Part 6>>>The Shadow of Love (an LoF adventure)

[Larry_OHF]

Larry

As Larry was in the middle of his tale, Morgie walked away, heading toward the apparently tired Joseph. He thought nothing of it, as he could not see the big man's probable countenance of frustration towards the young man. One thing was for certain, however...the air suddenly seemed a little fresher, and he felt a little more happiness in his heart...almost as though a burdon of some dark secret had been lifted. It was a pleasant sensation, and Larry wondered silently at it as he spoke to this mysterious wanderer. He waited for her response...


OOC>>>The uplifting feeling that Larry has felt was the removal of the presence of the Shadow Mage in this game world, since he is now outside the boundries of this thread in the region where Cyril has led him. By being removed from the game, Larry Silverfall can sense that something about this game is brighter and fresher...but has no idea that a mental link with the Mage has anything to do with it.

[ 04-26-2005, 11:33 AM: Message edited by: Larry_OHF ]

[Cyril Darkcloud]

The Treehouse

Myron Epimetheus

Among the tongues strangely loosened this night is a tongue whose muttering of the metered syllables of an arcane and long forgotten language shifts in cadence until its tones keep curious time with other murmured words. Tonight the dead find voice, and tonight their speaking is one. Even as his mutterings slide into the rhythm of the great and numberless chorus of the dead the little man writes with a feverish intensity, his pen tracing out sequences of complex characters upon the white squares provided by those little napkins which are so useful for the writing down of things. He mutters in time with the murmuring of the dead, but unlike the other voices that comprise this great whispering chorus his words are recorded in the furious motion imparted by lifeless fingers to the scraping of an ink bearing quill against the surface white beverage napkins.

The little man mutters and a penetrating light burns within the sunken sockets from which living eyes once looked outward. He reads what his hands are writing and his mutterings grow faint, for what he reads chills him who is never warm with a biting cold not of temperature but of fear. His voice falls suddenly out of step with the lifeless chorus and there is a dry and brittle sound to his speaking, “So that is the secret of the dead......” His body stiffens and the little man falls both still and silent, as still and silent as the grave. The light within his eye sockets dims to a pair of faintly glowing dots. And when after long minutes of silent thought he at last finds his voice again it is to enter once more the somber cadences of the numberless dead and to whisper but a single word, “Doom.”

[TAOWolf]

Her wolves whine softly and bury their heads in the tall grass and leaves
accumulated around her cloak. The younger ones begin to sing, helping at least to their minds,
to help drown out the sound of the scratching. The beeswax mixed with baneroot is working,
at least mostly.

Her eyes narrow as she cocks her head to the side, and her faint wolf shadow upon the ground
lifts it's head and howls....... loud and long, into the evening air... The spirals painted
upon her cheeks adds a little more protection against the banewolves, if only to help her
keep her mind upon what she needs to do..

She needs them to move closer. Her mind both objects to this, and agrees, and in the end, her
willpower overpowers the need to take a step back. Lifting her staff above her head, she
starts to softly sing into the wind, adding her voice to the younger wolves, and the stone
upon the staff sends a shaft of pure blue light into the air.

It hits the ground a few feet behind the banes, and the ground and rocks explode upwards in
tiny shards, moving directly towards them.

[ 04-27-2005, 11:17 AM: Message edited by: TAOWolf ]

[Cyril Darkcloud]

For Plaxica

There is a chill within the night air that has nothing to do with things so mundane as temperature or weather. It is the chill of absence for there is that which moves about this night from which all trace of life is absent, as if the grave has found legs upon which it might wander with its cold and heavy touch out among the lands of the living. To say, however, that life is absent is to understate matters, for that which moves about so freely this night is no mere object nor is it that blasphemous mockery of life referred to as ‘undeath’ in popular idiom. Life is absent from that which moves this night for that which moves about does so in hunger, a terrible appetite which consumes, feasts upon, and destroys that which lives. It calls out and its voices are many, but its tone is ever the same, unchanging, flat and monotonous with the never varying chill and stillness of the grave. Life, that life which could move of its own accord, has fled this forest at the touch of this chill and the sound of this call. That life which could not flee has fallen numb, unable to feel and unable to move, into a stillness that betokens the finality of death.

The owl, while for some reason not so strongly affected as those other living things of this place, still feels, all the same, a certain sluggishness in its movement and a dulling of senses that are normally much more keen than they are at present. According to the directions given by the woman the place is not far and a certain heaviness of death in the air, a heaviness oppressive with the stink of blood spilled in great amounts, would seem to indicate that this assumption is indeed correct.

The howls, and the movement of the banewolves and their terrible hunger after the living as moved elsewhere – in the direction of the stone circle and the woman. But the calls are many and so is the movement, and one cannot be completely sure that all have moved on when his senses are numb and death lies heavy about the air within which he moves.......

[dplax]

Plaxica 85/85

He sniffed the air of this part of Ironworks and felt the scent of death and of the dragon's spilled lifeblood. The closeness of this many banewolves affected him even in his owl form, but the scent of the dragon was a scent already known to him and he recognized it.

His sense of smell mostly clouded he could not accurately say whether there were any banewolves close. Visually he could not see any of them, but these were creatures he did not know. And the unknown was always to be feared. He started going over an ancient poem he had learnt several years ago.

"I must not fear
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass
Over me and through me.
And when it has gone past
I will turn the inner eye
To see its path.
Where the fear has gone
There will be nothing.
Only I will remain...."
- Bene Gesserit litany against fear, from Frank Herbert's Dune series.

Slightly calmed down he circled the area where he had sensed the smell of spilled dragon blood, until he finally spotted the life-fluid of the ancient creature. It stretched in a large area, but there was no body to be seen. Could the banewolves have totally destroyed it? All to be seen was the massive quantity of blood. Not even a single scale remained of Arcades. Half-paralysed by shock it took Plaxica a few seconds to remember to flap his wings. He could see the blood soaking into the ground slowly. Much of it still remained and he could see it would still take several minutes to disappear.

Plaxica wanted to make sure that no banewolves would disturb him while he uncorrupted the blood so he circled the area several times more, while his thoughts started racing. Something was nagging at the back of his brain, but he couldn't quite get it yet.

Strangely the spirit inside of him had been silent for the last half an hour, and hadn't reacted in the least to the sight. Maybe it was already preparing for what Tao had said it knew needed to be done?

[dplax]

Ramella Tarina

Daniel had ran around Ramella for the whole of the morning, but now he was visibly tired. He was not running around anymore and just trailed behind Ramella.

"Is it still far away, Mummy?"

"I don't know exactly Danny. But don't worry, we shall rest now to have some food."

They sat down and Ramella gave Daniel one of the sandwiches she had asked be made at the last tavern. The boy started eating it fast. Clearly he had been hungry.

A man, in his mid forties by the looks of it appeared around a bend in the road. His clothes and the way he moved betrayed that he probably was a farmer in one of the surrounding fields. Daniel, sandwich still in his hand walked over to the middle of the road.

"Mister! Mister! Do you know how far the Tavern of the One Eyed Dog is?"

Behind him Ramella laughed and whispered.

"It's wolf, not dog."

"I mean One Eyed Wolf." - he said as if nothing had happened.

The man smiled a broad smile at Daniel.

"The tavern is two and a half miles from here, just follow this road."

Ramella nodded her thanks to him and offered the man one of the sandwiches, which he gratefully accepted. Ramella asked whether the man had seen Plaxica in the area, but he could not say. A lot of adventurers had been around the Tavern lately. She thanked him and the man went along on his business.

They finished their sandwiches a few minutes later and Ramella and Daniel set out to complete the remaining two and a half miles to the Tavern of the One Eyed Wolf. About three hours later they reached the outskirts of the town, where the tavern was...

[ 05-04-2005, 02:59 AM: Message edited by: dplax ]

[Cyril Darkcloud]

The Circle of Standing Stones

Silently the flame arrives, blue in color and burning with the heat of the woman’s anger. Silently it arrives and in arriving it shatters silence much as it shatters the stones behind the banewolves. Shards of stones fly outward by the hundreds. At the advancing of the flame the banewolves began to move, leaping forward toward the great standing stones. The first two find their progress arrested abruptly, however, as the ground upon which they land has more of the substance of liquid than of solid about it. Caught in the mire prepared by the woman and unable, for the moment at least, to move, they are struck by the stony shards. A third banewolf has found safe landing on a flat stone within the mire and tenses itself to leap forward toward the woman.

At least two others remain unaccounted for, their droning calls having grown silent once more ......

[Cyril Darkcloud]

Near the valley of the Dark River

In the time of the Great Struggle the storms that raged in the mountains washed away what roads provided ease of travel and flooded the hidden warrens beneath the stony crags. The relentless falling of the rain also set the streams and rivers to swelling and in places entire cliff faces were simply washed away by the rushing water. Among those pieces of mountain stone that had been swept away was the splintered seam of an ore-bearing vein, a seam broken into several large stones lined with a deep black metallic substance. Ebony it is called in the distant lands of Tamriel * where skilled craftsmen have labored long to master the secret of shaping it into weapons and armor of great strength and value. Rumor speaks of a mine, long forgotten and now flooded, somewhere in the mountains wherein such ore might still be found in great quantity, but rumors such as this are notoriously difficult to verify. Be that as it may, ebony bearing stones were left at the edge of this vale as the flood waters of the Dark River receded. Those who lived at the edge of the vale, not knowing the nature nor the value of such stones, and seeing their obvious strength, fixed them into the foundations and walls of their houses.......

.......And so it was that four families were slaughtered for the sake of stones.

All is silent at the edge of the vale, save for the muted striking of tools from within the houses, and a bit of singing that accompanies the swinging of picks and the striking of hammers against chisels

And it’s go, boys, go!
They’ll time your very breath,
and every day you’re in this place
you’re two days nearer death.
But you goooooooooooooooo!


* The setting for the Elder Scrolls games.

[dplax]

Ramella Tarina

It was when they reached the outskirts of the town that Daniel started acting strangely. He had been complaining of tiredness for the past two hours and it had taken Ramella the promises of a long stay in bed next morning to keep Daniel going for the rest of the afternoon. But then to Ramella's surprise when they reached the outskirts of the town Daniel stopped suddenly.

"Come on Daniel! We're nearly there."

The boy, standing there in the middle of the road looked at the town with a strange fear in his eyes. He looked at Ramella but did not answer.

"Ok. What is wrong this time?"

"I don't know."

"Oh don't be stupid, there is nothing wrong. In ten minutes we shall be sitting in the Tavern of the One Eyed Wolf happily waiting for our supper. Come on, one last effort."

Seeing that Daniel still did not want to move she walked over and picked him up, putting him sitting around her neck. She started moving towards the tavern, she could see at the other end of the town, but she had not made fifteen meters of progress when Daniel started to wildly move about at her neck and out of fear of dropping him she put him back down on the ground. Why was the boy acting this strangely? If something was wrong with him Ramella needed to get as fast as possible to the tavern and have a cleric see him.

As she sorted out her thoughts she saw that Daniel was slowly backing back towards where they had come.

"What is wrong with you Daniel?"

The boy answered, in a tone of voice Ramella had not heard from him before. A tone filled with fear, as if the boy could sense something she could not.

"I'm afraid. Something very bad is on the other side of the town."

Ramella looked at the boy with a somewhat curious expression on her face. She had to rethink the situation, but her priority was still to get a cleric to see the boy. Something was definately wrong with him.

----------------------------------------

Daniel was tired and weak from all the running around during the morning. But there was nothing else wrong with him. It was because of his weakness that the banewolves advancing towards the Tavern of the One Eyed Wolf affected him from a much greater distance than they could affect his mother. He had to make her understand. They could not go towards the tavern. He had no idea what was there, but even moving a few feet closer was as if he doomed himself.

[Morgeruat]

Morguerat

Morguerat settled into the earth, feeling the coolness of it through the illfitting armor. He closed his eyes to meditate when he felt something, a crying from the grave, or beyond.

DOOM!

With a start the former knight jolted, his eyes scanning wildly for the cause of the call. Seeing no one else reacting, and hoping he hadn't drawn undue attention to himself he closed his eyes again, searching out the cause of the chill that had entered his old wounds making them ache as they had not done since the Windbringer had purged Larry's poison from him. There was silence once again. The trump of doom was lost to the ages, although it's mark was left.

Why had he felt this call, was it a test from Helm, a message that he was not completely forsaken as a herald, or perhaps a curse, to hear the spirits call, and be unable to act. No certainly Helm would not toy with him so, and if he did, the nearness to things of spirit would be taken as a gift even if it was meant as a curse. He felt closer to Helm than he had since his fall then, the recent purging of the Modding based powers Larry had imbued his generals with had opened something Morguerat felt, but what fruit it would bear remained to be seen.

The former knight breathed heavily as he composed himself from the ordeal of hearing a chorus of unearthly voices, his eyes closed against the world as he tried to right himself. Aside from the slightly heavier breathing the only indicator that all was not right was the white knuckle grip he held on his staff.