Stranger Tides at the End of the World

From RPGnet
Jump to: navigation, search

The Wolf at the Edge of the World treads the skulls of the fallen into dust. It would have felt more satisfying had his opponents not already been dead before he felled them. He regards the strewn mess before him with disgust. No true foe, this, merely puppets, marionettes dangled before him by an inept puppeteer whose impending doom these sad toys had been entirely unable to avert. He flexes his claws with savage frustration. It would feel good to sink them into actual quivering flesh, instead of the dry, parchment-like skin and leathery sinews of his only opponents thus far.

The inner sanctum is dark, but the flaring of Wolf's anima and the glow of his moonsilver tattoos, combined with his preternaturally acute vision, make illumination unnecessary. The usual tawdry scene awaits him: chanting cultists, their sweat rolling down faces rendered featureless by voluminous robes; smoke from censors, fouling the air with the stench of scorched mildew and other less savoury aromas; an altar, upon which lay a girl, her nudity luminous in the half-light, bound wrist-and-ankle awaiting the attentions of the man who stood over her, the soulsteel knife in his hands panting for blood.

They turn to watch him approach. The cultists bunch to deny him access to their holiest-of-holies. The celebrant throws back his cape melodramatically. "Avaunt ye, moonspawn! The Neverborn shall have this one!"

Wolf glances at the girl. Very pretty. A shame. He shrugs and begins to wade into the cultists, leaving a trail of shattered bodies in his wake as he makes his inexorable way towards the celebrant.

To the man's credit, despite his penchant for the dramatic, he wastes no time completing his sacrifice. The knife plunges down, and there is a horrible scream...

... that, instead of ending, goes on, and on, and on.

Quirking an eyebrow, Wolf tears the head from a particularly truculent cultist and flings it after the last fleeing man, striking him low in the back with enough force to snap his spine. He glances at the altar, to see to his surprise that it is the celebrant who is screaming, his voice reedy and girlish as his lips melt from his once-handsome face. The sound becomes an inarticulate gargle as the brilliant green spray that had engulfed him begins to dissolve his flesh. A circle of dark light flares on his brow, and the progress of the accelerated corrosion slows, and then stops, and finally begins to reverse.

The girl slides off the altar, nonchalantly brushing at the bleeding wound in her abdomen. It still leaks a faint trickle of whatever potent agent wrought such harm on the visage of his quarry. "It seems the wolf has taken the bait. I no longer require your services, Ashen Celebrant of Unspeakable Rites. May your next incarnation choose truer allies and less silly names."

She gestures negligently, and the clotted gore that Wolf has left in his footsteps begin to writhe. A host of tentacles burst from the carnage, as the girl's hair takes on a similar writhing life of its own, spilling down past her shoulders in a straight fall to the floor, where it begins to collect in puddles of animate shadow. She raises a hand, and the tentacles strike at the Abyssal, who leaps back and defends himself with the knife. Despite the dark power that etches lines of sickening light across his blade, his blows avail him nothing against the liquid substance of those tendrils: the blade's keen edge slides ineffectually through the things. On the other hand, the lash of the tentacles appear to work on him just fine: welts appear, that begin to hiss and release a faint steam as first skin and then muscle begins to dissolve. Wolf is no stranger to the properties of soulsteel, and is surprised to see that the strikes the man manages to land on the woman's animate weapons appear to avail him nothing, while each strike the girl lands appears to only make her stronger. She perches on the corner of the slab upon which she had once been tied, kicking her feet idly even as her tendrils scourge the man Wolf came to slay.

Finally, a flick of a razor-tipped tentacle lops off the man's hand, and hand and blade go spiralling away into the corner of the cavern. He screams for the second time that night, and this one goes on for much longer, as tendrils seize his wrists and feet, lifting him above the ground until he is held suspended above the girl in the same attitude she had been held in. She stands beneath him, looking up into his face. "If you happen to remember me when you awake, tell the Prince I said hello."

The tentacles surge with unholy strength, and the man's scream reaches a new pitch for just a moment, before his skin splits and he is torn into ragged halves, his blood raining down on the girl who laughs delightedly and raises her face to taste it, tossing her hair with the reckless abandon of a child dancing in a spring shower.

She finally deigns to notice the bemused Lunar, and advances on him, clad in her sodden hair and viridian light and the blood of her foe. Without preamble, she says, "You know that there is much that is wrong with this Creation that you defend with such vigour. You've absented yourself from this thing that you love because it was never right for you, did right by you.

"Finally, we can begin to change all that."

She holds out her hand to him, and he finds himself bowing over it with unfamiliar gallantry. "Rejoice, my love," she murmurs, her voice rich with affection, "for years innumerable and stranger tides than mortal destiny have borne me back to you. At last, our work can begin."