Year 219. Acocaea - Khirn
THE RUNEMASTER
ne’Banuus ducked his spear, cracking against his sternum with a wild haymaker with her fist. Blood kissed the back of his teeth as he coughed from the hit. His free arm shot up to deflect the following swing from her axe. Though he felt a new strength in his body, his wards were still spent from the battle and the frequency with which his opponent had unexpectedly struck him. Light glinted off the edge of the Belanorian’s weapon as the mystharinic shield around his forearm surged with power to diverge the impact of the hit.
He flung around from it and shot out with his spear in haste to keep her at bay. ne’Banuus slunk past the spear just enough to avoid it skewering her flesh. Her armor was neatly carved in its place. The Runemaster grinned, dropped his spear, and tackled the woman as she raised her axe to strike at him. It was quick and nowhere near as forceful as it could have been, but it knocked her to the ground.
His hands wrapped around her throat as they grappled along the ground, the darkness of Tsiyno looming around them like an audience. She gasped and choked as she flung her hands into him, fist after fist, breaking his wards where they remained active and denting his once immaculate armor. He roared in her face, a sound cut short by her backhand that knocked his helmet off his head. His face revealed to the world, and he glared at her before bracing a gauntleted fist to his nose. Erik’s grip loosened—blood spurt from his nostrils. The Great Blade kicked him off.
The two warriors readied themselves in the darkness. “You appear far different than I had anticipated,” ne’Banuus noted.
“Apologies for not living up to your self-developed expectations,” he muttered, popping his jaw back into place.
She smiled and rubbed her throat. “Not everyone can match the legends.”
Erik pointed a knowing finger at her. “You, however, do. Bloodied, burned, a vessel for righteous wrath, as Belanorian as the next. Tsaptayoa yeki man Tepia."
Another smile, far more crooked than before. “Well, I am glad that I meet your expectations, Runemaster. As bin tsě yoz ki tsěf tsě bu d’ukvi kan. Tell me, before we fight again, has Acocaea gone as you envisioned it would?”
The Runemaster rolled his shoulders and peered at the darkness surrounding them. He wondered if those outside were beating and bashing against it, fruitlessly attempting to save either of them. “Not at all,” he admitted, looking back at his foe. “I had hoped that this all could have been settled without bloodshed. Of course, that was a brief and foolish hope.”
“It was.”
“The siege itself broke through the walls with ease, as if you wanted us to. And now we are stuck in these ludicrous streets, fighting to survive.”
“The same can be said for us,” she mused. “I planned a feint. A flank of your army. A swarm of numbers as you broke through the walls to whittle you down until we could kill you.”
“You managed that. An impressive feat to avoid the rest of my army, to be sure.”
“It is not that difficult when madness sets in and betrays our sensibilities,” she said. There was lament in her voice.
“Then you saw something, too?”
“I did. Grotesque.”
“A creature in a pit.”
“Working on some hairless-”
“-Eyeless, fleshless-”
“-Thing. Attended to by horrible creations.”
They charged each other, picking up their weapons and trading five blows. The Runemaster’s wards were shattered, and his armor was scratched and gouged. The Great Blade’s armor was cut and sliced. Blood trickled thinly from their armor’s wounds.
They paced around each other—hounds ready to duel over an invisible hunk of meat in the center of their circle. “‘Horrible creations.’ I saw one of your Aslofidorian friends,” Erik explained. “A giant of a man calling himself Eos. He was deathless, bleeding black and green. Only by the intervention of another was he felled. Loukas Tamasos.”
Another three strikes were dealt between them, ne’Banuus taking the worst of it. Her grip on the axe slackened. She heaved her breaths more than she had been before. “The Akaios Opos.”
Erik nodded and thrust his spear at her unprotected face. She batted it aside but crumpled as the man quickly shifted his weight and swung the spear shaft into the side of her head. His body shook with reinvigorated potency. “Aslofidorians using mystharin. Unprecedented,” he chortled as she rolled to her feet, a split welt the size of a coin formed on her temple.
She spat blood from her mouth and breathed nasally air. “We have to be to beat you. Your force was unexpected in size, and you openly use the powers without complaint from the Vasileús or his men.”
“A strange thing that, is it not?”
She swung at him, missing horribly. He kicked her axe away and lunged for her with an open hand. He clenched her throat and lifted the Great Blade into the air. “It very much is,” she replied all the same. Erik grinned lopsidedly and slammed her down onto her back. He kicked her hard in her ribs as she attempted to get up. ne’Banuus belched blood and bile.
He circled her again. “I wonder to myself a lot...why? Why do the Vasileús and his ilk allow me and my kin to practice our powers with impunity? Why?”
ne’Banuus struggled to her feet. “Likely the same reason why your mother aligned herself with them. Something greater at work than a bloody war and a hope to end an endless feud.”
“Once again, doubting my mother.”
“You saw the creature. You saw what I saw. You saw it with your mother and that thing that resembled her.”
He had not the energy to lie in this banter. “I did.”
Blood coated her face. Her breaths were shallow, and her voice was sharp. “Yes. So tell me, Runemaster: why do you think they allow you to use this power with impunity? Why would a realm almost as opposed to mystharin as Belanore suddenly align itself with the only one that openly practices it?”
Erik considered her question before lunging at her again, leading with his spear for her heart. “I will find out in my own time.”
The spear skewered the Great Blade as the darkness around them flashed white. Thunder boomed in Erik’s head. Another image filled his dazed vision. ne’Banuus was there as well, furious and loathing. She appeared slightly older than she had just been. Far more alive, as well.
The creature in the pit sat between them, its face contorted in an indecipherable emotion. They were in a different room than before—a study rather than a workshop. Floors of full bookshelves towered over them, and tattered papers cluttered the dusty ground. Still, the creature sat in a pit of ooze, black and red waves of indescribable substance.
“Tʼu si ju b’a,” the thing said in a voice like boiling water. "Tʼu ja sadi d’ed tawaskhu."
“Be silent,” ne’Banuus seethed. She stepped closer to the man. “You are an abomination. I have seen your work for too long. Let me go and let him go.”
The creature laughed. “Tʼu khu notiched ja yul khewdu ju pej’ j’ir.”
“What are you saying?” the Runemaster asked, stepping forward as well. “Who are you?”
“Pej’ khal tʼu Yej’,” the creature cackled, leaning its head far too far, the folds of its swollen obese form stretching like leather. "Pej’ khal tʼu Yej’!"
“Make sense, you freak,” Erik demanded, his steps forcefully marching toward the creature.
The thing held out a hand, or whatever its approximation to a hand was, and pushed Erik back several feet. It did the same to the Great Blade, only to melt into the ooze as the world changed again, turning into a vast, endless wasteland of black sand and a sky of red-blue Borealis. In the center of this waste rested an orb, a sphere of obsidian glowing with scripture, held on a levitating podium of spikes and metal. A new thing stood beside it: a draconic creature of white scales and black eyes dressed in regal clothing from a land Erik Apa did not know of. “Wawaj’i nya ub mas. Ja chreators gesrang nyip yiw, mi miw pap khu pej’ uddi,” the new creature said.
“Speak plainly!” the Runemaster screamed.
“Erik!” the Great Blade called to him, recovering from the telekinetic blast—no, it wasn’t her. That ne’Banuus had been shattered apart at the joints. It was another her, in the corner of the study. She had dropped down from the levels above, gripping her axe. She was younger, bearing the wounds of their fight. “Erik, you must find a way out of here.”
The creature glanced at her. She melted into a pile of bones.
Erik jumped to his feet. “What?”
Another ne’Banuus appeared from the shadows, lobbing her axe for the creature’s head. It deflected it with a finger. “Erik! Do not listen to him! This is a lie! That is not-”
The creature melted this ne’Banuus as well, turning as the youngest of the four to have appeared so far lunged into sight from an imperceptible angle and slashed across its face. Her axe was glowing with runes. Druyan runes. The creature shoved her back with a touch. A fifth appeared. Confused, bearing the wounds of their fight.
“What’s happening?” she asked, falling to her knees.
Erik felt drool run down his lips as he attempted to make sense of it. The creature stepped closer to the Great Blade, fangs gnashing with saliva and tar-like blood leaking between them from its gums. Its eyes were a void. Entropy. In its hands, it produced a great spear. A monumental spear made of ruby and amethyst. It flung the spear at the Great Blade, stabbing through her armor effortlessly. She grimaced and screamed. The creature did the same to Erik, dropping him to his knees.
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The creature stomped to where Erik choked and sputtered and groaned, its very footsteps shaking the world as it grew and grew in size. Ten feet tall it stood, a monstrous thing. It grabbed the Runemaster’s face and stared into his eyes. Its breath was putrid. The sphere behind it hummed and reverberated and shook. Erik saw himself in its eyes. He watched as a worm forced itself out from his pupil and dragged yellow fluid down his face as it broke through the flesh of his cheek and disappeared once more. Then, the creature holding him spoke in a voice that should not have been a voice. It was a voice that encompassed entropy—all that should not have been and all that was reaching its destined end. It froze Erik’s hands so still that they began to turn blue and black. His neck stiffened, and his arms seized. His head rang with pain, his spine stinging with a rising sensation of a thousand hot knives being stabbed into it. His chest pumped and thrummed with agony as his heart struggled to maintain itself. His lungs collapsed. His intestines boiled. His eyes rolled back into his head. His jaw unhinged from itself in a silent scream.
“Decide...fate. Who...will be...the end?” the creature said, his visage dissipating into something of smoke as the sphere rose and rose into the Borealis, the humming now an all-encompassing noise that shattered his eardrums. “Who...will be...my champion?”
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Year Null. Brass Tower - Unknown
THE RUNEMASTER
Erik awoke in a long hallway of swarthy illumination. The framework was cobbled with red stone that seemed to weep between the segments. Blood and ooze. He was armorless, weaponless, and physically strained even in this supine position. His mouth was dry, as were his eyes, and no amount of blinking could alleviate the stinging sensation plaguing them. His chest felt crushed, and his attempts to stand were hindered by the pressure of invisible hands holding him down. He fought against them and stood despite the crackling of his knees and the near-snapping of his femurs.
Sweat drenched his hair and his face. He could barely stand. Breathing was hard and heavy. His mind raced with questions: how had he ended up here; how had he been led to defy the will of his mother; how had all of this come to be?
An answer, likely the only answer, slithered into his mind from the recesses of his memory. “You are Maprapeyni. What is there that you cannot do?”
He breathed through pursed lips and felt spittle run down his chin. The woman of the Ogar Isles. Sevi Ulu. She had filled his head with these words for years since he had met her in the camp en route to Lydoros. She had been his confidant. His bedwarmer. His seeress. She had told him to come to Acocaea. She had convinced him to slay all in the path toward it.
Yet, why had she not told him of his mother, the thing that looked like her, and the man that had put her on that table?
His seeress. More questions flooded his mind as his spine fought to maintain its structure.
“I will not die here,” he said to himself, righting his stance to face down the darkness of the passage. A noise came from the end facing him. A noise echoed back from behind him. He gritted his teeth and set his jaw. “I will not fear you, aberration. I will not fear your creations.”
He marched into the gloom, feeling the heat of eons beat against his skin. His steps were plodding and aching. He wanted to stop after a minute but pushed on. More noises echoed in the halls, growing in intensity as he turned corners of labyrinthian design. Step after step, he took into a gale of blistering warmth, invisible in the lightless hall, until a speck of fire appeared in the distance. Erik believed that it was the south that he saw the flame. Steps turned into jogging. The speck grew brighter until it filled his vision like a roaring tempest. The rest of the beast it belonged to turned to him, drooling from a gaping mouth lit with burning sticks for teeth. It was tall with crooked limbs and a stitched torso. Erik was ten paces from it, roared in fear, and turned to run. The beast followed him, lumbering with a horrific gate.
“You can be much more than this lapdog for your mother and an alliance you have no use for.”
He cursed the memory and turned a hundred corners with the beast not ten paces behind him still. Erik fell through an open archway and tumbled down an impossibly angled staircase. His new prison was a windowed, winding spire, the beast falling off the stairs as it failed to navigate the angles. Into the depths below, it vanished, its rumbling growing ever-distant. Erik stood up and found the fingers on his left hand bent awkwardly, bones sticking out at the knuckles and bleeding profusely. He felt no pain and merely gazed out the window before him. A vast scape of clouds, smog, and a crag-dotted wasteland greeted him. Worm-like creatures on four canine legs with four human arms and skinless horses’ heads crawled through the land, braying so loud that the window’s glass shook and cracked. Erik vomited in his mouth and forced it back down his throat.
“I will not fear you, aberration. I will not fear your creations,” he repeated.
The sounds of battle took his attention, and he turned toward the nearest angled staircase. He descended slowly and found a group of armored people clashing on a landing. Four wore armor of soot black and sun orange. Four wore armor of cobalt and wine red. They fought with mauls, swords, and fists. They fought each other and shambling creatures—mummified creatures with distended mouths that moaned and screamed. The Runemaster descended the stairs, grabbed one of the creatures by the neck, and threw it off the edge of the landing. He retrieved a fallen sword and slew two more of the creatures. He struck out again, killing three more. One of the Veorisians turned to face him and attacked with their maul. Erik screamed for him to hold, but the Veorisian would not listen to reason.
When he blinked as the maul cracked across his head, he was on a different landing surrounded by armorless merchants, their throats cut and their purses torn open to reveal a spectacle of gold and silver. Erik shook his hand and fought the rising sensation of seizure in his legs. His eyes felt heavy, and his neck stiff. The veins in his head throbbed with pulsing blood, and his nose felt as if it was running free of mucus and brain fluid. His chest panged with agony.
“You are greater than what you are now, Maprapeyni,” Sevi Ulu told him. He growled at the words and sucked in an airless breath.
“I will not fear you, aberration. I will not fear your creations.”
“Erik!” his mother shouted from below in the spire. “Erik, help me!”
The Runemaster rushed down the impossibly angled stairs, screaming for his mother. Outside the windows, the worm-like things had begun to cling to the glass alongside winged bugs with the faces of rotted Elven corpses. He ran until he could no longer and found the bottom of the stairs. His mother stood over the fire beast, blade coated in gore.
She was smiling. Too widely with too many teeth. “Erik. Maprapeyni. You are finding yourself,” she said.
He took a step back and pointed the sword at her. “Mother? You...what are you doing here? Where am I?”
His mother’s smile grew from ear to ear and beyond, stretching to the back of her head. “Heaven, my dear boy. You are in Heaven now.”
“What?”
“Acocaea was a success, but you died to the Great Blade. She killed you. I found your body, and I died of a broken heart. We are together again. I have much to tell you.”
The Runemaster shook his head. “No. No, the...you are not her. You weren’t there. I was about to kill her. ne’Banuus was defeated.”
“She was luring you in like a huntress, Erik,” Ezel Apa said. “She was never close to defeat. You were holding back, and she capitalized on it.”
“No. No, I was-”
“You wanted to give them mercy. You were hoping she would surrender. You have no fury towards the Belanorians. Only the Aslofidorians.”
“No.”
“For their crimes.”
“No!”
“You held back because of it.”
“NO!”
“And she capitalized.”
“NO!” the Runemaster roared, lunging at his mother and stabbing her through her mouth. “You lie. I am Maprapeyni. I do not hold back!”
His mother spoke with a gurgling, muffled voice. “You did hold back. Here, you are learning how to not. He can help you, my son. Help you learn your true self as he tried with me.”
Erik shunted the blade further into his mother’s face. “I already know my true self! It is you who needs to learn who I am! I am Maprapeyni! I am the Runemaster of Druyan! I am the next Runearch!”
“You are. As I have always known.”
“No. NO! You have never known that. You have always held me back. Held me down, refused me positions of honor and glory! Who are you but a failed mother? A failed commander? A liar?”
“I am all of these things, my son. But all that I have done was for your benefit.”
All questions he had wanted to ask her poured free like the blood from her mouth. The windows of the silo shattered. The worm-things and the insects swarmed the two Druyans. The Runemaster ignored the injuries being done to his body. His mind refused to acknowledge them. “My benefit? Why did you align with our mortal enemies? Why did you place us in the land of our most hated foes? Why am I allowed to run rampant with impunity like I have been? The Vasileús and the Vasiles say nothing of what I do. The Vasileú says nothing of what I do! Why? Why?”
His mother’s eyes darkened to onyx black, and she wept gallons of blood. “All I have done was to raise you to the person I could not be. To fix the mistakes of those before you.”
Erik pulled the blade from his mother’s face and stabbed her through the heart. She remained still. “Madness! There is no fixing what is done! There is no truce to be had, and you know it! What is the truth!? For once, tell me the truth!”
His mother’s smile grew so vast that her head split in half, and a voice that should not have been a voice echoed for eternity. From her open head, a void poured into the spire, flooding it like water and drowning everything within it save for the Runemaster, who swam against the current as his mother’s body dissipated into strips within the darkness. He swam and swam, looking for the surface, but instead found the face of a terrible thing rushing to meet him. He choked on the waters as he screamed, and the horrible thing in the void—which bore eyes of that obsidian sphere—opened its cavernous maw and said: “Decide...fate. Who...will be...the end? Who...will be...my champion?”
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Year 219. Acocaea - Khirn
THE RUNEMASTER
Erik Apa swung his spear for the Great Blade’s head and roared with the thunder as she snapped it in half with her axe. He charged her, bull-like, and grappled her to the ground. She rolled on top of him and attempted to pierce his eye with the spike of her axe’s pommel. She punched her in the gut, a hit that sent visible shockwaves through the clearing in their makeshift arena. ne’Banuus flew back into the gathered crowd and dropped her axe.
“I am Maprapeyni!” the Runemaster bellowed to the cascading cheer of his warriors. Blood filled the streets to their ankles, and gore adorned their armor like party attire. “I am the Runemaster! I do not hold back!”
“Glad you found your way out, Runemaster!” the Great Blade said, cracking her neck and marching forward with fists raised. “Did you find the answers you were looking for?”
“Enough talk!” the Runemaster screeched.
The two warriors traded punches, kicks, and headbutts of such ferocity and power that the shockwaves knocked down the crowd surrounding them. The ground itself was cracked, dented, and split by the potency of attacks. The Runemaster summoned great torrential spires of rain, dissected the town of Acocaea with mountainous geysers, and decimated the armies with winds of magma produced from nothing. Reality was his to mutate. He was Maprapeyni, and no one would deny him his destiny as Runearch.
The Great Blade snapped his arm at a point, only for him to snap it back in place without issue. Erik cracked her jaw to the side of her face, only for the Great Blade to heal it in seconds. ne’Banuus launched herself through the air and crashed down with a fist, cracking the streets to what remained of the walls. Belanorians and Druyans both tumbled into the resulting chasm. Around and around, they fought, neither warrior gaining an advantage until, as the storm began to soften and sunlight began to peak over the horizon, the Runemaster found himself thrown through the air by a powerful thrust of energy.
Loukas Tamasos, the Blessed Harbinger from before, and a host of gilded warriors along with him faced down the Runemaster. Energy crackled between their fingers, their eyes alight with righteous flame. “This ends now,” he grumbled. “You will die here and now.”
The Runemaster straightened and shook his head. “No. I begin here.”