”Persistence… The ability to fail, fail, fail and fail again – and then keep on failing. A virtue, really, to us more than most.” Eminence commented and gazed at the few dozen corpses that now littered the ground around a very annoyed and angry necromancer and a simulacrum who was starting to see the pointlessness of their exercise, but was still willing to go on. “But there has to be a limit, where it just becomes stubbornness and from thereon stupidity. I’m not sure we’re quite there yet, but I’m starting to think you might not be convinced by the forty-ninth attempt any more than you were by the forty-eighth one. Who knows, maybe it’ll finally be the end of this story?”
“Say ‘story’ one more time and we’ll find out.” Anastacia groaned back at him and stuck the sword into a pile of corpses to rest her mind for a moment.
The fresh corpses left behind by the Eminence appeared to be real at least, but weren’t without oddities. Of course, they were drenched in the force that resembled tainted necromancy, and because of that, out of Anastacia’s reach. They were also completely cold to touch, but not rotten or already dead as the dark violet blood in them had yet to settle. This perplexed the necromancer, as she felt that corpses should have been the one thing she knew, but nothing she knew seemed to apply.
“Yet, I appear to be no different! Because once more I ask: will you join us in our mission?” The Great sage asked for the forty-eighth time. “It would be a great boon for us to be joined by the one who cut the red line.”
“What are you even on about? I haven’t cut anything.” Asked the adventurer.
Eminence straightened his posture and began pacing back and forth, as if giving a lecture. “For the last couple of centuries, the leaders of that accursed Red Inquisition have held us out of this plane almost entirely. They have watched the skies and warned those we would contact, fought us wherever we emerged. The latest among them was Amaranth, whom, if our information serves us correctly, you cut down before she could pass on the knowledge of her duty to the next necromancer fit for it.”
Anastacia rolled her eyes at the mention of the old inquisitor. In no way was she surprised that the problem was somehow related to necromancers. “So, what you’re saying is that this is my fault?” She sighed and sat down on a pile of bodies that hadn’t gotten too mangled.
“A rather harsh way to state it. Your actions have allowed us to get to work for the benefit of everyone, and now is your chance to further stay the hand of the unavoidable end of everything! Join The Violet Sect and use your gifts for the good of the world!” Eminence exclaimed and spread his arms to welcome a new member to his group.
“Riiiight. You’ve just been kept out for no real reason and now that you finally returned, you’re just going to save the world from the goodness of your heart?” The necromancer smirked, not believing a word that came out of her opponent’s mouth. “I may not have gotten to the end of the book yet, but the last time I read about this sect of yours, they were pretty much the worst necromancers ever to exist, and that’s possibly one of the most crowded rankings ever to exist.” She referenced the book written by Amaranth herself and tried to remember what exactly it was that it said about the sect.
As she wasted the sage’s time by making him market something she considered to be just one of the many spiels for whatever convoluted plan to achieve pointless evil or gain something. Anastacia kept an eye on him to hopefully confirm something she had started to suspect. This may not have been the Eminence. She was almost certain that the bodies she had been cutting down weren’t the source of the presence she felt. They may have been drenched in it enough to slowly bleed corruption in their wake, but nowhere near enough to stain things kilometers away from the cell he was being kept in. It was much akin to seeing a thrall that had been used by a necromancer for a long time, and their powers lingered in the remains more than usual. The problem with the theory was that Eminence didn’t appear to have control over flesh or bone, even if he had once been a necromancer. So, if the bodies that walked around, talked and now littered the ground looked like bodies, felt like bodies and definitely smelled like bodies, but yet couldn’t be bodies, what were they?
She had at least one sure way of finding things out, the topaz ring she still carried in her belt pouch, along with the other two enchanted rings. However, the ring was limited to a single question, so to use it meant she had to know what to ask and be sure that it would be helpful. While The Great Sage did embellish and twist his words without a doubt, he wasn’t exactly secretive, so there may have been more she could figure out even before having to rely on the ring.
“So, let’s say that I was self-centered and vain.” Anastacia suggested as if she wasn’t. “What do I stand to gain from this, if the good of the world just wasn’t my thing?”
Eminence was visibly taken aback, as if even the suggestion of personal gain insulted him deeply and made him rethink his speech – or even perhaps Anastacia’s suitability for the job. “I… I suppose you would gain access to our discoveries in the fields of science and arcane? Longevity and youth to last with it, alchemical research, travel between planes… But what does that matter when it will all be gone one day?” He explained, clearly having difficulties understanding the selfish mindset of the question.
The adventurer nodded, feigning serious consideration and turned to Leggy for her opinion, only to receive a shrug back. The sage’s reaction seemed very genuine, so either he was a very convincing actor or at least he himself believed that world was coming to its end.
“And what’s the timeline with all this? If nothing was done, when would the world end? In a week? A year? A decade? Did it already end and having to deal with you is my punishment for something?” The necromancer further inquired.
“You are being punished, but for nothing more than your curiosity in coming here. Yet your punishment is uniquely cruel, as I have torn you from the story of comfort, safety and false eternity, into one that has no good endings. From here on out, there is no happily ever after to be found for you, no more meaningful victories, only loss after loss after loss to the passage of time as the end approaches.” Eminence said and continued his lecture. “The question to ask is not when, as it is already here, slowly tearing apart this world, as a flame that burns wood, rust that eats metal, cold that needs to be repelled – and life, slowly eating away at all it was given.”
“Our quandary can be summed up more elegantly with an analog; how do you stop a writer from reaching the final page of their story? Do you snap his quill, only for him to get a new one? Do you tip over his inkwell so that he needs to refill it? Do you burn his papers and force him to buy more? All this delays him, but it does not make the story in his mind any longer. So, what is it that you do?” Eminence posed a question and walked towards the pair, grandly gesturing for each part of his sentences. “We have found… an answer. A rather simple one, to be honest, and far from perfect. To enact it, we have built our forces using out mastery over the countless different arts from both this plane and others. Despite the red ones’ disruptions, we have scouted talent across time – much like this, and others have joined our cause, but we need more. So, how about it?”
As the sage approached her, Anastacia noticed a coin-sized medallion dangling on his neck. Depicting the right half of a skull and the left half of a compass rose, it matched with the emblem she had found on the remains littering The Baron of Iron’s keep. This confirmed that The Violet Sect and the group Sylvia would no doubt violently tear to shreds for baron’s death were the one and the same, and further strengthened Anastacia’s decision to not even start to consider Eminence’s offer. No matter how powerful the sect truly was, an angry deity would no doubt balance the scales a bit.
“Oh, it’s that simple then?” The necromancer smirked in response to the question. “Okay, so what you do in that situation, is burn the writer’s house with his stuff still inside so he has to relocate to continue writing. While he’s doing that, you climb the ranks of a fairly large religious institution in the area. Then, you burn his house again before he gets the chance to sit down and start writing. This time, you’re in a sufficiently high position to start planting people from your church into the local aristocracy and make them increase power of your cult, church or whatever scam you’re running at this point. Then, boom, another arson to buy a bit more time. With the third house burnt, he’s going to start considering that this might be divine intervention, and who’s in charge of the biggest religion in the area? You are. So, when he comes to you, you start suggesting to him that maybe, just maybe he shouldn’t have material possessions anymore because clearly the god of coincidental housefires thinks he shouldn’t. While this is going on, you use the guys you planted into the high society to start getting a new law on its way, one that prevents for anyone who has had more than two homes burnt down, can’t buy any more. With that in effect, the writer has no other chance to join your cult and become a monk. When that happens, you pretend that the god you claim to serve has given you a vision that all their servants need to wear thick mittens and eye patches on both eyes at all times. Of course, once he has the eye patches on, he can’t see anything and you can just take yours off, but he needs to live the rest of his life without being able to see or use his hands to write because the mittens are too clumsy to hold a quill.” She said, speaking as rapidly as she could to confuse the sage on top of mocking him.
Eminence stopped to stare at the smarmy necromancer in dead silence. It was hard to tell if he actually went through the answer again and again in his head to test its validity, or if he was simply baffled like never before. Even through the metal mask and the veil under it, the sage’s annoyance was visible. A few times he lifted his finger, as if to say something, but ended up still being speechless over what he had heard.
“It appears I’m being mocked.” He finally stated and calmly drew something in the air with his finger.
As he finished, the invisible glyph made an audible shattering noise and seemed to puncture a hole into the realm itself, as pieces of reality cracked, and whatever was in the darkness on the other side began flooding in. It only manifested as ripples in the mist that surrounded them and spread into the entire cell like noxious gas. It had no distinct scent or taste, but could be felt as stillness in the air that resisted all movement. Breathing started to require conscious effort, eyelids became heavy to lift after blinking and when Anastacia jumped up and lifted her sword, she could feel the sluggishness even in her necromancy. However, it wasn’t enough to stop her from swinging it through the hole and the sage behind it, cleaving Eminence in two but not stifling the flow of stillness in any way.
Recovering from the swing, Anastacia noticed that a greenish patina quickly developed on the metal of her weapon and rapidly began eating through the blade. The bones she used to control it decayed, aging several years in seconds until they crumbled into dust. This prompted the necromancer to look around for the effects of this invisible force.
Stolen story; please report.
The clear, though now fairly bloodstained liquid on the floor became murky and thickened into a sludge, the stone floor under it cracked and fractured and the light patterns on it dimmed and died, darkening the room along with the settling mist. The giant stone and metal orb that was supposedly Erratic Judgement themselves, slowly fell onto its crumbling pedestal and started to fall apart as the pipes leading to it severed and collapsed. Large pieces of its shell split off and revealed the incomprehensible mechanisms within for a fraction of a second before they rusted and ceased entirely, until finally, the last lights on its surface flickered out and the ticking noise it made slowed down and stopped. The fortress itself gave a few more pained creaks as much, much larger machines somewhere deep below stopped their work, until all there was left was dark.
Anastacia quickly turned to Leggy, worried that she was going to suffer the same fate, but strangely enough, the venator seemed just fine and her light blue eyes burned bright as she got closer to not lose the necromancer.
The decay still didn’t cease, as the muck on the flood dried entirely, the ceiling far above them collapsed and it all began crumbling to dust. Eventually Anastacia and Leggy stood in the middle of a dark desert of rusty sand with the open sky above them. However, neither the sun or the stars were visible, but rather the torn remains of both night and day, which mixed together to emit some meager amount of orange-tinted light – not quite like a sunset, but more like a massive fire that covered the entire sky.
The adventurer could only stare at the desolate world around her. Nothing as far as the eye could see moved, no wind blew the dust around, no cloud remained in the sky and absolutely nothing lived anywhere nearby. She kicked the dust at her feet just to see if it would move. The chance that Eminence could or even would turn everything, including the kilometers of stone above them into dust seemed slim even to the naïve necromancer, but there was no real indication that he absolutely couldn’t do it. The wasteland didn’t seem like an illusion, but she was no expert.
Before she had the chance to further inspect her surroundings, a pile of dust suddenly took the shape of Eminence. His feet were built from the ground up and some of the dust was kicked into the air to swirl around him and form the rest of his body.
“And so, it all ended.” He said, sounding awfully pleased with himself.
“You think you can scare me into joining you with fancy tricks? Trust me, I’ve dealt with enough spooky fucks that have tried it to fool me with illusions to not believe them – mostly!” Anastacia scoffed at what she figured was false scenery and grabbed one of her remaining crystal daggers.
“Call it an illusion, call it a glimpse into what’s to come, it’s no lie or deceit. It is the reality itself, the only difference being time.” The Great Sage stated grandly and raised his arms to proudly present his creation. “This is what your path leads down to, sooner rather than later without our intervention. I thought it would emphasize my point. Gaze upon it and understand there are no other choices. We are the only ones willing to do the right thing – to oppose us is… evil.”
Anastacia took in the view and considered how out of her depth she was. Debating matters such as the eventual end of the world and what to do about it wasn’t something she had prepared for at any level. By any measure, even her own, she was just dome dumb fuck kid when it came to decision making. Easily foolable, naïve to a fault, somewhat slow and just kind of uninterested in the larger functions of the world. Assuming the claims Eminence made were true in the first place, which they may have been since some of them did make sense and it wasn’t the first time she had heard that things were going downhill, was it really her responsibility to take part in delaying something that she wouldn’t even notice during her relatively short lifespan?
Being someone who hadn’t even spent a year exploring the world she was now being forced to supposedly protect, Anastacia was more than slightly overwhelmed by the complex morality of the situation at hand and unable to make a decision based on reason. Perhaps she was in a position to help countless people by joining The Violet Sect, or perhaps she was in a position to put an end to some twisted invasion that was being planned, none of this she could know for sure – but what she did know, was that she was a young girl, slightly petty and quick to anger, and that was all she could base her decision on.
Unfortunately for Eminence, this slightly petty, selfish and fiery young girl had just walked through a fortress that he had turned into a tomb for simulacra.
“I see… I see.” Anastacia nodded. “The problem with that is that I hate you, and will find a way to kill you.”
“Ah…” Was all Eminence could say in response before a ball of fire engulfed his head. It wasn’t enough to kill the sage, but the building anger was very audible in his voice. “Maybe… you need something more personal for you to see.” He coughed as the embers rained down from his singed mask and horns.
The sage lifted his hand and pointed at Leggy. Before the necromancer had the change to intervene, he drew a small circle in the air and it let out a fizzling noise. Anastacia turned to the venator to see what had happened, but couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Leggy herself checked her body quickly, but seemed unbothered.
Eminence repeated the gesture but the results didn’t seem to change. “Why…” He muttered and tried for a third time, unsuccessfully. Utterly puzzled and confused by his failure, the sage started to wander closer to see what caused Leggy’s apparent immunity to his spell, but as soon as he carelessly got within stabbing range, the necromancer sliced his finger clean off.
“You come anywhere near my housecarl, I’ll cut your dick off and weave it through your eyeholes!” Anastacia threatened and swung her knife again to keep the sage away.
The Great Sage briefly glanced at the stump of a finger that was left on his hand and took a step back to assess the situation again. So far, he had appeared somewhat cheery despite his frequent deaths and the bleak matters at hand, but that was soon about to end. He quietly stared into the horizon over the field of dust and sighed. “Perhaps I am the fool here… Is it truly so that you can not be convinced to see our angle? You would gladly see the story to its end and then let it all be erased, as if nothing happened? You would willingly let it all crumble into the void and just… accept the end?” He asked seriously in a slightly lowered tone.
The necromancer shrugged. “I don’t know about all that. It just seems like a decision I shouldn’t be making, so I won’t. I’m just an Anastacia, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s not my job to mess with anything greater than stuff on the guild’s quest board.”
“Hmm… I see.” Eminence nodded disappointedly as the scenery began reassembling itself from the dust.
The floor reformed just as it had been, the massive machine orb coalesced already floating above its pedestal and the strange liquid on the floor began to flow as the mist rose again. Anastacia’s sword reappeared just the same, as did the bones wrapped around its handle. The only thing that didn’t return were the bodies that had been splattered everywhere, but Anastacia considered that an improvement.
Anastacia spun the sword in the air to get her bearings on it again while she and Leggy prepared to kill Eminence as many times as was needed to finally get rid of him. “So are we doing this, for real this time?” She asked and pointed the sword at the sage’s face.
Suddenly the world darkened and the malevolent presence of Eminence strengthened tenfold. The relatively frail frame of The Great Sage appeared immensely more threatening as everything around him began distorting and corrupting from the violet miasma that began flooding from under the shiny skull-mask.
“Gazing down into the unstoppable, all-consuming void that will one day be the end to all there is does not come without its consequences. It infects your mind with despair that flays what hope you once saw in the world and drowns your feelings with apathy. It teaches you fear you wouldn’t believe could exist and shows there are no happy endings to be found. You will fight it for as long as your body and mind allows, but both of those will crumble before the eternal nothingness, and all there will be left is a formless, hollowed out husk of what you once were. That is what we found on our quest for power and naught but five of us returned. For what felt like an eternity, we sought ways to reform out beings from the shredded remains, and all that gained us were hideously malformed incarnations of once overly proud necromancers. Our bodies, minds and powers permanently atrophied and corrupted into unspeakable horrors. Driven mad and despaired by what we had learned. Repulsive to a point where time itself refuses to claim us.
“Yet, in it we found purpose. An unfaltering will to delay what we had found to be inevitable, willingness to do anything to add a single grain of sand into the hourglass. So no, we do not do this from the goodness of our hearts, we do it because we are… afraid and because in the end… nothing else matters.” His distorted voice echoed in the hall as if spoken by someone much mightier than the masked being. “We seek those with sufficient power to aid us with what is to come and to tip the scales to our favor, because our mission will not be viewed kindly, but we will not allow ourselves to be stopped. To that end, I have already laid eyes upon the end of my story – it only comes in a single shade: Red. Your pale hands have yet to be tainted by the blood of the thousands, your shroud remains uncolored by viscera, you are not one of the red – and you are not able to end my story.”
From the darkness behind Eminence, Anastacia could see a large form approaching. Still hidden in the shadows, she could only barely make out its more noticeable features. Standing somewhat hunched but still at least twice as tall as the sage, the being was only loosely human-like. Two pairs of massive wings opened themselves, spanning about ten meters from tip to tip, the quicksilvery sheen of armor reflected what little light it could and horns that resembled mangled birch trees grown on some tundra, were only barely visible. From above the sage’s head, three eyes stared intensely at the necromancer, and with them came the feeling of corruption she had expected. Darker than the shadows, they were clearly visible as they seemed to suck all light away from their surroundings.
Anastacia could feel her anger subsiding as all color faded from the world while her feelings numbed and decayed, the sword she held aloft fell on the ground as she no longer could usher forth the will to command the bones. She still knew that she needed to kill Eminence, but not knowing how made it feel pointless, like there was no chance of succeeding so there was no reason to even try. The simulacra of the fortress were already broken beyond repair, so there was no saving them and suddenly vengeance seemed pointless. While she may have been somewhat resistant to the lingering effects of the corruption, being stared down by its source proved to be a very different matter.
“Do you now see the immature foolishness of your rebellion?” Eminence spoke in his real voice, unpleasant and almost painful to hear. As he placed one of his elongated, lanky arms on the less corrupted version of himself, the mock sage faded into the purple miasma. “But perhaps, this was always meant to be the end of your story, and I never stood a chance of saving you.”
Though even Leggy could now feel the effects of Eminence’s powers, she wasn’t being focused on as intensely. She swiftly moved past the necromancer and firmly planted her feet on the floor between her and Eminence, pointing her dagger directly at The Great Sage and challenging him. As the ruinous gaze moved released Anastacia from its grip and aimed itself at Leggy, the lights in her eyes started to flicker and ever so slightly lose their bluish hue for a violet one. Unwilling to falter while the necromancer recuperated, she threw the dagger with her quickly draining powers and let out a horrifying mechanical screech as the parts inside her no longer properly obeyed her and grated against each other during the quick movement.
While the dagger was easily whacked away by Eminence and only caused him to flinch slightly, something else distracted him before he could finish spreading the corruption to Leggy; the machine fortress answered to the screech with a long and deafening groan from somewhere below. The patterns of light on the floor grew blindingly bright to combat the darkness, and slowly, Erratic Judgement rotated above the stone pedestal.
Anastacia stared at the giant orb and somehow felt that it was staring back at her, inspecting what it saw and drawing its conclusions.
Suddenly, a small tile on the floor right in front of her started to rotate and slide to the side. From under it rose a stone obelisk, like the ones outside the fortress but maybe a fifth of their size. It spun in its place for a moment before starting to emit a high-pitched noise that slowly charged up to a bright flash of light.