposedly involved fighting or killing or something; either the monk wasn't terribly clear on the whole business or Itera had gotten herself distracted again while matters of life and death were explained to her. Still, she seems to have gotten the right address. There was an arena, there was some kind of angry-looking creature with terrible fashion style, and there was a distinct lack of an opponent. Itera stepped out.

From the shadows, Itera's huge, gleaming amber eyes emerged first, followed by her fan, the rest of her, and finally her parasol. She had come dressed in an offensively frilly tea gown of white and purple and sensible brown shoes. The huge, loopy bow-knot of red ribbon on her white mob cap quivered in the wind. There was no ferocity, rage, or hate in Itera's expression, what little there was of it not hidden behind her opened fan. The mischievous amusement that fair well poured from those eyes promised horrible teasing for the unfortunate recipient of her attention.

Men came to the arena to kill. Fairies came to the arena to have fun. In Tenger Jerhal, death was but a setback and genocide was but a game.

Itera surveyed her opponent and hid a pleased smile; she would have been unhappy if she had gotten paired up with somebody really ugly. As it is, he was pleasant enough to look at and ugly enough to simply highlight her own beauty. The monks can be understanding, sometimes.

"You're kind of cute, for an elf." She giggled, for effect, "That expression doesn't suit you, though. Can you smile for me?"

Itera had arrived at the edge of the circle, but her footsteps stopped there. Carelessness had its limits, and she wasn't one of the more ancient Greater Fairies for no reason. Her parasol twirled a half-circle and a violet-rimmed rift tore open in front of her, assailing spectators with its distinctive unsound. Inside the rift was a deep-violet void full of unfathomable distance and staring red eyes. Itera moved the rift under herself and dropped in, vanishing up to her waist. The half-a-fairy-in-a-rift drifted over and into the arena, hovering four feet off of the ground.

In the tradition of Tenger Jerhal, it was customary to declare the victory conditions for a duel beforehand. Since the monks had said that this opponent had claimed no rights...

"Five hits. All terrain. Winner has to pay for tea and cake afterwards."

The fan clapped shut, revealing Itera's broad grin. She pointed the thing at Cydnar and two more rifts opened in front of her. These did not show a void, but rather showed the opposite side of its twin.

"Shall I make you smile, cute elf?"

[Cydnar]

Cydnar observed the enigmatic creature’s entrance, keenly, and with distrust. The woman’s movements, dress, and demeanour were all woefully alien to the Hummel, and he drew on what limited knowledge of the surface world he possessed to aid his decision making process.

“I will smile only when I am victorious,” he said, shortly, and sharply, and with hostility laced in his words. “You are too far from home to nail heart to command so easily.” If he were correct about his opponent, she was of the Fae kin, a capricious, though sometimes heartfelt race of tricksters, artisans, and zealots of ways and faiths much older than any elf. If he were incorrect, then whatever strange affliction of madness the fairy possessed was not because of geography. He would be fighting her blind, and a wild opponent unmeasured was a danger.

“Your terms are,” he paused as he tried to get his words out, phased by the notion of socialisation beyond the clash of blades themselves, “acceptable.” If he lost, he had no notion of remaining to ‘discuss’ his defeat. If he won, he had no intention of extracting anything else from her, least of all food and gluttonous delicacies he had no interest in. “Though my expression will remain.” It did, a sour, emotionless, stagnate visage of determination. Cydnar knew all too well that his composure, thought legendary and cold amongst the ranks of his own army, would not last. He would become just as maddened and obsessed with death, blood, and carnage as any other when iron and blood mixed into chaos’ wine.

“Lest you deem yourself worthy to change it?” he raised an eyebrow, breaking his own vigil, before he ran forwards. With the flash, and the sickening scent of magic in the air, he leapt clean over the moat. The lap of a scentless wind kicked his hair free of his shoulders, and the sound of his boots, well-kept leather slapping against the altar’s edge echoed through the damp cavern.

Without thinking, possessed by an instinct as old as beasts and behemoths, Cydnar crossed both his blades. When they sparked, and where they met, quartz began to form. From nothingness, or perhaps from things unseen in the arena, he drew on the empathic nature of the earth all around them. With an ancient boon, he summoned the crystal to swarm about his blades, forming a protective layer, that would offer him defence against whatever doubtless magic came out of this scintillating portholes into the beyond.

[Itera]

An interested twinkle in Itera's eye preceded the slight twitch of her fan. The pair of gaps moved languidly and came to a stop facing each other, one floating a few feet above the other. This was one of Itera's favorite tricks because it involved fruit, a healthy amount of momentum, and a degree of randomness.

She reached down into her gap, which had been moving along the Inside for a while now. The Inside contained, in addition to several small house's worth of haphazardly gathered furniture, the complete collection of a compulsive and highly competent kleptomaniac. Among myriad other things, there was a great big blob of water from that time when she stole a decent-sized pond, twenty or so headstones from when she went grave-robbing for a lark but misunderstood what she was supposed to take from the graveyard (graves being a novel concept for her), a pair of ancient fruitcakes of historical value, several suits of decorative armor, the front half of a dinghy (the other half snapped off due to a rift mistake), a man-sized pile of perfectly-shaped stones picked out because she wanted to be able to skip stones whenever she wanted to, a bale of hay that she had forgotten to feed to the pony that she had also stolen (the pony having since starved to death), a large assortment of keys belonging to different members of a single village, a quart of since-liquified plum duff, a colony of mushrooms of unusual size, and Fred. Fred is the name that Itera gave to her pet colony of bees. Itera very much loved to have fresh honey available at all times and she regularly provided Fred with a rift to a choice bit of meadow, even going at times to temporarily abduct beekeepers if Fred was getting sick.

It wasn't time yet to hurl a beehive at her opponent; it would be a terrible waste of honey and the sour-faced elf didn't seem like he would be inclined to let Itera lick it off of him afterwards. Instead, she chose a large basket full of gooseberries. She had picked these a few days ago from the orchard of a farmer who was confused and upset the following morning. It took some effort for the girl to lift twenty pounds of berries out of the Inside rift, but only a little more to tip the entire basket into the lower of the twin rifts.

Itera edged away in time as a waterfall of gooseberries fell out of the upper of twin rifts. Dozens of them missed the lower rift and splattered onto the ground below, but the majority went through and repeated themselves. She tossed basket aside, paying it no mind as it tumbled and then fell over the edge into the abyss with a sad little noise.

From behind the blurred, green pillar of ever-falling berries, Itera smiled at Cydnar and twirled her parasol, "That's good! It's more interesting if you have to work for your first smile, though it'll come all the more easily afterwards. I wonder... if you can take a joke?"

It was still play time for Itera. The best kinds of mortals to deal with are those who put up with some respectful resistance. The ones that crumpled immediately are just no fun at all. That is why Itera felt joy in her heart and was determined to play with this one as long as she could. Besides, he had already made the critical error of agreeing to a fairy's terms.

"Once upon a time, it was raining..." Itera winked at the elf behind the crossed blades, then swept her fan forward in one grandiose gesture. The top portal twisted its facing horizontal.

Twenty pounds of high-velocity gooseberries arced across the platform towards the elf. The mutual motion and air resistances spread it out into a green, pebbly wave crashing down.

[Cydnar]

Cydnar, honed in the field of war, reacted as any soldier might in the face of danger. He crossed his blades tighter together, raised his arms to his face, and looked away. When pips struck him, and fleshy fruit, his head reeled with confusion. Though the barrage battered his arms, and left them tingling with numb sensation, they did little in the way of lasting damage. He lowered his blades, slowly, and sent the fairy a piercing, languishing gaze. He spoke a thousand words with one expression, and then spread the haematite blades to his sides. They formed crystalline wings, glistening in the dim light of the cavern.

Contrary to the stoic and stubborn nature he tried to wield as a weapon, Cydnar could not help but do the one thing he resigned himself to not do. He, with relish, smiled. It was a broad beam, a happy, bemused curl of the lips. The effect was somewhat dampened by the fruit spattered robes and the tarnished metal of his pauldrons and chest plate.

“That was interesting, to say the least,” the blades continued to gather the dust from the air that spewed from nothingness. Cydnar’s concentration, though wavering, retained its keenness and he doubles his efforts to seal the swords in the negating gemstone.

“That is better,” she said, “now we are on an equal playing field.”

“Equal is a pejorative term,” Cydnar clashed his blades together, wasting no time to smash the quartz sheathes against one another. The geomantic progeny of his power prevented them from smashing, and instead, they simply splintered, cracked, and scattered fragments across the roughshod surface of the altar. The sound echoed through the chamber, a harrowing echo of a glacier moving across ancient tundra. It reminded Cydnar of home, far away, and beyond reach.

The damp surface of the cavern walls, at that moment, as if commanded, began to vibrate. It was a soft, lulling sound, indicative of life, more so than danger. It reverberated through the floor, rippled the surface of the altar’s moat, and tingled up the lithe limbs of their progenitor. The tension in the air, after a few seconds of harmonious discord, grew suddenly, and exponentially. The monks of the Ai’bron peered closer to their viewing orbs, curious, perhaps, though their hoods shielded them from exposition.

“You have succeeded in making the impossible happen, my lady,” he let the dust of his artistry fall to the altar, satisfied that the blades were adequately shielded from whatever magical trickery was going to come his way next. He only hoped he did not waste his efforts on another barrage of strange fruits.

“It is a good skill to have,” she chuckled. The maddening sense of wanting to punch her in the face became an almost feverish itch beneath his robes. His skin, cold, prickly, and alive with potential quivered. “Now, let us see what other…” he snarled, “tricks you have up your pedantic sleeves.” He rolled his eyes, set Freya at a parallel with Altheas, and readied himself. The threat in the air gave itself purpose, life, and presence. He sounded, like his quartz, deep purple and engrained with volcanic strength.

“Oh, this will be so much fun!”

“You have made me smile, now make me bleed.” He roared a soft and guttural growl at first, which grew swiftly into a bellow that could shatter rock. His fangs emerged from the deep-seated channels in his gums. The pain was drowned out by the rush of adrenaline that fired into his body as he leapt forwards. A son of a snake charged, head first, swords prepared for a scissor strike, directly at the bastard daughter of the moon kin.

“Playtime is over!” he followed, boots pounding the altar, heart pounding the aeons of time.

[Itera]

Itera had a moment to think about playtime and instantly came to the conclusion that there was nothing about an angry elf with some blades that would demand her to actually take things seriously. The score was 1-0 in her favor. The elf wasn't about to hit her in the face with terrible, destructive magics like those used to play football in Tenger Jerhal. Most importantly, the audience was rising up to a deafening cheer. It would be a terrible shame to do something serious, like launching an ocean at her opponent, and ruin all the atmosphere

A pond, on the other hand, was a perfectly acceptable substitute.

As the elf closed the distance with long, powerful strides, he was treated to the curious and mildly nausea-inducing sight of one portal flattening itself against the ground right in front of him and expanded to several feet across. The nauseating part was how it suddenly opened not to some other bit of the arena but rather apparently opened to an infinite depth of deep-violet space filled with countless glaring, red eyes.

Still, the response was going to be the same. He was going a good clip, so one powerful leap at the edge carried him right over the exceedingly obvious bottomless pit.

Itera, having stuffed one portal into her riding-portal to the Inside, smiled even more broadly and tilted her fan. Inside, a pond fell into a portal, its water pressure driving the mass through with inexorable force.

Outside, at the apex of his jump, Cyndar suddenly noticed that the bottomless pit below him resembled a lot of somewhat muddy-looking water moving rather fast towards him. He was in the air, without any means of traction, so he did the only thing that was remotely sensible when attacked with a pond: he crossed his swords and blocked. It was not, upon later reflection, his brightest moment.

The column of water continued into the air, struck the ceiling of the cavern, and came back down as a brief but intense downpour. Itera didn't get a drop on her, having put her parasol into some use other than as an elegant accessory. Cyndar didn't care, having tucked into a roll on the far side of the big rift and landed soaking wet. It wasn't far now, a few more feet and he'll have her.

"It's over!" He cried and lept forward. Itera's parasol was suddenly in the way, but the two blades made short work of the wet fabric to reveal a approvingly smiling face behind. The skeleton of the parasol was still annoyingly in the way, but Cyndar's grimace was edging closer and closer by the second as his blades slashed and tore through the sturdy wood until... THERE!

A white mob cap, its ribbon and face slashed in half, its frills trailing a few strands of severed golden hair, sailed through the air. Itera had just narrowly ducked a decapitating blow, yet still, still the fairy smiled! Cydnar reared an arm back for one more blow past the tatters of the parasol.

There was the unsound of a portal repositioning itself directly above the engaged pair. Trailing intensely hallucinogenic spores, two huge, misshapen mushrooms fell through the violet-rimmed rift and landed in large, dark puffs on the ground.

[Cydnar]

Cydnar had explored the depths of the Under Dark, the very maddening outer reaches of his world. In his explorations, mushrooms, fungi, and other similar biological organisms has always been the source of the gravest peril. His primitive cry of ending, now a naive egotistical roar, seemed horribly immature. His blades, haematite, ore and steel combined, scraped against the damaged frame of the fairy’s parasol.

“You are really getting to my inner beast,” he hissed, his tongue lashing between her serpentine fangs like a snake’s vitriolic and barbed cuss. Knowing he was in graver danger than the woman’s smile, he stumbled back, sodden, dripping, and growing increasingly cold.

“Shame,” Itera griped, her smile, once beautiful, now a deadly weapon. It struck a blow to Cydnar’s pride that would take a long time to heal, and more divine power than whatever magic the Monks of the Ai’bron used to heal the wounded and the destitute entrants to the Citadel’s halls.

“More of your petulant tricks?” the elf asked, though somehow, he knew the answer already. Keeping his blades, now bereft of their crystalline scabbards, crossed over his torso, he glanced across his shoulder. “Poison, no doubt,” he turned, held out his blades, and glanced across his shoulder at the fairy.

The water from the portal, which had seemed so innocuous, innocent, and harmless at first, was doing wonders at draining his stamina. With every motion, beneath his heavy armour and now chainmail weight robes, he lost a movement, a sword clash, or a chance to survive whatever gambit his opponent plied next to her victory attempts. He wished he had the opportunity to shed some layers, but to afford himself that luxury; he would have to occupy her for just long enough.

“Let’s see,” he said, cantering across the platform to the first large, morphed fungi. With two strikes, cut close to the mark and a split second apart, he gauged the density of the organic mass. The first slipped into the outer skin with ease, released nothing, but the second cut deeper, and the cloud of spores that came out instantly filled the air with ardour.

The dust cloud they had erupted in their descent had been harmless enough, perhaps just pheromones to attract insects, mates, and innocent prey. Whatever was contained beneath the surface, on the other hand, could have smothered even the hardiest of men. Cydnar had barely enough time to stumble to the right, flailing futile, and swearing, in eight languages, just to make the moment seem less certain, determined, and prescribed. He would have hated to have lost to the minions of his opponent. If he was going to lose, he thought, as he wavered, tripped, and fell gracelessly from the altar, he was going to lose to her, not happenstance.

The irony of his considerations was not lost on him as his body crashed against the abyssal surface of the moat. It did not take long for his armoured form to disappear beneath the surface, drowned out by ripples that burst into star falls and volcanic explosions. The echo of his ill fortune rebounded around the cavern like thunder, knocking dust, debris, and decoration from stalagmites and stalactites. The mushrooms continued to emit a painful, searing array of spores, meant to impregnate and irradiate, dissolve and consume whatever fell in their way.

As Cydnar struggled for his life beneath the dank waters of the arena’s only prominent feature, Itera would have to fight for hers amongst the effluence of her own enigmatic, erratic, and enduring style.

[Itera]

(Forfeited. I have no idea how to actually continue this.)

[Revenant]

Wager Battle – 200 gp prize.

Condensed rubric requested, battle forfeited by Itera.

Plot: (18) – As a straight up conflict between the two of you, this was going pretty well until the forfeit. The setting got somewhat lost in the midst of what your characters were doing.

Character: (18) – I felt like Cydnar never really got anything of character through aside from the fact that he was battle weary. It would have been good to get a more in-depth study of the character, his motivations, and how he got to be that way.

Prose: (17) – Pretty basic here, nothing really sticking out.

Wildcard: (5)

Total: 58

Cydnar Yrene receives 435 exp and 245 gp.
Itera receives 239 exp and loses 165 gp.

[Revenant]

EXP/GP added.