It happened with too great a swiftness for the first involved to so much as twitch before it came.
Pattoli was the first, at the front of it all and nearest the gate. Two spectral chains of light flicked out from it, cleaving straight into his chest. One chain of light that seemed come through a pall of fog, the other black and starry – seemingly made from the same stuff as dimensional rifts. Yanked him right off his horse with a choked groan, pulling him into the spatial aperture, spit out as a collection of jellied remains, all turned inside out and still very much alive.
Mewling in discomfort as his body tried to figure out why his brains were on the outside.
No quick death, the man was a jellied lump of screaming, wet flesh left to suffer, disabled, unable to die so as to return to the field in a new body.
Morden seemed scheduled to go next, but as a spatial mage himself he had an eye for this sort of thing. At least enough to hop off his mount and run away as fast as his clone magic would take him. The crescent blades at the end of the chains whipped around in pursuit, freezing just inches before it struck the flesh of his flatter.
The beasts went wild, bucking their riders and tearing off into the gloom of the sunset. That end of the day, end of all else come for them.
Caspian shouted something, twirling his saber in the era to get their attention but near everyone present was transfixed on that gate, caught in the pressure of looming, existential dread. A perfidious, evil thing, an aberrant thing, eldritch and indescribable in the terror it invoked.
Like the mind of a man manifested into living color, except it was the mind of no human at all, cold and yawning and...
“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up now!”
Next came the horn, the sharpened tip jutting vertically from the forehead of that vicious helmet, a guise all of them were intimately familiar with. The steel blue of the tabard, the long plume that hung to the mid back at the rear of the helm whipping about in the midst of a violent charge. Legs pumping with enough force to crater the ground, adding to add the rumbling.
Two eyes, deep blue and piercing through the low light seeming to gaze at them all at once. To take their measure and find them wanting. Klaus didn't even bother trying to intercept the man, digging both hands into the earth and rousing himself in a panicked bid to flee. Too late, it was all a blur and before any of them knew it he was pinned to the ground with blades that did nothing to mar his flesh. He felt the pain, but no blood came. No death for those who couldn't die, Tyr adapted to their capabilities and took to ravaging their spirit in lieu of so replaceable a body.
His screams... Even over the roaring of the aperture each and every one of them could hear it, loud and ear scratching, a level of suffering that snapped the rest from their reverie and sent them wailing in the opposite direction.
Run. Their minds told them. Run, now. Or they'd never get a chance to do so again.
A dull thrumming, not an earthquake. Like a heartbeat in the earth, the wicked whirling of the red handed dervish known as Tyr Faeron joined by a lady encased in all white armor near identical to his own. Spear and shield, a lute hovering at her back and adding to that song, a melody as if the writhing ground were some kind of baseline.
Yucca couldn't hope to move, none of them could after their first impotent attempt.
War magic was tricky like that, a spell prepared over many days to shut them down once and for all, to cut them off of any support. To grind them down unto dust.
Slowly drained of mana until they couldn't hope to avoid what was coming, the pall and pressure of it pushing down on them like a hundred anvils. And what a song it was, magic the likes of which they'd never seen. Two beating hearts, a singer and a dancer.
It had been a relatively cool afternoon in the evening and now it was positively frigid. Heavy, steely, emotional – a funeral dirge. Black roses burst from the ground to aid in the process of holding them all down. It had all happened so quick, truly, before she knew it Yucca was pinned under the boot of a dead woman, disabled while Tyr made a point of gently pulling her back.
And above it all was a man, a small and inconsequential man that hadn't done much of anything, snapping his fingers and freeing his companions. Throwing all of them through gates until only Tiberius Scarr among them remained, a man who refused to be moved or burdened unto unconsciousness.
“Let her go,” Tyr rumbled, his voice smooth like honey and impossibly deep, and Astrid did as he asked, picking her boot off the woman's chest and glaring down at her balefully. If ever there was an evil eye, it was hers, one white and the other black. The man on the other hand seemed, from what Yucca could see, caught in some kind of madness again. Grinning mad and wide eyed, twitching all over with an itch commonly seen in the junkies so common in Kriegstad. Lips split and tongue running a jittery path along his gum line, drooling. “She is of no consequence.”
They turned, ignoring her, and she would obey the compulsion to flee. Hastur had willfully allowed for the deaths of her mother and brother, that was clear to Yucca now. She hadn't known before, but when his eye had come through that window in space she'd seen the truth in it. They all had, forced to confront the reality that they'd all been made as slaves in both body and mind, the compulsion broken and left with a choice for the first time in a long while.
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Two choices. Kneel or die.
Remain a slave to Hastur who was black hearted, or become servant to something truly profound, a real Primus. Caspian wept, beseeching and begging for salvation, always the steely eyed and self possessed man, he seemed mad in this moment of reaching out. Save us, o' great one, he said, save us, o' Primus, he babbled – and for all his begging he received no mercy in the many blades that tore him apart, not a single glance offered.
“But...!” Yucca craned her neck, calling back and Astrid turned to address her as Tyr Faeron belted off to parts unknown.
“You may stay in Amistad if it is your wish to do something better with your life. To give it some meaning.” That wasn't much of an answer, leaving Yucca puzzled.
“What are you doing!? You can't fight that army, Hastur is on one of those ships!”
Tyr spoke again, shrilly now in his transformative high, the alfen bliss that stripped away his mental walls and unburdened him of such petty things as morality and conscience. “Hastur does not concern me,” He said, ensuring everyone was gone before extending his hand and bathing Tiberius in frighteningly baleful flames. “I'm here to kill a Hero.”
–
“Looks like he's back, as I expected,” Ryker laughed, the boy certainly had a flair for the dramatic. Appearing just at the last minute in full view of the army, peeking out in observance of him effortlessly slaying so many powerful adepts. There had been 'no chance' of anything going wrong, or so Hastur had claimed, and the heroes had been called back to the fleet to attend council. Hastur might posture that everything was still proceeding apace, but in Ryker's opinion it didn't seem like it could fall apart any faster than this... Not that it mattered. “Should we engage?”
And the apparition of that gate, at the perfect moment, had shattered the slew of wards they'd put up to protect this fleet, stripping them of any defense against it.
“No,” Hastur smiled, it was unfortunate, but just a temporary setback. If even that, the result of the crusade was inevitable, Tyr Faeron was not enough to stop him and never had been. “The awakening of an arcanum is novel, but not a threat, or else he'd be here on the ship with us already.”
“...So?” Ryker asked, obvious questions being just that.
“What's he going to do?” Aurelius clucked his tongue in annoyance. Staring out across the water with a sour look marring his otherwise handsome face, golden locks tousled by the breeze over the channel like some kind of pirate king. “Kid can't fly, if he tries to swim we'll pepper him at range. Mid ranged combatant, no chance he could reach us out here. Two hundred thousand men says he can't do much of anything else, either, but maybe it'll make for a good time.”
“I wouldn't be so sure,” Hastur chuckled, pointing. “And I bid you adieu, do handle the business of incapacitating my little brother for me, will you? Guard your mouth, and don't let him kiss you.”
“Kiss me?” Aurelius arched a brow, “Is that euphemism?”
“I hate it when he does that,” Ryker remarked, “But it seems you were wrong about something after all.”
“Shut your mouth, Fox,” Aurelius sneered, “Let them come.”
'Tyr Faeron cannot fly', he'd said, but a man had no need of flying.
Hastur left his present body and went to parts unknown. His frozen haemonculi still pointed at the form of Tyr, rapidly approaching with Tiberius Scarr held over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Great gouts of flame and vaporized water spreading in his wake, a cannonball propelled through an eruption of compressed air, fire and water mana. It certainly looked phenomenal, but Ryker frowned at the lack of common sense. There were far more efficient ways to travel if one were looking for a propulsion method...
Aurelius glared at him pointedly, not interesting in getting into a dialogue with a 'Hero' of the fox god, dashing off the side of the barge and running as if there was no definitive distinction between land and water. Ryker heard people chant his name, a shame the kind of people they chose to deify, but the golden hero couldn't care much about that. All he'd wanted was for Hastur to show him the 'secret' to becoming a Saint. For a Chosen of the Betrayer and Lady of Lies it was with an awful lack of trust that Aurelius engaged with his 'leader', considering Hastur was quite the duplicitous one himself.
But he was ready, felt ready for the collision as Tyr Faeron shot across the water as though on a pair of skis.
He wasn't.
It wasn't long before that prospective Saint came crashing back into the barge with enough force to crack the enchanted ironwood. Back first against the hull with a very wroth looking Tyr Faeron following closely behind, feet first and wreathed from head to toe to finish to job.
“Armor off! Armor off! The barge is about to--!” The helmsman tried, at least, to save his men, a noble man.
Ryker shook his head and alighted daintily on the water below. The barge above would stay floating for a while longer given the ironwood decking, but it was rapidly being shattered by the body of Aurelius being repeatedly and forcibly slammed into it by a volley of catastrophic boots come crashing down on him. That was some interesting magic the boy had, overflowing out of control for whatever reason, emotions running wild. Odd stitches and tics to the mana flow that didn't make much sense in observation, like he was in the midst of a mental breakdown.
Or... As though he had purposely overdosed on a psychoactive drug, mulching Aurelius into the wood and leaving him spewing blood and hissing.
It was Ryker's turn to snort now, watching with disinterest as Tiberius Scarr leapt onto that same deck being so abused and began to butcher the soldiers hastily attempted to strip themselves of their armor. His swordwork ran in smoother flow than the currents they floated on, mangling men and shearing their limbs through with no difficulty.
Even though the more able bodied of the lot should've been disabled, the Raven was in perfect health, even stronger than before. And Tyr... Well, he wasn't the only one to be mindful of, it seemed, Ryker could smell something on the wind, roses, and it brought him near to shivering. Reminding him very much of the same sort of sensation he'd experienced when communing with his god for the first time.
Perhaps it would be a fun night, after all.
Or perhaps I'll just leave... Ryker mused. So many decisions.