Baethen used his sword-spear much as a stave, putting his weight on it to navigate the treacherous terrain—the land was as much a foe as the devils and angels that they’d soon encounter. The ground was pockmarked as if with the burrows; a disease which afflicted its victims with deep, gaping spiralform sores that incubated bloodflies.
There was a reason [Bloodfly-Husk] was so cheap for a panacea-card.
The cadre’s formation put Baethen at the front with Haviershan; Escoriot and Lacariah at the mid right and left, respectively; Tratvgar at the middle with Narancan at their backs, guarding against any that might waylay them.
Rather than festering darkness, it was the blinding light that forewarned them of coming danger. There, beyond the clouds, were blazing eyes of fire. Death descended on the red wings of vultures, the harpy angels of Yurnmagog the Hanged-God seeking to slake their thirst on the cadre’s blood.
“Ignore the tits, lads and laddies—these ones aren’t here for a lay.” And then Haviershan was pulling out a clockwork boltcaster from its holster; a Nezarri weapon, the boltcaster was a thing of mechanical beauty and it sang like thunder. For every clap, a harpy fell to the earth, limbless and limp, grotesque falling stars.
Baethen threw a pile of lead chips into the air and, with his lips forming a tight funnel, blew out a plume of white flame and then struck it with his sceptre. Quicksilver and brimstone rained upon the swooping angels, their feathers sizzling before the onslaught as metal weighed them down.
Tratvgar added his own missiles to the salvo, the rest of the cadre ready to defend their ranged attackers. Narancan, Lacariah, and Escoriot were pure melee fighters with decks that provided them with little options in regards to distance.
A harpy, her blood-slick flesh bare and her talons wicked, stole upon Narancan unawares—there were simply too many of them and more coming. The terrain, though difficult footing, was a bulwark against coordinated swoops as the red boughs proved shield enough.
“Escoriot, shields up.” The Cap’n commanded. “We fight a retreat there—more cover.”
The shield-warden brandished his sigil-etched sceptre and conjured a dome of outward pressure around the cadre. The arcana of protection formless nothing into a ward that beggared the toughest steel; it would last for as long as Escoriot held his breath.
Quickly, the harpies began to pile onto the dome through sheer instinct, clawing at it with desperation that only cornered animals could invoke. Unfortunately, Escoriot’s card-set had the [Heavy-is-the-Head] drawback, transferring the weight of their foes upon his temples.
A quarter of the way towards the thicker cover, Escoriot cried out, unable to handle the combined mass of so many foes. By then, Baethen had set up the shield-disk card-chain, spinning around his blood-soaked sword-spear into a great wheel. It proved near enough to see them to the better terrain, the burning slag and red-hot amalgam warding off the worst of the harpies like a flame before the wolves.
Underneath the second skin of metal, Baethen was clad in wormscale from his fingertips to his elbow, augmenting his grasp over the arcana of fire. He felt the {Brand-of-Wrath} stamp itself upon his mind’s eye like its namesake, a burning wound on his soul, stoking all that made Baethen a savage. He almost gave in to the bloodlust, almost let go of the shield, the one and only protection between his comrades and winged death.
He wanted to rip and tear the beasts apart by hand, to exult in sheer dominance and unbridled power over the lesser. All men, independent of what was between their legs, had this seed of ruin within them; the desire to destroy for no other reason than to dance amidst the ashes.
And then they were under the thicker canopy and Baethen let go of the [Lesser-Wormhide] meld. The metamorphosis of his left arm would keep until the brand subsided but it would not otherwise worsen like a wound going sour. The letting go of anger was much like coming to after climax—disoriented, vulnerable, and a tad ashamed after the exhilaration had run its course, Baethen saw the fruits of his labour: Escoriot, Tratvgar, and Haviershan yet lived, bleeding from their many nicks and breathing ragged breaths from the uphill sprint but alive all the same.
Under the auspices of the scarlet leaves, the cadre needed not fear an attack from all directions. The canopy functioned much like the many murder-tunnels within a king’s keep, funnelling enemies so that they might become manageable. With the tighter quarters, Narancan and Lacariah showed their worth.
The latter was a swordswoman, wielding a greatsword that was less a blade and more a lump of iron like raw ore sharpened to a dull edge. She swung like it weighed nothing, breaking bones and shattering harpies like an ox within a potter’s shop. Her cards allowed her to manipulate the sword’s momentum regardless of inertia; this way, her long, unwieldy weapon was not so but instead an implement of brutal and exacting precision. Lacariah’s weakness lay in her inability to influence anything not within {Thrall-of-Arm} due to the {The-Sword-Itself} drawback. The moment anything left her hands, it ceased to be considered a {Sword} by her cards; the opposite of Baethen’s suite that allowed more versatility in his choice of arcane focus and how he wielded it.
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Narancan, the former, was a whirling blur of daggers wrought from his own blackened fingertips. They shot out from his hands like a crossbow’s bolts, supplying him with an endless arsenal of purpose-made weapons. A talon-sickle for decapitation, a rapier-like needle for piercing hearts, and a shiv for the bellies of the harpies. Laid within every wound were the sharp-though-brittle fragments of his frostbitten fingers, festering with a gut-gnawing numbness that dazed many an angel.
[Frostbitten-Fingers-of-the-Eiruenn] was a metamorphosis card much like Baethen’s [Lesser-Wormhide] meld, taken from the Eirú’enn; giant-spawn that dwelt atop the coldest mountains—blackspires of the northern isle of Rebare-Dul especially ridden with those trulls. Eirú’enn were known for their wicked, black claws which cursed all those cut by them with creeping cold that did not abate even before open flame.
With practised ease, Baethen spun the disk back into a sword-spear, losing about half of the mercurial font. Now that Escoriot had recovered and could guard them again, Baethen returned to the offensive, the bulwark standing between the horde and the cadre now transformed into a weapon that would see every flying pair of tits felled.
With every strike, he hardened his partisan’s blade with [Cycle-of-the-Crucible] so that it did not turn soft under the heat and kept its edge. Baethen kept a low and balanced stance as he scythed through the cloud of feathers and flesh, reaping blood and sowing death. His ability to elongate his weapon added precious reach such that he needed not leave himself open to reprisal from the harpies’ talons.
Finally, after what seemed an eternity but was rather no more than five licks of the clock, the murder of harpies abated; their will broken before the cadre’s onslaught, the vulture-angels returned to the heavens so that they might live to kill another day.
The slain harpies began to melt into pools of coagulated blood that emanated copper-like vapour, joining with the boiling skies above. Left behind in their place were obols-of-Stribog, God-of-Strength-and-Storms; bronze-tokens formed wherever men worked the forge or cinders otherwise festered. The burning-star Sol was a portent of wildfires and fever and drought.
The wyrd-plague of pyromania oft coincided with sightings of the burning-star, gripping people with an unquenchable allure for flame. Those stricken with pyromania burned from the inside-out with invisible fire, their fingers turning coal-black as if by frostbite and their minds obsessed with arson. In the wake of this wyrd-plague, whole towns were razed to the ground by a fever of insanity, leaving behind but bronze-tokens amidst the charnel-bone ashes to tell tale of what happened. Cards of [Bloodfly-Husk] manifested in the same manner.
The cadre licked their wounds, wrapping themselves in bandages and whatever else they’d brought with. Baethen was the only one to remain unscathed, his living-steel armour and wormscale hide proving an inviolate defence against their foes so far.
“They can’t harm me.” He told the others as he removed his helm to let in some cool air to refresh his heat-stricken head. “Let me take the brunt of them so that they might break against my bulwark.”
Having witnessed his imperviousness, Haviershan agreed and put Baethen at the front of a diamond formation rather than the previous blunted spear-head.
“Hel’s Twelve-wormin’-Bells,” Lacariah cursed as she poked at a downed angel that was rapidly decaying before their eyes. “I’d be jealous of their racks if they didn’t look in desperate need of a good wash.”
Baethen was still reeling from the fight so he could only pat the woman on the back and smile dumbly back at her as he chuckled hoarsely. Tratvgar chortled and Haviershan rumbled something unintelligible. Narancan had a glassy-eyed look about him and just ignored the brazen display of blasphemy.
Escoriot looked at the lot of them as if touched-in-the-head.
An accurate-if-hypocritical assessment as they had all ventured into the waiting maw of Rimare-Tul.
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Each rung of an Evergaol was a fractured shard of a divine realm; this one was inhabited by creatures born of the arcana of the Hanged-God Yurnmagog, warped by the influence of the archdæmon at the tower’s heart so that only the worst aspects of the Twelfth remained.
The World-Shadow was the Twelfth-God-of-Sacrifice-and-Rebirth, one that was equally feared and loved, reviled and adored. The season of spring fell under His purview as did droughts where grazing-beasts lay upon the earth rotting, but bones to be picked clean by the vultures.
The dichotomous nature of this rung was exemplified everywhere Baethen might look.
Twisted, bone-white trees drank any blood spilt upon the arid and desolate ground. Wriggling, vermillion worms spawned from the sacs that hung like strange fruit from their boughs, desiccating into empty husks as they fell to the ravenous earth. The stems of these maggot-ridden fruit were fashioned in the manner of the hangman’s noose, the fruits themselves like bloated faces condemned to death for the sins of the many.
There was no night in the Land-of-the-Gallows, only a sempiternal day of sulphur and drought. Time and again, great shapes wove their way through the dark clouds above like copulating serpents amid the waters. Baethen was reminded of [Gullet-of-the-Sky-Gorger]’s portfolio, that leviathans swam not only in the fathoms but also in the heavens.
The cadre kept their wits about them by use of a compass-clock; a contraption of Nezarrem that allowed one to keep track of time and direction. The only problem was that this realm did not adhere to the same laws as Eot—time flowed faster than it should, stunds of the clock-compass sometimes skipping entirely in but a single lick of subjective or ‘felt’ time.
The only constant was that direction did not change. No matter which way the group ventured, their path inextricably flowed towards the northern Lode, no different than in the Dreadsea. An Evergaol may trick and test its players but it must still guide them towards its heart, towards its eponymous gaol where a great evil lay dormant.
By the fifth stund of endless wandering, the group reached their second altar-of-refuge and made camp, exhausted and battered and dead on their feet.