718 Vhalar 66...
As Primrose had predicted, they arrived at the edge of the ruined barony by the beginning of sundown.
There had been no sign of creepborne throughout the night, and at the first screech of the morning, oddly distant and faded so far from the cloistered walls of the city, they had set out. The stillness of the Quacian wilderness was often deceptive – a gentle lie to lull the unwary and weary into calm and much-needed security only to tear it from their broken bodies and consume the remains. That trial, save for the sound of their own boots upon the soft earth and the occasional hiss of the grasses shifting, the peace had been genuine.
Old buildings of stone crumbled around them. There had been, at some point in the hundreds of arcs that had passed since the barony’s first iteration, a wall – though now it was little more than scattered stones arranged in the semblance of a perimeter. It had been constructed - as many of the distant baronies had been – over the ruins of some even older, even more dilapidated remnant of a time before Quacia’s fall, or so Caetano said. There were hundreds of sites just like it, scattered throughout the valleys and forests and, perhaps, somewhere in the far-off mountains and sunken deep below the surface of the sea. Whether or not the good barony of Perosinho sat atop wonders and treasures and dangers of the Deep was not the reason they had come.
It had been, however, the reason she had set out for it.
The Lady Graciana Moreno, a master abrogant and woman of both poise and wit, had been requested to join an expedition to distant Perosinho. The purpose, as Primrose had explained to him before they had even passed under Condemnation’s yawning maw, had been one of discovery: to determine if the barony did indeed have merit beyond its distance from the deadly walking forests.
Whatever had happened, she had been gone for far too long, and though she had not explicitly written down upon her note where it was she was going or what it was she was doing, he had known where to go to find out. The band of mercenaries – or, rather, the nobleman – that had contracted her had grown worried as well – less so for the well-being of the expeditionary party and more so for their investment in it – and they had agreed to send a smaller, more specialized group to investigate at Mathias’ behest.
Alone, he most certainly would not have survived the trip, and even together, it had been a wearisome journey enough to weather even Caetano’s spirits. Though he found it difficult – if not impossible – to imagine Graciana in any other situation than one in which she was in control, he understood that it was likely she and those she had been accompanying were gone. Until it was confirmed by his own eyes, however, he kept focused on the purpose of his foray into the Quacian wilderness: to find her.
As they picked their way across the long since overgrown cobbles and occasional boulder that may have been the pedestals of statues or just as easily have been the cornerstones of massive buildings long since forgotten, Mathias questions his own motives. He knew he didn’t love her – she was not his mother, and they had had many a discussion on what it was to love. Both had come to the conclusion, in a manner of speaking, that neither of them was capable of it. Of love. It should have been a tragic revelation, but neither of them had thought much of it.
He was her heir, in all ways but blood, and she had yet to teach him everything he needed – and wanted to know.
Stumbling over a rain-smoothed stone stuck firmly in an earthen halo of vines and sharp-edged grasses, Mathias hopped a step or two to keep balance before he pressed on, eyes set on Primroses’ three swinging braids and Kysar’s bright, bushy head of hair. He imagined that was the closest he would ever get to love – the desire to keep someone around for what they offered him. He knew there should have been more, but even the steady chill of his spark gave little indication he felt much at all as he pondered over the nature of his personal quest.
At the very least, he supposed, reasons aside, they had come across interesting creepborne, even if they couldn’t find Graciana. The beast of a bear still hung about in the after-images of his thoughts.
“Wait.” Primrose’s voice was clear and commanding, though she kept her volume low.
Mathias blinked three times in rapid succession before he settled his focus ahead, coming to stop beside her as both Kysar and Caetano departed to carefully weave through the far more substantial skeletons of buildings that were perhaps only a century or so abandoned. Before them, at the end of what must have been an alleyway at some point, sprawled a large open area – a courtyard of a kind. In its centre were several bodies – or what remained of them. They were too far away to make out any definitive deals, but Mathias saw no sign of Graciana’s recognizable ivory-coloured robes she wore out on longer expeditions.
He and Primrose both remained where they were while their companions quietly circled around. A gentle whistle sounded from their left, where Caetano had headed, and Primrose gestured with a nod of her head. Together, she and Mathias picked their way through the rubble of the buildings, both moving slower and with more caution than before. Neither spoke as they walked, but, once they caught up to Caetano, who stood in the middle of a wider, ancient “road”, frowning sceptically down the way at the carnage that littered the spacious enclosure, Primrose whispered in a surprisingly gentle hush of tone. “Is it them?”
“Dunno.” Just as quiet, Caetano shook his head, hands on his hips, as he continued to stare. “But-“
“Behind you.” Without hesitation, Mathias extended his arm, fingers splayed, as ether erupted from his fingertips, the minuscule spheres and cubes positioning themselves within a thin circle that snapped into being a trill before the wicked end of the ferahom’s spear pierced through it. Both weapon and wielder recoiled from the shattered barrier’s backlash as the force of the spell exploded outwards in retaliation, as Caetano whirled around, unlatching the axes from their straps on either side of his belt and quietly muttering an annoyed, “Shit.”
Bow drawn and arrow knocked, Primrose called her shot with a clear but hushed, “Right.”
Humanoid but unnaturally tall, the ferahom’s face, though pale with a sickly green tint, was almost entirely intact – a strong, masculine jawline; slight stubble; a high bridged nose. Where its left eye should have been, instead of soft flesh that carried with it the gift of sight, bloomed a pale white flower with a dark centre. All throughout its warped body, smaller versions of the same seemed to have forced their way through various lesions within the flesh. While the muscular male torso was mostly intact, save for where a cluster of pale white petals had burst from a gaping hole just off centre of the chest, it had the appearance of a dancer’s revealing garb, in that where the stomach should have been was only a writhing mass of vines, leafs, and flowers.
It continued for about twice the length of the torso before fusing with a curvy, feminine set of hips and legs – of which only the left was complete and the right had been removed at the knee, leaving the rest to be filled in with a thin, bark-covered limb that ended in a jagged, splintered point. Its forearms were much the same, muscled biceps tapering into thin, woven vines that wrapped around the shaft of the spear the creature wielded, locking it in a vice that not even the reflective force of Mathias’ magic could serve to disarm it.
What was most striking about the creature, however, was where the top and back of the skull should have been. Instead of hair or skin or bone, dark green stalks grew outward and upward. Large pitcher-like leafs adorned the hearty stems, and at their ends was a collection of dark, blood red fruits of some kind, tightly packed together in a fashion that was reminiscent of corn, only with a far waxier sheen. Though the stalks themselves did not extend too far beyond a meter at most, paired with the pale blooms and the nearly artistic manner in which the vines weaved around the spear and shifted in their place to some unheard, undulating rhythm, it was almost beautiful, in the most macabre sense of the word.
The arrow hissed through empty air, passing dangerously close the thing’s face but, instead of sinking into the eye Primrose had no doubt been aiming for, it clinked harmlessly against the cold stone wall behind the creature. It soundlessly stared at them for a trill, the vines that composed its "hands" squriming with the softest of squelches.
Then, it charged.
As Primrose had predicted, they arrived at the edge of the ruined barony by the beginning of sundown.
There had been no sign of creepborne throughout the night, and at the first screech of the morning, oddly distant and faded so far from the cloistered walls of the city, they had set out. The stillness of the Quacian wilderness was often deceptive – a gentle lie to lull the unwary and weary into calm and much-needed security only to tear it from their broken bodies and consume the remains. That trial, save for the sound of their own boots upon the soft earth and the occasional hiss of the grasses shifting, the peace had been genuine.
Old buildings of stone crumbled around them. There had been, at some point in the hundreds of arcs that had passed since the barony’s first iteration, a wall – though now it was little more than scattered stones arranged in the semblance of a perimeter. It had been constructed - as many of the distant baronies had been – over the ruins of some even older, even more dilapidated remnant of a time before Quacia’s fall, or so Caetano said. There were hundreds of sites just like it, scattered throughout the valleys and forests and, perhaps, somewhere in the far-off mountains and sunken deep below the surface of the sea. Whether or not the good barony of Perosinho sat atop wonders and treasures and dangers of the Deep was not the reason they had come.
It had been, however, the reason she had set out for it.
The Lady Graciana Moreno, a master abrogant and woman of both poise and wit, had been requested to join an expedition to distant Perosinho. The purpose, as Primrose had explained to him before they had even passed under Condemnation’s yawning maw, had been one of discovery: to determine if the barony did indeed have merit beyond its distance from the deadly walking forests.
Whatever had happened, she had been gone for far too long, and though she had not explicitly written down upon her note where it was she was going or what it was she was doing, he had known where to go to find out. The band of mercenaries – or, rather, the nobleman – that had contracted her had grown worried as well – less so for the well-being of the expeditionary party and more so for their investment in it – and they had agreed to send a smaller, more specialized group to investigate at Mathias’ behest.
Alone, he most certainly would not have survived the trip, and even together, it had been a wearisome journey enough to weather even Caetano’s spirits. Though he found it difficult – if not impossible – to imagine Graciana in any other situation than one in which she was in control, he understood that it was likely she and those she had been accompanying were gone. Until it was confirmed by his own eyes, however, he kept focused on the purpose of his foray into the Quacian wilderness: to find her.
As they picked their way across the long since overgrown cobbles and occasional boulder that may have been the pedestals of statues or just as easily have been the cornerstones of massive buildings long since forgotten, Mathias questions his own motives. He knew he didn’t love her – she was not his mother, and they had had many a discussion on what it was to love. Both had come to the conclusion, in a manner of speaking, that neither of them was capable of it. Of love. It should have been a tragic revelation, but neither of them had thought much of it.
He was her heir, in all ways but blood, and she had yet to teach him everything he needed – and wanted to know.
Stumbling over a rain-smoothed stone stuck firmly in an earthen halo of vines and sharp-edged grasses, Mathias hopped a step or two to keep balance before he pressed on, eyes set on Primroses’ three swinging braids and Kysar’s bright, bushy head of hair. He imagined that was the closest he would ever get to love – the desire to keep someone around for what they offered him. He knew there should have been more, but even the steady chill of his spark gave little indication he felt much at all as he pondered over the nature of his personal quest.
At the very least, he supposed, reasons aside, they had come across interesting creepborne, even if they couldn’t find Graciana. The beast of a bear still hung about in the after-images of his thoughts.
“Wait.” Primrose’s voice was clear and commanding, though she kept her volume low.
Mathias blinked three times in rapid succession before he settled his focus ahead, coming to stop beside her as both Kysar and Caetano departed to carefully weave through the far more substantial skeletons of buildings that were perhaps only a century or so abandoned. Before them, at the end of what must have been an alleyway at some point, sprawled a large open area – a courtyard of a kind. In its centre were several bodies – or what remained of them. They were too far away to make out any definitive deals, but Mathias saw no sign of Graciana’s recognizable ivory-coloured robes she wore out on longer expeditions.
He and Primrose both remained where they were while their companions quietly circled around. A gentle whistle sounded from their left, where Caetano had headed, and Primrose gestured with a nod of her head. Together, she and Mathias picked their way through the rubble of the buildings, both moving slower and with more caution than before. Neither spoke as they walked, but, once they caught up to Caetano, who stood in the middle of a wider, ancient “road”, frowning sceptically down the way at the carnage that littered the spacious enclosure, Primrose whispered in a surprisingly gentle hush of tone. “Is it them?”
“Dunno.” Just as quiet, Caetano shook his head, hands on his hips, as he continued to stare. “But-“
“Behind you.” Without hesitation, Mathias extended his arm, fingers splayed, as ether erupted from his fingertips, the minuscule spheres and cubes positioning themselves within a thin circle that snapped into being a trill before the wicked end of the ferahom’s spear pierced through it. Both weapon and wielder recoiled from the shattered barrier’s backlash as the force of the spell exploded outwards in retaliation, as Caetano whirled around, unlatching the axes from their straps on either side of his belt and quietly muttering an annoyed, “Shit.”
Bow drawn and arrow knocked, Primrose called her shot with a clear but hushed, “Right.”
Humanoid but unnaturally tall, the ferahom’s face, though pale with a sickly green tint, was almost entirely intact – a strong, masculine jawline; slight stubble; a high bridged nose. Where its left eye should have been, instead of soft flesh that carried with it the gift of sight, bloomed a pale white flower with a dark centre. All throughout its warped body, smaller versions of the same seemed to have forced their way through various lesions within the flesh. While the muscular male torso was mostly intact, save for where a cluster of pale white petals had burst from a gaping hole just off centre of the chest, it had the appearance of a dancer’s revealing garb, in that where the stomach should have been was only a writhing mass of vines, leafs, and flowers.
It continued for about twice the length of the torso before fusing with a curvy, feminine set of hips and legs – of which only the left was complete and the right had been removed at the knee, leaving the rest to be filled in with a thin, bark-covered limb that ended in a jagged, splintered point. Its forearms were much the same, muscled biceps tapering into thin, woven vines that wrapped around the shaft of the spear the creature wielded, locking it in a vice that not even the reflective force of Mathias’ magic could serve to disarm it.
What was most striking about the creature, however, was where the top and back of the skull should have been. Instead of hair or skin or bone, dark green stalks grew outward and upward. Large pitcher-like leafs adorned the hearty stems, and at their ends was a collection of dark, blood red fruits of some kind, tightly packed together in a fashion that was reminiscent of corn, only with a far waxier sheen. Though the stalks themselves did not extend too far beyond a meter at most, paired with the pale blooms and the nearly artistic manner in which the vines weaved around the spear and shifted in their place to some unheard, undulating rhythm, it was almost beautiful, in the most macabre sense of the word.
The arrow hissed through empty air, passing dangerously close the thing’s face but, instead of sinking into the eye Primrose had no doubt been aiming for, it clinked harmlessly against the cold stone wall behind the creature. It soundlessly stared at them for a trill, the vines that composed its "hands" squriming with the softest of squelches.
Then, it charged.
