Shayrel-Ta the last Bloodweaver strode along the cobbled path of the Castle's courtyard. She passed a set of Golems which stood facing inwards towards her, and then another, and then another. The gap between each set was the distance Shayrel covered with one stride, the distance she preferred them to be spaced at.
A gust of wind carried with it a metallic stench. Blood. It was splattered all across the courtyard, the markings left behind from a battle. So much blood was spilled that the grass seemed like islands, each of which was surrounded by an ocean of dark, red liquid.
Shayrel inhaled deeply through her nose. Her stiff posture relaxed. Blood was a safe and familiar smell, one that put her at ease.
Each of the Golems wore and held what they had before Shayrel-Ta grafted them.
She’d consider it an anomaly if anything of theirs remained unstained with blood after the process was complete, but Bloodweaving was rarely without its messes.
With each stride the comforting smell of blood wafted from the Golems, their robes were still stained with blood. Given a day they would dry and unfortunately for the Bloodweaver so too would the smell subside.
She glanced at one of the Golems as she strode past. His robes - like the robes of all the others - belonged to a Magi of the Yerid Tower. This one in particular was an apprentice, hardly even that. He hadn’t had time to learn Bloodweaving before she attacked. The poor thing clutched a small book of some kind. Perhaps it was a journal? She thought. Out of respect she never pried at its contents.
With another stride she recalled the two Golems that now flanked her. They were lovers, and she always found them to be a distraction. Shayrel didn’t feel nearly as sorry for them as she did the boy, but nonetheless out of a sense of respect she ensured they were always close to one another.
Shayrel turned her gaze forward. She felt a wrongness deep in her stomach for what she’d done, but as quickly as that feeling came it was subdued. Like a predator pouncing on its prey, the blood of the god she’d consumed soothed her.
“You were in the way of the old traditions.” She spoke aloud to the motionless courtyard. “This was the only way forward.” Shayrel continued down the path, her eyes shifted upwards, past the stone archways that encompassed the perimeter of the courtyard and to the main shaft of a tower that stood far higher than any on a normal castle would. It was here long before the castle surrounding it was built.
Yerid Tower; the place where all Bloodweavers were trained. Now it was desolate, its students and teachers reduced to nothing more than Golems. Golems that stared lifelessly at her as she walked towards the entrance of the Tower.
With a final few steps she passed through a stone archway and into the sheltered walkway. Her footsteps echoed eerily as the deafening silence at the Magi campus finally set in. Not a single soul remained but hers.
At her approach to the Tower’s main door she stopped. Blood streamed from the eyes of one of the Golems that stood guard. It wore an embroidered blue robe, something reserved for only the most powerful of the Yerid Magi. This was her former teacher; Raetir-Ko. In the time of the old traditions she’d have outranked him by virtue of birth.
A shame that tradition dies, that people so easily forget. She thought, the blood of the god stirring her on.
She rested a hand on his cheek and gently wiped the streaming blood like one would wipe tears. Was he crying? She wondered. That was unlikely, grafted Golems didn’t have the capacity for it. However, the blood continued to stream and soon it coated the back of her hand. Shayrel must have been lax when she grafted the stone to her former teacher. Nothing a little touch up wouldn’t fix.
With a sharp breath she mustered her Voice and spoke an incantation in the Vile-tongue. In an instant the blood came to a stop, then it slithered upwards along the form of the Golem. It moved across the neck and then cheeks before finally the blood entered back in through both of the eyes. Every last drop returned to it and then with another Vile-tongued incantation the stone that was grafted onto Raetir sealed tighter. In-between the sounds of stone against stone Shayrel swore she heard a scream of agony - muffled behind the stone - from the Golem, but that’d be impossible. She took their Voices before they were grafted; they couldn’t scream anymore.
Shayrel looked at her now bloodless hand, she felt a slight remorse for having cleaned all of the blood up. Its smell was weaker in the walkway than in the courtyard and it’d be nonexistent inside the Tower. She took a deep breath, savouring the scent of blood with the safety and comfort it brought and placed her hand on the knob of the door.
With a swift motion Shayrel opened it, revealing a pristine atrium. The cleansing enchantments kept the Tower free of blood despite her having grafted a dozen or so Golems in here. Disappointed, she held her breath and walked inside. For some reason the way the enchantment kept the Tower clean always left Shayrel with a scratchy throat.
I’m going to get rid of that once this is over. She thought to herself as she walked across the mosaiced floor of the atrium and towards the staircase that hugged the right side of the Tower. It was one of two staircases which wrapped around the interior of the Tower from bottom to top.
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As she ascended the stairway her face progressively turned deeper shades of red. Shayrel struggled to suppress the urge to breathe, each step made her lungs burn with a desire for air. With a final step she reached the first floor and unable to hold her breath any longer she inhaled deeply. That was all it took for the scratchy feeling to set in and irritate the back of her throat. She was tempted to take a detour and tear down that enchantment before she completed her objective. But as quickly as that temptation arose the blood of the god bolstered her and suppressed it.
This floor - like all of them - was less a floor and more a ring-like walkway that circled around the Tower. Bannisters topped with arches of stone provided a barrier between the edge of the walkways and the hollow centre of the Tower.
The first floor wasn’t Shayrel’s stop. She’d need to reach the chamber of scrying which was on the sixth floor to be rid of all Magi once and for all. With that in mind she pressed on and trekked upwards floor by floor. To Shayrel it seemed all too easy to wipe out the Magi here. This was the heart of their power, the place which held all their knowledge and secrets. Fortified by blood-enchantments - some of which were over a century old - and was home to the majority of the Magi. She came to doubt that they even had contingencies in place for such a betrayal. Of course her blood - like that of all magi - was keyed into the enchantments of the Tower so as to allow them to recognise her as a friend rather than a foe. She supposed that the defensive enchantments couldn’t interpret the actions or even the intentions of those keyed into them. They only knew to respond with a simple recognition test upon their threshold being passed.
As Shayrel reached the sixth floor a sense of triumph overcame her. She stood atop the Tower - like she was on top of the world - far above all of her former Magi who now stood motionless and ready at her command. They were sentient puppets that had their old flesh flayed away and replaced with grafted stone. The pain of that alone would be unbearable - It’d drive any who experienced it mad - but it doubled as a fuel for the blood-enchantment which bound their minds to Shayrel’s service.
The chamber of scrying awaited her and with hurried steps she crossed the distance of the walkway-like floor and reached the door that sealed the chamber. Unlike the rest of the Tower, this room - along with a handful of others - were protected by an additional enchantment that she wasn’t keyed into. She’d have to force her way in. But she was curious, this was the first enchantment that would act against her. Instead of using her Bloodweaving, Shayrel placed a hand on the knob of the chamber’s door and with an effort of strength she turned it and tried to push open the door. It felt like she tried to open a door that had a wall behind it. The enchantment held with such power that no matter how hard she pushed - even if she pressed her whole body weight against it - the door would not open. She’d thought it unlikely to work, though she did hope that the blood of the god might have allowed her to bypass the enchantment.
Shayrel released the door knob, straightened herself out and stood ready in her Bloodweaving stance. With outstretched hands blood flowed from her fingertips like dark red strings until she had enough to weave. With practised movements the strings of blood were weaved into several sigils within a hexagonal shape. Too much blood and the sigil would have excess shape, too little and not enough to complete it. Bloodweaving is a practised art and requires exact precision. She grabbed onto the spell she’d weaved with both of her hands and gently placed it on the chamber’s door. Shayrel took a sharp breath, readied her Voice and spoke in the Vile-tongue. The spell gleamed a crimson hue and as if it suddenly became heavy, the door creaked beneath it, then it cracked before finally it shattered into a dozen or so large chunks of wood. The enchantment was breached.
An orb, inscribed with countless sigils laid suspended atop a pedestal. Shayrel stepped over the broken pieces of the door. She passed curved shelves that followed the spherical shape of the room, each of which had four equally distanced aisles with gaps between each row of the shelves. On the shelves were stacked scrolls that Shayrel suspected contained political messages to the Tower. That was the only real value of scrying spells as they couldn’t be used unless you had the blood of the target. It was only practical as a tool for relaying information to and from the Magi that were far from the Tower and the Magi that were distant were always the ones on a political mission. Shayrel yawned as she approached the orb, she hated how bored those missions made her whenever she was dictated where to go and how to act and when to smile. She would be penalised when she showed too much power and scolded when she showed too little.
Once again she weaved the strands of her blood into a spell, this one took much longer to weave than the simple one she’d used to breach the enchantment. She grabbed the completed spell and placed it on the surface of the orb.
I’ll show them the true power of bloodweaving. She thought as she drew in a sharp breath and readied her Voice. As she spoke in the Vile-tongue the spell gleamed with a crimson hue before tendrils of blood seeped their way into the orb, each wriggled to touch one of the sigils. She’d not spoken in the Vile-tongue for so long before and with her words came a black miasma that polluted the air around. She felt a lump in her throat that grew with each word she spoke. A part of her wanted to call the spell off, but as quickly as that thought entered her mind it was suppressed as the power in her blood - the power of a god - saw her through the final words she needed to activate the spell. The spell was now ready.
Shayrel reached with her power and all of the Magi whose blood was active in this orb became visible to her. She saw their confusion. They always had specific times they’d be contacted and this was not one of them. Before she gave any of them time to react she touched them with her spell - a spell of possession - and snapped their wrists. Each released a scream of terror and with that their only tool for bloodweaving was taken from them. The orb shook vigorously, as it struggled to channel the power that Shayrel forced through it. She wasn’t sure that her spell would reach over such distances, the furthest she’d seen offensive bloodweaving used was still within eyesight of the caster, but she reached miles beyond sight and it excited her.
Shayrel felt the remaining magi tightly within her grasp and with a thought she lifted each of the magi off of the ground and suspended them in midair. She was glad there was no one left in the tower to see her goofy smile. The power she was demonstrating was unheard of, neigh, impossible until now and she was the one practising it. Shayrel knew she was the one destined to rule this world. With another thought she made the magi’s limbs snap and twist in ways only dark power could achieve. She could hear not only their screams but also the screams of those around them. The news of this would spread quickly, they’ll fear her and quickly submit to the old traditions.
The magi’s flesh blackened at the newly formed joints before it spread like a corruption across their bodies. She reached with her power and pulled at their Voices. Like a child that played with a doll she made their jaws move with unnatural contortions in a mockery of speech. “The priesthood of the Ta is once again ascendant. Submit to the old traditions or die.” The vileness of her power soon overcame the bodies of the magi. Their eyes burst from their skulls as the corruption consumed their entire form.
Shayrel’s hand slipped off of the scrying orb and came to rest by her side. In her final glimpse she saw each of the Magi’s bodies reduced to nothing more than a twisted amalgamation of flesh and bone. She leaned against one of the nearby shelves and let out a breath of exhaustion. It had been a long day and she’d done more with her power than ever before. Left with the deafening silence of the Tower she slumped to the floor and unable to resist the urge to keep her eyes open she drifted to sleep.