Castle of the Bloody Night (Open) {October Event!}

[Slayer]

He'd found the first page shortly after he'd crossed the border of the Tular Plains. The unofficial border, that was. The smattering of patchy forests and weedy grass fields of the outlands had died off a mile back, but it had only been when he saw the page, snagged in the gray claw of a dead tree branch that the sky had changed, grim colorless sunlight snuffed and smothered underneath heavy dark clouds that stretched their tumescent bulk to the edge of the world, that he knew the border was official. Reaching a hand up, knotted scars criss-crossing the pale flesh of his thick knuckles, the branch creaked, groaned, and let loose a little trickle of tinder-dry splinters as it responded to his unspoken command, bending to the ground so that he could snatch the paper from its barren bough. The paper had been carefully torn on its left border, so as not to interrupt the bizarre rings of concentric circles that glowed faintly on its pages, their interiors filled with odd swirls, interlocking curves and oddly twisting zig-zags. Nodding without a word, he folded the paper in half and tucked it into the breast of the thin leather jacket he was wearing.

The second he found when the ground lost its color and become as gray and listless as his only natural eye. It was pinned under a fist-sized stone in the middle of a recession in the ground that he surmised had once been a river bed before the land was damned. The water had dried up and the dust blown by the wind had slowly filled until it would have barely come to his ankle if by some miracle it rained, and filled the little dent in the ground. He didn't even flinch when five demons, all a motley assortment sickly colors, bruise-purple, rot-green, and puss-yellow, came shrieking down on him from a nearby cluster of crooked dead trees. The best trap they could devise, with their degenerated minds, he assumed. Lifting his right hand, he flickered his fingers, and the demon making up the back of the raiding party was lifted off the ground by parched branches, twisting and coiling around its limbs in an impossible, weaving around its chest, then reaching into its mouth, slithering down its throat and wind pipe. Focusing on the two on the left and right, he raised his pinky and index fingers. Two stones shot off the ground and hurtled through the air, leaving a trail of dust and pebbles as they sharpened to a wicked point each, a breath before they sank so deep into the right eye sockets of the scaled abominations so deep they vanished and would have punched through the backs of their lumpy skulls if it weren't for their nigh-impenetrable hide. The left hand came up before him now, and he made a swift separating motion. The ground in front of the lead demon opened up in a fissure and swallow him up to its pointed chin, while the last lunged over, sailing through the air on a direct collision course with the man in the thin leathers, who pulled a silver, double barreled handgun from the holster on his thigh. The demon opened its fanged jaws to let out another hideous, keening shriek, which was met with the thunderous crack of a fifty caliber punching through the soft palette of its mouth in a spectacular spray of blood that scattered sharp curved teeth and pieces of demolished tongue at the man's feet as it thumped to the ground in front of him.

It all took less than a minute.

He crouched down in front of the buried survivor and pulled the cotton mask off his face. Around the demon's neck was a twisted cord of desiccated skin and paper which on closer inspection had similar symbols as the first he'd found. Tucking a cigarette between his thin lips, Dan Lagh'ratham lit it with a match, the flame glittering off his ice and stone eyes, flickering the spent thing into the demon's face. It cringed and began hissing at him in Haide. Showing it the pager, he asked it if it could read the Saraelian glyphs, then when it kept cursing him, he asked it where his brother was, slapping its face lightly with the page.

When it didn't answer that either, he cut its eyes out and left it behind him.

Derium was here in the Plains, hiding these books that would tell Dan everything he needed to know to kill his gilded dick head brother. The Terran saraelians had known how to kill the high and mighty lumarians, and he knew now Derium had butchered Claire and hunted Meredith until she'd vanished. Once he got the book and figured out how to read it, he was going to commit the most vile fratricide Althanas had ever seen. As he pushed on through the ruined hellscape of the Plains, his thoughts went to her. That laugh. That red hair. The way she'd always look at him, like he wasn't a monster. Like he wasn't the Red Beast.

The hate grew colder in his guts.

Dan stopped suddenly and dropped to a crouch, spying the tiny glow of a distant camp fire. The scattered demon tribes didn't light fires. They had no trouble seeing in the dark. Licking his lips and tapping the piece of jade under his jacket and shirt, he whispered Kikurin's name under the whisper of the wind and moved forward, keeping low as his features became blurry, then transparent, and then finally he simply vanished from sight as he drew closer. His confusion only grew as the group came into sight. What kind of lop sided freak show had wandered so far out into the Plains? Some kind of bird girl-thing, caught in the embrace of some much stranger vine-armed monster, a very tired looking man that looked a bit similar to himself - less handsome, of course - in a sharp pin stripe suit, and a...person whose gender he couldn't decide on, though they gave him the weirdest feeling in his pants. That one, Dan could nearly smell the magic lingering in it, a scent of buzzing ozone around it. Golem? Sentinel?

He continued to circle them quietly, still masked from sight by Kikurin. Further along, closer to the looming dark shape in the horizon trod a young man with hair as bloody red as his hands had often been only a short few years ago, clad in tunic made of unmistakable magim hide beast. Been here before? You didn't really find magim beast leathers at the bazaar. Before he could even wonder who in Hromagh's name these people were, he spotted the last two. One was the ugliest lump of plant matter he'd ever seen with an excellent taste in clothes. He could smell the sharp, bitter stink of poison all over it, and he marked that one as the most dangerous of this gaggle of freaks. It was spitting obscenities at a bubbly little cat girl with cobalt blue hair and a nice bottom that almost, nearly managed to push Claire out of his thoughts. He stopped behind her in particular, and pulled his gun from its holster, letting it hang at his side, hidden behind her. He reappeared slowly in the firelight, the mask off, grinning like the cat that ate the canary.

"Well mama, it ain't interested, but I tell you what, I'll make you purr all night." He leaned closer to her pointed ear, lowering his voice, but leaving it loud enough for all to hear. "You're a little familiar...huh. Dan Lagh'ratham. Pleasure's all your's. If you answer two questions. Why are you all out here in the Althanian version of Detroit?"

He raised the two pages he'd found clutched in his fist, the ink still glowing, its shapes and glyphs visible in the firelight. "And any one of you able to read this fuckin' chicken scratch?"