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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 3962285" data-attributes="member: 11697">***“Doesn’t it make you nervous out here?” Corwin Briggs asked as he looked up from his map and out at the field of shadow-frocked boulders. The wind tousled his hair and threatened to knock the parchment from his hands.“It gives me the creeps out here.” His companion put down his lamp and looked over his shoulder. “I think I preferred Carceri. At least there you could see the things that wanted to eat you before they tried to do so. Out here? Pitch black and you can’t hear a thing over the wind.”“What’s up with you?” Corwin asked.The other man, a fellow archaeologist out of Silvania by the name of Logan the Persistent, looked up and frowned. “What do you mean?”    “You’re scared of the dark.” Corwin said. “Aren’t you?”    Logan scoffed a bit too much. “Of course not!”“There’s nothing out there man.”The sudden voice startled them both and they looked up at its source. Despite laughing at his friend, Corwin nearly leapt out of his skin.“Where the hell did you sneak out from?” Logan asked, catching his breath as he picked the lantern back up.Frollis chuckled and took a seat atop a flat-topped boulder, calmly and effortlessly jumping the distance from the bottom. Well, that wasn’t quite right. He didn’t so much leap the distance as leap and then seem to just appear at the top of the rock, skipping the transitory distance like he’d walked into one patch of darkness and stepped out of another a yard or two higher.“That’s why they pay me to watch you and not the other way around.” He smirked as he drew a dagger and lazily balanced the blade in the palm of one hand.“Well that’s ever so helpful.” Logan complained. “You didn’t answer my question at all.”“Quite true.” The response still didn’t answer the question.Corwin frowned. “So just how long have you been lurking about listening in on us?”“For some time now.” He grinned. “I’m paid to follow you around and watch. There’s nothing in anything I signed that said I have to let you know I’m here while I’m doing that. Don’t mind me at all.”The first scholar shrugged and went back to his work, not wanting to waste his breath with a sell-sword. The man was probably illiterate anyways, so even if he’d been listening in on their conversation, fat chance of him being able to contribute to it.“In any event, the answer to your friend’s question is no.” Frollis said out of the blue.    “Eh?” Corwin asked, confused.“No.” The rogue reiterated. “There isn’t anything out there. We’ve scouted the immediate area around here for anything lurking beneath a rock or in your shadow. There’s nothing out there moving, just rocks and inscriptions which is for you to deal with. And they don’t bite, not unless they’re symbols or explosive runes, and I’d have found those if there were any to be found because I’m good like that.”    “We’re a bit busy here.” Corwin said, politely dismissing the rogue. “I appreciate you doing your job, but we’re fine here. If you’re so inclined, you might even go tell the others in the group that we’ve found a few inscriptions on some of the larger rocks that fell from somewhere up on the south slope. With any luck we can match them to a spot and investigate it once we move on to that area.”    The rogue looked at him like a man who didn’t have any sense of what he was talking about, or a man who really didn’t care and wanted to deflate the scholar’s ego.    “Most of them have moved on to the next section of the grid, it’ll take me a few minutes to reach them. Besides, they won’t have found anything by the time I get there. They might have started, but they won’t have found much of importance if there’s anything to be found. Besides, I felt it best to check up on you two. Don’t mind me.”    Somewhat humbled, Corwin shrugged and turned back to his work, though he felt the rogue’s eyes on his back a bit too much. A few uncomfortable minutes later and a rock distracted him, taking his mind off of the rogue and whatever social unpleasantness he’d brought in tow. Frollis sat quietly and watched without comment.    Several minutes stretched onwards to thirty, and the scholars continued to catalog rocks amid the wind-whipped gloom. They were mapping and making comparisons to older maps and old accounts of the site’s terrain, but to a layman they were cataloging rocks, and it seemed rather droll and boring. Faced with such enrapturing activities by a pair of not so socially brilliant men, eventually their watch grew bored atop his perch, not that he’d interrupted them, and not that they’d paid him much attention in return.“Have fun scraping around the dirt like a pair of hungry hens.” Frollis said as he stood up and stretched, seemingly bored with the men. “I’ve got another dozen bits of mutton to follow around. See you later.”“Whatever…” Corwin didn’t bother looking up to see if he’d left or not, and his companion was too absorbed looking at a curious rock formation to care one way or the other.    Without bracing himself, Frollis fell backwards off of the boulder. They might have expected a heavy thump and some cursing had they been paying him any attention, but no sound of a landing was apparent. It was as if the gloom had swallowed him up whole, or he’d landed in the waiting gullet of some hungry beast that he’d woefully failed to notice. His dancing with shadows went without view or notice though, not that he’d particularly done it out of a wish to impress them; it was simply his style.Ten more minutes passed and the two scholars fell into their element, insulated from their cold and the dark surroundings by professional curiosity. A herd of Arborean bison set on fire and driven on by cackling fire mephitis could have snuck past them at full gallop had they been there to make the attempt. Minutes passed on to an hour and the men lost all track of time as they wandered deeper from where they’d begun.“Did you hear that?” Logan asked, peering out into the gloom. It had sounded like footsteps, or something scraping against one of the stone piles that littered the area.“It’s probably just Frollis again.” Corwin said.Logan looked at his companion. “Do you think he’s still around somewhere?”“That cagey bastard?” Corwin asked. “Probably.”“Hey! Frollis!” Logan called out. “You out there?”The wind whistled and the gloom ate impotently at the edge of their magical illumination, but the shouted questioned garnered no reply.“Guess not.” Logan shrugged. “I don’t think he’s out there.”“He wouldn’t show himself if he was.” Corwin scoffed. “He’s just going to let you yell your lungs sore, or make you jump at nothing by kicking a rock around when you’re already jumpy.”“Hey! Frollis!” Logan waited and heard only the wind in reply. He frowned and picked up the lantern. “I’ll be right back.”Corwin rolled his eyes as his companion walked off still calling the mercenary’s name. His footsteps receded till they were swallowed up by the wind, and his light vanished down into a dim glow, tossing shadows from behind a dozen spires and crags of rock. Twenty seconds and he was out of contact and Corwin was left alone with his work and a lantern for a bubble of protection from the gloom.A minute passed before the light came bobbing back out of the gloom, pushing Corwin’s shadow long and thin.“Did you find him?” He called out above the wind, not turning around.Footsteps echoed behind him, crunching lightly on the loose gravel.“I take it that’s a no?” He asked, still concentrating on the edges of a broken rock that might have held a weathered, worn down symbol. Logan had been rather quick about coming back after all. “What? Got scared of the dark?”    “Hello.” The voice was cold and devoid of inflection, with the odd, off-putting tremble of a person mentally coaching himself before an uncertain action.    The wind roared again and the lamplight caused his shadow to writhe and dance.“Oh!” He said as he turned around, startled slightly. “I didn’t expect you to be standing there. Did you see Corwin? I think he went looking for…”    Cast against the illumination, fleeing for the edges of the light that its owner could not, Corwin’s shadow writhed for another reason entirely.The scholar’s eyes went wide as the blade punctured his ribcage and punched a hole in his diaphragm with a single, smooth, quick motion. He screamed soundlessly, giving only a hoarse, caustic rattle from his voice box, unable to force a breath past his lips. His eyes bulged as his killer grabbed and supported his slumping body, whispering something to himself over and over again like a prayer or ritualized chant.    Abruptly another light bobbed out of the darkness and boots crunched on the gravel. His hand trembling with sudden nervousness, the killer shut his eyes tight and silently cursed to himself. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.“I couldn’t find…” Logan’s voice died with an inarticulate croak as he saw Corwin covered in blood, gasping for breath and heard the low whistle of a punctured lung as the other man’s sword slipped free of the dying man’s chest with a wet hiss.“I only wanted one of you.” The killer’s voice was cold, devoid of inflection, and awkward with an odd, off-putting tremble like a schoolboy caught kissing with a young woman by their teacher.Logan recognized that voice immediately, even if he’d yet to see its owner’s face, and stood shocked and dumbfounded. What use would running be now?The killer turned around with eyes clenched tight and mouth pursed, almost as if he were trying to find something to say that would explain it all, make it all better. He never had the chance though, as the scholar turned and ran. Of course, just like Corwin, Logan never had a chance either.Everything happened in an instant, purely by reflex as he raised his right arm and held his sword parallel to the ground, but it could have been that something was guiding his actions more overtly rather than just giving him purpose and inspiration. The words to the invocation came quick to his lips, soundless as the spell had been prepared to operate within Cocytus, and the telekinetic grasp on the fleeing man’s body was instantaneous. Had the winds not drowned the sounds in a sea of white noise, he would have heard the peculiar wet slice and the sudden release of air, rather than just feeling the sudden, jarring impact on his sword-arm when the man’s neck slammed into his waiting blade and was neatly, deftly decapitated.The body collapsed with gravity’s pull and awkwardly slid a few inches across the gravel, finally stopping, slumped on its knees with arms slack and limps in a perverse semblance of prayer. Blood spurted from the carotid in several quick, rapidly failing pulses, mixing with clear spinal fluid on the artist’s pallet of the severed stump as the head rolled end over end to finally smack into a boulder and come to a halt, ending up facing his killer, eyes glazed over but still showing a sense of utter surprise and shock.“I’m sorry.” He said, almost with a hint of contrition.They were only men, and they had done him no wrong, but that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Blood taken in justified rage or in cold, insensate dispassion was blood spilt in His name nonetheless. It wasn’t always this difficult, but it had been some time since the Voice had beckoned and called him to action.“I obey my Lord.” His voice was a whisper, slightly trembling as he looked at the blood on the blade and on his hands.He shouldn’t have felt remorse, but the nagging voice of conscience was still present like a deep and unhealed wound. The first killing a moment before had been awkward and stilted, without any grace or artistry. Without surprise the man might have even cried out and alerted one of his fellows further out within the gloom. That would have been a mistake, and that was also the reason for the second killing.He hadn’t intended to take two lives. Before the first he wasn’t even sure if he would have been capable of it on the first attempt. Between nerves and the worrying irritation of the other voice -the one from within rather than without-, between those two things he’d almost sat in silence from the shadows and just watched the man who now lay dead before him, running over in his mind the ways that he might have killed him, practicing mentally for when he felt his unholy confidence rise to the occasion.By comparison the second death had been much easier. His conscience had squealed with the blade’s first bite and taste of blood, but at the second that tugging at his mind turned frantic. Humanity was losing to the touch of the Other that called. Altriusm was dying one deathrattle at a time. Death by death, he was reaching towards the goal that the Waste had whispered to him paradoxically years earlier in that tiny, frozen vale on Mungoth’s slopes.He smiled, hands trembling less now as he cleaned the blade and prepared to dispose of the bodies. “Glory be to the Ashsinger. This is how it begins.”This is how it begins. This is how it happens once again. This is how it happens just like it did before.This is the first of the signs.***</blockquote>

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