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Message: <blockquote data-quote="talien" data-source="post: 4780648" data-attributes="member: 3285">Secret of Semar: Part 8b – Ancient SecretsKham’s pupils adjusted to the dark.  It wasn’t the darkness he was accustomed to.  The darkness was literally a vacuum of light, so dark that staring with his eyes open almost hurt.  If he couldn’t see, Kham would have closed his eyes. But he COULD see.  His mind tore through the possibilities as his body continued to move.  Ffashethh was already pressing the advantage.  Emric seemed completely unhindered. Vlad held his own, taking slow, methodical swings to defend himself. Beldin flailed, swinging blindly in front of him.  From the looks of how the Agamis was reacting, it wasn’t much better off. The animated statues, however, were not so encumbered.It was Daemonscar! The breastplate Kham picked up in Canceri gave Kham the ability to see in magical darkness, like a dark-kin…Kham looked up. Sebastian, unhindered by the magical darkness, flapped like a giant bat, unleashing a blast of flames that somehow didn’t manage to illuminate anything despite the conflagration.  It was all heat, no light.  The fireball looked like a smudge with gradations of black and white.The blast struck the bags, tearing them open.  A torrent of stagnant liquid rushed out.  A naked, dark-skinned human spilled to a halt in front of Kham.  Kahm hesitated.  The smell of ammonia nearly overwhelmed him.  But it wasn’t the stench that stopped him.He stared down in horror.  “Althares!” The corpse’s eyes were wide open.  Even in the pitch darkness, Kham could make the man’s features out as a val’Abebi.  But the pupils were serpent slits.Ffashethh pointed. Tree roots exploded out of the ground, encircling Vlad, Beldin, and the Agamis’ legs even as the two stone constructs slithered closer.  It was apparent Ffashethh had no use for his minions. “Kham, the snakes!” Sebastian pointed and shouted another word of power, but Kham was stunned by what he had found.  Was Emric truly the first of his kind?  Did Yig really give him a choice? Or was he a pawn of Ffashethh all along, some kind of failed experiment that had turned against him?  Or would he yet betray them?One of the serpents exploded from a blast of magical force.“That’sss enough out of you!” Ffashethh pointed at Sebastian and suddenly he went silent.Emric fired two arrows into the other snake, but they bounced off its stony carapace.  The samat returned to his chant.  Around him, the glyph-etched stone urns pulsed in a blasphemous rhythm.Kham took careful aim with both of his pistols.   “Ladies, don’t fail me now!” The weapons jerked in his hands.  The familiar sulfurous smell reached his nostrils, although the smoke was invisible in the darkness.  Ffashethh’s head snapped to face him as a crack appeared in one of the urns.   He uncoiled from the throne, lurching to shelter the urn from further harm, but it was too late.  The urn was brilliantly illuminated from a thousand cracks where Kham’s shots struck home. The ensuing magical blast penetrated even the magical darkness. “The urns!” shouted Kham.  “Break the urns!”Emric fired another volley of arrows.  One of them skewered an urn and it cracked as it rolled, spinning rays of light in the darkness.  Then it exploded.Ffashethh roared with rage.  The samat reached behind his back and drew two wicked-looking sickles. The handles were sculpted in snake bodies swallowing curved blades.  “That wasss my sssissster!  I will make you pay for that.”  Kham fell backwards as the samat loomed over him.  He drew another pair of pistols from his haversack. It was so fast—His fingers went number as one pistol and then the other was batted aside.  Ffashethh was playing with him.The samat’s huge snake head darted forward to lick his chin with a forked tongue. “I’m going to make you sssuffer.”“Not if he has anything to say about it.” Kham pointed over Ffashethh’s shoulder.  Sebastian came in a silent dive-bomb, but the samat forced him to veer off with a shrug of its thick tail. Kham used the distraction to draw Talon and Coomb’s dagger, but the samat was watching him the whole time.  The two sickles pierced his shoulders, pinning him to the stone.  He screamed.“You’ll have to do better than that,” sneered Ffashethh.  The samat let out a horrible hiss, spraying poisonous spittle over Kham’s face.  The wicked fangs slowly unhinged, the jaw unlocking as it grew larger. Suddenly the mouth snapped back as an explosion engulfed Ffashethh’s torso.  The sickles were yanked out of Kham’s shoulders.  Sebastian had picked up one of the urns on his first pass and dropped it on top of the samat.  They were using the samat’s own tools against him.Emric rolled an urn towards Ffashethh.  The samat seemed torn between trying to defend himself and protect the urns.  The hesitation cost him as an arrow followed soon thereafter, smashing the top of the urn.  The explosion blew one of Ffashethh’s arms clean off. The samat flailed, his tail crashing through another urn and setting off another explosion.“Skiz!  Reload!”“But—““NOW!”Two more pistols nudged their way out of his haversack.  It hurt, but Kham drew the two pistols and took careful aim.  Urn after urn exploded, consuming Ffashethh.  The darkness suddenly receded.Sebastian landed near Kham, capable of speech once more.  “His spells have ended—he’s dead.” The Agamis was dead too.  The remaining snake statue was rubble. Although Beldin and Vlad were hurt, they were alive.  Kham searched for Emric.  He was staring down at one of the corpses. “I don’t understand.”  The half-breed’s lip quivered.  “I thought I was unique…was it a lie?”On closer inspection, there was a sac that had already been opened long before they arrived.  Sebastian studied the empty sac.  “Kham did animate Ffashethh with his own flesh,” the dark-kin said with a frown.  “It stands to reason Ffashethh could have used Kham’s life force to create these ss’ressen/val’Abebi hybrids.”Kham struggled to his feet.  “Look, it doesn’t matter if you’re really Emric or not.  You stood by us when it counted. I don’t care how you came to be…hell, I was originally planning to eat the serpent egg I picked up. Sometimes, things work out differently than you planned.”  Kham clapped Emric on the shoulder and winced.  The sickle wounds hurt, but he would live. Emric’s brow was furrowed.  “Thanks, Father.  That means a lot coming from you.”“And stop calling me Father.”Vlad stared up at the far wall. “I don’t mean to interrupt the family reunion, but if Ffashethh is dead, why is that wall still glowing?”Emric followed Vlad’s gaze. “Yig have mercy,” he whispered.</blockquote>

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