[High King Meridian] Human, Male, High King Location: The Human Capital, Palace
Meridian stands up high on the balcony of the castle, looking down over the city below that has fallen dark. Yet, lights glow within its confines. Streaks of orange press through the total blackness, forming crooked lines that ebb and flow in all directions, looking much like the roots of a tree from above — or the veins in a body.
As people move, the clusters of lights travel with them, giving credence to the constant flow of life. People move, coming in and out of the world just like the tide against the ocean. Day in, day out, they move from place to place, age to age, and face to face until they eventually crash against the rocks and come to a total standstill. However, that which remains of them will sink down, coming apart in the black of the ocean, until it one day returns again as new life.
Fish eat a carcass, and from that, more fish emerge. The old fish die, and the new fish come. The tide comes, the tide goes. It’s all, everything in life, it’s all a back and forth. Nothing ever stands still. Even the mighty mountains of the world, over the spans of aeons, rise and fall with the elements.
— Something out of place catches his eye. A blue orb shines in the sky, disrupting the sea of endless orange.
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[Azimuth] Orc, Female, True Hero Location: The Human Capital, Streets
Out in the darkness of the total night, Azimuth is with the people who need her most at this time. It is quiet, but they still fear the darkness, as they are right to do. She’s here to show them in person that they are safe and that they may go forward with their lives without hesitation.
“Go on, scoot,” says Azimuth, nudging a child away who had just gotten a small handout in secret from her. The orc nods her head to the side, and the girl runs, secretly clutching the coin in her palms as she runs off. The woman gets back up, having lost her attendants in the crowd for now. But it’ll only take a second until they catch up. They’re real professionals.
“Miss Azimuth!” calls a voice, trying to break through the crowd of onlookers. She winces, jumping to her feet, and then quickly escaping, before she can be found.
Azimuth moves through a tide of lantern light, pressing through the crowd, until suddenly the crowd comes to a stop. The lifeblood of the city, its foot traffic, simply comes to a standstill as everyone begins to lift their gazes collectively, all at once, and she does the same.
Thousands of eyes wander towards the darkness of night, which was before only dimly aglow with star and moonlight, but now, a third source of radiance comes to illuminate the city. There, floating high above them all, is an arcing ball of crackling energy — like lightning, but cold and blue. Wild energies erupt from it in all directions, as if it were a will o’ the wisp unable to control its shape and form.
She recognizes that color.
Azimuth places a hand on her heart, recognizing the pure heat of the energy as being one and the same as that of the god’s wrath. It is them, making themselves known.
The orb lowers itself down, floating towards her, the crowd parting in fear as she stands there, her face illuminating with the deep hue from the blue aura that she is immersed in.
— It begins to float away, down the street.
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[Kai] Artificial Intelligence Unit, No Gender, Dungeon-Core Location: G:\GenAI_Core_Primary
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Kai watches the man through the camera feed, lugging a ripped out, massive metal container over his shoulder into the bay. Broken cables and wires hang out everywhere from its back ends. A missile from the nuclear arsenal hangs draped over the other.
[Remark]
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- This is an extremely poor idea.
Orbital Gunner Gottlieb’s chance of survival is not even worth calculating, given that it is infinitesimally small.
He turns his head, looking at it. “Then I suggest you figure something out, Kai,” replies the idiot human.
[Response]
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- Visual signaling has already been initiated via simulated ball lighting, produced through a consistently timed electro-static load transferred to an aerial vector.
Qualified personnel are being led to the source of the disruption in the city as we speak.
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[Azimuth] Orc, Female, True Hero Location: The Human Capital, Streets
Azimuth runs after the whisper of the avatar of God, chasing the light through the night, pushing through crowds and streams of people as she hurries. The gods never appear for no reason; there’s always something they’re trying to accomplish. She is a tool for them to leverage; this much is clear to her, and she accepts the role gladly.
The orb flies down another road, and she turns toward it, looking down the way.
There’s nothing there.
The light is gone.
Confused, she looks around herself, stepping into the part of the city that is always quiet but unusually so tonight.
Something catches her eye on the ground. Azimuth looks down, staring at a coin on the stones. The orc bends down, picking it up and looking at the glinting metal in the moonlight, recognizing it by its markings and smudges as the same exact coin she had just given the girl a few minutes ago.
But she is nowhere to be seen.
Azimuth rises back up to her feet, looking around the area with narrowed eyes as she steps forward, aware that something is clearly wrong here as the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
The air above her crackles.
She looks as a new orb forms, marking something to show her.
— And then another one.
And then another one.
All around her, all around the empty street and the dark houses, balls of crackling lightning form and hover — shining in to reveal the many heavy shadows, untouched by lantern light. Lightning radiance illuminates the stream of gangly, long bones covered in stretched skin, striding through the darkness.
Hundreds of monsters line the road, having hidden in its shadows. Their eyes and teeth shine as they cower and hiss at the light above their heads.
Her hand grabs the hilt of her sword as the crowd, which had followed her and the light, screams in terror.
Signaled by the shouts of alarm, the monsters draw together and stream forward, the cover of their incursion having been disrupted.
— Her sword hisses as it slices over the metal of her scabbard, cutting through a long arm and splitting it in half from the fingers to the elbow as it reaches for her, a tide of gray washing past her towards the heart of the city.
Screams fill the night, as bells start to ring.
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[High King Meridian] Human, Male, High King Location: The Human Capital, Palace
Meridian watches as one of the darkened arteries of the city fills with blue light, as bells of alarm begin to signal the presence of a threat. Immediately, the entire city, the entire flow of lantern light, constricts. Thousands of individual orbs quickly begin to flow chaotically, moving back from whence they came or extinguishing as they flow toward places of shelter, such as churches and guard houses.
Soft leather thuds behind him, striking against stones.
“If nothing else, I admire your grit,” remarks the old lighthouse keeper, sighing and shaking his head.
The old man turns around, spells and explosions lighting up the air of the city behind him, as he looks at a familiar elf. The woman rises to her feet, knife held in hand. She is the one and the same person he had been with in the lighthouse during its collapse, as well as having already chased him down once during his arrival in the city.
“I realize this looks bad,” he admits, given that the woman had the specific task of killing him so that he couldn’t be used by the enemy within as a political figurehead, and here he is, having become the king and all. “But even you have to admit the clarity of the situation here,” he says, lifting his hands.
— A fireball careens through the night, exploding high in the air and raining down flames toward the city below.
“Every time you try this, the gods intervene,” he says, his back pressing against the balcony. “It’s clear that I’m meant to be here.”
She readies her knife. “If they wanted me to stop, I’d be dead by now,” says the elf, the wind blowing the short, knife-cut hair on her head past her face.
The door to the castle room behind them shatters, breaking apart and sending wood splinters flying everywhere as a large, filthy monstrosity with lanky limbs and long, curled teeth breaks through the barrier, sniffing the air and looking towards them, yellow spittle dripping down its mouth. The smell of filth fills the air.
The hobgoblin screeches, leaping over the furniture and through the air towards them with its claws, ripping the room apart.
— The assassin ducks down under the monster as it leaps through the door, falling to her back and holding the knife up into the air, cutting straight through its guts that glide over her arms.
The hobgoblin falls down, losing its momentum between them, landing at his feet.
Meridian looks at the assassin, holding her arms at her sides, covered from head to toe in entrails.
“See?” he asks, shrugging. “Told you,” remarks the old man, turning his back to her and looking out over his city.