“I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen
Iseret was rarely indecisive, but at this point, she was still weighing the upsides of intervening against her annoyance with the priestess.
The patrol consisting of seven undead in various states of decay and two cowled and robed figures closed in on the intersection that Jill was rapidly nearing too. Just now, she seemed to have heard something and began to rapidly look around before pressing herself into the entrance of a mausoleum. But as luck or misfortune in this case would have it, the patrol turned and began to walk down the path between several crypts and mausolea containing the exact one the priestess was hiding in.
Speaking a quick prayer, gathering wind and some shadows to herself, Iseret jumped and rapidly descended from the forested slope. Rolling to dissipate momentum, she came to rest behind a row of graves with impressive and, more importantly, large tombstones.
“Did you hear something?” An aged male voice asked.
“Mh. No?” A much younger, also male, voice responded.
“I could have sworn.” The older man spoke a quick cantrip, and pale white light shone from a crystal he held toward Iseret’s hiding place. Moving it to and fro, he shrugged. “Perhaps it was just some loose snow.”
“Most likely.” The younger man rubbed his arms to stop himself from shivering. “By the queen, it’s cold.”
“I told you to wear two robes. But no.” Grumbling, the two turned to go as Iseret chucked a piece of fallen masonry down the way they had come where it clattered against cast iron bars closing off a crypt.
“That was no loose snow.” The older man turned and spoke a short spell. Dark energies infused his robes and robbed the snow of its luster. Gesturing, the group of skeletons and flesh fiends shambled toward the crypt.
“Shouldn’t we keep some back? What if we are attacked?”
The older man turned and gave the younger a quick look. The latter shrank a bit into himself and coughed awkwardly. “Yes. Of course.”
Jill gripped a dagger in her right hand, and with the left, she seemed ready to form a glyph. She flinched as a whisper reached her. “Don’t move and don’t reply. I will get you away from them, but you have to cooperate.”
“Where are you?” The young woman furiously whispered back.
Iseret sighed to herself and then leaned out from between two crypts opposite making a beckoning gesture. “Over here.” The sound was unnaturally clear carried on a soft wind.
The cowled wizard, the older of the two cultists, gestured and began to cast another spell.
Jill gritted her teeth while shutting her eyes before she calmed down and hurried across the narrow gravel-strewn path. Visible only where the snow was blocked by buildings or dense trees.
Iseret cautiously kept an eye on the dagger and led them through a maze of tombs and crypts.
Chanting reached them from beyond several rows of tombs.
“What is this? And where are we?” Jill tensed as several voices rose shouting a name made of guttural consonants.
“I have no idea, and I think we are near Sevenpeaks.”
“Sevenpeaks? That’s three days, five with this weather from Volstedt!”
“The astral plane is dangerous and unpleasant, but there are advantages. Don’t talk, let’s make haste.” Iseret gestured toward the forest's edge.
Jull swallowed and pressed her lips together then nodded silently.
Both made quick and stealthy progress.
Eerie light flashed behind them, and lightning flashed but without the accompanying thunder. The chanting resumed after a short pause and the earth rumbled.
The priestess stumbled and turned to look, but Iseret pulled her along, nearly getting stabbed for her troubles.
“I should have left you.” Iseret cursed under her breath.
“...hm...sorry.” The reply was nearly drowned by the moaning wind.
Looking back with a raised eyebrow while not stopping for a second, the snake-woman gave her a quick smile. “Appreciated.”
Despite the scars she carried and the obvious expertise in wielding her weapons, Jill seemed to be just a bit over twenty years of age and blushed under Iseret’s gaze- though partly from anger.
“Come here. We have to get back to the others. And no. We don’t plan on letting them keep doing whatever, but with just the two of us, it would be quite hopeless.”
“Yes,” Jill answered grudgingly before both she and Iseret finally reached the treeline.
Turning back, halfway up the slope, they saw the armored figure surrounded by a glowing circle of runes while only indistinctly visible figures gestured and chanted.
A quick look at the sky showed the white moon just setting, the reddish one, Ioreth, had not made an appearance yet. ‘So it's the latter half of the night.’ Iseret quickly calculated.
Working their way back to the spot where they had exited the astral plane, Iseret spotted her friends resting underneath a large fir tree. The ground was nearly bare of snow and made a reasonable campsite.
“You are back...and she is too.” Mireille looked at Jill with some distrust.
Now that there was a bit more time and neither worms nor wolves were trying to get at them, she took a closer look. Jill was wearing a slit robe with pants underneath chased in silver and completely white. Even after all the strain the clothes had been through, they were still pristine. The arms and face were somewhat sharper cut than was perhaps considered beautiful, but pretty was an adjective she would probably receive often. And that was despite several small scars marring her arms and face. A particularly severe cut had left a white streak in the hair of her forehead up to her right eyebrow, thankfully sparing the eye itself.
“Will you try to kill us, or does the truce still work?” Alyssa asked bluntly.
“I...cannot understand how you willingly associate with the undead.” She gazed at Alea, Iseret and Mireille.
“I did not realize she was dead...ehm...undead...at first. She is just the same as before. So I treat her the same.” Mireille shrugged. “And Vanessa is a real dear most of the time.” Getting an unreadable look from the subject, she hastily corrected herself. “All the time! I meant all the time.”
Jill looked at them incredulously. “Is that..why are you…?”
Mireille suddenly got up and hugged Alyssa. “See? Nothing to it. A bit colder than she was, and that’s a damn shame but otherwise good as new.”
Alyssa gave a pained smile at that. She felt the warmth emanating from her friend, but the cold inside of her muted everything like touching through a fine silken cloth. Comfortable at first, but if you remembered the real thing, it was but a shadow of the former sensation. But then she hugged her back, trying not to think of everything that- was- different. The illusion covering up the most obvious changes, not the least of it.
Alea shrugged. “Until recently, I lived with my grandmother and did not get to meet many people. And now I found friends in Alyssa, Mireille and Vanessa. I cannot lie and say that what happened does not affect me, but Alyssa and Vanessa are my friends, and Vanessa at least was a vampire as long as I have known her and as upright a person as any I know.”
Jill frowned, “Undeath isn’t just like...like being a foreigner. It’s as if you compare yourself to a piece of stone. It.” And she looked at Vanessa and Alyssa. “Is not a living person anymore. Some hunger for your lifeforce, some for emotions, some are simply filled with hate and want to destroy. They are no longer a person.”
“You are mostly right.” Vanessa nodded.
“...and because of that...what?” Jill looked at the elf, nonplussed. A snowflake took that moment to land on her nose, and she shook her head to get rid of it.
“What you said is conventionally correct. But there are exceptions. It took decades for me to perfect the spells keeping me sane, relatively speaking, and in a mental state approaching what it was before my demise. For Alyssa, it is the intervention of the goddess of grief, Charys. And now the enchanted circlet she is wearing.”
“That…” The priestess looked lost.
“Here.” Alyssa raised her hand, and the teardrop imprinted in her right hand rippled and shone with a gentle, silvery light. “That was left when I came back to my senses after...you know.”
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“What do I know?” She looked confused.
“Ah, right, you weren’t there. I used a lot of void magic to defend Volstedt, and that...killed me.” She inhaled, held her breath for a moment, and then exhaled again. “But it didn’t take. And so I’m here as I you see me now.”
Licking her lips, Jill slowly resheathed her dagger. “Charys.” It sounded like a curse. Shivering, she looked back. “I don’t trust you. But this symbol...” She looked at Alyssa’s hand. “I mean, there are some dark cultists in the graveyard.” She sighed. “Truce?”
“Yes!” Alea quickly answered before taking a shy look at the others.
Vanessa nodded approvingly. “I concur. Let us take care of the next problem and then see about shelter. Mana dust should not be a problem for the near future, but we should not waste it on heating enchantments.”
Alyssa nodded along with them, still held by Mireille, and then self-consciously adjusted her circlet the black metal somehow warm against her cold body. Moving, she felt her skin pull where moisture had frozen on its surface. She would have to do something about her lack of healing as well. Shrugging those thoughts off, she extricated herself smiling at the somewhat disgruntled-looking Mireille. “Later. Now we have some cultists to catch.”
Moving back toward the graveyard, they soon heard the chanting.
“Do we try to be, you know, sneaky?” Mireille asked the rest.
“Vanessa and I could take the lead, and then you follow. When you are discovered, we can spring an ambush.” Iseret offered her yellow eyes glittering darkly in the light of the setting moon.
Silence reigned, and the wind rustled the branches, accompanied by rhythmic chanting. The moonlight glinted on the snow covering the tombs and crypts, interspersed with the occasional mausoleum.
“I think that sounds good. We are not that good at stealth.” Alyssa said diplomatically, looking at Alea, who fidgeted under the attention.
“Then it's settled,” Vanessa spoke up and gestured for Iseret to follow. Jill looked at the group, hesitated, and finally followed Mireille.
The graveyard was a substantial and sprawling affair. You could see where the first nobles had erected monuments and crypts to the honored and wealthy dead, and from there came large areas with tombs competing with each other for ostentation before finally petering out in simple stones marking simple graves for the poorer citizens.
It was also soon apparent that the graves had been disturbed. Many tombs had been opened either conventionally with a shovel or from the inside by the inhabitants crawling out of their coffins. The crypts had mostly been left intact. But here, too, were signs of vandalism, and behind the bars closing off, some of them shambling corpses could be seen scratching at the stone and metal.
Jill looked at Alyssa. “Do you have my sword?”
“Oh. I think Vanessa took it. I only have another dagger if that helps?” Alyssa patted her belt and pulled out a dirk offering it to the priestess.
Recoiling a bit from the white-haired girl, the priestess shook her head. “No, thank you. I have one already.” Motioning with the dagger she had drawn again when they entered the graveyard, she tried to downplay her aversion, but the disapproving huff from Mireille showed her efforts to be in vain.
The group continued, and the chanting grew louder.
In between a set of monuments depicting a victorious warrior lifting a flag while ascending something like a steep slope and another showing a relief of Charys drinking the tears of indistinct mourners, they saw a small plaza. There had been a brazier mounted in the middle, the rest of which lay to the side, broken and dented. The space that had been freed was taken up by a complicated symbol daubed in glittering reddish fluid in the middle of a large circle painted in chalk. The circle was augmented with dozens of smaller glyphs, all of them outside the boundary of the white line.
A round dozen robed cultists stood outside the markings and were swaying and chanting while wisps of dark energy crackled over the symbol in the center. A large armored form stood at one end, simply observing a two-handed sword loosely held with one hand, point stuck in the snowy ground. A woman in a tattered dress with a child at her side stood incongruously close to the armored giant. Spikes jutted from his pauldrons and helmet, lending him- or her, for that matter- a demonic air.
The woman seemed to be arguing, but the words were drowned by the continuous chanting.
Alea wobbled as one of her feet hit a hidden stone boundary surrounding one of the monuments, and as she put out her arm, trying to stabilize herself, she brushed against the piled-up stone covering the religious carving of Charys. With a rushing sound, the snow slid down the side in a white cloud.
With nearly synchronous movements, the woman and the warrior raised their heads and looked in their direction.
The warrior grabbed the sword with both hands rolling his neck before lifting it into a ready position.
The woman pulled the child closer, which did not seem to elicit any sort of reaction. The exquisite pale face, framed by blonde hair, as still as a doll’s.
“To me! Defend the circle!” With a booming shout, the warrior began to trot, then run in their direction. From further in the graveyard, answering shouts could be heard.
Vanessa looked at Amber and the unbreathing ‘child’ at her side. “Don’t hold back! She is very dangerous. Uses uncontrolled void.” She murmured to Iseret. They were both lying on the roof of a particularly ornate mausoleum prominently displaying the Nordmark coat of arms.
Iseret gave a slight nod and stroked the runes on her khopesh.
With a sudden coordinated movement, they both sprang forward, Vanessa summoning her ice claws while Iseret flourished her sickle sword, runes flickering to life alongside the cutting edge.
With inhuman speed Amber, for that is who the woman was, turned and raised both hands, letting loose with streams of black flame, that burst forth with uncontrolled fury while shouting. “You! You will not take her from me again!”
In Alyssa’s sight, the symbol burned with a mixture of void and some other magic she had not had much contact with. The blood crystal was the next best approximation.
The cultists had differing reactions, most of them were in a trance and did not react in any way, but some turned and grabbed wands or daggers from inside their robes, leveling them at the group of friends.
Looking guilty and covered with fallen snow Alea rapidly incanted a spell but misspoke at a complicated passage. The curtain of light that was forming flickered, and then a barrage of force bolts impacted, disrupting the still-weak spell.
Mireille looked alarmed and pushed a web of lightning to the fore shielding herself and her companions.
Alyssa formed a voidbolt and threw it at a particularly enterprising cultist who had overtaken even the charging warrior. Hitting a leg, the cultist gave a shrill scream tumbling head over heels before landing in a moaning heap.
With a swing of the greatsword, the onrushing armored fighter shattered a low railing, probably once denoting a flower bed. Shards of stone sprayed across the ground. Alyssa winced at the display, probably meant to intimidate as much as for clearing the way.
Vanessa twisted in midair, conjured winds changing her trajectory, and narrowly avoided the gushing black flames.
Iseret sped up her descent, ducking underneath the torrent before she slashed in a spinning motion, neatly circling Amber and cutting into the raging woman from the front to the flank. The runes on the khopesh lit up more brightly as the blade clashed into some form of shielding before penetrating and slicing deeply into undead flesh.
Screaming more in anger than pain Amber turned and lashed out with a stream of black fire that incinerated or, more aptly put, disintegrated several cultists. One of them, who had been firing force bolts at the group around Alea, shouted in anger and loosed a few force bolts at Amber before his wand spat a shower of sparks and detonated with a sharp crack lifting him and throwing him into a bush.
Jill uttered a prayer, and her dagger shimmered with a bright light. Jumping forward and to the side, she stabbed at the onrushing warrior, but the cut was turned aside by heavy armor.
Alyssa shot a few void bolts, but even as they impacted the plate armor, there was no visible damage. Deliberating for a second, she said, “Don’t follow me!” Before sprinting forward while gritting her teeth. Dark mist sprang from her hands and cloaked her form as she avoided a slash from the greatsword that would have split her in two.
“What are you…!” Mireille gasped as her lightning shield got another beating from both some force missiles and a slash from the armored fighter.
Alea was suddenly bathed in light as a glyph construct in the form of an eye formed above her head, emitting lances of light that burned into the metal of their adversary's armor.
Giving a pained grunt, the fighter raised an arm conjuring a disc of magical force, hefting the two-handed sword in one hand before advancing further.
Jill stabbed into the less armored joints hoping to pierce the armor that had frustrated her efforts, but even there, the enchanted blade found little purchase.
Stumbling over obstacles buried beneath the trampled snow, Alyssa hurried forward. A cultist tried to get in her way, but she shot a void bolt into his torso, causing him to crumble. A force missile impacted her chest, carving deep into her flesh, but other than a vague discomfort, there was no pain. Deliberately not looking, she put everything into a final leap carrying her into the circle.
The warrior turned and shouted something.
Jill finally managed to push her dagger into the thin slit beneath his helmet.
Mireille dropped her shield and infused her degen with lightning before speeding after Alyssa.
Alea directed her construct to shoot forth beams of light, burning several cultists who had been focusing on Alyssa.
Vanessa buried her claws in Amber’s back as she was turning toward Iseret, the latter rolling with her unspent momentum just a hair in front of the black flames.
Cyrus, who had been sluggish during their return from the astral plane, roused himself and then jumped and flew after his mistress stabbing at anyone that got too close.
Pushing magic into the jewel in her wrist Alyssa raised her left arm, the artifact embedded in her arm glowing with baleful light. Shadowy energy flowed into her as her body was pummeled by several impacting force and fire bolts. One of the cultists having decided to cast his own instead of relying on a wand.
The warrior grasped at his throat as white light shone from the dagger embedded in his neck. Stumbling a few steps, he punched with a sudden desperate move with his left hand still carrying the sword, and hit Jill with the pommel snapping back her head as blood flew from a deep cut on her cheek. She had tried to parry the blow but been too weak to do more than divert it.
With a snap, the magic that had lit the runic circle vanished, and the jewel in Alyssa’s wrist pulsed like a black heart.
With deep clarity brought by her connection to the void, Alyssa concentrated, and the magic snapped shut around the minds, or what was left of them, of the undead populating the graveyard. Screams rose from the patrolling cultists as their attending skeletons turned on them.
Amber ripped herself loose from Vanessa opening grievous wounds on her back. Falling heavily to the ground, she twisted, trying to right herself as she felt the edge of a blade touching her throat. Looking up, she saw Iseret holding her khopesh in a two-handed grip.
After a quick look at Vanessa, she tensed her grip.
“Please! Don’t hurt Lily!” Desperation shone in her eyes, clouded by madness. “Don’t. Don’t hurt her!”
Vanessa faltered, and a complicated look passed over her face as Iseret slashed downward, the keen blade slicing through the neck. Amber moved her mouth as darkness flared from the stump of her neck. A pressure, a sense of oppression lifted just like that, and- those who still could- were suddenly breathing easier.
Undead burst onto the plaza and rushed at the still reeling cultists. Half-decayed skeletons in ruined finery threw themselves at their former masters, silver and gold jewelry glinting in the light of smoldering fires and the slowly setting moon.
Alea looked at the fallen priestess and quietly thanked Jaros that she did not see the scenes that followed. The warrior was quickly swamped and torn down.
And then the plaza was silent once more. A hint of grey touched the horizon sharply, painting the barren trees against the dim sky. With angry caws, a flock of crows burst from a large belltower situated at the edge of the graveyard as the bell began to toll.
Alyssa covered her eyes with her hands, refusing to look down as Mireille softly hugged her. “It’s not so bad.”
“Liar.”