Midnight RPG - Chapter 31.110

It is the evening on the 24th day of Sahaad. Kyuad walks over a large, twisted and dead tree. Behind him Durgaz, Eranon, and Zal'Kazir walk in the opposite direction, into the dark night to the north.

The conversation with Durgaz had went well, but it sapped Kyuad to have held on to who he is for so long. Now walking alone, he relaxes his mind and reopens his third eye, seeing the world around him in all its painful confusion.

PREPARATIONS

The First

Kyuad walks along the forest floor, back toward the site of the worst of the carnage from the days before. As he passes over the bodies, he inspects each one carefully for the spirital markers that tell him a soul is still bound to the flesh. Some of these he deals with by the blade, with mercy, to see the spirit off to the only freedom it can know.

Then, he stops at the body of a large orc, and kneels.

The mouth of the orc is agape, and into it Kyuad rests a handful of small, black gems. He then rests a translucent finger on the throat of the orc and says "Battau chakira."

The body of the orc jerks and convulses, and Kyuad looks into the air just above the orc. His gaze then quickly draws upward and he mumbles, "Even you deserve release."

The body of the orc then shakes and arches back, arms twisted behind it, and a black glow rapidly spreads from the mouth over the rest of the body.

Then, the orc rises to his feet.

With a crack, the jaw slips back open and begins to move, spilling out the gems to the forest floor. "Maaasstteeeerrrr..."

Gathering

The lurching orc corpse, now animated through its consumption of the stuff of life itself, drags another orc body into the pile. Kyuad sets down his book and says in Orcish, "That is enough, Vantic. Stop and wait."

"This should be enough, I believe," Kyuad says to himself. As he stands, he reaches for his scythe. "Vantic, hold very still." With one motion, Kyuad takes the head off of the orc's corpse, leaving it to crumble to the ground. "These shall have to be fit for travel if they are to be of any use to me."

Kyuad moves from one orc to the next, placing gems in the eyes or mouth of each one. Then one by one, he reaches down and touches the foreheads of each corpse, saying the same words in Safati, "Battau chakira."

By the time he has spoken the arcane words to the corpse of the last orc, the first in the line rises, flesh hanging like sea weeds on driftwood, revealing stark, dry bone beneath the remains and armor of the creature. The eyes now hollow in the fleshless face, no sound coming from the quiverring jaw.

"You are now Vantic." Kyuad motions to each, assigning a new moniker to each. "Jabartik, Gekn, Jobobr, Zeker, and Gonor are your new names. Follow me.

"You no longer serve the demons of greed and hate, you now serve us."

Building

The skeletal orcs work hard clearing an area in the woods where Kyuad can work. The trees have been moved back, cut up, or moved to make a barrier around the location. From outside, it appears that the trees have all fallen in a huge pile - but from Gekn's vantage point on the top of a large log, it is clear that this is a tall wall, not a pile.

"Gekn, remove that corpse from the branch and throw it out," Kyuad calls up to the skeleton. Kyuad stands in the center of the clearing, arranging purified food on a makeshift pedistal. Two skeletons in the edge of the clearing have gathered weapons, armor, and arrows from the bodies in the area. Another still toils outside the wall, moving bodies into a pile many yards from the clearing.

"Vantic, stop and come. Find long, thin wood for poles." Kyuad waits as the skeleton walks over the wall, into the woods. "Gekn, I need a large stone. Jobobr, help Gekn carry stone to me." Kyuad continues making notes.

When the skeletons all return with supplies, they construct a scaffold and a stone table in the center of the clearing. Around this, Kyuad attempts to replicate the arcane foci that seemed to work the first time he attempted this ritual. The moon high overhead, the clearing is bathed in a gray light, cut by the harsh lines of the shadows from dessicatted and barren tree limbs.

RITUALS

Summoning

Kyuad begins his efforts as soon as he is satisfied with the level of preparation. As the skeletons toil tirelessly at the ritual's scaffolding, Kyuad sets to work on the pedestal.

During the process, Kyuad is troubled somewhat by the spirits of the land around him. Spirits of creatures that once walked Aryth struggle with one another to get at the food presented as a sacrifice for the ritual. They vie for attention from Kyuad, each asking in some way to be the one to be made manifest; the one given the chance to live again and serve. Through all of this Kyuad is stoic and silent, except for only once saying, "It is only myself who I would put through the suffering to come."

Hours pass. The skeletons now stand still and mindless, facing their master, waiting for orders to come. Hours continue to pass until night's end comes. By now the food has turned to ash, burned on the pedestal by nothing more than the arcane energies being infused by Kyuad's very spirit.

Dawn - as the light of Aryth's sun touches the ashes on the pedestal, a heavy cold smoke spills out, sinking down and covering the ground until everything in the clearing below Kyuad's waist is shrouded in black, sooty smoke.

Kyuad's face is drawn in effort as he continues to fight against the distractions of his own mind and the spirit world around him. The difficulty now comes in the separation. Most live their whole lives with an intact spirit in one body. Kyuad is on the verge of emptying a portion of his own spirit a second person; but who he is now is different from who he was when Nisse first came forth from him.

Finally, he locks onto the dividing line of himself and his third eye, the creature of the Darghul, the librarian of Moria, the Cadaverous Eye. Here, he finally separates who he is, himself, what makes him Kyuad, from the creature that was part of his mind for what felt like lifetimes. It is here in the gap that Kyuad forms a place for Nisse again, and then pours part of himself inside. Like a ladel lifted out of a cauldron, Kyuad drags the spirit of Nisse out of his own consciousness and blesses the ashes with personage.

As though merely covered, Nisse rises and shakes off the ashes - sings a whisling, haunting call - and flaps herself clean as she ascends above the ruined canopy.

Kyuad rests.

To Brave Fate

Kyuad rises just after the noon-day sun has warmed the decaying forest. His mind reels at the stench of rotting flesh around him, unable to marry his thoughts of revoltion with his physical feeling of calm indifference. For a moment he is sent mentally reeling again, grasping at threads of consciousness for a footing in reality....

Then he hears the whistling call of a myling echo through the lifeless wood, and for a moment he is reminded of a childhood fear of the ghosts that this call foretells. But with sight of Nisse swooping into the clearing, Kyuad remembers the long night and the sight of his bird-self rising from the ashes. In a cracked, rasping voice Kyuad calls to her in Safati, "Come Nisse, come to me and let me see you."

Nisse alights on Kyuad's arm, which seems leathery and tough enough to no longer need the hawking gloves, and replies to him, "We must get to work. Every moment I continue to live adds to the pain I will suffer when we are through with this."

"So you know that I intend to repeat The Vile's ritual of Fell Bonding."

"In the dark of this morning, I was a tall man with stretched skin. In the light of dawn, I became a bird. I know all you knew before your morning meditations." With that, Nisse flies to the stone table in the middle of the makeshift scaffolding and lays herself out on her side, one wing reaching back.

Kyuad rises, forgetting his discomfort, and inspired by Nisse's bravery and focus. "Zeker, Gonor, stand by my sides." Kyuad arranges the skeletons around the ritual place and begins his work.

Transition

As he traces arcane symbols on the poles and table, Kyuad thinks back to the first time he attempted this process. For a moment he pauses, "Shadaar... must be finally free from his Fell prison. When I lost you before, Nisse, his spirit should have been released. This time however, I understand what went wrong. His body was giving up the need for flesh of the living, and it had to be given to something. It was given to you, and in the process, took from you the life that protected you from this curse. The bond between the two of you was the part of the ritual that I hadn't expected at all. Now I know it is the central focus of the ritual.

"This time, the ritual will take from you life, and make you one of the Consumptors of the world. But the bond it creates will be between you and I, not you and a stranger. With this new bond, I should be able to see out of your eyes as though I were there myself." Kyuad pauses and seems to consider something, "At least, I think that is how it will function. It may take some experimenting to get things right."

For the rest of the day, Kyuad works tirelessly, measuring and marking the ritual location. The skeletons follow his orders faithfully in the work they are able to perform. Scavengers that find a way through or over the wall are either attacked by the skeletons, or driven off to ensure peace and privacy.

By the next morning Kyuad begins the ritual. Many hours are required for the ritual to succeed. However, as he no longer needs sleep, Kyuad works on through the night with no rest, doing everything it takes to complete the ritual before his friends return from the refugee camps.

CRUNCHY BITS

• The First - This is all 100% flavor and not at all necessary. Kyuad could have simply animated the orcs as he found them, but it's too fun to make a zombie just for the purpose of moving bodies to one spot so he could do the skeletons all at once. So really, it's just here for story purposes and doesn't need rules.
• Gathering - Kyuad cast animate dead six times (3SE each, 18 total, which I think is 1 or 2 above what Kyuad has available during a day before spending Con [or now that he's undead, Cha]), on six of the 7HD orcs found in the woods.
  • Total HD controlled through this spell: 42 of 48. Material components consumed and recorded.
  • The names given to the skeletons are for kicks. They are soulless creatures of animated body parts without personality or names. The names given are to make things less confusing for Kyuad.
• Nisse - The summoning ritual takes a day and sacrifices food. The Midnight book doesn't say how the food gets sacrificed, so I made up something. Next begins the ritual to turn her into a Fell Familiar.
• What happens next - Total time needed to complete all of the work necessary: 4 days
  One day (24 hours) after the others left Kyuad alone in the woods he had started preparing for the Fell Familiar process. Just before they'd been gone 48 hours Kyuad started the actual ritual. Another 48 hours are needed after this point. This should help map out what is going on when the other PCs arrive, if they come back to where Kyuad is.