Anastacia peered through the small window from the attic down to the street, where countless training simulacra still held their gathering after a few hours of waiting. “I don’t think they’re going to give up any time soon…” She whispered to Leggy and moved further from the window before she would get noticed.
During the wait, the necromancer had gone through the venator’s entire body with a piece of charred cloth from her shirt. Though it did finally give her the chance to do some more intimate research on her workings, missing her usual tools for the job left the quality of her work lamentable by her standards. Ever so often, she still pressed her right palm on the simulacrum’s cheek to try and reactivate the connection they shared in the orchard, yet it didn’t seem to work again.
Shaking the final drip of water from her canteen, Anastacia racked her brains for a new plan that would at least let them leave the town. “What if we get on the roofs and just burn everything? But that doesn’t really solve anything… Maybe- no, that’s dumb, even for me.” She muttered and weighed their options. While not out of time yet, waiting more didn’t seem like it would have changed things like she had hoped it would and something definitely needed to be done. “What if I sacrifice like a pinky or something? The simulacra are so slow and weak that I could probably clear them out with a piece of bacon.”
While she stared at her fingers and toes trying try and decide which one she liked the least, she thought she caught a whiff of an all too familiar scent. The disgusting, metallic reek of fresh blood she hated more than almost anything else. She instinctively checked her clothes for signs of bleeding, but even the wound in the back of her shoulder had plugged itself properly during their wait and no longer stained the bandages over it. She sniffed the dusty attic air a few times but didn’t notice anything odd again and returned to her pondering – for only a few moments, before the scent found its way to her once more. However, this time it was unquestionably there. Anastacia crawled around for a bit, trying to figure out where it was coming from. There definitely wasn’t anything in the attic itself, since she would have picked up on that ages ago, so it had to come from outside.
Before she even had the chance to peek out of the window, she realized that she no longer wanted to be anywhere near it, much less see what was on the other side. All of a sudden, her powers picked up a literal tide of blood around the edge of the town. It flooded in through the same path they had entered from and begun to slowly wash over the streets as it spread at roughly a walking pace. It seeped into the soil, flooded the ground floors of every building it clashed against and drained into the basements and foundations below them. All of the blood originated from a single point that slowly moved through the town, but it spread to almost every street and alley as an ankle-deep layer of horrific sanguine sludge.
Anastacia panickily scrambled into the corner furthest away from the window and the hatch to the lower floors. Whatever was going on outside, she wanted absolutely no part in it and quietly prayed to every god she knew that it wasn’t related to her being there. She wasn’t able to tell much about the blood itself, other than that it was just regular blood that resonated just fine with her powers, but what was odd was that it seemed to appear from out of nowhere. Though it would have been something only a handful of necromancers could even hope to do, it was definitely possible to recreate the effect, but no matter how powerful they were, no necromancer could just usher forth material from nothing – not to mention that there were no other necromancers present, there wasn’t even another living being there. Though she could feel a disturbance in the flow of the blood directly at its source, it was hard to differentiate it from the steps of the countless simulacra that were now flocking towards it, but if it was anything resembling a person, she would have been able to tell the flesh from the blood.
Leggy didn’t quite understand what was going on and merely wondered if the necromancer had seen something scary outside. She quietly moved to the window and took one quick glance at the bright red street below them before coming to the same conclusion as Anastacia: whatever was out there, didn’t need their intervention. The venator hastily joined the necromancer in the corner and huddled together with her to wait for it to be over.
Accompanied by haunting mechanical screeches from the training simulacra, the source of the blood moved through the town all the way from one edge to another, along a path that suggested it knew where it was going but seemed to be searching for something at the same time. It stopped in the town square for a moment before continuing and eventually leaving the town, and finally the necromancer’s range. The blood-soaked streets it left behind revealed to the necromancer that nothing in the town was moving anymore. Had the simulacra still been patrolling along their paths, it would have caused disturbances in the surface of the dirt roads that were now drenched in blood, but that was not the case.
Anastacia lifted her head and stared at the window on the opposite wall. “Please don’t let that be whatever we came here to get rid of… If it is, I don’t know, I’ll just go cry in a corner and die or something. We really need to find King and Emilia…” She sighed and began to steel herself for what was unavoidably going to happen next. “We better go, just in case it comes back.”
The necromancer moved to the hatch, slapped her cheeks lightly to perk up and cracked it open while very deliberately breathing through her mouth; had she not been doing that, the eyewatering fumes rising from the blood-soaked first floor would have probably been enough to knock her out after a bout of projectile vomiting. With Leggy’s aid, she lowered down to the second floor and ventured to the staircase to face the mess below.
Though the wooden floor of the first floor was no longer covered in a pool of blood, it had been dyed permanently crimson by it. Gagging and physically shaking, Anastacia headed outside, hoping that the slightly more open chamber the town resided in wouldn’t be as bad as the inside of the building. While it was true to a degree, nothing could have prepared her for the sight of the freshly coated streets of red. As if the disgusting mud created from blood and dirt wasn’t enough, the brief mystery of what happened to the simulacra was solved by the countless mechanical husks dangling from iron spikes that had seeming grown out of nowhere and impaled the machines wherever they had stood at the time. Inexplicably dripping blood, some of the crushed simulacra were bound together with metal wire which prevented them from falling apart.
“What the… Who does this?!” Anastacia exclaimed. As she took a look at one of the broken simulacra, the way they were impaled reminded her of the tomb sealed in the tunnels under the Baron of Iron’s keep, where the invaders that had eventually bested him had been dealt in much the same manner – without the tide of blood.
Each step in the muck took a considerable portion of the hemophobic necromancer’s self-control and she spend most of the journey down the streets staring at the fake sun, partially hoping it would blind her for the time being and spare her from the rest of it. The mushy feeling under her feet made her curse her lack of shoes for the first time in her life.
Eventually, Anastacia and Leggy found themselves at the edge of the town that bordered with the small river and the forest on the other side. The blood coating the ground thinned and eventually ended only a few meters away from the still pristine water. The river itself was perfectly uniform in breadth and depth, and though it did have some bends to it, it was still obviously just as artificial as the town. The sandy bottom was perfectly visible through the crystal-clear water and the complete lack of life in it made the stream eerily similar to those in Mournvalley.
Anastacia dipped her finger into it, sniffed the water and was delighted to find that it hadn’t been tainted by the blood yet. She proceeded to fill her canteen once more and washed her face with glee.
“Where’s the exit?” She asked, feeling refreshed once more but avoiding having to look into the direction of the town.
Leggy pointed into the direction the river flowed towards and proceeded to wash the blood off her legs after seeing the necromancer do the same.
With their cleaning done, the pair headed downriver and soon enough spotted an already open door along the wall of the chamber. A plentiful trail of blood leading from the town to the door explained why it was open but caused some understandable concerns at the same time. Anastacia had no intention to catch up with whatever it was that left behind the inexplicably ridiculous amount of blood, but Leggy confirmed that there were no other paths they could take.
Hesitating to enter the dim corridor waiting for them on the other side of the door, Anastacia took a better look at the trail left behind by the thing that quickly moved towards the top of the list of creatures she feared. Surprisingly enough, there were actually two trails of footprints. One trail had deep prints that could have well been that of a knight of stone but were shaped differently from the ones she knew well. The steps were meticulously exact and unhesitating, which further confirmed that they were made by a simulacrum, which was more or less par for the course considering where they were anyway. The other trail was messy, not only was every step surrounded with a pool of blood, a cape or a cloak had dragged over them, making them even harder to decipher.
“Housecarl! Make a note that excessive bleeding will henceforth be illegal in the goblin kingdom!” Anastacia declared and gagged for one more time at the sight of the blood.
With a bit more time wasted, the necromancer and her housecarl finally braved the tunnel, which once more lit up with their presence. As the light patterns spread a few meters ahead of them, they revealed something that send shivers down Anastacia’s spine like nothing before – smeared across the wall was a message written in large letters of blood: ‘Anastacia, follow the blood’.
Quietly staring at the message with a blank expression on her face for a time, she let out a dry chuckle. “That sure was a nice five minutes we had without being utterly fucked, wasn’t it?” She groaned with her will to live audibly draining out of her. “What are the chances that there’s another Anastacia lost here, and this is actually for them? With the size of this place, it has to be above zero, right?”
Now newly worried over some kind of a nightmarish being of metal and blood trying to lure them somewhere, the pair hesitantly wandered deeper into the corridor. The trail of blood continued as a trickle of coagulated clumps that gave the necromancer a rough idea of how long it had been since the thing they were forced to follow had gone through there. Afraid of accidentally catching up to it, they were in no hurry and checked every door they came across, even if the map Leggy possessed told them the rooms were of no importance or didn’t contain anything useful for their journey. Whenever the corridor split into two or more paths, the trail unfortunately stuck with the one they had to take as well.
Even as a couple of hours passed, the smell of blood never stopped bothering Anastacia. She had hoped she would be desensitized to it with time, but whenever she stopped smelling it, her necromancy reminded her of it and the cycle of being disgusted by it repeated. Though it did make her feel somewhat proud of how far she had come with her fear of blood, every now and then she still had to take a breather and stare at the ceiling to not throw up.
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Trying to wiggle some of the pieces of armor on her to see if they were any more willing to come off, Anastacia leaned against Leggy’s shoulder. “I hope King and Emilia are doing alright. Honestly, I’m not too worried for them, if anything, I feel bad for whatever they’ve run into. It’s a bit unfortunate we were the ones to end up in that town, those two would have had a great time in there… They’ve got all the coffee too…” She prattled to distract herself. “How far are we from the next chamber of bullshit?”
Leggy pointed at the darkness ahead, or more precisely, at the faint light of a stone door already waiting for them in no more than a hundred meters.
“Oh, let’s just go then.” The necromancer shrugged and began scanning her surroundings a bit more precisely. She could tell that though there was a somewhat of a pool of blood waiting for them in the next chamber, whatever had left it was no longer there, as it was already completely clotted, and the trail continued onwards from there.
As usual, the heavy stone door opened with a touch from a simulacrum and revealed the next hurdle to get over on the long journey towards Erratic Judgement. This one consisted of a relatively small chamber, much like the first one where Anastacia had been split into several color-coded fragments, and two oversized stone chairs with a small table between them. The door forwards was both closed and inactive as always, though the trail of blood did lead through it. Judging by one of the chairs being covered in blood, the blood creature had done whatever test the chamber was designed to run and had been granted passage for it.
“Dibs on the clean chair.” Anastacia declared, figuring that there was a chance both of them were needed for the test.
She took a look at the seat, which seemed identical to the one that had fragmented her, but the floor below it didn’t have any sort of mechanism to move it around the table. The table itself seemed more important, as it had a plethora of light patterns already shining on its surface, most of which led to a pair of metallic handles positioned near the edges of the table, one directly in front of each chair.
Anastacia climbed into the chair that was far too large for her and had to scoot all the way to the edge to reach the handle. “No sense in delaying whatever they’ve got for us.” She shrugged and grabbed the handle on her side of the table.
The lights on the table’s surface grew brighter and a strange mechanical hum began building up within it, but just as the sound was about to reach its breaking point, it flaccidly sputtered out along with the lights. Full of misguided hope for that being all that was involved with the chamber, the necromancer turned towards the inactive door, only to see it remain that way. She tried for a second time just to be sure, but that had no effect on the outcome.
Sighing deeply, Anastacia rid the chair opposite to her from what blood she could, tossing the disgusting lump of coagulated red sludge into the far corner of the room. “Hop in. I hope this thing accepts simulacra as well, or we’re stuck here.” She said and nodded towards the still stained seat.
Leggy did as she was asked, and without hesitation sat down in the chair that was slightly large even for her. On the count of three, they both grabbed the handles attached to the table and waited for the mechanical churning within the table to build up. This time, instead of dying down, the noise climaxed as a quiet sound of shattering glass. Fearing that they had broken something, Anastacia tried to jump up from the chair, but found her muscles unresponsive. As she turned to the simulacrum for aid, she could witness a white crack quickly spread in her surroundings, as it all, Leggy, the table and the chamber itself crumbled into a white void. She barely had time to be distressed, as the fragments rose back up from the ether and began rearranging themselves into a new scene, one she was completely unfamiliar with.
Where Leggy had been, now stood a tall being Anastacia recognized as one the ones that had briefly appeared next to Leggy and King when the flash of light outside of the machine fortress had ushered forth two images of beings from within each member of the party. Supposedly these tall, armored creatures were aureun, the builders of machine fortresses, and one of whom had been rendered into the mind of each simulacrum – or at least the ones that didn’t get called hollow by the Firstborn. This particular one was gravely wounded and held her side with her palm, trying to stop the thick, black ooze from draining from a large wound. Her stone armor was chipped and cracked, and a thin strand of the blood-like muck dripped from under the being’s mask.
Behind the injured aureun was a burning town which Anastacia didn’t recognize by its very stylized architecture at all, but the terrified group of injured and crying elves suggested that it was somewhere in the elven part of the world, or what had been the elven part of the world thousands of years ago. Lacking context for the scene, it gave the necromancer the impression that the lone aureun was defending the elven townsfolk from something behind the seat, which didn’t exactly match up to what she had been hearing about them.
“What ridiculousness has gotten to you Val-Varjo?! Cease this nonsense or we will be forced to take further action against you!” Echoed a threatening voice from behind Anastacia.
The injured aureun laughed and stood proud against her foe. “Then do it, you cowards! I have made my choice.” The stance she took immediately reminded the necromancer of Leggy after she had been shocked by the core on Anastacia’s shoulder. The wide stance and their idle swaying were remarkably similar despite the differences in body structure, which made Anastacia wonder if she was watching the aureun that went on to become Leggy’s mind.
“You would rather perish along with these mud-dwellers? What possible reason there would be for such a pointless sacrifice?” The voice behind Anastacia questioned, sounding genuinely confused.
Along with the voice, Anastacia could hear the humming of at least a dozen simulacra, some of which must have been quite fearsome based on the terrified looks of the elven townsfolk.
“The fact that you consider it pointless proves my thoughts to be true.” The injured aureun, apparently called Val-Varjo chuckled and coughed in pain. “Let me answer your question with a question. For a century and quite a bit more, I have stood where you stand now. Staring down at these ‘mud-dwellers’ and considering them lesser than the stone we carve our tools from, a mere resource at best. I have obeyed my orders and taken lives while convincing myself that fueling our machines is the most they could possibly achieve, that I was doing them a favor. But what gave me the right to do so? What flimsy claim can you make for your own actions now?”
“Our superiority over them. We are faster, stronger, more intelligent and will achieve things far greater than any of these mud-dwelling races. That is why we can – why we have to do this.” The confused voice answered, as if stating the obvious.
“So all it would take is someone greater than us, and you would kneel without a fight? Huddle down and accept your death as a lesser being as well? I have a hard time believing this. Our ways are no better than that of a wild beast, no number of glimmering lights and exact mechanisms is enough to hide that. Our empire is founded upon greed, cruelty and lies that even we believe. And that is why I stand here, content with my choice.” Val-Varjo protested without a shred of hesitation in her voice. “We could have chosen a path far less cruel; we could have chosen to teach the folk of this world what we know, arm them with ways to defeat what we have defeated. We could have grown alongside them, working together instead of suppressing their growth every chance we have. We could have been better. And that is why I stand here, because I am better.”
The injured aureun gestured for the elves behind her to flee and pulled out a small knife from behind her back. “I suffer no illusions of my chances against you and your company but knowing that I died above our lacking creed is more than enough.” She rejoiced and spun the knife in her hand.
A moment of silence ensued. It was impossible to tell if the other side of the conversation was actually thinking about what Val-Varjo had said, or if they were simply hesitating to strike down a fellow aureun, but regardless, their answer took what felt like an eternity.
“All your inane uprising here has done is waste time. The mud-dwellers you’ve trained will be hunted down in minutes, and what knowledge you may have leaked will die with them without achieving anything in the end.” The voice finally said in a cold tone. “And as you know, death is not something we allow for traitors, your mind will be distilled into that of a machine, and you will serve loyal once more.”
Val-Varjo cackled hysterically and spread her arms, as if inviting someone to attack her. “Even better! I will get to see our lies fall with my own eyes. So come, lesser one, prove me right!”
And with her words, the scene shattered once more and crumbled into the white void.
While Anastacia was having her experience, the scene in Leggy’s mechanical eyes crumbled in a similar manner, but the one it arranged itself back to wasn’t from nearly as far back in time. The walls formed as dark stone, creating a circular room with only one door to it and an odd-looking ceiling. Instead of being closed, them the room’s top half opened up into a larger space with seats that were facing directly towards the middle, as if there was supposed to be an audience for whatever went on in the room. Unfamiliar with the concept of anatomical theatres, Leggy was puzzled by the room itself, even before she noticed the table in the middle.
Laying on the large stone table was a shirtless man, whose hands and legs had been tied, and a sack had been placed on his head. He was clearly not too keen about the situation, as he screamed and moved around quite a bit regardless of his binds. Next to the table was almost a starvingly thin older man, wearing a set of black robes and holding a tray of nasty-looking tools. By him, stood a small child with strange white clothes, light hair and extremely distinctive turquoise eyes. The child was very similar to the necromancer Leggy had agreed to serve, uncannily so, but somehow even smaller. She was holding a small knife and pointing it at the man on the table with shaking hands. Above the room, in the audience, were three shadowy figures wearing crimson red robes with hoods that hid their faces in the dark.
“Anchor, would you please just silence him already. This is the third one this week and you’ve done it before.” The old man said annoyedly. “You must learn to be quicker.”
“Nah, don’t want to.” The child responded and lowered her knife.
“But you must. You are a necromancer so taking a life should be second nature to you by now.” The old man explained, sounding slightly threatening. “You know where the carotid arteries are, simply cut them and we can begin.”
“But won’t that hurt? They always scream.” The child asked and took a pitying look at the man on the table.
“What does that matter? Simply cut them and it will be over in seconds.” The old man kept insisting and began to get angry. “How are you supposed to practice if you can’t even dismantle material?! You are already nine years old and still hesitate when taking a life, I can’t believe so much power is being wasted on someone so useless.”
The child protested by throwing the knife onto the floor and pouting.
This angered her teacher, who slammed the tray he was holding onto the table, sending many of the tools flying. “You insolent brat! Pick that up, NOW!”
Instead of doing as she was asked, the unruly child pushed the tray off the table, spreading rest of the tools all over the floor as well. She seemed awfully proud of her mutiny, at least until the old man swung his arm in rage and hit her on the cheek with the back of his hand. Though this knocked the child over, it was the old man who screamed in agony. The bones in his hand had been rendered to mulch as soon as they had touched the child, and what was left of his hand was a liquified mess that was held together by his skin.
“What have you done?!” The old man yelled, turning bright red. He grabbed the child by the collar with his remaining hand and screamed incoherently at her.
Crying and understandably shocked by not only being hit but because she had accidentally lost control of her powers and hurt someone, something she had frequently been punished for and now feared more than anything else. When the old man grasped her collar, the child panicked, grabbed the closest thing on the floor and swung it at the adult she thought was attacking her. Unfortunately, that turned out to be the knife, and it cut cleanly through the old man’s throat.
The man fell quiet in an instant as his eyes rolled back and he collapsed on top of the child, profusely bleeding from his throat directly over the child’s face. Unable to move the dead adult, she was stuck there and could only scream in absolute terror.
Between the harrowing screams of the child and the tied-up man on the table, Leggy could hear a dry chuckle from one of the red figures in the audience before the scene shattered and collapsed.
As the pieces of the world reassembled themselves as the chamber with two chairs, it did so simultaneously for both Anastacia and Leggy. They were released from whatever grasp the mechanism held them under and were allowed to move once more. While the necromancer was a bit too disoriented to stand up immediately, the simulacrum swiftly hopped up and rushed to hug her.
“What? Oh, okay… I’m into this.” Anastacia muttered and accepted the sudden gesture. She had no idea why it was happening, but certainly wasn’t unhappy about it. While waiting for Leggy to let go of her, which didn’t seem to be happening for a bit, the necromancer noticed a light on the previously inactive door forwards.