Whilst he was seared by the flames of hatred, Aelfsigior also felt alive, youthful as if he was back to being in his first hundreds after he propelled himself into the air, leaping over the clashing living and dead beneath his flailing feet, his eyes forced onto the Decaying Colossus whose six piercing eyes glared right back into his, creating the chill soothing his hatred oddly.
He surged with the refreshing energies of his youth, his mind virtually empty except for the singular desire to take down the Decaying Colossus, like how he was three hundred years ago – give or take a few decades – when he was brazen aevhen lad led by nothing but his feelings, which cost him, sculpted him into the aevhe he was on that fateful night in the great and gloomy capital of the north.
His left arm holding the sword pointed forwards and rose quickly preparing to strike down at the long and bulky arm, the right wrapped onto the shaft of the spear, his forearms pressed against it as he moved it backwards while readying his muscles for the thrust, then when he landed the blade became pointy once more, brimming with an almost blinding radiant light as struck mud and snow instead of the armored chest or the outer ribs of the decaying colossus. And his blade cut no age old rotten flesh but instead cut the putrid cold air.
Its mace with an angular head attached to a long chain rose from the ground and flew towards Aelfsigior’s head, aiming to smash it to smithereens with one swoop. Rejuvenated by the conjured terror and his hanger combining, Aelfsigior instead of ducking down, used the flat end of his spear, creating a small ward before it as it smashed against the hard and dim surface of the mace’s head using its own force to propel it into the direction it came from, smashing into another undead charging from the market into the fray.
His lips curved into a faint smile, and he readied his blades while leaning forward as the mace came for his head once more, then leapt left and right sporadically when dark beams swirled from the two eyes of the middle head blurred by the great velocity. Two reaching their target dissipated with a loud chilling chiming upon impacting the hastily created ward. When he reached closer, two more landed on his breastplate after shattering the haphazard wards, and ricocheted off just as Aelfsigior raised his left hand into the air, swiping before the middle head, cutting off the oblong maw half decayed down to the bone.
The distorted and rage filled cacophony of the Decaying Colossus dinned all their heads, giving a chance to lessen the number of legionaries and custodians, whilst it decided in that moment to retreat further in, blocking Aelfsigior from following it were a dozen undead with sightless helmets welted onto their ghastly heads. His blade tainted by the gloomy ichor of the undead swung towards the first lunging at him with a slender, long battle axe aimed at the left joint of his neck.
He parried the attack with the short blade, then struck the spear into the chest, pumping iuboron infused small spells rapidly into the undead. Stretched sphered flew out from the tip of his spear as he turned at the remaining obstacles whose malformed bodies fell like stringless puppets consumed by radiant flames, then the one rotten meat shield fell with a quarter of its upper body sliced open after Aelfsigior forcefully pulled out his spear towards the seemingly endless, starless night sky.
Calmed a little, though still his whole being twinging from the sensation of three different primordial matters brushing his soul with serrated soft feathers, Aelfsigior slowly walked in, cutting the few lesser undead impeding his way upon the commands of their superior. Though he found it strange that the rage filled undead escaped instead of intensifying its attacks, and when he reached a proper state as he often called it, he realized that he may walk towards a trap as he found himself amongst the deserted kiosks and tents they visited six days ago.
“Need help?” Then as he stared daggers into the two middle eyes, an astral spear shimmering with the soothing, warm colors of the dawn poked through the chest and a long bellow akin to one blowing into a trumpet emanated from all three welted heads which Priernuss stepped onto as he appeared periodically in the air while leaping through short distance portals and stopped on his right with a forced smile and tired eyes.
“Could use some. But more importantly, do you need aid? The healers should caught up by now.” Priernuss waved then reached into his pocket and pulled out a vial filled with a translucent, glowing concoction with a faintly iridescent and effervescent liquid which prompted a relief filled sigh out from him. As he stared down, Aelfsigior noticed the bloodied long blade in his hand hanging loosely towards the frozen slush. “Came in handy twice. It’s a long story but we run into a group of unlucky ruffians.”
As he said those words with a somewhat somber expression, Aelfsigior took notice of the missing Hevaeck. Priernuss shook his head while staring back at their wounded opponent seething silently as the fully penetrated chest slowly healed, rotten flesh regrowing, the broken outer ribcages rejoining into their slanted curvature. “We managed to held out for a long while, but a group of ghouls burst forth the sewage and took him down with them.”
“Then there is hope.” Aelfsigior said as the two sprung into action, cutting down for more undead charging at them silently, only to be mowed down in four slices.
For a moment Aelfsigior felt a disquieting upon the sounds of battle dampening towards silence behind them and he took a short glance, noticing Eadwald, Azugh and Gna amongst the few remaining legionaries stomping towards victory as the almost hundred undead lessened in their numbers to two dozen.
“Let’s finish this quickly.” Priernuss nodded as astral veins popped in his striking eyes and lifted his blade while gripping it with both his hands. The two charged at the still healing Decaying Colossus who effortlessly lifted the chained mace and hurled its angular head sweeping before him thoughtlessly, faltering the two who quickly regained their hastening pace.
The two separated, running east and west while raising their palms from which a blinding radiant white glow blinded all six misty eyes of the undead. Its skeletal grip on the chain released and the weapon flew into the wall, creating a small crater in it while from its sides slits appeared emanating a vicious dimness forming into long and slender appendages with small childlike hands gripping onto the incoming blades, pulling it out of their hands with the force of a dozen bulls.
Their faces contorted in slight, momentary frustration then Aelfsigior leapt away from the incoming bony fist which caved in the ground, creating a dim aperture in the ground. Priernuss leapt onto the spiky back and pierced the eyes of the left aevhen head, pumping iuboron matter infused mana into it until it overcame the nekrotic matter and exploded sending him crashing into a kiosk.
Aelfsigior who hardened his leg to be as sturdy as marble polished by the crafty hands of dwarves, and swept it across the rotten muscled calves with a yell as he was assaulted by both mental and physical pain. His shriek mingled with the collapsing Colossus’s whose middle head he crushed with the sole of his right feet sending it down into the aperture where it fell into the cleansed water still overflowing with motes of dawn energies.
Its dampened shriek echoed through the square then silence followed as Aelfsigior laid in the mud and blood staring at the vacuous dark sky before Priernuss entered his vision with left hand held out he grabbed firmly whilst the metallic thuds of the others approaching followed. “It is not over yet.” He said looking at Eadwald whose eyes looked for Hevaeck knowing what the youth will want to do, no matter what.
**
Uchitemar slowly raised his withered, dried arms which lost their vivid color decades ago and slowly wrapped his bony fingers onto the ladder whilst the undead under their control crawled like spiders on the dim marble walls of the sewer. He slowly followed after them, less sure of their plan when he felt the weight on his soul lessen as the blessed existences of their minions extinguished one by one.
“Bring one of his companions, and he most assuredly will follow.” Da Yun’s words echoed in his mind forced into the dried husk of a fellow kindred as he peered out from the small grated aperture. Merchants and the few folk still awake in the hours of the night rushed in panic as they watched a few of their own mauled by their minions and the decaying colossus he built a few years ago when they received the sign of Dusk.
As he saw Hevaeck and Priernuss fighting alongside the ruffians who moments ago picked them out as potential targets, he ordered the colossus to stay back and threw the lesser undead at the group whose numbers began to dwindle as most of the ruffians proved quite not so erudite in the martial arts alongside equipped poorly wearing haphazardly crafted hide armor and their only weapons being thick wooden shaft and daggers.
What made him hold back the colossus was the two companions who were the only reason the ruffians haven’t yet hit the ground with vacant stares, with both proving themselves experts at the maghia of Dawn, the greatest weakness of the undead, the last children of the Dusk. Though as the lesser ones proved to be inadequate at taking either of the two, Uchitemar pondered whether to order the colossus to move to their aid.
In the end, his patience and overprotectiveness of his creation paid off as one of the undead achieved landing a hit on the dwarf draped in shapeless gray robes and swiftly dragged him out whilst Priernuss was occupied keeping the ruffians alive to not get overwhelmed by the numbers. Though he did notice Hevaeck dragged down into the sewers and his face reflected the conflict within of whether to follow or wait for the others.
Uchitemar himself climbed back down and let the three undead carry the priest unceremoniously, but still carefully to not fall into the folk-made river of cleansed waste water. With them he returned to their hideout in one of the nearby cisterns with an escape route out of the city in case their plan failed. “Just one?” Da Yun asked, his voice muffled, echoing through the draconic mask whilst he was draped in his dark eastern robes and a long pallid white cloak over it.
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“One should be enough if we go by the record of the previous chosens.” Uchitemar said with his slender arms with the bones poking through the pallid, colorless skin hidden beneath the soft fabric of his black robes’ sleeves. His voice calm and raspy as it came out from the expressionless mouth as he noticed his comrades, old friends’ son tapping his feet anxiously.
“For now, let’s proceed.” He reached into his robe and pulled out a dagger with a blade sculpted after shape of a dragon’s frontal fangs. With a swift strike, he struck it into the chest of Hevaeck and poured nekrotic and psioron matter infused mana into his body and soul, and formed it into a nekromantic spell which chained the will of Hevaeck beneath his. Uchitemar grunted as he arrived to blockage of runes implanted into the old dwarves’ minds and looked at Da Yun, seeking his aid. At once the xirong nekromancer moved and placed his palm, pouring inscriptions of his own into Hevaeck and the two slowly watched as the nekrotic matter hastened the decaying of the corpse beneath them while the protections were slowly sliced off.
Uchitemar tilted his head as he began to apply aevoron to halt the hastening decay leaving the reanimated corpse in a state where his blemished, creased skin gained a pallid earthen shade, his eyes liquified and in their place soothing, cold darkness lingered with a spark of mesmerizing violet as the parched lids rolled up never to be closed again. He rose back onto his feet and relinquished control over Hevaeck to Da Yun as he turned back to the dim passageway as he felt the weights of the dead drop from his soul.
Then when he felt the heaviest belonging to the Decaying Colossus vanish into the aether, he turned to Da Yun. “Seems the battle may have came to an end.” Da Yun nodded silently, still focusing on the undead dwarf before him as the memories of the dead flowed into his mind. “I see.” After he walked over to Uchitemar and placed his index and middle finger onto his narrow, gaunt forehead, he witnessed the memories and felt ever more uncertain at the things he saw.
“Seems the Night has smiled on us.” Da Yun said as the two stood in silence, pondering whether to alter their plans or not. “What should we do?” Uchitemar voiced the question. “For now, grab a few more and impede their way.” Da Yun said as he closed down his eyes and watched through a conjured astral eye as Eadwald leapt into the aperture created by decaying colossus thrown against the ground.
Uchitemar took off without a word, reaching out to the dead through the nekrotic link and called a few dozen near the cistern. With them he marched through the winding labyrinth of the sewer’s second level though before he came face to face with the small group, he halted in his tracks. His mind twinged from a pain of thoughts being forced into his head. “The Will of Dusk.” After the pain ceased, he murmured in his raspy voice as the revelation blossomed in his mind.
He stared at the corner inhibited by thick darkness and hovered above the shallows crevice where the billowing water flowed out from the city. The dead who marched with him continued on without him and whilst he felt regret at sacrificing his old friends’ child, the Will of Dusk came before such sentiments. From there, in the cold embrace of the darkness he watched as Eadwald and his companions charged, their weapons and armor drenched in the black ichor of the undead and after their steps grew distant, he stepped out and waited for a few moments before following slowly.
Distinct sounds of metal clashing against crackling spell, the shrieks of tortured dead grew denser and louder in the narrow passage where danger lied at the threshold, yet Uchitemar stepped firmly and assuredly as he believed in the Will of Dusk, as the Nightscale soared the planes and between long before the deossos awakened into existence.
Though he was not foolish enough to stand straight whilst watching the battle unfold in the lunius lit cistern where he watched the group struggle only for a moment, outnumbered by the undead whose numerical advantage counted nothing compared to the experience of the elders and the blessing of the Almodo and his children evident from the almost amber glow of Eadwald’s blade effortlessly relieving Hevaeck from his short, blessed state of undeath.
Even from the corner, from the far distance he saw the clear signs of hatred leading Eadwald’s blade aiming for Da Yun’s throat who blocked it with a quickly erected ward, then conjured forth translucent violet bony hands, grappled onto the youth’s ankles whilst in his left palm held forward a deadly spell formed to aim of ending the chosen’s existence once and for all.
Those nekrotic bindings proved little as a strange blur framed the boy’s radiant silhouette and lunged at the short nekromancer. Yet his life did not came to an end as Eadwald hesitated recalling the trance Azugh was in just a few days prior. Fate and Da Yun acting together forced his hand when the latter continued reforming the same deadly spell, leading to his lengthened death when the blade at the right of his neck entered through layers of fabric, flesh and bone not enough to kill in a moment’s notice. Uchitemar listened only to the throttled shrieks of Da Yun slowly collapsing on to the cold floor, clutching his bleeding neck and throat after freeing them from the cleaving grasp of the blade. Seconds, minutes passed before they came to an end and when he peeked over, he noticed the others surrounding the petrified and quivering Eadwald.
And without saying a word he took off not in Uchitemars’ distance whence they came down, but the opposite where the exit to the frozen tundra of the north laid around the city. Aelfsigior and Ashnan tried to reason, to hold back the Eadwald with little to no success as he still the Seed reacted, bloomed to the cavalcade of feelings raging within his heart and soul. He evaded their calming grasps with the eloquence of the primordial Fae, when they achieved to grapple on to hold him back, he broke free sending them tumbling down to the floor littered by the vacant forms with the strength of the Elder Dragons, and when they tried to restrain him with spells, they bounced, dispersed against the durability, resistance of the Titans inhibiting the hostile, chaotic realm between planes.
With each step Eadwald made towards the passage leading outside, the Uchitemar felt the trembling of the welted together marble all around him, he felt the city quiver before the manifested might of the Almodo and the withered vessel and his soul trembled in tandem as he experienced the awe and fear he felt centuries ago when he was allowed to stand in the shadow of the Nightscale.
He silently thanked the Dusk for saving his life once more, and after their steps once more grew distant went to the cistern. Before he followed after them, he kneeled down at the corpse of Da Yun and touched his chest pouring nekrotic mana into it and watched as it slowly decomposed until it looked barely recognizable. “May you find solace in His shadow brother!”
Outside at the exit, he stared forward at the hoary bridge erected by the cruel nature of the northern elementals and after waiting a while followed the footsteps in the snow shrouding the pristine ice revealing the depthless chasm below.
**
As soon as his sole stepped into the snow blanketing the earth around the gnarled, hollow tree Orhadin felt the primordial nekrotic matter swirling thickly in the air. A feeling of cold refreshment made him groan in his gravelly, sibilant voice as a weight he was unconscious of dropped from his soul whilst the freshly looking, reanimated adventurers and the revenants sworn in silence to the Queen of the Damned flocked around him, their vacant eyes occupied by a vicious darkness focused on the visitor.
As he glided across the snow covered road, one by one they stepped back in a motion reminiscent of waves parting by the potency of a great spell. Though as he walked amongst them, he felt and heard their thoughts leaking as they pondered whether he was enemy or ally to their gravely queen who inherited the place from the Fae of Death whom blossomed from the first corpse, given existence by the otherwise depriving breath of the Nightscale himself.
Before Orhadin entered, or could have entered his silent steps came to end before the gate hewn from rotting flesh and tarnished bones, ornated with the brutishly torn of torso of a boar like demikin still wearing her hide armor with the high, rectangular collar pressing into her corpulent, almost non-existent neck as her faded eyes stared into Orhadin’s slit pupils gleaming with a poisonous shade. “What business have you in the Court of the Damned?”
“I came carrying the Night’s Blessing! It is time for the Queen of this land to honor the pledge she vowed centuries before to Monarch of the Dead and Dusk!” He stated coldly and calmly and for a while the to torso stretching ever closer, her empty gaze digging deeper into his elevated soul, slid back and hung limply before it trembled along the lumps of rotten flesh.
Within the confines of the hollow tree, the soft ringing of his staff’s tip beating gently against the stone translucent as ice echoed through the oval space bereft of lofty furniture befitting of rulers, except for the throne at the end of the ascending steps. On it he glanced the hauntingly enticing pallid form draped in regal yet tattered robes and a crown of bones made from broken and welted ribcages of man, aevhei and dwarves.
Bottom of the stairs, at the sides two figures stood in their ivory plates crafted by the expert hands of the Empire’s smiths and tattered tunics and breeches protecting once from the cold adorned their withered, blessed forms adorned with blisters, dried blood and scars which would still bleed if blood would still flow in their forms. The right one, once a proud draevhe whose crimson scales faded to pink, the other a northerner whose striking, dashing face grizzled by her claws still recognizable to Orhadin who raked his brain where he may have known the man.
“Oh Blessed Queen of this Woodland! I came here by the Grace and Will of Dusk asking for you to honor your Pledge to his cause as time nears into the new age!” Though in the end he decided it was of no importance and focused back on the Queen of the Damned, a peculiar wraith he thought to himself, one who elevated herself to position of power when the Deossos still could exert their fading power in the world of mortals.
“Oh Child of the Night, of the Great Serpent of Worlds’ Ends I shall vow once more to carry out His will as I have always done so. Though all I ask for is to give me His blessing so that I can enact my vengeance on my betrayers or at least their descendants.” Her sepulchral voice, resonant as the chilling winter wind rang through the hollowed space and his mind as she rose from her throne of ice and stone, and as he met her cold gaze devoid of anger even as she spoke with a tone poisoned by it, he felt no cold presence leaking from her contrary to what his friends, what his master Grimslaukh told him off about what it felt like standing in her presence. The cold which was gifted to her by the Nightscale himself.
When she stopped before him, Orhadin nodded his head then lowered his staff until the peculiarly colorful trapezohedron on top of it reached a point where she could touch it with her hands adorned by bony, opaque fingers. “I shall vow no Dawn shall soothe my soul until the Dusk governs its rightfully owned lands occupied by the deceivers hiding in the scorching embrace of light!” Wind chilling their soul swept through the walls, the shadows of the space lengthened and creeped on the gnarled walls adorned by dangling severed heads singing primordial rhymes, whilst the reanimated dead within shivered in awe and terror as the presence of the Night reached once more into the forest when the last word poured forth the phantasmal dark lips of the Queen.
The trapezohedron lit up with the dim, soothing shades of dusk that slithered like serpents onto her long arm and into her heart as her head perched towards the blackened skies. Her lips stretched, her nekrotic epidermis cracked without bleeding as her form altered while staring into the cyclopean slit eyes of the Night peering into her.