In the intervening two notches between this rung and the next, Baethen took to hunting down every last harpy he could get his claws on.
This ended up being rather literal as they’d begun to run from him on sight and he’d had to improvise and capture them like headless chickens. Perhaps it was the disparity of their metaphysical weight, his arcanums heavy against their subtler senses.
He’d yet to get himself a [Spiritsight] card like [Lesser-Daemonic-Third-Eye] which could interpret gnostic-glyphs and in so doing give a rough estimate of an entity’s star-parity, or [Partial-Metempsychosis] which could take measure of souls as if vapour pouring from the living or as semi-ambulatory wisps for the dead. Numbered-Gods, Baethen would accept even a [Clouded-Arcane-Gaze] so he could at least read superficial aspects of the spirit.
Maybe it was just the nature of his trade or maybe it spoke of something deeper seated within Baethen, but he’d had the wherewithal to think through all of this while he wrung the neck of a harpy with his bare hands. Bone cracked, joints and cartilage ripping apart as the life left the god-beast’s beady-black eyes.
This was the thirtieth angel he’d slain since the battle with Ruination; he’d given back his rations to Escoriot a long time ago as he’d begun to subsist entirely on monstrous fowl. The blood, once salted and spiced, made for a decent enough tea if a bit metallic.
You lose disgust right quick when you’ve either thirst to slake or hunger to sate.
Especially so when the hunger was not merely physical.
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{Player}s ({Arcanum}: {Intrinsic}) {Read} as follows:
[Arcana-of-Blood] ★★ [Minor] III - {Resonant} II - {Dissonant} I ➤ [Minor] IV - {Resonant} II - {Dissonant} I
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[Arcana-of-Blood] ★★
➤[Minor] IV - [Resonant] II - [Dissonant] I - [Intrinsic]
Origin Φ: [Allows {Player} to {Manifest} a {Font-of-Blood} in the {Form} of {Droplets}, {Globules}, or {Minor-Pools} {Thrice} per {Hand} so long as there is a {Bleeding-Wound} in {Touch} with a {Font-of-Air} in a {Locus} around the {Player}.]
➤ [As the first contra, allows {Player} to {Imbue} {Metallic-Fonts} into {Corporeal-Fonts} so long as they are already {Imbued} with a {Metallic-Font} {Thrice} per {Hand}.]
➤ [As the second and final contra, allows {Player} to {Manifest} a {Font-of-Blood} so long as a {Locus} is {Resplendent} with the {Arcana-of-Death} {Thrice} per {Hand}.]
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His dominion over the arcana of blood had been at [Minor] II after the fight with Ruination. It had jumped two whole magnitudes since then after Baethen changed his diet from solids to semi-liquid stews of divine origin.
Baethen didn’t need to have a bleeding wound himself to manifest new fonts through the arcanum but rather just have any near him. Gashes afflicted on his enemies counted; strangely this did not take blood from a foe but rather was just a limitation wholesale—a product of dissonance, of antithetical dominions clashing with each other.
His resonance prefix did not change as he’d not gained any new arcanums.
Baethen took the harpy by its long, slender and limp neck and sat by a gallowswood’s stump, resting his back for a bit. He’d learned this next trick after a morbid afternoon of desecrating the carcass of an angel—the phrasing made it sound worse than it was though he imagined that even in this context it was still some variety of blasphemy.
The godspawn was beginning to sublimate, its pseudo-flesh evaporating back into pure spirit; a few more licks of the clock without interaction and it would return fully to the ether. Baethen breathed-in, pulling at the threads that held the angel together to unravel, beckoning its wayward Babylonic-script to join his.
Streamers of copper-red, letter-etched soulstuff were sucked into Baethen’s waiting maw. He couldn’t breathe through his nose lest he drown in godling blood. He had to pull and then stop in a steady rhythm to consume the godspawn’s spirit and the glyphes contained within. Each logogram cascaded into his soul like a cog falling into its slot, clicking into place where it belonged.
The harpy wasn’t sapient, only sentient, so there wasn’t a soul construct proper within to attach to his own and possess him so Baethen did not fret. Much. All power came at a cost, afterall.
Harvesting glyphs and arcana this way was faster than having to cook it though Baethen reckoned he lost efficiency. An actual alchemist would do better than him but there was no one with such a mastery over flesh-lore within twenty leagues of him, much less the current world.
Each rung of an Evergaol was a universe unto itself, expanding infinitely so long as someone was there to witness it. Anything not observed reverted back into formlessness which could then be fashioned into form. When you looked at something in the corner of your eyes, it appeared hazy, as if under a veil of smoke, ebbing placidly as if beneath stillwater.
It wasn’t real. Nothing here was. Just a figment of the imagination of a god long since dead, infected with the living thoughts of another divinity that ushered in sacrifice and bloodshed.
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No matter how many more harpies Baethen ended up swallowing into the seemingly endless gullet of his soul, he did not gain another magnitude to his minor arcanum of blood. He felt as if it was on the cusp of advancing, like a woodpile all neat and tidy and with tinder but lacking a catchspark or some other artefice with which to make a fire proper.
He’d not advanced his other arcanums at all, seeing as the most common resonant arcana to be had with the monsters of this rung was that of blood. The arcana of ichor was too rarefied to be had with lesser godspawn of this sort and the arcana of violence, war, and slaughter did not have a place within Baethen’s soul. His sheer antipathy towards that particular branch of the arcana made it unlikely to gestate within his Tower-of-Babel.
The arcana of betrayal and worms had been outliers due to the outside influence of having cards that provided said dominions wholesale—rather than trying to sow oats within the fallows of a field, that was like transplanting a sapling which would take root far easier in comparison to a sleeping seed.
Thus, seeing that he’d not gain much if any more glyphs from the monsters, Baethen stopped harvesting them and just went out on the warpath. The hypocrisy of despising the arcana of violence and indulging in it so deeply was lost on him as scales-of-scoria clad him in a second skin impervious to everything this rung had to offer.
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The single word that best described him then was ‘callous’ for he wore the dead remnants of himself as armour and could feel nought—no pain, no regret, no second thoughts, no hesitation as to whether what he was about to do was right or wrong or wise or foolish.
To start out confrontations with the harpy-angels of Yurnmagog, Baethen played [Cinderspark-Spit] and [Strike-While-the-Iron-is-Hot] with a smattering of others—this card-chain was an old but dear one he’d made when still under the auspices of the Azure Forest.
Rain-of-fire decimated the angels that descended upon him, a tenth of their number falling to the barren earth kicking and screaming, molten chunks of metal sticking to their wings and burning with a supernatural fire they could not put out. Baethen’s flames, through the influence of half-dozen or so arcanums, did not burn out, instead feeding on whatever they touched as if alive. He felt his dominion clash with theirs and supersede them in the fight for supremacy, for primacy.
When the second wave swooped down upon him, Baethen screamed and swung his sword-spear, having ignited it before the battle had begun. He drew upon his once-per-Hand arcanum of worms, transforming the amber fires that cowled him, arms and armour and all.
Sickly, sulphur and umber flames devoured those that birthed them from the inside out like teratomas, howling into being at the mere thought of violence. Their cores were the colour of brimstone and they stank of burning flesh even before coming into contact with such, emitting a choking miasma in place of smoke and with black tongues that gibbered in a strange language.
Wormfire did not kill fast. Its power was not one of raw volume but rather unceasing, inexorable, clawing persistence. All that the harpies felt then was an unsettling, tingling sensation like being bathed in vinegar and this spelled their inevitable doom.
Swinging in a slow and steady tempo, Baethen used the choking smog produced by the wormfire to play the smoke-burst chain, pushing away his foes when they congregated too much for him to handle. When his sword-spear could not cut through the swathes of airborne angels, he played a smoke-burst, seeding it with heat through [Cycle-of-the-Crucible]—within the substrate of the vapour was sublimates of various lesser metals such as lead and mercury and iron and tin, allowing his arcana to take root within.
Talons and wings choked out the bleeding, sulphurous skies; everywhere Baethen could and couldn’t see was now occupied by harpies. He’d not run when he should’ve, having stayed in place for too long. Once reaching this tipping point, the host of angels began to make way for their matriarchs, the wingless hags indolent upon their palanquins of vermillion and bronze.
“[Weaken.]”
“[Stumble.]”
“[Die.]”
“[Fear.]”
“[Blindness.]”
“[Deafness.]”
The curses built upon one another, carving brands upon Baethen’s soul, excoriating the skin of his being and flaying him from the inside-out. The world caved-in, vertigo making it so that Baethen was impossibly small as an ant; and tall as a giant; and swaying upon the peak of the greatest mountain from which he could see the entire face of Eot; and at the bottom of the bottomless pit where Alunariat’s angels-of-darkness, the Vesper, dwelled and made communion with the fathomless all-nothing which bore the Numbers.
Among the rootwork lattice of curse-brands, one stood out, deeper carved for it originated from within and not from without.
The {Brand-of-Wrath} burned, a blackness about it which knew no decency and no mercy and no care but for unbridled destruction and desolation. It howled and broke through the chains that bound him in deafness and blindness and fear and death and weakness and nervelessness.
Baethen opened twin portals into the pits of Gehenna, his pupils that of a serpent and his ire the venom of an asp. His irises were burning brimstone and his sclera coagulated tar. Beneath that malign, primaeval gaze, those he held in thrall cowered for the arcana of the worm was one of bone—nay—marrow-deep terror.
“[Lo and behold, O wandering-stars-of-heaven: fall, fall, fall.]”
The spell clawed out with one-thousand black fingers of sulphur-flame, cursing all which he saw. A hundred among the thousands fell as he commanded in the Language but still many more than him remained.
He wanted nothing more than to indulge in the violence, to let that black rage take hold and rip them apart limb from limb and rend their beating hearts out from the chests and tear asunder their frail, little wings. So he did just that, wading into the sea of the damned before him, striking out with his sword-spear and clawing with his talons when they got close enough to catch until he couldn’t feel his arms any longer. There was no pain under the earthen crags of scoria that had become his hide, his blood wrought of fire and his marrow a festering Helmouth.
With so many dead and dying upon the fallows of the battlefield, he did what came naturally to him and called upon the arcana of blood so that he might make life from the effulgence of death around him. A sphere of scintillating blood appeared before him, reeking of the iron-copper tang of mass-slaughter.
That red newborn he sacrificed upon the dread altar of the Nameless Arcana, breathing out a blanket of foul miasma. His throat distended as it poured out from his maw, a diluvium that would see all before him wiped clean from the face of the earth.
A holocaust not to the Gods but to the Devil. Sulphurous fires raged and then turned to ash and charred gristled, hoarse cawing coming from all around in a cacophony of pure despair and grief and pain.
A moment, an eternity, later—no more than a blink of the clock and longer than ten thousand millennia—and Baethen witnessed the devastation which he’d wrought. He came to, remembering his name for, in the throes of violence, he’d forgotten himself.
He reeked, covered in greasy and rotting blood, morsels of spirit-flesh hanging in tatters about his form as it sublimated into miasma and returned to the bosom of the World-Shadow. Baethen was utterly disgusted but he did not possess the wherewithal to admit to even himself that it had nothing to do with the apparent filth.
It, unlike what was to come, would disappear soon.
Any angel that survived beated back a desperate retreat, not a single one looking back as they flapped their wings with wild abandon. Baethen did not understand the harpies’ language of screeches and caws but he could glean the gibbering terror which soaked each sound.
With a stirring in his soul, he looked within to see that a dread-seed had not only taken root but had sprouted, stem and leaf and all. A tree of death which enshrouded the valley of his consciousness in the shadow of ruin.
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{Player}s ({Arcanum}: {Intrinsic}) {Read} as follows:
[Arcana-of-Death] ★★ [Minor] I - {Resonant} II - {Dissonant} II ➤ [Minor] III - {Resonant} III - {Dissonant} III
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[Arcana-of-Death] ★★
➤[Minor] III - [Resonant] III - [Dissonant] III - [Intrinsic]
Origin Φ: [Allows {Player} to {Manifest} a {Font-of-Miasma} in the {Form} of {Curlicues} {Thrice} per {Hand} so long as the {Player} has {Reaped} a {Life} in the current {Hand}.]
➤ [As the first contra, allows {Player} to {Manifest} a {Font-of-Miasma} in the {Form} of {Exhaled-Vapour} by {Expending} their {Breath-of-Lung} and {Blood-of-Vein} {Thrice} per {Hand}.]
➤ [As the second and final contra, allows {Player} to {Manifest} a {Font-of-Ghostlight} in the {Form} of {Wisps} by {Expending} their {Breath-of-Lung} and {Forfeiting} their {Cast-Shadows} {Thrice} per {Hand}.]
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There was a deep unsettling within his gut as if he was about to fall into a pit. And there was an excitement within his heart, the power that he held something terrible to behold.
He could never understand why someone would accept forbidden arcana within their soul; it seemed such a stupid thing to do. Now, he knew—this was why.
When the scales-of-scoria receded from him, leaving him naked and vulnerable, there was not a single scratch on him. He’d been bruised to the Twelfth-Hel and back but his skin hadn’t even been broken.
But there was no sating that hunger, that desire for more. Baethen, even after gaining a deeper grasp into the arcana of death itself was left wanting. It drove him near crazy enough to continue his death-march but he stopped himself before he went on to kill every last living thing within this rung.
Though restless, he needed rest.
This, at least, he was not a fool to scorn.