The loud screeching from the Roc quickly dies out, replaced by a thick, squidgy thudding sound.

Those sounds too die out after a short while and in returns Brother Tesurc, his black robes covered in fresh blood, as well as his body.

Gripping her hands so as to not shake like a leaf, she greets him as he walks back, an innocent smile apparent on his face.

Seems like I’ve found someone slightly more psycho than my friend…possibly.

As if on cue, her friend walks in, churning her stomach quite violently: His body is still sizzling with acid, or what remains of it. Also he’s dragging himself due to his mashed up legs, giving off quite the horror feel and immediately placing the man as highest on the insane list.

But what really made the vomit blast out of her, was the fact that he was grinning like a kid as he dragged his bare ribs over the floor, lungs sliding along, leaving a long bloody trail.

She recovers after a short while, with the help of a rocky hand holding her steady as she polishes the floor with the Roc egg from this morning.

“Ah Tandra, damn Roc’s stomachs are pretty nasty, all those half-digested worms and well medium sized animals in their guts aren’t the nicest companions to be digested with” He chuckles lightly to her dismay.

“Another child of the flesh…from where did you come?” Tesurc finally notices the man, who’s spent a short while dragging some loose intestines through the doorway. His rumbling voice is slightly alarmed.

“I am a simple priest, Brother” He gestures a bow with his hand.

“Ah a fellow brother, let us get you cleaned up then” All alarm in his voice disappears and he immediately trundles towards him, aiding the man inside.

While he’s being helped, Tandra has a look around: It is a small church with a few stone statues along the edges of the walls. In the center are multiple rows of black stone pews and an altar with a large, misshapen figure in the background.

Tesurc carries most of him to a nearby pew and with a quick inspection of the man, he shakes his head.

“There is little that I can do Brother” He sounds sad, even though the two do not know eachother in the slightest.

“Well what can you do?” He raises the surviving eyebrow.

“I can give you mercy”

“DAMN! Thought I’d be able to learn some healing magic. Anyways, I’ll be fine” The sudden shout makes Tesurc double back, his shock increasing every word the man says.

“Fine?” His eyes roam at less than half body of the man, looking very uncertain.

“Yea, don’t bother yourself about it” He waves Tesurc away. “So could you tell me which god you worship?” He immediately plunges into conversation, not allowing Tesurc to worry.

“It is not a surprise you do not know of Aval, Lord of the Firemountains. Father of Golems and Son of the Earth” 

He turns and bows towards the large stone statue, which looks almost liquid upon closer inspection.

“That is not a name I have heard before, what dimension does he call his own?” Tesurc looks as surprised as a rock face could get when the man mentions dimensions.

“I would not have expected a child of the flesh to know of such things”

The man gives a quick bark of laughter “This brother has had a more ‘demonic’ presence teach him”

Tesurc nods. “Aval is lord of the thirty second dimension, Embaral”

The man nods, taking in the information, while recollecting his intestines in the process.

“So Brother, who taught you of this?” Tesurc asks interested.

“Aethelx” The name sent a stone jaw crashing to the floor, while the man laughed, wheezingly.

Tandra walks over to them, interested by the conversation.

‘Who’s Aethelx?” She asks naively.

Tesurc motions for her to sit, still trying to recover his jaw, which literally fell off in shock.

While he’s restoring his jaw, the man turns towards her, to which she looks away at the gruesome sight of his lungs squeezing through his ribs whenever he breathes.

“Aethelx is some god I met a short while back, he taught me a couple of useful things, like the fact that each god has a dimension”

She was lost at the fact that Aethelx was a god…that the man had met and now was just casually mentioning his name.

 Certainly she expected something strange and got what she was looking for.

“So who rules this dimension?” She asks, head cocked towards the two of them.

Tesurc answers first “Leo, but they do not rule it, rather they are it”

Tandra looks just as confused as when she first asked.

“So the name of this world is Leo?” The man asks to a slightly confused golem, as one should know the name of the world they are living in.

“Yes, but perhaps you children of the flesh call it by another name”

“Nah, never really asked what the world was called, my bad” He chuckles before continuing “So, just before we continue on this religious talk, are we on top of a dormant volcano?”

Tandra gives him a startled look, emphasizing it when Tesurc nods.

“It is a sacred place for all us followers of Aval”

“But it’s dormant, does that not mean Aval has no influence here?”

Tesurc shakes his head “It is dormant because he has influence here”

The man raises an eyebrow, implicitly asking for more.

Tesurc stomps over to the altar, standing preacher-like, looking down at them.

“A few centuries ago, when blood ran rivers among the roots of this mountain, this church stood bathed in the holy lava of our god. For years we watched the volcano, tending to its needs; feeding it, caressing it, telling it stories to help it res-”

“You lost me at feeding the volcano” Tandra butts in, getting three evil eyes at her.

“A volcano is not a dead ball of lava as your gods would let you think. It is a child of Aval, given to us to be raised, and cared for until they mature and die” 

“Not much of a life is it?” She stares back Tesurc, not caring for his slightly annoyed glare.

“They are created to protect, to wipe away all from the land to give others a clean slate to begin on once more. They live for thousands of years and when they die, they do so happily, content they have done their duty protecting the land”

She just nods, mildly understanding.

“As I was saying. We helped the volcano grow under our careful eyes, watching it while staying away from all the bloodshed. We didn’t care about the war below us for it was just that, our duty was to this volcano and it alone.

We failed that duty, we let it go out of control and kill thousands, millions of beings. And so Aval sent this child to sleep and we vowed to protect its sleep forevermore”

Both of them nod solemnly at the vastly ambiguous tale.

“So, a few questions” The man puts three fingers up. “First, you said we?”

Tesurc points towards the statues on the sides of the walls.

“We take turns being the guardian, since without our god’s direct presence, one can feel lost. Allowing us to reconnect with the earth keeps us grounded, sane”

“Nice to know, so second question. How did it go out of control?”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“A woman” He looks bitterly towards the floor.

Tandra makes eye contact with the man and they both look a little confused.

“Day after day, month after month, she jumped into the volcano, swimming inside him. Her laughter and swimming drove it mad. Volcanos are not meant to feel a living thing swim and laugh inside them, that feeling, so foreign to them would certainly drive them mad. One day, it just decided to run away, to try escape the woman before she could dive into him once again”

Tandra raised many an eyebrow, the man went from a heavy snigger to full blown laughter at the tale, sending all four eyes on him.

“HA HA HA HA Ha, ooh, man. Well that answered my third question” He sends a slow round of applause to the sky.

Tandra assumes he’s insane, but Tesurc slams the table, looking quite furious.

“How dare you laugh off millions of deaths?. How dare you. You’re just like that woman, Aegi” He spits gravel on the floor.

“Yeah, kind of comes with the whole being their disciple biz” He shrugs non-commitally, much to the shock of Tesurc.

“You’re a disciple of that madwoman?” His eyes flash psychotically red.

“The only one apparently and seriously why does no one like her?” He looks up “Seriously, are you just unable to make friends?” The man doesn't seem to notice, or doesn't seem to care.

Tesurc growls “I don’t know about other gods, but she is no friend of Aval” He huffs for a few seconds before calming his red eyes to their usual dull black selves. “Please leave this place, as a Brother I will not hurt you, but remain and I will not promise anything” He smiles, innocently, letting what Tandra suspects is the more psychotic side of Tesurc come out.

“A true Brother” The man nods his head respectfully “I will depart at once, since what I am looking for is not here anyways” He stands up, lower body fully functional, much to Tesurc’s shock.

He begins for the doorway, before spinning round with a half-digested finger raised “A quick question before we go, I am looking to find entrance to Kravulkor’s dimension, would you know how to find it?”

“Kravulkor, a name I have not heard in a long time” Tesurc mulls over the name “The only thing I know and can tell you as a fellow brother, is that the doors to one’s dimensions is through their heart”

Bowing his thanks, the man leaves with a slightly confused Tandra behind.

“What did he mean?” She whispers in his ear as they leave the church, before recoiling at the sight of a Roc with its head bashed violently.

“No idea, but then again, I’ve gotten a little bit of good info from here”

“What?” She looks at him confused, for all she knows he’s just gotten a bit of information about Aval and some things that happened here.

“Well” He points over to the far distance, where what looks like a swamp resides “That is where we’re going next”

‘Why?” She narrows her eyes, quite unsure of his insane thought process.

“Simple, Aval’s followers are on a volcano so Kravulkor’s will be where the undead are”

“So swamps” She shudders at the thought of trudging through sludgy mud and meeting moving body bodies.

“Yep, so let’s get our kawabunga on!” He grins wildly.

She barely has to ask what he means when he charges off the edge of the volcano screaming joyfully towards his death.

"Kawabungaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"

“I’m so going to kill him when he catches up” Gritting her teeth, she begins a climb down.

…

*Pant pant*

“Whoo, been a while since I’ve speed climbed a mountain.  Can’t believe it took me a whole day and a half. Was a bit weird seeing those two kids climbing, wonder if they’ll ever make it up?” Ex-Guard Captain Cannith wipes a bead of sweat from his forehead with his bulging, burning muscles.

 He wonders about the strange duo he met yesterday in the midst of his climb. They seemed a bit odd for some reason he couldn’t quite figure out, but then again he was the one who was leaping up multiple rocks at a time.

Shaking the thought out his mind, he makes his way towards the black, cracked stone church, grimacing at the sight of a headless Roc, possibly the one he saw flying down below, looking pissed, a little while ago.

Tearing the door open, he strolls through to see a single black stone golem in an ash robe, sweeping fresh intestines from the floor.

“Priest, tell me, what god does this church belong to?” He asks while his hands slide across the smooth stone walls.

“Aval, child of the flesh, what is your purpose here?” Tesurc responds politely, staring and stopping his work.

“Damn, well cross that off my list” He takes out a small note of papyrus and an inkpot, crosses something out then returns it to his small pouch on his bum. “Now then, let’s get killing”

Before Tesurc can properly respond, Cannith rips out one of his dormant brothers, chucking it towards him.

He takes the impact, saving his brother in the process, but falling to the floor.

Bashing on the floor three times in quick succession, they eyes of all his fellow priests open.

But it’s too late for him as Cannith stomps his brother’s face in, foot smashing through his too.

Cannith turns around after removing his foot from the two dead golems, chuckling at the two dozens of slowly waking up golems, all with psychotic red eyes and innocent looking smiles accompanying them.

“Ah, golems, god I've missed seeing their psychotic side.” He cracks his knuckles “five minutes or I do a thousand laps around this godforsaken place”

While he rushed in, laughing happily as he bashed golems to pieces, left right and center, he misses the man poking his newly revived face inside, whispering “well shit he’s strong” before running off, to properly climb down this time.

Four minutes, fifty two seconds pass.

“Ahhhh, so much easier when they don’t use weapons” He cracks his neck as he stomps over the dead pieces, leaning on his right leg slightly due to being kicked a few times on his left, and these golems hit pretty hard.

Smashing a few walls in, he quickly escapes before the place collapses on itself.

He takes out his notepad.

“Hmm, I could go to some nasty ass swamp to find some decrepit old temple in hopes of finding some clues or…I could follow up on some strangely familiar rumours I heard back in town” He ponders to himself for a few moments, wondering where he should head off next.

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Author's Corner:

...Yes, yes  i know what i said...Buuuut i did an exam today and well brain was just not going to revise today sooo...This happened :D

Hope you enjoyed it and, oml CANNITH!

Btw, if you don't remember who he is, look back like 27 chapters or smthg...it's been a while but he's baaaack.

Hope you enjoyed it (although it was pretty chill, maybe could've added a lot more cannith murdering action, but then again, more to look forward too :D)

Anyways, i'ma go off now and I promise, no more till after tuesday!! (since basically my life is going to be hell for 6 days so Kawabungaaaaaaaa!!

-TRUE NORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD