“I’m not so sure about this,” Tenebres said nervously. He looked around the wide cavern, the same one he and Allana had encountered the darkmaw in just days before.
“Why?” Geoffrey asked. As he spoke, the assassin drove an anchor with a ring on one end into the stone wall in a single motion, showing a level of strength beyond his already powerful physique. “It makes perfect sense. The fiend you summoned back at the cult compound drained all of your physical attributes–if you use only a single attribute instead, I see no reason the summoned entity wouldn’t be both weaker and easier to control.”
As he spoke, he gestured for Allana to hang a lantern on the embedded ring, the fourth such that they had hung. While the lights couldn’t quite dispel the gloom of the deep cavern, they made the darkness significantly less imposing.
“And if you still can’t control it,” Allana pointed out, “we have one of the strongest gifted in the city to kill it for us.” Geoffrey sketched a little bow in recognition of the point.
Tenebres rolled his eyes. “And we have to do it here because… why exactly?”
“We know it’s secure. If no one found the darkmaw down here, we can be pretty sure no one will find us,” Allana told him for the fifth time.
“Besides. I don’t want any of your demons destroying my home,” Geoffrey added.
Tenebres sighed– his eyes couldn’t help but find their way to a set of dark stains on the floor, the only indicators of the place he had nearly died fighting the monstrous spider-rat. All the logic in the world didn’t make this place, or this idea, any more appealing.
But he knew the others were right. His refusal to use the gift of the void had nearly gotten him killed, and he would never be able to reach Apprentice level without leveling both of his gifts. He had hoped to find someone who could tell him more about the darkness inside of him and how to control it, but it was increasingly becoming apparent that Emeston did not draw the sorts of scholar that might be able to help with that. He had to start finding his own way.
With a thought, the description of the ability they were going to test flitted into his field of vision.
Void Invocation–Active, Summon–Open a gate and beckon a fiend to cross over. Nature and power of the fiend as well as ability cost varies based on the strength of the invocation. Sufficiently powerful fiends may be difficult to control. Moderate duration.
Tenebres took a deep breath and said, “Okay. Which attribute do you want me to start with?”
There was a whisper of metal on cloth as Geoffrey drew his sword, a remarkably long, gracefully curved blade that gleamed even in the dull light of the lanterns. Without a sound, Allana flicked each of her hands, conjuring her ensouled daggers, and each of the two assassins settled into fighting poses.
“Start with strength,” Geoffrey instructed him.
“Right.” Tenebres took another slow breath, and mentally prodded his gift of the void. He felt it, as always, like a hungry abyss in his chest, desperate to consume and destroy, represented by a yawning circle inscribed over his heart. He couldn’t have described exactly what he did to activate the ability, but he carefully fed his strength into that yearning maw.
Void Invocation activated
Strength attribute sacrificed
Minor fiend Green Imp successfully invoked
A fluttering darkness manifested in front of Tenebres as the ability activated, like a series of physical shadows wrapping around each other before quickly coalescing into the imp he had summoned.
It had some similarities to most outsiders. Like them, it shared the general shape of a human–two arms, two legs, a head atop a central chest. But that was where the similarities ended.
The imp was diminutive, perhaps a hair over three feet tall, and so layered in dull slabs of muscle that it looked positively deformed. Its skin was a dark shade of rotten green that made Tenebres think of bile, spotted with warts and pockmarks. Its legs were too short for its body, and its arms too thick, with each ending in an impressively clawed hand. The imp’s face was just as ugly as the rest of it, with a hooked nose nearly as long as Tenebres’s spread fingers and a pair of notched, bat-like ears rising above the top of its head.
“Well… isn’t that just disgusting,” Allana observed.
Beady yellow eyes flicked from place to place before Allana’s words drew them to her, and Tenebres felt a surge of violent hate flow from the imp into him. The sensation wasn’t anything as solid as thoughts or words, rather a simple tide of ugly, horrible emotion. The imp wanted to kill, to corrupt, to destroy as much as it could.
Tenebres staggered in place, wincing, and in front of him, the imp took a pair of quick steps towards Allana.
No! Without quite knowing what he was doing, Tenebres clamped his will down on the imp, preventing it from taking another step.
“Tenebres?” Geoffrey’s voice was sharp and clear. “Are you okay?”
“Y-yeah…” Tenebres flinched as the imp’s emotions lashed back, angry at being stopped, but he gritted his teeth and kept it from moving. “I think I’ve got it, but… it’s hard. It really, really wants to kill something.”
Tenebres was too focused on the imp to watch Allana and Geoffrey’s reactions, but Allana commented, “It’s really staring at me a lot.”
“Yeah it’s sort of… fixated on you. I think it knows you insulted it.” Even as he spoke, the emotions became clearer. The imp wasn’t truly intelligent, but it had enough of a mind to understand Allana’s tone as enough reason to kill her.
“Okay,” Geoffrey said, his voice carefully controlled. “Let’s work with that. We know it wants to kill, and it's focused on Allana. Can you direct it towards me instead?”
Tenebres blew out a breath and loosened his grip on the imp a little bit, trying to fix its ugly cocktail of hate at the man as he spoke instead. The imp resisted at first–but it was far easier to direct its actions than it was to hold it in place. He felt a surge of agreement from the imp, that all it wanted was to kill and that it was happy to as Tenebres asked if he let it do so.
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“Okay,” Tenebres warned Geoffrey. “Here it comes!” Finally, he fully relaxed his control over the imp.
The hideous green creature howled and threw itself at Geoffrey, dagger-sized claws flashing. Tenebres didn’t even see the assassin move–but suddenly, the hateful presence in his brain vanished, even as both halves of the imp dispersed into those same fluttering shadows.
Tenebres felt himself sag in place, and fell to his knees, shaking.
“Are you okay?” Allana asked. The girl was next to him now, one arm wrapped around his shoulders.
“Yes,” Tenebres told her, giving her a shaky smile. “It’s just a relief to not have it there anymore.”
“You could feel it?” Allana asked.
“Yeah… and it’s not very pleasant. I’ve…” he shook his head. “I only felt that kind of hate once before, back on that day. I don’t think it was sane. It’s like all it could feel, all it could think about, was the need to kill, to destroy, to do whatever harm it could-”
“Tenebres.” Allana shook his shoulder, and he realized that his voice had been getting louder as he spoke, distracted by even the memory of those emotions.
“S-sorry… It was a lot.” And on top of that, he felt weak. His legs and arms shook like he had just finished a long day of labor, the effect of sacrificing his strength to the invocation.
Geoffrey was willing to give Tenebres a couple minutes to recover, but he soon started pressing in with questions. “Can you tell me how much the cost was to summon that thing?”
“Invoke,” Tenebres corrected him gently, sitting on the floor now.
“What?”
“The word is ‘invoke,’ not summon.”
“Okay, how much did you pay to invoke it then?” Geoffrey asked, his expression calculating.
With a thought, Tenebre called up his attributes.
Attributes:
Strength: 1 (3 - 2*)
Resilience: 4
Stamina: 3
Coordination: 6 (4 + 2)
Speed: 3
Will: 11 (6 + 5)
Knowledge: 9 (7 + 2)
Focus: 7 (5 + 2)
Awareness: 5
Charm: 10 (5 + 5)
Mystical Well: 10
Tenebres chuckled dryly. “It cost me two points. I’ve only got one right now.”
Geoffrey sucked some air through his teeth. “Rogue’s shade, that can’t feel good.”
“Nope.”
“Okay… think you’re good for another attribute?”
“Geoffrey, come on! Look at him!”
“No, Allana,” Tenebres reassured her, “he’s right. The restoration potion will restore all of my attributes when I drink it. I might as well make it worth it.”
“Right,” Geoffrey agreed, “How about speed next then?”
#
A couple hours and two restoration potions later, Tenebres had a solid idea of the extent of his Invocations.
Speed and stamina had produced similar imps to the first, though colored differently. The blue speed imp had been more slender and sported a pair of wings and a pointed tail that it preferred to attack with, while stamina had produced a red imp with no obvious natural weapons but a small fire breath attack. They had the same sense of malicious rancor as the green imp, but they were just as easy to direct as the first had been, like little living weapons.
“It’s unfortunate,” Geoffrey observed. “Those seem like your ideal summons, but you’re too weak to be functional once you summon them.”
“Unless you use that buff ability,” Allana pointed out.
Coordination and resilience had produced a couple more interesting fiends–a ball of writhing tentacles and a glob of sentient slime, respectively. While fairly immobile, both had proven to be significant hindrances, the tentacle able to bind and tie up enemies while the slime had a faintly acidic touch and was extremely difficult to kill. Geoffrey had to hunt down a small core, only slightly darker and more dense than the rest of the glob, to kill the thing completely.
Best of all, both of the fiends lacked the concentrated malice that filled the imps’ thoughts. In fact, they didn’t really seem to feel much of anything. Or, Tenebres mused, the emotions they do feel are too alien for me to understand.
“As much as I hate the idea of a tentacle ball being my best option, it sort of seems that way,” Tenebres groaned as he waited for his second restoration potion to do its work. “It’s easy to command, a functional distraction, and coordination is my highest physical attribute.”
“Unless some of the mental attributes work out better,” Geoffrey posited.
Unfortunately, that idea had come up empty. Focus, will, knowledge, and charm had all produced the same result.
Void Invocation activated
Insufficient attributes sacrificed
No fiend invoked
“I think it wants me to add another attribute,” Tenebres intuited. “Everything I invoked so far was barely sentient, at best. Maybe mental attributes are how I make intelligent fiends.”
“Then we should try it,” Geoffrey suggested.
“No.” Tenebres held firm on that point. “I’m willing to experiment with one attribute invocations, but a second would make the fiends both smarter and more powerful. It’s too likely something could go wrong.”
However, even discarding the other mental attributes, the last invocation ended up being a worthwhile one.
Void Invocation activated
Awareness attribute sacrificed
Minor fiend Flying Eye successfully invoked
The resulting fiend was a single eye about the size of Tenebres’s fist. The “eye lid” of the fiend wrapped fully around it when it shut, and it sported a pair of bat wings to either side, allowing it sporadic, fluttering flight. Like the tentacles and slime, it lacked the murderous desire of the imps, instead carrying a sense of indulgent curiosity. Best of all, it conveyed some small sense of the things it saw back to Tenebres.
“It’s not like seeing it for myself,” he explained, “but I can feel its sense of fear when it looks at Geoffrey.”
“It could be a functional scout,” Geoffrey suggested, after killing the ocular demon. “Overall, your skillset has some similarity to a sorcerer.”
“That’s summoning magic, right?”
“Correct. They tend to favor more supporting abilities though, especially at lower levels. Scouting spirits and the like. Your invocations are much more offensively focused, but at least that eyeball gives you a little flexibility. The general strategy of the void gift seems clear, though.”
“Kill something with Sacrificial VIctim,” Tenebres guessed, “then use that buff to summon a bunch of imps.”
“Easier said than done, though,” Geoffrey said. “Final abilities like that, that activate only on a kill, are rare.”
“You’ve seen one like it before?” Allana asked.
“A few. My gift of the assassin has one, though that’s more meant to make an escape. It gives me a veil if it triggers. But they’re almost always low power–you’ll need to plan very carefully to have it work properly.”
“It’s a physical attack, too. I have to touch them to use it. Doesn’t play nice with my general strategy of staying as far away from the things that want to kill me as possible.”
“Which brings us to our next point,” Geoffrey told him, giving Allana a pointed look.
The words brought a bright smile to the girl’s mouth, completely at odds with the threatening twirl she gave one of her daggers. “You’re too dependent on staying at a range. It’s high time we work on that.”
Tenebres sighed. Even after the relief of his invocations going off without a hitch, he was exhausted, and it was clear that his day wasn’t going to be ending anytime soon.