Angels did not descend upon them any longer, the eerie silence and lack of resistance like a beast’s waiting maw around them, waiting to snap shut once they delved far enough into its gullet.
They advanced through the treacherous terrain, careful not to twist their ankles. Sulphur clouds churned above, ever acrid in their nostrils with the stench of rotten eggs, burnt hair and lightning. Sulphur, as an element, was more closely associated with the Fifteenth God rather than Twelfth though that mattered little in the grand scheme of things. The Major Arcana bled into one another as evidenced by Their numbers. From Justice came the Gallows, followed by Death which gave birth to Temperance afore giving way to Fear—Gods Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, respectively.
No matter how far the cadre treaded ground, they seemed to not move at all. The ashen trees were indiscernible from each other and there was neither sun nor northern Lodestar by which to follow or chart. Instead, they put their lives in the hands of the compass-clock and thus Captain Haviershan’s.
Suddenly, as if by serendipity, the scarlet leaves receded, the cadre happening upon the ruins of some great temple. The ziggurat was built in the same style as the altars-of-refuge, of black-alabaster and Byzantium brass and purest, unmarred marble. Broken statuettes dedicated to forgotten godlings littered the barren earth like trash, the idols but the barest echoes of past grandeur.
Decadence was so named for this was the fate of all worldly riches: ruination.
The Parthenon of Reordranhall was erected in a decidedly different manner than this nameless temple. Rather than columns, the ziggurat was wrought of great blocks of seamless marble. The only evidence for their rivening was dirt that brought it in sharp relief.
Braziers and tripods of Byzantium and damascene were untouched by the ravages of tide and time, their divine metals protecting them from rust and wend both; even a single of those treasures could see Baethen through this life and the next in coin. Mirror-slates of black alabaster lay indolent upon the unswept dust, unbroken and clean where all else was, most decidedly, not.
As they scouted the periphery of the ziggurat, here and there, Baethen happened upon relics of rotten-copper. Little amulets in the shape of faceless people, rings that should have shone like bronze were instead scaled in verdigris, hiltless blades and lonesome spear-heads about the place.
The divinity of the fallen temple warded but the edifice itself, not what lay outside it. There had been a battle here, so bygone that not even the combatant’s bones were left, pulverised into dust by Father-Time’s slow-but-unyielding hand and scattered by Stribog’s breath to the four winds.
Through their scouring of the place, the group found a hand-mirror of black alabaster for each of them and a single sword of damascene-steel, its pattern-weld appearing as if flowing water rendered in argent. Damascene was a divine substance grown from the spilt tears of the Weeping-God-of-All-Sorrows or, some say, from the blood shed by the Broken-God-of-Babylon. Perhaps it was both with Morophesh mourning over the dead body of Her brother, grief and ichor mixing to become one.
It did not rust and could not be broken nor shorn and would keep its edge until the Game after the next—all such artefacts were relics of the second Game, afterall, and showed no flaw. The only way to manipulate the metal, to make it soft enough to mould or pour, was by quenching it in a bath of tears under three full moons. This was usually done by the Church-of-Sorrow, for a tiny fee, of course. Once the ritual was complete, sorrow-steel did not require heat and was malleable by human strength alone so long as it was cold. Damascene scorned flame, being unmeltable no matter the heat.
“Baethen, keep it with you for now. You’re best suited for it with your cards; we’ll just take it off the top of your cut at the end.”
He nodded to the Cap’n, accepting the sword of living silver, and then they resumed their search in silence. The weapon was in the form of a Byzantine gladius, its argent as lustrous as the day it was forged a thousand-thousand-thousand turns ago. The hilt was a solid cast, the blade and haft one single, seamless whole.
Baethen didn’t know how to wield a shortsword and was a novice to forms and the like, so he simply kept it belted around his hip as a side arm. He could weld it to his spear-sword later on. As for the black tablet, he bound its loop with a chain and affixed it to his side as well. He did not worry about it being nicked in the heat of battle as godstone was invulnerable to harm of any kind.
Emperor Solomon of the bygone Byzantium empire was said to have worn a suit of godstone during campaign against the Woedenites, beating them back from the Kataban continent into the Sundered-Isles of the Dreadsea. Whether there was truth to such tales, only the Numbers knew.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
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Stunds later, the ensemble had scoured the outside of the ziggurat and most of its vestibules and so only the inner chambers were yet to be penetrated; they’d left no stone left unturned. With all the easy portions scouted and accounted for, they retreated to a near-intact pavilion where they might rest before tackling the Guardian.
The compass-clock stopped making sense ever since they’d happened upon the ruins, pointing this way and that, undecided, as if trapped between two Lodestars.
In the calm before the storm, Baethen took to welding the blade of sorrow-steel to his spear. He’d had to mould the metal around it to secure the gladius to his ivory-cored haft. Without a partisan’s head, the weapon was now a more narrow implement, no longer a spear-sword but rather just a spear.
Baethen didn’t worry much, if at all, about getting used to a new weapon before the fight as he wasn’t much of a swordsman in the traditional sense. He didn’t know his cuts from one another and that suited him just fine as his parries came from spellcraft rather than martial form. Clad as he was in a second skin of living steel, he didn’t need to fear hits like the others. Force was distributed evenly throughout his body due to [Flawed-Steelheart] transmuting his flesh and blood into amorphous metal; when he was struck, it sounded like a bell being rung.
They ventured forth once Baethen finished welding the sorrow-steel blade to his spear.
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The interior of the ziggurat was a lesson in harsh transitions. Where the outside was white with accents of bronze and hammered copper, the interior was wine-dark with accents of porphyric amaranth. The colour was so rich that it left Baethen’s temples aching, as if his mortal mind wasn’t meant to look upon it.
Here, columns of igneous rock abounded, circled in silver and tin, each one so thick that the group could not wrap their arms around it. And they’d tried. The columns were inset with carvings of twelve-handed and six-winged spirits, of the dæmons of Babylon before they were corrupted by the forces of Gehenna.
Baethen saw the resemblance of the psychopomps of Chinvat in them, their large wings and serpentine necks lending them an air of regal primality. An aspect under Nagalfaram, Chinvat was the current arcana to hold the mantle of God-of-Dreams after Babylon’s murder. The difference between the dæmons and the psychopomps lay in their heads: these spirits had the countenance of wolves affixed upon their necks, their eyes closed and mouths open to bear what lay within, fangs tusk-like and many within their gums, jutting out from snarling lips.
There, at the centre of each gaping maw, lay a single, seven-ringed-eye each. Heptagrams circled their heads like halos and their hands formed countless signs of benediction.
Column by column they walked past until, at last, the cadre came upon the inner chamber proper. Behind a veil of bruised scarlet lay the shadow of a beast of knowledge made flesh. It resolved into the image of a dæmon after pulling back the curtain, its single, open gullet-eye staring down at them, baleful and suffocating and enrapturing.
It had the body of a wolf with hind legs to match and the arms of three men, three arms for each side and two hands for each arm. The dæmon, a sphynx, sat on its haunches upon pillows of sendal; a tail, long and sinuous, beating back and forth in anticipation like a cat having come upon a fallen nest of newborn birds—oh so very vulnerable. The tail ended in what could only be described as a deformed flail’s head. It rattled, oh how it rattled, a susurrus that resounded in your chest, shaking your heart into the canter of a panicked horse attempting to trample a serpent but failing miserably to do so.
The dæmon opened its two wings—two, terrible red wings—wide in exaltation and addressed them like a judge addresses the masses before the gallows.
“[We are known as Orexis the Desire-that-Brings-but-Despair-and-Ruination. Thou may call us Ruination for that is what We are within this dread place and what We shall engender upon thee. Come, mortals, and test the mettle of thine souls against the barest trace of a dead god.]”
Its voice was divine mandate, setting their legs to marching forth without their conscious assent. Its voice was legion, a thousand-fold chorus singing in discordant union; young, old, infirm, hale, man, woman, child, fearful, sure-as-stone, shaking, imperial, many—one.
The dæmon spoke reality into being, bearing down its will upon the fabric of existence such that it bent to conform to its preconceived shape rather than the other way around. The soul of Man was moulded from his flesh, from his experiences in the world physical. But the soul of a dæmon was moulded by itself and imposed upon the world its form spiritual. Imagination made manifest, given gross being from the consummate nothingness of the ether through sheer weight of delusion.
It believed itself to be and so it was.
The cadre shook themselves from their fugues of terror as the dæmon’s shadow bore down upon them and assembled once again into a formation with Baethen at the front. He felt his flesh pale and shiver before the dæmon, but his soul held firm, resolute—waves against the rocks.
The only breach within the bulwark of his being was the {Brand-of-Wrath}, an open ulcer into the inner sanctum of its tower. A snaking tendril of the dæmon’s presence slithered within, climbing and climbing further and further still, down to that place that not even Baethen knew of. The sphynx recoiled at what there lay like a reflection becoming cognizant of the image it had been fashioned from.
A faceless god stared back, and the dæmon came to know the terror known only to men that have swam waters thought shallow and seen the gargantuan eye of a leviathan come open in the unbeknownst fathoms.
Through that tendril of thought between them, the god spoke a single Word-of-Power.
“[Die.]”